Next, she purged everything except the raw, elemental sea from her imaginings. The reef, carved into grotesqueries pleasing to the ixitxachitls’ alien aesthetic, flowed into a form entirely natural but no less threatening, with coral spikes and edges to sting and tear, and countless crannies with moray eels lurking in their murky depths. Beyond, in a limitless ocean, krakens, sharks, squids, and demons pursued their prey, seizing and rending eternally, insatiable no matter how many victims they devoured.
She made the sky above scab over with inky storm clouds. Lightning flared, thunder roared, and rain hammered down. The wind screamed.
A corresponding violence erupted within the sea. The currents, strong and treacherous before, surged and became irresistible. They tumbled Tu’ala’keth from one impact to the next, slamming and scraping her against the coral.
A spell might have quelled the water, but it would also have defeated her purpose. She had to submit to the turmoil. She went limp and allowed the ocean to abuse her however it wished. The coral slashed and ground away her skin. Bones snapped in her foot and arm. Her right profile plunged toward a stony, branching growth, and even then, clenching herself, she managed not to flinch. The coral stabbed out her eye.
It was agony, but gradually, it became something greater as well, a transcendent state in which she was both the victim and the malevolent ocean smashing the life from its toy. The sea’s vast joy so eclipsed her pain that the latter became insignificant, and as her blood streamed away, and her heart stuttered out its final beats, she became aware of something greater still, a splendid dance of slaughter that was everything… and silence and peace at the core of the frenzy.
The fierce current bashed her once more then whirled her lifeless, flopping body beyond the reef. Small fish came to feed on her then fled when a colossal shadow engulfed them all.
Though dead, Tu’ala’keth could still see the prodigious octopuses and weresharks when they writhed and glided across her field of vision. What she couldn’t do was turn her head to behold the far huger entity whose familiars they were. She both yearned to see and was glad she couldn’t. Her instincts warned that the sight would be too much to bear, that ecstasy or terror might extinguish her utterly.
But she could pray, if only silently, and it seemed appropriate that she do so: I am trying to do my duty, great queen, as best as I understand it. It has taken me to strange places. Places where I am clumsy and ignorant. Places where I lose my way. Still I persist.
The answer came back as a wordless surge of passion as nuanced and intelligible as speech. At its core was malevolence. Umberlee hungered to destroy any creature who engaged her attention, her own priestesses included. But cruelty wasn’t the dominant note in the complex harmony that was her thought, but rather, subordinate to exhortation and a sort of cold, conditional approval.
The message, reduced to its essence, was this: You are on course, but the time grows short. Kill for me. Kill everything that stands in the way of your goal.
With that, the goddess and her retinue moved on, disappearing as quickly as they’d arrived. Tu’ala’keth’s heart thumped and kept on beating thereafter. The water flowing into her gills washed the blighted immobility from her limbs. Her broken bones knit, and new skin flowed over her wounds.
It was time to reconstruct physical reality. She quelled the currents then added the contours of the vault, the heaps of eggs, and Yzil to her visualization.
In so doing, she shifted her awareness back to the mundane world, but remained deep in trance even so. Though free of pain, her body was exquisitely sensitive, as if from the battering her spirit had endured. It enabled her to feel water flowing and yielding all the way across the chamber.
She was reluctant to move or unveil her eyes for fear it might dull her newfound powers of perception. Still, Yzil, an acute observer in his own right, discerned a change in her.
“Can you speak?” he asked.
She decided she could. “Yes.”
“You traveled a long time.”
“I journeyed all the way to the Blood Sea, in Fury’s Heart.” It was there Umberlee herself had deigned to recognize her. She felt a pang of wonder and wished she could speak of it, but it was too holy and private an experience to share with an unbeliever.
“Did it do what it was supposed to?”
“Yes, but this is new to me. I did well to send the guards away. As I suspected, their movements might have confused my perceptions and blinded me to the emergence of our foe.”
“I hope it does emerge. While your spirit was away, it occurred to me that the enemy, if it understands our situation, need only take a night off. Then we won’t be able to vanquish it and will have to endure the consequences of our failure.”
“Nonsense. If the entity does not destroy any eggs, we will claim victory, and how can Shex refute us?
The ‘chitl chuckled. “When you put it that way, I don’t suppose he can. I’ve missed that shrewd mind of yours. I’m lucky you returned just when I could make use of you.”
“As I am fortunate your situation is desperate enough that you were willing to promise aid in return.”
Except that it wasn’t truly a matter of luck. It was possibility, pattern, and energy rising from the boil of coincidence that was the universe to guide and empower those who embraced the furor. But she knew she didn’t need to explain it. Yzil, himself a cleric of chaos, albeit vowed to a lesser deity, already understood.
“You never really told me who it is you want to attack,” he said.
“Dragons and the coven of necromancers who worship them.”
He eyed her askance. “I’m not sure I ever heard you joke before.”
“Nor have you now. I told you it would be difficult, but-“
She sensed surreptitious motion and pivoted in that direction. Something was there, hovering above a pale mound of eggs, but she couldn’t make out what. It clutched one of the soft orbs in its jaws, fingers, or claws and squished it to jelly then it was gone.
“Do you see it?” Yzil said.
“Almost,” she said. Trailing strands of slime, an egg bobbed up from another pile and ruptured into goo and drifting specks.
“We need better than ‘almost,’” the ixitxachitl snarled. Flat, flexible body writhing, lashing tail defining mystic figures, he rattled off a prayer. A virulent darkness billowed across the chamber like an octopus’s ink, but lacking a clear target, failed to achieve an effect. As it faded from existence, a third egg crumpled and burst.
Tu’ala’keth focused… focused… gradually discerned intermittent flurries of motion… then suddenly saw the creatures clearly.
They weren’t invisible in the technical sense, but might as well have been, for they were made of the same saltwater that surrounded them, congealing from it to break the eggs then dissolving back into it. It was the reason no ward could keep them out. They could manifest wherever water was, and in Seros, that was everyplace.
Their forms were flowing, inconstant, swelling and dwindling from one second to the next. A double-headed eel became a crab then passed from existence into lurking potentiality. A dolphin-thing abandoned any semblance of a fixed shape for the oozing bell-shaped body and trailing tendrils of a jellyfish. The constant transformations made them difficult to count, but there were at least half a dozen.
That was too many, but Tu’ala’keth reassured herself that at least she had a fix on them now, and they were some breed of water elemental, subject to the innate authority of a waveservant no less than fish and ixitxachitls. She gripped the drowned man’s hand and evoked a flare of Umberlee’s majesty.
The intangible blast hurled them backward, and their presence on the physical plane became more definite. Though still twisting from one shape to the next, they were no longer bleeding in and out of the world entirely, and Yzil exclaimed as he spotted them at last. Tu’ala’keth’s display of faith hadn’t destroyed or cowed them, but it had, for the moment, frozen them in a condition that would enable her and the ‘chitl to come to grips with them.