Previous Chapter

The Mists whistled and howled like a thousand tea kettles, the deafening cacophony battering Adalai worse than any physical thing he’d seen along the Drownway. He wished he was back in the vacuum of Marta’s shield. It took several seconds before he realized the Mists were actually speaking to him. The discordant shrieks did a good job of obscuring the more sibilant sounds and the words had a breathy quality that made picking out individual syllables more difficult than it should have been. But there were definitely words in there.

Adalai Carpathea, the Mists howled. Have you at last come to return what was taken?

“I don’t have anything of yours,” he yelled, spinning around and trying his best to locate exactly where the voice was coming from. The mist deadened the sound and made his hearing unreliable.

Not so, not so, the voice hissed. Once you have evaded us and twice you have stolen yet you come to us now and plead ignorance. No more! Return what is ours and we may yet forgive the rest.

The tone and cadence of the voice changed from one statement to the next and Adalai briefly wondered if the ‘we’ the Mists spoke of was a royal we or something more concrete. It wasn’t that important, though. So instead he turned about, trying to locate the rest of his group. Whether by chance or by deliberate design it turned out that there was no sign of Cassian or Marta, or even the Benthic. He did catch a brief glimpse of a winding, serpentine form that might have been the Linnorm, although whether that meant Verina was nearby or the spirit was just visible through the obscuring vapors the Mists had conjured was an open question.

There was also a possibility the Mists were, in fact, a dragon themselves. That was something he didn’t want to think about.

Do not think you can deceive us, Adalai Carpathea. The voice had shrunken to a whisper. We can smell on you the touch of the Mist. You pollute it and us with your filthy, mortal flesh and we will have it from you. From all of you. It never should have been given to the likes of man.

The image of the glass box came to his mind like a thunderclap. At the same time he remembered the moment, just before he was sent to Nerona, when he had met with the King of Stars. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

Adalai slowly reached into his bag, digging for the box, as his mind cast about for a way to stall. “Why do the great Mists in the Deep show so little charity? Certainly it is a small thing to spare for the low and mortal-”

It is your very mortality that offends! The voice returned to full shriek. Why should the life of Mist Eternal be shortened to that of vanishing mortals, creatures that pass into Eternity with nothing to their name, not even their very flesh? We were made for so much more than this!

“Well if it’s Eternity you’re concerned about you could just ask the Kings directly,” Adalai said as his fingers closed around cool glass. It was the wrong thing to say.

A wave of sound crashed over Adalai, knocking him down. It was impossible for him to describe what he heard, the sheer volume of noise battering his ears into uselessness. He felt, rather than heard, the cacophony. On the other hand he still heard everything the Mists had to say, as strange as that might be.

The Kings, you say? Nothing more than mortals who have strayed from the very things that made them special. They should have known their place. What have they done instead? Meddled with the order of things, taken and returned on their own whim and doomed those such as you to suffer the trials of life far longer than is just or proper.

Adalai flailed his free hand about, trying to find purchase to get to his feet again. To his consternation he discovered there weren’t any solid surfaces anywhere around him, not even in the direction he had thought of as ‘below.’ Was he lost in a vision again? It would explain why he hadn’t seen or heard from the others since breaking the stone knot.

Not that he was hearing very much at the moment.

“I’m not that upset about the trials of life at the moment,” Adalai said, trying to feel the words as they rolled off his tongue. Hopefully the Mists could understand him regardless of how his words sounded. He pulled out the box and held it aloft. “If taking and returning is what really bothers you I don’t know why you want this back so bad.”

The pounding pulse of the Mist’s rage faded away, replaced with a chilling sense of malicious attention. What have you done to it?

“Nothing. It was like this when I found it. What makes you think I did anything to it?”

Adalai could practically feel a watching eye boring into him from somewhere in the Mists, moving around from in front to behind him like a stalking tiger. It is constrained. Unnatural. You have perverted our nature. Set it free.

“It was like this when I found it. I have no idea how it got in here or how to get it out.”

It is your crime that has imprisoned it. The voice grew softer and softer, setting Adalai’s hair on end. You must set it free.

The box didn’t have a lock but it did have a latch, a small silver flange that swung down over a little post. Opening it wasn’t exactly difficult. On the other hand, whatever was speaking on behalf of the Mists didn’t seem to understand the lives of so-called “mortals” very well. Perhaps that was enough to thwart it.

On the other hand, perhaps it needed permission to take what it wanted.

“If it was really yours, why do you need me to set it free?”

It was stolen. The voice spoke as a parent to a particularly stupid child. It must be returned.

Adalai studied the box, wondering if his new intuition was correct. Cassian hadn’t been able to see the mist within, which suggested it wasn’t a normal mist. Shortly after handling it he’d seen the King of Stars in a vision. The King claimed that vision was an omen yet it wasn’t a sign of things to come, which was the generally accepted nature of omens, but rather a vision of things that had been. The explanation didn’t seem to explain.

On the other hand, the scrying pool that showed Adalai the vision was tied to the Mists in the Deep and the King spoke as if the Mists were at least somewhat aware of his presence. Had that forced the King of Stars to speak in riddles? What had he really been trying to say?

Most of all, why did the mist in the box seem familiar? Was it because he’d looked into the scrying pool and his Gift of Arms had allowed him to pick up some sliver of intention from the Mists in the Deep?

Or was it because he had seen this mist before? Not just anywhere, but in the hands of the King of Stars when he was offered a second chance at life?

Adalai looked up from the box and swept his gaze across the fog surrounding him. “Are you certain you want this?”

Certain? If he’d been hoping the Mists would show some sign of hesitation he was disappointed. Why would I question my desire for what is mine?

“Because it’s not yours. It’s not even a mist.” He flipped the latch open, lifted the lid and reached to take the Gift within. “It’s a cloud.”

When the King of Dreams gave Adalai the Gift of Arms he hadn’t really noticed much change at first. It had taken months of practice before he was able to make much sense of it. The Gift of Clouds was the opposite. As soon as the cloud merged with his hand Adalai became aware of the mists surrounding him, feeling them drift and turn almost as if they were a large, lightweight head of hair.

Except he could feel them. It was like every drop of mist was a raw nerve and a thrumming muscle, waiting for him to direct them. It was overwhelming. For a brief moment he hesitated and, in that moment, the Deep struck.

There was something malevolent among the mists, something seething with fury, burning hot and demanding control. It was the Deep, truly, but had nothing to do with the mists. They did fear the Deep, however, and as it moved they fled before it. Perhaps the Deep had hoped that Gift would give it the control it desired, perhaps it just resented others having control over what it delighted in terrifying.

The mists whipped around Adalai, panic and dread spreading through them and reaching their fearful tendrils towards him as well.

“Enough hiding.” Adalai spread his hands apart and called the clouds to himself. The mists rolled together into tighter and tighter clumps until they were nothing more than a pile of woolly mounds around his feet. All around him was a dark and empty void. The only other thing present was a single eye.

It was as huge as a house and yellow, with an odd, rectangular red pupil that stared with fiery intensity. It gazed at him from the same plane at first. Then it lifted itself higher and higher, rising up to reveal a strange, insectoid face over a mouth with flat, grinding stone teeth. The Deep was far greater than anything Adalai had ever seen.

His heart hammered at his ribs wildly, as if it could burst free of his chest and flee from that stare. His grip on the mists slipped and the clouds began to billow up again. His legs felt weak and tried to back away from the soul shaking figure before him but there was nothing to stand on. No place to find purchase.

You should not have looked. The Deep continued to rise higher, sending him tumbling further and further down. Now you will die and another will return what was stolen from me.

“Clouds don’t hide the depths,” Adalai stammered. “They hide the sky.”

The Deep’s single eye blinked slowly, as if it failed to understand. At the same moment, far above it, seven points of light glimmered into the void.

Adalai had a hard time following what happened next, not only because it happened so quickly but because the scale was so vast. One second the Deep’s head was slowly turning upwards. The next a spinning galaxy in the shape of a man, a crown of seven supernovas on its head, crashed into the Deep. The King of Stars beat the Deep with meteoric fists. The Deep struck back, wrapping his starry body in serpentine limbs burning with deep, red fury and dragging the two of them down.

The clash unleashed a horrifying shockwave that blinded Adalai. His ears, still ringing from the Deep’s previous screaming, were battered once more. Crushed under the weight of unfathomable battle raging around him he felt his consciousness slipping away. By all rights, that should have been the end of him.

So he was quite surprised to open his eyes and find himself surrounded by jagged shards of stone, lying on a still warm chunk of the ocean floor, his eyes and ears once again working normally. Instead of clashing cosmic forces he heard Cassian shouting orders as Trill’s Benthic gathered up water from the sea floor.

The Mists in the Deep may be dealt with but that was only the beginning of their troubles. Adalai grasped around until his hand fell on the hilt of a sword and he dragged himself to his feet.

Previous Chapter

For a brief moment Adalai let himself fantasize about the Mists in the Deep having a totally scientific, material basis that Benthic mythology had distorted into a legend over time. It was the kind of thinking most people back home had indulged often. Over the years since he’d left home he’d spent many a wistful night wondering what his life might have been like if it was true and there were no personal avatars of the inexorable forces of nature. Definitively shorter, for one thing.

However his life had not been short because death, at the very least, had spokesmen. He wondered what the Mists in the Deep actually spoke for. Nothing good, if what Trill said about the Benthic life cycle was accurate.

He wasn’t a huge fan of the way the Stellaris dragged them everywhere underwater but he did appreciate how quickly his Benthic minder got him down to the stone structure they’d discovered. He’d barely started examining it when Trill said, “It looks like the Sign of Folded Water.”

“That’s the primary Benthic god, right?” Cassian asked. “Is that good or bad?”

“The Stellaris don’t venerate any of the creatures the other Benthic worship,” Trill said. “But it was the Lord of Folded Waters who supposedly raised us up from eels and gave us minds and the power to control the tides.”

“I don’t suppose you know anything about the Mists in the Deep?” Adalai asked.

“No. Nothing of their songs or prayers were brought into the Stellaris when we were founded.” She stared blankly at the stone knot for a long moment then shook her head. “I doubt either of them will look on us with favor now.”

“If the Lord of Folded Waters thought it was a good idea for Benthic women to eat all their sisters I’m not sure his favor is something you want,” Verina said. She let herself drift down until she was on the bottom next to the stone formation.

Adalai settled next to her. “Do you see something?”

“No…” But her voice suggested just the opposite.

“Does the Linnorm see something?”

“I’m not sure. It’s not answering my questions right now, which happens every once in a while. This is the first time it’s happened when I’ve been in some kind of immediate danger, though.” She stuck a knuckle between her teeth and chewed on it.

“Have you been in danger a lot in your life?”

“The Slavs are lost, Adalai. I fear we’ll all be in danger until we find our home again.”

There was more truth in that than he wanted to admit so he ignored it. “So I guess we’ll have to figure this thing out on our own.”

“Why are we figuring it out?” Marta asked. “We could still try to bottleneck the Benthic up at the entrance.”

Adalai shook his head. “I’m not sure that’s going to work now. What was it you said back in Fionni, Verina? This whole job has the touch of inevitability to it, right? I think this is why.”

“I did ask you to come on this job because you have a Gift that gives more insight than the norm,” Cassian said. “However, in this case I’m going to need more than ‘a touch of inevitability’ to go along with whatever you’re suggesting.”

Adalai chewed on his lower lip, trying to organize his thoughts. “It’s not as simple or straightforward as you might like, Cassian, but I’ll try my best. The Kings at the Corners are revered in Nerona but they’re not from Nerona, if you see what I mean. Where I’m from we had a name for them but we didn’t have anything like the orders of Heralds, for example.”

“The Slavs are much the same,” Verina said. “But what does that have to do with this?”

“It’s the same concept, I think. The Mists in the Deep are revered by the Benthic but it doesn’t mean said Mists have no influence at all on the rest of us. Or that we have no value to them. Trill says they’re associated with volcanic vents which are created by liquid stone. Clayhearts can turn to stone and the sea dragon had a whole mess of them captured in its lair. A place that also had a scrying pool in it which I am certain was connected to this thing somehow.”

Cassian shook his head. “That doesn’t feel very concrete at all, Adalai.”

“I know, I know. There might be more I could get if I used my Gift on it but I’m fairly certain that if I did I wouldn’t live long enough to share any of it with you.” He rubbed his gloved palm with the tips of his fingers, wondering if he was about to say something foolish. “The worst part is I’m fairly certain those Clayhearts are dead, or close enough to it. I’m afraid that if your brother is up there we’re not getting him back.”

The other man had gone dangerously still. “Why do you think that?”

“Because when I looked into that scrying mirror I saw the King of Stars and I don’t think he was just there because a scrying shows you omens of things to come. Those pearls…” Adalai tasted bile in the back of his throat as he thought of them. “I think those pearls extract the Clayheart’s souls for some purpose. I’ve no doubt that at some point the King will have to take those souls into Eternity and that was the real reason he was there.”

“You can recognize the King of Stars just like that?”

“We’ve met.”

“Yes…” Trill said softly. “You said the only one you hadn’t met was the King of Dawn.”

Cassian ignored her. “You don’t know that-”

“No, I don’t.” Adalai let himself drift up from the seafloor and grabbed the other man by his shoulders. “Your brother may be alive. He may not even be one of the dragon’s prisoners, we didn’t have time to look at all of them. That thing over there might have nothing to do with the Mists in the Deep. But we’re out of options here. We can try and fight that Matriarch and her Benthic, however many there might be, or we can tamper with that thing, whatever it might be. But those are our choices. Only one of them seems like it might get us out of this alive.”

“So let’s get up to the entrance and barricade it before the Benthic get down here,” Marta said.

“He means this,” Trill said, pointing to the stone knot. “Matriarchs can have hundreds or thousands of daughters. There’s no way we can kill them all, even with the strange and unpredictable way human Gifts work.”

“That’s insane,” Marta snapped. She thrust the head of her mace at the knot. “We don’t know what that is and we don’t know how to manipulate it. If we fight the Matriarch at least we know what we’re fighting and when we’ve won, we touch that thing and we might not even realize when it’s killed us.”

“Marta.” It took a second for Adalai to realize who was talking. There was a chill in Cassian’s voice that made him sound like an entirely different person. “Look around. You’re not tired but that makes you the only one. Summoning the Linnorm in water took a lot out of Verina and I doubt she’s going to be able to pull it off again more than once. Adalai has used his gift a lot in the past few hours on top of the puking. Trill and her troops have been dragging us all over the ocean floor for half a day in addition to fighting with the Benthic earlier. Me? I suppose I just don’t have your stamina.”

The last one was the only one that didn’t have a basis in reality. Adalai watched Marta’s face as she looked around her and slowly realized it was true. “Fine. Fine. How are we getting into the middle of this thing, then? I can’t swing a mace fast enough underwater to smash it.”

Cassian peered at the stone, running one gloved finger along it, his sudden grim mood receding for the moment. “It’s not metal, so I can’t help.”

Marta glanced at Trill. “Can you four breathe air at all? I know the ones the dragon enthralled stayed on land for a good while.”

“We can hold water in our chest and breathe from it for nearly one hour if we don’t move much,” the Benthic replied.

“Better suck all that in, then. The rest of you, hold your breath.” Marta unslung her shield and raised it over her head. The metal scale pulsed with light. Unlike with most of the shields she created with her Gift this one did not simply appear at the size she desired. Instead it bubbled out slowly, pushing the water out from a central point and expanding around any solid object that got in the way.

Adalai wasn’t sure why she said to hold their breaths until his ears slipped inside the shield dome and suddenly heard nothing. There wasn’t any water inside the dome she’d created. There also wasn’t any air. It was a vacuum. They were going to have to try and smash the stone knot as fast as they could because he couldn’t breathe water from his chest for nearly as long as a Benthic.

Based on the strain visible on Marta’s face one of the rest of them was going to have to swing her mace for her. He doubted she had the energy to spare. So he reached down and grabbed it, only to drop it again when the Linnorm’s heads peeked into their world. They appeared as soon as there was space, their eyes gleaming with some emotion he couldn’t describe.

The spirit latched both its jaws onto the stone coils and chewed, spectral muscles on its necks standing out in ropes. He shot a look at Verina but she seemed just as surprised to see it as he was. The Benthic fell back from the Linnorm, shielding their faces against the heat they doubtless expected from it. Of course, in a vacuum they were in no danger but he didn’t think people in Nerona encountered those very often.

Adalai tried to find an angle where he could look under the dragon’s jaws. If it needed help prying the stone apart the mace was still near at hand and he wasn’t above contributing his own arm strength to the endeavor. Thanks to that he got a front row seat to the stone structure breaking apart.

It did not look like he’d expected.

Instead of a violent shattering or a sudden crumbling the loops of stone gracefully unfurled, at least at first. It reminded him of a flower blooming. Except halfway through the Linnorm got a solid grip on two of the petals and ripped them right out of the flower with a silent snap. The remaining three loops continued to unfurl until they pointed out and up towards the ceiling like curled fingers.

In the center of the newly created flower was a dull red thing that looked like clay yet glowed with its own light. It released a torrent of white, roiling mist into the vacuum. With no pressure to contend with the mist immediately boiled out to fill the dome, washing over Adalai and obscuring everything around him.

As soon as he was surrounded by mist Adalai noticed three things. First, he could hear again, which meant he was standing in the air or the water once more. Second, the mists were warm but not as hot as one might expect if they were coming out of a lava fed steam vent. Third, he was being watched again.

It had the same feeling as the thing that had watched him when he looked into the scrying mirror. Just much closer. To drive that point home the watcher chose that moment to speak to him.

Previous Chapter

“You think we have a problem?” Cassian stopped himself from giving vent to six or seven possible come backs to that ludicrous statement. “What problem are you expecting, if I may ask?”

Instead of answering right away Adalai grabbed the box he’d been asking about earlier and shoved it into his shoulder bag. Then he brushed the seven pearls out of their niches and into the shallow pool in their center. “This is a scrying mirror,” he said as the gemstones plunked into the water and rolled along the bottom, their glow becoming oddly dispersed. “I think the dragon was using it to communicate with something.”

“Something? Not someone?” Adalai jerked back from the water, horrified, and Cassian instantly drew his sword, expecting yet another problem to deal with. Turned out it was just the pearls dissolving in the bottom of the pool. “Were you expecting them to melt?”

“They’re not melting.” Adalai leapt up, dashed over to the dragon’s shelves of treasure and came back with a huge rug and an armful of candlesticks. With a single smooth motion he unrolled the rug over the pool saying, “I think that is an altar to the Mists in the Deep.”

“Sounds like a Benthic god,” Cassian murmured.

“Exactly. I couldn’t say for sure but I’m willing to bet it’s the source for all these pearls. Maybe it was bribing the dragon with them.” The candlesticks went around the edge of the rug to hold it in place.

“Bribing a dragon doesn’t make any sense,” Cassian said. “You can’t offer dragon’s treasure to get them to behave as you wish, they’ll just take the money and do whatever they wanted in the first place.”

“Maybe that’s what it would do with a human bribe. Dragons can easily overpower people, no doubt, but would they have such an easy time with something that qualifies as a god?” Adalai finished anchoring the rug in place and dusted his hands off. “It’s even possible the dragon was in thrall to the god the same way the Benthic were in thrall to the dragon. Either way, it’s time we got out of here. The Mists know we’re here now. They may have known we were here all along, although I doubt we’ll ever figure that out.”

“Lovely.” Cassian grabbed Adalai and pushed him towards the water. “Trill is here already and she says the ocean Benthic are already on their way in force. Says they brought something called a Matriarch. Head back the way we came, we’ve already put together a plan to get out of here we were just waiting for you to cool your head.”

The other man didn’t waste time apologizing, just put his head down and ran. Compared to their trip into the lair they got through the water and back to the entrance tunnel in fairly short order. That’s where their good luck gave out.

The tunnel down was already full of hostile Benthic, piling out of the entrance two or three at a time. Four of them were dead, impaled on the spears of Trill’s warriors. Another half a dozen were pushing Trill and her troops back with spears of their own. The water around them shook and trembled under the invisible influence of the Benthic’s wave shaping powers, adding an invisible layer of danger on top of the obvious conflict underway.

“Trill!” Cassian called, stretching his pearl out in front of him to amplify his voice. “Trill, back off! We need to dive!”

“What about these stale eggs?” Trill snarled.

“We can deal with them.” He caught Verina’s eye. “Boil it.”

For a moment she was confused then realization dawned and she nodded.

The quartet of friendly Benthic shot away from the tunnel mouth, grabbing Verina and Marta as they dove deep as quickly as they could. Adalai and Cassian were left to swim after them as fast as they could. Cassian spared a moment to see how the deep water Benthic responded and, as he hoped, they waited as more of their own number massed at the tunnel entrance.

That was their undoing.

Watching the Linnorm manifest under the water was a surreal experience. One moment there were eight Benthic swarming around the mouth of the entrance tunnel. Then there was a flash of green light. The water bent and rippled, distorting the Benthic until they looked like dolls made of string, then it exploded into a wall of white hot steam. Trill’s soldiers grabbed him and pulled him deeper into the chasm.

The screams of cooking Benthic receded into the distance as they made their way into the chasm’s darkest reaches. They paused for just a moment so Trill and Burp could fish small glowing anemones affixed to some kind of seaweed strap out of a belt pouch. These were tied around their necks.

It didn’t create a lot of light but it was apparently enough for Trill to navigate by so they continued down at a more sedate pace. Cassian quickly took stock of their situation. Marta was looking around, fine by all appearances, while Adalai let the Benthic drag him along, his brows furrowed in thought. Verina was pale and a little shaky but she hadn’t passed out like she had when the Linnorm got doused by the sea dragon.

All in all they weren’t in bad shape given the circumstances. “Trill,” he said, “how sure are you there’s an opening down here?”

“Not certain.” She pointed to the glossy black stone walls. “These were probably created by liquid stone bubbling out of the ocean floor in times long past. It may have poured out in other places creating other exits. Or the chambers the stone once ran through below the ocean floor may have currents of their own that we can sense from here.”

“How likely is it these chambers have liquid stone in them now?”

His answer came from Sputter rather than Trill. “No one has seen signs of liquid stone in this part of the ocean for hundreds of spawning cycles, since long before Lum the First created the Stellaris. If we find chambers below there’s no danger we will find liquid stone there. It’s far more likely they simply never connect to the open ocean anywhere else and we will be trapped in them until we starve.”

Cassian winced. “Wonderful.”

Her comments got Adalai’s attention, pulling him out of whatever thoughts had consumed him since using the scrying mirror. “Do you know exactly how long it’s been since-”

The walls of the chasm shook and an impossibly loud impact rippled through the water, hitting Cassian with more force than he would have thought possible. “Speed up!”

“We can’t go any faster,” Trill snapped. “We can only see so far. The flow of stone isn’t even, any of these walls could have sharp spurs on them that can maim or kill.”

“Don’t worry about that, the walls are smooth for hundreds of feet.” Cassian squinted slightly, his vision blurring and focusing as he strained to work out how to see in the dark while surrounded by light. After a few seconds of concentration the tunnel snapped into focus. “I’ll warn you if I see any change.”

Trill gave him a skeptical look. “And how will you do this? Humans cannot see in darkness any better than the Benthic.”

“I told you. We ate a dragon. I don’t know what that does to a Benthic but it changes humans quite a lot.”

A second impact shook the chasm and that was apparently enough to convince Trill to take his word as she sped up until they were moving almost as fast as they had in the open ocean. “If there’s no liquid stone in the chambers,” Marta asked as they rushed along, “then what is that sound?”

“The Matriarch,” Trill said. “She is trying to smash a way in to reach us.”

“What is this Matriarch?” Cassian asked. “I assumed since there were so many female Benthic your leader would be female as well but that sounds like something a lot bigger than you.”

“You assumed correctly,” Trill said, a dark note in her voice, her frills and fronds lying flat. “A Matriarch grows huge by devouring her sisters. In time she will be the only one left from her brood and she will spawn thousands of eggs to hatch the next generation so that the violence may be repeated. When Lum fled the deep oceans to found the Stellaris it was this cycle he sought to break.”

A third impact shook the chasm and a sickening crack echoed overhead. Cassian spared a look upwards. A thin beam of light split the darkness there. “It does sound bad. At the moment it definitely gives them the advantage.”

“What do they want?” Marta asked, also directing her attention upwards. “If they wanted the dragon’s treasures they already have them. We haven’t done anything to them, other than pass through their waters, so why is the Matriarch of the Tidallais here pounding on our walls?”

“They’re after the Mists in the Deep,” Adalai said.

“The altar is also up there,” Cassain said. “Or are you just saying they haven’t found it yet?”

“They aren’t looking for the altar, they’re looking for the magma tubes.” Cassian didn’t recognize the word ‘magma’ but he didn’t want to interrupt. “In places where it bubbles out of the ocean floor it creates steam. Mists in the Deep.”

Burp, the Benthic that was pulling Adalai, twitched violently, her fronds waving wildly in the water. “Are you saying we’re swimming into the grasp of the Cursed Mists?”

“No. I’m not sure of anything here. But it would go a long way to explain everything we’ve seen so far.”

“Enough!” Trill cut off the conversation with a violent slash of her tail. “Perhaps we journey into the Sky Below, perhaps the dry borne speaks of things he knows nothing about. Either of these may be true. Neither may be.”

“Both may be,” Cassian added.

“As you say,” Trill admitted grudgingly. “Regardless of what else is true, the only way out of this for us is down. We will just have to deal with whatever is beneath us.”

About a minute later they discovered that what was beneath them was a huge, egg shaped cavern with smooth walls. Cassian guessed the chamber was a good three hundred feet from one end to the other but only a third that height. The chasm emerged near the center of the chamber’s roof. Even with his dragon enhanced eyes Cassian couldn’t see any signs of weeds or anemones growing along the chamber walls. They were perfectly smooth.

Except for the very bottom, near one end of the chamber. A strange series of stone loops passed over and around a weird, reddish brown object that shed a dim light.

Marta pulled her shield around to a ready position. “Is that liquid stone?”

“Not possible,” Verina said. “The water is far too cool for that. The Great Linnorm once lived on a mountain of liquid stone, it knows the signs well.”

“You can see this whole chamber, Ironhand?” Trill asked.

“Everything except what’s under that thing. And before you ask, no, there’s no other exits.” He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to weigh which was the greatest danger they faced. “Think the Matriarch will leave if we kill all her troops?”

Trill made an indifferent motion. “Perhaps.”

“We could try and bottleneck them back at the entrance. Verina, how many times could you manifest the Linnorm?”

“No.” Adalai shook free of Burp and started swimming towards the strange object. “They want that thing, whatever it is. We get rid of it, they leave us alone.”

Unfortunately for him Burp was much faster in the water than he was and grabbed him again right away. Cassian frowned. It wasn’t like Adalai to act so impulsively. Trill caught his confusion and asked him, “What are you thinking?”

He sighed. “I hired him to come on this job because he’s good at reading things and he’s the one who looked at the altar in the dragon’s lair. If he thinks we should get rid of it we should at least try.”

“Then we will try.” But she didn’t look happy about it.

Previous Chapter

When Cassian left to go deal with the Benthic Adalai blocked him out of his mind. Gaining impressions from an object wasn’t normally difficult but nothing he’d seen in the dragon’s lair qualified as normal. He started with the obvious. Water was terrible at retaining impressions from people, it flowed past too quickly for anything to be left behind. Even when bottled and held by a single person for a long time the liquid itself was generally sterile, although the bottles that held it might pick up a ghost of intent. The water in the small depression was no different.

The ring of stone around it also lacked any traces of human purpose. The six empty spots for pearls were mundane, as far as he could tell, as were the seven spots occupied by the precious stones. It was only the pearls themselves that had the glimmer of human intent to them. What purpose the gems had he couldn’t determine, which wasn’t exactly surprising. Most jewelry didn’t have a purpose beyond decoration. He’d handled several rings, a few bracelets and a necklace and all had a vague sense of purpose but they weren’t like swords, which would freely tell him what kind of drills the previous owner favored or whether they fought with fear or bloodthirst in their hearts.

However there was one vague impression he got from handling the pearls. They didn’t want to be near one another. So, as he put them back down after examining them in turn, he changed the spacing so that there was an empty space between each rather than putting them back in the crescent moon shape. As he put the last pearl in its new space they suddenly lit up and the water briefly flickered. Then it turned reflective, showing Adalai his own face with a clarity he hadn’t seen in a mirror since he’d come to Nerona.

He wasn’t a fan of the way he’d changed since his first death. He’d never been one for a beard but the quality of razors in the southern marches was poor enough he’d given up shaving for his own health. But more than the facial hair it was the deep lines around his eyes and mouth that bothered him. The Kings at the Corners had sent him here three years ago but he looked like he’d aged a dozen instead. Annoyed at himself for focusing on such trivial matters, Adalai reached out and swiped his hand through the water to break the reflection.

When the tip of his finger connected with the tip of his reflection’s finger the world shifted.

With a stomach turning lurch Adalai felt as if he was suddenly falling upward, then sideways, then finally down into the water. Except the reflective pool was suddenly three times as wide as before. His head broke the surface and he caught a glimpse of a bottomless expanse full of drifting shadows and distant points of light. He thought he spotted seven of them, arranged like a crown, somewhere in the infinite distance.

Gravity continued to shift and he felt his feet catch on something. He fell sideways onto the ground, his feet hooked on the edge of a shallow puddle sloshing in a field of porous rocks. Confused, he scrambled to his feet. The landscape around him now had a dreamlike quality to it. He was definitely above ground as the sky overhead was full of twinkling stars but the rocks around him seemed to fade into mists just a dozen feet away.

Yet the mists were not so close as to obscure the three living beings seated or reclining around a massive slab of coral that grew in a low depression to his left. The pungent smell of seawater stung Adalai’s nostrils. He sneezed, the sound oddly rough and sharp in the cottony, slow moving atmosphere of the vision.

As if thinking it tore the veil away Adalai realized that was exactly what this was. The water in the lair was a scrying pool and he’d activated it. The question was why the pool had shown him this vision. More pressing, who were the three creatures by the coral? Whatever they were, it seemed like they were aware of him because two of them were getting to their feet, looking in his direction.

“Not quite a vision, is it?” Adalai muttered to himself, backing up a step and nearly tripping over the uneven rocky terrain. By the time he got his feet under him again he noticed something odd.

One of the three creatures watching him was a Benthic, which did not surprise him at that point. What was surprising was the other two, which were both human. One was wearing the brown robes of an Omenspeaker, the self proclaimed clergy that served the Kings at the Corners. The blue trim on his sleeves and collar marked him as serving the King of Stars. The other man was dressed in a rich tunic and hose, marking him as a wealthy and important man, if one who was very behind the times in terms of fashion.

Cassian would not have approved.

“Who are you?” The unfashionable man demanded, his hand coming to rest on the hilt of a broad bladed sword.

“Adalai Carpathea. Who are you?”

“Porphyrio del Torrence.”

Adalai’s stomach did a little flipflop when he heard the name. Ever since the Emperor of Lome had died fighting Old Lum the nation of Nerona had been without a unified government. The Torrence and Reniece lines both had claims to the throne but neither one had earned legitimacy from the Omenspeakers or the other nobles. A stray thought crossed his mind and he turned to the Benthic. “Does that make you Lum the First?”

“Lum is my name,” the Benthic replied, holding up one of the familiar speaking pearls, though it was smaller and dimmer than those he’d seen before.

“Not the First yet?” Adalai looked at the Omenspeaker. “What about you?”

The robed figure tilted his head up enough that he could see under its hood revealing not a face but a deep, almost endless expanse of stars.

Adalai sucked in a breath. “Don’t tell me I’ve died again.”

“Not at all,” the King of Stars replied, his voice surprisingly human compared to the last time they’d met. It was a mellow baritone that seemed to come from somewhere inside the hood. “You’ve wandered into a vision. Like all omens, visions fall under our jurisdiction so I am here. Although I have to admit this was not what I thought they would choose to show you given the opportunity.”

Adalai had heard the Kings ruled over prophecies as well as death although he wasn’t sure why that was the case. “So this wasn’t your idea?”

“No.”

“Then who’s was it?” He looked at Porphyrio and Lum. “Theirs?”

The human and Benthic leaders stared blankly at him, his question having no apparent effect on them. “You’ll have to forgive them,” the King said. “They are just shadows of what was, they cannot hear your words or even recognize your presence.”

“They just walked up and talked to me.”

“You arrived in the same way I did on this day. The questions they ask are those they asked of me when I came to solemnize their negotiations.”

Adalai glanced behind him and saw there was a huge number of stars reflected in the pool he’d just appeared out of. “Is that why you’re here?”

“If you are asking whether I can be here in your vision because I was here when the vision took place then yes, it certainly helped.”

He knelt down by the pool but didn’t see the circle or pearls from the dragon’s lair. “So did you make the scrying glass I came through? Or is this just the same place the dragon made its lair later on?”

“I can’t answer that.” The King of Stars knelt down by the water as well, rolled up his sleeves and plunged both hands into the starry pool. A tunnel downward appeared and Adalai caught a glimpse of himself under a ceiling of coral on the other end. Other branches of the tunnel curved away in other directions. “I can send you back to where you began. Or you could delve deeper into the visions, although I cannot say whether you will be able to return to the Nerona you know safely if you do. This is not a world made for mortals. When we cross it we do so at our own peril.”

“You can’t answer those questions.” Adalai tapped a finger against his chin, mulling that over. The King of Stars had answered him when he asked about the vision itself but gave ambiguous answers when asked about the people or mechanics behind the vision. Clearly there were certain things he could and could not say. “Why were you here in the first place? Aren’t the Kings at the Corners the overseers of mortality? You call our souls up into eternity, you don’t negotiate truces or care whether we keep our word to each other.”

“Both false,” Stars replied, turning his starry visage towards Adalai with what he took for an amused tone. “Beyond the borders of Eternity lies peace. If you are to pass into that blessed place then you must be prepared for peace. Many are the tasks that prepare you for such perfect peace and the keeping of an oath is not the least among them.”

“Cryptic as usual.” Adalai sighed and looked at Lum and Porphyrio as they returned to their starting place. The Omenspeaker and the King of Stars split apart, the man going with his companions as the King remained with his attention on the Arminger. It was disconcerting to watch. “Shouldn’t you go with them?”

“This isn’t the past, just a reflection of it. I have no particular need to play a part to satisfy them.” The King once again manifested as a man shaped silhouette filled with stars, his seven pointed crown gleaming. “Shouldn’t you return to yourself? They know you are here.”

Frustrated Adalai threw his hands wide, encompassing the veiling mists around them. “Who? There’s nothing here to see!”

“It would have been easier -” Stars paused, its crown bobbing in an unsettling pattern as the entity shook its head. “Nevermind.”

Adalai’s life had gotten much more eventful since his first untimely death but, even counting the sea dragon, he’d never seen anything that held a candle to the kind of power and presence the Kings at the Corners had when he passed through their Courts. Now here was one of those same beings clearly unable to do what it wished. His first thought was that it had something to do with the nature of the being itself. It was a creature of visions and omens so that was what it spoke about. Now Adalai wondered if it was being restrained by an outside force. How was that remotely possible?

“Do you -”

“If you’re not interested in the visions you should return to yourself, Adalai Carpathea.” Yet the King of Stars continued to ignore the three specters just beyond.

Almost as if it couldn’t bring itself to look at them. Was that the King’s choice or something else forced on it? With a sneaking suspicion Adalai moved past the King to the coral where the three others were seated. “You will grant us refuge in the Gulf,” Lum was saying. “No ship or army of Nerona will menace us and humans who trespass in our waters will be removed.”

“You would have to find a way to hold them for us,” del Torrence replied. “There is little call for us to regularly patrol the Gulf. It’s dangerous for ships and it would put us in the waters you seek to claim. Not to mention there’s very little in this compromise that favors us.”

“We will repel interlopers sent by the Matriarchs of the Deep,” Lum replied. “They are our enemies as much as yours. Few of your Gifts and fewer of your ships are suited to fighting them yet your people will feed the Matriarchs as well as ours. Give us a home here and we will keep them and the Mists in the Deep far from your shores.”

Startled, Adalai spun to look at the King of Stars, only to find that the entity had vanished. The fog had enveloped the place the King once stood. Adalai slowly turned a full circle, finding that the vapors had grown close at every point and from them came an inexplicable feeling of menace. The specters continued to discuss their treaty but Adalai ignored them. He had the feeling he’d worn out his welcome.

Which way had the scrying pool been in?

A thrumming sound echoed out of the mists, deadened by the fog but still clearly audible. Panic seized him and Adalai did a simple about face and sprinted straight forward. In the roiling vapor it was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead and the pool took him by surprise. He stumbled in, smashing one shin on the edge of the pool, then found himself tumbling in freefall through the dimly lit, starry abyss once more.

This time there was no constellation of stars in the distance. Instead a much closer, larger shape loomed towards him, its silhouette like the one he’d seen in the deeps while travelling with Captain Trill that morning. It moved far faster than it should have for something of its size. Worse, it clearly sensed Adalai’s presence and headed directly towards him.

For an immeasurable moment Adalai thought it might catch up to him.

Then Cassian’s hand grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled his face up and out of the scrying pool. The Ironhand gave him a hard shake and he said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Startled by the abrupt transition, Adalai went limp with relief. Then his eye fell on the box he’d asked Cassian to look at earlier. The glass box Cassian insisted was empty but that Adali saw was full of roiling mists. “Cassian,” he said. “I think we have a problem.”