The Scar

Interlude I

Unclear things glide and grapple rocks, pulling their way through the water.

They move in the night through sea opaque with darkness, through cultivated fields of kelp and seaweed toward the lights of cray villages that scatter the shallows. They slide silently into the kraals.

Penned seals glimpse them and taste the eddies of distorted water that spin off in their wakes, and in a panicked frenzy twist and hurl themselves against the woven walls and roofs of their cages. The intruders peer like curious goblins through the gouged window holes of huts and terrify the inhabitants, who rush out on their segmented legs wielding pitchforks and spears, fearfully jabbing.

The cray farmers are quickly overcome.

They are held, captured and held still, and questioned. Lulled by thaumaturgy, persuaded by violence, the cray mutter answers to hissed questions.

In haphazard shards of information, the sinuous hunters learn things that they need to know.

They hear about the shelled submersibles from Salkrikaltor that cruise the villages of the Basilisk Channel. Patrolling a thousand miles of water, watching the nebulous borders of the cray commonwealth’s influence. Watching for intruders.

The hunters bicker and brood and caucus.

We know where he came from.

But perhaps he does not return.

There is uncertainty. To his home, or east-out?

The trail forks, and there is only one thing to do. The hunters separate into two contingents. One heads southwest for the shallow water, for Iron Bay and Tarmuth and the drooling dilute salt of the Gross Tar estuary, to watch and listen, to wait for word, to spy and hide, and seek word.

With a flutter of displaced water they are gone.

The other group, with a more uncertain task, heads away and down.

They swim low, heading for the crushing deeps.