Jyrbian released her. He went to Bakrell, touched him as gently as a lover. “Don’t you want the pain to be over? Don’t you want this to end? All you have to do is tell me. Just tell me where I can find Igraine. I know you know where they were going. How else were you going to take Khallayne and Jelindra back?”
Unable to speak, Bakrell rolled his head back and forth. Back and forth. No.
His dull eyes stared out through swollen lids at Khallayne. For a moment, just a moment, there was recognition in his face. Horror. Understanding. “Forgive me,” he rasped, his voice a blood-filled whisper. With effort, he rolled his head back until Jyrbian was in his vision. “‘You won’t hurt her?” he rasped, and when Jyrbian agreed, whispered, “Near Schall. On the shore.”
His eyes slid shut. His head rolled heavily to the side. His chest heaved, then settled, and didn’t rise again.
For a moment, the silence in the room was overwhelming. With a triumphant malevolence, Jyrbian turned to the guard in the doorway. “Take a company immediately. Start tonight. Bring Igraine back to me, dead or alive. But the humans who guard him I want alive.”
The Ogre saluted smartly, disappearing into the dark corridor.
When his footfalls had died away, Jyrbian turned to Khallayne. “Allow me to escort you back to your apartment.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sunlight pierced deep into tbe clear blue waters of the Courrain Ocean. As she often did in the mornings, the Xocli paused, her large, flat tail moving lazily in the current, and turned one of her three heads to watch the return of her fellow sea creatures, riding the warming beams of light down from the surface.
A stately leaffish drifted by; the rippling fins for which it was named gamboled like ornaments, waving a warm good morning.
The nightly, vertical migration had begun at dusk. Tiny fish, too small for the Xocli to actually see, rose, seeking food. Slowly, the small fish that fed on the tiny ones followed, and the larger creatures followed them in turn. Nighttime in the depths of the Courrain Ocean was a totally different world than the day.
She watched the nightly dance and the morning return, though the Xocli didn’t rise with nightfall, not unless there was a voice, calling to her-as one called to her this morning, faintly and dimly.
The caller was not nearby, perhaps not even on the water, but she could feel the call of its sadness; the sorrow touched her core. Motioning to her children, she set out across the ocean floor, allowing the current to pull her along, take her where it would. There was no hurry. The melancholy of the caller would tell her when to rise.
One of her heads snapped up a larval shrimp floating on a sea leaf that sparkled like sequins. The tiny morsel made her hungry for more. She opened her three mouths and gulped in water, enjoying the rush of it through the gills on her necks.
Spectral light played across the gossamer, transparent mantle that shielded the organs in the Xocli’s necks and torso. Streaming along behind her, the little ones, the children, frolicked in and out of the beams of sunlight, diving below the reef and popping back out above or behind it.
The children ranged wide, then circled back to her as she turned. Not only was she avoiding the colder area north of the reef, where a vent in the ocean floor sent inky fluid smoking toward the surface, but the melancholy from the surface was stronger, singing in her bones, a siren song that could not be ignored.
The young were miniature copies of her: three heads sitting atop long necks, golden scales and fins rippling with all the colors of the ocean. The transparency of their young skin, their developing mantles, made them difficult to see against the reef, save for the brightness of their eyes.
She felt, rather than heard, the cry of one of the children. Turning back rapidly, she counted. One, two, three, against the reef. Another out on the floor, examining a miniature “chimney,” the beginnings of a vent, from which pale particles drifted upward. Another, still farther away, swam lazily. That left one unaccounted for, the one who was bugling in pain and fear.
The cry was coming from the north, from the vent. Ordering the others to stay away, she darted toward the sound. She twined her three long, thick necks and swam with her three heads nose-to-nose. Gone was the lazy, panoramic view of the underwater as she homed in on the pleas.
Visibility narrowed as she approached the vent. The smoky black fluid that spewed from the vent clouded the water until almost no sunlight penetrated. She swam by feel, following the vibration of her child. Its pitiful cries were weakening, moment by moment.
She bugled her distress, and a mere whimper was the only response from the lost one. She circled in the cloudy darkness. Just when she thought she would never find the little one, she saw it, its back closer to the reef than she had thought, trapped in the waving tentacles of a giant tube worm.
The tube worms were not maneuvering creatures. They lived out their lives attached to the reef or a boulder, unable to chase after their prey. They shot stinging tentacles into the current to capture their food, then dragged the stunned, hapless creature back in a deadly embrace.
The little one was mewling weakly. Held immobile in the grasp of the huge tentacles, it was drowning. The Xocli swept in toward it, screeching a cry of warning, of distress and challenge.
The tube worm, stupid and sluggish when feeding, was quick when it sensed prey. The stinging tentacles darted out and latched onto the tender flesh at the base of her necks.
Pain like the bite of hundreds of tiny teeth shot through her nervous system. She squealed and kicked backward with her large pectoral fin. Her weight and the power tore her loose, leaving her flesh on the barbed tentacles. She darted in again. And again the tube worm pricked her, pumping its venom into her veins.
She tore loose again, tearing several of the tubes from the base this time. She felt the whisper of the mindless creature’s anger conveyed through the water. She surged in once more, spreading her three necks as far as they would go, as wide, attacking from three different directions.
Ignoring her pain, she attacked. Again and again. Tireless. Desperate. She besieged the tube worm from above, below, charged in, a direct frontal assault. She tore off pieces of the ugly, writing tentacles, snapped whole clumps from the base.
The tube worm met her assault on all sides, spraying out a thick, noxious white poison in addition to the stinging tentacles. The Xocli backed away, blinded, bleeding, defeated. Her little one moved no more in the grasp of the tube worm. Its ululations stilled forever.
She reared back and sounded her distress, her grief. Her anguish was so great, it almost overwhelmed the calls from the surface. With one last glance back at the remains of her child, she swam upward, signaling for the other children to attend her.
She shot upward, heeding the siren call from above, feeding on the misery of the caller, drawing it into herself.
Added to her own sorrow, the emotion was overpowering. She gave vent to her pain. Anguish became fury, building inside her to a fever pitch, until the Xocli that broke the surface of the ocean, rising up into the air, was crazed with rage.
The tiny ships pitched on the ocean’s surface below her. And she drank in the fear and pain of the tiny beings that clung to the decks. She sucked in the anesthetizing, exhilarating emotions.