A kuo-toa on his flank shoved a spear into Thoster’s left hip.
“Umberlee’s lying lips!” he said.
He took a step back, but his sword found the throat of an attacker. The creature blackened with poison and fell, but another kuo-toa immediately stepped into the gap.
Thoster tried to take another step, but the smooth curve of the mainsail ended his retreat. At least they couldn’t get behind him, he thought.
The exclamations of his crew grew more desperate. Thoster couldn’t spare a moment to assess the situation. It was all he could do to keep the five creatures pressing him from sliding something sharp into his viscera.
Then the kuo-toa on his right spit up blood and dropped. A sheen of light briefly illuminated … something standing behind it.
The creature next to it turned to see what happened to its comrade, but before it could complete its motion, it screamed. It joined the first on Green Siren’s deck. The same sparkle of golden light hinted at an invisible presence.
“Anusha?” the captain said, and plunged his sword through one of the remaining confused kuo-toa.
Yet another of his attackers shrieked and fell.
“None other!” came the woman’s voice from an empty point in space.
The combined effort of his poisonous blade and her invisible one broke the wedge of attackers into so many unmoving fishy corpses.
The deck vibrated beneath his boots an instant before Yeva appeared from the doorway leading to the ship cabins. Four milling kuo-toa rushed her. She glanced in their direction. A corona briefly flared into an elaborate pattern of light haloing her head, and two of the four tumbled and lay still.
The other two didn’t flinch. One stabbed Yeva in the stomach; its spear broke on her metal body. The other tried to run past her through the door, but she stopped it cold with an iron punch to the face.
“Why are the kuo-toa attacking us, Captain?” said Anusha’s voice.
He shrugged. “They’re babbling something, but I ain’t proficient in fish talk,” he said, grabbing his amulet.
When he touched it, his sense of the ethereal music sleeting through his head faded, and the chant the creatures uttered lost its familiarity. But something in him was kin to the fatherless biters, and both Anusha and he knew it. She did him the courtesy of not pursuing the issue.
Another wave of kuo-toa swept over the railings on both the port and starboard sides simultaneously.
“How many are there?” Yeva yelled.
“Too many,” he said. “Yeva, you and Anusha are worth five of my crew put together. Hold ’em off the port side. I’ll help the lads keep starboard clear.”
He swept into the press, wielding his sword like a scythe; with it, he reaped.
But no matter how many kuo-toa they killed, more leaped out of the water. Their awful, lisping chant, voiced nearly as one, was thick in the air. The words tugged at him, urging him to accept some terrible insight. Part of him wanted to look. Most of him wanted to turn tail and run the other way.
Thoster’s shadow reached out across the deck for an instant as thunder cracked, too close.
He whirled and saw Yeva lying unmoving, face down. Her metal skin glowed a dull red. Where her body touched the deck, wood smoldered.
Two kuo-toa with elaborate headdresses and brandishing pincer spears stood near the fallen woman. Residual sparks of electricity danced between them. They reminded him of the priestess Nogah, whose strange message had pulled him into the mess in the first place. If those two shared anything like the power Nogah had been able to command, Green Siren was in trouble.
Kuo-toa stampeded through the doorway Yeva had guarded, into the crew cabins.
“They’ll find my luggage!” came Anusha’s voice.
She briefly materialized, resplendent in golden armor. She hewed into the rear flank of the creatures swarming the cabinway.
“Here! This way!” she yelled. “I’m right here!”
A few of the boarders turned to engage her. Most didn’t.
The anxiety fluttering in his stomach redoubled. Green Siren was being swamped beneath a horde whose numbers seemed endless. If ten or twenty kuo-toa appeared for every defender, the ship would be lost no matter how much power he, Yeva, or Anusha could bring to bear individually. And Yeva didn’t look like she was part of the fight any longer. Anusha might soon follow; if she wasn’t able to defend her body, her phantom self would be snuffed out too.
He had to do something. But he was terrified to try.
“You’d rather be dead?” he muttered to himself as he pushed his sword into the stomach of a kuo-toa trying to do the same to him with its spear. His enemy curled into a knot of unmoving scales.
With his shaking free hand, Thoster grabbed his amulet. He jerked hard, parting the leather strand securing it around his neck. He dropped it into a jacket pocket.
The ethereal music resolved to a symphony of dire portent and crystal-clear meaning. The chant of the kuo-toa sounded in nearly perfect accompaniment. The kuo-toa were indeed set to guard the ocean beneath the hovering city of Xxiphu.
With his mind now naked to the penetrating emanation, Thoster was commanded to do the same.
“No,” he said. “I am Eneas Thoster. I am slave to no one!”
The clamor of Xxiphu’s melody redoubled. He resisted the authority the music tried to assert over him. It did not have the right. Xxiphu was claiming dominion where it should have none. And Thoster wasn’t going to stand for it.
His fear turned suddenly to anger.
Something inside him reacted. Like a burning taper set to a pile of oil-soaked tinder, rage flared in his chest. It filled him up like waves fill a bay at stormcrest. It was intoxicating. His eyes and mouth popped wide, and he screamed out a challenge. His voice was louder and deeper than was humanly possible, but he was too caught up in the surge of his fury to marvel at the volume.
His wrath burned away his wall of denial. Time to stop hiding from himself.
He was of kuo-toa lineage.
Denying it was a childish pursuit. Because, he suddenly understood, the blood that flowed in his veins was akin to the scaly forms that surged around him, but … it was also more potent. There was a strength in him that the kuo-toa around him lacked.
He reached for that strength, and it fitted itself to him like a comfortable pair of gauntlets.
His shadow wavered on the deck, seeming to inflate for a moment before becoming his own shape again.
Thoster’s gaze fell upon the two kuo-toa wielding lightning. They stared back at him. Their confident grip on their pincer spears grew slack in confusion.
One spoke. Her voice slurred as it attempted Common. “What … What is this? Who are you … Should we know you?”
Thoster didn’t have an answer for her.
Anusha’s form wavered into existence once again, convulsing. It disappeared in a puff of golden light. A scream, Anusha’s physical, fleshy scream, echoed down the crowded cabinway. The invaders had found her sleeping body. Time was up.
He bellowed out a command of his own. “Stop your attack!” He felt his voice partly reaching into that same mental plane in which Xxiphu’s mental command reverberated.
All around him, kuo-toa paused.
Thoster raised both hands over his head, the palms spread wide. A vibrancy tingled beneath his skin, a feeling of freedom that, for the first time, didn’t terrify him. He wanted to see what he truly was.
Time for worry was long past. He channeled all the power surging through him into his voice. “Leave these waters, kuo-toa!” he called. “By the right of my blood, which I share with you, listen to me! Forsake this false idol, lest it command you to your doom.”
His last word hung in the air and in the ethereal space beyond hearing like the tolling of a cathedral bell. His shadow enlarged once more for the length of a heartbeat. When the sound finally died away, Thoster slumped to the decking, utterly wrung out.