by Angus Wells
“Burash shall judge,” he said. “For none may harm his chosen ones, save on pain of his wrath.”
“Return me my blade,” Bracht rasped, “and I’ll teach your fishy god how a warrior of Cuan na’For judges him.”
The priest ignored the challenge, merely beckoning as he turned away, his robe rustling as he passed between two stones into the darkness beyond. Hard hands gripped Calandryll’s arms as he was urged to follow, his captors chanting softly now, their voices rising and falling in vocal emulation of the ocean, the words too low that he might understand, but the intonation chilling as the winter sea itself. He was brought after the priest, between the great slabs and along a kind of avenue of lesser stones, unlit save by the receding brightness of the ashets, the way sloping downward so that he thought they must approach the river. Katya and Bracht were at his back, the remaining assassins forming a procession behind. The path steepened, then leveled, running straight and smooth toward a low-arched opening through which pale radiance glowed.
It was not the light of torches or flambeaux but a softer, more regular illumination, as if moonlight played on calm water, green and silver mingled, each color vying briefly for mastery before conceding dominance to its fellow. The pungency of burning oil and the sooty odor of the torches faded, replaced by the sharper perfume of the ocean, such as comes from rock pools, from seaweed and shellfish. Calandryll felt it smart in his nostrils as he was hauled beneath the arch into a cavern vaulted round and smooth as the carapace of an oyster. The priest halted and Calandryll saw clearer where he had been brought; where he was to die. The light came from all around him, some natural phosphorescence, glowing like witchfire from the algae that covered the walls and roof. Immediately beyond the arch a shelf of rock jutted over a deep bowl, wide steps carved in its side, going down to where water puddled, scattered with shells and weed, the ocean smell heady now. Among the smaller items lay larger pieces, bleached white, some straight, others curved, some . . . were skulls, he saw, separated from rib cages, the bones of legs and arms.
He steeled himself against the involuntary shudder of horror that threatened to tremble his as-yet fleshed limbs as he recognized the manner in which he was to be sacrificed: he sensed that the priest anticipated such reaction, and refused to grant that satisfaction.
Across the bowl, lower than the rim of the ledge, the phosphorescence was broken by a single dark eyelet. It seemed to stare at him, or he at it, for he saw its purpose and it drew his gaze with horrid fascination. His surmise that their journey inward from the cove had run parallel to the river was correct. The descending path from the cavern temple had wound counter to that, bringing them close again to the water, but dropping, bringing them to the tidal levels of the Yst, within reach of the sea, into the domain of Burash. The Vanu warboat had quit Vishat’yi on the outgoing tide; by now the race must be turning, incoming. Ere long, it would reach this place, the ocean flow down whatever tunnel ran from shore to cave to flood out through that eyelet. It would be a slow death.
Dimly, an intrusion on his horrid speculation, he heard the priest intone some plea that Burash deliver judgment. He looked about, fighting rank fear, and saw that the shelf bore no sign of flooding, presumably standing above the water’s highest level. Victims, then, must be taken down those steps, likely chained there, to await the salty caress of their fate; likely, too, the Chaipaku would wait upon the ledge, gloating. He clenched his teeth, standing straighter, hoping that he could deny them the reward of his terror. He caught Bracht’s eye and the Kern grinned. Past him, Katya stood grim-visaged, her grey eyes stormy.
Then the droning of the priest’s voice ended and they were bundled down the slick steps. The Chaipaku kicked bones aside to expose manacles set into the bowl’s rock, snapping them about ankles before cutting the cords that bound their victims’ hands. Katya was fastened between Calandryll and Bracht, he to her left, the Kern to her right. Bracht stooped instantly, testing the chains: finding them solid. From above came laughter and the priest’s booming voice.
“Too stout to break, those bonds. Save Burash grant you mercy, you pay for your affront.”
The Kern swung round, as much as he might, and said, “Affront to rid the world of such as you? For such duty I think the gods more likely to reward us.” Through the mouthpiece of the concealing mask he was answered with laughter. He spat and turned away.
“I think this will be an unpleasant death,” Katya murmured, her tone carefully controlled, so that Calandryll was unable to decide whether she felt the same terror and hid it, or was truly unafraid.
“I’d not envisaged so watery an ending,” Bracht admitted. “But we all must die, and at the least I face it with true comrades.”
Calandryll could think of nothing to say. He stared at the opening, wondering how long before he saw it spout, how long the bowl would take to fill. He felt frustration join fear, that their quest should end thus, pointlessly. That likely his murderers would suffer the weight of Tharn’s madness was poor consolation. “Dera be with us all,” he muttered.
“I think your goddess has little to do with this place,” Bracht said. “Neither she nor Ahrd. I think we rest on Burash’s mercy here.”
Calandryll snorted. “Burash is not a god known for his mercy,” he grunted.
“Would that you yet possessed that power,” Katya offered. “Mayhap with that, you might turn back the tide.”
“Gone with Rhythamun’s stone,” he replied; and added, unthinking, “And whatever Menelian saw in me is useless.”
“What did he see?” demanded Bracht.
Calandryll experienced a moment of embarrassment, guilty that he had withheld that knowledge from his friends. It had seemed the wiser course then, for fear some mistrust might arise, product of Bracht’s instinctive dislike of magic. Now it was pointless to hold back; preferable that he die without secrets, he told them of the sorcerer’s examination and the indefinable power Menelian had claimed to find in him.
“Why did you not tell us?” asked the Kern when he was done.
“I was afraid,” he explained, not sure if resentment or curiosity sharpened Bracht’s tone. “You’ve little enough love of magic and I feared such knowledge might change your opinion of me.”
For a while Bracht stared at him, head cocked, his good eye bright. Then he laughed, shaking his head so that the long tail of black hair swung wildly from side to side. “In Ahrd’s name, Calandryll!” He chuckled. “We’ve come too long a road together that I’ll change my thinking now. Are we not comrades? Should I think ill of you for some talent you’ve no knowledge of? Rather, I begin to change my opinion of wizards.”
For the Kern, it was a lengthy speech, and Calandryll’s guilt dissolved, though his embarrassment grew for so misjudging Bracht’s loyalty. “Forgive me,” he asked.
“There’s no need,” said Bracht. “But if you wish it . . . Aye.”
“And you cannot use it?” asked Katya, hope and resignation vying.
“I do not understand it.” Calandryll shook his head. “I do not feel it. All I know is that Menelian said it was in me—whatever it is.”
“Try it on these chains,” Bracht suggested. “And on the fish-lovers. Reive them all.”
He shrugged—why not?—and turned his gaze downward, focusing his attention on the manacles, concentrating his will. Break, he told the iron, burn, dissolve. Nothing happened: he shrugged again. What use a useless power? Then he heard Katya’s sharp intake of breath; another sound beyond it. He looked up, and saw the eyelet was no longer entirely dark. Foam frothed white about its lower rim now as water entered. Behind, he heard the priest announce, “Burash comes,” and with the uttering of the words saw the gurgling drip become a jet, lashing fierce from the hole, spouting furiously across the declivity. Dread gripped him as anticipated fear assumed the dimensions of physical reality. Salt water splashed his boots; he saw the puddles in the bowl enlarged. Some distant, still rational part of his mind told him that the bore of that t
unnel was narrow, the rising tide unable to throw its full weight into the hole. Such an onslaught would be preferable, a swifter death: this way, as Bracht had said, would be slow. He stared at the water, wondering how long it would take to reach his mouth, to block his nostrils. Likely he would float awhile—the chains that bound him held sufficient play that the incoming water would lift him up, that a cruel embellishment of the Chaipaku. He saw the base fill, the level rising up his boots now. A skull stirred, rolled by the pressure, the empty sockets where once eyes had been gazing blindly at him. He shivered, wondering if the denizens of the sea, the crabs and small fishes that must surely enter with that spouting, would being to feed before his thrashing ceased, if he would feel their nibbling before his lungs emptied. It was academic: he would be dead soon enough and his bones, in time, join those others.
The water rose, creeping up their legs, overtopping their boots. It was cold with awful promise. It reached their waists, and slowed. Hope flared. Bracht cried, “Does it halt?”
“No.” Calandryll looked across the bowl. The level within was above the eyelet now and the tide must fight the pressure of its own deposit: a further sadistic refinement. “It only slows. This place must lie below the upper tide line—the tide is pitted against itself, but it will still come in. Only slower.”
Bracht grunted. Katya said, “What manner of man devises such a thing?”
“Chaipaku,” answered Calandryll.
“May their own god deny them rest,” returned the warrior woman. “May fishes eat their eyes.”
It seemed to Calandryll a fate far more likely to apply to them than to the Chaipaku who clustered along the shelf, eagerly watching their victims, silent now as they anticipated the slower, but still steady, rising of the water level. Nonetheless he nodded silent approval of the curse, willing the flow to halt, willing debris to block the tunnel, some freak of nature to turn back the implacable sea.
Uselessly, for where the eyelet lay there was a steady gurgling, the water bubbling and splashing as external pressure proved the greater force, driving ever inward, steadily lifting the interior surface.
It was above his belt now and it seemed time slowed as he watched it rise, climbing upward, chill, to lap against his chest. When the level in the bowl reached that of the tide line outside he knew it would halt, but that level was surely above his head, and by then he would float, an anchored corpse. Anger joined his fear and he mouthed curses of his own as he stumbled to hold balance, shivering in the cold, inexorable embrace.
Lapping ripples touched the skin of his face and he spat salt water from his mouth, craning his head back, seeking to hold lips and nose clear of the flow. Rank fear threatened to void his bowels and he fought the impulse, unwilling to thus express his terror. He heard Bracht shout, “Courage!” the cry abruptly cut off by a dreadful choking. He turned, looking past Katya, to see the freesword spitting, coughing, his dark features furious. The woman met his eyes briefly, smiled thinly, and turned toward the Kern. He heard her say, “Bracht,” before she, too, was silenced by the rising tide. Then both were lost behind wavelets of freezing silver that draped a stinging curtain across his vision. He clamped his lips tight closed, instinctively fighting to ride the flow, to tilt his head back so that his nostrils remained as long they might above the water.
That respite was brief. In moments, the level was risen above his head, his ragged breath sucking in not air, but water. It burned his nostrils, seared his throat. He choked on cold fire, his mouth opening involuntarily, and pain exploded in his chest. He held what breath remained, a miser hoarding the very last of his valuables. His feet no longer touched the bowl’s floor; he floated, turned this way and that as blind panic set him to thrashing, arms flailing wild as he sought hopelessly to thrust his head upward, into the air. The panic grew as his oxygen-starved brain began to pound, and with it a tremendous rage, a fury at this injustice, at this pointless ending of the quest. Red light danced across his eyes, daggers stabbing into the nerves, driving deep. He felt his mouth open: he could not prevent it; no more than the inrush of water that came down his throat in place of air to fill his bursting lungs.
He felt death touch him.
In that moment he lost himself. He was no longer Calandryll den Karynth, but a single spark of being that raged against the Chaipaku, against death itself, that screamed insensate fury, demanding to live.
And hands, cold and immensely strong, lay on him, lifting him. He felt the manacles snapped, the cold green submarine light replaced with the glow of phosphorescent algae. Water spouted from his mouth and nose and he drew in great sobbing gasps of air. His sight cleared and beside him he saw Katya and Bracht raised up, supported by a massive arm. Muscle rippled beneath skin akin to fish scales, green and blue, like deep seawater, and where the arm joined the spectacular shoulder, weed hung, robelike. He blinked stinging salt from his eyes, aware that his comrades stared in awe at the creature that brought them to salvation, and his own gaze rose, up a columnar neck to the gills that fanned where ears should be, seeing that what he had thought was weed was hair, long and wet and dark as the fronds that wave in the ocean’s depths. The face turned toward him, human and piscine, together, the eyes round orbs of aquamarine set deep in their centers with pupils of cold yellow, the nose broad and flat above a lipless line of mouth. He was reminded of Yssym and the reptilian Syfalheen of Gessyth, though he knew, even before the voice spoke inside his head, that this was none other than Burash.
That knowledge sparked amazement, and a fresh bout of coughing that left him weak, hanging like a child in the god’s embrace, grateful and afraid, not knowing if this was salvation or merely a continuation of the sacrifice.
You shall have no harm of me. Should I not sooner help those who seek to aid me!
The question was soundless, yet still it rang within his skull, booming like waves breaking on rock, imbued with all the terrible power the Lord of Waters commanded. Helplessly he shook his head, as yet too numbed by death’s proximity, too confused by this intervention, to offer any coherent answer.
Do you not quest against Tharn’s rising? Do you not think I favor that; would see you victorious? I and all my kindred gods!
Calandryll could only nod and stare.
You called out, man. Did you not know you called me!
Again he shook his head.
No matter. You did: I heard, and came. That suffices. The cold piscatorial gaze altered subtly, the great head turning toward the others, an element of amusement in the silent voice as the god directed a question to Bracht. And you, warrior of Cuan na’For, would you still pit your blade against me!
Bracht pushed strands of soaking hair from his face, meeting the god’s eyes. “Against a friend? No,” he said carefully.
Unheard laughter rang out, approving.
You’ve courage, warrior! All of you—and that commodity you shall need aplenty where you must go.
Calandryll gathered his reeling senses. His attention was focused entirely on Burash, but from the corner of his eye he saw that the water receded, lapping now, as if in homage, about the god’s waist. Below the surface a great tail seemed to stir. On the ledge, the Chaipaku stared in awe, frozen and silent. He asked hoarsely, “You aid us, then?”
Have I not? These fools—a jut of square, flat jaw indicated the assassins—would wreak their petty vengeance unknowing what they do. That I shall not allow.
“Lord Burash!” The priest’s voice no longer boomed, but emerged frightened; he fell to his knees, arms flung out in supplication. Behind him the rest dropped in obeisance, cowering. “These three slew brothers. Their blades have drunk the blood of your chosen followers—this sacrifice was surely merited.”
Burash changed shape. Calandryll was no longer supported on the arm of a merman, but in the embrace of a huge tentacle, the eyes no longer greenish-blue, but unfathomable black, vast discs set above a cruelly hooked beak, the body’s bulk hidden beneath what water remained. A tentacle lashed out, sn
atching the priest from the shelf; another tore the golden mask from his head. Behind it was a face lined by age, the hair on head and chin streaked grey, the eyes widening in horror as they surveyed the god’s threatening beak.
You dare to question me?
“No, Lord!” The protest was a whimper. “Never!”
Then speak not of merit when you talk of revenge. Did I ask it? No! These three serve me and all my kin far better than you who name yourselves my chosen. Did I choose you? Rather, you choose yourselves, for petty reasons beneath my consideration. And you—not these three you would slay—have earned my wrath.
The priest’s eyes bulged as the tentacle squeezed tighter. His mouth gaped wide, the tongue protruding, and his hands beat uselessly against the rubbery flesh. Calandryll heard the dull sound of breaking bones and saw blood jet from between the parted lips. Then the tentacle hurled the limp body away, tossing it like flotsam to the ledge. The golden mask followed, striking the wall, the image dented by the force, and rattled to the floor among the cowering assassins. A Chaipaku wailed in fear and fled into the cavern.
Let some other wear this bauble. Burash shifted shape again, assuming more human form. Calandryll found himself standing beside a tall figure whose leonine head approached the roof of the chamber, a massive, corded arm protective about his shoulders. And let wisdom guide your choice. But hear me! These three I name my wards, and all who move against them move against me and shall feel the weight of my anger.
Those of the Chaipaku capable of voicing a response mumbled nervous agreement. One, braver than the rest, asked, “What shall we do, Lord Burash?”
Call off your hunt, the god commanded. Raise no hand against these three; neither, be it in your power, let any other harm them.
“It shall be so, Lord.”
Along the shelf the grey-clad assassins groveled, ignoring the body of the priest. The god studied them a moment, then turned, his head ducking toward Katya and Bracht, to Calandryll. His features resembled those of the mask, but smiling.
