Dream Storm Sea

by A. E. Marling

  On the last word, the blue rings on the tentacle flared to a violet hue. Hiresha waved to Skyheart’s vivid pigmentation. “Humans should not be judged by their skin colors but by what we build.”

  The paragon diamond spun on her fingertip, the pyramid balanced on one point.

  The eyespots rearranged themselves, and between them the kraken’s skin darkened to red. “I judge a human by its hunger.”

  The kraken referred to people as if they were objects. Hiresha could not say she was surprised. She did the same for it.

  Emesea asked, “What’s she saying?”

  Hiresha ignored the warrior to signal back. “Your hatred of humans was clear after the umpteenth dismemberment. Why, then, would you try to speak with me?”

  “It can handle wild magic. And its blue skin signaled it wanted to communicate.”

  The kraken thinks my dress is my skin. Ah, misperceptions, how they turn the world. The inaccuracy reassured Hiresha that this could be reality. Unless the Jeweled Feaster added the kraken’s misinterpretation to trick me. She is cunning enough.

  Skyheart curled its arms into seashell spirals. When they uncoiled, they read, “I want its help.”

  “Before I learn why a kraken needs a human, tell me this. Why do you murder us?”

  Except Hiresha knew no pattern for “murder.” Instead she had to describe the tales of how Skyheart dragged out human deaths, how it plucked off limbs, how it tried to juggle Hiresha and the others. What she did not tell was that Skyheart’s life depended on its answer. Her jewels were enchanted to kill.

  Their facets reflected crimson from the kraken’s skin. Its eyespots darkened to so deep a shade of purple they looked black. “Humans cut out the intestines of fish and throw them to their dogs. They chop off our heads, flay scales, tear out bones, and pack us in ice. I watched. I learned.”

  “I admit, the perspective of a cold-blooded octopus is not one I had considered.” She had to simplify her phrasing into the patterns, I see this now through your eyes. “So you hunt humans because we hunted you first?”

  “I eat only a little human. There’s no strength in them. No wild magic. And its people are stupid. I try to warn them. I kill. And still it sets sail.”

  “The intelligence of humans should always be called into question,” Hiresha replied. “Yet there’s a mortal logic to fishermen. They fear the certainty of starving more than the chance of death in your arms.”

  “More of them hunt in the Far and Near Sea. Many more fish die on hooks. You pull us from safety so we gag on air venoms.”

  Hiresha asked, “Is this the Far and Near Sea?”

  “No. Why would it travel here? It doesn’t even know the sea’s name.”

  “Then do you mean the sea beyond the desert, to the north?” The Sea of Fangs. Hiresha tried to imagine the Murderfish crawling across the scorching dunes. Unlikely. “How do you know of it?”

  “Whales travel far. Twice I made the journey, but this sea is my home.” Rather than gesturing at the waters as a person might have, the kraken revolved, its arms spinning like curving spokes on a carriage.

  So, it speaks with whales. Hiresha thought that might explain how the kraken had found them on this floating grove.

  “What’s she saying?” Emesea punched at the air in her excitement. “Look at her! She’d make any bird jealous with that color, any princess even.”

  Hiresha considered the kraken. It treated humans cruelly, and knowing it did so in defense of other fish was not enough to make Hiresha share the warrior’s glee. The enchantress could understand Skyheart’s horror at seeing fishermen butcher their catch. The kraken did seem a creature of thought and feeling. It was enough to brighten Hiresha’s interest.

  If this is a dream, it is a most diverting one.

  The enchantress spoke aloud for Emesea. “The kraken may be sensible enough to negotiate. It wants something from me. Perhaps I might come to be the empire’s emissary to the sea.”

  She beckoned to the sky, pulling on the blue diamond she had left on Tethiel’s palm. He descended to the barge. Tethiel said nothing of the kraken or the droppings splattered across the remains of his coat.

  “My heart, I believe this must be the best and most elegant boat that ever sank. What will we name it?”

  Hiresha nodded toward the hieroglyph on the mast visible between mussels and draping seaweed. “The barge is called Pharaoh’s Wisdom. That might explain its grim fate.”

  Hiresha enchanted four of her diamonds with Attraction spells that could pull her to safety. With these orbiting around her, she leaped above Skyheart. She wished to distance herself from those on the barge. The kraken did not take the sudden movement well. It blended in with the sea and shot to the side in the water.

  She made quick to apologize. “I shouldn’t have moved into your blind spot.”

  The skittish gargantuan reappeared to normal sight once Hiresha started signaling again with her diamond dust.

  “After you saved us from the rogue fish, you asked who we were, what we were doing at sea.” The enchantress could read the eyespot patterns in hindsight. “This is Emesea—”

  Skyheart interrupted. “The dragon child. I knew what it was after it cut me.”

  “—and that is the Lord of the Feast. He prefers cannibalism to sea food, if that is a reassurance. I am the Lady of Gems. I only wished to cross over this sea to escape the prejudices of my fellow man.”

  The Murderfish tilted its body to the side to gaze up at her with an eye. “Lady of Gems, the sea is your journey. It is our home. My name is Skyheart.”

  “Most exceptional to meet you, Skyheart. Understand that any agreement we make must include safe passage for myself and my associates.” She knew the sign for “friend” or “partner” but used instead the pattern that suggested that they were less close, only members of her fish school.

  Skyheart’s eyespots took on hues of cyan. Its tentacles made flicking motions toward Hiresha. “Might I still juggle it? It would be most safe. I never miss a catch. Except on purpose.”

  “No.” Hiresha wondered if the green tint to its markings indicated a jest. “You may now tell me of your request.”

  The kraken’s spots turned azure. “Can it pool all the wild magic from a dream storm?”

  The enchantress would never have conceived of such a request. The scale of power would be catastrophic, the logistics boggling. Except that she now had the niggling feeling that she just might succeed. What an oddity. In this state of dream inversion, failure will be most uncommon.

  “Possibly.” Her diamonds spread and reformed in the floating disks. “What use does a kraken have for concentrated power?”

  “Come, and I’ll show it.” Skyheart tucked its arms behind it and sped head-first through the water like an iris-spotted fireball.

  Waters that had once chilled and frightened Hiresha now warmed and soothed her. She dove after the kraken and had a sense of swimming through liquid sunlight.

  Skyheart guided her around clouds of invisible jellyfish. Hiresha would have sensed them regardless by the rippling disturbances of their ghostly tendrils. For a split-second, the jellyfish swarm lit pink like a pillow with thousands of dangling silk threads of stinging death. The enchantress assumed the infrequent discharges of light kept whales and other unsuitable prey from barreling into the jellyfish and causing wreckage.

  The Pharaoh’s Wisdom barge was a shadow behind them. It could not keep up, even with its sail full and Skyheart looping back. Each time the kraken circled the enchantress, its skin changed to a remarkable pattern. There were no words, only swirls of color and shadow. Once, black sand seemed to wash down Skyheart’s head to its arms. Next, it was the hue of seaweed with the same opalescent gloss. Another time, tiger stripes strummed over the eight arms.

  It made a beating sound as it swam. Water coursed into pouches on either side of its head then sluiced out its neck from a siphon. The force of the flow jetted the kraken forward.

  Tha-thum
p! Tha-thump!

  The noise was as if Hiresha rested an ear against a man’s chest. Skyheart is an apt name.

  The kraken’s siphon blasted out streams of current that sent swordfish tumbling. Hiresha avoided the flows. She kept pace with Skyheart’s meanderings by launching a jewel ahead of her with a sweep of an arm. The diamond Attracted her forward, and when she caught up she replenished its magic.

  The enchantress did not worry overmuch about the barge falling behind their pace. Emesea and Tethiel deserve more time together, in peril. Besides, even if the pair lost sight of the kraken, Tethiel could sense Hiresha’s direction by the tug of the diamond bound to his hand.

  The enchantress had implanted three diamonds in her own face. Her skin throbbed around the jewel piercings, but they did not distract her focus. The first diamond glowed between her brows, and it Repulsed water from her eyes. Her lashes grazed the edges of each air pocket. The enchantment also repelled the sea from her skin and gown. Instead of the water dragging on her, she glided through it.

  The second enchantment permitted her to breathe. A jewel in either cheek Attracted water units apart, breaking the bits of matter into a gritty air. Each sip of the sea gave her a mouthful of frigid breath. The potent enchantment taxed her, and she doubted she should attempt creating one for another person.

  Not that she cared to. Emesea and Tethiel had disappointed her. The enchantress was enjoying herself well enough without them. Fish as bright as jewels flitted back and forth near a reef.

  A ridge sloped out of the depths. The land reached toward the molten-metal shimmer of the water’s surface but stopped short. This almost-island was crowned by coral. Skyheart led Hiresha toward it.

  The kraken camouflaged two of its tentacles. Those unseen arms plucked up a catfish and shark, coiling them into Skyheart’s underside. Hiresha refrained from looking, but she heard the slice and crunch of eating.

  Her diamond dust spread from her palm in a spiral of circles. She knew the kraken would see her words. With an eye on either side of its head, its vision spanned everything not directly above or below.

  “You eat fish, as people do. Is it that you object to the way we kill them?”

  “Yes.” Skyheart’s bulk shadowed the aqua filigree of coral fans. “And taking them is stealing wild magic from the sea. The dream storms have shrunk since I spawned.”

  “I may be able to ban sea fishing in my lands.” Hiresha felt that she could accomplish anything. She signaled she could “stop fishing” because she had learned no concept in the kraken’s language for laws.

  Skyheart’s coloration turned a topaz yellow. “All the nets gone? All the hooks and harpoons?”

  “Not all. But fewer.” The enchantress dashed closer to a tentacle to touch a fishhook embedded in flesh. Her magic flattened the barb against the bronze shaft, and she pulled out the hook. A wisp of blue blood followed it.

  “Don’t.” The kraken folded that arm amongst the others. Two other tentacles touched hooks stuck in other spots. “They’re to remind me.”

  “Of what you fight against?”

  The kraken gave no answer as it laid tentacles over the wall of coral. Skyheart clambered over it, and the underside of waves lapped against its head. Hiresha followed in a leap that breached the water’s surface. A ring of coral sprawled before her in an atoll. Skyheart dropped into its center, a dark well, a deep blueness as wide as a pyramid.

  The vastness of the atoll sent anticipation zigzagging over Hiresha’s skin. She felt something important would happen here, or that it already had. Have I been here before? The uncertainty jarred her. In most things her recall seemed perfect.

  Fish swarmed upward from the walls of the atoll. Some long and green, others yellow and puffy, they crowded after the kraken. They appeared like people flocking after a celebrated priest. Skyheart only ate a few.

  One tentacle unwound to point at its side. “I’ve another reminder in me. A harpoon head, nested next to my heart.”

  Hiresha kicked closer in a non-threatening way. She touched the kraken’s skin. It was cold and slick, like a stone wall in the rain. The swath of scar tissue there reminded her of barnacles in its roughness and tan color.

  The enchantress shook her head. “The harpoon must have been massive to leave such a scar.”

  An eye the size of Hiresha’s head peered down at her. Its pupil had widened to a rectangle with curved sides. Even so close, Hiresha did not feel afraid. Her thoughts moved fast, and so could she. If anything, Skyheart should be afraid of my jewels.

  The touch spread her awareness within the kraken. She detected the beat of not one heart, but three. Extraordinary! Beneath the closest heart she could sense a wedge of metal. It was laced with silver and enchanted. A spearhead. And, yes, those serrated edges would explain the severity of its wound.

  “I killed the human that did it,” Skyheart replied. “Walked over the shore that night to grab it.”

  “I heard that story.” Hiresha remembered Maid Naroh’s tale of the spellsword. Nausea wrinkled its way up the enchantress and left her with a cringe. “You took all night to kill him?”

  “The humans had to know they couldn’t best me. And it had hurt me. It owed me some play. The arms and legs of humans are four eels bound by their tails.” The kraken’s tentacles flailed in demonstration.

  The enchantress felt that something memorable had to happen in the atoll, and perhaps for that reason she decided to argue with a kraken. “You shouldn’t expect this to amuse me. We may eat fish, but we never kill them for the pleasure of causing pain. You torture people, and if we’re to have any agreement it must stop.”

  For the concept of “torture,” she invented a pattern. Her circles split into jagged bolts.

  “Humans don’t feel much pain.” Skyheart circled the wall of the atoll. “Their skin never shows hurt. Only a little fright or a little anger.”

  The kraken had never seemed more like a man than when it authoritatively told Hiresha what she should and should not feel.

  She thought, It misunderstands so much. Skyheart is no more intelligent or sympathetic than the average person.

  “We communicate pain in other ways,” she said. “I’m certain we can feel as miserable as a speared octopus.”

  The kraken did not reply. Its bold eyespots faded and blended in with the wall’s frills and knobs of coral. Hiresha could only speculate if this was a sign of regret. Skyheart slinked out of the atoll.

  Hiresha took one last look around the ring of coral and its deepness. She expected something yet to happen.

  A jellyfish bobbed from the depths. Its bell head curved in and out. The tendrils reminded her of flowing veils, necklaces of flowers, strands of gold, and beads of aquamarines and violet topazes. They all danced. They allured, and fish swam straight into the beautiful deadliness. The tendrils embraced them.

  Hiresha wished to touch the jellyfish, but the desire was a meek thing next to the chiming intensity of her focus. As she turned away, she still felt she had missed something in the atoll. She also thought Tethiel should have loved to see the jellyfish.

  The slope of the seafloor was forested by kelp. Hiresha swam among air sacs and rubbery leaves. The swaying spires of seaweed all leaned to their sides as the kraken plowed through. Skyheart spread its arms only when it reached a clear stretch of white sand.

  Chunks of broken-off seaweed floated after the kraken. Except they were not kelp after all but octopus mimics. They shed their camouflage and lit with orange and blue spots. They zipped over Skyheart’s tentacles. They looked tiny in comparison, but when the enchantress swept past one, its arms spread longer than she was tall.

  The octopus ignored her to climb Skyheart. The smaller creature could fit in one of the kraken’s eyespots, but the octopus had dots of its own. Hiresha recognized some of the patterns as, “beauty,” “courage,” and “spawn.”

  “They are your children?” Hiresha asked.

  “How foolish.” Skyheart sucked a few oc
topuses inside its head then spouted them from its funnel. Their skin turned yellow, and they signaled “joy.” “We put all of our strength into our spawn. To mate would have been my death.”

  The kraken’s skin took on an appearance of grey, sloughing off in strands of pale flesh. The decay was only another layer of camouflage, but the octopuses shied away until Skyheart’s color returned.

  “I promised never to mate,” Skyheart explained, “until the seas are safe from human hunger.”

  A kraken vowed to celibacy. The strangeness of the idea might have amused Hiresha, yet the sight of Skyheart’s skin withering had touched her core. Hiresha had once promised herself never to bear children until she cured herself of her somnolence.

  The enchantress felt a deep stirring of respect for the kraken’s dedication, even if she could not approve of its methods. She gazed over the spotted octopuses. The larger ones seemed most interested in the kraken, many crawling across the kraken’s brow with their suctioning arms.

  “They are yet trying to mate with their guardian?” Hiresha indicated it as a question by thinning out the diamond circles. The gem rings were paler and less substantial.

  Skyheart’s hide turned fuchsia. “They do want me to spend myself laying eggs.”

  So it is a ‘she,’ as Emesea thought. Hiresha found the matter irrelevant.

  The kraken’s eyespots were still moving. “Even the more intelligent creatures in the sea can be short sighted.”

  “The same is true on land. But you have a plan that involves the dream storms. Know that I’ll not agree to any demolishing of cities.”

  Skyheart reached to the seafloor and furrowed the sand with two tentacles. The lines circled close to each other but did not touch. The enchantress recognized the drawing as the coastlines of the Lands of Loam. The slender tips of the kraken’s arms even traced the onion tower skyline of Jaraah, for her benefit, she suspected.

  The enchantress floated over the southern part of the map. “This is the Dream Storm Sea, and there the Sea of Fangs with desert between them.”