The Trident and the Pearl

Chapter Thirty-Two

I place my hand in the water, about to shift to the canker in the sea. Instantly, I’m smacked with a torrent of prayers. Prayers to me—the God of the Sea. I’m made breathless by them, bowled over and thrown about. If I were not in a boat, I fear I might be dashed on the rocks by the swell of them.

In my time as a god, I have never been swept away by the power of my people’s prayers. They come to me in trickles. One here, one there. But these… these rush over me with the power of a waterfall.

“Help me!” one penitent begs.

“Save your people!” another cries.

“They come in ships. They’re everywhere. They’ve taken the docks.” The voices are overlapping, one drowning out another in their wails and sobs and cries.

There are hundreds of prayers. Each more desperate than the last, and I am shaking, shuddering, lost in them.

This is what had Markanos so rattled. Like him, I was only gone for a couple of nights, and I think I would have heard them if they were praying to me yesterday.

This conflict is fresh. The god wars have started, and they have come to my shores.

I taste acid in my mouth because I do not doubt the truth or sincerity of these prayers.

I stand up almost unconsciously. I need to go to them.

And yet, I also must discover if my work has freed Okeanos, and I must decide whether to use the five great tasks to restore his life, or restore the Lighthouse.

Because if his help is available to me, it could make all the difference to them.

My people need that Lighthouse now more than ever.

And they need Okeanos, who would know exactly what to do.

I put my hand into the sea, and as the pain of so many prayers descends on me, I twist my hand in the wash of the surf and travel.

When I reach the canker in the sea, all is not right.

I leap from the craft onto the black rocks. Everything looks smaller in the light of day. The island feels claustrophobic, though it is exactly the same—the giant anchor jutting out of the sharp rocks, the chains and loops that hang from it, and the rivets set through the crossbar.

The same, and yet different.

There are no birds. The seaweed has been swept aside. Any remnants of the fire Oke shared with Markanos are washed away. The blood he leaked out over the ground has not even left a stain.

And he is not here.

I stand still for a moment, desolate. Where is my husband? I’m assaulted by a series of imaginings of him drawn under the water and torn apart by sea creatures, or snatched up by an enemy and thrust into a pearl, or sinking in the waves as he tries to swim for safety and drowning under the surf.

I can’t quite catch my breath.

I’ve lost him.

My fingers crawl up and clutch at my own throat, and for a moment I’m lost to shattered thoughts and rough breathing. But no, I am panicking for no reason. There are ways I can verify this.

I trail a hand into the sea, and then wade right into it until it is over my head, close my eyes, and reach out with the part of me that is the sea to sense him.

I reach through the screams and cries, through the quiet pleas and distraught tears.

They shred at my mind, scrape across my nerves.

I know I need to help them, but I don’t know how to answer so many at once.

No wonder Markanos was so desperate when I saw him this morning, if he was answering prayers just like this for his own people.

I need Oke to show me what to do. This sudden cataclysmic threat is too big for me alone.

I see my people in tiny glimpses—mothers clinging to little children; tiny ones sobbing, their hands clutching desperately for parents who cannot come. Whoever has attacked our shores has come quickly and brutally.

I didn’t expect this yet. I thought there was time.

I try to focus. Where are these attacks? Where are these prayers coming from?

It’s the shores of the mainland, not my islands.

I almost sigh, but then my heart clenches hard, for I am no longer Coralys of the Crocus Isles, I am Coralys, God of the Sea, and that makes all those who pray to me mine.

My people on the mainland have been attacked by the armies of these rebel gods who wish to start a war and overthrow their ruler.

I see little bursts of what is happening, a fleet flooding into a harbor, armies roaring as they take to the smaller craft and cross the swell of ocean to reach the shore.

My men swept away by waves or floating on the water trailing red for the sharks.

My women so cut to pieces that they cannot be recognized.

I recoil from it, but I cannot stop the onslaught.

The god war has started just as Markanos said it had and my people need me.

They need Okeanos.

I claw through their prayers, looking, searching, sobbing in my frantic scramble.

I do not feel my husband in the sea. It is as if he has ceased to be entirely.

“Oke!” I scream beneath the waves, but he’s not there.

“Okeanos!” I call mentally with all my heart as if my prayer—the prayer of a living god—might somehow trump the prayers of the desperate mortals calling out to him and to me.

Something is terribly wrong. Not just with my people, but with the missing dead god who ought to be here waiting for me.

I stumble back up to shore feeling cored and gutted. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to help first.

“Oke!” I call, but the only ones who answer are the gulls and they are far off. I hope that is not because they float somewhere on a corpse. I hope it is only because without him here there is nothing to draw them.

It’s no matter. I have Vesuvius’s pearl here and he will tell me—for a price. I lift my trident as I remember that Markanos didn’t even have to pay a price. Perhaps I, too, can use his method to pry information from the former god.

I draw the pearl from my belt and it’s not hard to drop a tear on it. I’m frantic enough that the tears are coming whether I want them to or not.

But the tear does nothing. Or at least—it doesn’t draw Vesuvius. There’s a moment where I think it draws someone out. There’s a glimpse of tentacles and an impression of the struggling shape of a man, but then he’s gone again. Is it possible that Markanos harmed Vesuvius more than I realized?

I feel cold all over. There will be no help from him, then.

Fine. Markanos will help me. He is, after all, as culpable as I am for whatever befell Oke.

I don’t know how to get to Markanos’s home.

I should have asked while I had the opportunity.

I grip the trident hard in one hand and stand in the water, twisting my hand and thinking of Markanos, but again, nothing happens.

I try enough times that I feel like a fool.

I want to abandon this search for my husband and go and help my people. I want to travel from place to place and beat back their enemies, but I know that a frantic leader loses battles and that if I simply throw myself into the fray, I will be destroyed and my people with me.

For there is only one conclusion I can draw—Okeanos has been taken by his enemies. The magic was broken, he was freed, but dead and tortured, he was easy to snatch up and steal away.

And if they have him, then they have half the sea.

And that alone changes the decision here. Where I might have had to balance his safety with the safety of our people, it is clear that both are tied together. Whoever has him has access to them, and with that access, the ability to conquer them outright.

I must focus all my resources on getting Okeanos back.

I hurry home to gather what resources I can. I must make a plan. For my people. For my husband. I tie up the boat, chewing my lip, deep in thought, trying to formulate a plan.

My eyes drift to where Aurelius stood just months ago taunting us, and there, on the upright he’d leaned against, my husband’s fishing spear is jammed into the wood affixing a fluttering piece of vellum to the upright.

That wasn’t here when I left. I would have seen it.

Markanos would have seen it. Trembling, I clamber out of the boat and over to it.

The spear—stained yet by the lifeblood of my husband—quivers in the wood.

My hand hovers near the shaft, but then I draw it away. I have no right to take it up again.

I have to bring my breathing under control to turn my attention to the vellum. Someone has left me a note written in a delicate, florid script. My eyes skip down to the closing.

Aurelius.

I can hardly read, my heart is beating so quickly. My eyes keep trying to dart forward and I have to draw them back to read the note word by word. He has not minced words.

This offer comes but once and if ignored unleashes upon you the hatred of the heavens.

It’s a dramatic opening. I have what you desire.

Come to me in the way I detailed not long ago upon this very pier.

I will await you until dark. Fail and I will consider your rejection of my hospitality a declaration of war and shall take from the flesh of your people an appropriate recompense.

He’s signed it with a dozen titles and then ended it with his name. Aurelius, God of the Air.

I stare at the note for a long moment, but there’s no ambiguity in what he’s said and no doubt in my mind that he can make my people suffer even more than they do already if I do not meet with him as he has laid out.

And yet, I hate to go where he has the upper hand and I have only my own desperation and my wits to carry me.

Despite that, I dare not hesitate.

I kneel on the dock and rip the pouch from my belt with trembling hands.

The sea has gone dark, clouds rolling in. I hear a sound like squelching, but I pay it no mind. A sea creature, perhaps, working its way up the beach. I need to stop trying to distract myself from what I’m about to do and just get it over with.

I spill the contents of my belt pouch across the dock and fumble past the flint and the black pearl to where the sharp belt knife lies.

I pick it up with trembling hands and look from it to the sea and back again.

I wonder if it matters which finger I pick.

I place the edge of my knife against the joint of my smallest finger on my left hand. I’m sweating, but my mouth is dry.

Behind me, I hear the same slippery sound. This time, nerves frayed, I twist to look.

A familiar figure is hunched over the dock, caught in the act of reaching for the single black pearl lying on the weatherworn boards. It’s a man with six tentacles and two stumps where the others ought to be.

We both freeze.

“Going somewhere?” he asks me, eyes wary.

He must know that I know he wasn’t in the pearl—that when I tried to draw him out, he didn’t appear.

He must see that I realize what this means—that when I thought he’d retreated into it, he’d somehow slipped away instead into the shadows of the island and hid there, likely waiting for a moment just like this where he could catch me unawares.

“Stealing something?” I reply.

“It’s not stealing if it belongs to you.” His words are bold, but he is trembling.

We’re both silent a long moment. What do I care if he takes the pearl? Without him inside it, it is useless to me.

“Take it, then,” I tell him.

For what use is his ghost to me? He’s done nothing but betray me and lie to me and lead me into traps.

He’s welcome to his pearl and welcome to leave my life forever.

He snatches it up and then retreats, and I wait until he has slipped back into the shadows before I turn back to my task, press my left hand firmly to the dock, and with my right hand carve the last finger away and throw it into the sea.

Pain makes me blink and sputter as I fight to control the shaking of my hands.

I fumble and manage to wad cloth around the wound as the wind around me whips up, spinning like it means to form a hurricane with me at the center.

Back on shore the trees bow down and the ocean at my dock depresses until it nearly touches the land.

My little boat bucks and thrashes on the end of its tether and then I’m swept up into the fury of the wind, spun around, and spit out again.

It’s just like when I move from place to place using the bowl of my hand, but this time I have no control over the movement and no sense of where I’m going.

I crash onto the stone steps of a temple.

It’s a temple I know very well—the temple of Okeanos on the island of Talasa, and I know who I will find inside it without having to be told—Aurelius, God of the Air, who by his power, and by the sacrifice of my own flesh to his will, has brought me here.