Oshenerth (10 page)

As if by magic (and maybe it was by magic, Irina realized), the vast cloud of glowing cephalopodan ink began to dissipate and fade. Within the bounds of the canyon itself, soon only the general glow generated by the participating manyarms remained. Those individual lights began to swirl faster and faster, the patterns they formed to change more rapidly, more frantically—almost explosively, she thought.

It had grown dark around her. Not that far away but still in the distance she could make out the salp and jellyfish lights that lined the homes and shops of South Sandrift. Clearly the gathering darkness, the steady increase in the activity she was seeing, the strange aqueous music rising toward a barely perceived crescendo, all portended something of great significance. But what?

“Poylee, what does …?”

She spun around in the water, looking in every direction. There was no sign of her hostess. In fact, there was no sign of anyone she knew. Only the barely glimpsed silhouettes of merson shapes darting and swimming at the limits of her vision, visible only when they encountered groups of strobing manyarms rocketing to and fro through the reef’s reassuring embrace.

A shape passed close by her, moving at a different kind of speed of light. Something unseen brushed her floating tresses and she flinched instinctively though no solid contact had been made. What if, say, a preoccupied hundred-pound squid traveling at full speed ran into her in the sparkle-lit shadows? How were injuries treated underwater, where omnipresent moisture would inhibit healing? Crossing her arms over her chest and drawing her legs up to her stomach, she struggled to espy a path out of the escalating pandemonium.

“Poylee.
Poylee
!” She found herself yelling, then screaming. It was fruitless. Her shouts could not be heard over the hiss of sleek bodies shooting through the water around her and the jubilant thunder of the musicians.

“Here, Irina!”

A familiar voice, though not a merson one. A shape materialized out of dark water rendered hallucinogenic by drifting constellations of phosphorescent ink. She exhaled gratefully, the bubbles momentarily blocking her vision.

“Glint! So glad to see you.” She looked around. “Poylee abandoned me.

“Left you to participate, no doubt.” Pulsing orange and cyan, the cuttlefish pivoted in the water. “I suspect she is searching hopefully for Chachel. I don’t think she will find him, and it will do her no good if she does.” He turned back to her. “But why are you not joining in? Colloth is a celebration for all.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for anything ‘all-consuming.’” Surrounded by a detonating macrobiotic universe, she stayed close to the genuinely bemused cephalopod. “What is ‘the ecstasy,’ anyway?”

“You truthfully do not know?” The cuttlefish stared at her. “It is true; I see you do not. Come then with me, changeling, and I will show you—even though what you seek lies all around you.”

Once again she felt herself being drawn forward, away from the comforting lights of North Sandrift, ever deeper into the raging confusion of light-emitting lifeforms that raced and tore through the ring of musicians. Enchanted, fairytale-like shapes zoomed around her; sometimes brushing her body, sometimes making firmer contact, but never bruising, never forcing.

“Let me hold your hands,” Glint instructed her.

Extending her arms, she felt her fingers grasped as a single tentacle wrapped individually around each of her splayed fingers. That was when, for the first time, the numerical coincidence struck her: a human has ten fingers. A cuttlefish has ten tentacles. Gripping her firmly, his suckers holding fast but not painfully to her soft flesh, Glint bent his flexible siphon to one side and, pushing water, began to spin them. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until she felt herself growing dizzy from all the light and sound and motion. In the real world, in her world, had someone spun her like that she might have lost her balance and fallen. But not here. It was impossible to fall here, coddled and cradled by the sustaining, supportive sea itself. Letting her head fall backward she started to laugh uncontrollably.

“Stop it! Glint, stop it, I can’t see straight anymore. I can’t …!”

A pair of cuttlefish whipped past her, their bodies locked tightly together, the light they were emitting incredibly vibrant and vivid. What took place in the realworld on the night of the occasional full moon, she found herself thinking wildly? As Glint spun her and she found herself growing ever more drunk with sight and sound and movement, she remembered. She knew. Not all things in Oshenerth differed utterly from those that took place in her own seas. The raison d’être simply had not occurred to her before because of the elaborate civility of her surroundings and the fact that cuttlefish and squid were not known to—celebrate—in such a fashion together. Certainly not accompanied by music.

Here however, mutual conviviality and intelligence counted for far more than mere species differences. It extended to manyarms including sociable mersons in their celebration. As Glint continued to whirl her helplessly and with increasing giddiness through watery space lit by visible expressions of cephalopodan ecstasy and underscored by all-enveloping otherworldly melodies, she finally understood the significance of Poylee’s words. In the realworld, divers and scientists lucky enough to see and experience the massed festivity called it one thing. In Oshenerth they called it all-consuming. Here, on the reef, they called it the ecstasy.

Colloth was a celebration of, and a time for, mating.

— VII —

For the first time since she had entered the village, a lightheaded Irina felt accepted. Resident mersons waved at her, or blew kisses, or ignoring her origins and setting aside their initial fears, extended invitations to visit. Could one blush underwater, she found herself wondering? She forgot her situation, forgot what had happened to her, forgot her displacement in time and reality as she let herself sink into the sheer shimmering splendor of the mass manyarm mating that was occurring all around her. Cuttlefish flashing every color of the rainbow locked and parted. Squid wrestled and writhed, the bands of color shooting through their bodies giving visible expression to their orgasmic release. Out of mutual delight and joy in sharing the celebration, mersons coupled nearby. She alternated between looking on in fascination and turning away awkwardly. The warm water that enveloped her was brimming with music and with moans.

What would it be like to make love underwater, she found herself wondering? To be locked in intimate embrace there among the bioluminescence and the warmth, drowning emotionally but not literally in a cosmic dispersion of liquid pheromones and an ocean of light? Without a hard surface to bruise one’s body, drifting together effortlessly, plunging and swaying in perfect time with one’s partner as if suspended in magic itself.

Then, without warning, as the tumult of music and flurry of activity and the frenzied discharge of bioluminescence blurred together in a maelstrom of orgiastic bliss, clouds of a different kind of phosphorescence began to illumine the sea in the space above the sand slope and below the mirrorsky.

Expelled almost simultaneously by several thousand female manyarms, a billion glistening eggs filled the water. Glowing pale blue and white, they pulsed with unnatural inner radiance. Within moments spawn, musicians, dancers, the exhausted cephalopodan birthing brood, and a dazed and dazzled Irina found themselves adrift together in swirls of dynamic milt that fluoresced a pale pink. Sunk in this sea of resplendent reproduction, a visitor from outside was presented with a choice of drifting in sticky enthrallment or vomiting. Though a lover of underwater life, Irina kept her mouth shut tight as she gazed in astonishment at the nova of luminous procreation now surrounding her. Gazed but did not gape. It was one thing to marvel at the miracle, quite another to inadvertently swallow some of it.

It struck her then that by taking her hands in his tentacles and the burden of her depression on his heart, Glint had sacrificed his time and opportunity to participate fully in the festivities—in other words, to reproduce. She would have shown her gratitude with a kiss, except that she was unsure how to work her way through the basket of sucker-lined arms that surrounded his face to find his beak. She settled instead for thanking him verbally.

He shrugged it off, the cuttlefish equivalent of a shrug being a slow ripple of gray down the length of his body. “I can reproduce anytime. There will be another Colloth next month. It’s not every night I get to initiate a changeling.” His ease turned to sudden concern as he looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

Irina had begun brushing furiously at herself. “It’s gooey—all of it, eggs
and
milt.”

“Of course. What else would you expect? But there are other side effects. Look down at yourself.”

Pausing in her futile brushing, she complied. Her eyes widened. Much of her body was covered with the combination of freshly laid manyarm eggs and fertilizing milt. From drifting strands of hair to the tips of her now webbed toes, she was glistening blue, white, and pink.

“You look beautiful,” Glint told her unexpectedly.

She made a face. “Maybe to another manyarm. I sure don’t
feel
beautiful. Not to give offense, Glint, but I feel—I admit that the phosphorescence is striking, but I’m afraid for someone like me there’s an inescapable concurrent ick factor.”

He gestured understanding. “Just relax and enjoy the rest of the celebration. Once the eggs have been fertilized, they’ll drop off.”

Arms spread wide, she gazed down at her shimmering self. “What about those that don’t get fertilized, and the milt that doesn’t manage to do any fertilizing?”

He moved toward her. “Don’t worry. I’ll eat them for you.”

She hastily backed water. “That’s okay. If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep brushing.”

O O O

From the grotto he called homeor at least the place where he slept and stored his few possessionsChachel could hear the music as it rose to a crescendo, signifying the cumulative reproductive vehemence that was Colloth. He could see the lights, too, enough concentrated in one place to send upward a glow sufficiently intense to light the underside of the mirrorsky itself. Drawn to the atypical brightness, all manner of nocturnal planktonic life danced and spun in a frenzy beneath the uncharacteristically illuminated ceiling of the world.

Sitting atop the flattened disc of dead shelf coral that marked the entrance to his abode, he watched as the ghostly shapes of half a dozen silky sharks swam silently past to disappear into the darkness downreef. They too had been drawn to the celebration, but they would find no sweet pickings in Sandrift tonight. Not with every one of the festival’s non-participants drafted for patrol duty.

He ought to have been among those standing guard on behalf of the celebrants, he knew. But doing so would require voluntarily inserting himself into the social life of the community, something he declined to do. He would not stand guard for them. Conversely, should sharks or other dangers invade his own space, none would come to his aid no matter how loudly or desperately he called for it.

That was just fine with him. He already knew how he would handle such a potentially fatal situation. He would fight for himself and, should he lose, he would die. He was perfectly willing to accept either outcome. Except …

Except something had changed. As was true of most unforeseen changes, it was not one he had sought. Given a choice, he would have avoided it. But it had been forced on him by circumstance and accident and, like most accidents, could not be taken back.

In spite of himself, he found himself growing more and more curious about the changeling.

Don’t think about her, he told himself angrily. Put her out of your mind. She’s Oxothyr’s problem if she is anyone’s. Not your responsibility. In saving her you’ve already stepped beyond the bounds of noninterference you set for yourself. Concentrate on something else. On your inability to share, to participate in, to enjoy something as purely pleasurable as Colloth. Focus on your bitterness. Gnaw your own soul.

That was better, he told himself. He generated bile the way a mourner seeps grief. In his renewed melancholy he was once again content. What were the right words? Oh yes. Muttering under his breath, waving a hand, he numbed the water just outside his cave. It muted the thrum of joyful music emanating from town and dulled the distant effervescent light. Satisfied with this modest if idiosyncratic bit of amateur aqueous sorcery, he turned back toward the darkness of the inner cavern. A few forlorn shrimp and small-minded crabs muttered to themselves in its black back reaches. Each managed to emit a single unvarying and decidedly uncelebratory pinpoint of light. It was all the illumination Chachel desired.

It was all that he sought.

O O O

The light and the music, the gaiety and celebration, did not reach into the depths of the reef where Oxothyr made his home and his magic. Lit by a single shaft of moonlight, the vaulted entryway where the visitor from the void had been transformed into a proper merson was all but empty. The soft argent glow from overhead made of swarming many-legged zooplankton a snowstorm of dancing gems.

Deep within thick coral that had accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years, acidic dissolution and natural erosion had hollowed out a maze of interlocking tunnels and chambers. At the center of this warren of wizardry Oxothyr held thaumaturgical court. Powerful yet sensitive tentacles drew special stones from their resting places on shelves that had been cut into the surrounding walls. From carefully tilted pots and jugs, oily spirals of liquids denser than seawater trickled into a waiting bowl fashioned from half a tridacna shell that had once been home to a now absent giant clam. Plucked from the transparent tunicate containers that contained them, select pinpoints of living light were carefully added to the expanding brew. Held in place by the shaman’s spells, unable to escape, they infused it with an unearthly green glow.

As Oxothyr hovered above and to one side of the concoction within the clamshell, Tythe and Sathi darted hither and yon within the chamber, fetching ingredients and components for the increasingly concerned sage. The octopus’s voice grew louder and more strained as the blend grew brighter and more potent. What it all portended the two famuli did not know. The intense olivine radiance was deviant and the faint moaning that was beginning to fill the chamber bore little relation to the music that underscored the delights of Colloth. Never before could they recall having seen their master so intense.

“Look at him,” Sathi whispered in the near darkness. “His color stays dark brown and does not change.”

“Not even a ripple,” a troubled Tythe agreed. “What manner of magic it is that he works tonight I do not know—and do not want to know.”

Sathi gestured with several arms. “Nor do I comprehend its import, save that it is of manifest significance. What spirits does the Master talk to, what demons does he invoke?”

An explosion of ruby light from the central concavity of the clamshell saw them simultaneously sink into silence. The green luminosity became edged with black, as if the magic the mage was so forcefully propagating had acquired a literal as well as metaphysical edge. The ominous emerald shadows cast on the walls reminded Sathi of a shallow cave he had once wandered into that turned out to be choked with noisome, poisonous algae. As he contemplated the resemblance, the unwholesome luminance seemed to prickle with tiny tendrils that sought to ingratiate themselves into the very walls of the chamber.

Even in the Master’s moments of casting most serious, Tythe had never heard him speak in timbre so profound. Oxothyr sounded simultaneously worn and angry, frustrated and demanding. As he intoned, the two famuli clustered closer to one another. It felt as if the walls of the inner chamber were closing in around them as more and more of the green glow was overtaken by the expanding blackness.

Throughout it all Oxothyr continued to add to the insidious fusion that threatened to overflow the clamshell. Words cajoling and soul of periwinkle, threats implied and tincture of void. The calcium-white shell seethed with resonance. Green gave way entire to black, and then black to a discoloration that was not only new to the assistants but new to the realworld. This essence coiled and writhed upward from the shell, rising so strong and unforgiving that Oxothyr found it prudent to retreat slightly. Arms entwined, Sathi and Tythe looked on wide-eyed at this new phenomenon that had taken physical shape in the chamber before them. Their reaction was hardly surprising.

It was the first time either of them had ever seen cold.

Waving every one of his eight arms, Oxothyr uttered an incantation as commanding as any he had ever summoned forth. For a terrifying instant, nothing changed. Striking outward from the center of the gruesome conjecture that coiled snake-like above the clamshell, something touched Tythe. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He screamed.

Then, just like that, it was gone. Reality returned to normal. Feeble though it was, the blue-green light that now returned to the chamber was soft and familiar. No more noisome green, no more oozing black, no more—cold. Sitting alone atop its supporting pillar, the tridacna bowl once more gleamed lustrous, white, and empty. Behind it—behind it Oxothyr floated; eyes shut, arms coiled in a ball around him, his boneless body a lightly-spotted drifting brown balloon.

“Master!” An alarmed Sathi rushed forward. Still trembling from his brief contact with what the mage had summoned, Tythe was slower to respond.

One eye opened. Tentacles unfurled. Sathi let out a sigh. The shaman was unhurt. Physically, anyway.

“What—what was it, Master?” the squid inquired hesitantly.

“Coldness.” Oxothyr replied without hesitation. “Chill. Frigidity of a kind I have read about in the Old Tablets but never expected to encounter myself.” He looked past the worried famulus. “Are you all right, Tythe?”

Trembling slightly, the other squid gestured in the affirmative. “I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, Master, or even what I just saw. But I do know one thing about it. It bites.”

Oxothyr indicated understanding. “Indeed it does. It will also kill.”

“Why did you bring it here?” Sathi was not normally so forward with his master, but the experience had emboldened him. Given the gravity of the occurrence, Oxothyr took no offense.

“I did not bring it, little silver dart. I went looking for something else, and the coldness came in its stead. Something is using it. Something or someone is manipulating it. For what specific purpose or to what eventual end I do not know. Only that it cannot be good.”

Tythe had recovered enough to ponder. “This something is a danger to Sandrift?”

The mage rotated toward him. “This is something that endangers the whole world as we know it.”

The two assistants exchanged a glance before turning back to the shaman. “What is it then, Master?” Fear and wonder inflected Sathi’s query.

Oxothyr let out a sigh so substantial it disturbed the volume of water within the chamber. “I wish I knew, Sathi. I wish I knew.” He turned away. “I have been brooding on it much. I must brood on it a while longer still. Leave me now. Even serious contemplation must eventually surrender to fatigue, and fatigue to sleep.”

Obediently, they gestured their goodnights and turned to depart. As they did so, Tythe looked back long enough make sure that the shaman was squeezing comfortably into his filament-lined sleeping hole.

“I can still feel the touch of this thing called ‘cold.’” He shuddered. “And its appearance haunts my thoughts. Is the danger as serious as the Master says, do you think?”