by Chris Howard
It tipped noseward, catapulting the rider and archer into open sea.
She looked up, surrounded by streaks of black and white, gaping mouths, sharp teeth, a shuddery roll of firing noises from twenty archers.
Andromache asked to be of assistance, and danced into control, kicking Nicole out of the saddle with the reins in one hand, heaving the crossbow at the nearest of the king's riders. He caught it, kept his seat, but it slowed him enough to throw his archer off his mark.
Loose in the water, holding long the reins, Nicole swung under the orca, came up around the other side with enough force to kick a rider from his mount.
Then a bolt of lightning cut through the water, blinding lines of fire arcing the spaces between the king's orca riders, slipping through armor, riders screaming and jerking reins. Nicole's pursuers folded in two lines, diving deeper to escape.
Six teams collided, riders and archers cartwheeling into the gloom. Kassandra kicked through them with her trident swinging, and nothing else, just her swimsuit, her hubris, and the helmet of the soldier who used to ride Nicole's orca, the straps cut, flapping around her neck.
She grinned at her sister, pointing north, swung her legs down and landed in the archer's stirrups. Then turned into their wake, waving the captured helmet over her head, crying her joy, "Yeah! Go tell your king! You got your asses kicked hard by a couple of surface girls!"
They pushed the orca in a rapid dash north, Kassandra pointing to change their course a couple times. She reached past the dorsal fin and slapped Nicole on the shoulder. "Sorry, Nic. Wonder what's going on. Never would have expected that much reaction."
"Like they were waiting for us."
"You handled it well." Kassandra shook her head. "Not us."
Nicole slid sideways in the saddle to look back at her sister. "If not us, then who?"
"I was going to say 'what' not who. That was some serious armed response."
Nicole gave her a frown, a slide of fear when she saw Kassandra tense up, flexing her fingers, and then her teardrop call for Ochleros spinning into the orca's wake. "What is it?"
Kassandra shook her head. "Not sure."
Ochleros fired from the depths, his claws fully extended, keeping pace with the orca, growling something that may have been a curse. Then he turned to the Sea. "Something has come from the Lithotombs, guarding them. Now it hunts you."
Kassandra kicked out of the archer's stirrups. "Take her home. I will deal with whatever my grandfather has summoned."
"What do you believe it is?"
She floated in the sea, perfectly still, tasting the water. "Something very big, my dear Ochleros."
Chapter 25 - Soul Stuff and Open Wounds
She didn't know who she was at first. There seemed to be several choices, but she couldn't even remember who she wanted to be. That made it worse.
She also didn't know thoughts could have distance, an echo that told you there was some space between you and them, an audible tracing that could tell you how far away the thoughts were. They existed in space. She knew about the space. She'd been inside enough souls to know there could be miles of it in someone's head, made of wispy dark soul stuff, seawater, sludge you had to crawl through. She'd also never thought about time being another dimension, like a clothesline that ran into the soul's recesses along which you could hang memories, visions, voices, fear, even the truth. It made perfect sense, once the idea occurred to her.
"Nic...cole?"
Is that me talking? My voice sounds...sloppy. Wet.
She heard her sister talking to her, coming out of some temporal pit in her soul, joyfully telling her what she was, You're a siren. Lure them onto the rocks, girl. That's where you're strongest.
Water in her mouth, a gush of it, salty, gurgling; her breathing came out in choppy wet gusts.
My beautiful tides. They're waking me up.
There was something hard and flat against her cheek, and her jaw wasn't working right.
She concentrated on pulling her tongue to the roof of her mouth, pulling it in, curling. Her lips came together without much pressure. Just enough. She sucked in the water, tasting like metallic mouthwash. Held it in her mouth, trying to remember what to do next.
Oh, yeah. She spit it out. Blood in her mouth.
She opened her eyes, nothing but blurry bars of slate gray. She blinked and the bars came in clearer. Not really helpful. She commanded her right hand ...what's wrong with my hand? Fingers broken. Two that aren't.
I can't feel my left hand.
She pulled one leg up. Her knee bent, skin tearing along her thigh, squeezing open, muscle tissue, bone exposed, and sticky warm blood everywhere. I'm messed up. She dug her toes into the sand, and kicked. A jolt of pain ran up her body, a hammer's thud in her skull. Really messed up.
She imagined a dying fish, on its side at the edge of the surf, foamy seawater sloshing in and out of its gaping mouth, gills flexing, useless. Fish out of water. Hook in its mouth, all its strength spent on getting away from the angler. Dying slowly, the air too thin, too dry.
She kicked again and rolled to her back.
She found her left hand—she had been laying on it, a cold tingling coming through her senses, enough to feel the numb deadweight, life flowing to her fingers, but that may not be a good thing. Could be draining out of my wounds onto the beach.
Her face had been pressed into hard damp sand, loosening up now that she was on her back. Her leg twitched, a spasm of nervous discharge, gnawing cold where the bone was exposed to open air.
There were voices in her head, a woman singing, and what sounded like harp strings, gentle, plucking, merging notes.
God, that's annoying. But it continued, an epaiode to close wounds.
A man's rich voice right in her ear, so close she turned her head with a burning pull up her spine. He wasn't outside. He was in her head, too.
Strates Unwinder, the minor Rexenor lord, his words breathing life, soft, ancient and calm, rolling the r's, savoring the sounds, but every letter so necessary, commands to her bones and muscle, organ tissue reconstruction, part of one lung and her fractured, splintered ribs.
There were others in her head singing, dozens of them contributing their power, their experience, their skills, all toward putting her back together again. Like Humpty Dumpty, only with all the king's men—and women—being a fuck of a lot more useful.
The steel hard voice of Queen Nannakis coming through loud and clear, All the toes on her right foot are broken, two crushed. One on the end is not much more than blood and bone gravel wrapped in dying skin.
I will help you with that, said another woman's voice, old Queen Moirion, Wreath-wearer a thousand years ago, named after King Moiriades, the son of Eupheron, who was working intently on the gaping wound stretching up her right thigh to her hip. A deep clean slice through her skin and muscle from something with very sharp teeth.
Her whole body jumped, an electric punch to every muscle still functional, her eyes bolting wide open. "Ormenos!" She gargled out the name through seawater and blood pooling in her mouth. A fit of coughing, that wrenched and tore her damaged body.
On their own, three fingers on her left hand clawed through the sand to find the grip of her sword. She fought the night, a dull roar of unconsciousness creeping around her senses as she spent more of her returning strength to summon her trident, then the night was gone, a swift receding tide, and the tall spear with the forked top appeared, planted in the sand next to her.
She pulled her right hand up, dragging it over the sand using her shoulder and upper arm strength, dragging as if everything below the elbow was dead. She managed to hook her broken fingers around the trident, a jolt of gulped down power when she curled in her thumb and forefinger.
"O, Lord Poseidon, please help me."
She felt a rumble up her back, something that made the earth shudder, and then Queen Polyxene's shrill cry, It has found us! The ocean blackener. Ormenos!
King Moiriades shouting that
she wasn't ready, and Queen Onasikleia yelling back that it didn't matter. Lady Kassandra, get to your feet. Now! Pick up your sword. It is here.
Her voice came out hoarse, "I will need your help, all of you." God damn my head hurts.
Bachoris waited for her at edge of the Atlantic, starting to get a little nervous. He had walked miles up and down the deserted strip of coast from Hampton Beach to Little Boars Head. And she hadn't come back.
He looked at his watch. A little after four in the morning.
He bent down, picked up a warm sea-rounded stone that fit well in his palm, pulled his arm back, snapped it into the air with more than human fury. It flew in a shallow arc, a hundred yards over the water and hit the calm moonlit surface with an overlapped pluck and thump.
Bachoris stopped, folded his arms, watching the ripples in the water, a wavy dance of light. The pale moon stood a finger's width off the horizon, strings of white slashing the surface, a cold hard beam of it like a carpet rolled into shore, painting the slick rounded hump of something very big in the water.
His eyes narrowed suspiciously, following the thing's movement toward North Hampton Beach a kilometer up from where he stood.
"Do whales beach themselves here?"
A boulder the size of a VW broke the surface of the sea, seemed to float in the air like the moon, crashing into the sea further from shore. He focused and tracked the bulge of ocean running before the monster, and found Kassandra, on her knees at the edge of the water.
Bachoris took one uncertain step toward her, then another, then he ran to meet her, arms pumping, breathing hard. His voice came out a whisper, fear like sand in his throat. "Run, Kassandra." And the earth shook under his feet.
Kassandra crawled out of the surf, dragging her sword. She staggered, dropped to one knee, and then got to her feet, swaying, held up by her trident.
She didn't look behind her, didn't see the beach shudder and slip out from under Bachoris. He fell, skidding face first across a gravel bed, a sharp surprise of broken mussel shells. He crawled to his knees, blood dripping down his arms. He looked up to see something monstrous rise out of the Atlantic, a small island of slick mottled gray skin and tentacles, some as thick as a mature tree, ringing a smaller group of slender whippy arms thirty feet long ending in gaping holes with snapping, flexing jaws and teeth.
Bachoris froze, the name spilling out of his mouth, drooling the sound, "Ormenos."
Akastê had shown him this beast, one of her pets, one of the hungry things she kept around to frighten him, teasing him with tales of feeding Agenika to it.
Kassandra stood knee-deep in the surf, straightened defiantly, dropped her sword in the shallows behind her. She pulled her arms up, uncurled most of her fingers, conducting the sea. A net of watery cables sprang from the surf to bind the creature, snapping up the tentacles it threw at her.
One got through her net, a mouth full of teeth, a gray and shiny nest of sharp triangles around a hole for ingesting whatever the teeth tore from their prey. It swung low along the water, curved up to snap closed around her thigh, but failed to knock her off her feet.
She lowered her arms, let them swing to her sides as if she didn't have the strength to hold them up anymore.
She looked down, too weary to be afraid. She crouched without turning around, let the teeth dig deeper into the muscle, a gush of warm blood down her leg. She grabbed her sword, hacked through the tentacle's end behind its jaw. It ratcheted open, dropping at her feet, some kind of death reflex.
Then she was running—toward her own death, right at the monster, blood streaming off her, her body streaked with it, a smear up her cheek, thick drops of it thrown into the air, curls of it in the shallows. Her toes touched the sea's surface and didn't go through as it accommodated her dash for death. A quick crouch on the ocean, knees bending, springing her body into the air, up one on the bound groups of thicker tentacles to the massive central body. She kicked over the flexing overlapping plates of armor, rounded knobs poking up out of the skin to trip her. One of its eyes, swiveled up, following her impotently.
Kassandra jumped straight into the air, and came down with the sword in both hands, driving it to her knuckles into the monster. She screamed a battle cry, only half coherent, something about killing, heart beating, seas of blood, and then more killing. She pulled it out and drove it in, repeating the spring and thrust move until she couldn't jump or stand anymore.
Ormenos thrashed, the motion dying after her eighth deep stab, its limbs and tentacles dropping dead in the water, the plates of armor flattening, the bulbous pressurized lumps that had spat poison going slack. Everything about the monster sagged in the water, spreading out, oozing, and the hunger in its eyes died.
Kassandra fell to her knees, holding her sword, and crept to the edge of mottled gray skin, to her net of water cables still holding up Ormenos. She slid down a pair, splashing in the surf, the thump of hard sand jarred her bones. She tried to get to her feet, stumbled, and gave up, crawling up the beach, dragging her sword.
Bachoris' feet came unglued, and he sprinted down the sand, trying to cry her name. It came out in a whisper.
"Kassandra?" Bachoris raced up, stopping when he saw her eyes.
Her face, twisted in pain, turned up to his, and there was no recognition.
She gasped and let out a desperate yelp, as if she'd been caught in her weakest moment by enemies. She stumbled back on her heels, swinging her arms forward with the same motion. Two thick beams of water fired out of the surf, aimed at her attacker.
Kassandra blinked.
The water stopped, inches from punching Bachoris. She waited, breathing hard, begging for clearer vision. She saw him, nodded, and released the water from her control. It crashed to the sand and shell gravel, splashing him, then curled back on her, washing some of the blood from her face.
She looked up at Bachoris pleadingly. "Help me. Please take me home."
He took a step toward her and paused, his eyes dropping to the sword. She nodded weakly, waved at him, and it dissolved in the air. A soft haze of sea mist haloed her body and then drifted away with the breeze.
He bent, grabbed her under the arms. Kassandra grunted, staggering to her feet. She swayed forward and back in Bachoris' strong grip, sighed, a choppy release of the air in her lungs, and let all her weight fall against him.
Blood dribbled from one of her ears and the braid on that side had been torn off—not cleanly. Bachoris blinked, had trouble seeing her through the tears in his eyes. He bent to pick her up, but her fingers dug insistently into his arm.
"Wait." Kassandra swung her head toward the sea, waving. She took a step toward the ocean, pulling Bachoris around with her. "Take my hand. Do not let go of me."
He took it, looking down at her torn and broken body. "How? You can barely stand. How did you kill it?"
She put her weight on her left leg. "He and I have been battling for hours—and not one-sided. He was as bad off as me, but without inside help."
"Ormenos?"
"Yes." She pointed at the mass of slick gray flesh rolling in the surf. "That is Ormenos."
Bachoris spent a few seconds studying the dead limbs and shattered living armor and dead rings of eyes in the water. "What is left of him."
She nodded. "Do not be afraid." And a tear rolled down her cheek.
Then he almost dropped Kassandra. Another monster appeared in front of them, human-shaped with bulging muscles, its whole body made entirely of water. The thing came out of the surf and rose twenty feet in the air, its head the size of a beach cottage; sharp ripples of water sloshed along its skin.
"Lady Kassandra." Its voice thundered against their ears. It was angry. "Why did you not help me find you? Leave a trace. Call me to your side. I circled the Nine-cities, caught their conversations. The king has told the seaborn that it was you who summoned it, that this thing is yours." He threw one hand and a thick thumb-like jet of water over his shoulder, indicating the tenctacled monster. Ochleros
pleaded, "I beg you not to swim this close to the edge of your life without taking me there with you. Please, my lady."
Kassandra pressed harder against Bachoris, trying to stand up straighter, a smile crooked across her mouth. In a poor attempt at appearing casual, she said, "Oh, it was nothing I couldn't handle on my own."
Ochleros bent down, his eyes level with hers, open to her scrutiny. "Would you like me to take you home?"
Kassandra shook her head. "Bachoris will get me there in one piece."
"Very well. Then would you like me to dump this thing—" He motioned to the mound of dead monster behind him. "—in front of the Nine-cities, and give the king a message from you?"
She closed her eyes, not wanting to open them again. Forced them open, forced them to focus on the slack tentacles rolling in the surf like logs. "I want you to hide it, somewhere deep, where Tharsaleos will not be able to find it. I do not want him knowing what has happened here."
"But he has told all the Thalassogenêis that you raised this monster, that you are evil, that you will destroy them. They fear you. They believe this thing is yours."
Kassandra's weak smile appeared again. "Then let us make them believe that I have merely put my pet back on its leash."
There was absolute silence for a moment. Even the ocean went calm.
Ochleros stared down at her, frowning. "I do not understand you."
"You sound like my father." She laughed wearily. "I'm tired. Dead on my feet, really. Good night, Ochleros."
She fell into Bachoris' arms, and he scooped her up, her knees over his forearm, her head resting against his shoulder. She closed her eyes, whispering, "Thank you, dearest."
Chapter 26 - Thursday Night
Bachoris stayed through the night, waiting on Kassandra, running down to the kitchen for orange juice, tea, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, anything she ordered. She rarely took more than a sip or a bite of anything he brought her. He cleared the dishes, glasses, brought her more. He helped her get out of bed, and stumble to the bathroom to pee. Blood swirling in the toilet.
