Secrets of the Deep (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 5)

by E. G. Foley

Boom-boom! Boom-boom! went their footfalls.

  One by one, they marched into the water, disappeared up to their knees, then their waists, then their heads, and just kept walking out to sea.

  Lord Wyvern looked askance at him in satisfaction. “Believe in me now?” he murmured.

  Dmitri gulped and nearly fell down on his face. “Y-yes, my lord.” He swallowed hard and tried his best not to overreact. “A-at least now I know why you said we wouldn’t need a crane. Or…a field crew.”

  Wyvern’s grey eyes glittered as he nodded. “Precisely. When I need servitors,” he said, “I make my own.”

  “Th-that must be—very convenient for you, sir.”

  Wyvern laughed at his discomfiture, and it was only when he drew back his lips in feral humor that Dmitri noticed the earl’s other horrifying deformity.

  Double rows of teeth.

  And he stared while his heart pounded in time with the clamor: boom-boom, boom-boom…

  CHAPTER 2

  Deep Trouble

  “What on earth is that noise?” Sound travels great distances underwater, so Princess Sapphira of the Royal House of Nereus was as startled as her dolphins when the pounding started.

  The dolphins squeaked and chittered and bobbed their heads in annoyance at the reverberating echoes, then sped away to escape the noise, off to hunt sardines amid the pink clumps of staghorn coral.

  Sapphira stayed behind, staring with furrowed brow in the direction from which the ominous noise was coming.

  Boom-boom! Boom-boom!

  As Crown Princess of Poseidonia, she was instantly concerned, and decided to investigate.

  She didn’t have much else to do at the moment, anyway. The glorious spring afternoon had lured her to sneak away from the palace, escaping her studies once again.

  She figured that her tutor, Professor Pomodori, was so engrossed in writing his tome, A True History of the Mediterranean Sea Tribes, that he probably hadn’t even noticed she was gone.

  With a flick of her tail, Sapphira left the warm, sunlit crystal shallows and followed the sound eastward. Pushing off the sandy bottom now and then with her stingray spear, she swam at a moderate pace, gliding alongside the descending curve of rocky mounts crusted with sea anemones.

  Along the way, she stopped and carefully dislodged one of the countless alicia mirabilis growing there. The phosphorescent sea anemone stood like pillar candles fixed to the rocks, each about six inches tall and topped with a shock of tentacles like wild hair blowing in the wind of the current.

  The merfolk called them sea candles.

  By day, the alicia mirabilis looked like any ordinary sea anemone, but by night, they glowed in the dark like delicate magical lanterns. This would prove helpful if she needed extra light when she reached the deeper valleys of her father’s realm, where it seemed the noise was leading her.

  Carefully tucking the alicia mirabilis into the satchel she carried over her shoulder, she decided she needed more speed, and summoned the fastest fish in the sea with a watery whistle. A pair of huge, strong bluefin tuna darted over to attend her. “Mind if I hitch a ride?”

  They were not as communicative as dolphins, but they seemed happy to comply with a royal request. Each over a thousand pounds and nearly ten feet long, the two massive tuna swam into formation side by side and allowed her to loop a length of kelp around each one as a makeshift harness.

  She held on tight and gave the green reins a jangle. “Ready!”

  At once, they tucked in their dorsal fins a bit to reduce drag and took off at top speed. Sapphira let out a yelp of glee. She couldn’t help laughing as her chariot team streaked across the Ionian Sea in a foaming wake, speeding around rock formations, whizzing through the center of schools of fish.

  They pulled her so fast that her long, dark, spiral-curled tresses stretched out almost straight behind her. The shades of blue all around them kept her apprised of the changing depths as they traveled due east.

  The deepening water turned from aquamarine to cerulean then cobalt and grew cooler. Heading ever deeper, she passed the black coral hills and the red sea fan forest.

  Before long, the barely winded tuna had carried her all the way to the far edge of her father’s kingdom. She was leagues away now from the warm, familiar waters around Coral City and the royal palace.

  At these depths, the sea was at its most mysterious, the surface above not even visible anymore. The surrounding waters had turned a thick, soupy indigo, sluggish and cold. Just a little deeper, they’d turn black. Here below the bottom edge of the normal ocean currents, the stillness was eerie.

  She murmured soothing words to the nervous tuna. She knew they couldn’t go much deeper than four thousand feet. Nor could she, for that matter. She could already feel the increasing pressure on her ribcage and her eardrums.

  “Come on, just a little farther,” she urged her team with a twitch of the reins. They balked but obeyed.

  Ahead, an ominous sight awaited: the edge of the Calypso Deep, named after one of her ancient ancestors.

  It was said to plunge more than three miles down into the Earth’s crust, its waters as black as octopus ink.

  Nobody knew what was down there. Oh, the whales could withstand its depths and chose private retreats like the canyon in which to birth their young. The occasional giant squid and certain species of large sharks also liked to lurk there. They did not mind the cold.

  But even the great sharks never ventured all the way to the bottom. Sharks’ teeth were no defense against the poisonous sulfur fumes belching up out of the sea vents from the Earth’s molten core.

  The seafloor was sown with the towering mounts of undersea volcanoes, around whose feet the tectonic plates crashed and crumbled ceaselessly, churning with their never-ending little earthquakes.

  The whales had reported that the Calypso Deep was full of weird creatures who kept to themselves. Gelatinous things without skeletons, many of them glowing and transparent. Most had no eyes, since there was no light to see by, anyway.

  Boom-boom. Boom-boom…

  Pulling her chariot team to a halt several yards from the edge of the canyon, Sapphira tied off the kelp reins she had fashioned. “Wait for me,” she ordered. “This won’t take long.”

  She swam past the agitated pair as the cold seeped into her bones. She felt swallowed up in the murky indigo waters. Reaching into her satchel, she took out the alicia mirabilis and held it up like a torch.

  In the blackness of the canyon, she could already make out the tiny pinpricks of light where the legendary glowing creatures passed.

  So it was true! They really did twinkle like stars in the darkness, she thought in wonder. Even now, a large white shrimp with shining innards swam by so close it nearly got tangled in her long, floating hair.

  As she stared around in nervous wonder, the thought drifted through her mind that Father would be furious if he knew she was down there, especially alone. Well, he’s always irked at me about something. Dangerous as it was, Sapphira gazed all around her, enthralled by this deepest, darkest corner of her father’s realm. She was more curious than afraid.

  A little ways ahead, a few bioluminescent squid drifted in place, studying her, flashing who-knew-what messages about her to each other and to their fellow creatures out in the canyon.

  Looping gracefully through a rock formation, she swam to the edge of the canyon, angled her body downward, and peered into the abyss.

  It was too dark to see anything except a few delicate sea creatures twinkling in the midnight depths. But she could feel the ponderous distance, and heard the haunting song of a sperm whale very far away.

  Boom-boom! Boom-boom…

  The sound was getting louder, coming closer. A slow, rhythmic banging echoing up from the deep like a drumbeat—or what was the sound called that humans made when they walked? Ah, yes.

  Footsteps.

  She had tried walking herself when her tutor and guards had escorted her on a few short visits to the human
world as part of her education. She wasn’t very good at it.

  As the footsteps grew louder, rumbling like earthquakes, she spotted a weird orange beam of light moving in the distance, casting out a few yards of illumination ahead of it.

  It was coming up from the canyon, about a hundred yards to her left, and still well below the edge. She almost got the sense that some huge humanoid creature or machine was trudging up a narrow path that hugged the wall of the canyon, winding up the cliffside from the deep.

  As the thing approached the top, the squids darted away and turned off their twinkling to hide in the blackness. Sapphira gulped, rather wishing she could have done the same. Especially when a second orange light appeared, following the first, still some distance behind.

  Ignoring the little frightened flutter of her gills, she gripped her stingray spear more tightly in one hand and carried her alicia mirabilis in the other, skirting the curved rim of the canyon to get a closer look.

  Though it would be shorter to cut across, she didn’t dare venture out over the deep. She had no desire to become a meal for any of the massive predators lurking in the canyon.

  When she spotted something climbing up over the edge of the abyss, she immediately tucked the sea candle in her satchel to avoid being seen. Plunged into darkness, she swam closer, keeping low to the ground.

  She gawked at the creature, baffled, as it crawled up onto the plateau and stood up, fully in view. It was neither a machine nor any child of nature that she had ever seen, but a great, towering monster of sorts, an animated pile of boulders.

  Huge, lumbering, and powerful, the rock giant walked undeterred through the water, guided by the glow from its orange eyes.

  A glance into the canyon revealed a second one on its way up the ramplike walkway, and if she was not mistaken, a third still farther down. Bewildered, she watched the creature continue on its way, trudging up the slope that would eventually take it up to one of the Greek islands.

  Then she noticed it was carrying something over its shoulder—a sort of sack made of chains. She followed the creature at a careful distance. A walking pile of boulders could not be very intelligent, she thought, but she did not wish to test that theory by attracting its attention.

  Glancing down to make sure the others were still a good distance away, she left the canyon’s edge and swam stealthily after the first to investigate. As the rock monster walked away from the blackness and up into the indigo blue, Sapphira could see a bit better here, and breathe more easily, too.

  Summoning up a burst of effort, she glided right up behind the brute without so much as an extra bubble. Trailing the rock monster, she finally got close enough to see the contents of the sack—and then she was outraged.

  Stone tablets carved with bizarre hieroglyphics, strange statues, sealed stone amphorae, no doubt containing secrets of her people’s past. He’s stealing our antiquities!

  The theft of ancient artifacts was, sadly, a common problem throughout the Mediterranean, but this was her father’s territory. These treasures belonged to her people. She was not going to stand by and let these creatures, whatever they were, loot her kingdom’s history.

  On the other hand, she wasn’t sure exactly how to stop the thing.

  She was outnumbered here, and these rock monsters were awfully big. They didn’t have flesh to pierce with her spear or lungs that needed air, and they were obviously unfazed by the pressure at these depths.

  While she bit her lip, trailing after the creature and debating what to do, a small, round artifact tumbled out of the sack.

  It slipped through the wide netting of the chains and fell to the seabed, rolling off through the sand. She dove to retrieve it while the rock monster marched on, oblivious, but the artifact had disappeared into the purple shadows.

  Hurriedly pulling out her glowing anemone, she felt around the sandy seafloor until her searching fingers seized upon a smooth metal sphere. She grasped it, picked it up, and inspected it for a heartbeat by the light of her sea candle: a silver metallic orb about the size of a grapefruit.

  Oooh, shiny.

  Unfortunately, at that moment, the second rock monster climbed up over the edge of the canyon and saw her.

  She froze, plainly visible in the sea anemone’s glow.

  The creature stared at her in wrath, its gleaming orange eyes like flecks of undersea lava. Whisking open her satchel, she dropped the alicia mirabilis into it along with the orb and fled.

  The second rock monster steadied itself on the flat ground around the top of the canyon, then it shifted the weight of the sack on its shoulder. It roared to its mate, set its sack down, and began stomping toward her.

  Sapphira shrieked and took off swimming at top speed as both rock monsters began chasing her.

  Boom-boom, boom-boom, right behind her!

  She raced blindly through the murky blue, heading back toward her waiting chariot. The monsters’ thunderous footsteps and guttural roars were not far behind.

  Quivering with fear and pumping her tail through the water as fast as she could go, she sprinted back toward her trusty tuna.

  A panicked glance over her shoulder showed the monsters keeping pace with her, their big boulder-legs slamming down long, fast strides across the seafloor.

  But, to her horror, she squinted toward the night-blue slope and saw no sign of her ride. The tuna must have gotten spooked and darted off, abandoning her there! She was on her own.

  Suddenly a huge rock hand swept by over her head. She felt the whoosh of the water as it passed, grabbing for her, nearly taking her by the hair.

  She lunged lower with a shriek, wincing as she scraped her scales on the rough seabed.

  The giant rock hand curled into a fist and came down at her from above. It seemed that if the monster couldn’t catch her, it was happy to crush her.

  Sapphira rolled clear of the strike only by throwing herself over the edge of the canyon, and with a few quick flicks of her tail swam out over the deep.

  As the first monster caught up to the second, they stood on the plateau, reaching out for her.

  She swam farther over the canyon—it could be suicide, since any sort of predator could be down there, but she had no choice. At least it put her beyond the rock monsters’ reach. They continued trying to swipe and grab for her, their misshapen mouths groaning in frustration at their failure.

  She watched them for a moment in dread until it dawned on her that these brutes couldn’t swim. Their massive weight confined them to walking along the seafloor. Whew.

  But treading water over the abyss, she was hardly safe. Even now, a huge shark or something worse could be hidden in the blackness below, sizing her up for dinner.

  Better keep moving.

  “Goodbye, boys,” she muttered. Stretching her arms up over her head, she swept them down to her sides, gliding upward with a firm swish of her tail.

  The rock monsters roared after her in the distance, but as Sapphira began her measured ascent, there was nothing more they could do.

  # # #

  By the time the rock monsters returned with their haul, Dmitri neither knew nor cared what Lord Wyvern was, or how he had known where to look for the artifacts. He had been right. That was all that mattered.

  It was real. All of it! They had proof!

  The cave on Nisáki was now brimming with the treasures of Atlantis. Dmitri was shaking, crying, babbling incoherently, somewhere between scholarly ecstasies and apoplectic fits, as he examined one otherworldly artifact after another with trembling hands.

  There were a few small ones, however, that Lord Wyvern set aside for himself. A black cube. A winged sun-disk. And a small pyramidal gadget. He also took a cylindrical wrap of metal that looked like some sort of gauntlet or bracelet or cuff.

  Dmitri didn’t mind. He was quite prepared to worship the ground the man walked on after Wyvern had just saved his reputation and set him up to become rich and so famous that his name would go down in the history books—all of whic
h would have to be rewritten after this.

  Dr. Schliemann—doctor who! Dmitri thought amid tears and mad laughter.

  “These few items I shall take back with me to show my colleagues in England,” said Wyvern, looking annoyed with Dmitri’s hysterics. “The rest is yours. But tell no one of this yet. Do not announce our find to the world until I give you permission to do so. Or else.”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” Dmitri sobbed.

  “Pay attention, Giannopoulos! Get a hold of yourself, man.” Wyvern said in annoyance. “You may come here to study the artifacts as often as you like, but my large boulder-headed friends will spring to life again if they sense a threat. I’ve set them up as guardians of this treasure, do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, sir,” Dmitri said, trying to wipe away his tears of joy.

  Despite his hysteria, he had noticed absently that Wyvern’s golems had collapsed back into ordinary-looking piles of rocks and rubble outside the narrow little entrance of the hillside cave.

  “Whatever you wish—!” Too choked up to finish, Dmitri nearly hugged him, but Wyvern held him at arm’s length with a smirk.

  “Good. I shall take leave of you now. Pleasure doing business with you, Doctor,” he finished, and he held out his horrible six-fingered hand with a challenging stare, as though daring Dmitri to shake it.

  Dmitri looked at the freakish, large hand, and though he was a bit revolted by the earl’s inbred abnormality, he reached out and grasped it with his own.

  After all, a simple handshake was the least he could do after Wyvern had just fulfilled the obsession of his lifetime and given him a path back to respectability.

  Still, curiosity overcame him.

  “May I ask…who you really are, sir?” Dmitri whispered.

  Wyvern smiled his terrible, toothsome smile. “Little late to be asking that now, hmm? Cheerio.”

  The earl released his hand and strode lightly out of the cave with his few chosen pieces from the collection in a satchel slung over his shoulder. He swung a long leg over the yacht’s shiny railing, then set sail, driven by an unnatural wind that shifted direction when he told it to.