Banished Sons Of Poseidon

by Andrew J. Peters

  The valorous thing to do was end it quickly. He would show whatever god or spirit inhabiting the well that he was unafraid. Dam opened his mouth and gulped for his death. Venom, thick as plaster, clogged his throat. His body, which was bound to other interests besides valor, retched to expel the mori-mori, but its defenses had been brutally broken. The molten death claimed his insides as though he had swallowed a titan’s fist. If the well had powers to bestow to the brave, it knew no kindness.

  It held him suspended without breath or the pumping of his heart. A deathly shroud pressed in on the corners of his mind’s eye. Just before he thought he could not withstand the pain, a distant sound like thunder echoed in Dam’s ears. Then there was nothing.

  Chapter Eight

  A hand thrust through the membrane of the well and grasped its scalloped rim. Dam froze in on that sight as though he was disembodied. He was a ghost hovering above his final resting place. Whoever that stranger was, he possessed the strength of a god to forge his way up from the depths of the mori-mori well. Either that or the fickle well had granted him mercy and relaxed its leaden grip.

  A second arm and a head emerged. The stranger found a mooring on the side of the well. He gulped and heaved for air. He strained to raise himself from the pool. Scrabbling a knee up to the edge, he threw himself over to the side and collapsed on his back like a corpse dredged from a mucky grave.

  It was a young man in a tunic lacquered to his slight body. A sword and a tin bucket stood nearby. He must have left those implements behind before his audacious plunge. A fool or a daring champion?

  That image faded. He opened his eyes to a shuddering blanket of night. He reckoned groggily that the shudders came from within him. He lay flat on his back on the bank of the well, drenched in its gilded batter, bleating with breaths and throbbing from the rapid drumming of his heart. The aura from the well lapped at one side of him. Dam had died and been reborn.

  Lost in the impossibility of it, Dam worried for a moment if he could trust his memory. Could he have slipped into the well and pulled himself up from its shallows in a panic? He was enervated, not charged with magic power.

  As he gradually regained breath and strength, Dam sat up and wiped the mori-mori from his face and his head where it dripped into his eyes and stung. He collected his sword and used it like a strigil to scrape the well’s batter from his body. The substance rolled from his blade in fat, phosphorescent sheets. Dam remembered the waterfall. He could wash up there after completing his errand. The bucket was a short distance away. He crawled to the bucket and carefully reached it into the well, filling it halfway for the priest.

  When he stood, aware of his surroundings, he noticed for the first time something had changed. Though the darkness blunted his sight, he could sense the contours of the smoking crater field below. Sounds from the depths of its shadows filled his ears. A rumble of shifting rock. An eternal gust whistling across its barren floor. The patter of anthropoid legs in the shelf above the ceiling.

  Dam knew instinctively those sounds were far away even though they were sharp and distinct in his ears, as though he could reach them with an outstretched hand. A hidden world had been unveiled. Every kind of matter had its own distinctive sound. The floor of the bank where he stood hummed from some underground current of energy. The well echoed like a conch shell. Deeper within, he could hear the bubbling pinpoints of air rising up its molten shaft and breaking at the surface with tiny pops.

  Dam’s own body was a wonder of grotesque noises, from the pumping of his blood to the gurgle of gases through his intestines. He could hear the creak of his bones when he walked. He could hear the scrunch of his muscles when he flexed his biceps. Dam took up his sword to behold the tinny song from the strange vibrations of its metal. Every miniscule thing was in his ken, and when he looked around him, he could see those sounds drifting and swirling, suspended in the air like traces of the wind.

  He spoke his name and watched it fog out from his mouth and drift away on a boundless journey. He spoke it louder to make it denser and send it on a faster path. Then he spoke his name a third time. Imagining balling it in his fist, he crushed it into a higher pitch and hurled it, screaming across the crater field below.

  These things he understood now. He was the Master of Sound. Dam would have tried out more of the astounding possibilities, but a troubling noise approached. An army of spiny legs scratched across the well plateau. They were near, advancing on Dam’s location.

  The well’s aura illuminated a shallow perimeter around Dam. He stared beyond into the shadows. Maybe his vision ought to have been a secondary consideration, but it was still the habit he was used to. Flashes of flames blinked through the darkness. They had to be fire scorpions, as Zazamoukh had mentioned, and they had come out to devour him.

  Dam zoned in on the monsters’ strange chatter. They had a language, though that thought never would have occurred to Dam before. It sounded like rabbeting, rusted shears, but he knew that if he studied it, he could decipher patterns, cadences and tones. He could then mimic it to blend in as one of their kind or send them searching for a better meal elsewhere. Before Dam grasped that plan, the herd emerged from the darkness.

  They stood the height of stallions and had fore-pincers as big as giant cudgels. Their towering tails were wreathed with stingers long and sharp enough to hack through a man’s gut and come out on the other side. Blue flames breathed from the spiracles under their bellies. Each one was a furnace that could launch a flaring jet from its serrated gob. They numbered at least one dozen.

  Dam threw up his hands as though brokering a truce. Rad’s lessons in swordsmanship had barely saved him from the carrion beetles. They were of no use against an army of monsters that could kill men through impaling or venom or flame. The monsters spared him a brief moment while they cocked their antennae-crowned nub heads, flooding vibrations at him to lay bare every contour of his body. Then they pressed in on Dam from three sides.

  Dam searched for the trace-like currents of sound he had seen before. As many as he could spot, he imagined gathering them with titan hands into a globe above his head. He pressed in on that globe to make it dense and wicked. The weight of it nearly foundered on top of him, and it pulsed and clamored like lightning from its capture.

  The fire scorpion horde hissed plumes of flame and drew back from that ominous mystery. Dam cried out fiercely, drawing out his voice to the roar of a colossus. He hurled his globe of sound at the fire scorpions like a boulder from a sling.

  It blasted with a force that shook Dam’s legs out from under him. The sound shattered against the distant borders of the crater field and echoed back. Dam stumbled to his feet to get his bearings. The well plateau was deserted. The fire scorpions had scattered. Their footfall skittered to far-off hiding places. They were not likely to venture back for quite a while.

  Dam shouted out a taunt to keep them cowering for days. He felt tall enough to reach the shelf above him. He had been imbued with the powers of an immortal.

  That gave him plenty to think about, but he remembered he had tasks to do before his powers were lost to him as Zazamoukh had mentioned. He needed to take care of the priest first, and then the snakes.

  Chapter Nine

  After scrubbing the mori-mori thoroughly from his clothes and his body, Dam reentered Zazamoukh’s cave. The priest had not budged from his position on the floor. His silent face was aglow in the light of the amulet. He either slept or he had closed his eyes while concentrating on a conversation with Calaeno. Dam needed no trick of sound to steal up on him and drop the bucket a breath away from one of the priest’s ears.

  Zazamoukh shook awake and made a fearful survey of his surroundings. He looked at the bucket and then Dam, who stood in a far corner of his vision. Without a doubt, he wanted to swat Dam, but all he could manage was a reptilian scowl.

  The priest hissed, “What was that for? You ought to mind your manners.”

  “Sorry,” Dam said. “I wanted to brin
g the bucket close. The handle slipped.” He massaged his hand.

  “Stand closer.” He tried to take a better account of Dam. “What was all that commotion out there?”

  Dam stepped forward a bit. The priest must have been referring to the giant blast Dam had created to scare off the fire scorpions. It had been loud enough to travel miles. “There was a tremor,” Dam said. He looked at Zazamoukh’s face with concern. “Are you not feeling well?”

  The priest winced. “I feel as horrible as ever.” His face darkened and trembled as he struggled to raise himself on one bony elbow. It took the breath out of him, and when he had recovered from that, he trained his gaze on Dam. “Feed me. You dallied too long on a simple errand. I can see there’s mischief brewing in that marble brain.”

  Dam came nearer, but halted with a curious look at the amulet. “What’s that?” He clutched the necklace with his mind and surrounded its chiming energy with an invisible sheath. He trapped those sounds and pinched them together to make them sharp and loud. Releasing them from his grip, an explosion of noise like a sack of bells tumbling down a hill surrounded Zazamoukh.

  Zazamoukh threw back his head.

  Dam pointed at the necklace. “I saw it move.”

  The priest glanced from the amulet to Dam and back again.

  “You didn’t see it?” Dam said. He called up an eerie sound from the dark side of his imagination: a woman’s tortured screams. Slyly concentrating, Dam pulled the sound from his head and sent it spiraling into the amulet, where it broke free with an anguished wail.

  Zazamoukh collapsed to the floor, gasping.

  “Something’s wrong,” Dam told him. He summoned into his palms the cries of children torn from their mothers, the howl of widows, the clanging of cuffed chains on prisoners’ ankles. Anger fueling his psychic energy, Dam rolled those noises into nut-sized balls and bowled them through the air to break against the amulet around Zazamoukh’s neck. They burst open into a horrible lament that besieged the priest. It was so loud that it filled the cavern with its resounding chorus of misery.

  “Take it off me,” Zazamoukh cried out.

  Dam stooped down and rustled the amulet over the priest’s head. Zazamoukh lay back stunned and pale. Just in case he recovered quickly and launched some nasty complaint, Dam grabbed a fist-sized void in an invisible hand and stuffed it in the priest’s mouth like a gag.

  He swaggered over the prostrate priest. “Someone must have cursed it while it was out of your possession,” he said. “It seems you can’t command it as well as you used to.” Dam looked to the bucket. “Here’s your meal.”

  Dam dumped the bucket over Zazamoukh’s head. It wasn’t enough to drown him. It was just enough to humiliate him, and it would give him the chance to lick off a few more rations to stay alive. Then Dam ran off with the amulet, cloaking his steps as though he walked on air all the way to the bottom of the cave.

  *

  Now Dam faced a far more ambitious task. He had to enter the serpent’s den, grab the Oomphalos, and make it out alive. He needed to work out a strategy, but first, Dam had to reconnect with Calaeno to settle some things.

  Her voice returned, strained with worry.

  “Dam—that’s really you? I feared something had happened. Eudoros sounded so weak and desperate.”

  Dam raised his voice in disbelief. “You didn’t know that he can command the amulet?”

  “Of course. I knew that he could use it the same way as any of its wearers.”

  “I meant, summoning it away from me and trapping it around his neck?”

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “He told me you had given it to him. I didn’t believe him. But he promised he hadn’t harmed you.”

  “He didn’t mention that he had taken the amulet hostage so I’d be bound to him as his servant?”

  “You must believe me, Dam. I knew that he had forged its mind portal, but I had no idea he could take the necklace away from you.”

  Dam wasn’t sure she was speaking the truth. And if she wasn’t speaking the truth, a terrible thought occurred to him. Maybe she couldn’t be trusted to say whether or not it was safe for the survivors to come aboveground. Maybe all she had wanted was to find her way to Zazamoukh. Zazamoukh ought to have drowned in the flood. Had he made it to the portal by chance or had Calaeno aided him?

  “Dam, how did you get the amulet back? Was there a fight? Was Eudoros hurt?”

  “He’s fine. We’re speaking, so you ought to have known the answer to that.” Having said it, he even wondered if the story about the amulet’s power depending on the priest’s life was a lie.

  “He’s dying,” Calaeno said. “I knew it before he spoke the words. I could tell by his brittle voice. The last thing that I heard was an awful scream.”

  Dam bristled. “If you’re so worried, should I take you back to him?”

  Calaeno muttered, “You don’t understand. How could you understand?” Her voice gained courage. “He’s lost his way. Maybe it was wrong for me to lead you to him. I should have foreseen that he would do anything to cling to life.”

  “I got what I needed,” Dam said. “I suppose that’s the only thing that matters in the end.”

  “I feel like I’ve gone mad,” Calaeno said. “You don’t trust me. Tell me what I can do to repair that?”

  The question stumped Dam. Speaking to her through the amulet’s mind portal felt so unreliable. Dam had no idea what she was hiding. She could have been smiling while her voice portrayed worry and remorse.

  “Why did you give the amulet to Aerander?”

  Calaeno hesitated. “I told you. So I could tell him when it was safe to bridge the portals to the surface.”

  Dam rubbed his scratchy chin. He made a decision then. She called out for him, and he shuttered his mind and opened his eyes to the crater field. He would work out a plan to get the Oomphalos by himself. If that all went right, he would return the amulet to Aerander. Until then, Calaeno could keep to herself without spying on the underworld. Aerander could work out whether or not she was honorable.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter One

  Zazamoukh had told Dam the location of the snakes. If the Fates’ grace was in abundance, they hadn’t moved out yet to attack the city. Dam’s first dilemma was how to get up to their lair with speed. He had fallen and climbed down two tiers below the mountain pass, and it had to be a good hike to the other side of the mountains even from there.

  He scaled up the platform of rock by the well. Aboveground, he could have hastened his journey with a horse. In the below-world, he would have to improvise, and he had learned a bit about that from Hanhau and the slug-sledges. Dam prayed the underground’s more ferocious creatures could be tamed in the same manner.

  He called up from his mind a memory of a shrieking carrion beetle gored in battle, and he sent it spraying into the shadows. That could have brought out any number of freakish scavengers from their hiding places. The response was quick, and the ones to respond to Dam’s ploy were the most treacherous of all. The fire scorpions skated out from a crusty burrow on spiny legs, venturing through the crater field and toward the well bank.

  Dam captured in his head every sound of their approach. He sensed some rudimentary communication between them unrelated to the shearing noise they had flailed at Dam to threaten him. Beneath that noise, he heard a scraping of tiny limbs, some device below their fire-venting gobs that sent out the direction for their route from the captain to his anthropoid vanguard as well as his admonition to be wary based on the memory of what had happened at the well before.

  An infantry of towering fire scorpions came up on Dam, shrugging their stinging tails. Dam let the distress signal slip from his mental grasp. He was unveiled as a mere boy on the well bank, but the hulking monsters shirked back from him. They remembered his clamorous display of might. Whatever reverberation they detected from his tiny body, they took for a superior enemy. One scorpion rasped its twiggy whiskers, and they took flight into the
shadows.

  Dam hadn’t thought out how he would bridle one of them, but he had somehow imagined he would have more time. How was he to use them if they burrowed away at the slightest notice of his approach? He grasped out quickly to capture one of the fleeing creatures with his mind. Then he mimicked the bristly vibrations he had heard from their leader.

  The creature halted from its flight while the rest of the swarm scattered. Concentrating sharply, Dam menaced the fire scorpion with a tyranny of vibrations. As sure as Zazamoukh had commanded the amulet, he brought the creature back to him with the power of his mind. Dam buried his quarry in a cloud of forbidding sound. It bowed its head and pincers and relaxed its tail. Dam held the fire scorpion like a leashed dog.

  He came up on the animal for the final and most precarious step in his plan. He gripped a horn in its shell above its gob, anchored his foot in its side, and mounted the animal. A bridle and harness would have been helpful, but Dam had to make do.

  He roused his awesome steed by sending vibrations to its antennae It lurched forward. Dam held on tight to the lip of its shell and braced his legs. He commanded the fire scorpion into a trot and then an eight-legged gallop. It was just a matter of conjuring faster and louder vibrations to control the animal’s speed.

  They were off at a brisk clip, a boy mounted on a titan fire scorpion, skittering across the crater field toward the passage back to the mountain pass.

  *

  They scampered up the gulley and through the passage where Dam had found water, and farther to the tar pit cavern where Dam had fallen during the tremor. Dam was psychically fused to his fire scorpion steed by a language he had not known he commanded. The thought of a direction or a precaution manifested itself as a rhythm of vibrations in his head, and that signal radiated out to his eight-legged carriage as pulses of sound.