Out of the Waters

by David Drake

  They were each the length of his forearm. Corylus was more pleased at having come up with a clever idea than he was at the prospect of eating them raw.

  “Cousin?” the sprite said. “Have you looked into the water over the stern recently?”

  Corylus grimaced to be interrupted: another fish had landed on the deck and there was one caught on top of the port sail as well.

  She didn’t sound concerned—but she never sounded concerned.

  Corylus leaped past the Ancient, looking back while holding onto the inward-curving stern piece. There was only swelling water, a translucent green that darkened—

  “Take us up!” he shouted. “Higher, by Hercules!”

  The Ancient laughed like a chattering monkey. The sails slammed the air back and downward, thrusting the ship upward and making it heel onto its port side. Corylus grabbed the starboard railing with both hands and kept his grip though his feet skidded out behind him.

  The sails flapped again. The ship wasn’t gaining height—the port rail barely skimmed the tops of the swells—but they had turned at almost right angles to their previous course. The golden-furred creature continued to laugh.

  It was going to let us die without saying a word!

  But then, it was already dead. Presumably nothing would change for the Ancient and Coryla if the glass amulet was in the belly of a—

  The sea exploded upward where the ship would have been if it had continued dawdling along catching flying fish. The head of the monster was ten or a dozen feet long in itself, and its gape was wider yet. The fangs were a foot long, back-slanting and pointed like spears.

  The jaws clopped shut on spray and air. If the ship hadn’t twisted to the side, they would have crushed the hull.

  The monster curled to follow its prey’s new course. Its head and body were a tawny bronze, with darker mottlings as though brown paint had been dripped over metal.

  The eyes, prominent and well forward in the snout, glittered with what Corylus read as anger. He knew he was projecting his fear onto a beast whose small brain likely had room only for hunger. Hunger was quite enough of a threat.

  The ship was rising at last, describing a slow curve which would bring it back on the course which Corylus had left to go fishing. He looked at the magician in the stern. His right hand trembled toward his sword hilt.

  The anger flooded out of Corylus; he laughed also. He leaned over the railing to see the monster which had almost devoured them.

  Coryla’s friend had done what he told it to do. If Corylus stabbed in the dark and cut down the wrong person, would he be angry with his sword? In the future, he would be more careful, but—

  He turned to the creature and bowed. “Thank you, Master Magician,” he said. “By turning the ship instead of just rising as I ordered, you saved us from the danger I put us in by my ignorance.”

  The Ancient very deliberately touched the tips of his long fingers together, then put his hands on his thighs as before. Corylus didn’t know what the gesture meant, but it was clearly an acknowledgment.

  Corylus looked down at the giant fish which now was swimming near the surface. It had a fin the whole length of its back, but nothing else marred the serpentine smoothness of the several hundred feet of its body. The ship was drawing ahead, but it was clearly following.

  “Our magic drew it from the bottom,” said the sprite. “The eel isn’t a natural creature, you know. Well, most of what I’ve seen in this place you brought me to isn’t natural, as we know it in the waking world.”

  Corylus cleared his throat. They were a hundred feet above the water and leveling out. He thought of going higher, but—

  He smiled grimly.

  —experience had taught him to trust the magician’s judgment over his own.

  “Will the eel chase us far, mistress?” he said to the sprite. His hands ached from their grip on the railing; he began to spread and clench the fingers, working circulation back into them.

  “Until it dies, I suppose,” Coryla said, “or we leave its world.”

  She shrugged. “Or until it catches us and you die, of course.”

  “Of course,” Corylus said. By squinting when he looked back along their course, he could see the eel as a long shadow rippling in the water.

  The sun was past zenith. It would go below the horizon in five or six hours.

  For now, the ship flew on.

  * * *

  WATER TRICKLED DOWN A BACK CORNER of Hedia’s cell. It wasn’t because the walls sweated like those of the cells under the Circus during the winter: this stream was guided by a channel. When it reached the floor, it ran down a channel cast into a tile with a beveled hole in the middle.

  A greater flow echoed hollowly in the sewer beneath the cells. Though the floor was probably nearly transparent like the rest of the building, there wasn’t enough light below for Hedia to see through it.

  She walked to the grating on the corridor side. Two Servitors stood against the far wall, watching her. Each held an orichalc spear; a dagger of the same gleaming metal was thrust beneath a sash of coarse fabric.

  “I need food!” she said, not shouting but in a commanding voice. The glass men didn’t move any more than she expected them to.

  She rattled the grill. It was steel, or at any rate some gray metal. The hinge pins were discolored, but there was no rust despite the damp conditions. The bars were too thick for her to cut through in less than a month even if she’d had a saw.

  Which she certainly did not. There was nothing with her in the cell except the garment which the Council of Minoi had given her after their decision. She had taken it off and used the wetted cloth to rub herself clean as soon as she had taken stock of the situation. She didn’t need clothing, and she would feel much better to be rid of the filth and dried blood in which she was covered.

  “Your masters don’t want me to starve to death!” Hedia said. “If you don’t bring me food, that’s what will happen. What will they do to you then?”

  The Servitors were as still as statues. She wasn’t sure that they could understand speech anyway—or even hear.

  A steel grating of about the size of the cell’s floor covered a section of the corridor roof. It stood out as ridged black against the faint blue glow of the crystal in the walls, floors, and the rest of the ceiling. Air rose through it with a low-pitched whistle, drawing cooler air along the corridor.

  A human servant shuffled down the corridor, carrying a nearly empty sack made from rope netting. He was a stooped old man with his eyes fixed on the floor in front of him.

  “Good sir!” Hedia called, pressing herself against the bars. “Come here! I will make it worth your while.”

  He ignored her as completely as the Servitors had done. Stopping, he rummaged in his bag and brought out a lump the size of two clenched fists. He offered it to a Servitor, who took it in his glass hand.

  The human continued onward without ever having looked toward Hedia. The Servitor crossed the corridor and thrust the doughlike lump through the bars. They were set closely, but Hedia could have reached between them.

  She didn’t bother, since she knew from experience that she couldn’t have overpowered a glass man. Even if she had, it wouldn’t get her out of this cell.

  She grinned. It would be satisfying, though. Throttling anything would feel good right at the moment.

  Hedia bit into the lump as she walked to the back of her cell. It reminded her of overcooked octopus: bland, resilient, and tough. She chewed mechanically, wondering what it had been originally.

  The cooks of noble households in Carce prided themselves on disguising the ingredients of their dishes, fashioning “roast boar” from mackerel and “rack of lamb” from peacocks’ tongues. She doubted whether even the most experienced of them could create something quite so namelessly nasty as this, however.

  Because she didn’t have a cup, she held her lips to the groove in the wall and sucked the trickle which followed it. It was good water, at least.
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  She resumed eating. The situation was unpleasant, but the fact that she didn’t like the food wasn’t close to the top of the list of things she didn’t like. If the guards had been human, she might have complained; though without expecting anything to change. Railing at the Servitors was as pointless as screaming at her bronze mirror.

  A clang like a cartload of armor overturning sounded in the corridor. Holding the lump of food in one hand and her garment in the other, Hedia walked in a dignified fashion to the grilled doorway. Walking was about the only dignified thing she could do under the circumstances, and she didn’t imagine that her moving faster would change anything that was going on outside her cell.

  The Servitors had leaped into action. They stood beneath the grate in the corridor ceiling, pointing their spears toward the dark bulk that had crashed down hard enough to dimple it. Had a block fallen from the top of the airshaft?

  Fingers from above thrust into the grating. It rocked, then lifted slightly. Hedia touched her own bars. If the grating was the same metal, it had to weigh five or six times as much as she did.

  A guard thrust upward, nicking the steel. His orichalc point missed the gripping fingers.

  The square grate lifted a hand’s breadth higher, then shot down into the corridor. One guard dodged in time, but it struck the other squarely and slammed him back against Hedia’s cell. His spear flipped into the air like a spun coin, bounced from the corridor ceiling, and landed ringing on the floor. The grating toppled to lie on the point and half the shaft.

  Lann hung within the air shaft, his broad palms pressed against opposite walls. He had lifted—and thrown—the grate with his feet. Weight alone held it on studs cast into the sides of the bottom course of crystal blocks.

  The ape’s tattooed human face scanned the situation below; then he leaped onto the standing guard, catching his spear-shaft in his toes. They hit the floor together with Lann on the bottom.

  Hedia pushed the rolled-up garment between the bars with her right hand and caught the end with the other hand, lacing it back through the next opening to the left. The guard had fallen with his back against the cell. He started to get up.

  Hedia looped the garment around his glass neck and crossed the portions on her side around one another. She didn’t have time to knot the ends, but even so the fabric took the strain instead of her hands and arms. The Servitor half-rose, then recoiled into the bars with a clang almost as loud as that of the grating hitting the floor.

  Lann used his hands and feet together to fling the other Servitor against the wall of the corridor. The glass head shattered to dust; the Servitor’s torso and limbs crumbled into gravel-sized chunks a moment later.

  The remaining guard jerked forward again. The steel bar flexed noticeably outward, but to Hedia’s amazement the makeshift noose didn’t break: the fabric had made her itch, but it was clearly stronger even than silk.

  The Servitor turned and reached through the bars. Hedia jumped back, avoiding a grip that she knew could squeeze her bones to powder. The glass hands pulled the loop open, now that she was no longer able to keep the ends tight.

  Lann grabbed the Servitor by the ankles. The glass man reached for Lann’s wrists instead of holding onto the bars. Lann swung him sideways like a huge club. His head hit the opposite wall and powdered like that of his fellow guard.

  Hedia stared at the ape-man, scarcely able to believe what she had just seen happen. How strong are you? she thought. But unless he could tear apart steel bars as thick as her two thumbs together, killing the guards wouldn’t change her situation.

  Lann gripped the spear of the guard he had just killed and jerked it from under the grate. He thrust the point into the door’s lower hinge. Gripping the shaft in his hands and the bars with his toes, he pulled. The slender orichalc blade didn’t bend, but the hinge pin snapped and the lower corner of the door twisted noticeably inward.

  I might be able to slip through, Hedia thought; though she knew that slim as she was, she wasn’t really that slim. But if Lann would break the upper hinge also—

  The ape-man dropped the spear and gripped the corner of the door. With his feet braced on the crystal jamb, he used the bars’ own length to lever them outward.

  “There, I can squeeze through!” Hedia said. She got down on her hands and knees.

  Lann continued to pull. Can he understand Greek?

  The corner of the door squealed as it bent upward like a scrap of cloth caught in a breeze. The ape-man dropped to the floor again. He was breathing hard and the fur of his chest and shoulders was soaked with sweat.

  Hedia started to crawl out. Lann pushed her back with the brusque gentleness a nurse uses toward an infant who insists on going somewhere she shouldn’t. To Hedia’s surprise, he crouched and squirmed into the cell, twisting partway through so that his massive shoulders would clear. She hadn’t thought he would fit, but the ape-man had a better eye for the problem.

  Although that didn’t explain why he apparently wanted to imprison himself. Hedia could think of one possible reason, but she supposed she should discount that because her mind always tended to run in that direction. So, however, did the minds of many men who came in contact with her.

  The ape-man ignored her and shuffled splay-legged to the drain. He thrust his right hand into it and planted his left hand flat on the floor. The muscles of his shoulders bunched again.

  Hedia thought for a moment that Lann’s hand was trapped; then she realized that the tile was lifting. The ape-man straightened till his long left arm was straight; the tile wasn’t completely out of the hole in which it had nested, but she could see the underside shimmering close to the level of the floor.

  Lann leaned backward, using the weight of his body to balance that of the massive tile: it was square, three feet on a side and eight inches thick. He gripped the upper edge with his left hand and tilted it further upward; his right hand was clenched into a fist, creating a lump too big to slip back through the drain hole.

  He rotated the tile in the opening, then gave it a slight shove sideways and unclenched his fist. The tile, aligned with the diagonal, dropped through the square hole and smashed into the sewer beneath.

  Lann turned, grinning, to Hedia. His right wrist was ringed with blood. He pointed down into the opening, grunted, and then climbed through. He held the rim for a moment, then dropped.

  Hedia looked into the hole. She couldn’t see the bottom, but she caught the motion of the ape-man waving. He grunted again, louder and this time imperiously. The sound echoed like a lion’s cough.

  Hedia darted to the front of her cell and stretched through the bars for the spear Lann had used for a lever. She pulled it in with her, then managed to reach the belt from which the second guard’s dagger hung. The previous wearer was now a pile of sharp gravel which spilled away when she tugged the scabbard. She hung the belt over her shoulder like a bandolier instead of bothering with the complex buckle.

  Lann called a third time, obviously angry. She doubted he could climb up again to fetch her, but she had learned not to discount the ape-man’s strength and resourcefulness.

  Hedia thrust the spear through the opening butt-first and waggled it until she felt a powerful hand snatch it away from her. She slid into the opening, bracing her arms on the sides as Lann had done. Relaxing them, she dropped.

  She hoped Lann would catch her instead of letting her fall onto the edges of the drain tile. Even if that had happened it would be better than being dangled as bait for a monster.

  Besides, trusting Lann had proved to be a good idea this far.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Lann caught Hedia not only easily but gently; his hands were like a pair of leather pillows shaped perfectly to the contours of her body. He lowered her till her feet touched water. She twitched back for an instant, but the ape-man was standing so she straightened her legs.

  The bottom of the channel was no more than six inches below the surface. The trickle down the wall of Hedia’s cell had b
een fresh, but this was salty enough to sting her many cuts and scratches. The Minoi must use a constant flow of seawater to flush the sewer.

  The current was noticeable but not hazardous. Lann set off against it, hunching as before. He looked as though he were fighting a fierce wind.

  Hedia fished up the spear—Lann had dropped it—and followed. She wished that the ape-man could talk, though his strength was certainly more valuable an asset than speech would have been.

  She visualized a frail, scholarly monkey declaiming to the crowd in the Forum in a toga. The thought made her giggle and feel better.

  As her eyes adapted, she could see that the walls of the sewer glowed faintly blue up to within a foot or two of the high ceiling. She scraped the spear butt along it, finding crystal beneath. She left a mark on the surface and lifted a blob of bluish slime which she flicked off.

  Algae, she supposed, or perhaps moss like the sheets that grew on the ancient well in Saxa’s back garden. About all the light showed her was Lann, sloshing on ahead, but he was a comforting sight.

  Hedia couldn’t see into the water, and there was no walkway to the side of the channel. She decided not to worry about what she couldn’t change. Occasionally her foot squished instead of splashing, but that could happen in the streets of Carce. If she had been squeamish, she would have missed out on quite a lot of what life had to offer.

  It was growing brighter. There was something ahead, a cross-hatched pattern glimpsed past the ape-man’s bulk.

  It was a grating across the sewer. Vegetation so dead and dry that Hedia couldn’t tell what it had been originally clung to the bars. It was a solid curtain at the bottom, and stray wisps remaining almost to the top from when the channel had been flooded. Through gaps Hedia could see the end of the tunnel; open water gleamed in the moonlight.

  Lann reached out with both hands and shook the grate. It was fixed so firmly to the crystal that Hedia couldn’t hear the metal ring—though she told herself that she did.