Dam brought the stone out of his apron and handed it to Ysalane. They exchanged a quiet smile. Ysalane withdrew into the quay, carrying the brilliant stone beneath the folds of her cloak.
Dam climbed the iron ladder up to the battlements at the top of the wall. Backlum had taken up a position above the gates among a tightly packed fleet of archers. Dam glanced over the shoulder-high parapet and down the drop on the other side. Dizziness and nausea claimed him. It would be a fatal tumble from the archer’s alley, which was no broader than one man across. Dam breathed in to buffer his dizziness. He swallowed hard.
He tried looking out again. Gradually the world stopped swaying, and it felt like his feet were on solid ground. The sounds and sights below were troubling. The snakes had managed to leap across the drawbridge before it had lifted upright, and their combined weight had crushed down its metal leaves. A shadowy mob of them rammed and wrenched at the gates. Light from the city bled out from a narrow gap between the iron doors. The snakes had made a deep dent in that spot.
They were easy targets for the archers, but even riddled with metal bolts, the snakes pounded the doors relentlessly. They were crazed in their pursuit of the Oomphalos. Dam noticed something even more worrisome. As the archers felled a few with tens of deep punctures, another line of snakes piled on top of the wounded, accomplishing a greater height. They were building a scaffold of bodies that would allow them to scale the battlements and pour into the city. The warriors had no chance of stopping the fanged monsters in close combat, even for those who were skilled with crooks and axes.
Dam called the shock waves from the battle into his grasp and crushed them together lengthwise like wrinkling together tight folds of fabric. He knew the snakes had a keen and delicate sense of sound. If he flooded them with a loud pitch of an exceedingly high register, it might deafen them and impair their assault. He hurled his menacing creation at the mob. It rang out with a harpy’s squeal that could shatter glass. Dam had to cover his own ears, though none of the warriors could perceive it.
The snakes curled back from that phantom shriek. They were momentarily stricken, dumb and static targets for the quick fire of the archers. Backlum glanced at Dam. The warrior looked like he was adding up that Dam had performed some feat of magic. For a triumphant moment, the plan seemed to have worked.
Two-thirds of the gory horde were bolted down for good. But as Dam’s stupefying shriek diffused out to the canyon, some of the snakes sprouted up from the mound of bolt-riddled trunks. They skated over the dead toward the height of the battlement. Dam realized he should have held the noise over them in a frozen grip. He reached out for more shock waves to launch a second assault.
The serpents spread out below to different approaches. They were clever to Dam’s strategy. He would have to stun them one by one with his concentrated weapon of sound.
One of the serpents found a high perch on top of the felled bodies and reached to the height of the parapet. Archers hacked its snout and neck with their bolts, and it writhed and sloughed down the city curtain. Another serpent reared up to an undefended vantage. Dam honed his ammunition and aimed it at the creature, striking it with an ear-splitting blow. The serpent winced and tumbled over itself.
A third creature sprung up to the battlement and dragged itself past a pair of archers. It took skewers of bolts at close range and kept trundling over the wall. The beast skated down a ladder to the quay.
Backlum commanded the battalion to keep their aim on the enemy outside the wall. He looked at Dam. The warrior’s sweat-slick face was grim with desperation. Dam understood. The archers were too few to split their attention between the inside and the outside of the city curtain. It was up to Dam to subdue the serpent that had breached the city.
Dam summoned sound as quickly as he could. The beast below beserked through the quay. It lunged for the warriors who buttressed the gates with their bodies and iron crooks, scattering them to the sides. It pummeled back a team of men with battle axes with its tail, and it turned and shrieked at a single archer who rifled bolts from one corner of the yard.
Dam zoned in on that brave warrior. He recognized something familiar in his bearing, or was it the distant, shadowy silhouette of his face? It was Hanhau, managing a crossbow with one wounded arm braced upright at his side. The serpent rose above him, preparing a strike at his head or his sides.
The sound blast that Dam had accumulated didn’t have the density or throbbing power to deafen the beast, but there wasn’t time. He slung it quickly at the serpent, praying for the best. It burst into a high-pitched wail. That was enough to startle the beast, but Hanhau was still cornered and fumbling to reload his weapon after that bizarre apparition of sound. Around the quay, every other warrior had retaken their places holding the gates.
A sole, slight figure entering the yard caught Dam’s attention. He was no warrior. He was an unarmed, lanky boy in a kilt approaching the serpent as though he had some capacity to subdue it. Dam watched in disbelief. What did Hephad think he was doing?
Hephad swung his arm outward and upward and shouted. Three juvenile spotted tigers scrambled from the alley behind him and lunged for the serpent’s neck. In the time Dam had been away, the kittens had tripled in size. That still left them at half the length of the serpent if they were all three lined up head to tail, but they each sprang onto the monster biting and ripping at its scaled skin with their claws.
The serpent thrashed and twisted to throw them off. One of the cats lost its grip and tumbled off, but its sisters hung on with feral mercilessness. The creature gasped and bowed to the floor of the yard. The cats bore down on it with their heft. The third one leapt back on the serpent’s neck to help wrestle the kill. They dug their jaws into the collapsed beast until it lay lifeless.
That was a heartening sight, but sounds from the other side of the wall signaled an ongoing struggle. Three serpents had reared up to the battlement, with only pairs of archers to vie with each of them while the rest of the company fought to volley back the rising horde. At the gates, one of the serpents had wrenched its snout deep into the dent between the doors. Once the serpents broke open the gate, they would massacre the city. No power of archery, mastery of sound, or feline ferocity would stop them.
The crimson glow of the Oomphalos washed into the quay. The serpents shrieked greedily for it. For a moment, everything seemed to be stained in blood as though the world had hemorrhaged.
Dam perceived a figure in the quay who held the magical stone in front of him. A crowd gathered behind him, mostly boys who had come out to fight with short swords. Dam recognized Ysalane in the crowd as well as the warrior Ichika. They were following his cousin Aerander out to battle.
Aerander strode forward intrepidly toward the city gate. Either he was healed, or he was possessed by some otherworldly power that guided him, giving no hint of his injury. The men holding the gates parted.
The serpents high up by the battlements jettisoned down to join their brethren outside the gates. They must have sensed the opportunity to burst into the quay and claim the Oomphalos. Every atom in Dam’s body winced at what was to come. He rushed to a ladder to descend to the yard.
The gatehouse in the quay rattled with its machinery. The warped, elephantine doors bellowed and grated open. By the time Dam had climbed down to the quay, the gears had separated the doors wide enough for two or three snakes to squeeze through.
For the space of a breath, there was a standoff between Aerander and the serpents piled on top of one another on the other side of the gates. They were a spellbound swarm of salivating snouts and beaded eyes in the rhythmic cast of the mysterious artifact.
The stone swelled and constricted rhythmically like a heart ripped out of a man’s chest. Some current from within Aerander’s body strengthened into a white-hot fire and pulsed down his arms, into his hands, and into the stone itself. In a blink, a bolt of light shot out of the stone and into the serpent horde. It held the monsters like a wall of frozen totems.
The bolt vanished. A profound silence, like the cloak of death, presided over everything. Then the swarm of gory snakes crumbled like crushed cinders.
Every last one of them had been incinerated by the Oomphalos.
Chapter Five
In the wake of the battle, Dam rooted through the crowded quay to try to reach his cousin. He could hardly hear for the teeming celebration of cries and fists launched high in the air. A group of boys lifted Aerander onto their shoulders to hail the serpent slayer.
Dam veered from one knot of bodies to the next. Even craning and perching on the tips of his feet, he couldn’t see past the high-shouldered warriors in his way. He might just have to wait things out and find Aerander when the celebration had died down.
His ears detected someone calling his name. The distant voice was drowned beneath the cheers that filled the yard. Dam never would have perceived it before he had been magicked with the mastery of sound. That voice made his mouth curl into a smirk. Tracing it like a beacon, he shuffled through the crowd to the margins of the quay.
He came up on Hanhau before the warrior noticed him. Hanhau’s black mop of hair was damp with sweat, and his face was strained from calling out for Dam, not to mention the stress of the battle. He looked at Dam, and his face flushed with light.
They stood together for a quiet moment. Hanhau reached out for Dam with his good arm, and Dam embraced him so hard he could feel Hanhau’s heartbeat thrumming against his chest.
Hanhau brushed his lips against Dam’s cheek. “I prayed, and the Creator God brought you back to me,” Hanhau said.
Dam gripped harder for more of that embrace.
“You saved the city.”
Dam glanced over to the center of the quay where boys and warriors jumped and hollered around his cousin.
“Aerander did it.”
Hanhau narrowed his gaze reproachfully. “You brought back the stone. You fought the serpents to get it. If I hadn’t listened to you and let you come on the expedition, the New Ones would have taken the city and sent us all hiding in the backcountry.”
Dam agreed, but that was hardly worth dwelling on. Finding Hanhau after everything that had happened had been the greatest miracle. He remembered the mill-worm hole in the mountain pass that had been the only escape from the avalanche. Dam crushed his lips against Hanhau’s and shut his eyes, savoring their embrace. For a wonderful moment, all of the commotion in the yard seemed to drift away.
Attalos’ voice called out to him, trying to pry away his attention. As soon as Dam turned to his friend, more voices in the crowd piped up as people recognized him. Attalos goaded Dam to join him and his friends in the celebration in the quay. Callios, Heron, and Hephad called out to him. Farther off, sturdy Rad nudged his companions and howled out Dam’s name.
Dam looked to Hanhau. Hanhau grinned. “Go on.”
Dam ventured into the crowd. Rad fought through people, caught Dam by his legs, and hoisted him onto his shoulders.
Cheers of victory surrounded Dam. It was something he had never wished for and certainly never anticipated, but a hero’s welcome was an insuppressible intoxication. He thrust his fist into the air.
Rad carried him alongside Aerander. A martial anthem broke out among the boys, and they clasped each other around the shoulders and sang a boisterous ballad of triumph from their homeland.
Dam visualized the strains and rhythms of that song, smoothing out its sharp parts, overlaying a harmony, and filling in a steady timbre like the drummers from a military parade. It came together as a symphony of sound that circulated through the quay. Pipes and flutes. Lyres and mandolins. Leather drums and clappers.
The crowd quieted for a moment, awed by that mysterious music. After everything they had seen that night, it didn’t take long for people to shrug off that miracle and raise their voices to sing along. The underground city filled with the rowdy sounds of a festival from the old country.
PART FIVE
Chapter One
Ysalane proclaimed they would have three nights of feasts to celebrate the return of the Oomphalos and the defeat of the New Ones. Banquets were laid in the warrior queen’s Great Hall of mirror-plated walls, and its surrounding yards were cleared for a tournament of games. The underground people had their traditions of archery challenges and hammer throws. The Atlantean boys organized wrestling bouts and foot races.
Everyone attended spectacles of music and dancing, some of which had been put on by the Old Ones with their drummers and their warriors’ gymnastic jigs. Since everyone had witnessed the magic Dam could perform with sound, he was called upon again and again to entertain them with fantastical melodies conjured from some otherworldly realm. Dam would have preferred to enjoy the celebration quietly with Hanhau and his friends, but he supposed it would have made him quite a spoilsport if he didn’t share his magic. While he wove melodies of phantom pipes and string players from vibrations suspended in the air, the Old Ones’ engineers put on an awesome pyrotechnic display that dazzled the city.
That all made for the best party of Dam’s life. Though it was the stolen hours in Hanhau’s bed, when his warrior roommates had cleared out of the barracks, that Dam liked the best.
Hanhau’s broken arm, which he had incurred from being thrown in the mountain pass, had been quickly healed by Ysalane. She had conjured magic from the Oomphalos to mend the bone as she had restored Aerander’s sight when the New Ones had stormed the city.
After Dam and Hanhau lay together, Hanhau’s body armor molted off in patches, stripping him down to fresh skin on his chest and back. In that private moment, they vowed that their hearts were twined in iron. They were promised to one another, two men living their lives side by side until the end of their days. Most of the other warriors strode about the city stripped of their body armor as well. The season of courtship had resumed.
When the feast was over, Hephad started a big fuss about recovering the bodies of Calyiches’ party from the mountain pass. It wasn’t a popular idea at first, but Hephad won the support of Aerander, who then asked Ysalane to endorse the cause. That situation stirred up the first lover’s quarrel between Attalos and Hephad that Dam had witnessed.
Attalos thought it was sufficient justice to let the traitors rot beneath the avalanche. Hephad called him barbaric. Dam kept quiet, sitting safely on his pallet with Pleione bedded in his lap.
“If they don’t get their funeral rites to send them off to the afterlife, their souls will roam the underworld for eternity,” Hephad told Attalos sharply. “It’s not for us to judge them now that they’re dead. Their souls will have their reckoning in the heavens when Poseidon decides their fate.”
Attalos stewed beneath a moody cloud. Since Hephad had recovered his speech, he had really come into his own, keeping the boys in line with their daily oblations and showing them how to cobble together household altars and fetishes. Everyone admired how he had trained the kittens to be fierce defenders of the city.
Attalos had good reason to heed Hephad’s decrees. Attalos had given Hephad his family ring and proposed that they be bonded like a proper gentlemen’s couple. A ceremony was planned. Hephad said that it could hold until after the funerals for Calyiches’ party.
All of the members of Ysalane’s sixteen volunteered for the second expedition. It was to take place in haste before the bodies were scavenged. The city smithies quickly built wheeled sledges so they could transport the remains.
The night before they were to embark, while Dam nestled with Hanhau in his barracks bed, Hanhau edged around the notion of Dam staying back. Hanhau held his face and gently traced the puffy half-moons beneath Dam’s eyes. “You’ve barely rested since coming home. It wouldn’t trouble our cause one bit if you let us go without you.”
Dam knew that he was right. Since the battle with the snakes, he had been racing from one thing to the other, fueled by the collective excitement in the city. Exhaustion clawed at him. Dam laid his cheek on Hanhau’s chest and clutched his thigh be
tween his legs. Staying back made good sense, but he didn’t want to be separated from Hanhau now that he knew what it felt like to be together.
Hanhau kissed the crown of his head and combed his fingers softly through his hair. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
Dam listened to the drumming of Hanhau’s heart. “I’ll follow your sound every moment that you’re gone.”
Hanhau chuckled. “You should be sleeping instead of checking up on me.”
“You’ll never know the difference.”
Dam saw Hanhau safely off when the team embarked from the city gates, then he traveled to his house in the Honeycomb and lay down on his pallet.
His senses roamed into the distance to follow the rumble of the expedition’s sledges. He searched for the familiar, calming sound of Hanhau’s heartbeat, but his concentration was spent. His eyelids shuttered like lead weights, and sleep quickly engulfed him.
Chapter Two
Dam awoke to a room bathed in red, crystalline light. So it had been nearly every day for a half year’s passing, but for a strange moment, he could not remember where he was or how he had come to be there. Slumber had washed his mind clean. Dam even forgot that he had been living in the underworld and wondered what had made the light of day turn red and twinkle as though the sun had been caged in stained glass.
The events of his recent past drifted back to him. He remembered that the Old Ones had built a new tower for the Oomphalos. By the faint light of that thrumming red, underworld sun, it was early morning. Dam remembered Hanhau, which brought a grin to his face. His stomach grumbled mightily. Dam thought about going down to the dining hall and fixing himself a feast, but it was nice to just lie lazily in his warm bed for a little while.
A figure stood in the doorway to his terrace. He was backlit by the ruby glow of the Oomphalos like a messenger descended from the heavens. Dam sat up and squinted, trying to make a better reckoning of his visitor.
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