Banished Sons Of Poseidon

by Andrew J. Peters

  It was as though Dam had possessed that otherworldly power his entire life. If he pondered on that too much, he would have been lost in its impossibility. As it was, he didn’t have time to think about such things. He didn’t want to break his concentration. They were making good speed, but he was impatient to reach the serpents’ den.

  At the tar pit cavern, they needed to find a way up the cleft where the mountain pass had split open. It had been a sightless vertical drop, and Dam had no idea if he could find footholds along the walls of that cleft or hidden passages in the cavern that would lead up to the mountains. Those concerns thrummed down to his charge as easily as they had occurred to him. The fire scorpion skirred around the tar pit, stopping here and there to twitch its whiskers beneath its gob and tap its forelegs on the bank. It was sorting out a route.

  It scampered to a side that Dam had not explored and found a narrow ledge. It climbed up and onward, winding around the pit, eking out an upward path Dam would never have been able to manage. Dam was jostled forward, backward, and side to side while his carriage scaled the steep and wicked route. The foul breath of the pit surrounded him. Dam held on tight to the creature’s shell. He did not care to take a plunge into the scalding pool again.

  The cleft narrowed and became more workable. The air turned cool and fresh. Dam reached out with his acoustic senses. A breeze washed through the ravine above. As it gusted through hollows and swirled back from the edges of the ravine, an image of the mountain pass formed crisply in his mind’s eye. His steed crawled out of the cleft and into the blank night of the ravine.

  Dam commanded the scorpion to halt. He needed to sort out one direction from another. More than that, the sensation of ice-cold dread had clutched his gut. The last time he had been in that spot, the ravine had shuddered and rained down boulders on him and every member of his party.

  Dam sent out a flood of vibrations to plot the faces of the gorge. Toward one end was a narrow hollow, which was the way Dam’s team had come up from the lake. Toward the other, a tall mount of rubble dammed the ravine.

  Dam thought of Hanhau, Attalos, Callios, Heron, Blix, and Rad. He grasped each name from his mind and sent them searching through the wall of rubble like ethereal tentacles. A chorus of names bled through the gorge in Dam’s voice and echoed back to him bleakly. He commanded his steed to climb the hill of fallout so he could survey the site more closely.

  His hearing roamed through the wreckage searching for the faintest breath or the drumming of a heartbeat. Dam visualized Hanhau’s leaves of body armor and wondered if he could pick out the particular sound of his voice rippling back from him. Vibrations could lay bare everything. They bounced back swift and sharp from hard matter and slower and fainter from softer things, like flesh. His fire scorpion possessed that kind of perception, and Dam was mastering it quickly.

  He fanned out his voice and sorted out its reverberations. Buried in the rubble, he found metal tools and weapons and pieces of earthen things—all remnants of the expedition party, but nothing corpse-like or gory. That was a hopeful relief, yet still a puzzle. He had crested the dam of fallout, and it filled the entire rotunda where they had discovered the remains of Calyiches’ party.

  A cold bolt of fear struck Dam’s heart. A pattern of sound had traveled back to him and formed a vivid image. Bodies were piled on top of each other in the wreckage. His survey of sound revealed the texture of flesh and bone, but no breaths or living sounds came from the buried bodies.

  Dam remembered they had laid out the dead for a pyre before the tremor struck the ravine. That death pile had to be what he had located. It was too deep beneath the fallout to confirm with his eyes, but he had no other answer. He compelled the fire scorpion farther into the ravine, still searching for traces of human life. The wreckage declined to the surface of the ravine where a buckled trail snaked through the mountains.

  Could scavengers have cleaned out other bodies? A swirl of echoes caught his attention. He zoned in on that sound and pulled his steed in that direction. Faintly, he made out a depth of darkness on one side of the ravine.

  Coming up on that spot, Dam saw it was a mill-worm hole like the one Blix had pointed out farther back in the mountain pass. The tunnel was approximately at shoulder height and wide enough for men to climb into. He halted there and listened.

  A channel of inert vibrations stretched to the extremity of Dam’s hearing. It would have made for a solid shelter from the tremor. Far away, the winding burrow opened up to a broader place, but many tunneled branches led to dead ends in the mountain as well as berths filled with spiny, chattering things.

  Following the tunnel would lead Dam far aloft from his destination, and it wasn’t big enough for the fire scorpion to get through. Dam cursed himself that he hadn’t thought about the power to be in two places at once. His heart was pulling him to climb into the tunnel, but he leashed it brutally and pressed his carriage onward. He had to get the Oomphalos first. All he could do was pray that Hanhau and the others had escaped into the mill-worm hole.

  *

  The mountain pass emptied into a valley shored in by furrows of hills. Dam called his fire scorpion to step slowly and lightly as though traversing a spider’s web and to pay attention to the mountainside. Unless Zazamoukh’s story had led him on a fruitless mission, the serpents’ den was near.

  Dam scanned the faces of the mountain with a supremely delicate auditory touch, finding many nooks and spurs until the entrance to the lair revealed itself as a translucent spout of arcane energy. Dam hardly needed to plumb the mountainside for its location. The round hole that Zazamoukh had described was a portal to the Oomphalos. The snakes must have cached their prize deep inside to hide its brilliance, but its magic was too powerful to be smothered completely. It radiated vibrations, and its energies pervaded as far and wide as the sun itself.

  Those vibrations reached the skin of Dam’s face and pulsed gently through him. How many serpents guarded the jewel that would enable them to conquer Agartha again? As fast as Dam had sped toward the place, fear held him captive for a vulnerable moment.

  The errand had to be done alone. Even if the fire scorpion could fit inside the lair, it was too large a target for the serpents. Besides, keeping the scorpion in step with his commands would take too much of his mental focus.

  Dam would need to concentrate every filament of his power on stealth. The serpents couldn’t see well, but they had a keen sense of motion. Dam recalled the speed with which their queen had sorted out their route when he, Aerander, and Lys had snuck into her nest to retrieve the Oomphalos. The only way they had managed to give Aerander a chance to claim it was to split off and create scattered targets for her to chase. The serpents also had the intelligence of men. A surprise commotion, like the one Dam had conjured to frighten the fire scorpions, wouldn’t work on them. They would fall back to protect their precious stone.

  Dam dismounted the scorpion. He wished that he had the means to tether it to a spur in the mountain pass. The creature would no doubt be useful if he had to make a quick escape.

  Turning to the nearest border of the valley, Dam sent waves of sound into the sightless hills. Slow vibrations echoed back to him, unveiling lodes of thick and bubbling mori-mori in that ridge, just as Zazamoukh had described. With a quick, little rasp, Dam prodded the fire scorpion in that direction. Hopefully the creature would find a fractured trough of mori-mori where it could graze, and it would remain nearby when he emerged from the den.

  Dam hid his sword and sheath behind a crag in the mountain shoal. He didn’t want to leave them, but the iron-forged weapon rang out with vibrations he couldn’t afford to cloak on his mission.

  Dam looked back to the mountainside and was almost on his way when he remembered one last task. The glow from Calaeno’s amulet needed to be extinguished. He couldn’t slip into the serpent’s stronghold with that lighted target on his chest no matter how stealthy he was.

  It would be the greatest test of his mettle, rely
ing entirely on his mastery of sound. He called out to Calaeno. Dam wished he had thought about that earlier. He wanted to be done with the princess.

  “Where are you, Dam?”

  “I found the den. But I can’t go in with this light around my neck.”

  “Oh—I thought—well, never mind. That’s easily enough done.” The amulet faded and disappeared in the darkness.

  “You can’t light it up again. Not until I say so.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t.”

  “Right. Well, I’m off then.”

  “Dam, be careful. You’d let me know if you’re in danger, wouldn’t you?”

  She sounded sincere, but Dam didn’t know whether it was because she genuinely cared about him or because he was her only link back to Zazamoukh.

  “Sure,” he said, and then he shut her out of his mind.

  Chapter Two

  Approaching the mountain socket, Dam cloaked his body to absorb his movements. It occurred to him, however, that the trick was not enough. The snakes’ forked tongues were like the antennae of the fire scorpions. They lapped the air to taste displacements in their surroundings, and the vibrations of their tongues would reach that sheath around him and echo back, revealing an intruder. Besides, the energy of the Oomphalos would halt and ripple like a stream parting from a rock that jutted through the surface.

  He needed to imagine himself as spectral as a dead man’s soul drifting through a crypt. It required an extraordinary amount of concentration. The air was filled with hundreds of currents of sound. Dam had to anticipate each one of their trajectories and to visualize them passing through his body unbroken, as though he wasn’t there.

  Meanwhile, he had to scope out the way ahead. Dam climbed into the tunnel, shifting from one priority to another. It had to be worse than heading into a swarm of arrows. Even a battalion of archers let up from time to time to reload their bows. Sound and vibration was eternal and infinite. Dam ventured forward, modulating the vibrations that traveled in and out of the tunnel so that it seemed like they were passing through him. When he found a bunker in the cave to hide behind, he quickly fanned out a faint wash of vibrations to paint the next stretch of his path.

  His other senses picked up the danger farther ahead. The foul odor of overcrowded reptiles crept into his nostrils.

  Dam came to a junction of tunneled passages. He shrank against the wall and focused on acting as a porous veil. Movement echoed from one of the tunnels. It rose up in a rumble, and then a giant serpent trundled through the junction. Its flickering tongue nearly skimmed Dam’s face. Dam grasped his breaths in an invisible fist while its enormous trunk skirred past him.

  The creature headed down a tunnel that led to the Oomphalos’ cascading energy. Dam followed, gaining courage from the success of his disguise. He had been a thief before. The stakes then had been miniscule in comparison, but he knew the feeling of skating the edge of danger. It was a delicious thrill.

  Down that tunnel, a torrent of vibrations swirled at him. He had no cover and no time to piece through the commotion to visualize its sources. He needed all of his focus on maneuvering around the beams of sound, and when he couldn’t duck or bend away from their projection, he had to imagine his body as the sheerest of membranes and mimic the sounds passing through him.

  For a moment, he was marooned and panicked. The dilemma was overwhelming, like trying to capture every current of a typhoon and recreate its path beyond him. Dam wondered if he had overestimated his powers or misjudged his strategy. He would be trapped in the tunnel hiding soundlessly for eternity, and he didn’t have eternity. His powers would fade. Sooner than that, the snakes would move on to attack the city.

  Courage swelled up in Dam. He was the Master of Sound. He only needed to slow down the passage of its currents in his mind, like freezing time. He crept ahead with a newfound acuity and fearlessness. His mind was a whirring machinery, capturing every vibration and guiding it on its way. Soon that flurry of commands came together as second nature, just as easy as skulking through the tunnel. He was a walking void. Every gust and ripple of noise passed through him. He arrived at the end of the tunnel. Dam visualized a sea of movement in a wide pit below.

  Coiled and writhing monsters undulated in that pitch black expanse. It was the serpents’ habit to nest together as one gory horde. When they held the city, they had numbered in the thousands. They had been cut down to dozens when the prisoners revolted and the Old Ones came to reclaim their city. Dam was stunned by how many snakes inhabited their den. Several hundred? They must have bred, and no doubt the Oomphalos had catalyzed that effort.

  Across the pit, the magic of the Oomphalos radiated out like an invisible beacon from atop a tall platform of rock. The relic was buried beneath a mound of man-sized spheres. Even under all that, the stone had to be covered by a solid cage to muffle its energy even more. Perhaps they were wary since the Oomphalos had been stolen from them before, or maybe it had been hid in that mound for another reason.

  As Dam zoned in, he noticed that each of the mounded spheres gave off a drumming, squirming energy. Cold dread poured over him. The spheres were serpent eggs being nurtured by the stone’s strange power, a new generation of monsters to terrorize the underworld. Three serpents guarded that hatchery.

  Dam traveled around the narrow ridge of the pit. Rustles, squirms and hisses clamored up from the serpent nest below. Edging around the pit, Dam bounced those noises back as though he had melded into the walls of the den. As he neared the platform of the Oomphalos, he realized his impossible predicament. He could cloak himself to slip past the serpents guarding the eggs and the Oomphalos. If he did it very quickly, he could avoid their dull and cloudy vision. But he would have to dig the Oomphalos out of the egg mound. As soon as he did that, its full, brilliant energy would flood the den, and the entire horde of snakes would launch at him to defend it.

  As he fretted, a method struck Dam. He could use his magic to squelch the stone’s vibrations like muffling a buzzing bee with his hand. That would panic the guards to sift through the eggs to investigate. Dam wouldn’t be able to do anything about the stone’s throbbing glow, but if he hid near, he could take advantage of the moment of confusion to grab the Oomphalos and tuck it in a pocket of his tunic. The stone would be plunder, not a weapon. Despite what Calaeno said about the line of Atlas, Dam couldn’t fathom commanding the Oomphalos as Aerander had done. He was just its thief. He would have to work by decoy and stealth to accomplish his job.

  The gamble was perilous. For one thing, Dam did not know if his power could quench the stone’s vibrations even temporarily. For another, he would have to be as quick as lightning to run off with it before the serpent guards took notice of him. Afterward, he would have to seal up both his vibrations and the stone’s to escape from the den while every serpent in the lair leapt up from the pit to catch him. His odds weren’t very good, but Dam had surrendered himself to fate from the moment he had entered the den. Besides, fearlessness was his nature as it had been with his father.

  He came up on the platform of rock overlooking the pit, and he stole into position behind the trio of serpents watching the hatchery. Beneath the mounded eggs, he perceived a horned shell caging the Oomphalos. It might have been the husk of a carrion beetle. The serpents’ weakness was that they lacked the industry of the Old Ones. Having shed their limbs through their monstrous transformation ages ago, they depended on human slaves for any type of craft. Maybe that was why they were biding their time to attack the city. It took greater numbers to enslave an enemy than to annihilate it.

  Penetrating into the depths of the hollow, farther inward on the cliff where he stood, Dam perceived pens walled with boulders hobbled together by the serpents’ snouts and constricting trunks.

  The Oomphalos throbbed beneath its shell. It generated thrumming halos of energy that seemed strong enough to travel out to an infinite circumference. Hazily, Dam could visualize its silhouette, but it was hard to capture exactly in his mind’s
eye. A great welter of vibrations fought to get out of that shell. The stone’s energy was distorted, and it seemed at times multiple entities were beneath its cover.

  Dam drew up near. He had to camouflage himself precisely. Two of the serpents were bunkered around the egg mound. The third looked out over the pit, reared to its full height and lashing its tongue, performing some foul accounting of its tribe. Dam called up orbs of smothering silence into his palms. He had one chance to perform his trick. If he only accomplished a hiccup in the stone’s energy, he would be easily discovered when the serpents locked in on the egg mound to sort out the irregularity.

  The orbs of silence grew in Dam’s hands, drawn from every void of sound in his ken. When they felt strong enough to cloak an erupting volcano, he flushed them deep into the egg mound to grasp the shell around the Oomphalos. They made their mark, spreading around the husk, and billowed back from the stone’s tremendous energy. Dam bore down on them. He was fighting magic with magic. He needed to channel more silence from his surroundings and bear down on the stone with greater strength. Dam managed a solid grip on the shell and muted the Oomphalos completely.

  The two serpent guards snapped to attention, and their lookout curled back to the egg mound with a reptilian gasp. Two of them nudged through the eggs. The third made a keen appraisal of the perimeter with its flicking tongue. Dam prayed that they unearthed the Oomphalos quickly. He was starkly in their midst with only a sound barrier for cover.

  The eggs tumbled away from the shell. Angry hisses scraped through the air. The serpents had to be panicked, thinking that the source of their power had been stolen right from under them or worse, that its ancient energy had died.

  Dam inched closer to the shell. As soon as the Oomphalos was unveiled, in that blink of confusion when the serpents found it shining but as inert as an ordinary gem, Dam would have to grab it. He kept his aura of smothering energy trained on the shell, ready to shrink it around the skull-shaped stone and lunge for the prize. One of the serpents moved the shell with its snout.