The sound of his voice still echoed in her mind. Valdemar was impossible to refuse. There was no way to question his conviction and vitality, or the intensity of his flashing eyes and the passion of his love as he seduced her to his plan. It was to be the last time they’d be together. The memory of him still crowded this room, this bed where Miranda had been conceived, the bed she hadn’t slept in since he had died defending the oceans for her. Suddenly it was the only place she felt she could bear to be as she watched Miranda sail off to defend the piece of land that had meant so much to him.
For all their love and all their years together in the sea, he had never been able to sever his ties to his former kingdom. Valdemar needed the duchy estates as a connection with his past. The castle was their special oasis, Val’s and Miranda’s. “The mermaids’ sacred cove,” he would tease her. He had built it for Helmi, but Miranda was the one who loved it as he did, and like all things, it needed love and attention to survive. She had not wanted to let Miranda go, but for the love of Valdemar, she’d had to.
Helmi’s face was wet with tears. She was not a queen without a king. She was not a woman without her man. She felt miserable and incompetent in every way, except when she looked at her daughter. Miranda was so much like him, so strong and savagely beautiful, so full of passion. How was she going to survive her absence too?
She didn’t realize she was rocking back and forth hugging herself until she almost knocked her cup over with her elbow. The tea had grown quite cold. She hadn’t really intended to eat any of the mandel kager that Valdemar loved so much. Unlike all the rich creamy pastries that she found so deliciously different, he had preferred this simple, crunchy, buttery cookie. He loved the delicious, spicy scent that seemed to hover around the cookies with each bite. For Helmi, the scent now brought images of his smile and delight. It was comforting having the fragrance kiss the air, but she really would have liked some more hot tea.
When Kaja suddenly entered to clean the room and collect the china, she found Helmi still curled up in the chair with everything untouched. “Your Highness, you haven’t touched a thing!” she scolded. Then without another word she scurried out.
“Kaja is always scurrying,” Miranda used to say to Helmi. “It’s as if she’s trying to get her feet to move on land as fast as her flippers move in the sea.”
A moment later Kaja scurried back in with a fresh hot pot of tea. “Now, Your Highness,” she admonished as she fetched a small chair and set it in front of the table between the large winged chairs and sat down, “I’m not moving from this spot until you have a nice cup of tea and a least one of my mandel kager.”
Helmi smiled at her tenderly and swallowed back a sob as her eyes began to tear.
“No more tears, mistress! Now you know how upset King Valdemar would be if he knew you were still crying over him after all these years. You’ve got such a beautiful daughter—and so much like him—to give you joy. The world is in a horrible state, mistress. The Great War may not have reached us here, but it was terrible elsewhere, and you must be happy that all the things you love are still safe and sound. Now, I want you to drink up!” And she slipped a hot cup of cinnamon tea into Helmi’s hand.
Helmi dutifully took a sip and gave a little sigh. It was sweetened with honey just the way she liked it, with a hint of apple to the tea that made it taste so delicious.
“Now, that’s better.” Kaja smiled. But as she handed Helmi the plate of mandel kager, her raised eyebrow warned Helmi that, queen or no queen, if she didn’t eat at least one cookie, a tongue lashing would follow.
As Helmi looked at that one arched eyebrow aimed punitively at her over the proffered plate, a giggle suddenly bubbled up inside her. Feeling like a cannon waiting to fire, she reached out and snatched a cookie.
“That’s much better.” Kaja added her own giggle and took a cookie for herself.
Four Hundred Thirty-Seven Steps
Helmi slowly descended the four hundred thirty-seven steps from the Manor House down the secret staircase to her sea palace below. Valdemar had actually counted them when the passageway was carved five hundred years ago during his construction of the Manor House above.
Above? The world of men was all that was above! A world that would never know what Valdemar had done for them. The eruption of the volcano, Krakatau, would have been a much greater disaster than they could possibly have imagined if it hadn’t been for him.
“What a terrible loss of life!” the two-legers had cried. More than 36,000 people had been killed by the tsunami created by the volcano’s eruption, which was felt and heard for three thousand miles. It had also claimed the life of her king. Krakatau’s explosion had merely been an attempt by the Titans to escape the caverns of Tartarus through the volcano vent, just as they had tried in ancient Pompeii. But at Pompeii, Zeus had sealed them in once again, tossing Cronos down in after them.
When Krakatau erupted, the Titans had tried to escape into the depths of the sea, aided by the Hag and her skarzs. It was Valdemar and his army of whales and whale sharks that had beaten them back into the deep and sealed them in yet again. If they had broken free to walk the earth, they would have wielded unspeakable power, and the sea would have been safe for no one.
Helmi had not tracked down Medea and taken vengeance on her. She had not wiped out her abominable children the skarzs. She had let the sklugmires grow in numbers, corrupting the kelp beds and terrorizing the fishermen. She had cried and cowered and wallowed in her own personal pain, something a mother—let alone a queen—had no right to do.
Well, that was over. Helmi was going to behave in a way that Valdemar would have expected her to, and rule her world as it should be ruled. She would go out into the ocean once again, visit her father in his palace, and then find the Hag and make her pay for her treachery!
But “soon” in terms of a mermaid’s life would turn out not to be soon enough.
Sacrifices
The queen was still drifting, both in the sea and in her mind, as her body struggled to heal as quickly as possible so she could get to her granddaughter. Helmi felt the power of the sea filling her with life again and stirring her memories. For the first time in a century, she felt Valdemar near. She sensed that warm touch of the mind they had shared from the day they had wed until the day he died, when they fought back the Titans. Her mind wandered back to that day.
Water was not the natural element for any of the Titans trapped in Tartarus. The Titans drew their strength from the element they commanded, or were born of, so they were vulnerable in the water. In the water, Helmi was invulnerable.
All these thoughts were bubbling through her mind like the lava flow that had surged up from the rupture in the ocean floor. It was not a natural rupture; it smelled of magic, and took the shape of magic. It marked the exit tunnel the Hag had created from Tartarus. The lava was too intensely hot even for the Titans to travel through, and they needed to wait until the flow had stemmed and their vertical escape shaft had cooled and hollowed. How old Cronos had given the Hag the secret to create a rupture so deep, and puncture a hole in the womb of Gaia, Helmi could not imagine.
Her sentinels had warned her that the Hag and her spawn had armed themselves and created an army of abominations, the sklugmires. They were horrible creatures that were the result of crossbreeding between the skarzs and a variety of sentient deep-sea kelp pods. Their bodies were a queasy shade of grayish green and contained a bivalve chamber that provided a similar propulsion capability to that of a squid. Like the skarzs, the sklugmires had only one eye, and their heads were made of the same rubbery substance that formed kelp pods. Their trailing tentacles resembled strands of seaweed and were armed with rows of jagged, venomous spines that released on contact, embedding themselves into their prey’s flesh, releasing the poison that paralyzed their muscles. Enough venom could stop the heart.
These half-creature, half-plant creations seemed to function with the mass mentality of a school of fish, swarming and diving, gnas
hing and grasping in vast numbers that overwhelmed their adversaries. They also regenerated lost body parts quickly and felt little or no pain, and they would keep gnashing and fighting until they were shredded to pieces. Thousands of Helmi’s precious dolphins and selkie seals had fallen in battle as they were tangled and trapped, deprived of the ability to surface for a brief moment of air. They drowned to become fodder for the Hag’s atrocious army to feed on.
The Hag used the sklugmires exclusively to attack the sea mammals, a strategy that had rendered all but the mightiest sperm whales and the single male narwhal Helmi rode too vulnerable to risk in battle. She was forced to order the rest of them away before their ranks were decimated any further, along with the last few surviving selkies, not willing to risk the very last of them in battle.
Valdemar did the same with his royal cavalry of killer whales. Because of their natural warrior instincts he had been especially reluctant to withdraw them from the battle, yet he could not put them at risk. It was just the whale sharks, hammerhead sharks, marlins, groupers, and tuna that for some reason remained unaffected by the venom, so they were the only ones that swam into battle with Valdemar and Helmi against the Hag’s legions.
For once, time had not been on Helmi’s side. And time was all the Hag needed. She merely had to drive Valdemar and Helmi back until the Titans cleared the breach and her battle was won. Then the Titans, the Hag, and the skarzs would rise from the deep and crawl out of the seas. The Titans would regain their full powers on land, and each of her skarzs would transform into a cyclops, with the giant stature of their sire, and a savage lust for blood and destruction born of their shark hearts and killer instincts. The freedom of the Titans and the skarzs was something Helmi and Valdemar could never permit.
They had managed to send Miranda to safety, charging her with the task of leading the endangered mammals away and bringing her father the Ring of Atlantis, for the power it could help him wield. They timed her departure so they would be certain that the battle would be won or lost long before her return. It was true the ring had power, but nothing was as powerful as the Trident Helmi clasped in her right hand. Miranda’s errand was merely a ploy they had planned in advance to remove her from danger should the battle grow fierce.
The heat from the lava flow was making the water unbearable for Valdemar and his army, while it nourished the skarzs. Because they had been conceived in the trenches of volcanic waters, they could actually convert and channel the heat into energy. Their one glowing red eye looked like a flame through a porthole.
The lava superheated the ocean water, creating a current that constantly tugged and dragged at Helmi and her army, trying to sweep them away. Helmi used the power of the Trident to weave in ice flows to counteract the heat and the current by supper cooling the water and forming ice spheres and shields around her army. But the power and concentration it took to do that hindered her from leading the offensive attack that would seal the rent and trap the Titans back in Tartarus.
“Helmi!” Valdemar cried. “You’ve got to collapse the canyon walls down into the trench and seal the rupture!” He whirled and dove astride his mighty whale shark, oblivious to the blistering hot water, desperately trying to attack the Hag. A mighty warrior on land and sea, now deep within the ocean, he still fought with amazing strength and courage. Despite their pain and the unnatural enemies, their aquatic army followed him blindly, even as the echoes of their agony bombarded Helmi’s mind.
She felt disembodied. One hand clutched the Trident, weaving intense spells of cold, as waves of heat swept through her. The other hand whirled and stabbed at the abominations that came close enough to kill. These vile creatures were her sadistic distant kin, the spawn of her ancient grandfather, Cronos, and the twisted scion of the Hag, her own cousin. Their hungry, hate-filled minds ate away at Helmi as surely as their teeth would. She was a queen defending her realm, yet the man she loved beyond everything else was charging down toward Hell itself with a death squad of loyal soldiers ready to give their lives to save the oceans—and the very planet—from hell on earth.
Valdemar, don’t! she screamed in her mind as she flung a desperate burst of power into her freezing spell to try to cool the waters in front of Valdemar and his ocean Spartans.
“Ayeeeeh!” rang out the death cry of a skarz that tried to attack from the back as Valdemar swung his naricorn spear up in an arc behind him and pierced the skarz’s hide. The weapon slashed straight through the leathery body and poked out the other side. The skarz’s death cry was pathetic and reminded Helmi more of a lobster being thrown into the pot than a cursed denizen of the deep experiencing death. The one red eye grew dim as a murky, crimson cloud of blood swirled through the water. The blood from all the slaughtered creatures from both sides of the battle had turned the water into a foul mixture. All the warriors were finding it as difficult to breathe as it was to see.
Valdemar gave a mighty yank and pulled the naricorn spear free of the body without ever looking back to savor the death. Though he was a great warrior, he hated war with a passion that surprised even Helmi. Savage death was part of ocean life and a constant among the gods. As much as she despised it, she had grown accustomed to the blood lust of the males of her family. Val’s strength, and his adversity to needless violence, was just one of the many amazing things that made her love him.
“Helmi!” Valdemar shouted to her again. “Collapse the canyon walls now! We can’t wait any longer!”
“The Trident is too powerful and the island is too unstable,” she yelled back. “I won’t be able to control the avalanche. It could cause the volcano to explode!”
“We’ve got to risk it, Helmi! The Titans must be sealed back in Tartarus forever!”
A surge of skarzs broke through the circle of hammerheads and great white sharks that were protecting Helmi and Valdemar, causing them both to swing into battle. They wove their naricorn spears in swirling arcs of death, stabbing and slicing through the skarzs that tried to reach them, defiling the waters further with blood. When the attack was pushed back, and Helmi once more had a chance to breathe, Valdemar forced a large wedge of skarzs deeper and deeper into the trench.
“Blast the canyon walls, Helmi. Blast them now!” Valdemar shouted.
“I can’t—you’re too deep. You could be killed!”
“Helmi!” He reared up in the saddle of his whale shark like a vision of her father of old and pointed his spear at her with a fierce cry of command that brooked no interference. “Do it now, Helmi! Now!”
So she did. Without a second thought, without restraint, she obeyed him as a king of his stature should be obeyed. She unleashed the wrath of the Trident against the canyon walls of the trench at the base of Krakatau and blasted a deep gash in the underwater mountain a mile deep and three miles long. The rush of seawater surging into the mountain’s volcano stem super heated instantly, and the cataclysmic pressure it created blew the top of the entire island away, hurling half of it into the air and the other half down into the sea.
Days later, two thousand miles away, the corylians found Helmi on the ocean floor. She was still unconscious, having been carried there by the front waves of the giant tsunami that had drowned 36,000 people from Krakatau to India. They had carried her to the coral palace off the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Valdemar was gone. His body was buried somewhere under hundreds of feet of rock and lava down in the trench that sealed the vent and ended the Titans’ bid for freedom.
Krakatau was no more. The island located in the center of the Sudan Strait between Java and Sumatra had literally vaporized into the air and sunk into the sea. Columns of steam and smoke rose 11,000 meters into the air. Bodies washed up as far away as Zanzibar, and the effect of the waves reached all the way to France. Five square miles of earth were hurled up into the atmosphere, and the explosion was heard up to 3,000 miles away.
The battle of Krakatau was won on August 27, 1883, and the world was very lucky that the consequences were contained to the de
gree they were, for the alternative would have been much, much worse.
Helmi regained consciousness with a shuddering sob as she screamed out Valdemar’s name. Two arms wrapped around her and hugged her tight. She saw Valdemar’s ring on the hand holding her, but it was not Valdemar’s hand, it was Miranda’s. His Ring of Atlantis was now on her finger, and she was wracked with guilt that she had not returned in time to save her father. Miranda had spent several days lying beside her mother, terrified she might never wake up.
Having Miranda to comfort her had kept Helmi from losing her own mind from grief. She reassured Miranda that her father’s death had been none of Miranda’s doing—even if she had returned with the ring during the battle, she could not have saved him. The only solace they could share was that Medea the Sea Hag and her spawn were trapped beneath the crushing weight of a mile of earth and rock, and Medea, immortal as she was, was now imprisoned in a dark choking eternal hell of her own.
Helmi and Miranda stayed with the corylians for over a decade searching the waters to make certain the last of the skarzs were destroyed. Then they finally made the journey home to the Faeroe Islands.
A Well Laid Plan
Less than half an hour after he walked into the bank in the Bahamas, Holger found himself sitting alone in a private room, staring at the contents of a large, doublewide safety deposit box that was less than half full. It had been retained in both Halder’s name and his own.
He stared at the contents of the box. Each item was a revelation. The first item he lifted out was a document—a scientific paper, couched in Latin on heavy linen paper. The subject was the myths and legends of mermaids of the arctic seas. The paper clearly spelled out Pearl’s family bloodline and recorded the geographic locations of family residences. It was enough to make him tremble. The Faeroe Islands seemed to be one of the primary family abodes.
All The Mermaids In The Sea Page 16