35. Chapter 35

Niara brought up some valid points, things I had never considered before. Every year Queen Sarissa brought us a crop of sprouts , ranging from a hundred to two hundred. They were placed in nurseries and raised by specially designated Leandars who raised them as their own.

Each year we had a waiting list of Leandars, much longer than however many sprouts Sarissa brought that year and each year that list was getting longer, giving preference to the ones who had missed out the previous year.

That’s how we were born and raised.

Except me, I was different.

My father like the other vissigroths before him, had chosen a Leandar seffy, to bind himself to. They only ever finished the mating of bodies ceremony, they didn’t have any attachments to one another, since she would have never lived on Oceanus. Her part of the deal was to present him with a healthy baby boy wearing the kiss of the dragon, after that, she moved to court, enjoying the rank of Vissy of Oceanus and was never heard of or seen again .

I had hated the very idea of this, had contemplated taking one of the sprouts Sarissa gave us as my son, but the thought of him never wearing the kiss of the dragon had stopped me. Deep in my heart I had always known that one day I would have to take a vissy the way my ancestors had, but I had dreaded that day and each rotation I promised myself I would do it the next.

I was glad now that I had waited.

I had been clueless to the human seffies reaction to the sirens though. I would need to talk to a Thyre seffy and find out what their reaction was, now that I knew it wasn’t Oceanus necessarily that they were adverse to. This could be the beginning of a whole new era for us. And I owed it all to Niara.

And Nathan.

Without Nathan’s genius we wouldn’t be working on a plan to move Aecor, would instead have to begin building a new city.

Life did indeed take unexpected turns.

Nathan had been busy these past few days outlining all of Aecor’s massive tube system, writing down complicated mathematical equations I couldn’t even begin to understand. But equipped with one of the rare palmtops he was slowly drawing a smaller version of Aecor, which he assured me was drawn to scale, even explaining to me what it meant. In the end I simply had to trust him that it would work.

In the meantime, we took several ships to scout Fall Mountain Island. Which wouldn’t be easy, since it teemed with sirens. But it was time to find out more about the creatures we cohabitated Oceanus with. I supposed I could have asked Sarissa, but I didn’t want to tip her off, that I was about to renegotiate our agreements. The more I could find out first, the better my negotiating leverage would be.

Niara had wanted to accompany me on this mission, but I talked her into going back to the ruins with Kyle instead. I didn’t dare bring her anywhere near the sirens. It would be bad enough if they caught my dragoons and me spying, I didn’t want to know what they would do to Niara.

I hated being apart from her for two days, but unfortunately it couldn’t be helped. The trip by boat to Fall Mountain Island alone took almost a day. The I was planning to dive at night, when the sirens didn’t expect any commotion. Not that they were expecting it anyway, since they thought themselves of as the queens of the deep.

Well they would be in for a rude awakening, if even half of what we were suspecting was true, the next war would be between us Leandars and them.

I moved my improved goggles down, which now encompassed the entire face. Instead of a mouthpiece, oxygen was pumped into the mask and out, just like regular breathing. These masks were tight and left bruises, but the sirens or anybody would have a hard time ripping them off our faces.

The tanks had also been enlarged and rested in squares on our backs, connected to the face shield by a short, metallic tube that couldn’t be easily cut.

I held up my fist and was the first to jump into the dark waves, followed by more subdued splashes as ten dragoons accompanied me. The others would stay aboard, but were also ready to dive at a moment’s notice. The signal would be a tug on a line, one of my dragoons held firmly in his grip and another aboard the ship.

The fins hadn’t needed any improvement, they were long and elastic enough to allow for maximum speed. I even had to slow myself, because I was diving down too quickly, feeling the pressure in my ears.

When Myccael arrived, he had brought me another present from the Cosmic Coalition, still trying to convince him to join them. The humans called the gifts flashlights, they were narrow tubes that we attached to our forearms. The beam could be set not only to different strength but also changed the color of the lighting.

For now I had chosen a very subdued illumination, that allowed us to see, for about twenty paces around us, but wasn’t too visible from afar. At thirty paces someone seeing us would think us a school of yellow tailed fish, as they glowed in the dark. Only if a siren got curious and came closer would she realize what and who we were.

As we neared the bottom of the ocean, I made out the first fields of quanip. I narrowed my eyes at the ingeniousness of the sirens. Quanip was very rare and hard to find, the reason why it was so expensive.

There had been attempts made by Leandars to cultivate the seaweed, but our attempts had been done in shallower water. Without the diving gear nobody but a siren could do this .

This was more quanip though than they were selling to us. Either they were selling them somewhere else, or they had only recently begun to plant more.

Schools of fish swam through the long, fanlike weeds as they danced with the waves. Behind the fields, a wall of cliffs appeared, leading straight up, to Fall Mountain Island I assumed. For now, I preferred to stay low to the bottom of the sea and swim around the island, scout the area more.

Here and there eelfish poked their ugly heads curiously out to see who the unexpected intruders were. With their eight red eyes all around their heads, and long bodies they reminded me a snork if it hadn’t been for their millions of tiny feet, which creeped me out. Some Leanders considered them a delicatessen, I would have rather eaten frill flies than eelfish.

I shuddered at the memory of my friends teasing me one night when I woke to the touch of those millions of feet moving up and down my leg. I nearly hacked my friends to death too as I turned the eelfish into tiny parts. Their laughter still rang in my ears every time I saw one of these demonic fish.

About an hour later swimming around the rock wall, a sudden opening in the cliff made me tread water and stop the dragoons following behind me. The opening looked like a rift, a rift that seemed to go on all the way to the surface, but narrowed on the way up.

Down below at our level it was wide enough to allow three of us to enter swimming shoulder to shoulder .

A low glow was coming from within and I signaled the dragoons to turn off their lights and to wait for me, as I made my way cautiously into the opening. Staying close to the wall, I peaked into the entrance. The glow came from a little farther above me, illuminating a cavernous space, about twenty by twenty paces long and wide. Jagged rocks filled the bottom, and jagged walls led up.

Ignoring small cuts as I swam as close as I dared up on the wall I stopped when my eyes came level with the ground above me.

A lone siren swam in circles, her hands grasping a long spear. A guard. I watched her for a little while until I was sure it was only her, before I tugged hard on her tail when she came closer to the edge. I tugged hard enough for her to lose her spear. Her eyes opened wide when she saw me and her mouth was about to do the same, but I planted my palm on top of it, to stifle her scream of alarm.

She dug her clawed fingers into my arm, shredding my flesh until I managed to catch both of her wrists in mine. Her tail moved up my legs, circled around my waist and began to squeeze.

Despite the tank pushing oxygen into my mask, it was hard to breathe with her tail tightening around my lungs. The blood from my arm was dissolving quickly in the water, but the current would carry the particles with it. Mantadors were known for their keen sense of smell, one particle was enough to attract them from as far as the volcano to here.

I needed to end this fight quickly, if I didn’t want a swarm of mantadors upon my dragoons and me. Not to mention that the siren was close to getting me to pass out .

There was no choice, I hated hurting her—I had never hurt a seffy in my life—before I realized that I was about to incite a war with seffies. Sirens, granted, still, seffies.

Snyg , I cursed and banged the sirens head against the wall, knocking her out. Her tail loosened around my torso, allowing me to take a deep, painful breath.

Before I had a chance to contemplate my next move, the water stirred around me and my ten dragoons swam at me at a deadly speed, pointing up and behind them, where I made out the long dark shadow of a mantador. They must have been close by and my blood had led them straight to us. With my dragoons swimming so urgently I realized there had to be more of them. Many more.

I gripped the unconscious siren firmly and began to swim the only way open to us, up.