of panic, not helped by the cold currents from the trench playing across her diving suit. As cold as hell, a voice inside her whispered. Somehow, she knew that this was the reason they were fighting here. The nomads believed that the trench was the opening to the underworld.
Someone in the ring of surrounding seanore — it might have been Tera — held a crystal aloft on the end of a staff, triggering a short sunburst from the gem. Vane didn’t need any further urging; the chieftain launched himself above her head, short powerful thrusts of his legs powering him through the water. It was all Charlotte could do to spin around trying to fix his continually shifting position. If the clan leader had been minded to, he could have torn the spine of her suit open on the way past. Bastard. He’s playing with me. The roar of the crowd transmitted to her speaker box diminished to a distant surf as she raised the short glittering head of her spear against Vane — but the nomad wasn’t where she thought he would be. Where?
‘Over here,’ hissed Vane, a shadow moving off her side. ‘Has the silver-beard not trained you better than this? Can’t you even swim, surface dweller?’
She contorted around and jabbed out, but the chieftain was moving too fast, a sinuous twisting shape beating an undulating passage through the waves as though he was a merman.
‘What would you do among the seanore, what good would you be?’ he laughed. ‘I would not trust you to clean the seaweed off our nets.’
Vane darted in and stabbed her in the right thigh, a quick piercing pain burning her muscles. So fast. She yelled in anger and tried to thrust back, but he was already gone, an underwater whiplash retreating. The water around her leg was misting with blood, her blood. I don’t have that much to spare to begin with. At this rate she wasn’t going to last until Vane came at her from behind to sever her rebreather’s air pipes. Charlotte willed the Eye of Fate into life, but instead of the tug of power that usually filled her when the jewel leaked its hypnotic radiation, her head flared with an aching light. A panicked breath as she mistook this new spinning lance of pain for the ground falling away under her feet.
‘Foolish girl,’ something whispered. ‘Duelling with a lowly nomad of the depths.’ The words were coming out of Charlotte’s lips, but not at the bidding of her mind!
Not my voice! That’s ‘Elizica. I told you, girl-child, you walk in my footsteps.’
Vane slashed at Charlotte’s arm with the jagged gem-bladed shaft, but she had already turned and kicked herself away. A slight, spare movement, but the inch of distance between Charlotte and the spear might as well have been a mile. The clan leader hissed in frustration as he realized she had avoided his blow.
‘And now, my footsteps walk in you,’ whispered Elizica.
‘What are you babbling about, surface dweller?’ snarled Vane.
‘That a clan chief should be more careful who he chooses to fight.’
The gem nestled between Charlotte’s breasts weighed down as heavy as a block of lead, absorbing all of her mass, the rest of her left so light, buoyant and quicksilver fast. The jewel’s energies were not entering Vane, casting a glamour over him. They were entering Charlotte, binding her, changing her. What is this?
‘The Eye of Fate has had many owners over the ages. Even I was not the first of them, although I had a hand in refashioning the eye’s original purpose. I wore it once, my soul imprinted across its angles when I walked where you walked,’ said Elizica.
Charlotte had worn the Eye of Fate for so long, how had she failed to see? All these years, had she been using the amulet or had the jewel been using her? Preparing Charlotte until the shock of her confrontation in the pie shop reawakened the gem’s true purpose.
As Charlotte spoke a dead queen’s words, her left hand fiddled with the controls on the chest-mounted speaker box, her right turning the spear, tracing a deadly pattern through the water. Slowly, the constant roar of the crowd died away to be replaced by a different sound… a low-pitched whistling rising and falling. The modulation of the box was changing with the sinuous movement of Vane circling Charlotte, the clan leader trying to unsettle her into dizziness. You’ve changed the range and frequency of the box. I can track him!
‘That’s all sound is underwater… sonar.’
‘The sounds of your death scream!’ cried Vane, arrowing in with his spear to impale Charlotte. She bent herself into a ball, before unfolding on the charging clan leader’s flank, cutting out with her spear’s blade like a sword. Vane connected with its lethal edge along his ribs, an explosion of blood clouding above the seabed.
‘You bleed red blood, gill-neck, just the same as me. Why is that, I wonder?’
Vane moaned, clutching his side and no doubt re-evaluating his options now that Charlotte was proving to be an opponent worthy of the challenge.
‘I think it’s because your ancestors were outcasts who slunk into the sea because they were too lazy to survive on the surface. They were sitting in a bath for weeks and discovered they enjoyed it too much to ever go back to the hunt. And look at you, the mighty Vane, unable even to defeat the young fancy-piece of the man that got your father killed,’ laughed Charlotte. ‘I can taste your blood in the water, Vane, and it runs true. Your father was probably sitting on his fat arse when the tiger crabs turned up for him.’
Vane yelled in fury, closing with her. Rather than avoiding him, Charlotte stepped in, her body matching his in a supple grip of angles and joint-locks, twisting him about, stealing his momentum, thieving his considerable strength. There was a groan as Vane hit the rocky seabed, a shower of sand rising up from the slam. Charlotte had him pinned beneath her boot, the blade of her spear pushed a fraction of an inch underneath the green scales of his bare neck, ready to be hammered through his thyroid cartilage if he so much as quivered.
‘The silver-beard tricked me,’ moaned Vane. ‘You’re not what you appear to be.’
‘Which of us is, leader of the Clan Raldama?’ Her fingers fumbled with the speaker box, adjusting it back to its normal range and she called out. ‘Do I hold his life before my blade?’
Cries of confirmation returned from the seanore, uncertain at first, then louder and clearer as the magnitude of the turnaround in the arena became apparent to the clan.
‘Finish me,’ demanded Vane.
‘But I am not finished with you,’ said Charlotte. ‘I have need of you.’ She pushed her palm out. ‘I have need of you all!’
Tera had entered the arena through the space in the fence of rotor-spears, the wise woman swimming in above the pinned leader and the challenge’s victor. ‘Who are you, creature? What is your true name?’
‘Would you know me better if I carried a silver trident down from the surface? Would you know me better if I entered the ocean from a beach, two lions walking by my side? Lions that swam alongside me?’
Tera fell back, shocked.
Charlotte nodded. ‘It is good that you still sing the songs from the time before the sides of the sea froze. I am returned.’
‘What else, what else has returned?’
‘You know the prophecy of the shadowed sea.’
Tera cowered above the rocks. ‘A thief shall walk among us. A thief to fight the greater thieves, the thieves of life!’
Dick groaned as the two guards dragged his beaten body out into the light, throwing him onto the ground in front of Boxiron and Sadly. The two of them were helping him out of the dirt when the silhouette of a gill-neck loomed in front of Dick’s vision, light from the high, hot sun glinting off his metallic vest. Dick didn’t need to note the creature’s finery, his jewelled insect swatter or the entourage hanging back from him. The swagger of the gill-neck was easy to read. Another bloody officer.
‘You have missed my welcoming speech to the other surface dwellers,’ said the gill-neck officer, as if the fact of their imprisonment in the camp cells had been an act of provocation on their part. ‘I am On’esse, the camp commandant. I only ask two things of my prisoners. First, you do what any gill-neck orders you to do. Second, you work until you die. There are only two punishments for breaking these rules. One is death. The other will make you wish for it.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Sadly. ‘But what is this work, I ask?’
‘A pertinent question,’ said the gill-neck. He moved forward and kicked the cane out of Sadly’s hand, sending him falling to the floor; then he lashed into the informant’s stomach with his boot, Sadly rolling away in agony. ‘But I am not here to answer your questions. Anything you need to know, you diseased surface-dwelling scum, you will be told when we require it. Anything else, you can beg or steal from the other inmates here.’ He clicked his fingers and a prisoner ran forward, her tattered uniform laden down with a silver tank. She hosed the officer with a thin mist of water and his face bobbed in pleasure as he absorbed the moisture. ‘Barely tolerable, much like life here. I loathe
