Dream Storm Sea

by A. E. Marling

  The kraken told the octopuses to all wait in the sketch of the Dream Storm Sea. They crawled over each other, some twining tentacles. By their patterns, Hiresha could see that they had done this before and considered it a delightful game.

  Skyheart waved an arm over the empty Sea of Fangs. “None of us remain here. The journey around the lands is too long for these little ones. I go, and the hunger of humans grows. There’s a shorter way.”

  Its tentacle carved a gorge across the desert.

  “You wish to connect the seas,” Hiresha said.

  The octopuses pattered across the gorge to the other sea on the sand map. The rest swam above the desert in their eagerness.

  Interest crackled through the enchantress. She had not expected enthusiasm, but this scheme had a point of particular merit. By dividing the lands, we’d create a moat between the Oasis Empire and the Dominion’s sacrificial knives.

  Skyheart lifted a few octopuses back to the Dream Storm Sea. “With the channel I can be in both seas. Often enough to beat down human hunger.”

  The kraken channel would also block trade. That would stop infiltrators like Emesea, and with her chances at war swept away she’ll be furious. Hiresha saw the plan as full of advantages.

  She asked, “The power of a dream storm would make this possible?”

  “The seas were mated once. For a few days when I was small. A hurricane brought them together.”

  A flood, and the last recorded one was two hundred and thirty-seven years ago. Skyheart has survived long. Hiresha pointed to the narrowest stretch of desert. “The waters dried to salt fields. The land here is low, fissured, and sulfurous. Oasis City is nearby but on higher ground.”

  Close to the salt fields, she drew a pyramid. A sand crab scuttled past.

  “The city’s wall was designed to stop floods,” Hiresha explained. “With warning, the people and their camels could all be safely inside. That concerns me, at least.”

  “The flood must carve the lands apart. The deep wisdom of the sea told me one day this will happen.”

  Hiresha believed the erosion could occur naturally. She refrained from nodding in agreement, since the motion would have no meaning for Skyheart.

  The kraken’s eyespots had intensified to a breathtaking amethyst. “I’ve waited, and I’ve waited long enough. We must make our own flood, our own storm.”

  “If my lands are to have their salt fields drowned, we must harvest salt from the shore.” Hiresha had overheard lords in Oasis City arguing the merits of desert and sea salt.

  “I don’t like anything taken from the sea.” Skyheart’s arms twined around each other, with octopuses dancing up them.

  “Salt is a spice we need to live. I don’t believe farming it would steal wild magic.”

  “Humans on this coast harvest the shores.” A tentacle swept over the western lands of the Dominion. “Many are eaten by terror crocs. I grab more.”

  “That’d have to stop. You must vow to spare salt farmers and to keep the fangs of the sea away from them.”

  Skyheart’s eyespots turned the color of limes. “Could it make all the dogs of the lands stop biting?”

  “You must promise to do what you can, or I won’t be handing over any concentrated dream storms,” the enchantress said. “I’m assuming you can summon a hurricane from wild magic, but how much could you control it?”

  “I can’t call storms. We’d need the typhoon dragons.”

  Hiresha imagined the blue serpent tattoo on Emesea’s chest coming to life. Once the enchantress would have been horrified at the prospect at meeting a sea dragon. Now the idea charged her with a vibration of possibility.

  Those old seats at the Academy thought only of me as a threat. I could stop a war before it starts. I could craft the first treaty with the sea. History is being made in the Lands of Loam, and I could stand in the eye of the hurricane.

  That is, if I’m not dreaming.

  The enchantress held her paragon diamond in front of her. An octopus grasped it, suction cups sealing in pairs like red eyes. It made the patterns for “water rock” and tried to pull the gem away. Hiresha’s mental grip was stronger.

  She was resolved. “Where might we find a dragon?”

  “That’s easier than losing an arm.” The kraken hid one tentacle beneath two others. “Just follow the lightning.”

  Hovering between the mangroves wracked Hiresha with disorientation. Spasms clenched their way up her chest and neck. She was splattered with kraken blood. It had dried and caked on her. The day had gone, and she could count the stars with a glance.

  Hiresha remembered swimming beside the Murderfish. Had I learned to speak with it? The details flowed from her grasp. That infuriated her. Enchantresses always remembered their dreams, and she felt lucid enough to have perfect recall.

  “Thought you’d never wake.” Emesea sprawled against a mangrove. She nodded toward the wreckage of the island. Half the trees bobbed on their sides. Broken roots and their woody air sacs littered the waves. “She tore the place apart, and it didn’t stir you.”

  The enchantress studied the position of a red star in the night and made a calculation. “I woke precisely when I intended.”

  But when had I gone to sleep? Hiresha imagined herself in a blue dress and drifting senseless through the water. She could not remember why she had taken off her purple dress for blue. Wait, the diamond!

  She leaped over a pelican nudging a floating egg. She landed beside the oilskin sack, tore it open. The tree it had been tied to had splintered.

  Behind her, Emesea said, “I’m losing time. Looked like you jumped further than a dolphin.”

  The enchantress clutched the pouch that held her diamond. The lacings burst. The stone that stared up at her was full of blackness.

  The sack held only obsidian, only rock. Hiresha scoured it to make certain. Then she vaulted back to the warrior, and three chunks of obsidian arced after the enchantress like dark comets.

  “Inannis gave you my diamond,” Hiresha said. At the same instant, she wondered, How do I know that? “Where is it?”

  “Why would I keep something so valuable in a sack?”

  “You couldn’t have hidden a crystal that size anywhere else.”

  “Was afraid you’d use it to kill the Murderfish. Didn’t want the gorgeous girl to die.” Emesea held up a fist. She grasped a diamond—Hiresha could sense it—one too small to be the paragon. “But I’m not weathering another bout with her, and you need to get to shore.”

  Her fingers opened with a gleam of crimson. Hiresha’s dream magic shone within a triangular diamond. It was the jewel the skin-stitcher had pried from the enchantress’s chest. The goddess of fate had blessed it with the rarest of hues. The red miracle. A fire diamond. A treasure from the center of the world.

  The enchantress’s heart lurched with a stabbing happiness.

  Motes of light like rose petals fluttered over the warrior. Blood both red and dark covered Emesea, her skin shredded, her ribs a broken jumble, and her arm bone jutting from her skin.

  Hiresha did not quail from the gore. She touched the warrior’s neck, stopped her from feeling any pain below her shoulders. “Did the Murderfish hit you with a tree?”

  “More’n one.”

  “And I woke without a scratch.” Technically, she lied. The enchantress had already healed her own scrapes and bruises.

  “Said I’d watch over your sleep, didn’t I? Sorry you didn’t see the battle. Was a story worth a lifetime of beers.”

  Hiresha wasted no time in setting Emesea’s bones with magic. The warrior’s internal bleeding was leached out of her body, circulated around the red diamond, and back into the veins of her wrist.

  The enchantress was not about to let a woman die who had protected her from a kraken for half a day. Gratefulness smoldered within Hiresha, the warmth balanced by the question she dreaded to ask.

  “What became of Tethiel?”

  “The Feaster did have some fight in h
im. He distracted the Murderfish from you.”

  “And it took him.” The enchantress already knew where. Like the first wave of weakness from a kindling fever, she knew.

  The warrior pointed to sea. Hiresha knew that direction, the same the kraken had led her in the facet of reality where she wore blue.

  “To the well of coral.” The enchantress’s words were a whisper.

  “You sound certain as rot.” The warrior eyed her own wounds closing then gazed at the glowing diamond. “Must’ve been some dream you had.”

  “Or having.”

  The enchantress closed her hand over the red diamond. It glared through her skin. When she opened her fist, slivers of gemstone spread in a flower design. Her touch had recut the jewel, creating more facets. Tethiel had given her the diamond years ago when she had been but a sleepy girl with no more resource than lucid dreaming. Now the gem was perfect.

  Hiresha would not leave Tethiel to the kraken’s torture. She could well imagine that without his help she would’ve woken up in those limb-wringing tentacles.

  I must attend to Emesea quickly.

  Basic enchantments could fit in the diamond shards. Hiresha pressed them against Emesea’s skin. They would hold her wounds closed. The enchantress even took care to fit the skin together without marring the dragon tattoo.

  She would not leave the exhausted warrior marooned. I’ll build us a new boat. The enchantress knew she would also need something to sleep in, once her half day was up.

  Hiresha took her inspiration from a drifting bird’s nest. Snapped roots and broken branches flurried around the enchantress, and she fitted them together in seconds into a ship’s hull. Two of the straighter mangroves became masts. One feather from each of two thousand, three hundred birds became sails. She decided she owed the squawking creatures a moment of grief. For ropes, her mind stripped the fibers from leaves and bark, twisting them.

  The boat floated like a water fowl. Its sails gave the impression of tail feathers and one upright wing.

  Emesea said, “That’ll fly over the water.”

  The enchantress Lightened Emesea and lifted her into the boat, worried the warrior would otherwise hurt herself jumping aboard. “This is The Roost. Sail after me to the atoll.”

  “That’s not the tone of a woman who can be talked out of a notion. Even if it’s trying to steal a kraken’s new toy,” Emesea said.

  “Tethiel has always had unreasonable belief in me. It’s time I prove him right.” Hiresha Repulsed the dried blood off herself along with the purple dress. Her captors had given the garment to her, and she decided it time to try a warrior’s hue. She lifted an arm toward a clump of fabric drifting in the water.

  “You may be stinking with magic, but you don’t know a battle tactic from mud, do you?”

  “I can invent as I go.” A red dress breezed onto her. It was the one Emesea had once worn, with folded, embroidered cuffs. Its seams pulled apart then were stitched back together for a better fit, Hiresha's magic Attracting thread through fabric.

  “When your foes are strong, make yourself look weak. They’ll believe it and lunge straight into your blade.”

  Hiresha nodded. Strips had been cut from her red skirt, and her leg fitted through one slit when she leaped over the sea. She bounded and glided. Frayed strands of cardinal fluttered after her.

  Toes grazed the waves. Magic spread into the water. A moment of weightlessness, a jump, a soaring, and Hiresha shot between the crescent moon and its rippling-scythe reflection.

  The red diamond flickered between her hands, and the obsidian rocks tumbled after her, fracturing into swarms of black glass. The shards shredded the air with her mounting anger. The Murderfish had toyed with her for days. If the opportunity comes, I won’t make it suffer a long death.

  Beneath her in the waters, lights of citrine and aquamarine chased themselves in spirals. The luminescence was a wheel of sparks. Tendrils of color weaved up to sway in the waves. They belonged to upside-down jellyfish. Their filament arms defied gravity, reaching skyward. Hiresha leaped over the stinging lights.

  Racing over the sea, Hiresha noticed more than she had in days. The waves formed patterns. Sequences of silver lines: low, low, high, wide, narrow, wide. They spoke a language, and Hiresha felt that if she studied the waves she would discover the sea’s master design.

  She had not the time. The enchantress dashed over the rim of the atoll. Veins of coral shone vermilion in the light of her diamond. The well of sea was a black mirror. She gazed past the stars, beyond her crimson reflection, to where the darkness uncoiled in tentacles.

  An ordinary woman would never have seen the Murderfish. Its hulk appeared as no more than a current rising from the deep. An ordinary woman could not have crouched on the water’s surface, waiting for the kraken to strike. She would never have pretended to ignore the nearing menace, focusing her eyes beyond and spotting Tethiel.

  He struggled in the claws of a fluorescing scorpion. The segmented tail of the fisherman’s bane curved down to sting him once, twice. Tethiel went rigid, and agony zapped through Hiresha from the equivalent spots on her body.

  She could only hope the venom was of the fiery-pain variety, not the flesh-corroding or heart-stopping kinds. He was dying underwater, but a slow death would give him a chance. The scorpion carried him past a brain coral and into the atoll’s wall, and a moldy-green light illuminated a cavernous opening.

  Hiresha could not follow Tethiel into the coral cave. Not yet. The Murderfish reached for her.

  She Attracted all her obsidian blades with such force that they would slice through her bones. She sprang out of their way as the kraken’s arm broke the surface. Its suckers filled with water like saucers.

  The stone razors hit the tentacle with hissing sounds. Obsidian bristled out the other side, and the arm jerked and flashed crimson. Its hide faded back to the color of night sea, but it fumed a dark blood.

  Hiresha descended from her leap to see two tentacles beneath her. She threw her diamond to the side, and it pulled her out of harm’s way. More arms speared from the sea. They lashed at her like spectral whips. She tossed her diamond against one, whisked to the slick flesh, then vaulted higher. Her obsidian lanced through another section of muscular trunk and left it as pulp. Again the Murderfish lit a furious crimson.

  She had never felt so awake, never so aware of death scrabbling for her. Her thoughts sped so fast that the tentacles seemed to crawl. Each moment of staying alive bombarded her with bliss but also anguish, knowing as she did that scorpion claws held Tethiel.

  I must be done with this fight. Now.

  Her volley of obsidian would kill a man. It had caused only flesh wounds on the kraken. She needed to pierce its vitals, so she dove toward the water, to the point where all the arms connected.

  A blocky pupil glared up at her. It glazed red as the enchantress neared. Let it be blinded.

  She split the sea’s surface and threw her diamond to the side. The gem pulled her out of the way of the storm of obsidian. The black shards spun in front of the stars and hissed into the water.

  The Murderfish’s pupil lengthened. Its head undulated with the sound of a sluicing thump. A siphon opened in a torrent that launched the kraken away and straight out of the sea.

  The enchantress could predict hundreds of hazards in a second. What happened next still surprised her. The airborne kraken’s skin turned into lava. Tentacles of molten stone curled as it changed direction. Its funnel blasted air, and the sea monster flew overhead.

  The tentacles gave off no heat, but they still seared the eye. Each sucker was brighter than a burning brazier. A volcano might as well have erupted above the enchantress. At the center of the black-crusted lava, a beak dribbled shimmering venom.

  Hiresha was astonished. The shock of it ricocheted up her spine and bolted down the nerves of her limbs.

  None of that slowed her mind. She had already enchanted her red diamond to repel water, and she lobbed it downward. It pa
ssed through the sea as if shot through air, towing her into the depths of the atoll.

  Her armory of obsidian whizzed past her, up into the heart of the volcano. The angle was perfect, and the Murderfish’s spreading tentacles blocked its own sight. The shard volley hit. The kraken’s flesh darkened to shades of hatred. It slammed into the water with a thunderclap.

  Hiresha did not wait to see if the Murderfish would die. She glided past mollusks with crimson gills that sucked back to hide in stony stalks. The brain coral she had seen earlier was a maze of pink ridges and creases.

  She reached the sea cave. A school of silver fish veiled its entrance. One of them tried to gulp her diamond, but she reeled it back to her palm.

  Behind her the kraken impacted into the water's surface. The shock wave pushed Hiresha into the cavern.

  The current heaved streamers of algae and parted the school of fish. A sea scorpion’s glow tinted the far side of the cave in slimy light of bluish yellow. The scorpion’s claw snapped forward, impaling a fish on a row of black spines. The fish tried to escape by turning insubstantial, but it reappeared the next second, dead from its wounds.

  Hiresha saw this was not the same sea scorpion that had carried Tethiel into the cave. It had lost a hindmost, paddle-shaped leg. The thought of Tethiel’s skin punctured by claws with similar barbs revolted her. This scorpion dissected its fish with mouth pincers, cutting bits off the face of its prey.

  The scorpion dropped the pulpy pieces of flesh to undulate toward Hiresha. Its broad body flapped through the water. Two claw-like fins at the end of the tail flanked the stinger.

  She burned with the desire to throw her gem against its tail and Attract the venomous prong to pierce the scorpion’s own back, to kill the six-eyed horror. But she needed to save Tethiel more, and each moment of delay decreased his already dubious chances. If he dies, I’ll exterminate these oversized arachnids. From the world.

  Tossing her jewel, she flew past the scorpion. Fan coral and streamers of orange algae broke off with her passing. She braced her feet against the cave wall, between two purple starfish, and plunged downward. The cave wormed deeper.