by Starla Night
The giant cave guardian flung his tentacles wide. They tumbled out. Nora grabbed a sucker. “Whoa! Not me!”
Octopus Kong scooped her up.
She waved as his tentacles closed around her once more. “I’ll catch up with you guys later!”
Her vibrations cut off as his protective tentacle closed around her.
A massive army of elite warriors stormed the giant cave guardian from three directions. They were efficient, well-armed, and coordinated.
And no match.
The giant cave guardian raced over the distant pursuers, driving and scattering their formations. They regrouped and chased after him. It was like watching a human wearing an impenetrable suit antagonize swarms of bees. No matter how the bees might think to sting him, Octopus Kong was barely irritated. His appalling song rose in volume. He frolicked over their formations, having a wonderful time.
The All-Council warriors who usually guarded the great stone hall of the healers had disappeared. Trainees raced around disorganized, flying with armfuls of instruments and healing tools, some hurrying toward the giant cave guardian to prepare for healing injured elites and others fleeing from the awesome creature.
Balim and Bella had a short window in which to enter and escape.
He pressed Bella to his chest and dove along the ground, skimming the rock. His fins pumped, rested and ready to move. She belonged pressed against his body. And she did not think he had an irredeemably dark soul.
He flew.
There, the unguarded back entrance led into the great hall of the healers. “Can you make your fins?”
She flexed her stubby feet. “Not on command. I’ll practice.”
“Pretend to be injured.” He coached her to swim side by side with him. When satisfied that they would pass as two male mer, he led her through the cavernous carved stone of the hall.
Unlike most mer cities, which were comprised of organic Life Trees, the All-Council carved their city from immutable stone and cloistered their sacred plant inside a stockade. No warrior could enter its sanctuary.
Those who had seen it said it was disappointing and not worth the mystery. Living in such rocky, harsh conditions, it was spindly and weak, with few resin Sea Opals and never any flowers. The only warriors elected to be elders or representatives had long ago claimed brides and raised young fry. Their reproductive days were behind them. It was the same for All-Council generals and, until recently, the elite military. Any who held power had already met and discarded their sacred bride soul mates. So of course, the Life Tree of the All-Council never put forth any blossoms.
Balim flew across the barren stone.
Most of the guards must have been drawn off by Octopus Kong. Balim snuck along the empty colonnades flashing through the shadows. Other healers hurried to the entrance. None glanced at him or noticed Bella.
His mentor’s voice boomed from his chambers at the end of the hall. “Go forth, my trainees! Rarely does the battle come to the All-Council. Do not let pass this training opportunity. There are warriors to heal!”
Balim reached his mentor’s private chambers, confirmed they were alone, and pulled Bella inside.
The room was as he remembered. Empty of comforts, barren as the rocky halls, but filled with study tools, equipment, and small gardens of curative plants, cages of animals, and piles upon piles of rare healing materials in various states of growth or harvest.
His mentor, Great Healer Dalus, looked up from the weave of one such flat plant. “I told you to—Trainee Balim.” He straightened, noted Bella, and fixed on his former trainee. “I should say, Healer Balim. You are far from the rebel city.”
“I was exiled.” He positioned himself in front of Bella to disguise her appearance. “This is my apprentice. Bella.”
“Bel-la,” he repeated and folded his fingers over his thick abdomen. In the years since Balim had trained with him, the elderly warrior had grown older, wider, and balder. “Not rebel nor Undine.”
“No.”
“You have, of course, come to study Blue Ring.”
Balim’s belly lurched. He knew?
“Yes, yes, of course.” Great Healer Dalus kicked at an easy pace out of his private study and down the empty hall. “This battlefield has seen great interest lately. General Giru has asked endless questions. He has ambitious ideas on how to end the rebellion.”
“Did he share those plans with you?” Bella asked smoothly.
Dalus glanced back. “Only what was necessary to prevent contagion within his warriors.”
Balim’s belly fell further. “Then he was successful in removing a weapon from the cursed field?”
“I will show you. See with your own senses, Balim. Do not become lazy because you hold a title of Healer now.”
Bella vibrated to Balim. “Is the battlefield honestly right outside?”
Healer Dalus answered her. “It is my favorite place to contemplate the limits of knowledge.”
“It seems risky to live right next to an infectious hot zone for an incurable disease.”
“Is it not natural? So many traveled to study the field, it became an established meeting place of healers. A cursed, incurable battlefield is the most natural place.”
They exited to the upper ledge of sheer cliffs.
Below, the battlefield spread out. Like the wrecked boats in Lake Eerie, broken tridents stabbed out of rocks where the bodies, abandoned even by fish, calcified into limestone skeletons.
The shouts of the living echoed along with the noise of Octopus Kong leading a merry chase. Here, the still water contained a deadly message for any who would sit and ponder it.
Dalus heaved himself onto a rock worn smooth on the ledge. He had often rested there to ponder this battlefield during Balim’s apprenticeship. More lines etched his old face, and a deeper sadness mixed with the active curiosity that had safeguarded his permanent place as the highest healer of the mer.
“You still force your trainees to study it for lessons?” Balim asked.
“I ask them to consider what drives a male to continue to fight when his body breaks down around him, when sense should hold him back, when even honor has abandoned his fight.”
His curiosity was legend. If anyone cured the disease, it would be Dalus.
“We’re more interested in how to cure it,” Bella said.
“Yes.” His mentor’s lip quirked. “And, perhaps, how it has spread from Oannes Field to Undine to Atlantis?”
Balim’s stomach rolled. “You knew?”
“Not much passes by my eyes unnoticed, especially if a gifted trainee turns his gaze on my passion project.”
Balim had thought himself so sneaky, stealing away when the others were occupied and studying the field. Fantasizing how the old king would die and no one could stop it just as no one had stopped him from killing Balim’s father.
Dark times were only a thought away.
Bella pressed her hand on his.
Her presence washed away the darkness in a soothing wave of light. He needed to trust and focus. The dark time was past.
“The ingenious method you used to remove the cursed items without contracting the illness is the reason new items can be removed.” Dalus cast his eyes back at Balim, insulted by Balim’s surprise. “I know the interests and occupations of my warriors, Balim. Although I am a healer, I am not a hermit.”
“Why are others items being taken out?” Bella asked. “And where are they going?”
“First, to study. But it is impossible for mer to conduct such research without contracting the illness. So, in the end, we collected them for you to study.”
“Me?” Balim repeated.
“You.” He nodded beyond Balim to Bella. “Humans.”
Balim gripped the pommels of his daggers. “Make any hostile move, and I will forget you are a great healer.”
Dalus narrowed his eyes.
“Well, you got me.” Bella hugged herself. “I guess I wasn’t as sneaky as I thought.”
&n
bsp; He laughed. “I am trained to examine warriors for physical illness. It would be a sad day for healers if I did not notice your particular deformities in the chest, hip, and fins.”
She squished her breasts. “Thanks for the tip.”
Balim’s heart thudded as hard as when Dalus had revealed he knew of Balim’s crimes. “You will not summon your guards?”
“They are busy with a giant cave guardian that has arrived at the same moment.” His suppressed smile told them he was no idiot. “To answer, I have no interest in engaging in another war where the two sides would rather die than allow the other to survive. We know how that ends.”
They gazed out on the battlefield. Ghosts had come and gone. The past battles were long ended, deaths long forgotten, but still caused a powerful effect on the living.
“You should be on our side,” Bella said. “We’ll save your race.”
“You will save nothing if you succumb.”
“Is that why you surfaced and broke into Balim’s hospital? So you could infect Pelan and the other humans?”
“Surface? No. I have too many responsibilities here. But you say Blue Ring infects humans? Do they get the bruising, the blue chains, the suicidal memories?”
“Suicide?” Bella and Balim both repeated the word at the same time.
Balim followed the thread. “The incurable disease kills by suicide?”
“It causes irreparable body decay unhalted by the Life Tree and wracks the warrior’s soul with pain. Most commit suicide before the disease finishes its course, but make no mistake: the disease will finish its course. We have learned that much.”
“What else?” Bella asked.
“What else have you learned?” Dalus pushed back, eager and interested.
“Tell us!”
Balim answered. “Human females and males are both susceptible, but elixir slows the disease or cures it in females.”
Balim shared the information about Roxanne and Mitch.
“At least one modern bride was immersed in the diseased fluid and suffered no effects, while the warrior now circles the last stage of illness.”
“Fascinating.” The healer’s eyes glowed with great interest. “Then, I suppose it will not matter for long. I have lied to you, Balim.”
He clutched his dagger and moved in front of Bella. “How?”
Dalus ignored his movement. “I teach that there were no survivors of this war. That is the lesson of the field and the wish of the All-Council. Not the truth.”
“So there were survivors,” Bella breathed.
“Two,” Dalus confirmed. “They came not from this battlefield. As you know, the last kings carried the disease home in their dying corpses. The citizens, weakened by age and starving from the long war, succumbed also.
“Except in Derketo. A young male remained with his new bride.” He nodded. “They survived.”
Balim frowned. This contradicted everything. “How? Why did they survive?”
“They weren’t starving,” Bella suggested.
“His bride was fuller and more rested than her ragged husband, but by his account, he was quite ill. He even contracted the disease. She never did.”
“And he recovered,” Balim mused. “She healed him.”
“Something, yes, healed him. I have spent my lifetime studying this field and this disease to answer how.”
“She used queen powers.”
Dalus tipped his head back, another smile on his face, and raised a brow. “Legends do not cure diseases. Healers cure them.”
“They are not legends. I have seen them, Great Healer.”
His mentor tsked with disbelief.
“So how did the healer cure him?” Bella asked. “You have a theory.”
“Very rudimentary. After consultation with General Giru, I have learned so many things. Humans classify their illnesses by the creature that causes them: parasitic, bacterial, and viral. They have promised me that once they have finished under their ‘microscope’ machines, they will tell me how to defeat the disease that annihilated the most powerful kings of history.”
“Which is it?” Bella asked. “Animal, bacteria, or virus?”
“That, human, is something I hope your people will explain.” He looked up again and rose, his fins descending as recognition filled his face with subdued welcome. “General Giru, I have held the intruders right at the lip of Oannes Field as you requested.”
Bella clung to Balim. “A double-cross.”
General Giru descended to their level.
He had a strange, unnatural coloration of pale skin and wore an unusual chest plate. Dark weave hid his shoulders and cushioned the skin beneath his daggers. Dark purple, iridescent tattoos tangled across his face like human blackberry vines.
Bella gasped. “The fake merman!”
“I am a true merman,” he barked, his chest vibrations rough. “You poisoned your city. Destroyed your castle. Murdered your king. You and the warriors who compromise our proud traditions are pond scum.”
Balim held Bella tight. His heart thudded out of control.
He was no warrior, and he could not fight off the second-highest commander of the All-Council, who descended to their side, nor his warriors massed around him.
“There is nowhere to escape.” General Giru vibrated with a gravelly tone in his chest. Congestion? But as he had proclaimed, he was no human. “Your weapons, Healer Balim, or I will cut you down where you float and leave your human bride without a protector.”
Balim relinquished his daggers and trident. Although a central tenet of the mer was never to injure females or young fry, the All-Council had decreed rebel queens to be not female. Some generals still treated them with honor and others as rival warriors. General Giru’s feelings were unknown. Balim would not risk Bella.
General Giru’s elite warriors bound Balim roughly. They turned on Bella.
“Leave her,” he begged. “Take her to the surface.”
“We will.” The general smiled coldly, his teeth white behind pale lips and semitranslucent skin. His soul was dark. He bit back great pain. “Great Healer. My draught?”
His warriors lassoed ropes to drag Bella without touching her.
Dalus gave the general a soft jelly flask filled with greenish-black liquid. He swallowed the inky substance. It must have been bitter because his throat muscles worked against his swallows, suppressing a gag. He finished the medicine, shuddered, and waited for it to take hold.
Dalus stood back watching. Just like Undine under the old king. Silent, judging, and leaving Balim to his punishment.
General Giru opened his eyes slowly. “Great Healer, bring the relic box.”
“You require another cursed dagger?” Dalus brought him the equipment he requested.
“The humans have one request.”
General Giru operated a modified metal version of Balim’s lamprey to capture a crusty dagger from the battlefield below. He donned a thick mitt and studied his prize. The dagger resembled any other weapon lost to the ages. Although invisible to the senses, disease seemed to radiate danger.
Through the mitt, General Giru clasped the crusty pommel and brandished the dagger at an invisible enemy. “Ha! Ha…”
Imagining stabbing someone seemed to give him relief. His shoulders lowered, and his cheeks went lax. He blinked and straightened. His pupils dilated, and a strange dullness crossed his face. He shook himself and turned on the captives.
Bella watched the loosely held dagger with wide eyes.
Now he knew she was immune, Balim’s fears eased. No matter what happened to him, she would survive.
General Giru focused on him.
Balim braced.
The general crossed the distance in a single, loose kick. He positioned the coral-crusted dagger against Balim’s chest, just below the heart, and sliced a deep line.
“No!” Bella shrieked.
His chest radiated pain. Balim’s nerves screamed, and his blood soaked the water. He thrashed, the c
loud of disease growing excited as it interacted with his blood. Little stings like invisible anemones struck his veins, invisible sharks biting his body. Streaking, like the poison vial, into his chest and blackening his soul.
Bella moaned. “No.”
“General, I am disappointed in you.” Dalus sagged with a heavy voice. “Was injuring my trainee necessary?”
“Yes.” The general wrapped the dagger in multiple layers of seaweed and placed it in a stone box. He secured his glove atop it and sealed the box.
“He was a good healer. Risk-taking but dedicated. Willing to pursue the truth no matter how deep into the wolf eel hole.”
“Great Healer, a king killer, human sympathizer, and rebel cannot live. And do not forget that his injury is his own fault. If he had not shown how to acquire these cursed weapons, you would not have taught me, and I would not have made the allies I have.”
Dalus peered into the battlefield. “But I only shared this with you so you could bring me a cure. And you have not.”
“One is forthcoming. Failed Healer Balim shall again be instrumental in its discovery.” The general nodded at his warriors. The elite guard dragged Balim and Bella for the surface.
“He will be cured?”
“No, but his sacrifice will serve the mer.” General Giru turned away from the healing hall. “The Sons of Hercules need another test subject.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Bella tried to kick her fins to keep from being dragged by the warriors and to catch up to Balim.
His skin paled like Pelan’s, turning translucent, and dark bruising spread out from the scabbed-over cut. His mouth opened and closed like a fish unable to breathe.
General Giru’s warriors escorted them to a cable anchored to a distant rock. They clipped on to the same harnesses used on the Atlantis cable and ascended straight up.
The general sneered at Bella’s anger. “Do you not enjoy the human marvels?”
“I thought the All-Council never surfaced,” she snapped, repeating what Aya had told her. “I thought the ancient covenant restricted you to the sea.”
“The founding of Atlantis destroyed the natural order. We must adapt until the order is restored.” The general’s lazy, complacent tone sharpened. “All will pay. Even me.”