There was one way, maybe. But it required him to free up a hand.
It was hard enough to hold on with both of them. As soon as he let go with the right, the strain on the left, and the arm attached to it, became all but unbearable, and he cried out at the sudden jerk.
But the pull didn’t break his grip, at least not instantly. He must have done the octopus some harm, after all, enough to weaken it a little. Perhaps, then, he had the seconds he needed.
He groaned another incantation and twisted his right hand through an arcane pass. The extremity took on a pale silvery hue, and the fingertips lengthened into talons. A keen ridge, a blade to slash and hack, pushed out from the underside, from the base of the little finger to the wrist.
When the transformation was complete, he drew a deep breath, released the float, and allowed his tormentor to drag him back under the water.
He cut and tore at the octopus, severing two more of its limbs. It hauled him to its beak, and he slashed that, too, and the soft, pulsing flesh around it. He ripped and sliced, straining for one of the dark little eyes
The world exploded into blackness. For a moment he didn’t understand; then he realized the cephalopod had discharged its ink. Its tentacles released him, and he felt a spurt of pressure. The creature was jetting away. It had had enough.
He struggled back to the surface and, as his hand melted back into its normal shape, back onto the float. The shalarin regarded him for a moment, then turned and swam away.
“That’s right,” he wheezed, “you see, I am dangerous. You’d better not hang around, or…”
Oh, to Baator with it. Even if the shalarin had been able to hear and understand, he was too spent and in too much pain to finish the threat or do much of anything else. He knew he should examine his new wounds and check to see if the old one had started bleeding again, but it simply wasn’t in him. He could only lie still, trying not to cry or whimper too much, with his hands and feet dangling in the water.
Though he somehow avoided sliding or rolling off the float again, he kept drifting in and out of consciousness. Since oblivion washed away misery, he welcomed it. It might well mean the end was near, and during his lucid moments, he supposed that would be merciful. He was too stubborn to put an end to his suffering. He’d proved it twice today already. But the sun and sea might soon do it for him.
He closed his sore eyes. Just for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them, the stars were out and the water was black. He wondered if, without the sunlight baking him, he might last a few more hours and couldn’t make up his dazed, wretched mind whether to hope for it or not. Then he noticed a crested, oval-shaped object sticking up, beyond the float but almost within arm’s reach.
It was the shalarin’s head. The creature had returned and ventured close. Perhaps it reckoned he was finally weak enough to attack without any risk to itself.
The thought stirred the dregs of the resolve he generally felt in the face of danger. He tried to rear up so he could use his hands for self-defense but found he lacked the strength. All he could was flop around a little, like a dying fish in the bottom of a boat.
The shalarin surged up onto the float. The wooden surface rocked, but its new occupant centered its weight before it could overturn.
The creature gripped Anton. He struggled to shake it off but couldn’t manage that, either.
The shalarin rolled him onto his back. They were now closer than they’d ever been before, with no distorting layers of water between them, and despite the dark, he picked out details he hadn’t discerned hitherto. Slim as it was, it had a certain subtle fullness in the area that would be a woman’s bosom, as well as a breadth to its hips, that told him it was a she. Gill slits opened along her collarbone and above her ribs. A round markthe paucity of light prevented him from making out the coloradorned the center of her brow just below the beginning of the fin. The pendant was a skeletal handhuman, by the looks of itand she also wore a belt around her narrow waist. Attached were several pouches.
She unlaced one of the bags; extracted something small and roughly cubical in shape; and pressed it to his dry, cracked lips. He found the action mildly reassuring. She probably wouldn’t try to poison a man who was already dying, for what would be the point? The action suggested that, inexplicable as it seemed, she’d finally decided to help him.
Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to understand that his most pressing need was water, not food. He wondered if his swollen throat could even swallow anything solid without choking. But he’d try. Maybe the pellet, whatever it was, would help him a little, anyway.
When he sank his teeth into it, it burst into fragments and a copious quantity of oil. The liquid tasted so bitter that in other circumstances, he might have spit it out. But when he swallowed some, it assuaged his thirst like water.
He greedily consumed it and the solid mattersome sort of preserved fish? too. “Thank you,” he gasped.
The shalarin fed him two more cubes then produced a different sort of pellet. It was rounder, tasteless, and as tough to chew as the stalest ship’s biscuit he’d ever sampled. Still, hoping it would do him as much good as the other morsels had, he gnawed until it softened and broke apart.
As soon as he swallowed it, the shalarin gripped him with her long, webbed fingers. She half rolled, half shoved him toward the edge of the float.
“No!” he said. “Wait!”
But she wouldn’t relent. He struggled to resist and in other circumstances might have succeeded. He was an able wrestler and brawler, and his brawny frame surely outweighed her spindly body. But while the pellets had snatched him back from the brink of death, he was still weak as a baby, and his attempts to grapple and punch were pathetically ineffective.
The float tilted beneath him. Clasping him, the shalarin rolled down the incline, and they tumbled into the sea together. Kicking, she dragged him downward.
He kept struggling but still couldn’t break her grip. After a minute the burning in his chest demanded release. He let out the breath he’d clenched in his lungs and gulped in water instead.
It felt different than inhaling air. Water was heavier, more substantial, in his chest. But the sensation wasn’t unpleasant, and more important, he wasn’t drowning. Something the shalarin had fed himthe round morsel, he suspectedenabled him to breathe. Maybe it helped him to ignore the heightening pressure, too, considering that he didn’t need to pop his ears.
But the magic didn’t help him see. As he and the shalarin descended, the benighted waters rapidly became impenetrable to human sight. He couldn’t even make out his captor hauling him along. It reinforced his sense of utter helplessnessnot that it needed reinforcingand he simply hung limp in the shalarin’s grasp and allowed her to do as she would.
It was cold in the depths, though not insupportably so. Perhaps he had the pellets to thank for that as well. He had the feeling he was drifting in and out of awareness, but the unchanging blackness made it difficult to be certain.
Finally, a soft glow flowered in the murk. Below him stood a vast, intricate riot of coral, portions of it shining with its own inner light. Spires rose, or partly rose, from the tangled reefs like trees mired in parasitic vines. Anton might have assumed the city, half buried as it was, was an uninhabited ruin, except that the bluish cryscoral wasn’t the only source of illumination. Lamps shined in windows and along the boulevards. Altogether, the lights sufficed to reveal the tiny forms of the residents swimming to and fro.
Fascinated, Anton wished the shalarin would swim faster. He wanted to get closer and see more. But he passed out before he could.
Testing his strength and stamina, Anton swam back and forth and up and down at the end of the tether binding his ankle to the marble couch. The leathery cord reminded him unpleasantly of the octopus’s tentacles dragging him down.
Fortunately, barring a ring-shaped scar or two to go with all his others, nasty memories were all he retained from his ordeal. He was whole again, thanks to the shalarin. When he’d seen the skeletal hand hanging from her neck, he’d suspected she was a priestess of Umberlee, and she had in fact employed a cleric’s healing prayers to mend his damaged body.
What she hadn’t done was talk to him. Not once, no matter how he entreated her. Such indifference made him suspect she intended him for sacrifice or slavery. She was, after all, a servant of the Bitch Queen, goddess of drownings, shipwrecks, and all manner of deaths at sea, a power notoriously malign.
But if she did mean him ill, he didn’t intend to meet his fate like a sheep placidly awaiting the butcher’s
