Emerald Sea

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The next day dawned clear again and before the mists were off the ground, the dragons were aloft searching for a school of sizeable fish.

Koo and Vickie had stayed on land, so the only rider with Herzer was Jerry, who was the strongest swimmer. In the detritus from before the Fall, Jackson had dug up a set of fins and a conformable mask and snorkel, which fit the rider, and he intended to participate as much as possible in the hunt. Elayna had stayed back at camp, but the group included Jason, Pete, Jackson and an older mer-man named Bill, all of whom planned on working the net. Bast had also chosen to stay back at the town.

They spiraled upward, the dragons having to work for altitude with neither thermals nor wind, and looked for anything moving. But the surface of the ocean was glass smooth for klicks and there was no sign of migrating pelagics to be seen.

“I guess it’s reef fish, today,” Jerry said.

“Whatever,” Joanna complained. “I’m damned hungry.”

“If we can take just a little time,” Bill said, “sometimes schools wait for the ebb tide by Roberts Inlet. It’s not far down the coast.”

“By where we went fishing the first time,” Jason said.

“We can try it,” Joanna grumbled. “And if they’re not there we either eat reef-fish or mer-men that send us on wild goose chases.”

Herzer looked back to the east, squinting into the rising sun, and saw a flash on the surface.

“Hang on,” he said, spinning Chauncey practically on his own tail. “There’s something back there.”

“Dolphins,” Jason said, as Nebka banked around to follow Joanna. “Or maybe delphinos.”

“Delphinos,” Joanna said. “I can see the rounded foreheads.”

“From here?” Pete asked. He was riding behind Jerry and squinting to try to see what everyone was looking at.

“I can adjust my eyes for enhanced distance vision,” the dragon said. “They’re delphinos. But…”

“Why are they just standing on their tails?” Herzer asked. It was apparent the pod was not moving, just thrashing at the surface. As if they were trying to attract attention.

“I dunno,” Joanna said. “But there’s something closing on them from the direction of the town. Something underwater.”

“Commander,” Herzer said. “Will all due respect, I suggest we proceed immediately back to the town.”

“It’s an orca,” Joanna growled. The whole group had been gliding in the direction of the delphinos and now the great dragon started flapping her wings, accelerating. “It’s hunting them.”

She entered a steep glide then pulled out as she swept over the delphinos. She stayed on level flight, wingtips just above the ocean, until she passed over the orca. She had timed the strike, by luck or planning it didn’t matter, perfectly and just as she swept over the unsuspecting orca broached the surface. As it did, all four talons shot down and sunk into its skin.

She had banked upward as she struck and had nearly forty kilometers of forward momentum so the massive marine mammal was plucked from the waters as neatly as a fish being caught by an osprey.

But the massive orca weighed a good percentage of her own weight and Joanna quickly discovered that getting him out of the water was not the same as keeping him out. After a few desperate wing beats she released the whale and let him drop, bleeding, back into the water.

The orca, however, seemed to have had enough, and dove for the reef below, heading out towards deeper water and away from the delphinos.

“Just peaceful diplomats, huh,” Joanna said as she gained altitude. She banked towards the village but took a look back at the trail of blood from the wounded orca. “Buh-bye, buh-bye now.”

“We need to get down there!” Jason shouted.

“Let me and the dragons handle this,” Joanna replied. “Herzer, the birthing cavern.”

“Shit!” he said, banking Chauncey towards the land as the rest of the dragons thundered into the shallows. “I’ll be back!”

Rachel was watching her father, who was talking to one of the older mer-folk in the shadows of a ledge. The mer-man was nodding his head as Edmund talked, clearly agreeing with what the general was saying. Edmund had been doing the rounds ever since Bruce had ordered them to leave, late into the last night and was at it again even before breakfast this morning. He seemed to reach some sort of agreement and was just starting to swim away when there was a shrill screeing in the distance.

Rachel had become inured to the constant low-level noises of the sea. There was a constant snapping, which she had been told were shrimp although she rarely saw them. And there was the semiconstant pinging of the delphinos that hovered near the periphery of the town. But this was different, it set her teeth on edge and made her want to get up and run.

When Edmund heard it he seemed to recognize it and headed up above the enclosing coral with Rachel following.

When she got above the coral she spun around, looking for what was making the noise but what she saw was a line of raylike forms heading in from the direction of the rising sun.

“Attack!” Edmund bellowed, just as the rays swept across the crowded square.

The creatures, Changed humans, were the size of manta rays, nearly three meters from wingtip to wingtip. But instead of the soft, plankton-gathering mouths of manta rays they had vertically slit mouths lined with sharklike teeth. Rachel saw a line with a bony harpoon head dart down from the belly of one of the leading ixchitl and strike the mer-man that Edmund had been talking to. The mer-man struggled for a moment then went flaccid as the line began to accordion back up to the ray. When the still-twitching mer-man reached the belly of the ixchitl the beast tore into his body, tearing off great strips of flesh as the shallow water turned red around it. More of the darts were dropping among the mer as those that could dashed for the relative safety of the ledges and swim-throughs.

Bruce the Black suddenly appeared from one of the swim-throughs, a bone-tipped spear in his hand, and shot up into the crowd of ixchitl. He caught one of the beasts in the maw and the hard-driven spear penetrated through its mouth and up out of the back in a welter of blood. But even as he took that one out, another speared him and the leader of the mer shuddered as its neurotoxin ran though his veins.

“Get under cover!” Edmund bellowed at her, drawing his knife.

Rachel ducked under the ledge but continued to watch her father, sure in her heart that he was as doomed as the former mer-leader. But Edmund seemed to dodge the ixchitl’s darts as if he had been fighting them all his life. She saw him cut one that came at him and swarm up the retracting organ that dangled from the belly of the beast. When he reached the ixchitl he drove the knife into its anus and cut upward, gutting it from bottom to top. As the ixchitl thrashed in its death agonies the general shoved his arm into the slit and grasped something in the interior, dragging the ixchitl’s body around to block another cloud of descending darts; he had created a giant shield out of the ixchitl’s body.

The shield was unwieldy in the extreme but Edmund had not planned for simple defense. His free hand darted out and grasped the retracting cord attached to Bruce and let it raise him, and his shield, up to the ixchitl that was preparing to feast on the mer-leader. The ixchitl apparently divined his intent because it began to flap wildly, but because of the drag of the dead ray that Edmund grasped couldn’t pull at any speed. It apparently had no conscious control of the retracting harpoon cord. Edmund was inexorably drawn up to the belly of the beast. He gutted it with another of those powerfully driven thrusts then cut the cord loose, leaving Bruce free to drift to the bottom.

More of the rays were gathering around him, though, and all the mer that were left had darted for safety. He managed to kill another of the beasts, who could seemingly only fire their darts straight down, but the crowd around him was eventually going to get a dart past his defenses. It seemed only a matter of time before the beleaguered general would be killed when a shadow passed over the square and Nebka dropped out of the sky into the midst of the rays, Bast hitting the water beside her like an avenging angel.

The dragon turned its head like a snake and caught one of the rays on the wing. The wyvern’s broad, crocodilian head shook like a shark and ripped most of the wing off, leaving the mortally wounded ray to writhe in a death spiral to the reef below.

But the dragon was nothing compared to Bast. The elf moved with an unnatural grace and blinding speed, like some knife-wielding demon. She disdained the gutting technique of Edmund, instead whispering in from above and slicing along the back of the rays, cutting the muscles to their great wings, her knife slicing through their tough skin as if it were paper. She had taken out two of the rays before the rest of the dragons appeared, swimming over the reef edge like great birds of prey and descending upon the suddenly outgunned ixchitl.

The rays, at the appearance of the dragons, turned for deeper water and put on a burst of speed until the last one vanished over the reef edge, chased by the wyverns as Joanna coasted to a stop over the square.

“Commander Gramlich,” the general said, tossing aside his ersatz shield, “get the dragons back; those damned rays can overwhelm them if they get their act together. And the orcas are going to be around somewhere. Daneh!” he bellowed as he drifted down to the twitching body of the mer-leader.

Rachel darted out of her shelter and to the side of the mer-leader who lay on the sand by the coral head at the center of the square. The mer-leader was still alive, twitching in the grip of the neurotoxin but Rachel could think of nothing to do for him. Suddenly, her mother was beside her.

“It’s a paralyzing toxin,” Daneh said. “Probably voluntary muscles only, which means he can’t breathe. If we can get water over his gills he’ll survive. But I have no clue how to do that.”

“Get him to the surface,” Edmund said. “Mouth to mouth.”

“We can’t get the water clear,” Daneh said, desperately. “There’s not enough air in our lungs to blow him out.”

“He’s trying to say something,” Elayna said, dropping to the sand by her grandfather and grasping his hand. “Just clicks. But…” she leaned forward, holding up his head and cradling it to her. “Grandfather?”

“Cave,” Bruce said. “Cave…” and then his eyes rolled back in his head.

“The birthing cavern,” Edmund said, coldly, turning to look towards the land. “I’d wondered where the damned orcas were.”

After Daneh had told about the birthing cavern, Herzer had taken the trouble to walk the crest of the island until he found the light-source of the cave. It was near the summit of the island, above the spring that had made the ancient lighthouse possible in its day. Now he winged Chauncey to a hard landing and sprang off the wyvern, slapping it on the flank.

“Go follow the other dragons, Chaunce,” he yelled, pounding up the slope to the cracks in the rock.

When he got there he could hear the screams from below and his heart dropped, but he got down on his belly and peered into the fissure in the rock.

His eyes were blinded by the bright light on the surface but after a moment he could see the tableau below. A small orca was swimming back and forth in front of the main ledge, where most of the mer-women and their children were huddled, as far back as they could crawl. From time to time it turned and got up speed, finally lifting its body out on the ledge and writhing back and forth, trying to snap up one of the mer. Finally, it writhed back and forth and dropped down from the ledge, circling back through the water for another run.

The crack was narrow and the drop was at least fifteen meters. Not a problem if he was falling in water, assuming it was deep enough, but Herzer was well aware that he was not Bast; if he fell into the water the orca would be on him before he could react and Herzer would just be a part of the food chain. He turned and lowered himself into the fissure and then rammed his good fist into the rock, dangling over the drop below.

The orca came back for another run and got out of the water, just about reaching the tail of one of the mer-women. He snapped and writhed, but try as he might he couldn’t, quite, reach the twitching tail. Finally, he started to hump himself backwards and was just about in the water when he was hit by a tremendous blow from above.

Herzer was half stunned by the impact and knew that he was going to feel it for days afterwards. He had hit the orca just forward of the dorsal fin with both feet, but they had both immediately slid out from under him on the slick skin of the beast and he had impacted on his hip and side, flipping sideways on the right side of the orca, entering the water with a tremendous splash.

The impact, however, had stunned the orca as well and Herzer was the first to gain some semblance of consciousness. He kicked himself back from the depths to which he had sunk and, taking a leaf from Bast’s training, slid his prosthetic into the blowhole of the orca and grasped the flexible flesh on the side of it. Then he squeezed.

The sonar blast that the orca released was like nothing that Herzer had ever heard, the shriek of a dying child the size of a whale was the closest he could imagine. It thrashed its way to the surface and blasted out air, flailing its tail and spinning around the cavern until it impacted nose first on one of the unyielding rock walls.

“Quit this!” Herzer shouted. He put his knife by the eye of the beast and it quieted.

“Leb go ob my ho!” the orca said as distinctly as it could. Its surface method of communication was its blowhole, which Herzer still gripped, although less firmly.

“The hell I will,” Herzer said. “I’ve got a cutting edge on this thing. I can cut right through the muscle. You won’t be able to submerge for weeks until it heals. You’ll starve to death first.”

“Baberd,” the orca said. “Pleab?”

“No,” Herzer replied. He suddenly realized that the orca, by its dorsal fin, size and, hell, demeanor, was no more than a teen, probably a young one. “Where are the rest of the orcas?”

“Nob gonna te’,” the orca said. “Leb go.”

“Fisk you,” Herzer said, engaging his pinky muscles and bearing down with the internal gear.

There was another shriek from the orca and it sobbed in pain.

“Where are the rest of them?”

“A’ da fron,” the orca sobbed. “Wai’ing.”

“For you to bring them little mer-snacks?” Herzer said, nastily. “I don’t think so. Turn around and put your tail up on the ledge. And no tricks; I can press harder than I have. Not to mention putting this knife right into your brain-case.”

He maneuvered the orca’s tail onto the ledge and had one of the mer-women secure it with his leather belt to a projecting rock. Then he let go of the creature’s blowhole and swam around to where it could see him with eye and sonar. Herzer ducked below the water for the conversation.

“I know what it is to fall in with the wrong companions,” Herzer said. “Which is the only reason you’re still alive. I’m going to ask the mer-ladies not to kill you. On the other hand, did you catch any of the children?”

“No,” the orca said. “I didn’t want to do this, but Shanol…”

“I know,” Herzer said. “And I also know that having power over the defenseless can be a rush. I know that you enjoyed yourself, even while you hated feeling that way. Am I right?”

“Yes,” the orca whispered.

“I don’t have time for this, but you need to think about something while you’re tied up here. Which side do you really want to be on? Who are you, inside? A good guy or a bad guy? Think of this as a chance to correct a mistake. And use it.”

He popped up to the surface of the water and looked at the mer-women, still huddled on the ledge.

“Ladies, this young man is very sorry for causing you all this distress,” he said. “For that reason, and because he’s a source of information, I’d appreciate the hell out of it if you could see your way clear to not beating him to death with rocks.”

There were a few half hysterical giggles at this speech but one of the mer-women crawled forward in a furious slither.

“He nearly ate my Gram!” she shouted. “I want him dead!”

“Yes, well, as I said he’s sorry,” Herzer replied, heartily. “And we all have our character flaws. I, for example, get angry when a reasonable request isn’t granted. Am I making myself clear, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she said, gulping.

“Glad we’ve got that sorted out,” Herzer replied. “Now, I think I need to go see what’s waiting at the entrance.”

“You’re crazy,” the mer-woman said. “The rest of the orcas are going to be out there!”

“Well, better out there than in here,” Herzer pointed out. “And if this youngster doesn’t bring them out little mer-snacks they might try to wriggle their way in. I think I need to go make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Why?” the mer-woman asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“As I said,” Herzer replied, sadly. “We all have our character flaws.” Then he ducked under the water and headed for the blackness of the tunnel.

The tunnel was pitchy black, a solid darkness that seemed to creep into his soul. It also was so tight in places, he had no idea how the orca had wormed its way in. Possibly there were better ways through, ways that would be visible to a creature with sonar. But Herzer could only grope his way along, hoping against hope that there were no side turns that would take him off into some tunnel from which he might never find his way. Again and again he hit projections of rock, once solidly on his forehead, and he brushed against things that he really was sure he didn’t want to see. Once his hands settled into a mass of corruption that burned his skin so that he flailed back wildly, shaking his good hand as it tingled and burned.

Finally, when he was sure that he had lost his way and would be wandering around in this watery tomb forever, or until his air ran out, there was a faint gleam of blue light. His eyes, adjusted to the darkness, started to let him distinguish the walls around him and he sped up, headed for the light, headed for hope. Until the light was extinguished as an orca head popped into the opening and blasted him with sonar.

“Well, what do we have here?” Shanol said. “If it isn’t the little lieutenant. What happened to Tomas?”

“He saw the error of his straying ways,” Herzer said, suddenly tired. He could see the other orcas cruising back and forth; it looked as if most of the pod was out there. He could hold the entrance against them, he was sure, but his every bit of training resisted simply standing on the defensive.

“You’d better hope he’s still alive,” Shanol said.

“What do you care?” Herzer said. “You were the one that sent him into a tunnel that could have killed him.”

“I knew he could get through,” Shanol said. “There’s a lot I know. Like what happened with you and Daneh. Do you dream of her at night, Herzer?”

“Oh, man, you have been reading too much pop psychology,” Herzer laughed. “There’s a degree of anger there. But anger is such a useful emotion when you learn to properly channel it.” With that he darted forward and slammed his knife into the orca’s eye.

Shanol had opened his mouth to dart forward and catch the human but the narrow entrance of the tunnel prevented him from moving and Herzer’s sudden attack caught him off guard. He screamed in sonar, bubbles pouring out of his blowhole and backed up, his tail flailing wildly.

Herzer lost his grip on the dagger as he was slammed into the roof of the tunnel and he backed up into the entrance as the orca swam backwards, blood streaming from his eye, the hilt of the knife standing out like some bizarre ornament.

“Kill you!” the orca screamed, heading to the surface and getting a breath of air. But the sound he made was as much sob as scream.

“Come on and do it, then,” Herzer shouted back. “Come into the tunnel! I can stay under as long as I like. You have to breathe. Come into my parlor, little fly!”

“I’ll kill you,” the orca sobbed. “Kill you and eat you! Eat you alive, from the legs up! Nittaatsuq!” he continued, leaning the knife towards one of the other orcas.

Like the delphinoids the Changed orcas had stubby fingers and the indicated orca drew the knife out of the eye socket with a quick jerk and a scream from his leader. Then Nittaatsuq got what he thought was a brilliant idea and swam forward, thrusting his pectoral fin with the knife gripped clumsily in its fingers into the narrow crevice.

Herzer simply laughed and grasped the blade with his prosthetic, wrenching it out of the grip of the orca with an expert twist.

“Thanks for my knife back,” Herzer laughed. “I was sure I’d lost it for good.”

“BASTARD!” Shanol bellowed, charging at the entrance, then turned aside, trailing blood.

“Hey,” Herzer said, in a thoughtful tone. “Don’t sharks home in on the smell of blood?”

“I’m going to kill you,” the orca ground out.

“You keep saying that,” Herzer responded. “I don’t think you’re orca enough. I’ve had much better people than you try to kill me and so far they’ve all failed. By the way, the orca that was after the delphino found out that he really doesn’t like dragons. And as soon as they get done with the ixchitl, they’ll be back for me. I’d suggest you beat feet before they get here.”

“We will,” Shanol said after a moment’s pause. “But we’ll be back. You wait.”

“Breathlessly,” Herzer replied. “I’m so looking forward to it.”

When the orcas were gone he took a deep breath, noticing for the first time a slight constriction on his breathing caused by the mask. He started to panic, his breath coming faster and faster, feeling that he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. Finally, he got a grip on himself, thrusting the dagger into a convenient crack and holding onto the walls as he strove to conquer his breathing. Finally, when he stopped hyperventilating, he started to calm down, as the mask finally had enough time to pump the built-up carbon dioxide from the fight out of the area. Eventually he hung, limp, from his deathlike grip on the rock until Chauncey and a group of worried, spear-wielding mer-men appeared in the entrance and he could finally leave his lonely vigil and swim to the surface to gulp in lungfuls of good, clean, salt-tainted air.

“I warned you about the dragons!” Mosur said.

“I am in no mood for you,” Shanol replied, tightly. The salt water in his wound stung like fire.

“We need to get out of the area,” Shedol said. The orca second in command had returned covered in punctures and slices from Joanna’s attack. “We can’t stay down long enough to keep out of the vision range of those damned dragons.”

“We can just go back,” one of the pod pinged nervously. “There’s too many of them.”

“No,” Shanol replied.

“The ixchitl are calling for us to ambush them,” Shedol noted. “They have a plan.”

“BE DAMNED TO IXCHITL PLANS!” the big orca boomed. “No. I have a plan.” He turned to Mosur and ran a wave of sonar over him. “You’re of no use to us now.”

“Good,” Mosur said. “I’m quit of this.”

“And we have a long way to go,” the orca continued, running his sonar over the mer again. “And I’m hungry.”

With the small bone that they used to communicate underwater, it was almost impossible for the mer to scream.