by Matt Larkin
“Because traditions dating back to Old Mu and even beyond have always paired an apprentice with a master, and the relationship has always been a sexual one. Males train females and females train males, but you have been long away from men. If you so desire, you may sate me first.”
“Sate …? What the fuck?” Poli‘ahu scooted away from the akua. “Is that your way of asking me to sleep with you?”
“It is commonly believed that two kinds of intertwining energies exist within us.”
“Two kinds of mana?”
“One kind stronger in men, one in women. The interplay between the two is crucial to life, and mana becomes shared when one achieves sexual climax. Through the sharing of mana from a sorcerer or otherwise extraordinary individual, you might gain insight into Otherworldly knowledge. As a female, you might get more useful mana from a man, you could still draw out almost as much from a woman you brought to fulfillment. Consequently, I leave the choice of the gender of your partner to you.”
Her head felt like it would burst apart from all this. The spirit spoke of taking a lover as though doing so were merely a functional concern. As though her emotions were entirely secondary in the process. Indeed, if she understood Lilinoe correctly, Poli‘ahu’s pleasure was largely irrelevant to the point. What mattered was her pleasuring someone else—someone who already held greater understanding of … “This is about the Sight. You’re cranky because it has taken me so long to see beyond the Veil. And what, you really think fucking someone will help?”
“As I said, we are all deeply sexual beings, child. The interplay of forces forms our basic natures. Of all the schools of sorcery that existed in Old Mu or beyond, all I know of followed the same basic pattern, perhaps back to the beginning of time. Some tales claim the sorcerous lodges of Kumari Kandam held orgies involving a dozen practitioners of the Art.” Lilinoe smiled as though the thought aroused her. “It has struck me that I have pushed you as far as I can down this road without a more direct transferal of knowledge.”
Why did her chest feel so damn hollow? “And if I said a man, you’d go find some sorcerer to come and …” She swallowed, overcome by a heady mix of excitement and terror that had a clammy sweat running down her back.
“Yes …”
In her mind, she could see herself laying with either. Could see herself holding Lilinoe … but the image rang false, leaving her feeling too cold inside. Lilinoe was beautiful, yes, but she was made of ice, and knowing all she knew about what lay beyond, Poli‘ahu could not imagine intimacy with her. Besides, she did generally think of men.
“What if I don’t want anyone right now?”
Lilinoe leaned forward. “You do not want to defy me, child.”
Poli‘ahu shuddered. “Fine. Find the sorcerer.”
It happened three days later.
Lilinoe bound her hands, claiming she didn’t want Poli‘ahu to accidentally use her powers against the sorcerer.
Given the pain, she very well might have. In that instant, she wondered if she’d made a mistake in not choosing Lilinoe herself. The unwelcome intrusion, the ache. The helplessness as the sorcerer grunted and thrusted.
He didn’t look at her face. He just kept staring at her breasts, growling like a pig.
His release hit her, hot inside and cold in her mind. An instant, like when the entity had tried to touch her from beyond the Veil. A moment of falling, of choking, of sobbing, of gasping, all at once.
Not conscious knowledge. Nothing she could look at and mull over.
And yet, it felt like someone had cleared away a few cobwebs in her mind. Like the sorcerer’s presence—part of him was deep inside her now, even after he pulled out and rolled over—had begun to reveal hidden tunnels of thought. Places she had not known she could explore.
Almost, she wanted to ask him if it had felt the same way for him, when he was training. According to Lilinoe’s instruction, he too must surely have lain with an elder, an experienced sorceress to induct him into the Art’s mysteries.
But the sorcerer rose and left, saying nothing at all to her.
She’d expected to enjoy sex, at least a little, but by the time the man fled the cave, Poli‘ahu was just sore and feeling more alone than ever.
Lilinoe bent over her to unbind her hands. “Wash yourself if you wish.”
Poli‘ahu did, making her way down the ocean and sinking until just her head was above water.
Her father had taught her to swim as a little girl. She’d loved it, then, and some days now, she swam for hours, pushing herself to exhaustion before her night sessions with Lilinoe.
Now, she imagined sinking all the way under. Letting herself be carried away by the tides, maybe to the sunken ruins of Old Mu, now home to the mer civilization. She imagined letting everything go, most of all herself.
Times like this, she wished she could cry. But any tears in her body had frozen solid long ago.
A fortnight more. Meditation, practice. Delving through those tunnels in her own mind Poli‘ahu was now aware of. They had been there all along, but she couldn’t see them until she’d taken some of that sorcerer’s mana. She didn’t even know his name.
Nor did it matter.
She’d decided he was irrelevant. A means to an end.
She didn’t need to name the fish she ate. The man mattered no more than that.
Everything began to fall away. The coldness in the air grew deeper, more pervasive, as if heat had become a foreign, alien idea. Colors faded from view, replaced by shades of gray and blue and black. In the cave, shadows danced like living things in her periphery. A fell whisper carried on a breeze with no source.
The dripping had stopped.
Poli‘ahu trembled, looking outside. The moonlight had vanished from the sky.
She glanced back to Lilinoe. The akua looked almost translucent, like she herself was made of shadow, but, as Poli‘ahu watched, Lilinoe became more solid. Yet, wisps of fog flowed from her body, wafting from the hem of her skirt and billowing about her heels. Here, in this reality, the spirit was all too clearly not human.
“You see me now, because now I am also looking through the Veil,” the spirit said in answer to the look of shock no doubt cast upon Poli‘ahu’s face. “And you have taken a major step along your path to queenship. You are seeing directly into Pō. Your mind and consciousness expand, preparing you for deeper lessons in the Art.”
“You mean sorcery …”
“Yes …” Lilinoe rose, and guided Poli‘ahu outside of the cave.
The world beyond had changed, twisted somehow—as if bent back upon itself in pain—and yet still an Echo of the world she knew. Moonlight had given way to iridescent starlight in the sky. A haze in the distance and the omnipresent shadows prevented her from seeing so far as she was accustomed.
Out there, in that darkness, forms moved. Men and women, drifting about, as if caught in anguish or agony.
“Ghosts.”
“Yes …”
“Can they hurt us?”
“If they so choose. If we draw near enough, they will notice you. Seeing you here, between the worlds, they may try to communicate, or they may try to take out their frustrations upon you. Or they might ignore you completely. Either way, they are best avoided when possible. If threatened, release the Sight and leave their world.”
“Are there spirits—other akua out here?”
Lilinoe looked around a moment, then pointed her finger inland. “Out there, in the jungle. Others, in the sea. The spirits dwell beyond this liminal place, entering when called or when they have business here. But we’ve no business with their ilk, nor would you wish to encounter them. My sisters await you, up on the mountain. Up on Mauna Kea, they wait for you to come and see them. We will leave tomorrow night.”
A new chill swept through Poli‘ahu.
For so long, this had been the goal. To get here, to see this. Except, it wasn’t an end point at all. Just a stepping-stone toward something greater, deeper, and more te
rrifying.
And there was no turning back.
11
Midnight had long passed and, as dawn drew near, fatigue closed in around Nyi Rara. Enough she found herself slinking out of the archives and meandering through the winding tunnels of Uluhai. The refugees had wedged wisp lights into many of the recesses, enough to allow mer eyes to navigate, but still, the waters remained dark, thick with debris bestirred in the excavations. The passages were often narrow, sometimes actually requiring her to squeeze up against water-worn stone and wriggle through at odd angles.
Other places, the ruined city opened up into great cavernous expanses, pockets within the gorge hinting at the long-fallen glories at the center of all mer erudition. The longer she explored these vestiges, the more Nyi Rara found herself caught in strange musings. The elder mer spoke of eschatons as a cycle, the repeated annihilation of human civilization across the Mortal Realm, but even they, spirits, seemed caught up in the tides of such cataclysms.
The Elder Deep had destroyed Old Mu and the other continents that had once composed the world—and millennia before that, the scholars of Uluhai had speculated on multiple endings endured, now murky by the passing of eras. Old Mu had fallen, even as Uluhai had fallen, as Mu itself was falling. A never-ending circle of decay, with each new civilization built upon the bones and dust of those who had come before.
But looking at this place, at its broken majesty, it made her wonder if something was lost with each apocalypse. Did the world grow more desolate, more ignorant? Did the elder mer know something of the times before the Worldsea and keep their counsel tight to their chests? So far as she knew, none of those yet living in Mu had witnessed the Deluge.
No, but some were ancient enough, among those, Kauhuhu, whom she sought out in a recess granted to the Nanaue. It lay upon the outskirts of the city in what Nyi Rara suspected had once been a garrison in the old days, perhaps meant to ward against incursion from Cantref Gwaelod. The Nanaue offered no objection to such a location, however, perhaps because it granted them easier access to the outside where they might continue their patrols. Indeed, Nyi Rara suddenly found herself wondering if they had been the ones to occupy this place in the lost age before the Sundering.
Other Nanaue watched her as she swam through a colonnade connecting the greater city to the garrison, approaching their Voice where he reclined upon a bed of kelp. A few beats of her tail carried her through these chambers—only a handful of Nanaue swam within, so perhaps the others still patrolled—and directly across from Kauhuhu.
“May I speak with you?” she asked when the elder mer finally looked up at her.
Kauhuhu’s only answer was a shift of his shoulder.
“You saw the First Age of the Worldsea?”
“Yes.”
“Were you …” Nyi Rara hesitated, then settled onto the stone floor of the cavern. “Were you there when the first mo‘o grew out of the taniwha?”
The merman bared his teeth in a half grimace. “There is … entropy … the loss of self and memory that siphons away bits of existence over time. We feast upon the souls of others to maintain our existence as long as possible, to avoid being dragged back into the darkness whence we emerged. But we lose things along the way, you know.”
Nyi Rara shuddered. Even some of her early memories were blurred. She had heard elder spirits might forget even more, particularly those who passed often in the Astral Realm and suffered from the Lethe. But all of them were always damned to spiral toward oblivion, and Kauhuhu seemed to confirm that.
She found herself squirming in discomfort. Would she, one day, lose the pieces of herself that made her Namaka as well as Nyi Rara? That was, of course, assuming she could endure long enough to suffer such a fate, rather than have her soul consumed by Kanaloa or the Elder Deep or even some other spirit eager to stave off its own dissolution.
“You mean your memories of back then are hazy, yes? How … how did you come to have the mo‘o Piika-lalau in your service?”
The merman stared hard at her a moment before beckoning her to sit closer, speaking only after Nyi Rara had scooted near to him. “I saved his life.”
That earned him a raised brow. “How, exactly does one save the life of a dragon? Or rather, from what?”
“From one of his own kin. The mo‘o are no more united in purpose than any other species. They fight for territory, mates, power, or ideology, much like us.”
Nyi Rara folded her arms over her chest. The mo‘o shared a common origin, a creator, but perhaps Kanaloa lacked the power to maintain dominance over all of them. He had created them from taniwha using the Chintamaniya, but maybe each flaming pearl could overmaster but a single dragon? Or perhaps the he‘e god-king cared little if his creations fought one another.
Nyi Rara opened her mouth to ask for the details when another Nanaue mer burst into the chamber. “The enemy approaches!”
Indeed, Nyi Rara had not made it far before the scent of blood carried over the waters. Mer blood, slain with alarming rapidity, and small wonder. Kauhuhu’s scout reported a small army of mo‘o now assaulted Uluhai. The thought of it had Nyi Rara’s scales tingling in anticipation, her skin itching as though the waters had become harsh.
Dragons attacking the city.
Kauhuhu raced out ahead of her, leading his swarm of hammerhead warriors to the city’s front lines, while Nyi Rara sought out Ake and the Dakuwaqan Rangers who would form a secondary line of defense just outside the main tunnel.
No one, so far as she knew, bothered to inquire how or why mo‘o now assaulted them. Perhaps they took it as a given that Kanaloa had conscripted them. Perhaps, rather, they took it as a blessing merely that it was mo‘o and not another taniwha. While the mo‘o had the advantage on land, taniwha proved far more destructive in the water.
In the distance, out in the gorge, the blood scent grew so strong Nyi Rara’s shark teeth descended of their own accord. That much blood had to mean at least two dozen dead, maybe more. In her mind’s eye, she imagined the rampage of such creatures, tearing through mer like mer tore into fish. Reptilian jaws crunching down on tails, ripping out great pieces, fangs punching into flesh. The dead reverting to human form as their hosts died and their spirits fled to Avaiki.
The imagery made her wince, drawn at once to charge in and join the frenzy, or to flee the carnage.
Beside her, Ake trembled, gnashing his teeth. He had a coral lance mounted on the stump of his left arm, now thrashing in the water as if he expected a mo‘o to simply swim up and impale itself. “They’re coming.”
Screams carried in the water, cries of pain, fear. Visceral reactions of the mer. The mo‘o could not destroy their spirits, true, but no spirit enjoyed being discorporated. The pain of corporeal death, the ensuing weakness of the soul that left one vulnerable to both predators and the Lethe …
“Easy,” Nyi Rara warned.
Kauhuhu was undoubtedly the most vicious mer she had ever encountered. And, indeed, dragon blood now mingled with the scents washing over her. Thick, ichorous, poisonous—the same as the blood of the Elder Deep herself, purified into the Waters of Life, if less potent. Dead mo‘o out there meant maybe the dragons would not even reach Uluhai. Maybe she and Ake would—
The Ranger Commander lunged forward without warning. Perhaps his enhanced senses caught something approaching she did not yet see, with the chaos of battle interfering with her ability to locate friend from foe based on the feel of currents. Perhaps he simply could no longer abide the anticipation.
Either way, Nyi Rara snarled, chasing after the Ranger. What choice had he left her? Indeed, the remaining Rangers—all six of them—swam forward as well, outdistancing her almost immediately. Nyi Rara could have used water jets to catch them, but then, she might well need all her strength before this was done.
In the swirling murk, incandescent eyes appeared, fathomless in their depth, swallowing her and leaving her suddenly back into the abyss of Naunet, choking on her own heartbeat. Here, a true spawn
of the Elder Deep swam, come to consume them all. Mired in those depths, Nyi Rara was no longer certain the dragons could not, in fact, consume mer souls and utterly destroy them.
A blur, Ake lunged at the glowing eyes, crashing into the mo‘o, driving his coral lance against hardened scales. A rush, a tumble, and the pair crashed into the gorge wall. Nyi Rara couldn’t see if the lance pierced, but fresh dragon blood scented the waters. The creature itself was a good eighteen feet long—a tumbling mass of muscle and snapping jaws.
Before she could act, the mo‘o’s back claws scraped over stone and it twisted around, driving Ake into a ledge. Its fore claws dug into the Ranger’s shoulder, shredding flesh. Its jaws descended, opening wide enough to bite his head off.
Shrieking, Nyi Rara flung a blade of water at the creature. The attack jetted through the ocean with such force the mo‘o looked in her direction the instant before catching the impact in the face. The blade cleft into its skull, slicing free scales, snapping a horn, and sending the mo‘o tumbling in wild circles.
Another form darted in, grabbed Ake, and dragged him away. From the corner of her eye, Nyi Rara caught sight of Apukohai rescuing his Commander, before directing all her focus at the mo‘o. With a snarl, she launched a water lance at the creature. The beast surged at her, caught the lance in the chest an instant before it would have reached her, and pitched around end over end backward.
A beat of her tail carried her away, closer to the shelter of the tunnels. Her attack had split more scales, drawn blood, left it dazed, even—but hadn’t slain the creature. Like its taniwha forebears, this mo‘o did not die easily.
Once more the dragon surged forward. Nyi Rara fired another lance. Surprisingly agile, the mo‘o twisted aside, dodging the assault and continuing at her.
Apukohai’s coral lance caught it under the chin just as it drew near. The shaft drove the mo‘o aside, and Nyi Rara set upon it with water blade after water blade. Her sharpened currents turned the waters into a slurry of scales and flesh and dragon ichor. One of her blades managed to cut through a foreleg, sending the massive clawed thing adrift.