Starspawn

by Wendy N. Wagner

  “The offering will keep the god calm enough for travel,” Skortti warned the denizen of Leng, “but it will still be dangerous. The god has been sleeping a long time. It will not be easy to control.”

  “The moon-beasts will be more than its match,” the denizen of Leng answered.

  “So you have said, Ahrzur. But the people of this island worshiped this creature. Their whole city worked to keep the creature happy. If such superior beings could not keep the god under control, I worry that a few pudgy pink beasts can handle it.”

  Was Skortti right? Had the entire island civilization existed just to control some sleeping god? And if so, what had made the civilization fall? Jendara struggled to move her hands. She had to get free and find Vorrin. There was no way she was going to risk staying on this island with a rogue god that may have already destroyed an entire society.

  She missed Ahrzur’s reply. The man seemed to be the leader of the denizens of Leng, or at least their representative to the ulat-kini. Though she couldn’t hear his words, his condescending manner was unmistakable.

  Ahrzur’s answer seemed to rankle Skortti. “Yes,” the ulat-kini snapped. “I am certain of the calculations. Not only have I been studying the scepter since Fithrax gave it to me, I’ve also done extensive study of the Old Ones’ library since our arrival on this island. The scepter’s symbols are clear: tonight is the best time for the ritual. Beginning before moonrise would be foolhardy.”

  The two leaders moved away, still discussing the ritual. Jendara wished she could follow behind them and learn more. What would happen during the ritual? What kind of device was going to be moved to the Star Chapel?

  The ulat-kini who had tied up Jendara stepped away. A black robe joined him. Jendara couldn’t quite tell, but she thought they were the only guards at this end of the room.

  “The god seems restless,” the black robe mused.

  “I hope we have enough humans to satisfy it,” the ulat-kini said.

  The two guards disappeared into the dark tunnel.

  Jendara could only widen her eyes, although she wanted to scream. That was it, then—Skortti was going to kill them all, a sacrifice to his god. A hundred people were going to die for the ulat-kini’s deal with the denizens of Leng.

  A sharp tug on her wrists brought her tumbling down to the ground. Kran pulled her face so she could look into his eyes. Whatever had held them immobilized no longer seemed to work on her son.

  He held her gaze for a long moment, his huge brown eyes filling her vision. She had to get free. For him. Her mind struggled in its prison. For a moment, a horrible squeezing sensation filled her head.

  And then, somehow, she could move.

  Kran pulled out his belt knife and cut her bonds. She had no idea how he’d gotten free of both his ropes and his mind control, she was just glad their guards had left them their weapons in case of spider attack. Jendara glanced around. The nearest exit was the doorway that Skortti had used. She had no idea where they were on the island, and the ulat-kini had taken her lantern, but it was better to be free in the dark than trapped in here.

  She jerked her head toward the doorway, but Kran held up a hand. He pointed to his left, toward the edge of the pit. Jendara frowned. She hadn’t been able to turn her head and look down inside the pit before, but now she might be able to get a glimpse. She wondered what Kran wanted her to see.

  Easing around Chana, she peered down into the dark pit. She thought she could hear the faint sound of waves coming from far, far below, but she saw very little. The walls of the chasm gave off a blue-green glow that filled the pit with an eerie gloom. She squinted.

  Something moved in the deeps, something huge and moist and horrible. Just looking at it made her remember her nightmare the previous night, as if the endless screaming of the stars still resounded in her head.

  Jendara wrenched her gaze away, feeling blessed silence fill her skull. What in all hells was down there? She didn’t want to stick around to find out.

  She seized Kran’s hand and hurried toward the doorway. Suddenly, Kran’s hand was ripped out of hers and she stumbled forward.

  “Hey, that kid’s getting away!”

  Jendara realized she hadn’t been seen, and was now hidden in the doorway—but Kran stood completely exposed, as still as a statue under the moon-beasts’ renewed control. An ulat-kini guard burst into view. Jendara shrank into the shadows. The guard grabbed her son’s frozen figure and dragged him back toward the others.

  Every instinct screamed at Jendara to charge the bastard, but she could hear more guards running their way. She backed away, holding her breath. If she was seen and paralyzed again, she couldn’t help anyone.

  She had to leave her boy behind if she was going to save him.

  23

  IN THE DEPTHS

  Somewhere behind her, ulat-kini shouted at each other. They had caught Kran, and now someone had finally realized Jendara was gone.

  Jendara didn’t dare run in the dark tunnel. She remembered all too well the rotten stone walls and floors she’d encountered throughout the island, and found herself whispering pleas to the ancestors as she groped her way along the nearest wall. If she died, no one would know about the people trapped in that horrible room behind her.

  Her prayers were answered by sudden empty space beneath her hand. She fumbled around, trying to feel if it was a doorway or just a crack in the wall. It was impossible to tell. The shouting sounded louder and nearer. Desperate, Jendara wormed her way into the opening just as torchlight appeared at the end of the tunnel.

  Her foot slipped on slick rock, and for a moment she teetered on open space. Then she dropped like a lead fishing weight.

  Jendara twisted and clawed at the rock wall, bashing her elbow on an outcropping. She bit down on a curse and clamped her arms around her head as she tumbled.

  She hit bottom in a spray of water and lay still for a moment, making certain all of her was intact. Her head protested the thumping ride, as did her elbows and tailbone. She was somehow, miraculously, in one piece.

  She rolled onto her hands and knees. A trickle of water ran over the floor around her, only about an inch or two deep. The wall she’d slid down felt wet, too. Maybe it had served some kind of drainage function, or perhaps it had been a sewage sluice in the island’s good years. She used the damp wall to pull herself to her feet. Sewage sluice or not, it had been a thousand years or more since anyone had flushed a chamber pot down that thing. That was more than clean enough for her.

  The tiny sound of water trickling over stone was not loud enough to obscure the low voices she could hear off to her left. Jendara hesitated. There was something familiar about them.

  Slowly, she made her way through the darkness. Her hand struck a stone wall, a dry one this time. But the voices came clearly from a point a few feet away. She followed the sound to another narrow opening in the wall, just wide enough for her to squeeze through. It mirrored the one she’d stumbled upon in the tunnel above. The people who’d built this island had needed to access their sewage system, but they certainly didn’t want to see or smell it any more than they had to.

  She wiggled out into another tunnel, this one faintly lit up with a submarine glow. Every twenty or thirty feet, a jar of phosphorescent seaweed sat on the floor giving off a little cold blue-green light, just bright enough to reveal the open doorway across the hall from Jendara. All she could make out inside the room was the far wall, as if the room had been built with its own narrow entry hallway. The rest of the space stretched out to the left, a mystery.

  But she was certain that was where the voices had come from. She crept forward into the room. On her left, a limpet-encrusted divider a little taller than herself formed the edge of the entry hall. She peered around it.

  Several jars of seaweed surrounded the space, bringing this room close to brightness. Three humans sat on the floor, bound tightly together. An ugly gash ran across Boruc’s forehead, but Tam and Yerka looked mostly unharmed. There
were no guards.

  Jendara ran around the divider and dropped to her knees beside her friends. “Thank the gods and ancestors!”

  “Dara!” Tam stared at her. A bruise covered his cheekbone and the bridge of his nose, and his nose sounded stuffy—probably broken. “You found us!”

  She began sawing at the coarse green ropes biting into his wrists. “How did you wind up down here?”

  “A bunch of deep ones got the drop on us,” Boruc answered.

  Jendara cut the last strands of Tam’s ropes and moved on to Boruc. Tam shook out his hands, trying to get some circulation back into his fingers. “They think we’re part of whatever the ulat-kini are doing. I’m sure they’ll be back any minute to question us again.” Tam pointed at the far corner, where their belts and gear were heaped. “If you hand me my dagger, I can help.”

  Jendara brought their gear over and was glad to see a lantern in the heap. They’d need that if they were going to get out of here. She went back to work on Boruc’s ties.

  “I’m sorry,” Yerka began, and broke off coughing. She twisted her head to wipe her mouth on the shoulder of her shabby tunic. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

  “Why’d you run away?” Tam asked. “You can’t want to go back to the frog-faces.” He reached out to cut the woman’s ropes.

  Jendara caught Tam’s hand. “Don’t.” She stared into Yerka’s dirty face. “Fithrax said you were working for the denizens of Leng. What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know!” Yerka shook her head angrily. “And if I was, the denizens of Leng are the ulat-kini’s allies. They’re all friends.”

  Jendara dragged the woman to her feet. “I don’t think so.” She caught Tam’s confused looked. “Let’s keep her hands tied for now. I want to keep an eye on her.”

  Boruc and Tam hurried to buckle on their belts. Boruc patted the scabbard of his sword lovingly, which Jendara fully understood. Being unarmed and captive was nearly unbearable.

  Tam, with the lantern now lit, stepped out into the hallway and announced an all-clear. Boruc made a lead for Yerka and he steered her out of the room. Jendara followed behind.

  “Where are we?” Boruc asked. “They covered our eyes coming here—lost all my sense of direction.”

  “I’m not sure,” Jendara admitted. She briefly explained what had happened to the rest of the crew since the two had been taken, and then gave them a more detailed account of what had happened to her since she left the ship this morning. Telling the tale made her realize the depth of their difficulties. She had no idea how long her mind had been hazed over by the moon-beasts; she couldn’t even guess what time it was.

  Tam nodded grimly. “This is bad. Our friends and Kran, captured for sacrifice. Enemies that can turn your mind against itself. And the captain has no idea what he’ll be walking into once this ritual begins.”

  Jendara stopped walking, horrified that she hadn’t thought of this herself. Deep down, she’d clung to the hope that of all the crew, Vorrin was the safest. She had told herself she had to save Kran. She had to save Boruc and Tam. Vorrin, though—he could save himself.

  But he was in just as much danger as the rest of them.

  Yerka broke into a coughing fit that doubled her over. Even Jendara was feeling the chill through her damp layers. This far down, the moisture clung to everything and resisted evaporation.

  This far down. Jendara thought about the island’s tunnel system. She might not know exactly where she was, but she knew she was in one of the lower levels, and that the very lowest level served as the sewers, which dumped refuse into the sea. If they could just get down to those tunnels, they could find their way to the outside. All of the Milady’s crew were good swimmers. They could swim for freedom.

  She kept her plan to herself as they walked along. Yerka’s defense against Fithrax’s accusations not only rang hollow—she’d practically agreed to them. If Yerka was a spy for the denizens of Leng, Jendara didn’t want her on board the Milady.

  A second tunnel joined their hallway, and Tam paused in front of its dark open mouth. “What do you think?”

  Jendara peered into the darkness. No jars of glowing seaweed broke the darkness, and the floor here at the entrance was covered in an untouched layer of grayish silt and broken shells. Nothing had passed down that hallway since the sea had drained from this level of the island.

  “Let’s stay on this path,” Boruc suggested. “The lights have to lead somewhere.”

  “We can always double back to try out the other tunnel,” Jendara said.

  Yerka shook her head. “Do you really want to stay in this hallway? Who do you think put these lights here? This is enemy territory.”

  Boruc turned to face the woman. “Why are the deep ones our enemies? We’re just looking for treasure.”

  Yerka pressed her lips tightly together.

  Jendara resisted the sudden urge to shove her into the wall. “Typical spy,” she spat. “You’ll sell your information to the highest bidder, but you won’t give it away to protect your own hide.”

  Yerka didn’t answer. They moved forward, Jendara’s words heavy inside each of them. This was deep one territory. The fish-folk had scoured clean the hallways and even lit them up. The deep ones may have been interested in the island for religious purposes, but it seemed as if they wanted to colonize it as well.

  Jendara couldn’t understand why the creatures would want to. She didn’t know much about deep ones, but they seemed more at home in the water than on the land. The ulat-kini were shallow-water creatures with no females of their own kind, totally dependent on islands and beaches to bring up their air-breathing hybrid spawn. The deep ones inhabited the deep waters of the open seas—hence the name. Jendara had never even seen the secretive creatures until she’d come to this place.

  With their broad skulls and large fins, the deep ones were quite different from the ulat-kini, much more like the remains Jendara had discovered in the flood prison two days ago. Had the deep ones’ ancestors visited this place? They certainly hadn’t built it. The strange, uneven stair treads would have been no easier for the deep ones to navigate than they were for humans.

  Tam raised his hand to stop them. “Someone’s coming.”

  “To the other tunnel,” Jendara ordered. “Quick!”

  They raced back toward the other tunnel. Yerka gasped for air, but Jendara yanked her along by the elbow. She wasn’t about to leave her behind to talk to the deep ones. They skidded into the tunnel, their footsteps crunching slightly on the dirty floor.

  Tam turn his lantern down to the faintest bit of light and then shielded its glow with his body. “Do you think we lost them?” he whispered.

  Jendara held her breath, listening. There were voices out in the tunnel, their foreign words meaningless to her ears.

  “They didn’t see us,” Yerka whispered. “I think they’re on their way to interrogate us.” She paused and listened for another moment. “They brought along something called ‘the Elder.’”

  “You speak the deep ones’ tongue?” Jendara asked.

  “It’s not much different from the ulat-kini’s ceremonial language. I can get a little.”

  “We’d better get moving,” Tam warned. “They’ll realize we’re gone any moment.”

  They moved faster. Tam uncovered the lantern but kept the wick low. This tunnel was narrower and colder, as if the heat were being sucked out into the bedrock of the island.

  Except that Jendara was starting to wonder if this island even had bedrock. It seemed to float upon the sea like a giant stone ship. Which meant if the cold came from anywhere, it came from the ocean, and this tunnel led to it.

  Jendara opened her mouth to tell Tam, but a roar from behind cut her off. The floor beneath her boots began to tremble.

  If the deep ones were coming, they were bringing something huge and angry with them.

  “Run!” she shouted.

  The lantern wasn’t bright enough for them to run safely, b
ut run they did. Jendara smashed into the wall when the tunnel took a sharp turn to the left. The floor began to slope down, and a cold breeze rushed up it, carrying the fresh tang of the sea.

  “I think I hear the ocean!” Tam shouted, and ran ahead. He hit a nearly invisible line at waist-height and toppled over, striking the ground hard.

  “Tam!”

  Jendara stopped short, but Yerka kept running. She jumped over the now sagging line and looked back over her shoulder to make sure no one was following.

  She didn’t see the spider on the ceiling until it dropped on her.

  Jendara grabbed Tam and pulled him to his feet. His mouth fell open as he stared at the spider, its purple hide nearly black in the low light. Its bulk filled the tunnel, blocking their path. It closed its armlike graspers around Yerka, lifting her toward its glistening fangs without taking its gaze from the humans on the ground.

  No, not the humans. Just one.

  Jendara.

  With a sinking heart, Jendara studied the creature. Yellow spattered one of its legs, and dripped down onto the floor: the same yellow as the stuff that had sprayed down on Fithrax’s face.

  She should have known Mommy Longlegs wasn’t dead.

  Yerka shrieked as the creature’s fangs pierced her chest.

  “Shit.” Jendara spun around, dragging Tam behind her. “Back to the other tunnel!”

  “But the deep ones,” Boruc protested, gasping for air as he ran. He wouldn’t have asked if he’d seen the rage burning in the spider’s eyes. He wouldn’t have asked if he’d faced one of their kind before, with their eerie mind tricks and hideous cunning.

  They rounded the corner and saw the blue light of the deep ones’ lanterns. Jendara drew her sword. Her right arm still felt a little stiff, but the muscles would work well enough for this job.

  She charged into the first deep one, skewering the creature before it could bring up its spear. The fishman’s mouth opened and closed, but she knew it was dead the moment she’d hit it. She slammed the heel of her hand into its shoulder to force it off her blade.