Ninety Days of Water

I should have known that my fears for my fellow sorcerer would turn out to either be misplaced or redundant. Indeed, as we were marched through the verdant reef, past congregations of onlookers, I came to hate him anew. He had recovered immediately, as though waking from a nap, and regarded his changed surroundings with wonder, not terror. He did not seem to anticipate death or persecution, nor was he silent with the effort of biting back unanswered questions. On the contrary, he was having a right adventure.

'Look!' he said, for the hundredth time. The coral he pointed at was luminescent, like the gilled underside of a mushroom.

I nodded impatiently.

'What do you suppose those are?' he asked. Following his line of sight, I found that many-finned sharks circled lazily overhead, death glittering in their open mouths. 'Ooh, look at that! Did you see? They've got one on a chain!'

I rolled my eyes, enduring more prodding and elbowing as a school of various jellyfish passed by. Some were majestic, like heavy lampshades frilled with tassels and lace. Others were minuscule, drifting along like thimbles, ceramic bells or teacups. Some were open umbrellas, veined with contrasting colours. Still more glistened like saucers or bulbs of blown glass, trailing long tendrils like bunches of ribbons, or twin tails of membrane like ragged kelp. They were the pinks of coral, the purples of royalty, and the energetic blues of lightening spells.

'That big one's a bit like a balloon, don't you think?' said Fletch, excitedly, quickly proclaiming the others to be goblets, dishes and bowls, but remarking cleverly that he didn't think their use as such would improve the bland flavours of Lightshale's soups.

'And here's a fellow!' he declared, spotting an enormous sentry crab with a grim expression, like a lipless scowl, and legs so elongated and spidery that they made my skin crawl. Each of the crab's limbs ended in a sharp, barb-like tip, and they were so spindly that it swayed in time with the current, bending like reeds. Like many other things, it wouldn't have functioned out of the water.

We soon found other crabs just like it. Some, to my companion's delight, were covered in spikes that looked as hard as the ones on Imperial helmets and shoulder plates. They formed a ring, guarding the Grotto, which, because it would be the scene of our judgement, naturally turned out to be Fletch's favourite place.

'Amazing!' he declared, as soon as we had been engulfed by darkness. My eyes were still struggling to adjust.

When they did, I saw that he was right at least in one sense- the cave was visually impressive. In any other scenario, it might even have been beautiful. It was as massive as the Great Entrance at Blackmouth, which was also a mouth, swallowing shadows and footsteps alike. Sponges and soft corals, all growing in dusky shades of purple, cushioned the rocks that rose out of the sand into sculpted pillars and spires, sculpting the hall proper. Flecks of violet coated the walls like lichen, glowing faintly, and magenta beads grew in clumps like clusters of berries.

Hinged oysters poked out of every crevice, their shells ajar like lidded eyes, pearls winking. The main cavern reminded me of a modern opera house with many, many flutes and funnels decorating the walls, the bases of the pillars, and even the ceiling. There were long, yellow tubes like the throats of pipe-organs, orange horns, purple trumpets, and thin, creamy flutes with tubular lips of scarlet. The whole Grotto was a veritable garden. As I was learning, agriculture and architecture went hand in hand under the sea.

In addition to all the flora, I had expected to find it full, of stern faces, or intimidating creatures with villainous eyes and murderous fangs. I was surprised, therefore, to find it empty.

'Where are we?' Fletch demanded to know. 'Where is everybody? I thought she said we were going to be on trial.' He addressed his disappointment to me, as if I was included in some conspiracy. The way he talked about trials made me think him almost eager for one. No wonder he had arrived so bright-faced at Lightshale! I thought, bitterly. Perhaps he had thought his expulsion an adventure, too!

'It's not a trial,' I snapped. 'It's a Council.'

He shrugged. 'Where are they all, anyway?' I still thought that he sounded indignant, rather than frightened, as somebody who was likely in real danger ought to think. I shivered, and cast a look at Vaghiiss, expecting it to glance off her ice-cold countenance. Once again, I was surprised.

'We are early,' she confessed. 'I wished to speak with you, so we have come here to avoid being spied upon. That is also why I sent Deghazin away. He is not pleased.' She pursed her thin lips, to stress the significance of this fact. The rainbow fins on either side of her face unfolded again and quivered in agitation.

'Nevertheless, the currents cannot hear us in this cavern. It is designed for privacy.'

Though he had been full of questions a moment ago, Fletch did not rise to the occasion. I had to speak for the both of us. 'What do you wish to say in secret?' I asked. 'Why should either of us trust you?'

'You have no choice. It is my job to bring you before the Council,' she explained. 'They will wish to question me about the storm, and your presence on the beach.' I opened my mouth to protest, but she anticipated my objection. 'However,' she added, letting the word linger for a moment, 'it is in my interest to see that you are not killed, in this instance.'

'Oh, well, that's good,' Fletch commented, sounding more sarcastic than jovial this time.

He won himself a withering glare. 'I will see if I can persuade the Council to keep you,' Vaghiiss continued, 'so that we might trade you for something. Your kind are normally difficult to reach, difficult to reason with, and even more difficult to capture. We will force your people to listen, then you may go free.'

Fletch interjected again. 'I hate to tell you, but nobody at Lightshale values either of us highly. We're exiles,' he said, proving his lack of any instinct of self-preservation beyond what even I would have thought possible. At least he has integrity, I thought, grinding my teeth.

'What he means to say,' I supplied, 'is that we're not very welcome in Lightshale Tower at the moment, because we're delegates from far away. We've been personally selected to appear on behalf of a much more powerful institution, Blackmouth, to which Lightshale reports. We are naturally quite important there, and so, even if it might pain them to do so, the mages at Lightshale would unquestionably barter a lot for our return.'

While an outright lie, I decided quickly, this was the happiest compromise I could offer between reality and what I presumed to be the sea-people's aims. They hated Lightshale, from what I could gather.

I didn't know how much of my fabrication would be meaningful to Vaghiiss, but it seemed to resound with her, as she didn't ask further. An alternative option was that she, like me, was afraid of admitting the truth, on her part, because of the investment she had made in us, at great personal risk. This, I was about to learn.

'Good,' she said. 'I've been watching you. I have told the Council I was on patrol, spying on the ones like you who came to our beach, but I watched more closely than that. I have been learning the things you say when you talk aloud to yourself, the better to make my meaning clear to you. I have watched you walk among the pools, picking up food and instruments, and living animals. “Whatisthis?” you repeat over and over, as you call the drifters “jellyfish” and the scrapers and needles and noise-catchers all by the same name, “shell”. All of this I do because it is necessary to find peace between our people.'

'You told me you would spit at me,' I reminded her.

'Deghazin was watching me then,' she said. 'He has been sent to assist me, and I cannot always send him away. He resents that I do so often, as he seeks approval from our Council, who are not so forgiving of your kind. He is ambitious.'

'So then, what were you doing really?'

'I have a plan that concerns you,' she said. 'I do not wish any more of us to be killed.' Her claws tightened around the staff, and her eyes became as hard as the black stones scattered across the floor of the cavern.

'Why?' I pressed. 'What are you planning? Who was killed? Why?' I felt my heart flutter as I considered the possibility that Lightshale mages had been hunting the sea-people. Why would sorcerers hunt anything? That was against our Code. The villages provided for us. 'Tell me!'

Her eyes softened back into liquid, conveying, perhaps, that she wanted to communicate the answers to all of these things, but couldn't. She hesitated, and before she could answer, the cavern filled with a soft chiming, as of an orchestra of bells. It took me a minute of puzzled looking around before I realised that the music was coming from the pipe-like plants and animals I had dismissed before as decorative.

The current also ceased moving, becoming tense with anticipation. As I was even then beginning to learn, natural bodies of water are not voids to be occupied, as is the air. A place as full of life forms as the sea not empty when the wind stops blowing. It is constantly flowing, changing and evolving. It is a vast web that sprawls in all directions, and every plant, animal or trespasser in it is an insect walking on the web, giving off vibrations. The sea has one pulse, just as anything that can be called collective beats with a unified rhythm, but it is a pulse as rich and complex as any symphony.

When any part of the web moves, each other strand feels it. Some movements are strong, like the churning of the waves or the passage of huge ships that displace lakes and cast shadows onto the seafloor hundreds of strides below. Others, by contrast, are so faint that they are noticed only subliminally. After several weeks of living on the bottom, in the sunlit shallows and in all the various pools and hollows in between, I became attuned to the vibrations of the web. Sensing the moods and attitudes of the sea became my instinct. In my mind, she was a more authentic deity than any of the Eight Gods. The range of emotions underwater is a thousand times more compelling than the handful of expressions the sky can pantomime, and Cthlaar's thunder is but a magician's trick compared to the powerful sorcery of which the sea is capable.

On that day, however, I could not read the water. I only knew that it had seized up, and then, almost as suddenly, changed direction, leaving behind no mark but the grim expression on Vaghiiss' face.

Had I been more observant, I might have been foretold of the procession that came swimming in. Each of them had a fish's tail, like Vaghiiss', but whereas hers was plain silver, theirs shimmered in spectrums blue and green. Oysters, like the ones that lined the walls, were clamped to their fins like jewellery- twelve per tail, split evenly along the flukes. There were ninety-six oysters in total- eight members of the Council, to match the eight feudal lords who sat on the Table in Tyrian City. One by one, they drifted into the hall and arranged themselves on a ledge that served as a kind of bench.

'Vaghiiss,' said the centremost Council member, whose green tail was laced with a fin like a strip of kelp.

'You did not tell us there were two intruders,' said another. I was amazed that I could hear him speaking at all. I was sure that he did not mean to speak to me, and so I guessed that this was another form of magic at work. Was it Vaghiiss' doing?

The speaker turned to acknowledge the latest additions to the Grotto's palace-like chamber. It was the woman with the wriggling hair, and a second female who was more human-like, and all the more uncanny for it. She had no tail like the others, and once she had settled herself on a rock, she was perfectly still. The slit marks on her chest and wrists were so subtly pink that, had I not known to look for some strangeness about her, I might not have noticed them at all.

Moving as slightly as she did, she resembled nothing so much as a drowned woman- lily white, slender and clothed in rags that floated as artfully as any jellyfish's raiment. Only her eyes were overly round, and black as bottomless pits, so that she might have been completely hollow.

As she perched morosely on a rock, a smaller, ghost-white creature paddled out of the darkness to join her. Pale and blind, it was the size of a small dog, with four pink, feathery appendages on each side of its disproportionately large head, and a dorsal fin that ran the length of its pudgy body to the tip of its thick tail.

'Sthyaar,' nodded the first member of the Council, 'Iyetta.'

Sthyaar pumped her slitted gills and fanned the fins protruding from her nest of worm-like hair. Iyetta, who seemed to be the pale one, gave no indication that she had heard or even noticed the speaker, whom I guessed to be the oldest member of the Council.

The second Council member spoke again, addressing Vaghiiss again. 'These are the only two you found?'

'Yes, Council.'

'I see. What would you have me do with them?' Her tail flicked, thoughtfully, or impatiently.

Vaghiiss looked pensive as well. I could tell she was choosing her words carefully. 'From my observations, I think, with all due respect,' she said, 'that they should be permitted to live. I have watched them very closely on my patrols, and I am certain that they could be an asset to us.'

'You are certain?' interjected a third Council member.

'The humans will trade for them, Council.' Vaghiiss remained straight-faced, though she looked up at ten faces, eight of which loomed over her from their perches on the rock. I did not envy her position. 'They are valuable. This one says that he is an Adept,' she indicated in my direction.

'I'm an Adept, too,' Fletch piped up, assisting our case for once, although I wondered what 'Adept' meant to the sea-people. Whatever it was, he met with no retort.

'It is as good that you mention this,' said the centremost Council member. 'I will have Deghazin investigate to confirm the truth.'

'With respect, Council, that should not be necessary...' Vaghiiss ventured, but was cut off.

The Council member had closed her eyes briefly, as if concentrating. Now, they had opened again. 'It is done,' she announced. The others nodded in perfect unison.

I thought I caught a glimpse of something that might have been despair crossing Vaghiiss' alien features, but it was swept aside before she could make any further comment.

'There are only two of them,' said a previously silent Council member, skeptically. 'We have lost shoals. Why should we trade for favours, even if they will accept it?'

'To prevent further bloodshed,' Vaghiiss replied, but her words rang empty, as though they comprised half an answer. I already knew that she had a plan involving us, but I suspected even then that she was hiding something else in addition. The Council also did not seem persuaded by her argument.

'I do not think that it is fitting,' said one of the oyster-wearers.

'Was not your own brother among the lost, Vaghiiss?' asked another, more evenly than unkindly. His expression was searching, and I felt the ripple as, for a moment, Vaghiiss peeled her eyes away from him and cast them at the floor. The lids that fell over them were nearly transparent, but they spoke wonders. It was an incredibly human gesture, and one that I recognised immediately. She seemed to take a leave of not answering this question, for nobody pushed the matter further.

'We will hear what Sthyaar has to say,' said the last Council member to speak, sparingly. I saw him pump his gills once. As if beckoned, Sthyaar uncurled from her spot on a nearby ledge and slithered over, her lean body and her purple tendrils swaying. Only then did I notice that she wore a shell around her neck to match Vaghiiss', as did every other person in the room, with the exception of Iyetta.

Most of the conversation that followed took part in the language I couldn't understand. I only caught clues of its direction when Vaghiiss interjected. 'The storm was not their doing,' she said. 'He did not extend his hand, as if to attack. I think it is some greeting of theirs. The sting marks...' eventually, she reverted to her native tongue, and I lost track of what was happening.

At the end of her speech, Sthyaar went to sit back down, looking sourer than before. Vaghiiss waited, her eyes fixed on the Council, whom I had expected to convene. Each of them closed their eyes, as though thinking deeply. I also waited, as did Fletch, until a well-directed elbow alerted me to the fact that this was already taking place.

'Look,' he whispered. 'I think they're talking to each other.'

After following the direction of his nod, I agreed this was likely. The Council were thrumming their gills rapidly, so that a kind of gentle hum was audible, as if they were in a trance. This thrumming, as I would later learn, was a deliberate manipulation of the currents, but at that moment, it seemed to be nothing short of telepathy. I thought it magical.

I did not even see the pale girl, Iyetta, whose eyes were also closed. She did not have proper gills like the others, and was only stroking her pet, running her fingers down the folds in its loose skin as though she were playing a harp. It was shaking its feathery, facial appendages happily. From the way they moved, I guessed that they were also meant for breathing. They strongly resembled soft corals, and could have been external gills.

Finally, the eyes of the Council snapped open, and the centremost member spoke aloud. 'They stay,' she said, fixing Vaghiiss with a meaningful look. 'They are your charges, as you request.' After she said this, however, her gills flickered angrily.

I thought I saw Vaghiiss sigh, her own gills and chest becoming still, as though she had just previously been whispering under her breath.



At sunset, we sat in a tranquil lagoon. Vaghiiss had brought us to a spot where, she promised, we could not be overheard. She also promised to explain everything, in as much detail as we required. I did not know whether I trusted her or not. I supposed that, again, I had no choice.

'You must be anxious,' she said.

I nodded hesitantly, although truthfully I felt less anxious than overwhelmed. If I had any anxiety, I thought, then I must be saving it until later, when I would be able to digest it properly. I was as weak and tired above the water as I had been below it.

'Yes,' replied Fletch, more confidently. With any kind of luck, I would be able to rely on him to relay me anything I missed at a later date. Hopefully, I thought, I would be able to trust him to keep an accurate recollection, and not forget the details.

I feel back in the sand, wedging my back against a tree with a hard, rough trunk. We were surrounded by such trees, with armoured bark and no branches, only spouts of fronds that erupted from their tops. With a sky inverted by fire, the lagoon was as alien to me as Vaghiiss herself, but whereas she looked ageless, it looked eons old.

In my exhaustion, I toyed with the notion that it might have been the mythical pool from which all life originally sprung, when Gheltar flung his spear into the mud and drew the blood of the land. Wine coloured water rippled out, lapping languidly at my feet, where it turned to turquoise on the shore. A white ring of sand contained it, and, beyond that, waves fluttered like a cape over the open ocean. Their steady, distant rhythm was nearly enough to send me to sleep.

'An oyster on your fins,' I heard Vaghiiss explaining to Fletch, 'means that you never have to leave the ocean. It is a symbol of rank in our society. The more oysters you are permitted to wear, the higher you rank. Twelve is the greatest number of oysters anyone may have.'

Never leave the ocean? I thought, watching the sun bleed over the horizon, as it had done millions of identical times in this setting. If you spent you whole life at the bottom of the sea, you wouldn't see any of this.

'Wouldn't you get curious?' I objected. 'About what was above the surface, I mean.' It never struck me as hypocritical given that, until mere weeks ago, I would have been content to live out my entire life inside the sandstone towers of Blackmouth Academy. That had seemed like so long ago, like something that had happened to a different person.

Fletch was sharper. 'Were you ever curious about what lay below the surface?'

'Not until I came here,' I admitted. 'And now I wish I'd never thought of it.'

Vaghiiss ignored us both. 'Most of us are not curious about what lies above the surface,' she said. 'The surface world is a most dangerous place. Many of us are killed there. They,' she pointed over endless water to where I presumed Lightshale lay, 'believe us to be demons and monsters.'

'No?' I feigned surprise. 'They think you monstrous?' I wondered why I had never heard any of the Lightshale mages speak about monsters on the shore.

'Sadly, yes.' Her forked tongue flickered around her fangs, and as she spoke, her hair played about her face. She pushed it away with the blackened tips of her claws. 'There is more, though,' she continued. 'Many of us were acquainted with the land in our former lives. We now seek only the refuge of the water.'

'What do you mean, “in your former lives”?' asked Fletch.

'Well, as you may have noticed there are no children of our kind.'

I nodded, for I had indeed noticed this. Fletch only cocked his head, anticipating that the next revelation would be coming from an odd angle.

'That is because children rarely survive long enough to be brought here,' said Vaghiiss, with an inclusive, sweeping look at the lagoon that misted her eyes over, as though she could see things I could not- things that she only really saw in memory. 'You must understand that we are made, not born. In fact, this,' she pointed at the ground, 'is the last place many drowning men see while they yet breathe air. If they can be carried here in time, a shell can be found for them,' she touched the tiny conch at her throat, 'and the rituals performed to let them join us. They cheat death, but at a price.'

'What price?' I asked. This was all starting to sound strangely familiar- bargaining with magical forces, pacts to avoid death... Such things were usually the exclusive occupation of sorcerers, we high magicians who dabbled in deals to secure the mightiest of our powers, and even then, only once we were equipped with superior knowledge and reasoning. I was immediately uneasy.

'Most of the very old,' Vaghiiss explained, 'are not interested in making the sacrifice, for they are so close to death anyway. The young, however, are often tempted. We feel cheated when we learn that our time on earth is destined to be so short. It is not an easy decision to make, because of what we must give up in return...'

'What must you give up?'

'Our souls,' she said, simply and sadly. 'There can be no afterlife for such as us, not as ghosts, nor as ascendant beings. When we die, we are simply extinguished. We cease to exist, just like plants and animals when they die. Of course, we also stay below the waves, for the most part. We live for so long underwater that we forget what lies above the surface. You are as alien to me as if I had never walked among you.'

I was silent. I could not comprehend, then, what such distance would be like. Knowledge was my strength. It was difficult for me to picture forgetting on such a great scale. I thought it must be tragic. Truthfully, I felt sorry for her.

'Ah,' said Fletch. 'So, that's why the Council was so unwilling to let us walk free when they could avenge their losses? A death to means a lot to your people.'

I thought this was a bold statement, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Fletch had been paying attention. Although I didn't know it then, I would later find out that he had picked up more than me- for one thing, he had perceived that the Council acted and spoke collectively, using terms like 'me' and 'I' to denote the attitudes of the whole. They never thought independently when they were aligned on the bench, because, as I would later learn, it had been specially constructed to funnel the same water through all of their gills. As they breathed, each of their thoughts and feelings fed the current, becoming absorbed by their associates.

'Partly, yes,' Vaghiiss agreed, but did not elaborate.

By this time, I had thought of a question of my own. A frosted moon had risen in the sky, and the moonlight was illuminating the sand so that it looked like snow.

'Who was that young woman?' I asked. 'The one with the... pet.' I wasn't sure what it was. In part, it reminded me of an especially squat salamander.

'Iyetta?' Vaghiiss clarified.

'Yes,' I confirmed.

'Ah, yes.' She nodded thoughtfully. 'There are not many like her, so it does not surprise me that you ask. She is one of the Drowned. You see, some capsized sailors and their passengers do not make it all the way to this lagoon before their last breaths leave their bodies. Women, mostly, and the young. Occasionally, the very old. The Drowned are traditionally unwelcome in our Grotto, because they did not ask to be among us. They are made by us, and with all the same sacrifices we adopt by choice. Some consider them an abomination.'

I was watching Fletch throughout this speech, and saw that his eyes narrowed in mistrust. 'Who keeps making them then?' he asked.

Vaghiiss sighed, her fins shaking droplets out of her hair onto the fine sand. 'Former sailors seem to have the weakest wills, at least while they are new. It is no coincidence that most of the Drowned are young women. Newly changed men sometimes cannot bear to see them slip beneath the waves. Unwittingly, they curse the objects of their affection with such half-lives as Iyetta has. She is not a strong swimmer, and cannot venture far from the Grotto without assistance. She also cannot sense the tides the way that we do, and must use her axolotl as an aid.'

'That's what that was?' Fletch said. 'That fat, white thing with the beady eyes?'

'Yes,' said Vaghiiss. 'He is amphibious, and thus susceptible to manipulation. I must warn you, however,' she held up a cautionary claw, 'Iyetta is not like the other Drowned. You must treat her with respect.'

Fletch and I nodded in unison. My own nod was more of an unconscious movement, born of fatigue. I let my head hang down so that I could see only the sand spilling around my seat, and scattered across my robes. These latter were miraculously dry, and had been as soon as we emerged from the water. I chalked that up to more of Vaghiiss' unexplained magic.

'Now,' she said, just as I had been starting to drift away, letting my eyes and my tiredness glide over the ocean. 'It is time for you to learn why this place, though so essential to our people, is so deserted. We must keep it uninhabited for the sake of the ritual, which must take place in complete isolation, and may be required at any time. I must show you why I have really brought you here.'

'I thought you brought us here to explain things,' said Fletch, uneasily.

'Yes,' she replied, slyly, 'but that is not all. If you are going to be my charges, then you will need to have some independence. I will not suffer to look after you all day, nor will I oblige myself to carry you places.' She frowned slightly, and I presumed that she was thinking of how she had hauled us up here, like two drenched and heavy burlap sacks. It was indeed impractical, and I was keen to avoid it in future if possible. Yet...

There was a moment of silence while Fletch and I each compiled our thoughts. 'I can't swim,' I croaked, finally.

'What?' Fletch turned on me, bothering to conceal neither his shock nor his apparent delight. 'What do you mean you can't swim? You mean can't swim very far?'

'I can't swim at all,' I admitted weakly. It was true, too. I had been brought up in the dry, sandy confines of city walls. Not even my first Apprenticeship had taught me to navigate large bodies of water. I had skidded about the slippery decks of fishing boats, heaved on nets and waded in buckets and troughs full of captured fish, but the sea was something I always encountered in pools, or as a scenic backdrop- I had never once found myself fully immersed in it.

'That is of no relevance,' said Vaghiiss, stroking the shell at her throat. 'Tonight you will swim as though you had been born with fins. Come, let me show you the last thing some men see in their lives, and the last thing many more see before they join us forever on the seafloor.'

I was unsure of this. In my own case, I was sure that it would be proven false. In Fletch's case, I thought that it was probably true already. That was the least of my concerns, however. Fear now woke me completely, shaking off exhaustion as a cold shiver ran down my spine. Was Vaghiiss going to drown us? Did she plan to make us into hybrid creatures, with webbed hands and feet, and tangled nests of seaweed hair like hers?

'Alright,' said Fletch, unblinkingly. He picked himself up off the ground.

I dogged them as he followed her up the shore, around the white ring that encircled the lagoon. Occasionally she would stoop, flipping over rocks, or groping in the muddy shallows. Lingering behind her, I could see tiny objects, like pebbles, that she picked up, examined between her taloned thumb and forefinger, and then discarded. Each fell back into the water with a plop!

I was torn between curiosity and the urge to run away, but there was nothing but endless ocean around me. The sea that surrounded us was so vast that I could no longer see the continent and far-off Lightshale Tower at all. The lagoon might as well have been the only speck of land in the universe.

That was the most disheartening thing of all, to think that land was so far away. Now that I could not see it, and with so many strange twists and turns having recently taken place, I began to doubt whether it had ever been real. If I had been able to travel back in time and inform myself that morning of what the coming day held, I would have thought the foretold events impossible. I had been removed from home, therefore, not only by countless strides, but by a shift in reality akin to the irreversible cataclysm of an earthquake. If a lifetime at Lightshale had seemed a bleak prospect, then it was nothing compared to what I was facing now.

My thoughts were interrupted by a splashing as Vaghiiss dug extensively for something that must have been buried in the mud. Triumphantly, she held the thing up in the scant light, almost all of which was seemed to be emanating, rather than simply reflecting, off the surface of the lagoon. The object was about the size of a coin, and the approximate shape and colour of a large peppercorn.

Muttering beneath her breath, Vaghiiss cradled it between her webbed hands and dipped it back underneath the silky water. When her hands emerged, they withdrew a shiny, black shell suspended on a glimmering string as fine as a strand of web covered in dewdrops.

'Here.' She presented it unceremoniously to Fletch.

'Pretty,' he said approvingly, and slipped the thing about his neck, with as little thought as I imagined he might apply to trying on a noose.

'Now, it is your turn.' A sharp claw beckoned me forward, and I took a reluctant step. 'Don't worry,' she intoned, none too reassuringly, 'we're not doing a death ritual, such as I have described. I see how you despise our appearance, and I do not demand that you bear it. I am merely bestowing on you to ability to breathe underwater, if you will at least endure that.'

Flushing with shame and indignation, and not wanting to rebuff her, I shuffled forward and let her fasten a similar thing around my own neck. My fingers went automatically to the cool weight that rested in the hollow of my throat, feeling the porcelain-smooth conch there. I held it up to inspect the delicate patterns on its coils, and the buttery yellow hollow that must once have housed a snail.

'Hold it up to your ear,' Vaghiiss instructed, amusement displacing her bitterness. Her arms were folded as she suppressed a smile. 'You will hear the sea in there.'

I did as she told me, and heard a faint echo of the sound the waves had made when they smashed against the rocks by Lightshale Tower. The echo sounded flat, however, and the breeze whispering in my other ear threatened to drown it out or snatch it away. Contained in her creamy prison, I realised, the sea was only slightly better than a mute. Her voice could reach me, but her arms could not, and she could not sing properly without embracing me in her dance. If I wanted to hear the heavenly chorus I suddenly knew she was capable of, or to feel the comfort it asserted, then I would have to duck my head, and the shell tethered around it, underwater.

My feet moved of their own accord. I was unusually aware of their presence as I dashed lightly across the sand, conscious of every abrasive grain that rubbed between my bare toes. My shoes had been discarded before my hands knew of their complicity.

Unable to bear the chill of the wind on my face, or the weight of my body on the land, I arced into a dive more graceful than I had ever thought myself capable of performing, and flung myself into the sea.