Dream Storm Sea (11 page)

“The Murderfish it is,” Tethiel said. “A sea god worthy of fear.”

Hiresha had thought she had known terrors before. Now dread was a pin that pushed through the flesh of her back leaving a trail of trembling hurt, scraping against the bone of each vertebra.

The Murderfish sank out of sight. Waves rippled from six points as the monster circled below. The pattern of water looked as if a giant were dragging its fingertips through the sea.

“It’s searching for us,” Hiresha said.

“When you’re most wanted is the best time to be scarce. My heart….”

Hiresha glanced toward the sound of his voice but could see little of the illusionist or the boat.

“…my creatively jointed fingers are not suited for untying ropes. Or pulling oars. Or any activity that has a hope of returning us to land. Would you accept a gem from my boot cuffs to cure yourself?”

“Not necessary.” Hiresha could manage to say no more through her pain. A distinguished Enchantress Lebanna had developed a method for knitting bones together that did not require jewels. The skeleton was in fundamental composition not so different from limestone. It could hold the most basic of spells, and none came more naturally to an enchantress than the Attraction of two objects together.

Hiresha felt Tethiel’s stiff fingers press into her back, helping her rest herself into the base of the boat. Her broken bones still ground against each other in white blasts of pain. Water pooled around her shoulder, an alarming amount considering the boat had just been upended. She had to suspect the Murderfish’s blow had damaged the boat’s planking.

In the Mindvault Academy, a ceremonial gown was presented to the enchantress who could fall asleep in the most trying conditions. In a sinking boat, pursued by a most malicious fish, with bones stinging from pain, Hiresha believed she deserved the award.

17

Desperate Magic

The dream laboratory provided a timeless tranquility of thought. Hiresha had awareness of her body’s pain, yet she was above it, concerned but not distracted.

“Lie down,” Hiresha said to her Intuition. “And try not to move your tongue too much.”

The woman in the yellow-topaz dress cradled her broken arm. In the dream, Intuition acquired Hiresha’s ailments because the enchantress found it more convenient to operate on other people than herself.

“We knew Tethiel was boating with us the whole time.” Intuition snuggled herself into a man-sized depression in a stone slab. “He was the one who reminded us to pull Emesea out of the water. He kept us awake, and his weight made the boat ride lower.”

“Remarkable.” Hiresha arranged her magical baubles. A set of blue diamonds dropped on Intuition's skin turned parts of the woman transparent, revealing the cracks in two arm bones. “I doubt the man has ever gone so long saying so little.”

“We’re dance-on-clouds happy he’s with us. He’s our favorite Feaster. The only way it could be better is if Spellsword Fos were here too. And they were both kissing us. And fewer nasty fish.”

“What did I tell you about your tongue?”

A dream garnet floated into Hiresha’s hand. She absorbed it for power. Her next spell Attracted a shard of bone imbedded in the muscle of Intuition’s forearm. The yellowish sliver fitted back into the slender contour of the repaired bone.

“It’s as Spellsword Sagai said.” This voice came from a mirror. Black, faceted claws pulled an arching fish bone from red lips. The Jeweled Feaster dropped the remains of her meal on a crystal plate, and she pointed across the laboratory to another looking glass. “The Murderfish is a creature of flesh and hunger.”

Only with the acuity of her dreaming eye could Hiresha pick out the outline of the Murderfish. She saw the memory of it grabbing Emesea. The enchantress could estimate its size—boggling—and its shape—an undignified number of limbs.

“I’ve heard of skin pigment that camouflages,” Hiresha said, “but this can be nothing short of magic.”

A dream storm of orange shimmered in a looking glass. This essence tempest reminded Hiresha of curtains of glowing amber beads skimming across the sea. She must have afforded it no more than a glance. She never could have noticed the Murderfish’s eyes rising above the water like a crocodile’s.

“The Murderfish studied us,” Intuition said.

“There can be nothing more frightening in a gigantic monster of many tentacles than intelligence.”

She had seen creatures of a similar nature on a smaller scale, most recently pickled in a jar at a bazaar. The recollection appeared in an adjacent mirror. Its suckers were shriveled, its eight arms curled upon themselves in spirals. Its skin was the yellow of dead parchment. The elongated head resembled that of an unborn human. Only puckered holes remained of plucked-out eyes.

Hiresha willed the pathetic sight away, and the jewels of the laboratory darkened with her mood. She could still see well enough to fuse Intuition’s ribs back together.

“The Murderfish can’t be the same species as that pickled specimen,” Hiresha said. “But the morphology has striking similarities.”

“We had better wake.” Intuition sat up, poking her repaired arm and chest and wincing. “Don’t want the sneaky fish to catch us sleeping.”

The Jeweled Feaster said, “The next time the kraken grabs you, it won’t be so gentle. It has lost blood in this hunt.”

Hiresha closed her eyes on the room of jewels and mirrors. They opened on a place of stars and salt spray.

The boat was made of glass. Illusion had turned it spectral, and Hiresha wasted time searching to find two oars. For all she knew, the other pair had washed away. She sat, looking about her. Tethiel fumbled with a gourd, filling it, spilling the rising water out from the boat.

He asked, “What of the sail?”

“Too primitive. It’ll only carry us with the wind, out to sea.” Hiresha squinted at the countless white lines of waves between them and the shore. “Did you notice where the Murderfish went?”

“She’ll be guarding against our escape. I know something of beasts of prey. The Murderfish will prowl near the shore.”

“Prodigious though its size is, the shore is wider.” Hiresha started rowing. “I’ll steer us there, obliquely.”

The enchantress’s arm and chest ached. A single jewel would have allowed her to craft magic complex enough to repair severed nerves and blood vessels. Despite the throb, her bones stayed together.

Hiresha felt less confident about the rest of herself. Even Tethiel’s presence could only keep her awake for so long. The second time she jerked back to alertness, Tethiel’s ghostly form spoke.

“We must be too eager to reach our goal. We’re getting further and further from it.”

She craned her head over her shoulder. The sway of the boat would have toppled her, but she had braced her feet beneath the bench. The shore huddled against the horizon, so far.

Hiresha hurt in many places in her body, a sore backside from unpadded seats, trembling arms from fatigue, but most of all her head ached from a growing sense of doom. “We won’t make it to land by dawn, will we?”

“Not you and I.”

“Will your illusions withstand the daylight?”

“They’ll be no great loss when they melt away. I can captivate a city, but I’m powerless to fool a fish.”

Tethiel gestured to a yellow shape swimming alongside the boat.

Fisherman’s bane
. Hiresha tried to hit it with an oar, but it paddled out of reach. “Why can’t you hide us?”

“You might as well ask a painter why his masterpiece fails to charm a pet turtle.”

Hiresha tried to calm herself, to stop her world from cracking into red shards of hysteria.
Only one scorpion found us. And, yes, it’s turning spectral, too. He’s trying to hide the overlarge arachnid as well.
“What of its clicking? Can you stop it from calling the Murderfish?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “And, my heart, I did mean to tell you. I took a liberty….”

One side of the boat dipped. As much as Hiresha wanted to believe otherwise, it had not been a trough between waves. Something had gripped the boards.

18

Between Storms

Fingers folded over the side. Emesea flung herself aboard and balanced her sword on a shoulder, glaring at Tethiel.

“I allowed her to see the boat,” he said to Hiresha. Tethiel bowed as far as he could while sitting on a swaying plank. “I even made her perceive the mast as burning. For encouragement.”

Emesea reached out to touch the rigging. “Guessed you two headless tortoises weren’t really sitting in a burning boat.”

“We were floundering,” Tethiel said to Emesea.

“Sinking, more like.” Emesea kicked at the bilge water.

He straightened his sodden lapel. “Otherwise, I’d never have allowed a sword-headed churl aboard who so recently tried to hack a coat this fine.”

“Know what my fondest memory is?” Emesea spun her sword below Tethiel’s nose. “Seeing the Murderfish bite a hole in the Lord of the Feast.”

“Speaking of imminent threats.” Hiresha coaxed the sword from Emesea’s hand. “How do we reach shore by morning?”

Emesea waded to the oars. “Won’t go far lugging all this water. Start bailing.”

“I can do better than that.” Hiresha lay between the benches. The water came to her chin. “Tethiel, give me your boots. Or, rather, the garnets in them.”

Once Hiresha had the jewel-tipped pins from him, she stretched one arm overboard then fell asleep. In her dream laboratory, she Attracted the bilge water from one hand to the other then let it fall into the sea. She then enchanted the boot pins to bind pieces of the boat together, to stop the worst of the leaking.

Hiresha multitasked her magic and her planning. She returned to the waking world with a few ideas in her mental armory.

Sitting up from the mostly dry boat, she said, “How close to the shore?”

“Maybe another lifetime away.” Tethiel inhaled a long breath and touched his tongue to his upper lip. “The Murderfish is coming. Faster than nightmare.”

Hiresha gazed over the sea, saw nothing. “You can smell its fear?”

“‘Fear’ may be too strong a word. Perhaps ‘caution.’” Tethiel’s hooked finger pointed a path from the sea toward the boat. “She’s marked us.”

Hiresha’s eyes tore over the calm rolling of the waves, searching for some sign of the Murderfish. She wanted to hope Tethiel had mistaken the scent of the kraken, but the possibility of its tentacles pulverizing the boat was too gut-twisting to ignore.

“If that’s her,” Emesea said, “she swims deep.”

“Cast another decoy, sailing back to the sea.” Hiresha swung her arm round to point behind them. She scraped her knee on an unseen bench. “We’ll row parallel to the shore. And hope.”

Paddles dug into wave crests. Tethiel gestured, and another ship split from them. Its hull also seemed made of glass, gliding over the waters without touching them. The illusionist had made his decoy hard to see. To Hiresha’s horror, the real boat beneath her solidified. Lines of wood grain filled in the once-transparent planks.

Hiresha could see her own shivering hands, her own dress. “What have you done?”

He said, “We disbelieve what’s in plain sight and seek out what’s hidden.”

Emesea asked, “You’re betting our lives the Murderfish thinks like a person?”

“Like a predator,” he said.

The decoy boat had its own school of fisherman’s bane. Tethiel must have created them of illusion, and Hiresha planned to thank him for that detail, if they lived. He had concealed the scorpion around the true boat.

Her eyes whipped from the wood boards under her feet to the spectral decoy.
Which will the Murderfish pursue? The obvious or the subtle?

The enchantress felt as if she were being pickled in liquid worry. Like the octopus in the jar, her skin had hardened to leather, her insides pumped full of foulness. She waited for her fate. Clasping her hands into fists, she drummed her thumbs against her chin.

The decoy erupted, torn to clear shards by tentacles splaying outward from beneath. Illusions tumbled through the air of an enchantress, a woman with a serpent tattoo, and a foppish Feaster.

Such a pain of relief burst through Hiresha that she embraced Tethiel. She let go as quickly, remembering that she should be angry.
He did sneak onto this boat after I said I wanted none of his help.

The Murderfish’s arms blended into the night’s constellations, but Hiresha could see the illusions of the falling human. Emesea’s decoy was dashed against the water, crushed by the force of impacting into the surface at great speed. Hiresha winced, regretting Tethiel’s gory attention to detail. The other two illusions spun up and down, flying in loops and screaming.

Hiresha asked, “Why’re you having them circling through the air like that?”

Tethiel’s eyes darted up and down. “The Murderfish is juggling.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Emesea grinned at the bodies bounding up and down past the moon’s sliver crescent. “Look, she picked up my corpse. Ha! Bet I’ll go higher.”

“You sound remarkably happy about this.”

Emesea said, “She only killed me first because she knows I’m the dangerous one.”

The decoy of the corpse, the enchantress, and the Feaster all tumbled into the sea. Hiresha waited for them to be devoured, but they only drifted or swam. Nothing attacked them.

“She knows,” Emesea said. “She’s seen through it.”

“I couldn’t track all her arms.” Tethiel sagged against the mast. “An illusion must have passed through one.”

“Create another decoy, going to shore,” Hiresha said. “Now!”

The enchantress saw a tangle-haired version of herself traveling away on an illusionary boat. Texture drained from the true boat, and once again Hiresha felt as insubstantial as a spirit. Joy flashed over her skin in a hot wave when she watched the fluorescing scorpions wriggling away.

Upon Hiresha’s direction, Emesea turned their true boat. One oar paddled backward. They steered toward the sea.

“The sail!” Hiresha reached upward and found the rigging by feel. “We need more distance.”

Emesea sat up from the oars. The edges of the glassy mast caught the starlight. Emesea felt her way along the sail, untying ropes. Water flicked from the crystalline cloth when she pulled it open.

The enchantress had taken over the oars. Facing backward toward the decoy boat, she could not help but notice that Tethiel had crafted his illusions of himself and the enchantress as holding hands. The false vessel plowed through another wave.

“The Murderfish passed it by,” Tethiel said. “She’s swimming along the shore. Circling back now.”

This time Hiresha felt it. The wake of the kraken pushed their spectral boat up and forward, further out to sea. The brightness of dream storms hid the stars.

Hiresha clung to the oars. Only after some seconds could she breathe. “Is it still near the shore?”

“Possibly,” Tethiel said. “She’s too far for me to sense now. My heart, you look well pleased with yourself.”

The enchantress had not realized she had been smiling. “We sent the first decoy seaward. The Murderfish must expect us to have headed the other way, toward the shore.”

“So you tricked her into thinking exactly what she wanted to think in the first place,” Tethiel said.

“And now we’re sailing to sea,” Emesea said. Her ethereal figure was tinted pink from the dream storm. “To loop around later for a safer stretch of shore.”

“Exactly,” Hiresha said.

“Must be a good idea. We’re still alive.” Emesea boomed a laugh.

“Quiet!” Hiresha said.

Emesea chuckled, and her voice tinkled with notes of pleasure. “Feels like my heart’s beating with jaguar blood. Nothing else gets me this good, and I’ve tried every beer, wine, and worse in the Lands of Loam.”

“You haven’t tasted black wine,” Tethiel said. His transparent chest and coat distorted the orange dream storm behind him, bending the sheets of light into swirls.

“I’ve never heard of black wine,” Emesea said. “Oh, that’s a Feaster thing? Put your head between these oars, and I’ll pop it like the sour grape it is.”

“So you don’t object to intoxicants,” he said. “Only the most potent.”

Hiresha too felt a choking relief. She had handed the oars back to Emesea. The motions of the boat would soon rock the enchantress to sleep.

If Emesea was scowling at Tethiel, it could not bee seen on her ghostly face. Only her voice sounded angry. “Haven’t talked with a brewer in a while, but don’t think you need to scare someone to death to make a jug of mead.”

He said, “You’ve helped the soulless kill my children, so neither do you object to murder.”

“Enough,” Hiresha said. She gestured ahead of the prow. “I suspect it’d be ill advised for us to sail under a dream storm.”

The glassy strands of Emesea’s hair stuck together in spines, some magenta from the glare of the storm on their left, other locks chartreuse from the one on their right.

She said, “We can squeeze between like an oiled anaconda.”

“The dream storms look remarkably like auroras, do they not, my heart?” Tethiel sat beside Hiresha, sending tingling waves up her hip and along her ribs. “Auroras that reach all the way down to stroke the sea.”

The boat lurched as Hiresha moved to the next plank. “And an ‘aurora’ is?”

“The northern lights,” he said. “Some people believe them to be rivers of dead spirits and fear them.”

In the storms, light sifted downward like sheets of colored sand. The sea reared upward to meet the essence falls. Hills of water crashed into each other, and Hiresha had no wish to test their boat among the swells.

“They are beautiful.” The storms played across the broad features of Tethiel’s face. His voice that most often lacked tone now had whisperings of reverence. “They must be deadly.”

“No, they’re more refreshing than a beer shower,” Emesea said. “You should swim into one.”

The next Hiresha remembered, she twitched awake to a silvery clamor. It sounded as if thousands of wind chimes smashed into each other. She looked behind to see the two dream storms clashing together. Fiery hues mixed with veils of lime.

Wind hissed past her ears. Salt-crusted clumps of her hair flicked against her cheeks.

The sea beneath the storms had taken on opalescent tones, shimmering with blues, greens, and reds. Waves chased each other, spinning into vortexes then collapsing into nothing.

Hiresha had never expected to witness such a mysterious spectacle of power. She felt a similar sense of privilege and wonder as she did when holding an uncut gemstone. Though she had never once worried that a turquoise or onyx in her hand might drown her.

Tethiel leaned close in the boat. He smelled of coffee beans, of a horse running over the desert, and of forgotten promises.

His hand lifted her chin. Tethiel grazed his lips against her cheek in a feathering of a kiss. A wonderful itching spread from her face until her entire skin shifted and refit itself to her body, more comfortable than ever. Hiresha thought Tethiel had been wrong to touch, to take advantage of her when exhaustion dampened her anger.

He said, “My heart, I don’t question lightning strikes, children’s laughter, or your decisions. Yet I will say I’ve never been so afraid.”

“Is that so?”

“Two people I love are perilously close to being lost at sea. You and myself.”

Hiresha was aware of her dress, cold and sliding over every inch of her skin. “I could wish to be closer to the shore.”

“When a plan has only one flaw, it has many.” He pitched his voice low and nodded to Emesea, who was cursing as she retied some next-to-invisible ropes. “She wants to smother me in my sleep. Her plan for you is, I fear, less benevolent.”

Hiresha meant to object, to say how Emesea had saved both their lives that day. Instead, the enchantress’s head sagged into the crook of her arm. She fell asleep again as the sun dawned on the Dream Storm Sea.