by Chris Howard
Nicole paced up and down the walkway outside, coming back to the open door to whisper, “The portside lifeboat is gone."
Kassandra stepped through the door on the other side of the bridge, nodding when she returned. “Gone on this side, too. There's another ship out there. I can hear it."
She grabbed a pair of binoculars off the console and scanned the horizon. Then waved Nicole inside while she turned slowly from one side of the bridge windows to the other.
"Two of them."
Kassandra pointed off the port. “A US Navy destroyer there.” Then swung her arm around to starboard. “A Chilean destroyer a little ahead of us over there. Part of a North and South American joint task force in the Caribbean."
Nicole frowned at the bizarre military details her sister seemed to know more and more about as the days toward the coming battle with the Seaborn passed.
They both looked up as if they could see through the ceiling. The slow thumping of a helicopter, dull black and nearly invisible in the night, slid right over the bridge to hover above the first stack of containers.
A blast of white light flooded the passageways between the giant steel boxes, and a group of soldiers in black, lumpy in battle armor with gear and guns dangling from their harnesses, shot down droplines from the helicopter into the maze of containers below.
Kassandra touched Nicole's shoulder. “Come on. Time to go."
They met one of the commandos on the stairs. He looked like something out of an alien invasion movie, all in non-reflective black, helmet, facemask, gloves. He went into a defensive crouch when he saw them, short perforated gun barrel aimed right at them while he rattled off status information into his comm gear in a low voice.
Kassandra shifted on the stairs, getting in front of Nicole, holding out her open hands. Then she said something that made the hair on Nicole's neck stand up, more the way she said it than her actual words.
Kassandra calmly took another three steps toward the soldier, and whispered, “I'm not going to hurt you."
He hesitated a second, then lowered his gun. Kassandra took another step, singing softly. She closed the space between them, drifting down the stairs fluidly, her gaze fixed on the man's eyes behind his mask. He nodded at something she was telling him to do. In the same steady voice, he said, “All clear. I'm on the port stairwell up to the bridge. Repeat. All clear."
"Thank you.” Kassandra took two more steps and reached him, put one hand on his arm, ran her other hand up his armor. She lifted his facemask over his forehead, letting it hang free on straps at the back of his neck.
Then she kissed him, leaning into him hungrily, her mouth on his, fingers climbing into his hair. Nicole watched her with arms folded and a disappointed sniff.
Kassandra released him. She backed away, let her hand slide along his face, running her tongue over her lips as if tasting something. “Thank you, Lieutenant."
Then she turned and took Nicole's hand and led her to the deck level of the ship.
Nicole shouldered her, and said with clear sarcasm, “What did you do back there?"
"Asked him a few questions. The Chilean ship found both lifeboats empty."
"Seaborn?"
"Still a puzzle to me. I need to give it some thought. And we don't have much time—we have a battle to win."
Kassandra gripped Nicole's hand harder, and yanked her off her feet. They jumped the rail, the sea rushing up in a spout to meet them, to break their fall, to hide them from watchers on the circling warships.
They vanished in the deep.
* * * *
House Rexenor gathered its forces, one thousand on orcas, many of whom had never seen battle before. Some were veterans of a hundred skirmishes and battles, the survivors of the failed defense against the last assault of the Seaborn armies—and the destruction of the old Rexenor fortress by Olethren. Many of these had also fought at Kassandra's side against the Olethren a second time, above the waves in the heart of the land above, the near-fabled Nebraska. A few hundred more soldiers loyal to Rexenor trickled in over several days from outposts in the North Sea and off the coast of Greenland.
"Not enough.” Kassandra watched them form ranks, charge fences of targets dressed in Dosianax green. She swam in circles—shark-like—over the training space with Nicole and her personal guards and advisors.
Gregor Lord Rexenor came out every other day with a handful of old abyss mages to practice combat casting, conjuring walls of defensive netting to stop crossbow barrages, invoking spells that sent coils of boiling seawater shooting across miles of open ocean. Even Jill swam out with a group of dolphin trainers, days into the strategy sessions, kicking silently at Kassandra's side, watching her sister nervously as if at any moment she'd be ordered back inside the walls. Kassandra had become overprotective, stationing guards with Nicole, commanding Zypheria to watch Jill.
Days passed and the training progressed slowly. “Too slowly,” said Kassandra to Queen Andromache in her head. “They will not be ready."
They will be as ready as you are, said the old warrior queen.
Kassandra took that advice to heart, spending more and more time in her head with King Eupheron, learning how to be ready for war, learning things no sane ruler of the Seaborn would want to know. She kept coming back for more. Eupheron even created a quiet space, walled off from the other wearers, where she could explore her powers without criticism.
Then in a surprise move, Kassandra relinquished all command over the Rexenor forces for a week, turning the training over to Nicole and her advisors, swimming north by herself, telling everyone that she needed to practice a few moves that might be dangerous to perform anywhere near the Rexenor fortress.
When she returned, she pronounced House Rexenor as ready for battle as they would ever be, and for days afterward, Kassandra wore a strange smile that hadn't been there before, and not even Nicole's angry rant about being deserted by her sister could take it off her face.
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Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Living Fortress
My inclination—the word reminds me of the “clines” of the ocean: thermocline, halocline, pycnocline—my inclination is to begin at the bottom, the deep ocean, for this is where I find myself, at some extreme dark depth, the abyss, breathing fluid which by all physical studies should not contain enough dissolved oxygen to sustain an adult human. I pull the sea inside my lungs and expel it with each breath. The water feels heavy in my mouth, a fullness that somehow makes me whole, as if by taking the ocean into my lungs, I have become a living breathing part of the three dimensional hydrospace, the plenum, the fluid continuum.
—Journal of Michael Augustus Henderson
* * * *
It was the presence of life that frightened Aleximor. He reached out one of Corina's hands, letting her fingertips slip along a stem of soft flowery coral, frayed slippery fronds of pale pink and white ruffled edges. The flexible stalk grew where nothing should grow, where nothing had grown for thousands of years.
There had always been bacteria, tiny scavenging crabs, and marrow-hungry worms, life at the edge of death, all of it small and tuned to feeding off the dead, but nothing higher, nobler—nothing that lived off life, the wanderers in the currents, or the chemicals in the water.
He swam along the foot of the great fortress of the Olethren, thousands of stone blocks, each one as tall as Corina, fitted into smooth vertical faces fifty times her height. Deep water corals blossomed in the channel that ran along the base of the walls. Clusters of tube worms danced in the current: flexible, impossibly tall pale lipstick tubes with buttery rich red tips.
The solid rush of noise hurt Aleximor's ears, exoskeletal scrapings of a million foraging arthropods. Tendrils of dusty pink bacteria leached up the dark stone like blood poison tracery across hard flat skin.
The living sea had returned to claim the dead army's fortress, a fierce chemosynthetic nature, immune to death as it was immune to the scalding fumes of
the vent communities or the chemical mix of cold seeps and, like death, preferring certain colors, bleached whites and dark blood reds.
Aleximor stared stupidly at the wealth of life, his whole world turned on edge, an offensive impossibility made real.
He looked over his shoulder at the crew of the Maria Draughn, eighteen of them, following him, bones and rotting tissue hanging off them as they stumped through the silt to the foot of the fortress walls.
Aleximor turned his back on them and kicked off the ocean floor, pulling water past him. Corina's arms ached with strain as he swam straight up the west wall, eyes fixed on the crown's edge.
He reached out and touched the stone facing, passing in blurry slate smears. His fingers connecting then drawing back, afraid of the soft carpet of algae and the living things—unimportantly small, hatching, growing, thriving and dying in the space of months, building on each other—life blooming out of death; the tips of his murderer's fingers brushing against it and snapping back, identical magnetic poles, repellent because they were the same.
The walls of the fortress of the Olethren, the army of the dead, rose out of the plane at the foot of the mountains many miles south of the Nine-cities. Vast walls of death's tyranny, towering over thousands of rows of wired-together rotting human forms, split bones, streaks of dusty white rot, limp tendons, soft digested threads of muscle tissue, and hollow eye sockets.
Aleximor kicked desperately. He needed to see them, the dead that filled the central plane inside the walls.
"A light perhaps...” Corina heard Aleximor's distressed mumbling through his unintelligible, wild guesses to explain life where death reigned.
The Nine-cities was not distant enough to dispel Aleximor's caution, but he would venture a light. He prepared the song in his head, his voice dipping and winding in the filmy shallows of his power, fingers tapping rhythmically, constructing a channel, intravenous-like, through the skin that sufficed for most work, to draw from the depths where his real power raged hot and violent. It would take more than a simple light to show him what was wrong with the Olethren and their fortress.
He reached out, hooked his fingers on the hard stone, swinging his body over. He paused on the outside edge of the wide stone cap, high over the plain, fearing to look in.
The faint presence of the Nine-cities caught his attention again, but when he faced north, it vanished. If he held Corina's head at an angle to the north and east he could just make out a mountainous outline, the light of the city behind them, serrated slate blue against pure black.
"Not far enough."
Is that the city, the Nine-cities?
He waved absently. “Yes. North and around a bend in the mountains. Quiet, now, my sweet. I need to cast a light."
Corina was about to answer him but stopped her thoughts. Aleximor seemed to be on the verge of tears, something she wouldn't have thought possible from something like him. He sounded genuinely distressed.
"It is all wrong.” He whispered the words of a child faced with a world he didn't understand.
He made fists, cleared his throat, and sang a trigger. A burst of bright sickly green flashed in his hands, and he pitched it into the darkness beyond the wall's edge. The ball of light flew through space, angling up, growing, gathering speed. Half a mile away it exploded, an umbrella-shape of light fragments ripping through water, smears of yellowy green that rammed up and slid around a fixed diameter.
Aleximor drifted cautiously to the inner edge of the fortress wall. He set Corina's feet down, toes sliding along the stone, and he looked inside the walls.
Corina felt him move her tongue, heard the starts of words in her throat. A shudder rolled through him. Then silence. Corina's legs folded under him weakly, and he started to sob.
* * * *
Klonassa, a veteran rider along the south plains abyss border, went still when she spotted the flare of green on the horizon. Then spat a piece of fish from her mouth, choking on the chewings already on their way down. She coughed out a command. One hand slipped along the smooth flank of her orca, Lochus, urging him into a rapid caudal dash, straight for the glow.
She bent forward along the whale's head, and shoved the rest of her meal into her stirrup bag. Her fingers worked to loosen the straps on her lance. She took the reins in her teeth and slapped her cheek guards down over her face. In seconds she was riding an eight-ton bullet in the water, tucked neatly along Lochus’ body, her lance, thick around as her forearm, sticking sharply into the night, four meters beyond the orca's nose.
She knew these waters like the Dosianax fields—the playing fields of her childhood—where she'd played with daggers, and the training fields—playing with killer whales taught to spot the armor and crests of enemy houses, and eat through them.
The waters far to the south of the Nine-cities were hers to watch, serene with the calmness of death. The Olethren had always kept the living away. She had grown up daring her fellow guards to run to the Olethren fortress—when it contained a quarter million of the dead—touch the stone wall, and return without shitting in their armor. Few could stomach their presence, the stench of an army that decomposed as it stood in ranks, the wrongness of so much death brought back into life, the wickedness of so monstrous a creation.
Klonassa tugged at the reins, leaning to bring Lochus around. One pass at the light-maker, loop, and run him through with her lance. Death to all who sought it. No questions, no right answers, no pleading, those were the laws for anyone caught near the fortress of the Olethren. They were the king's property, not to be seen by others’ eyes.
Klonassa wondered if the laws still applied with the Olethren gone. It certainly did while the army was off warring, but, as the king had recently admitted, they would war no more, for the woman who was the king's granddaughter, enemy of all the Seaborn, the Wreath-wearer, had destroyed them, brought them to her realm above the waves and taken their power away, shattering their bones with her fury.
Klonassa had read the Word of the King, had nodded in relief with the population of the Nine-cities at the news of the dead army's destruction. At least it could not be used against them. The king's Word, along with an artist's sketch of an unstable-looking woman with knotty brown hair, eyes filled with evil, had listed her wrongs and condemned her as a traitor, an enemy of the Seaborn.
Lochus banked sharply, charging toward the light-caster, a pale figure kneeling at the lip of the battlements. As she swung closer she saw that it was a young woman with pure white braids coiling in the currents around her head.
Klonassa slid her hand down Lochus’ head, easing his speed. The lawbreaker on the battlements did not look like something she needed to fear. She didn't know what she looked like. Klonassa had never seen anyone like her, a woman with milky white hair, her skin smooth—she was young, but dying in her eyes.
The pale woman lifted her head from her hands, the sea a blurry mess of tears in her front of her, and turned to face Klonassa, opening her arms and standing, inviting the lance to slide through her body and take her life.
This, even more than the woman's appearance, made Klonassa pull Lochus up and guide her lance wide, halting the orca ten kicks from the pale woman.
"Who are you and what is your purpose here, witch?” Klonassa felt the woman's power in the current, streaming off her, staining the water like her tears.
Aleximor straightened Corina's body, lowering the arms, fixing eyes on the border guard.
"Corina.” He whispered the name.
"Your name?” Klonassa's voice was demanding. “What house claims you?"
"One of the line of the ostologoi."
Klonassa stared for a moment, a command caught in her throat. “The bone-gatherers,” she whispered, the name like something out of childhood stories. Then she scowled at the way her own body recoiled at thoughts inside her own head. “What is your purpose here?"
Aleximor tilted his head to the side, a gesture of questioning he had picked up from his host. “Am I not permitte
d to see what has become of the army?"
Klonassa lowered her lance, the tip a few fingers from Corina's chin. “The army belonged to the king, they walked for the king, killed for the king, and no one else. Your line is past, ostologos, your family wasted, your power dissolved ice in the warm sea, salt melting in the currents.” She stopped her rambling words, vigorously stirring her feelings to dilute a thick hemorrhaging fear. Her mouth tasted like bitter metal. The woman did look like one of the dead-raisers. Not that Klonassa had ever encountered one in or out of the City. “Speak! What do you seek so far from your home?"
The pale woman dropped her shoulders and let her body sink, collapsing on the battlements, distraught. “I had hoped...” She sniffled, trying to hold back more tears. “I hoped, good lady, that I would find the army in place, at peace, in ranks in their home."
Aleximor lifted his head, displaying a mix of expressions: betrayal, pain, a fragile rebelliousness easily conquered by the commanding presence of the border guard. He dropped his voice to a low whisper. “My father...” He broke down in tears. “My father is cruel and will not permit me to go to the Nine-cities. I have heard no news, only rumor on the current, the taste of war.” Aleximor opened one hand weakly, pleading. “Perhaps you, good lady, could tell me what has happened here?"
Klonassa blinked, doubt raking through her resolve. “I do not know what you mean, ostologos.” It was a title, a rank one traded for life. “Have you not heard the tales of the Wreath-wearer?"
"Tales?"
"She lives among the thinlings. When little more than a child, she destroyed the army of the dead, snapped every bone, walked among them and crushed them beneath her heel, a girl with power beyond our imagining. They say she whispers, and mile-thick ice at the bottom of the world slides into the sea. They say she owns the oceans, that she will kill us all, that her tears bring doom, her song empties a man's mind. And she has declared war, this Wreath-wearer called Kassandra. Even her name is a curse."