Secrets of the Deep (3 page)

Wyvern would pay for everything and choose their first location, as well. All Dmitri had to do was act as His Lordship’s liaison in-country, and see to the particulars. Perhaps falsify some documents for him when the time came to smuggle any artifacts they found out of the Mediterranean without attracting the notice of the Ministry of Culture…

Admittedly, Dmitri had some skill in this dodgy practice. He was not proud of it, of course. But after being fired, he had to survive somehow.

After a few failed ventures, he had opened his little gallery shop on the island of Malta, selling fake antiquities to tourists. And moving
real
ones out of the region for the truly rich clients like Wyvern, who wanted authentic Greek and Roman treasures for their country houses back in England or France or wherever.

Dmitri had long rationalized his illegal little side business by telling himself he was only saving up for his great
someday
expedition. And now, at long last, someday had arrived.

Wyvern had promised he’d hold real Atlantean artifacts in his hands this very day. Vindication was so close Dmitri could smell it.

Provided, of course, that Lord Wyvern wasn’t barking mad.

There was that possibility. For the rich earl, bless his heart, had also claimed to be some sort of sorcerer or druid.

Ah, those English. So eccentric,
Dmitri thought nervously. For all he knew, the man could be an utter loon. At this point, though, he could not afford to doubt him. “Your, er, source was certain this is where we ought to start our search, my lord?” he asked gingerly. “I don’t believe you ever mentioned
how
this person determined these coordinates.”

“No, I did not,” Wyvern said with a chilling half-smile. “Nor did I say it was a
person
that told me.”

Dmitri frowned, squinting against the brilliant sun.

“Now if you don’t mind,” said Wyvern, “I require silence.”

“Of course, my lord. Apologies.”

Well, gracious, if Wyvern had gained his knowledge of Atlantis by some occult or paranormal means, that was the earl’s own business, he decided with a shrug. As his former students could attest, Dr. Dmitri Giannopoulos was unusual for a scientist; instead of believing only in what he could prove with his five senses, he knew the world and especially the sea were full of stranger things than most people realized. Fish that were supposed to be extinct for millions of years, for example, occasionally turned up in fishermen’s nets.

And then there were the mermaids.

As the son of a humble Greek fisherman, Dmitri had first seen them with his own two eyes as a boy: a pod of merfolk swimming through the waves with their dolphins.

They looked just as they did in the ancient tiled mosaics in the museum, the females longhaired and lithe, the males curly-headed and athletic, their powerful arms flexing as they carried their spears.

He had instantly wanted to catch one, but his father had said it was terrible bad luck. You didn’t want to anger their kind, Papa had said, for they could talk to the fishes, and they’d wreak revenge by making sure that no one in your village ever caught another fish again.

Of course, by the time Dmitri had grown up and lost his job and become the laughingstock of Greek academia, his papa was dead, so it had been easy to brush off the old man’s superstitious warnings.

Desperate for an income before he’d opened his flimflam shop, he had sailed out in his father’s old fishing boat, determined to catch a mermaid for public display. Perhaps he could not yet prove to the world that Atlantis was real, but he’d be on the right track, he had reasoned, if he could at least show the world a real, live—or even a dead—mermaid.

Gawkers at the freak shows would pay good money to see that, he had no doubt. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Every time he had got a mermaid into his net, she would laugh in his face while her friends circled his boat like sharks or leaped up like dolphins to cut her free.

They weren’t very nice. Toying with him had become a sort of game to the younger set. They were as bad as his students! Their mockery had only made him more determined to take one alive. Ultimately, though, he’d had to abandon his quest after a whale had rammed his boat with its head.

Whether it was a pet of theirs or just a friend, Dmitri could not say, but he’d learned his lesson. While the mer-brats had splashed about, laughing and jeering at him, he had gone limping back to shore with a hole in the side of his father’s boat. He’d never bothered them again.

Shortly after that, Dmitri had opened his fake antiquities shop—and it was there that the mysterious Lord Wyvern had first contacted him.

He still wasn’t sure what to make of the man. How could a British earl with no archeological background be so confident about where to find the ruins of Atlantis when he, a trained field researcher, had studied the question for a decade and still could not be sure whether to even start the search around the Pillars of Hercules or among the Caribbean islands?

Ah well. Dmitri had no desire to question him, considering Wyvern was the one with all the money.

The earl had sworn him to secrecy, then given him his instructions, and while Wyvern had returned to England for a while for reasons of his own, Dmitri had got to work making all the arrangements for their quest.

As it turned out, they didn’t have to travel far at all. A stash of Atlantean artifacts had supposedly been hidden just off the coast of Greece in an undersea trench called the Calypso Deep.

It was the deepest point in the Mediterranean, or more specifically, the section of the Mediterranean called the Ionian Sea.

I hope he’s right,
Dmitri thought, but he still had his doubts—especially about
how
Wyvern intended to retrieve the Atlantean goodies from such crushing depths, beyond the reach of man. Nobody knew how far the Calypso Deep stretched down into the earth. It couldn’t even be measured. It just kept going on down, down, down.

But no matter. Dmitri had done the earl’s bidding anyway, carrying out all his instructions to the letter. First, he’d procured a fine yacht for the earl’s use. Next, on His Lordship’s behalf, he had leased the tiny, private island of Nisáki, barely bigger than a dessert plate.

The uninhabited island was rocky and wild and pristine, home to nothing but seagulls and a few stray seals basking in the morning sun. High above them, its dramatic pinnacles bristled with spiky rock formations known by locals as the Cyclops’ Crown.

Lonely little Nisáki had cliffs and caves, scrub brush and wild olive trees, and not much else. It was edged with rugged pebble beaches, like the cove where they now stood with a crescent-shaped bluff at their backs.

Dmitri still wasn’t sure exactly what they were doing there. He glanced again discreetly at Wyvern, still waiting.

As for the earl, he was acting like, well, like a sorcerer—albeit one dressed in finest London tailoring.

Given that Dmitri believed in Atlantis and knew for a fact that the merfolk were real, it was perhaps not that great a leap for him to suppose that what people
thought of
as magic might turn out to be real, as well.

Who could say? There were probably logical explanations for such things—answers as yet unknown to science. And since the only intelligent way to go through life was with an open mind, he kept his mouth shut and watched.

Lord Wyvern lifted his hands over the rocks and boulders strewn along the shoreline and closed his eyes.

As he began to mumble a chant, Dmitri was suddenly startled to notice for the first time that the earl had a physical deformity: the otherwise tall, princely man had six fingers on each hand.

Dmitri grimaced as he stared at the abnormality, since Wyvern couldn’t see him, his eyes shut in deep concentration.

Honestly!
he thought in disapproval. The aristocrats and royals of the world really needed to stop marrying their cousins, or this sort of thing was bound to happen.

He couldn’t help thinking of the giant, Goliath, and his savage Nephilim brothers in the Bible. They, too, had been described as having six fingers, and like them, Wyvern was also unusually tall, maybe six foot six, though Dmitri would hardly call him a giant…

And just as Dmitri was contemplating Goliath’s nemesis, the short, scrawny, teenaged future King David, flinging his little rocks from his famous slingshot, Lord Wyvern made the boulders in front of him fly up, defying gravity.

Dmitri’s jaw dropped. Before his eyes, the levitating boulders began stacking themselves into roughly humanoid shapes with arms and legs and heads and came to life.

He quite forgot to breathe for several moments. If it hadn’t been for his familiarity with mermaids, he would have fainted on the spot.

One, two, three rock monsters towered over Wyvern, arrayed along the beach. His own army of giants, like huge, animated rock formations. They shuffled their massive feet, rolled their stiff granite shoulders, glanced back and forth at one another with glowing orange eyes. Dmitri barely dared blink, staring up at the three creatures.
How…?

His Lordship walked from one to the next, staring at each craggy boulder face and giving them their instructions in the same unknown tongue he had been speaking in since he’d started with the chanting.

Druid language, maybe.

But he finished in English. “Bring me the tools of my ancestors. Go!” With a large, swirling motion, he waved his weird hands toward the sea, as though directing gigantic marionettes.

Golems. I think they’re called golems in the occult literature,
Dmitri thought, finally managing to scrape the tatters of his wits back together as he stared. How could this be happening? He was open-minded, but this was a bit…
much
.

Blank with shock, he watched the massive rock monsters pound slowly into the waves.

Boom-boom! Boom-boom!
went their footfalls.

One by one, they marched into the water, disappeared up to their knees, then their waists, then their heads, and just kept walking out to sea.

Lord Wyvern looked askance at him in satisfaction. “Believe in me now?” he murmured.

Dmitri gulped and nearly fell down on his face. “Y-yes, my lord.” He swallowed hard and tried his best not to overreact. “A-at least now I know why you said we wouldn’t need a crane. Or…a field crew.”

Wyvern’s grey eyes glittered as he nodded. “Precisely. When I need servitors,” he said, “I make my own.”

“Th-that must be—very convenient for you, sir.”

Wyvern laughed at his discomfiture, and it was only when he drew back his lips in feral humor that Dmitri noticed the earl’s
other
horrifying deformity.

Double rows of teeth.

And he stared while his heart pounded in time with the clamor:
boom-boom, boom-boom…

CHAPTER 2

Deep Trouble

“W
hat on earth is that noise?” Sound travels great distances underwater, so Princess Sapphira of the Royal House of Nereus was as startled as her dolphins when the pounding started.

The dolphins squeaked and chittered and bobbed their heads in annoyance at the reverberating echoes, then sped away to escape the noise, off to hunt sardines amid the pink clumps of staghorn coral.

Sapphira stayed behind, staring with furrowed brow in the direction from which the ominous noise was coming.

Boom-boom!
Boom-boom!

As Crown Princess of Poseidonia, she was instantly concerned, and decided to investigate.

She didn’t have much else to do at the moment, anyway. The glorious spring afternoon had lured her to sneak away from the palace, escaping her studies once again.

She figured that her tutor, Professor Pomodori, was so engrossed in writing his tome,
A True History of the Mediterranean Sea Tribes,
that he probably hadn’t even noticed she was gone.

With a flick of her tail, Sapphira left the warm, sunlit crystal shallows and followed the sound eastward. Pushing off the sandy bottom now and then with her stingray spear, she swam at a moderate pace, gliding alongside the descending curve of rocky mounts crusted with sea anemones.

Along the way, she stopped and carefully dislodged one of the countless alicia mirabilis growing there. The phosphorescent sea anemone stood like pillar candles fixed to the rocks, each about six inches tall and topped with a shock of tentacles like wild hair blowing in the wind of the current.

The merfolk called them sea candles.

By day, the alicia mirabilis looked like any ordinary sea anemone, but by night, they glowed in the dark like delicate magical lanterns. This would prove helpful if she needed extra light when she reached the deeper valleys of her father’s realm, where it seemed the noise was leading her.

Carefully tucking the alicia mirabilis into the satchel she carried over her shoulder, she decided she needed more speed, and summoned the fastest fish in the sea with a watery whistle. A pair of huge, strong bluefin tuna darted over to attend her. “Mind if I hitch a ride?”

They were not as communicative as dolphins, but they seemed happy to comply with a royal request. Each over a thousand pounds and nearly ten feet long, the two massive tuna swam into formation side by side and allowed her to loop a length of kelp around each one as a makeshift harness.

She held on tight and gave the green reins a jangle. “Ready!”

At once, they tucked in their dorsal fins a bit to reduce drag and took off at top speed. Sapphira let out a yelp of glee. She couldn’t help laughing as her chariot team streaked across the Ionian Sea in a foaming wake, speeding around rock formations, whizzing through the center of schools of fish.