Pillars of the Deep Page 6

  Camouflage proved to be the right term as the shape separated fully from its surroundings, the chameleon effect falling away as distance yawned between the host and its backdrop.

  All thoughts of hightailing it out of Atlantis were concentrated into stumbling a few paces backward instead, because while it wasn’t some horrifying ocean demon that manifested, it was the astonishing vision of a mermaid incarnate.

  Flaxen hair swirling like windblown cobwebs, glistening near-naked torso plunging into a magnificent copper tail, a wicked trident wielded in one scale-flecked hand, the mermaid glared out at me from under long, webbed eyelashes. She pointed the three-pronged tip of her trident straight at me, and with a snarling curl of her shimmery rose-gold lips, uttered,

  “Issssa rosla dom agvaah koor inesssss.”

  Right.

  I was helpless to respond–or at least hesitant to test whether or not I’d indeed sound like a blathering, blubbering banshee–and so I cringed another inch away from the weapon directed at me. Was that really necessary?

  A dozen other mermaids materialized from various points of camouflage, and just like that I was surrounded. The only thing that kept me from completely panicking was the thought Well, surely it wasn’t my destiny to come all the way down here just to get skewered for discovering the secrets of Atlantis, so…no worries. But they really didn’t look friendly, and what if it had nothing to do with destiny and everything to do with siren-like creatures using their usual wiles to lure people down to their death in the depths under false pretenses?

  Had the ‘Call’ been nothing but me falling prey to some far-reaching siren’s song the whole time?

  Curses ricocheted through my head, a dozen profanities ringing in my ears.

  What would those sound like underwater?

  The copper mermaid pointed her trident at someone else, and for an instant I was relieved until she hissed a command at him as well, and that command saw him slurp to my side quick as a viper and seize my arms behind my back. My limbs were so numb from all I’d put them through that I hardly felt it, but as I was restricted to a stock-still prisoner, my muscles seized up with cramps.

  No longer able to refrain from all forms of expression, I cried out in pain. It gushed out of me in a garbled stream of bubbles, but sounded a little more like a regular voice by the tail end of the emittance.

  The aggressive mer-guard didn’t release me just because I showed signs of pain, of course, and so the cramps got worse, and suddenly I was jerking and writhing and doubling over in my apprehender’s grasp, and the onlookers all watched quizzically from the sidelines at my overly dramatic response to being taken into custody.

  Copper Mermaid–or perhaps ‘Mer-Cop’ would have been more appropriate–hissed another order at the one holding my arms, and with a swish of strong-muscled fin, I was whisked down the cobbled avenue. Hair swirled in my face, blocking my view, and then cleared my face and obscured my apprehender’s. There was a moment in which he balked, hindered by the assault of wild locks, and a diabolical wave of triumph went off inside me–but then he wrestled me into submission, thrust me down where my hair couldn’t inhibit his senses, and on toward my unknown fate we went.

  He towed me down the main street toward the rise of a huge palace-like monstrosity, something I might call a ‘surface-scraper’ since we weren’t within range of any sky. But it was also ornately adorned with castle-like turrets and Taj Mahal domes, and as we got closer I was assaulted by a million intricate details that lent themselves to modern Moroccan architecture and ancient Aztec ruins. Blue tile and complex mosaics and lacy filigree sandstone; beautiful mandala flourishes, totem pole pillars, tribal-sun carvings and flights of ultra-steep stone stairs etched with hieroglyphs.

  It was stunning. Daunting. Incredible.

  The prison to which, no less so.

  I was hauled through a great archway into the palace, ushered down a pillar-lined side hall, dragged down a dizzying spiral staircase, and thrust into a floating birdcage cell that dangled like a chandelier from the dazzling dungeon ceiling.

  Dizzy from the transfer, I untangled my limbs and rotated to face my jailer. If I was going to make sense of anything or otherwise make my case as a non-prisoner, I was going to have to speak.

  “Please,” I tried, but it came out rather like ‘BLARRTHH’.

  Not so good as a first impression.

  I tried again, taking great pains to enunciate. “Please.” This time, it was more like ‘pween’. Better. My captor paused on his way out of the dungeon, at least, glancing over his shoulder as I made an effort to communicate. I clutched the bars, placing my face between the corroded frame. A third time, I perfected my plea, and while still a little like bad auto-tune, it actually came through coherently–at least to my own ears. But would he understand? “Please, this isn’t necessary.”

  Even as I was pleading my case, I was distracted by looking him up and down, marveling at the hybrid of muscle and grace that was his body. Sweet simmering seas, I’m looking at a merman.

  Either he didn’t understand, or he ran out of patience during my brief distraction, because no sooner had he granted me a chance to speak than he cut it short, turning to go.

  With a flick of his tail he vanished into the antechamber before I could snap back to attention.

  “No, wait!” I called, pressing myself closer to the bars.

  But he was gone.

  I was left alone in a cage on the bottom of the ocean, muscles seizing until I curled whimpering into the fetal position, unable to decide which of two inconveniences was the icing on the cake: realizing that I was in my underwear on top of everything else, or the fact that thanks to the all-encompassing saltwater, I couldn’t even shed a tear worth squat.

  Chapter 11

  At long last I was able to massage and otherwise relax the cramps out of my limbs, and I floated like a dormant jellyfish in my cage, exhausted. Swimming across an entire ocean will take it out of you.

  I was drifting off into a fatigued sleep when the watery slur of someone coming down the spiral staircase roused me again. I summoned the strength to lift my head, sending my gaze toward the arch where they would appear. My jailer returned, the tarnished ring of keys clutched in his fist.

  That was a good sign. Wasn’t it?

  Warily, I watched him approach my cell. Could someone just tell me what was going on? But an explanation would probably sound a lot like what Mer-Cop had already uttered, and I’d be helpless to translate it.

  But it seemed luck was on my side, at least marginally, because my captor did open his snakeskin lips and sputter a few words, and in addition to understanding the likes of ‘legs’ earlier, I was able to make out audience and throne room. More cryptic than helpful, really, but my ears perked up at the familiar sounds.

  I shied away as he pulled the door ajar and reached in to grab me, but I was far more sluggish in the water than he, and his prowess overtook me in laughable succession. Back up the stories-high, tightly coiled staircase we wound, like specimens whirling down a reverse-drain, and just like that I was being hauled through the Atlantean palace once more, dancing with awe and trepidation all the way. The scope of the place was just so breathtaking, the details so tedious and intensive.

  A pair of towering double-doors opened to admit us–automatic, again–and the throne room yawned into cavernous fruition around us. A humongous chandelier that was really just a cluster of tiny cages housing glowing Angler Fish dangled from the dizzying height of the dome above, casting prisms of light throughout the massive chamber. Down a lane of mandala-patterned tile that served as a runner, a Mayan-style throne sat on the dais, and on the throne–or hovering over it, sort of, while still somehow molded to its shape–was another glorious merman.

  He was a stunning specimen of silver and turquoise, the end of his tail draping off the throne and across the dais in a long, tattered train of iridescence that brought to mind the spectacular fins of the Beta-fish. A chiseled V of muscle c
arved upward from the low-cut scales around his hips, framing an impressive rack of abs that in turn swelled into a distractingly muscular chest. Shimmery patches of scales dusted the musculature of his torso and arms, appearing in lustrous accents that made his more human half a molten mix of golden tan and silver glitter. Just as flashy but somewhat disturbing were the silver hashes and slashes that looked suspiciously like scars scored across various sections of his body, marring his perfection with a morbid aspect of glamour, no less beautiful. His hair was buzzed, making it difficult to tell if it might have been light or dark, though his eyebrows suggested a darker hue. A circlet of mother-of-pearl shells and shark teeth crowned his skull, rimming low on his forehead.

  As appealing as I found his physique, he was lean compared to the burly wingman who levitated to the right of the throne, thick arms crossed over a drum-like pale chest, his tail a shorter stub of navy-blue. Unlike the figure on the throne, he sported a flourishing shock of aqua hair, which streamed out in the water around his head.

  Whisked down the mandala runner, I was deposited at the foot of the dais before the kingly figure. Recovering from a bubbly sprawl, I drew myself up with a small shred of dignity and treaded water there, wondering if I’d be able to understand anything they might exchange in regard to my being.

  The mer-king looked me up and down with a piercing pair of silver eyes, his turquoise-webbed lashes flicking in segmented consideration down my form. Iridescent like the rest of him, the webbing glimmered back and forth between impressions of pewter and peacock feathers, depending on the angle. Blue pigment, like smoky eyeshadow, darkened his lids.

  Goosebumps rose all across my body under his gaze, and for the first time I realized how cold it was in the deep of the ocean. I longed for my clothes back, not that they would make a difference in staving off the all-encompassing chill.

  Directing his gaze to my escort, the mer-king spoke. His voice was a mix of long whispering sss’s and deep-chested reverberations. After the initial shock that came every time I heard their strange inflections, I actually followed along with about half of what he said. Similar to hearing someone speak in a language that you’ve been taught a few words in, but don’t speak–the sentence sounded like gibberish, but my brain picked up on certain words as if they rang with some level of familiarity, and then the meaning of those words filtered through as an afterthought.

  My escort responded to the king, and then the blue-maned wingman interjected something as well, and I honed in on following along as best as I could keep up. As the conversation went on, I found myself dissecting the words less and less and hearing them more as if in my own language. In a very thick accent, still, but words that I myself might speak, words that my brain thought in.

  From what I could decipher, they were talking about where they’d found me, something to do with the gates opening for me, and–again–my legs. I stayed quiet throughout the exchange, until their mer-accents had smoothed into something I could translate at least half-decently, and the conversation had gone on long enough that I felt ignored in their midst.

  I cleared my throat. Everyone looked at me.

  Well, now that I had their attention, what did one say to the mer-king of Atlantis? “If you want to know where I came from, you could just ask,” I blurted. Though a little warbled, I was pleased with how it came out. It was as if I’d only needed to acclimate to the alien accent and speak without using my lungs, and suddenly communication was open to me. Clumsy, perhaps, but viable.

  The mer-king quirked a brow so that it arched up to touch his circlet, a wry response to my sass. “She speaks,” he observed, as best I could tell.

  “I demand to know why I’ve been seized like a criminal and locked up in a cell.” Perhaps a little too eagerly for my recent language-aptitude skills to keep up with, I stuck it to him. I resisted cringing at the way the clarity of my speech tripped over itself past the first few words and grew increasingly worse toward the end, hoping I didn’t just sound like some angry harpy screaming bla bla bla BLAH-BLAH-BLAH in their faces. While a comical visual, I was not in the mood to be the laughingstock of the Atlantean court.

  Evidently understanding, the mer-king humored my demand. “While clearly unhindered by our waters, you come to us in a most unnatural state to be counted among friends.”

  Unnatural state… “My legs,” I guessed knowingly, since that was what they kept going on about.

  “Indeed. But, since you seem able to speak for yourself… Where do you come from, split-tailed fish?”

  Great. Not even a day in Atlantis, and I’d already garnished myself a pariah nickname. The Split-Tailed Fish.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but wondered how best to put it in terms they would understand. Were they aware of life beyond the surface? Probably best to generalize until I felt out how cultured the mer-kingdom was. “I come from beyond the Surface.”

  It seemed to confirm their suspicions. The mer-king’s bedazzled eyes narrowed. “From the land of humans.”

  “I…yes, from the land of humans. But I…that is, I live there. But was found as a child in the water.” I didn’t know how much to reveal, how much the mystery of my birth would actually help me. After all, what if I’d been born in Atlantis and cast out because I’d come into the world with the deformity of legs? I just didn’t know. But it seemed a valuable tactic to forge some possible connection to an oceanic heritage, lest they lump me in with the humans that they didn’t count ‘among friends’ and be done with me before either of us got anywhere. It was my best bet, in any case.

  “Codexious,” the blue-haired wingman interjected thoughtfully, drawing the king’s attention. Was that his name? Codexious? Slithering closer to the throne, the wingman murmured quietly in the mer-king’s ear. All I caught were the ss’s and random sputters. Those shimmering royal eyes grew more considering as Codexious absorbed whatever his advisor figure had to say. By the time Blue-Hair straightened from his conspiratorial stupor, the king was looking at me more like a curious enigma than a suspicious threat. He perched a scaled elbow on the arm of the throne and rested his chin in a lean, strong hand, tapping his pinky against the corner of his drag-queen eye.

  “Found in the water, you say.”

  Well, on the beach, but… Close enough. Apparently it had looked like I could have washed up in the waves. “Yes.”

  “And you mean to entail you know not of your official origin.”

  Might as well reinforce the impression that I was a lost puppy, rather than any dangerous crusader. “I know nothing but that I’ve spent my life trying to reconcile gills with legs.”

  He considered the slits on either side of my ribcage then, and I tried not to squirm from the feeling of his gaze on my naked torso. For so long I’d taken pains to hide my midriff, and suddenly I was disrobed for the scrutiny of all who cared to look. Who would have ever thought I’d end up a specimen of eye candy for merman royalty?

  “And how is it you came upon our secret fold of the ocean?” the mer-king wanted to know.

  “I have been haunted by tremors from the deep for as long as I can remember. I simply answered the call of the sea.”

  “The call of the sea,” he noted with interest, the shifting light of the lantern fish above casting his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks into shadow, thanks to an intense brow-line and stunning, high cheekbones. “What does that sound like?”

  “It sounds like pipe organ music,” I replied before I realized I was going to take that route.

  A flicker of intrigue wormed through his gaze. “Anything else?”

  “Whale calls mimicking the song of the sirens. The whispers of the waves trapped in seashells, that always sounded like poetry to me rather than white noise...”

  Somehow, he managed to look like a perfect mix of riveted and distracted, my bare legs as intriguing as my account. “Interesting.”

  “And I have dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Of a giant coral-pillared crown.�
�

  Intrigue turned to bemusement. Aha. I had struck some significant nerve.

  “They recovered it from the sea, you know. The humans. They think it’s a piece of architecture. But I know otherwise,” I announced haughtily.

  “Do you indeed.” While I may have detected a morsel of surprise, his voice didn’t let on. But I’d seen it, and I latched onto the trickle of being privy to something significant, clutching at the chance to entertain the upper hand.

  “And,” I plowed on while I had him in a considering mood, “I was granted passage through the great Maelstrom Aurora portal, herded by the spirit of the sea itself into the eye of the Atlantean Current, directed by your friends the whales all the way to your gates and granted passage through those gates, so I’ll have you know I was invited fair and square and I demand to be released from imprisonment and allowed to go free in your city.”

  Now it was both eyebrows touching the bottom edge of his circlet, and in place of the surprise I detected a bit of amusement. “Well, Spitfire Splittail.”

  Annnd, the name had already evolved. But–That’s right, I thought. Spitfire Splittail’s the name, and you’d better believe there’s more where that came from.

  The mer-king dropped his hand back to the arm of the throne, his fingers tracing an absent pattern where they dangled over the lip. I found myself oddly entranced by the motion, evocative of a sensual caress. He had the perfect fingers for rubbing genies out of bottles, I caught myself thinking, and had to snap myself out of such misplaced fantasies.

  “After much consideration,” the mer-king went on, and…was that a hint of sarcasm I sensed? Maybe they spoke more of my language than I thought. “I have decided you were unfairly apprehended, and you are released to go free in our city.”

  Oh. Just like that? I was already gearing up for more of a fight. Had the account of my ocean-blessed journey of destiny convinced him, or had it been whatever his wingman had whispered in his ear? Or perhaps his intent aquamarine scrutiny simply liked what it saw? With my luck, I hadn’t even needed to get all dramatic, and had just made a buffoon of myself contending with no one. The way he was looking at me, I realized it might have been overkill trying to win him over.