Ascott pointed at his head. The octopus regarded him for a long moment and then laid out O-C-T-O-P-U-S-A-L-L-B-R-A-I-N T-W-E-N-T-Y-O-N-E-P-O-I-N-T-S.
Communicating with one of the ocean’s most mysterious creatures fascinated Ascott so much he forgot to be afraid. This appeared to be the break-through he was looking for. Finally, a sea-creature he could share information with and learn from.
Staring at the line of tiles, he calculated the scores were 133 to the octopus and 118 to Ascott.
Moving the tiles he laid out, W-E-M-A-K-E-T-H-I-N-G-S, a fair effort for twenty-five points.
The octopus responded with, Y-O-U-D-E-S-T-R-O-Y-T-H-A-W-H-I-C-H-Y-O-U-C-R-E-A-T-E. Fifty-four points. The octopus seemed intent on driving the point home and went on, M-O-R-O-N-S, for a further eight points.
Noting his air supply was getting low, Ascott laid out the letter tiles for the last time.
Y-O-U-A-R-E-R-I-G-H-T-W-E-S-H-O-U-L-D-B-E-E-A-T-E-N, forty-two points.
A braver man might have told himself that there are certainly worse ways to die than being drowned and eaten by an octopus with a killer vocabulary. Instead, Ascott found that even his eyelids were paralysed with fascination. The octopus furled its tentacles and seemed to swell in readiness to lunge in for a killing grab. Or strike. Ascott wasn’t entirely sure how they did it.
The entire animal suddenly exploded in a cloud of black ink that obscured everything. In that dark cloud tentacles swirled and writhed until, in a final surge, the entire octopus vanished. Ascott blinked as several beams of light pierced the haze; he snapped off his own light and pulled himself down to the floor of the narrow corridor.
Hardly breathing, he watched while the lights played over the timbers, briefly shone into the white-out conditions of the corridor, and then vanished again. Someone else was searching the wreck.
The sound of timbers being hammered and wrenched was distorted through the water. Ascott crouched in the dark, his air gauge now touching the red. He had fifteen minutes of air left if he didn’t breathe too fast. Whoever was out there seemed intent on taking the wreck apart to find whatever they were looking for. Ascott watched as his displaced fin was swept into the corridor on a stray current. Reaching out, he snatched it up and slipped it back on to his foot. Now at least he might have a swimming chance of getting out undetected.
The Ixnay box had left a clear imprint on the wooden floor where it had lain for decades before Ascott wrenched it up. He could see the locking-bolt of a trapdoor through the gap in the silt. Working the bolt free he lifted the wooden door, hoping for a chance of escape.
The space below the trapdoor was darker than the ink still clouding the water around Ascott. He hesitated, unsure whether to go in head first or risk sticking his feet in. Flicking his light back on he peered into the hole, trying to pierce the gloom. A white shape moved in the dark and then bobbed up through the gap. Ascott tumbled backwards, bubbles streaming as he yelled. The shape was a badly decayed body, the flesh hanging from the skull in white tatters. The lips were gone, giving the eyeless skull a hysterical leer. The arms were crossed over the chest, held together by the rotting coat it still wore. Clutched in the bony fingers was a metal box, similar in size and shape to the Ixnay case Ascott had wielded earlier. The skeleton rose further, twisting slowly in the current as if conducting an inspection on the state of the ship. A crab waved its claws at Ascott from her seat in the empty eye-socket, like a passenger on a skeleton-shaped zippilin.
Ascott peered into the hole until he was satisfied that this was the only dead person waiting to come up. Sliding down feet first, he snatched the metal box from the skeleton and pulled the trapdoor closed over his head. A moment later he heard the first of the other divers swim into the corridor and tug on the collapsed pile of timbers.
The water in the lower hold was clear, though completely lacking in light. His torch only emphasised the darkness as he took stock.
Seven minutes of air and no apparent way out.
Of course, the other divers might be completely harmless. It could simply be the nagging distress he suffered when faced with crowds or strangers that had driven him down here into the dark, where a dead man had been floating for Arthur-knows how long.
Now, Ascott mused, would be the perfect time for Arthur, or Drakeforth, or whatever his name actually is, to appear and perform some miracle.
Ascott didn’t put a lot of faith in prayer, and he told himself this was just a fervent wish, rather than an actual appeal to a possible (retired) deity. There was no golden shaft of light, no underwater trumpet blast, and no appearance of Drakeforth. Probably off drinking tea with Charlotte, he thought with a pang of grief.
His grim reverie was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder, which nearly sent him through the low roof of the ship’s hold in fright. Spinning around Ascott found himself face to…well, face, with the octopus. This time there were no Ixnay tiles to communicate with. The octopus spread a pair of tentacles and displayed a cut-out paper chain of human figures. A second pair of tentacles appeared with a flourish and casually ripped their paper heads off.
Seriously? Do you just sit down here waiting for people to come along so you can do this sort of thing? Ascott thought.
Looking about he saw a pointed stone lying in the mud. Snatching it up, he scraped letters in the slime-cloaked timbers: I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS.
The octopus twirled one of its knives and scratched, FEEDING TIME.
NO, Ascott scratched under that. GO EAT A FISH OR SOMETHING. I HAVE TO FIND A WAY OUT OF HERE.
DON’T WANT FISH. WANT TWO ARMS NO BRAIN, the octopus wrote back.
THERE ARE MORE TWO-ARMS UP THERE, Ascott wrote, and gestured over his head for added clarity.
TWO ARMS WITH SHARP STABBY THINGS, the octopus wrote.
Great, thought Ascott. Not only is this a man-eating octopus that can read and write, it—
He became aware, with an attention-grabbing shortness of breath, that his air tank had run dry. The fat lady of panic stepped on stage to thunderous applause. Ascott flailed his arms, a thinning stream of bubbles trickling from the exit valve of his respirator.
Swimming blindly, he plunged upwards, struck his head on a low beam and stunned himself into insensibility. As consciousness hastily scrawled a note saying it didn’t know what time it would be back, Ascott was only dimly aware of the arms of the octopus reaching out and gathering him up.
Chapter 7
Death, Ascott always assumed, would be quieter. He lay floating in a warm light, but his peaceful transition from this world to what may lie beyond the veil was being interrupted by discordant squawks and a great deal of shouting and cursing.
He opened his eyes. The sun was high in the sky and the water was an incredible shade of blue that would have interior designers throwing out their thesauruses in frustration.
“Landlubberth!” Tacus was shouting. “Thcurvy dogth!”
Ascott lifted his head to tell the bird to hush and realised that he was floating on the surface of the ocean.
His weight belt and air-tank were gone, but on the plus side, he hadn’t been eaten by an octopus. Moving his feet and hands so he floated upright, Ascott took stock. A large cruiser boat drifted less than a hundred feet away, shining with a blue and white glossy finish. It was one of those rich-man motor yachts, all sleek lines and wooden panelling inside.
Tacus was at the end of his rope, literally and figuratively. His wings flapped as he strained against a cord that was tied around his feet, preventing him from escaping more than a few feet from the deck of the cruiser.
Ascott turned slowly, putting together a complete picture of what was happening. Tacus is being kidnapped by rich people; my dive gear is gone; and my canoe is on fire.
That required a second look. The dugout was indeed ablaze, and had burned down to the water line already. A column of thick black smoke
rose into the clear sky.
Ascott started swimming towards the cruiser. A small part of his mind, the part that wasn’t prepared to draw conclusions based on mere observation, thought that they might have, at best, a fire-extinguisher; and at worst, an explanation.
Kalim Aari appeared on deck and turned his sunglasses towards Ascott.
“My canoe is on fire!” Ascott called up to him.
“Yes, yes it is,” Kalim replied as if Ascott had commented on the pleasantness of the weather.
“My canoe is on fire!” Ascott repeated.
“I know! I set it on fire!” Kalim called back.
“Why would you do that!?” Ascott treaded water as he yelled.
“Because you are more likely to cooperate if you are in danger of drowning!”
“I’ve been in danger of drowning once already today! It didn’t make me cooperative at all!”
“Mutiny!” Tacus squawked as he landed heavily on the deck and began to pick at the rope around his legs.
Kalim leaned on the chrome rail of the boat, “Where is it?” he said to Ascott.
“Where is what?” Ascott cast about, looking for whatever it might be that Kalim had mislaid.
“The treasure.”
“What treasure?”
“My uncle was Captain Tithely Aarrgh. His grand-father, Fencer Aarrgh, was the first Captain Aarrgh. Fencer Aarrgh buried a great treasure somewhere on these islands and wrote the secret to its location in a logbook that he kept in an iron box. His ship, the Bilgepuppy, went down in a hurricane two days later. Captain Aarrgh was never seen or heard from again.” Kalim moved along the rail to keep up with Ascott, who was swimming towards the back of the boat.
“How do you know he found the treasure and wrote the secret down in a log book and put that in a metal box if he went down with his ship two days later?” Ascott asked as he edged towards the rear of the boat.
Kalim ignored the question. “They say my uncle found the treasure, but went mad. I don’t think that is true. I think he never found the treasure and went mad anyway.”
“Not finding a treasure that may not exist would drive you crazy,” Ascott agreed. He reached the dive platform on the back of the cruiser and started to pull himself up. Kalim levelled a loaded spear-gun at his face.
“I’ve had people dive the wreck of my great-granduncle’s ship, and they can’t find anything. You were diving around here. I think you might have found it.”
“I found an old ship. I don’t know about any treasure, I’m just here to research the fish.”
Kalim frowned. “What fish?”
“All the fish, any fish. The fish of the Aardvark Archipelago,” Ascott found it increasingly irritating that no one appreciated the task he had taken upon himself.
“Why do you want to do that?” Kalim asked, the spear-gun aiming steadily at Ascott’s right eye.
“Because there are thousands of unique species of marine life in these islands. No one has ever seen them before.”
“Did you lose a bet or something?” Kalim asked.
“No. I’m writing the definitive encyclopaedia about the fish of these islands, and—why does everyone find that so funny?!” he snapped as Kalim went from merely grinning to actively chuckling.
“You seriously think that anyone cares about a bunch of fish?”
“I care!” Ascott shouted. “These islands are a unique environment, the shallow waters and coral reefs give a perfect isolated breeding ground for species not found anywhere else in the world!”
“How do you know? Have you been everywhere in the world? Have you seen every fish there is?”
Ascott gaped up at Kalim. “Now you’re just being ridiculous,” he said.
“I’ve travelled all over. I’ve dived wrecks, reefs, ridges, and whirlpools. I’ve seen more fish than I can count, and you know the one thing that I’ve always noticed about them?”
Ascott shook his head.
“They all look the same! Now get your hands off my boat, unless you can tell me where the treasure is.”
Ascott let go of the ladder and sank back into the water. “I don’t know anything about any treasure.”
Kalim turned his head and shouted an order to someone at the helm. “As soon as the divers are back on board, we’re heading out!”
The water around Ascott bubbled and churned; he swam backwards and a moment later two divers surfaced at the back of the cruiser. They barely gave him a glance as they stripped their tanks and weight belts, passing them up to a deck hand who stowed the gear and helped the divers aboard.
Kalim appeared at the back of the boat again, the spear gun over his shoulder at a jaunty angle. He grinned and waved to Ascott as the boat engines coughed into life and it began to pull away.
“You can’t just leave me here!” Ascott yelled, waving his arms. Kalim waved back and the boat picked up speed, leaving Ascott adrift in a sea of choppy foam. The sound of Tacus accusing his kidnappers of an unhealthy interest in animal husbandry was the last thing to fade as the boat shrank towards the horizon.
The remains of the canoe eventually fizzled out like a wet fire-cracker. Steam and smoke drifted from the scorched log as Ascott calculated the minimum distance he would have to swim to reach anywhere. He figured he had as much chance of making it as he did of setting the steaming remains of the canoe on fire again to keep warm.
With nothing else to do before slipping exhausted beneath the waves, Ascott pondered the larger situation. Charlotte was still alive, but Drakeforth had said there was nothing that could be done to change what was already happening. A sense of powerlessness washed over him, and for the first time since childhood Ascott found himself crying. A weeping tantrum of frustration against the implacable and unknowable nature of the Universe. If the Arthurians were right—and even Drakeforth gave them some credit—humanity was a long way from understanding anything about the true nature of most of the inexhaustibly confusing things that made up the dimensions of space and time that they blunder about in.
“Is it any wonder,” Drakeforth had said over blood-flavoured tea, “that people believe in things like religion?”
“I don’t need religion,” Ascott said aloud to the blistering afternoon sun. “I just need to know that my life means something. That when I am gone, I have done something to contribute to the collective knowledge of the world. Why is that so hard for people to accept? But no one cares about fish, do they? No, it’s all treasure and saving the world and not telling your only surviving family that you are dying!” He slapped the water in frustration and thought about just letting himself sink.
Even if he got a ticket and the zipillin flew out of Montaban in time, what could he do? It was always Charlotte who managed social occasions and talked to strangers with ease. When Ascott left, she was working in her chosen field of computer psychology. It seemed in the here and now that even if he went charging home to save her, Charlotte would tell him that he wasn’t needed. She would take care of things, because that was what Charlotte did.
My entire contribution to society has been —what? A poor excuse for a brother, a half-finished book that no one else believes in, a foster-parent to a mad-parrot, and a joke to the people of Montaban.
With a quiet bloop, the metal box he had snatched from the dead man’s grasp surfaced next to him. Ascott stared at it, and then ducked his head under to see where it came from. Far below, he could just make out the fluid shape of a large octopus picking its way over the coral and sand.
Oh, very funny, he thought. His entry on the giant octopus of the archipelago was going to include a reference to them being the most irritating of the invertebrates.
As the sun sank lower in the sky thirst came and Ascott smiled grimly through cracked lips. Up to his neck in water, and he seemed doomed to die of dehydration. The same way that one of the Aarrghs had gone. Was i
t the first or the second Aarrgh? He couldn’t quite remember. It probably wasn’t important. One of them found a treasure, or didn’t. Then the second one found the same treasure, or didn’t either. It made no sense. Why would two people find a treasure only for one to get sunk in a hurricane and the other one to go mad? Ascott wanted to ask the octopus why the sky and the sea were the same blue. Surely it meant that the fish were at risk of swimming up into the stratosphere?
Density, the octopus typed on the same old Klang Mk II mechanical typewriter that Ascott used for writing up his research. Fresh water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimetre. The human body has an average density of 1.062 grams per cubic centimetre. Sea water has a density of 1.025 and the sun has a density of 1.40 grams per cubic centimetre. The sun is made up of hydrogen and helium…
Ascott stopped listening. The rapid clicking of the typewriter keys sounded like an orchestra of tone deaf crabs playing the castanets. “Quiet,” he muttered, thrashing his arms and tasting fresh salt on his lips. “I have infinite density,” he mumbled as the waves washed over his face like an incoming tide.
Chapter 8
Shoal was not one to hold a grudge. She tended to resolve any problems before they had time to become grudges. At age six, while out fishing with her year group in what passed for school in Montaban, Charlie Meninges had put fish guts in her hair. In response she punched him so hard his nose bled.
She didn’t advocate violence, although she did have a rock solid belief in not letting people get away with making your plaits stink of fish guts for the rest of the day. Her fight with Ascott bothered her. Pushing him in the water had been stupid. She wasn’t going to apologise, but maybe they could share a pizza and she would listen while he talked about the latest fish that he had “discovered.”
The skiff bounced from wave to wave; she rode the turbulence with the casual grace of an experienced equestrian. (Shoal had never seen a horse, except in pictures; they were odd-looking things with big teeth and she wasn’t convinced they were real.)
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