Nodding to reassure her, he quickened his stroke and swam through the rubble, following the swell of the green gown she wore over her armor. He stole a glance down at the sonar map built into his watch, and frowned when he saw that the women were swimming directly into a room which seemed to be crowded with a large number of enemy forces. Swimming forward rapidly, Trevain displayed his watch to Mother Melusina and Aazuria, making panicked hand gestures to indicate they take another route.
“I know this is the way to the royal quarters as per Vachlan’s instructions; but it’s too dangerous for the ten of us to take such a heavily guarded path. The sonar is registering thousands of men in that…”
Aazuria smiled and took his hands, cutting off his ability to speak. “Trust me,” her lips told him soundlessly. He read their movement with anxiety and alarm, but he knew better than to argue with Aazuria. He swam behind her, through a large cavern entrance and out into an open courtyard with the other Sisters of Sedna. He found his chest suddenly constricted when he saw the men before him.
Several thousand warriors were waiting in the cavern, armed with every manner of weapon. Trevain gulped, wondering what use his sword and gun would be in defending Aazuria against the dozens of incoming fiberglass arrows which were pointed at her. He reached out to touch her shoulder, fearing that the men who had their heavy arrows nocked in crossbows would release their projectiles. If that were to happen, the only thing he could do was twist his body in front of Aazuria and use himself as a meat shield.
Before he could move, however, he saw the Sisters grasping hold of each other’s hands. He saw them open their mouths, and heard—or perhaps he felt—the spine-tingling frequency which was emitted. It infiltrated his body like death; it felt like ghosts who had been dead for centuries were passing through his skin and slowly dragging their frozen mist through his soul. His fingers dug into Aazuria’s shoulder as he clenched his teeth together, trying to drown out the sound which permeated his brain like enormous brass bells, cymbals, and tambourines clanging together inside his brain.
He felt like the sound was killing him, so when Aazuria tilted her head to the side to rest her chin comfortingly against his hand, he felt like she was drawing him forth from a dark and dizzying place. He realized that the sound was causing the waters before them to tremble and simmer, and the thousands of men who had stood at arms, ready to defend this portion of Damahaar against intruders, were being boiled alive by the intensity of the sound.
Trevain stood in awe at the unmistakable, undeniable proof of the sisters’ power. It only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like he had spent hours watching in horror as skin and flesh easily melted to reveal blood and bone. When it was over, he realized that he was gripping Aazuria’s arm so tightly that it must be causing her pain. He released her, and tentatively reached out with his hand to touch the water and check if it was hot. It was just at a regular temperature.
“We need to keep moving,” Mother Melusina signed to the others, as she swam forward into the blood-tinged waters. “Come, ladies. There will be dozens of additional defenses of at least this magnitude.”
Trevain swallowed, feeling very much like a child who had just walked into a slaughterhouse. He knew that Mother Melusina had been correct; he was a useless spectator. His gun and sword were just children’s toys. Nothing could compare to the power of these women to control their environment. It was like the sea itself was on their side—and in his eyes, no force could compete with the sea.
“Are you okay?” Aazuria was asking him in sign language, with a concerned look in her blue eyes. He watched the gore floating around her white hair.
“What exactly was that?” he asked, staring at a few polished white skeletons which drifted lifelessly behind her. He shuddered.
“I don’t know, but I’m just glad that they’re on our side.” She looked around to see if anyone was watching before she mouthed a few private words to him. “They can call me whatever they like; the Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald, or freaking Amethyst. As long as they keep melting my enemies, I hardly care.”
He smiled. “You’re phenomenal, Aazuria. You’re a dream.” Something about the situation was so thrilling that he reached out to touch her cheek, leaning down to place a kiss on her mouth.
Aazuria withdrew before he could make contact, pressing a finger against his lips. She paused, staring at him uneasily as the intoxicating energy of the battlefield chipped away at her stoic resolve. Pressing a hand against his chest, she returned his smile coyly as she pivoted to swim away, signing a few words to him quickly. “After. Let’s make war now, and maybe we can make love later.” With a sly glance back at him, she headed after the mystical women in green gowns.
Trevain felt his chest swell with excitement as he propelled himself through the water, feeling more alive than ever before. Aazuria’s smile was more magical to him than the spiritual women and all of their lethal enchantments. Sure, she had discovered a vital weapon which would prove a huge asset in the war, but more importantly to him, she was back in his life again. In his eyes, the magic of the sea had always surrounded her like an aura, and it seemed fitting that she should be dubbed with the name of this supernatural Sapphire. But he did not care what they called her either, as long as she was his.
He imagined that as long as he could be near her, he would never stop learning more about what was possible. As long as he was near her, he would continue to be compelled to explore the depths of the mysterious oceans and their far more mysterious people. He decided to release the strict hold he had on logic, for it had never steered him correctly in the past. As he trailed after Aazuria, in the wake of the bubbles left by her motion, feeling the soft fabric of her dress waft over his arms, he made an internal pact with himself to listen more to his heart and his intuition.
Vachlan raised his fist. “Holding for orders from the general. Any minute now.”
Olokun ran his hands over the ammunition belts strapped across his body. “Hm. I still recommend that Colonel Namaka and Doctor Ramaris should stay behind on the ships.”
“That’s not how we do things in Adlivun,” Namaka told him. “Besides, Sio here is an expert field medic—you definitely want her along when you do something stupid and get your body ripped up.”
“Shut your smart mouth, girl,” Olokun said fiercely, holding a knife to Namaka’s throat as a group of his men marched by. As soon as they were out of hearing distance he removed the knife and winked apologetically. “Sorry, just keeping up appearances.”
“This is the ‘pirate king,’” Namaka whispered loudly to Sionna, with a roll of her eyes. “Mostly bells and whistles. I have been wondering if those gigantic muscles are from steroids.”
Sionna studied the man’s physique carefully for a moment before turning to Namaka. “Nope, they seem naturally built to me. I could be wrong though. Why do you ask? Do you have the hots for him?”
“A little bit,” Namaka admitted, “but he’s kind of a fruit.”
“Excuse me?” Olokun roared in a deep baritone. “Just because I like tea?”
Namaka and Sionna chuckled slightly at this, but Vachlan chose that moment to open his fist.
“She’s given the orders. Signal the other boats, Olokun,” Vachlan said, but the signals were already blaring, and the flares had already been fired. “Wow. Very organized.”
“Let’s go, my friend!” Olokun said eagerly, signaling his men and beginning to march down the length of the plank into the water. Vachlan followed closely with Sionna and Namaka. Before they could even reach the city, Vachlan noticed an odd disturbance on his sonar map. He gestured to Olokun to command his troops to pause as the technology seemed to go haywire for several seconds. He tapped the machine, but he could see that Sionna was shaking her head and indicating that her map had malfunctioned as well.
A few seconds later, the map was functioning again, but it blinked red, indicating that forces were headed toward them. Vachlan showed the map to Olokun before pulling his rif
le quickly into his hand.
“Assume formation!” Olokun told the men nearest to him, before pulling a gun from his belt and firing a green flare into the water to indicate the defensive maneuver he wished his troops to take. The row of thousands of pirates that had descended into the water immediately followed his orders like clockwork.
Namaka pinched Sionna’s side and gave her an amazed smile as if to comment on how much she enjoyed the way Olokun easily directed such huge forces. Sionna nodded in agreement but then frowned as she glimpsed the sonar map on Namaka’s wrist. Grabbing the younger woman’s arm, Sionna viciously began to indicate the situation to Vachlan.
“Those aren’t soldiers approaching us,” Sionna told him. “Those aren’t even mammals.”
Vachlan studied the sonar map before turning to Olokun nervously. “Sharks,” he told him. “Do your men know the maneuvers for wrestling sharks?”
“Only about 10% of these men are native sea-dwellers,” Olokun answered with a deep frown. “They don’t have the correct combat training. This could be a disaster.”
“See if you can signal the sea-dwellers to move forward,” Vachlan told him. “At any rate, a few bullets should be able to stop a shark.” He reached up and rubbed his recently-shot chest absent-mindedly. “But the beasts move quite quickly and it will take a lot of bullets. The men might panic and waste too much ammo—we will need our bullets once we enter the city.”
“It’s too late for plans,” Olokun said, gesturing at the multitudes of sharks that were exiting Damahaar and swimming directly toward them.
“Who keeps sharks inside the city?” Namaka asked with a frown.
“I did not anticipate this,” Vachlan said, staring at the dark creatures which were approaching at high speeds. He should have known that simply facilitating the spread of disease in Damahaar would not make this conquest an easy one. He had not expected Emperor Zalcan to be so creative in replacing his soldiers with ravenous predators. They seemed trained to feast on human flesh, for they had a singularity of purpose in their beady eyes as they headed straight for Olokun’s Somali pirates. Vachlan gripped the barrel of his rifle, waiting for the fish to swim into range. It occurred to him that the creatures had probably been starved for the occasion. They seemed hungry.
Chapter 27: Sapphire and Onyx
Visola liked fighting in narrow spaces. She liked being surrounded by enemy forces, feeling somewhat claustrophobic as they closed in on her from all sides, and then needing to think on her feet as she fought with several men at once. The truth was that she did not think. Fighting was so deeply ingrained in her mind, so perfectly fused into her every fiber as though she had marinated in the special seasoning of war for centuries, that she trusted her body implicitly to move in the correct way. It was in moments like these that she truly appreciated how beautiful her reflexes were, for they seemed far ahead of the conscious layer of her thought. There was a different zone she was able to reach in these moments, and the confidence she felt in this zone was overwhelming.
Her body knew instinctively how to preserve its own life, and for this she loved herself a little more. She felt a smidgeon of guilt for the careless way she had often tossed her body around, peddling it like wares and discarding it as a foreign tool. She spent so much time convincing herself that she could detach herself from her body, but in this moment—as she sidestepped the swipe of a blade in the water and used her boot to push down on the blade, giving her enough leverage and momentum to slice open the neck of the inferior warrior—she was implicitly thankful for its competence.
In fact, she hardly noticed or remembered that she was pregnant.
If anything, it was helping her battle; her body seemed more in tune with itself, humming with a latent fury which provided lovely icing on the cake of her usual fury. Also, several of the enemy warriors hesitated with obvious moral crises about the ethics of trying to impale or behead a heavily pregnant woman. Many of them had horrified looks in their eyes when they realized her condition, and some even dropped their weapons and lifted their hands, backing away in refusal to attack.
This gave Visola just enough time to snicker and kill them all.
When the last man in the narrow passageway was floating lifelessly, Visola returned her sword to its sheath and gripped her rifle. She used the nozzle to push the body aside and move through the crowded corridor. Looking down at her watch, she saw that there were soldiers just around the corner ahead of her. She glanced back, considering waiting for her armies, but too excited to stand still. Shaking her arms out to release their tiredness and increase the blood flow to her muscles, she pushed onward. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the sonar map, and saw that one of the green dots had separated from the pack, and was moving toward her.
Was it possible that he was some kind of scout or leader? Visola frowned and plastered her body against the side of the hallway as she pointed her weapon at the entryway. Realizing with dismay that her protruding belly did not aid in making her a small, narrow target, she reached down to grip one of the men she had felled, and yanked him up to use him as a shield for her stomach, positioning his body in front of her abdomen and holding his chin up with her knee. She placed the barrel on his shoulder, using him as a stand as she watched for movement through the gun’s sight. When she did see movement, she was startled to see that her attacker had a gun pointed directly at her face.
She immediately dropped behind her human shield, but not before firing a shot. She stared at her sonar to see if the man was moving forward or backward, and saw that he had withdrawn just behind the wall. She cursed, knowing that she had missed; or if she had hit him, it must not have been well-aimed enough to kill him. A text message suddenly appeared beneath her sonar map:
Haven’t you put enough bullets in your poor husband?
Visola’s nose twitched as she glanced over the shoulder of the dead body she was using to block herself from the green dot on the map. Grasping the dead man’s collar, she moved slowly with him, over to the end of the corridor. Once she was there, she turned the corner to get a better view of her attacker, with her gun still pointed at him. Seeing Vachlan, she laughed in relief and lowered her weapon.
“Sorry. I didn’t hit you, did I?”
“No, I evaded it. Couldn’t you see that my indicator was a little square instead of a dot? You should have been able to tell that it was me.”
“I don’t know how to read these things,” Visola signed. “All this new technology—I miss the good old days when you just killed everything in sight.”
“Let me help you read it,” Vachlan said, moving closer. “You see, right here, it says we’re completely alone and there’s no one around us for a few dozen yards.”
She was surprised when Vachlan grabbed the back of her neck and crushed his mouth against hers. She allowed him to give her a sensual kiss for a few seconds until she felt her knees go weak. This was not the time to have weak knees, and she shoved him away abruptly and with great effort. Since Vachlan had recovered from his wounds, she had found it extremely challenging to not spend every second of the day in bed with him; it was doubtlessly another side effect of the pregnancy.
“They sent fucking sharks at us,” Vachlan signed, as he leaned against the wall grumpily. “We lost a few good men to that tactic. I was pissed off.”
“Gross. I hate sharks,” Visola responded empathetically.
“It could have been worse,” Vachlan responded. “Now dolphins, those you really need to beware of. Much easier to train and much more organized—but not quite as fearsome looking. If it had been dolphins, we would have lost ten times the number.”
“At least you didn’t get chomped up and digested,” Visola said, moving close to him again, and kissing his neck. She playfully bit his neck to emulate a shark bite, and ran her tongue against his skin. She could taste his salty sweat even through the water. “Sedna, all this fighting turns me on,” she told him.
He glanced down at the sonar map with a gri
n. “Do we have time for a quickie?”
“No! My troops are only about thirty seconds behind me. It will take me thirty seconds to get my armor off.”
“What did I tell you about getting too far ahead of your troops, Visola?”
“That it’s dangerous, and I shouldn’t do it.” A thought occurred to her. “Hey, if we’re here, then does that mean we’ve fought our way clean into the center of Damahaar? Have we won?”
“Unofficially. There has still been no sign of Emperor Zalcan, but we will find him.”
“Do you think he evacuated? Would he have left the city?”
“He wasn’t a chump and a boob like his boy, Hamnil. I think he would have stayed, but if we’ve penetrated the city from both sides—maybe he isn’t here.”
“That’s disappointing. I wanted to hurt him quite badly.” Visola reached up to tug gently on Vachlan’s ponytail. “It looks like you’ve destroyed another kingdom, baby.”
He smirked. “It was easy. Almost too predictable.”
When she stared at him lustfully, twirling his ponytail around her index finger, he reached out and circled his arms around her back. “Hey, Viso,” he mouthed, very close to her face, forcing her to read his lips. “Did you notice that I just took my first step in conquering the world?”
“What?” she paused in her toying with his hair. “Again?”
“Yep. We’re going to look like the good guys going around ‘liberating’ the rest of the undersea world, but we can make them swear allegiance to the crown of Adlivun—or some other governing entity like the ‘United Undersea Nations.’ And that’s how you conquer the world and keep it.”
“You’re a dick,” Visola mumbled, but she bit her lip with excitement. “Did you plan this all along? Did you plan to conquer half the world for Emperor Zalcan, just to turn around and re-conquer it completely for Zuri?”
Sacred Breath Series (Books 1-4) Page 112
