“You think we have a problem?” Cassian stopped himself from giving vent to six or seven possible come backs to that ludicrous statement. "What problem are you expecting, if I may ask?”
Instead of answering right away Adalai grabbed the box he'd been asking about earlier and shoved it into his shoulder bag. Then he brushed the seven pearls out of their niches and into the shallow pool in their center. "This is a scrying mirror,” he said as the gemstones plunked into the water and rolled along the bottom, their glow becoming oddly dispersed. “I think the dragon was using it to communicate with something.”
“Something? Not someone?” Adalai jerked back from the water, horrified, and Cassian instantly drew his sword, expecting yet another problem to deal with. Turned out it was just the pearls dissolving in the bottom of the pool. “Were you expecting them to melt?”
“They’re not melting.” Adalai leapt up, dashed over to the dragon’s shelves of treasure and came back with a huge rug and an armful of candlesticks. With a single smooth motion he unrolled the rug over the pool saying, “I think that is an altar to the Mists in the Deep.”
“Sounds like a Benthic god,” Cassian murmured.
“Exactly. I couldn't say for sure but I'm willing to bet it's the source for all these pearls. Maybe it was bribing the dragon with them.” The candlesticks went around the edge of the rug to hold it in place.
"Bribing a dragon doesn't make any sense,” Cassian said. "You can't offer dragon’s treasure to get them to behave as you wish, they'll just take the money and do whatever they wanted in the first place.”
“Maybe that’s what it would do with a human bribe. Dragons can easily overpower people, no doubt, but would they have such an easy time with something that qualifies as a god?” Adalai finished anchoring the rug in place and dusted his hands off. “It’s even possible the dragon was in thrall to the god the same way the Benthic were in thrall to the dragon. Either way, it’s time we got out of here. The Mists know we’re here now. They may have known we were here all along, although I doubt we’ll ever figure that out.”
“Lovely.” Cassian grabbed Adalai and pushed him towards the water. “Trill is here already and she says the ocean Benthic are already on their way in force. Says they brought something called a Matriarch. Head back the way we came, we’ve already put together a plan to get out of here we were just waiting for you to cool your head.”
The other man didn’t waste time apologizing, just put his head down and ran. Compared to their trip into the lair they got through the water and back to the entrance tunnel in fairly short order. That’s where their good luck gave out.
The tunnel down was already full of hostile Benthic, piling out of the entrance two or three at a time. Four of them were dead, impaled on the spears of Trill’s warriors. Another half a dozen were pushing Trill and her troops back with spears of their own. The water around them shook and trembled under the invisible influence of the Benthic’s wave shaping powers, adding an invisible layer of danger on top of the obvious conflict underway.
“Trill!” Cassian called, stretching his pearl out in front of him to amplify his voice. “Trill, back off! We need to dive!”
“What about these stale eggs?” Trill snarled.
“We can deal with them.” He caught Verina’s eye. “Boil it.”
For a moment she was confused then realization dawned and she nodded.
The quartet of friendly Benthic shot away from the tunnel mouth, grabbing Verina and Marta as they dove deep as quickly as they could. Adalai and Cassian were left to swim after them as fast as they could. Cassian spared a moment to see how the deep water Benthic responded and, as he hoped, they waited as more of their own number massed at the tunnel entrance.
That was their undoing.
Watching the Linnorm manifest under the water was a surreal experience. One moment there were eight Benthic swarming around the mouth of the entrance tunnel. Then there was a flash of green light. The water bent and rippled, distorting the Benthic until they looked like dolls made of string, then it exploded into a wall of white hot steam. Trill’s soldiers grabbed him and pulled him deeper into the chasm.
The screams of cooking Benthic receded into the distance as they made their way into the chasm’s darkest reaches. They paused for just a moment so Trill and Burp could fish small glowing anemones affixed to some kind of seaweed strap out of a belt pouch. These were tied around their necks.
It didn’t create a lot of light but it was apparently enough for Trill to navigate by so they continued down at a more sedate pace. Cassian quickly took stock of their situation. Marta was looking around, fine by all appearances, while Adalai let the Benthic drag him along, his brows furrowed in thought. Verina was pale and a little shaky but she hadn’t passed out like she had when the Linnorm got doused by the sea dragon.
All in all they weren’t in bad shape given the circumstances. “Trill,” he said, “how sure are you there’s an opening down here?”
“Not certain.” She pointed to the glossy black stone walls. “These were probably created by liquid stone bubbling out of the ocean floor in times long past. It may have poured out in other places creating other exits. Or the chambers the stone once ran through below the ocean floor may have currents of their own that we can sense from here.”
“How likely is it these chambers have liquid stone in them now?”
His answer came from Sputter rather than Trill. “No one has seen signs of liquid stone in this part of the ocean for hundreds of spawning cycles, since long before Lum the First created the Stellaris. If we find chambers below there’s no danger we will find liquid stone there. It’s far more likely they simply never connect to the open ocean anywhere else and we will be trapped in them until we starve.”
Cassian winced. “Wonderful.”
Her comments got Adalai’s attention, pulling him out of whatever thoughts had consumed him since using the scrying mirror. “Do you know exactly how long it’s been since-”
The walls of the chasm shook and an impossibly loud impact rippled through the water, hitting Cassian with more force than he would have thought possible. “Speed up!”
“We can’t go any faster,” Trill snapped. “We can only see so far. The flow of stone isn’t even, any of these walls could have sharp spurs on them that can maim or kill.”
“Don’t worry about that, the walls are smooth for hundreds of feet.” Cassian squinted slightly, his vision blurring and focusing as he strained to work out how to see in the dark while surrounded by light. After a few seconds of concentration the tunnel snapped into focus. “I’ll warn you if I see any change.”
Trill gave him a skeptical look. “And how will you do this? Humans cannot see in darkness any better than the Benthic.”
“I told you. We ate a dragon. I don’t know what that does to a Benthic but it changes humans quite a lot.”
A second impact shook the chasm and that was apparently enough to convince Trill to take his word as she sped up until they were moving almost as fast as they had in the open ocean. “If there’s no liquid stone in the chambers,” Marta asked as they rushed along, “then what is that sound?”
“The Matriarch,” Trill said. “She is trying to smash a way in to reach us.”
“What is this Matriarch?” Cassian asked. “I assumed since there were so many female Benthic your leader would be female as well but that sounds like something a lot bigger than you.”
“You assumed correctly,” Trill said, a dark note in her voice, her frills and fronds lying flat. “A Matriarch grows huge by devouring her sisters. In time she will be the only one left from her brood and she will spawn thousands of eggs to hatch the next generation so that the violence may be repeated. When Lum fled the deep oceans to found the Stellaris it was this cycle he sought to break.”
A third impact shook the chasm and a sickening crack echoed overhead. Cassian spared a look upwards. A thin beam of light split the darkness there. “It does sound bad. At the moment it definitely gives them the advantage.”
“What do they want?” Marta asked, also directing her attention upwards. “If they wanted the dragon’s treasures they already have them. We haven’t done anything to them, other than pass through their waters, so why is the Matriarch of the Tidallais here pounding on our walls?”
“They’re after the Mists in the Deep,” Adalai said.
“The altar is also up there,” Cassain said. “Or are you just saying they haven’t found it yet?”
“They aren’t looking for the altar, they’re looking for the magma tubes.” Cassian didn’t recognize the word ‘magma’ but he didn’t want to interrupt. “In places where it bubbles out of the ocean floor it creates steam. Mists in the Deep.”
Burp, the Benthic that was pulling Adalai, twitched violently, her fronds waving wildly in the water. “Are you saying we’re swimming into the grasp of the Cursed Mists?”
“No. I’m not sure of anything here. But it would go a long way to explain everything we’ve seen so far.”
“Enough!” Trill cut off the conversation with a violent slash of her tail. “Perhaps we journey into the Sky Below, perhaps the dry borne speaks of things he knows nothing about. Either of these may be true. Neither may be.”
“Both may be,” Cassian added.
“As you say,” Trill admitted grudgingly. “Regardless of what else is true, the only way out of this for us is down. We will just have to deal with whatever is beneath us.”
About a minute later they discovered that what was beneath them was a huge, egg shaped cavern with smooth walls. Cassian guessed the chamber was a good three hundred feet from one end to the other but only a third that height. The chasm emerged near the center of the chamber’s roof. Even with his dragon enhanced eyes Cassian couldn’t see any signs of weeds or anemones growing along the chamber walls. They were perfectly smooth.
Except for the very bottom, near one end of the chamber. A strange series of stone loops passed over and around a weird, reddish brown object that shed a dim light.
Marta pulled her shield around to a ready position. “Is that liquid stone?”
“Not possible,” Verina said. “The water is far too cool for that. The Great Linnorm once lived on a mountain of liquid stone, it knows the signs well.”
“You can see this whole chamber, Ironhand?” Trill asked.
“Everything except what’s under that thing. And before you ask, no, there’s no other exits.” He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to weigh which was the greatest danger they faced. “Think the Matriarch will leave if we kill all her troops?”
Trill made an indifferent motion. “Perhaps.”
“We could try and bottleneck them back at the entrance. Verina, how many times could you manifest the Linnorm?”
“No.” Adalai shook free of Burp and started swimming towards the strange object. “They want that thing, whatever it is. We get rid of it, they leave us alone.”
Unfortunately for him Burp was much faster in the water than he was and grabbed him again right away. Cassian frowned. It wasn’t like Adalai to act so impulsively. Trill caught his confusion and asked him, “What are you thinking?”
He sighed. “I hired him to come on this job because he’s good at reading things and he’s the one who looked at the altar in the dragon’s lair. If he thinks we should get rid of it we should at least try.”
“Then we will try.” But she didn’t look happy about it.