Three Times Chosen Read online

  Pointing to the tapered summit of Mont Plaas, the Subos snapped defensively, “Cone wasn't built in a day! Give me room to operate."

  Working his magic on the expectant crowd, Eskaa embellished his findings. “It is as the Elementals forewarned. This Fish-with-Hands is the tip of the reef. A mighty warrior is Der-kay, dispatched by his chieftain on a suicide swim to bump off ours. Lying in wait in the lagoon, his intent was to ambush our revered Dokran at the first opportunity to present itself.” There was a critical ring of truth to Eskaa's lie; Durgay was expecting to die.

  Positioned at Ryops’ side, Chulib sized up the likely assassin. “If he's the mightiest fighter the Fish-with-Hands can field, our conquest will be a doddle."

  The Dokran's snouted mug showed confusion. “You favour the invasion?"

  Chulib inflated his throat sacs with pride. “I'm a warrior, Dokran. There's nothing better for me to like than a good scrap."

  Seemingly the only one on the island not buying Eskaa's creative licence, Ryops nonetheless gave the Subos the go ahead to play out his game. “Ask the beast if the female with him was his accomplice."

  "His name is Der-kay."

  The chieftain sneered. “I named the fiddler crab I kept as a pet when a froglet. That didn't smarten up its piddling brain any."

  "Did you call it Crabby, after your disposition?"

  "Get on with what you do best, Eskaa. Stretching the truth tauter than a bungee vine."

  "As my Dokran wishes.” After a brief, one-sided discourse Eskaa relayed the bad news. “He's clammed up, Ryops. But I have just the incentive to loosen his tongue."

  "Just so long as that doesn't involve a flambeau. The smell of smoked fish turns my stomach."

  * * * *

  "Der-kay ... saw."

  Swung around by manhandling acolytes, Durgay gazed on after being steadied as other labourers hauled by dragropes a tarp-covered sled up the beach through the parting crowd. Uncomfortable as he was, gulping down mouthfuls of desiccated air to relieve the strain on his overworked gills, the approaching freight transfixed him. Seagulls, from his viewpoint, screeched underhead, flocking noisily like monstrous blowflies drawn in by the enticing reek of rotting fish wafting from the sled.

  "Der-kay ... on look,” Eskaa directed the merman again, yanking off the bark cloth with a flourish to unveil the load weighing down the sled. Acolytes wielding sticks beat off the scavenging gulls.

  The grisly lump of mutilated flesh was unrecognisably Cetari. Pitifully just a headless and tailless torso, only the sparse blotches of steely blue skin unpainted by the greying putrefaction of death pointed to the corpse's merfolk heritage. Bloodless stumps where the hands should be reduced the flaccid arms to useless sticks of wasted flesh. Wilted breasts speckled with crusty red needlessly identified the pathetic carcass as Lorea's.

  To the best of Durgay's knowledge she remained the only other captive merperson within a twenty-mile radius of Lunder Atoll. Slaughtered by amphib butchers, the meatiest part of her was hacked off and dished up to the Shurpeha, the preferred islanders savouring the grilled tail cuisine. Chulib was favoured with the delicacies of sautéed heart, liver, and brain, while the misfortunate mergirl's hollowed-out head served a new function as nut bowl.

  Pointing to the dismembered cadaver, Eskaa asked, “Girl who ... Der-kay?"

  Possessing no tear ducts with which to physically cry, the mourning Fisher wept on the inside for the murdered princess. Pricklier than a porcupine fish and as charmless as a sea snake, the royal sprat did not deserve such an inglorious death.

  "Who she?” pressed the Subos.

  From a place of untapped resilience deep within his dejected psyche, a shaft of defiance purged Durgay of melancholy, stiffening his backbone. Mislaid courage rammed aside pain and disgrace, empowering the hapless merman to boldly chirp, “Scah, float belly up into the Sky Sea."

  While the Cetari phrasing went straight over Eskaa's head, the tone of the “Go to Hell” insult did not. Gesturing again to Lorea's chopped up remains, he threatened, “Der-kay talk ... Der-kay die same."

  The uncaring old Fisher shrugged. “Durgay die anyway."

  "Der-kay talk!” insisted the Subos. “Who girl? ... Like you come many ... Island fight will."

  "May Nupterus raise the stormy ocean into a monstrous wave to deluge this bone-dry rock,” Durgay clicked back.

  Losing patience, Eskaa balled his right hand and punched the merman in the face. His flying fist struck bone, scraping against the hoop of nodules armouring Durgay's left eye socket. Suddenly animate, Durgay twisted in his tail-noose, his thrashing body bowling Eskaa over. Emitting a high-pitched trill, which pulsed through the windless predawn air like a siren, the Landhoppers nearest the warbling Fisher covered their earholes with their hands and fell back.

  The canary of the seas was indeed singing!

  * * * *

  "Can't wait to hear the translation for that."

  Eskaa picked himself up off the cushioning sand as Ryops and the others within hearing of the now silent Fish-with-Hands uncovered their ringing ears. Nursing his bruised knuckles and ego, the shaken magician-priest granted the scornful Dokran's wish Subos style by playing up to the stunned crowd. Cuing waiting drummers, he skilfully synchronised his words with the throbbing tom-toms.

  "Straight from the seahorse's mouth Der-kay demonstrates the viciousness of Fish-with-Hands! Smote you down with voice and violence, will he. Witnessed have you all the power that mayhap destroys the Blessed Isle.

  "Say you, how can thinking fish smite the atoll? Breathe water do they. Unable to hop the land are they. Mark my words. Do fear. Der-kay revealed with evil pride the devilfish master plan. Seed our reef did they with the blight which emptied our salty waters of food. Schemed have they to starve us into Dughenna, ensuring the ocean alone is their domain.

  "Take heart, for the Forces That Have Always Been, the Powers That Ever Are, watch over and protect us. “Strike without mercy,” Divine Enayres and Holy Ceretas urge with one voice, “and the land shalt master the seas.” Good triumphs over Evil. The Piawro will prevail!"

  A tumultuous roar from the roused crowd drowned out the zealous Subos, rocking Durgay with its ferocious intensity. Taking up the chant "Earth ... wind ... water ... fire, grants Piawro hearts” desire" the impelled amphibs began to jump-dance, following the tempo set by the controlling hoppers. Leaping vertically eleven feet and higher to the frenetic drumbeat, the sand absorbed the gross tonnage of the jigging chanters landing in unison.

  Shouting to be heard over the din, Ryops found his concerns over the mergirl's participation validated by Eskaa. “The female was Der-kay's guide,” the Subos yelled back.

  "What of that squeal?"

  "Lamenting his cohort's fate. You'd scream too, staring that death in the face and realising you're next."

  "How many Fish-with-Hands face us out there in the open ocean?"

  "Not enough to defeat you,” Eskaa lied.

  As the Subos hopped off to bask in the rhythm of his handiwork, Ryops waved Chulib over. “It's time to put an end to this charade before it gets out of hand. Take your best Shurpeha and silence those drums. Be tactful, Chu. We don't want to incite an uprising."

  "No swords then?"

  "Not unless you can slice and dice that whole mob before they can crush you."

  The loyal guard captain hesitated, his miniscule brain ticking over. “You aren't persuaded the Fish-with-Hands are thinkers? Eskaa's dialogue was awfully convincing."

  "Well rehearsed, Chulib. There is a difference. Eskaa staged the whole shebang. Blow bubbles in the water at a froglet and it automatically copies you. Eskaa imitates the devilfish's animal noises and when the creature apes them he pretends to understand. It's simple mimicry. This freak show changes nothing. The Fish-with-Hands remain dumb brutes."

  "Then why go along with this war, Dokran?” puzzled Chulib, tacking on his personal observation, “Not that I mind the chance for a spot of action that'll bring more grub
to boot."

  Yelling to his blockheaded confidant, Ryops shared his innermost fear. “The pending harvest will not avert the downfall of the Piawro, and returning to the desert mainland is out of the question; it is an anathema. Already we overburden our fragile atoll. R'bat will double in size within our lifetimes. Corakk shall be depleted of timber and titbits in less than a generation, sickness spreading like sand on the wind after that. Dying from maladies with a full belly is small comfort.” Clenching his fist, Ryops swore, “I'm damned if I'll be remembered as the Dokran who ushered the Piawro into extinction. My chieftainship will end with a croak, not a ribbit."

  Chulib was diplomatic enough to refrain from pointing out there would be no amphibs left to remember anyone by the time doom snuffed out the Piawro. Moving decisively to muffle the drums, he was amused to see afterwards the dancing chanters continue to leap ecstatically without the beat.

  Raising his arms to pacify the dancers, Ryops was as ineffective as a shrimp vying for the attention of a whale. Behind him, backlit by the glowing bonfire, Eskaa revelled in the unnoticed Dokran's impotence before mirroring the gesture. Minutes later the chanting ceased and the leapers quit their impromptu dance as word spread of additional speeches.

  When the envious chieftain angrily turned back to Eskaa, the shadowy Subos flaunted his hands and leered in the settling silence. “It's all in the wrist."

  Resolving not to have Eskaa upstage him further, Ryops croaked arrestingly, “And now for the main event you've all been waiting for!” As befitting his station, the Dokran momentarily became the centre of the Piawro universe. Excited chattering buzzed through the audience. There had not been a good old-fashioned sacrifice in ages!

  Ryops only brought his people disappointment when he announced, “I have, after deliberation, decided to set the devilfish free. Let him swim home with his tail between his arms (a gymnastic feat surely!) to spread word of our coming, so that the might of the Piawro strikes terror into the hearts of our enemies."

  Disgruntlement again irritated the crowd.

  Pulling Ryops away from the spotlighting fire, Eskaa raged, “Have you lost all your coconuts? Your misguided sense of fair play will get us all killed. That mob over there is out for blood. It doesn't matter if it's Der-kay's or yours that is shed. I doubt even I could control that lot once they get out of hand. Only a drop of the red stuff will placate them, and rest assured it won't be mine either."

  Glancing at his nearest Shurpeha guard, Ryops advised, “Unhand me, Eskaa. You're making a spectacle of yourself."

  Backing off, the Subos said, “Leave the grandstanding to me, Ryops. You invariably make a hash of it.” Salvaging the messy situation, Eskaa sweet-talked the restless natives. “You did not mishear the Dokran. What fun would a sacrifice be without a little sport? Cut the devilfish loose and throw him back into the lagoon."

  Bewildered acolytes leapt to do their master's bidding. Swivelling the pole around ninety degrees, one of their number drew a wooden, toothed knife from his rope belt and sawed through the line holding the Cetari captive. With a loud splash the freed merman dropped into the lifesaving water and disappeared, save for a stream of bubbles popping on the disturbed surface.

  Thousands of pairs of questioning eyes rested once more on Eskaa. Like an actor born to the role, he played his jumpy audience with the mastery of a reed flutist. Waiting until the tension built up to an unbearable level, straining the nerves of the spectators to near breaking point, the Subos dramatically uttered two words laced with dread.

  "Release Cuddles!"

  * * * *

  Durgay sank like a stone. His useless tail muscles cramping up after days of prolonged immobility, the disabled merman drifted headfirst down the elevation of the lifeless coral wall ten, fifteen, twenty feet, gently coming to rest face up on the sandy lagoon bottom thirty feet below. Soon the emerging sun would reheat the super salty water irritating his gills to a temperature a shade beneath boiling, so for now Durgay revelled in the coolness, letting feeling seep back into his numbed flukes.

  Funny. I don't feel free.

  Bounty Reef remained a million nautical miles away. Invalided at the bottom of the sea—alright, a shallow tidal pool—Durgay stared up at the distorted faces of his tormentors lining the low bluff overlooking the northernmost sweep of the lagoon. What were the peering Landhoppers playing at? Why were they simply letting him go without further torture? Had they something more terrible in store than those cruel heat sticks?

  Too feeble to really care and half expecting not to make it any farther, Durgay lounged on the cushy seafloor. Automatically adjusting to the languid undercurrents swirling the lagoon, he perceived an outgoing tide change midway in the making. Hope raised its weakly head, and for the first time in five days since his apprehension and torture the Fisher actually contemplated escape.

  A grating sound jarred the deathly silent waters of Harvest Shallows, amplified by the acoustics of the lagoon's curve. Listening intently, Durgay lacked the personal knowledge to properly identify the unsettling noise. How could he realise at the extreme northern rim of the lagoon a slatted timber gate closing off a large bamboo pen was being arduously winched open, unleashing the horror contained within.

  Remembering with a shudder that nameless bulk on the periphery of his aural vision when first coming to after his capture, Durgay committed himself to a full sonar sweep. Floating upright, he projected a cone of high-frequency sound waves outwards in the general direction of the racket. Again the curvature of the enclosing coral played havoc with the returns, hazing the clicking merman's imaging. Frustrated, Durgay looked to the Landhoppers for divulgence and found them all gazing to the north, bar one; the weirdly blemished Scah leered at the short-sighted Cetari with a murderous grin.

  Terror gave Durgay flying fish wings.

  Adrenalin pumped through his veins like a wonder drug. Impelled by primal fear of the unknown, the juiced up merman took off like a scalded catfish. Pain, hunger, and exhaustion all dropped by the wayside as survival instincts overrode conscious thought. His underwater flight was mimicked landside by bounding amphibs keeping pace with the show's changing venue. Powered by broad sweeps of his fluked tail, Durgay raced away from whatever calamity approached. Unfortunately, he picked the wrong way.

  A sinuous shape undulated ahead of him, blotting out the diffuse light cast by the golden-rayed, pinkish sky. Purpose speeded up Durgay and he dove under the bow wave of displaced water preceding the colossus, mechanically hugging the bottom. Rolling onto his back, Durgay quaked as an impressively monstrous tylo-croc passed above, eyeing him hungrily. Never having personally encountered a marine reptile of such fearsome proportions, legend informed him of his immediate peril.

  1,300 lbs of twenty-foot long marine crocodile cruised effortlessly along propelled by sideways swishes of its down-turned, shark-like tail. Lacking the body armour of its heftier land-based cousins, the smooth emerald skin striped with camouflaging bands of grey maximised this lighter crocodilian's speed and flexibility. Steered and braked by its four flippered limbs, the streamlined seagoing reptile executed a flawless Split-S: an inverted roll followed by a half loop bringing the agile predator smack on the merman's track.

  No match physically for the super croc and utterly defenceless without his trident, Durgay's only choice was to outthink the fanged brute bearing down on him. Throwing caution to the current, the Fisher insanely attacked.

  Cuddles was far from being your average tylo-croc. For untold years her kind, relics of a bygone reptilian age which inspired local sea serpent legends, plied the shallow seas bordering Lunder Atoll unchallenged, ambushing reef fishes and beaching on the mothering sands to lay their precious eggs in a lasting link with the land. The arrival of the Piawro ended that unchanging lifestyle. Like a horde of vacuum cleaners amphib egg thieves sucked dry the croc nests, robbing the ancient reptiles of their chance to reproduce for the sake of making omelettes. Others trapped the adults themselves, purely for sport at
first and then food as crocodile cutlets and casseroles proved a scrumptious addition to the menu. The combined pressures of hunting and egg-collecting tipped the scales out of favour for the persecuted tylo-crocs and they disappeared entirely from the atoll, retreating to unpopulated islets further south to recover and prevent their dwindling numbers falling into the abyss of extinction.

  Instinct can be an unstoppable force and centuries later beachcombing froglets found a juvenile breeder marooned in the surf, the pooped female having swum hundreds of miles in search of the hatchery her grandmother's grandmother remembered. Rather than butcher the plucky reptile, the Subos of that particular decade took the stranding as an omen Piawro fortunes were reversing and adopted her as the island's unofficial mascot. Untameable and with a thorny disposition to boot, she was blithely misnamed Cuddles and fed scraps from the Dokran's sumptuous table. Needless to say the slow demise of the amphibs continued unabated even with crocodilian patronage.

  Eskaa inherited Cuddles when she was celebrating her thirtieth year of caged indolence. Brutalising his pet with underfeeding and a barbed, fishbone-headed goad used as a tickler, over the next ten years he malformed her into the leanest, meanest, and orneriest tylo-croc this side of Pah Ocean. Told you Cuddles went beyond being ordinary.

  She was also the craftiest crocodile alive. Sensing the underwater disturbance must be prey, after exiting her enclosure Cuddles advanced along the western rim of the lagoon aiming to surprise her takeaway. Catching an eyeful of the injured Cetari, the tylo-croc settled into an undemanding chase. Eskaa had planned to feed the merman to her anyway; a coursing crocodile was that much more entertaining.

  Jaws agape, Cuddles lunged for the hurtling Fisher complicating her hunt. Dodging the snappers clacking shut on empty water, the twisting Fisher back-flipped and spun, linking his brawny arms around the monster reptile's slender jaws before she sped by. The surprise move was simple yet effective. Exerting a closing power of four tons per square inch able to splinter bone and crush shell, the tylo-croc's jaw muscles were laughably weak when that maw needed opening. A fiddler crab with attitude could easily clamp shut the prime crocodilian weaponry with his outsized pincer, meaning Durgay had neatly muzzled the hunter.