Chapter 52
52
N YX DROWNED IN darkness.
After being yanked out of the skiff, she had struggled to hold her breath, fighting the clinging arms that held her in their constricting embrace. She lost both battles. The tentacles writhed and tightened, as if anticipating her every move. Suckers clung and shifted, cupping her everywhere.
All she managed was a brief glimpse over her shoulder. The creature—whether one of the Dreamers or its defenders—hovered at her back. A ring of fist-sized black eyes circled a bulbous, nearly billowing mass. It looked more like a spill of oil in the water. Crowning it, as if trying to hold that oil in place, was a spiked carapace or shell.
Those black eyes stared back at her, unblinking. A tracery of lights streaked through its dark mass. They flickered, blinked, and streamed in some mysterious endless pattern as she was pulled deeper.
She noted the same lights coursing through the water, marking the unseen passage of more of the beasts. A thrashing in the distance, illuminated briefly by another’s shine, revealed she wasn’t the only one fighting in these waters.
Daal…
In that moment, misery weakened her. Too weak and despondent, she could no longer hold the sea at bay. The last of her breath burst from her lips. Salty water flooded into her mouth, down her throat, into her lungs. She gasped, her chest heaving, instinctively still searching for air. Her vision constricted toward a point. Her body grew heavier and lighter at the same time.
Next came the pain.
She writhed in that embrace, still unable to move. Where suckers strangled her neck and latched on to her wrist, something pierced her flesh. The same stabbed her inner thighs, gouging through clothes and skin. From those wounds, something pushed into her. She felt them. Tendrils far smaller than the tentacles. They wormed through her veins, rooting deep and everywhere, until she was as much part of the beast riding her as she was her own self.
As this happened, a strange sense of tranquility swelled, slowly dampening the pain in her limbs and throat until she felt only numbness. Even her chest stopped fighting the seas, the water weighing heavily in her lungs. She expected death to come, but it was held at bay. Her vision cleared—though there was little to see but the zip and spin of those strange blinking lights. Her head also lightened as a slow realization grew.
I’m not drowning.
Whatever had writhed through her body was sharing its air. She had been taught that sea creatures could draw life from the waters around them—through gills or thin skin. The beast that held her must be doing the same, only passing some of that sustaining life into her.
Amazement and terror warred within her.
She remembered seeing the scars on Daal’s neck and wrists.
This is what caused them.
She stopped her fighting as she was drawn ever deeper. The pressure pained her ears, coursing down the back of her throat. As if sensing this, suckers shifted to the sides of her head and cupped over her ears. They sealed tight and pinched back, withdrawing the pressure from her ears. The pain faded quickly.
As she fell downward, she felt as if she were floating in the dark depths of the void between stars. Blackness surrounded her. Lights burst and dashed all about, marking the passage of these strange creatures.
Are these the Oshkapeers ?
She remembered Daal declaring as much when he was yanked from the skiff.
After an interminable time, light bloomed under her, vague and illusory at first, then clearer, illuminating a seabed. The glow etched a convoluted labyrinth across the sandy bottom. Past it, the waters boiled fiercely. It steamed from tall rocky cylinders, casting up black smoke, as if the Urth were burning below in an unending furnace.
As she was towed to the bottom, her toes were left hovering above the sand. The source of the glow became clear. It rose from a maze of tall reefs, climbing in rocky ramparts four times her height. The ridges were phosphorescent and luminous, like the icy roof of the Crèche, only shining in hues innumerable and unnameable.
Strewn across it all, large skeletal growths sprouted everywhere, forming fantastical horns and branching fans. Softer creatures—blurring the line between plant and animal—waved bulbous limbs or shivered with delicate fronds. No matter where she turned, life stirred, swam, and flickered.
But most of what thrummed throughout the reefs were the glowing Oshkapeers, crowned by their whorled and spiked carapaces. There were hundreds scouring the reefs, dashing about or hovering in place, their tentacles stirring in the currents. They varied in size—from ones no bigger than a melon to giants that would dwarf a bullock.
Certainty grew in her.
These must be the Dreamers.
She barely had time to absorb all of this when another tentacle-shrouded figure dropped next to her. Daal lay cradled and trapped in another Oshkapeer ’s embrace. Like her, he no longer fought, accepting his fate. But his expression was horrified.
She looked where he was staring, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. A dark leafy hump lay in the white sand. One of the Oshkapeers crawled over it, using its tentacles to gently pull aside those leaves. A pale arm fell loose, its length inscribed with tiny whorls of ink.
Nyx spasmed with recognition and shock.
One of the dead from Iskar.
The creature shifted over to the arm and lowered a beaklike mouth and began slashing through the tissue, stripping flesh from bone. The Oshkapeer sucked in great curls of meat, while inhaling the smoke of dark blood.
Nyx wanted to cover her mouth in horror, but her arms were trapped. Only now did she spot the other mounds scattered all around. More of the Oshkapeers feasted on the dead, ripping and tearing. As her eyes adjusted to this appalling reality, she recognized that the rocks and lumps in the sand were bones. Even the reefs, while mostly coral and rock, still showed layers of ancient skulls, crushed rib cages, and the knobbed ends of long femurs.
All around, the gorging continued, a macabre counterpoint to the tribute feast in Kefta. With that memory, she struggled to balance the gentle care of the loved ones above with the savagery below.
Nyx had to turn away.
As she did, a late arrival crashed into the reef. Bronze flashed and reflected the glow as Shiya tumbled down the side of a steep ridge, gouging a path of destruction in her wake. Nyx pictured the bronze woman diving from the skiff, coming to their rescue.
Shiya rolled off the reef’s bottom and skidded through sand and bones.
Life fled in all directions with flips of tails and squirts of ink. Even the Oshkapeers leaped off their dinners, swirling away from the intruder. The one holding Nyx drew her to the side, toward Daal, as if trying to protect her.
But that defensive posturing lasted only a heartbeat or two. Responding to some unknown signal, the beasts swarmed back in, ready to defend their reef from this strange trespasser. They struck Shiya from all sides, tangling around her limbs, pulling her off her feet, denying her any traction in the battle. Still, Shiya was incredibly strong. She freed an arm and began ripping other tentacles loose—until a bullock-sized Oshkapeer shot over the edge of the reef and struck her broadside. Its arms were twice as thick as Shiya’s thighs. They wrapped her completely, leaving only her head exposed.
With its prey captured, the giant pulsed its way back over the ridge.
Nyx realized the direction it was headed.
The boiling seas…
According to Shiya’s tale of her trek across the seabed to reach Iskar, even her strong form would succumb to that molten heat.
Panicked, Nyx elbowed an arm free. As she thrust her limb out, she caught sight of the tendrils running from her wrist over to the sucker that had been fixed there. Curls of blood wafted from the penetrating wound. She ignored it and reached to Daal, grabbing his bare shoulder.
On contact, her fingertips ignited with fire. Daal arched back within his embrace of his Oshkapeer. His body glowed. The tentacles briefly loosened their grip, as if sensing the flare of energy inside him. Daal hung there, threads running into his neck, wrists, and thighs—then the tentacles closed back tight.
Daal’s flames filled her, drawn by her fear for Shiya. Though she had no air to sing, she let her body burn in the water, burnishing a glow from her skin. She willed a single word, staring at Shiya being dragged away.
It burst from her in clear command.
No.
The strength of it momentarily unnerved her. Her control tremored. Her glow faded. But she drew more from Daal, trusting he could handle it. She steadied both her will and her power.
Still, she had been heard.
The giant Oshkapeer who clutched Shiya had come to a stop, hovering at the reef’s ridgeline. It turned in a slow circle, staring back at her with its ring of black eyes.
She didn’t know what to do or what to expect.
She simply tightened her grip on Daal, readying herself. But it did no good.
Nothing could prepare her for what came next.
I F N YX HAD the capacity to hold her breath, she would have, but her lungs were full of water. A long impasse stretched. The giant Oshkapeer still held Shiya trapped atop the reef, but it looked ready to jet away toward those boiling seas at any moment.
Movement, closer at hand, drew her eye.
The ridgeline before her shivered and glowed brighter. From every crevice and pock in the rock, around every shard of bone, small tendrils boiled forth. They wafted long and high, so thick in number that they obscured the reef. They looked like the threads that burrowed into her veins, but these shone with all the colors of the reef.
The storm of glowing tendrils crossed over and fell atop Nyx and Daal, as if trying to smother the fire they shared. She cringed, expecting the threads to dig into her skin, but they only lightly landed, dabbing everywhere, settling like snowflakes across her body. A few drifted up her nostrils, so thin and gentle that she barely felt them.
What she did feel was an overwhelming sense of peace. Her head lolled back. She sensed an inquiry forming like mist inside her head. Her eyes, unbidden, rolled to stare at Shiya. Curiosity piqued through her, but it was not born of her own inquisitiveness. Something wanted to know more about Shiya. A dark undercurrent of dread and fear underlay that interest.
Nyx sought a way to share what she knew. Though her eyelids remained open, she let her mind drift through her experiences with the bronze woman. All of them. From when they first met in the woodland town of Havensfayre—when Shiya had helped Nyx ward off a pair of steel-helmed scythers—to Shiya’s defense of Iskar, rising like a bright sun from the sea. But memory was a fickle master. Nyx also flashed to Shiya snapping the assailant’s neck on Kefta.
Still, Nyx felt sharing this was right, both the good and the bad.
Curiosity dissolved inside her. She felt a gentle probing, a sifting through all of her memories. She pictured the Oshkapeer peeling the leaves of kelp around the dead body to expose the richness within. This felt like that. She wanted to fight such a violation, but the gentleness and tenderness stemmed her apprehension. She let it be done, exposing herself fully.
Her eyes fell upon Daal. He met her gaze.
Is the same happening to him?
With that passing thought, gazing upon each other, enmeshed together in that glowing web of tendrils, she suddenly found herself staring out his eyes. She saw herself in the embrace of the Oshkapeer.
As that happened, Daal’s memories flooded through her. She had experienced a fleeting sense of this before, but now it was a torrent, filling every space and sense. She was Daal, experiencing flashes of his life.
—learning how to repair a net, sitting on the knee of his father, the salt bright on a breeze off the sea.
—shivering in his mother’s embrace as a lone raash’ke screamed over the village.
—feeling the tiny fingers of Henna wrapping around his thumb, her giggling breath smelling of milk, and the ache of love in his heart for his sister.
—fumbling in the dark with a woman’s bare breasts, then a moment later, a streak of humiliation, a shame buried deep.
—seeing Nyx on the beach for the first time, watching her come toward him, her hands up to reassure him. Awe and fear tremble through him.
The images began to quicken, flowing ever faster, backward and forward through his life. Eventually it trimmed down to just snippets of emotion or sensation. Still, it all blurred into one overwhelming sense: of Daal’s warmheartedness and honorable spirit.
Finally, it all faded away. She was allowed to settle back into her own skin. She couldn’t tell if a day had passed or a heartbeat. She let her fingers fall from Daal’s shoulder, but her gaze never left him, seeing him in a whole new light.
Yet not truly.
Down deep, she had already known who he was.
As Daal stared at her, his eyes looked as huge as hers felt. Had he also experienced the same shuffling and sharing of memories?
She finally had to look away, feeling naked, but also not regretting any of it. She focused instead on why she had traveled down here and risked so much. She closed her eyelids and pictured Daal on Iskar’s plaza. She heard his words again, about how the Dreamers knew more about the history of the Crèche, and more importantly about the raash’ke. She also relived Daal’s shame, remembering his description of his first encounter with the Dreamers.
They touch me. Then throw me away. Not worthy.
Maybe it was his acute pain that pierced through to the Oshkapeers the strongest. To address it, to explain it, images flowed into her from many eyes.
She briefly became a multitude.
—she thrashes her mighty body amidst bloody waves, her body pierced by scores of spears.
—she swims, flicking fin and tail, driven by an unslakable bloodlust toward a figure struggling in the dark, dragged deeper by an orkso.
—she continues following the hunt, hopping from one body to another.
Nyx knew what this was.
A recounting of Daal’s chase from six months ago.
But similar to sensing the entirety of the young man next to her, she divined a meaning behind the blur of energy and purpose. She felt the huge kefta being lured into the deepwater seas near the Dreamers, driven to strike a tail across a certain skiff. She saw how the sharks were equally drawn, like pieces on a board of Knights n’ Knaves.
A dawning realization grew. It wasn’t an accident that Daal had ended up with the Dreamers. They had herded him here.
A question coalesced inside her.
Why?
Though unspoken, it was answered.
An image filled her head from Daal’s past, from his first encounter with the Dreamers. He again hung in the embrace of an Oshkapeer , shrouded in tendrils.
While still imbued with those foreign senses, Nyx watched that glow inside him be changed. Tendrils cast weaves of silvery energy into him, molding his fire, enriching it brighter, tamping it into his bones and blood. It turned him into a great storehouse, far stronger than before.
She struggled to accept what she was being shown, both awed and horrified.
They had drawn Daal down here to fortify his gift, forging him like hot steel, hardening him into a sword.
She flashed to a moment ago, when she had gripped Daal’s shoulder, drawing his fire into her. Certainty firmed in her. She suddenly understood why the Dreamers had changed him into a great font of power.
To ready him—for me.