The Thing at the Shoreline
Mirian
She blasted the nearest guard in the face. As he dropped to the hallway floor, Mirian brandished her sword at the other. She’d hoped he’d back away, but these men were professionals, armed and armored, and he apparently thought he stood a good chance against a woman in a robe.
She parried high in his swing, shouted the wand’s activation word, and sent him clawing at his bubbling neck.
She’d never get used to what the weapon did to people. She stepped past the dying man and depressed the lever in the pillar beside him before finishing him off with a merciful thrust. The cage opened into the arena, and the two large rhinos tramped out into the rectangle of sunlight, pawing and snorting, swinging their metal-tipped horns left and right. The moment they were gone, Mirian used the jailer’s keys to open the pen and enter the stinking enclosure.
She’d already opened one cage to set loose a huge, four-armed white gorilla. Between the monsters she released outside and the prisoners she’d freed within, chaos reigned. She hadn’t even been challenged until she arrived at the rhino pen.
She worried about setting such dangerous monsters loose in the arena with her friends. But without a distraction, they had no hope at all.
Now, as she peered out the open doorway, she saw the gorilla turning to roar at one rhino even as the thunder lizard chased another. She looked up along the rim, and that was when Desna truly smiled, for who should she see but her brother’s murderer.
“Sylena!” she cried.
The moment that pale face looked down at her, she blasted. The wretched woman fell screaming, landing with a crunch six feet to Mirian’s left. Even over the rest of the arena noise, Mirian could hear the sizzle of the acid as it ate away at Sylena’s face.
For once she felt no pity for a victim of the weapon’s work.
“Jekka!” she shouted. “Jekka, over here! Kalina!” She’d spotted the lizard woman limping along the side of the enclosure, hand pressed to one arm.
But Jekka still hadn’t seen, or heard. He was running from the thunder lizard, which seemed to have caught the attention of the four-armed gorilla. Closer at hand, one of the rhinos saw something it didn’t like and swept its head low to gore Sylena’s body. It flipped her into the air, and Mirian realized in horror that the woman was still alive in the brief moment before she hit the arena floor and was thoroughly trampled by the rhinoceros. The crowd seemed uncertain what to make of that particular spectacle, for there were both enthusiastic shouts and screams of terror.
Kalina reached the doorway, and Mirian saw blood trickling from both her arm and her thigh. “Go on,” Mirian urged, “get out! Where’s Heltan?”
“Dead! Mirian, what are you doing?”
Mirian pushed Kalina toward the open gate. Jekka still hadn’t seen her. She lowered her wand and fired again. The acid spray hit the sand just past Jekka’s shoulder, right at the foot of the four-armed gorilla.
She had Jekka’s attention finally, but had to fire once more to distract the thunder lizard as it lunged for a bite. Mirian tagged it in the snout and it lifted its head to growl in pain.
“Jekka!” Mirian waved from the open gateway, and the lizard man turned on his heel, sprinting at full speed. He fell as the gorilla slapped him with one of its hands, but tumbled to his feet and kept running. Thankfully, the monster seemed more interested in challenging the thunder lizard and pushed into it with a demented scream of fury.
Jekka was almost there when Mirian smelled brimstone.
She whirled, sidestepped to avoid the bite from the massive, flaming hound with burning eyes that had appeared beside her.
Mirian had neither the time nor energy to care who had summoned the thing. It caught her sword slice with its burning maw and tore the weapon from her grasp.
Jekka charged in with Kalina’s laumahk. His was a mighty blow, backed up by the momentum of his long sprint, and sheared through the creature’s side. The flaming hound opened its mouth to howl as Kalina turned back and ran it through one burning flank.
Mirian rushed past, the wounded lizardfolk following. She heard the devil hound shamble after, moaning in something between pain and ecstasy.
With Kalina and Jekka beside her, she slammed home the bar on the pen. “Come on!”
She scanned her friends in the light trickling through the bars. Jekka looked to be in better shape, though a crossbow quarrel stuck out of one shoulder and a shallow claw mark stretched across his chest.
Kalina bled from half a dozen wounds, and there was a chunk carved out of her shoulder. Mirian fumbled with her hand and slipped the extra water-breathing ring onto the lizard woman. “You may need this. To breathe underwater.”
“Mirian.” Kalina breathed heavily, as though she were working up energy to say something.
“No time.” Mirian led them around a corner toward the largest floor grate only to find a squad of spear- and torch-bearing guards running their way. They ducked back as a spear clattered past.
“You came back for us,” Jekka said. He laid a clawed hand, softly, upon her shoulder. “But I think we will die together.”
“Not yet, damn it.” They raced past where the devil hound pushed against the door to the rhino pen, howling at sight of them. She was sure she’d seen a smaller grating.
There.
Just beyond the guards she’d slain lay a rusted metal grill through which dark water gleamed. She bent to it. Jekka dropped with her and the two gripped it by the bars and hauled.
The grating was exceptionally heavy. She heard something pop. It wasn’t her back, though, but rather one of the bars bending in the hound’s pen.
Mirian lowered the wand and fired, three times in succession. The first shot didn’t work, but the other two opened a steaming gap in the grill.
The guards rounded the corner.
Jekka planted his feet wide, swept a spear from the air with the laumahk.
The hound roared, and the door to its pen slammed open.
“Go!” Mirian shouted at Kalina. The lizard woman dropped through, narrowly missing the steaming acid.
“You go!” Jekka sent another spear clattering. “I’ll be right behind!”
The guards at the end of the hallway screamed at the appearance of the flaming, howling hound as Mirian dropped through the sizzling grate. Too late she remembered the air bottle she’d tucked into a pocket of the robe. She’d meant to hand it to Jekka, but under the constant assault there’d been no time.
She hoped he’d be able to hold his breath.
The old stone tunnel was even worse than she’d imagined. It sloped down and away, completely unlit and filled with not just water but offal. She didn’t want to breathe the stuff, so she held her breath as long as she could and let the current carry her.
It wasn’t very wide, either. She kept brushing her hand against the wall. Fearful that she’d damage or lose the wand, she thrust it inside its housing on her belt. The movement sent her off course, and she bashed her head against an old stone. At the same moment she heard a shattering noise and knew the air bottle had broken.
If she hadn’t been wearing the rings of her ancestors then, she would have drowned, for she was stunned and dizzy. The water didn’t taste quite as foul as it smelled, but she found herself coughing anyway. She could hear nothing now but the rush of water on stone, and she wondered if the young priestess had really known where this spillway led. Suppose she were merely descending deeper and deeper into the bowels of the world?
And had Jekka come with her? Did he trail yet, or had he sacrificed himself so they could escape?
There was a burst of light, and suddenly she was sliding into open water. Salt water. She swam up toward the light, then saw movement below her. She turned to find Kalina struggling away from a clawed, slime-coated creature like a man-sized crab.
Mirian kicked toward her friend and struggled to free her wand. The monster released Kalina to float in a cloud of blood and pushed up—not toward Mirian, but toward Jekka, out now and straining for the surface. The beast stretched with its two great claws and the writhing mass of tentacles that extended from its mandibles. She heard it chittering in excitement as it closed.
Mirian finally put hand to wand as the creature grabbed Jekka’s left leg in a huge pincer. Jekka swung desperately with the laumahk.
He missed, and the scavenger’s tentacles brushed his tail.
The lizard man went limp, drifting helplessly as the creature pulled him toward its maw.
Mirian shouted the activation word, but the damnable wand didn’t fire. Just when she thought she was getting better with the thing. Was it out of charges?
Kalina swam in and stabbed the thing’s eyes with her fingers. The scavenger dropped Jekka and lashed out at the lizard woman with both tentacles and claws. Blood gushed from the lizard woman’s side.
Mirian caught the sinking Jekka and wrestled the laumahk from his stiff fingers.
The monster had three or four hundred pounds on her, and was born to move in the water. But because of her second ring, she could move just as naturally.
At last, a fair fight.
The monster abandoned the motionless lizardfolk and churned after her. She swung Kalina’s weapon two-handed and slashed into the hideous tentacles. The monster pulled up short.
But even though the dreadful wound released ichor, the beast was undeterred. It stretched toward her with snapping claws. Mirian kicked away, risking a glance back at Jekka and Kalina, who still floated motionless. Ancestors, she thought, give me strength to save my friends. If she didn’t move fast, Jekka would drown, and Kalina might be dead already.
She bit deep with her second swipe of the laumahk, but then the beast wrenched the weapon from her hands. She backpedaled, lifted the wand, and commanded it to fire.
And again she failed.
With a powerful surge of its back legs, the scavenger swept in. She pulled away, but the tip of the claw snipped her shoulder. Blood billowed, and she knew pain as well as raw panic as the tentacles stretched for her face.
She had overestimated her own competence, and now she and Jekka and Kalina were all finished.
No. She raised the wand until the tip of it actually touched one of the tentacles. The creature grasped the weapon’s end even as it received the blast of green acid.
The creature let out a high-pitched wail and swam backward. Mirian fired again, and again and again as it attempted retreat, until at last the weapon stopped responding.
The monster moved only spasmodically. Mirian shook herself to life, kicked up to Jekka. She tried not to think about the thing below, and how it might recover and rush up to slice her feet off at the ankles.
She reached her friend, grabbed him by the hands, swam to the surface. She pushed his head into the air.
The steep, rocky shoreline lay only ten feet off. With her hand beneath Jekka’s chin to keep his face above the water, she kicked to it, then dragged him out across the rough stones, past a cluster of mangroves.
There she rolled him onto his stomach, wrapped hands about him, gripped fingers in a double-fist just above the muscular solar plexus, and pushed. Her shoulder throbbed in agony, but she pushed again.
He coughed up water once, twice, then groaned. He struggled to his knees, hands flat on the sandy soil, and vomited more water as Mirian beat his back with the flat of her hand.
He waved her off and continued to cough water. She turned, steeled herself, and dove after Kalina.
The monster was as motionless as the paralyzed lizard woman. Mirian tried not to focus on the deep gouge through Kalina’s chest. She grasped her under the chin, near the point where magical gills glowed, and swam for the shore.
Somehow, she reached it. Gasping from pain and exertion, she dragged Kalina by the arms over to her cousin, then stood panting, hands on knees. She considered the enormity of the lizard woman’s wounds. The pale green of her scales.
Kalina wasn’t moving. Wasn’t blinking.
“She’s dead,” Jekka said weakly. He had climbed to one knee.
Mirian shook her head. “Paralyzed. Like you.”
“No, Mirian,” he told her, gently.
Was he right? No. Kalina had simply taken a larger hit from the creature’s paralyzing tentacles.
Mirian was no healer, but she knew how to take a pulse. She threw herself down beside the lizard woman, sucking in a painful breath as a clam shell dug into her thigh. She pressed her ear to Kalina’s chest.
Nothing. But maybe lizardfolk hearts were located in a different place.
She put her hand to Kalina’s neck. Did they have the same big vein as humans? They were built on similar lines. “Where do you take pulses? Jekka?”
Jekka joined her and spoke quietly. “If her heart worked, her open wounds would still spout blood.”
Gods. He was right. Mirian stared down at the graying lizard woman, sank back on her haunches.
She was too stunned even to cry. “I don’t understand. The ring should have allowed her to breathe.”
“She was too badly hurt.”
Mirian was cool, dripping with water, and she stank all over. But these were minor irritants, like the bites of insects. She rose, scanning the ocean beyond the spindly legs of the mangroves. She spotted her wand among the rocks by the shore and numbly stepped out to grab it before a low wave swelled in.
When she returned, she found Jekka sitting beside his cousin.
“Mirian,” he said softly, “what happened to Salvager Rendak?”
“He got out. And Ivrian and Gombe live. My brother is dead.”
“Your brother. He worked with our betrayers.”
“He was weak, and foolish. But he died trying to protect me.”
Jekka nodded. “My brother, too, was less than I wished.”
“Yours watched out for his own clan, at least.”
“Writer Ivrian’s mother might be alive if my brother had warned her. It wasn’t just.”
“Like I said. Heltan was just looking out for his family.”
Jekka hissed. “You defend him? You, who looked out for all of us. Past race. Past clan.”
“I was your leader.”
“You came to save us, when our bargain was finished. Why did you come, Mirian?”
“Because it was my brother’s fault.”
“So it was your duty.”
She tried not to think of the still form beside them that had been so full of vivacity and charm. “My clan failed you. Now let me see that arm. We should get the crossbow quarrel out. And keep our eyes sharp for Ivrian. He’ll be coming after us.”
Mirian took the knife from its sheath and reached for his arm.
Jekka, though, seemed uninterested in letting her examine the limb. He kept it stiff beside him, and she frowned at the bruised ring where the bolt stood out from his fine scales.
“What will I do now?” His eyes were wide and bright as they met her own. “Where will I go?”
The quarrel, she saw, was lightly embedded, and judging by the feel of the scaled skin, she didn’t think it was barbed. “You’re lucky. This could have torn straight through your arm.”
It occurred to her that if she were to cut out the bolt, they’d need bandages. The only cloth anywhere nearby was on her and the lizardfolk, none of which was clean.
“There’s no point, Mirian.” Jekka reached up and put a hand on her arm. “You work too hard to save me. There’s nothing left.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have no clan. I have no brother or sister or cousin. What am I to do?”
She stared into those inhuman eyes and saw their pain, their loss. She felt tears form in her own, and put her hand to her wounded arm. When it was wet with blood, she pressed her fingers to the crimson gash across Jekka’s chest. He gasped in pain, his tongue sliding out in astonishment.
“Put your blood to mine,” she said.
Hesitant, Jekka dragged his fingers through that same wound, showing his teeth in a grimace, then touched scarlet-stained fingers to Mirian’s shoulder injury.
“Our blood is mingled,” Mirian said. “Now I will be your sister.”
Jekka stared. Slowly, his head bobbed up and down. “You are my sister. And I am your brother.”
Mirian’s wiped tears away with a bloody hand. “And right now your sister’s got to get our wounds bandaged. And then we’ve got to rendezvous with the rest of our friends.”
“And then?”
“Then we get the treasure back to Sargava.”
“Will your people want me in Sargava?”
“I don’t even think my people want me in Sargava, Jekka. But I’m a Raas, and the land is mine. And you’re my brother. So to hell with them.”