Oshenerth

by Alan Dean Foster

  Manyarms and mersons alike paused in their daily routines to gawk at the demon accompanying the returning hunters. Children stopped and pointed or zoomed excitedly around their parents. A clutch of curious, forearm-sized squid offspring shot fearlessly toward the demon, only to jet away in puffs of ink and hyperactive squeals when a burst of bubbles emerged from the rounded object held in the creature’s mouth. They were so startled they forgot to squirt the usual jibes at Chachel.

  Merson and manyarm guided the demon across the canyon and fetched up in front of the gate to West Sandrift. Holding his bone spear perpendicular to the sand, his shark tooth-edged sword secured against his back, Seravach the Gatekeeper eyed the arrivals warily as he gestured at the demon.

  “I don’t know what that is or where you found it, but you can’t bring that thing in here.”

  “It’s a she-demon,” Glint explained helpfully.

  “Really? A demon?” Seravach’s attention perked up, though he was still distrustful. “All the more reason then why it should not be admitted.”

  While he would have preferred to let Glint do all the talking, Chachel felt it was incumbent on him to speak up. “It’s a harmless demon.”

  The Gatekeeper whirled to face him. “Truly? Harmless? Is he-who-sexes-alone suddenly an authority on demons? Not, I suppose, that such an expertise on your part should surprise me.”

  Swimming downslope, a school of a hundred long-finned banner fish fluttered past behind Chachel; their bright black, white, and yellow bodies catching the afternoon light. They were followed by a thousand iridescent purple and blue anthias. None voiced an opinion on the confrontation. In common with the majority of small, colorful reef fish, their conversation consisted almost entirely of inconsequential chatter focused largely on group gossip.

  Under normal circumstances, Chachel would either have challenged Seravach to a fight or turned and left. But having come this far, he intended to see the episode through to its conclusion. And it would be have unfair to leave Glint to deal with the Gatekeeper by himself. Besides which, the cuttlefish presently had possession of the dead shark, and Chachel was getting hungry.

  “I’ll take responsibility.” Moving forward, Glint displayed a liability pattern common to his kind—dark brown streaked with green. The Gatekeeper let out a grunt; the low, thumping sound carried clearly through water.

  “I suppose it’s okay.” He studied the strange, black-skinned apparition. “It’s not a very big demon. What kind of magic can it do?”

  “So far, nothing,” Glint assured him.

  Snorting bubbles, Seravach set aside his spear and worked the simple mechanism that allowed one person to slide the heavy gate open just enough for the three of them to pass. As she finned through, the demon turned to look in his direction. Absently, he wondered what the creature’s face looked like, concealed as it was behind some kind of reflective transparency. He supposed it must be classically grotesque. Regarding her peculiar attire, the Gatekeeper found its design and nature quite unfathomable.

  As befitted his status and personal preferences, Oxothyr’s home was built into a section of reef wall itself. A few staghorn corals flanked the entrance while the opening was shielded from the mirrorsky and its light by graceful plates of carefully nurtured shelf coral. When Chachel indicated to the demon that they were to go inside, she hesitated, shaking her head and pointing again at the bracelet with the strange markings. It was left to Glint to pass the blacktip to his friend and coax her forward, pushing and tugging gently with his tentacles while flashing his most reassuring pink and cerise patterns.

  For a moment it looked as if she was going to panic and flee. Tilting back her head, she gazed upward at the mirrorsky, visible through the openings in the village wall overhead. Peering once more at her strange bracelet, she shook her head more slowly than before, let out a barely audible stream of bubbles, and finally allowed Glint to half pull, half push her forward.

  The short tunnel opened into a large circular chamber in the rock. Lined with frail glistening tunicates and decorative soft corals of lavender hue, the space was almost devoid of current. Cemented to the curving walls, hundreds of shells of evicted mollusks and spralakers sparkled and shone in the light that filtered down the parlor’s central shaft. Clusters of stiff black sea whips protruding from the rock offered the opportunity for precise backscratching. Utilizing colored ink rendered permanent by a fixing enchantment, several manyarm artists had decorated the remainder of the walls with designs both abstract and arcane.

  While Glint jetted off in search of the habitat’s owner, Chachel remained just out of the demon’s reach. He hated surprises, and to be surprised by a suddenly hostile demon was a fate he would prefer to avoid.

  This particular fiend, however, looked anything but threatening. As they waited, she hardly moved, apparently content to drift in center of the central, well-lit shaft that bored through the chamber from top to bottom. Her eyes were half closed, as if she was falling asleep.

  When Glint reappeared with Oxothyr in tow, she woke up very fast.

  Fully extended, the limbs of the manyarm mage were long enough to span the entire chamber from one side to the other. The fact that most of them remained coiled close to his body did nothing to reassure the startled demon. At the sight of Sandrift’s shaman her head virtually disappeared in a sudden eruption of bubbles. Spinning around, she kicked wildly in an attempt to swim back in the direction they had come.

  Sensing her distress, Oxothyr immediately changed hue from his normal relaxed beige-green to a pale turquoise streaked with pink—the most soothing color combination he knew. Since Glint had already informed him that the demon was incapable of civilized speech, the shaman did not try to reassure her with words. Instead, he compacted his body as best he could, twisted his eight arms around him, drew his eyes back into his head, and murmured a few choice reassuring words. Then, utilizing a combination of natural mimicry and a touch of wizardry, he changed shape.

  Grabbing the fleeing demon by one leg, Chachel twisted hard and spun her around in the water. Forced to look backward, she saw—herself. Herself flaunting cephalopodan eyes and tinted turquoise, but unmistakably herself. The incongruity of it was enough to halt her frantic flight. Her arms and legs stopped thrashing.

  All octopuses are natural mimics, able to alter not only their color but their shape to match their surroundings. These inherited skills the venerable and practiced Oxothyr had mastered long ago. Still, even sheened with magic, it required some of his most exquisite contortions to twist himself into a replica of the alien being currently hovering before him in the column of light shafting down from above. While far from a perfect facsimile, the resemblance was striking enough to unsettle not only the demon herself but Chachel and Glint as well.

  When the wizard extended a thick tentacle in her direction, she bent at the waist and started to reach for her knife. As Chachel prepared to intervene, Oxothyr perceived his intent and with another limb waved him off. Lightly, the tip of his extended tentacle made contact with the demon’s shoulder, ran down her side and leg. The extreme delicacy of touch must have reassured the creature. Straightening, her fingers slowly drew away from the weapon.

  As Oxothyr examined her closely, she marveled at his coloration, size, and the bejeweled bracelets that decorated each of the shaman’s eight sucker-lined arms. Scrunched up as near to his elastic body as possible, each armlet was fashioned of different gems, shells, and metals. For some reason she seemed to be particularly attracted to the circlet of hammered gold that encircled one tentacle. Watching her, Chachel just shook his head. Who could fathom the interests of a demon? Perhaps only Oxothyr—which was one reason they had brought her here.

  “Are you going to kill it?”

  “Are you going to eat it?”

  The squeaky-voiced queries came from Sathi and Tythe, the shaman’s sibling squid famuli. At their appearance, Glint flashed a disgusted pattern. Too often, the interests of the shaman’s servants
seemed focused on matters of feeding and reproduction to the exclusion of all else.

  “Why would I do either to something that is plainly so frightened?” the shaman murmured reprovingly to his assistants.

  Chachel frowned. “Frightened? The demon is afraid of us?”

  “It is plainly afraid of something. Perhaps the same distant menace of which I have sometimes spoken lately. It suggests to me that whatever we have here is not a harbinger of that distantly perceived peril.” Endowed as were all his kind with the ability to taste through his arms, Oxothyr reached out to drag a sensitive tip down the back of the creature’s pale right hand. This time the she-demon did not jerk away. “Truly, the poor creature reeks of fear.” He continued his inspection while Chachel used one hand to brush away the shaman’s annoying servants, who were persistent in their efforts to snip off tasty pieces of the dead blacktip.

  “A real demon,” Oxothyr marveled. “I have heard and read tales of such, but never having seen one for myself I had come to believe that they were little more than legends. Now here is one alive and in the flesh, as it were.” He moved forward again. “This is interesting.…”

  Using a pair of arms, he reached toward the neck of the demon. She tensed but did not try to swim away. As the tips of the arms grabbed hold and pulled downward, the black skin peeled away. Revealed beneath was another, partial layer of bright green skin and a good deal of pale flesh that was far more normal in appearance than what the mage was removing. From underneath the black “skin” that had covered its head, long hair spilled out. The strands were tinted a startling yellow-gold.

  “How many skins does the creature have?” a bemused Glint wondered as he watched the operation.

  Dragging the last of the limp black husk off over the artificial fins, Oxothyr cast it to one side. It drifted to the floor like a dead thing.

  “Why are you surprised? Most spralakers shed their skin many times. True, this visitor far more nearly resembles a merson, but we must not suppose that superficial similarities necessarily hold true throughout the entirety of its demonic form.” Extending an arm, he prepared to remove the second, shimmering green inner skin.

  This time the demon resisted, strongly. Not wishing to force the issue, Oxothyr promptly withdrew the probing arm-tip. Setting aside for the moment the matter of skins within skins, he reached up and let the tentacle tip crawl across the transparency that covered the upper portion of the demon’s face. It was hard and unyielding, like the clear crystals the mersons sometimes mined on another part of the sea shelf. Then there was the matter of the peculiar bubble-emitting construct that the demon continued to hold tightly in its mouth. Reaching up fast, he gently but firmly plucked it out.

  It immediately began to discharge a free flow of bubbles, not unlike certain special places on the ocean floor. Clutching at it desperately, the demon took it and shoved it into her mouth. The continuous flow of bubbles ceased, to be replaced by periodic bursts from one side of the apparatus.

  Waving an arm through the flow in order to sample its composition and consistency, an astonished Oxothyr pulled back. “Remarkable! Simply remarkable.”

  “Remarkable enough to eat?” wondered Sathi aloud.

  “Remarkable enough to kill?” added a hopeful Tythe.

  Ignoring them, the shaman turned toward the attentive hunters. He made no effort to hide his shock. “It seems impossible, yet there can be no doubt of it. The demon breathes void!”

  Though he had more respect for the shaman Oxothyr than he did for any of his fellow mersons, Chachel was not quite ready to freely countenance such an outrageous claim.

  “Wizened One, how can something breathe nothing?”

  “I do not know.” Oxothyr continued to hover directly in front of the motionless visitor. “Tales tell only of dead demons found. It is certain that the dead do not breathe at all. But I am convinced this wonderment before us is real.”

  Using his two padded hunting tentacles to keep the pair of hungry servants at arm’s length and away from the tasty corpse of the blacktip, Glint exhibited as much curiosity as his merson companion. “How can you be sure, Master Oxothyr, that the demon is not a scout for the still unidentified danger of which you have previously spoken?”

  “Admittedly, I cannot be certain of that because the nature of the peril is still unknown to me.” Extending and spreading two arms wide, Oxothyr drew them slowly up and down the merson-like flanks of the creature. The gentleness of his touch seemed to calm her. “I can only say that for a demon, this she-thing behaves in a decidedly undemonic manner.”

  As if to deliberately give the lie to the shaman’s charitable assessment, the creature raised her left arm, jabbed a finger at the crystalline face of its strange bracelet, and started to swim upward, using the light shaft that split the chamber for a guide as she kicked hard toward the surface. It took Chachel, Glint, Sathi, and Tythe’s combined strength to hold her down. She struggled violently for a moment, trying to free herself. Then, as if resigned, she simply went limp in the water.

  Leaning in close, Chachel peered at the transparency that covered the demon’s face. “Its eyes are closed.” He shook the figure. The feel of the bare arms was strange under his fingers, almost as if he was gripping a manyarm instead of a merson. In response to his shaking, the eyes behind the plate fluttered slightly but did not open more than halfway.

  Coming nearer, Oxothyr brought one eye close to the peculiar bracelet. “This is a device of some strange manufacture.”

  Freed for the moment from the need to defend the shark from the darting depredations of the shaman’s servants, Glint offered his own opinion. “Whatever its function, the demon is obsessed with it. During our journey home, she looked at it every other moment. Do you have any idea what it does, Wisearms?”

  Oxothyr turned dark brown spotted with white, a sign of negativity. “The unobvious requires study.” Reaching out with a tentacle tip, he felt of the apparatus that protruded from the creature’s mouth. The irregular flow of bubbles it had been emitting had undergone a sudden and dramatic decline. With another arm he pushed at the body. It drifted backward in response as the creature made no effort to ward off the shove. Its eyes remained closed and its head lolled to one side.

  “I think it is dying,” he murmured. “The void it inhales to live is gone, or going. Something must be done, and quickly!”

  “Why?” An indifferent Chachel had drifted backward. “It’s a demon. Perhaps it is time to let it die.”

  Oxothyr favored the hunter with a reproving gaze. “I do not know why the other villagers take the time and trouble to insult you when you do such a commendable job of doing so yourself.” Arms curling, he pushed away from the hovering body. “Consider that while this creature may not be a component of those disturbing rumors I have been perceiving, it may know something about them. In contrast, dead persons are notoriously uninformative.” Extending his eight arms in all directions, the shaman made simultaneous contact with both sides of the chamber.

  The chromatophores in their skin flashing excitement in rippling waves of silver and gold, the two famuli obediently released their respective grips on the hovering demon’s legs and shot into the tunnel that led into the depths of the shaman’s home.

  “Magic be coming!” Sathi squealed excitedly.

  “Coming is magic!” Tythe added redundantly.

  Clutching the dead blacktip tightly, Glint started to back toward the entrance to the mage’s lair. One eye fastened on the drifting Chachel. “You heard the squirts! Aren’t you coming?”

  “No.” Chachel remained hovering where he was. “I want to watch.”

  “Those who linger too close to a shaman’s magic sometimes find themselves caught up in it,” the cuttlefish warned him.

  “Go if you want. I’m staying. I might learn something.”

  “Like how to be turned into a limpet,” Glint muttered nervously. But despite his apprehension, he stayed his flight to remain with his friend. It would
not do to admit, even to himself, that a merson could be braver than a manyarm.

  Before their eyes, Oxothyr began to spin. His extended arms churned the water until Chachel and Glint had to grab onto the surrounding rock to keep from being swept up in the strengthening maelstrom. As its velocity increased, the whirlpool the shaman was generating began to acquire color. The deepening of hue, the change from transparency to a fiery blue, suggested that everything in its vicinity had begun to descend. It had not. The shaman’s home remained where it was, solid rock and coral affixed to the seabed. Only the light deepened.

  Oxothyr’s voice rose as he recited ancient axioms. Intoning the phraseology of the primordial depths, he summoned forth the deep water magic that was known to only the wisest of the wise. Within the roaring water outlines began to appear; streaks of light that seemed alive, flashes of mindful brightness, flares of shape-shifting scintillation that were the essence of ocean. Within the tunnel that led to the rest of the shaman’s house, the two squid alternately gushed expressions of exhilaration and fear. Reflecting their heightened emotions, their slender bodies rippled with color.

  Glint managed to maintain firmer control of his chromatophores, though he was still frightened. Never before had placid Oxothyr demonstrated this degree of power. This was intoxicating conjuring indeed. The water spun as the wizard spun; faster and faster, threatening to sweep up the sand below and drag down the plankton above, not to mention pull in his visitors and his servants alike.