“What do you think?” J.B. asked as they walked a few steps behind Donfil and Doc, both of whom were enjoying a spirited philosophical discussion pitting Native American philosophy against more traditional Western schools of thought.
Ryan shrugged. “Seeing Donfil sure distracted Doc from his depression, that’s for sure. ’Bout the rest of it, who knows? Mebbe the fish have wised up and just don’t live around here anymore.”
Mildred, close enough to overhear their conversation, frowned. “Maybe, but what about the disappearing people? I never heard any stories of fish developing a taste for human flesh. Unless these folks are suddenly getting real clumsy, something else is going on.”
“Yeah, but that don’t necessarily make it our business either.”
Mildred snorted. “Says the guy who didn’t hesitate to kill half the population of the last ville we came across.”
Ryan turned his head to stare at her. “Difference between there and here is no one’s tried to chill us yet. If that happens, my response will most likely be the same.”
“Why don’t we meet the elders and see what they have to say before making any decisions?” Krysty asked. “We’re probably only about a hundred miles or
so away from the mat-trans and aren’t that hell-bent to get there, so maybe staying here a day or so wouldn’t hurt.”
“We’ll see.” Ryan lengthened his stride to catch up with the other two men as they headed toward the second large building. “Donfil?”
The gaunt shaman stopped with his hand on the door. “Yes, One-Eye Chills?”
“Anything we need to know about these elders before we go in?”
Donfil shook his head. “Just answer any questions they have honestly. There is nothing to fear.”
“Never said there was. Let’s go.”
Donfil opened the door, and the first thing to hit Ryan and the group was the rank, almost overpowering smell, a sharp stench of guts and blood. This room was set up like the other one, but its long tables were given over to processing of giant tubs of freshly caught fish. With machinelike efficiency, rows of men and women gutted, filleted, skinned and deboned carcasses with precision, completing their assigned task before sending what was left on to the next station. They worked quietly, and the large fish bodies were reduced from their natural state to rows of pale white fillets. Not even the presence of the visitors caused them to lift their heads from their work. Ryan picked out more marine abnormalities, including more than one person who had only one working limb, with the other being what he could have sworn was a fin, but that might have been just a trick of the dim light cast from the high windows on a withered hand and arm.
The smell was most pungent where they were standing, and Donfil smiled as he led them to the back of the cavernous room, the swish and chop of the knives on the human disassembly line loud in their ears. “You get
used to it after a while. Of course, coming in where the fish guts are piled doesn’t help any either.”
“Excuse me, Donfil, but I fail to see the problem here,” J.B. said. “Looks like everyone’s busy enough, plenty of fish to go around, so where’s the trouble?”
“To you it may seem busy, John Barrymore, but this is the only shift that is still operating—we used to have two. We have been trading with other communities both around the Lakes and inland, using our extra fish, and if we only have enough to feed ourselves, then our trade suffers as a result.”
“Makes sense.”
Ryan thought about throwing a sleeve over his nose in an attempt to block the stench, but decided against it. No sense having to talk to these elders with his arm over his face. He followed Donfil up a staircase on the wall at the back of the room. At the top was a rusty metal door with a rectangular wire glass window in the middle. Raising his walking stick, Donfil pounded on the door, loud enough to be heard over the din on the processing floor.
The door opened, and what might have been a man or woman’s face peered out—it was that hard to tell. The doorperson was one of the more severe mutations they’d seen so far, completely hairless, with wide, bulging eyes mounted on either side of a flat, narrow head that somehow tapered down into a normal human neck. The rest of his or her body was normally proportioned.
“Donfil More to see the elders, please.” The shaman had bowed his head as he spoke, making Ryan’s eyebrows rise.
The person spoke with a watery gurgle. “Enter and be welcomed here.”
Donfil walked through the doorway, with Ryan and
his group entering behind him. This room was much smaller, and smelled of freshwater shallows. It was dimly lit, and Ryan heard a gurgle as he walked in, as if someone were slowly pouring out a jug of water.
At the far end, five people sat in small circles of light provided by a row of round, high windows mounted along the left wall. The right wall was dark, but Ryan got the impression of a large pane of glass of some kind mounted there with something large behind it, perhaps several hundred gallons of water. But he gave it only passing attention, his gaze drawn to the people before him.
The five people that made up the elder group basically resembled old, wrinkled fish mutants. They were certainly human, but their aquatic features were more pronounced than the rest of the villes’ inhabitants. As Donfil walked up, one of them reached down to a bucket next to him and picked up a dipperful of water, pouring it over the set of opening and closing gills in his neck.
Donfil approached the row of watchers and nodded to them. “Elders, I have returned from my mission, and, brought with me a possible answer to our problem.” Introducing Ryan and the others, he quickly recounted his group’s encounter with the bandits and their subsequent rescue.
The second one inclined his head to Ryan and the others. “We owe you a debt of gratitude for saving our people. We would ask that you stay with us tonight, and be fed and housed, and any other needs you may have will be taken care of, if they are within our power.”
Ryan nodded, as well. “Thank you. Not that we don’t appreciate it, but Donfil mentioned a problem you all are having recently. I don’t want to give anyone the wrong
impression here, but I’m not sure if there’s anything we’d be able to do about it.”
The third elder leaned forward. Although his mouth was small, he spoke very well. “We cannot ask you to do anything more than you have done already. We know well the cost of hired men and women such as yourselves, and it is an option we have considered.”
The member on the other end of the table stiffened and looked away from the rest. Ryan didn’t need a sign to tell he wasn’t happy about that last part.
The third elder continued as if he hadn’t noticed the movement. “However, we could tell you of our problem, and perhaps you could share your knowledge with us. As of yet, we haven’t even been able to discover the cause of the disappearances, either of the fish or our townspeople.”
A spark of light flared in the darkness to everyone’s right, and Ryan started back in shock as a humanoid form was revealed in the phosphorescent glow.
Like the doorperson, the sixth elder combined the strangest traits of human and fish into a completely new appearance. Perhaps four feet long, he had no legs to speak of, but a fish tail that waved back and forth in the water as he moved. His arms were a combination of human limb and fin, with a segmented elbow joint that allowed him more flexibility as he swam around the tank. His body, limbs, and tail were all outlined in an eerie, blue-green luminescence, making him appear partly translucent. His face combined what might have been the best or worst of both races, Ryan couldn’t be sure, with a gaping mouth that opened and closed to suck in water, and huge eyes that seemed more designed for a lightless environment than the surface.
“My God,” Doc said, entranced. He slowly approached the tank, his gaze never leaving the fish-being inside. It in turn swam up to the glass, regarding him with one pale, unblinking eye. Doc reached out a tentative hand to gently touch the barrier, which was answered in kind by the creature rolling over to extend a flipper to him in greeting. “Sentient, or I’ll eat my hat. The wonders of this world never cease to astound me.”
That wasn’t the only wonder either, for the elder on the far end, nearest the tank slowly stood. “Our brother may be about to speak—he usually lights up beforehand. He will do it by contacting your mind, so just relax and open yourself to him. He does not mean any harm.”
“Wait a minute—” Ryan began, but it was too late.
The fishman rose in the tank until he could see everyone in the room, his internal light glowing even brighter as he did so. When everyone was bathed in its radiance, Ryan didn’t hear a voice, but saw a series of images in his head: The village on a bright summer day, the sun shining over the houses, the buildings and the water, making it glitter like someone had scattered a handful of diamonds on the lake… Boats sailed out, the occupants fishing like their ancestors had, and their ancestors before them… A shadow suddenly fell over the harbor, the village, everything in sight…it came from the east, and grew from a speck on the horizon to reality in seconds—a gargantuan, massive tidal wave, seventy feet high, a churning, roiling cascade of bile-yellow, foaming water…people saw it…only had time to point and scream before it was on them…devouring the town under its pounding force, shattering the docks, washing away houses, caving in one side of the processing building…washing away both it and all inside, sweeping
them all back out to the implacable waters…leaving shattered debris, broken planks, and lifeless, floating bodies behind—
W
ITH A START
Ryan jolted out of the vision, coming back to the room around him. The pictures in his head had been so real for a moment, he found himself tensed to try to do the impossible—outrun the mammoth wave that had come crashing through his mind.
He glanced around to see his friends similarly shaken. Krysty’s hair had coiled tightly up around her neck, J.B. had taken his fedora off and was running a hand through his hair. Mildred’s eyes were wide as she stared at the rest of the group, while Doc barely repressed a shudder at seeing the watery death engulf the town. Jak simply wrapped his arms around himself, his head down, having seen a foe that even he could have no effect against.
Ryan cleared his throat, which had gone strangely dry, even in the damp room. “He a doomie?”
The second Elder considered the question. “To a degree. Some of what he foresees does come to pass, enough that we must take every vision he chooses to impart to us seriously.”
“Yeah.” Ryan rubbed his chin, also choosing his words carefully. “Look, if what’s on your horizon is something like what we just saw, there’s nothing we can do about it. Seems like the best idea would be to think about pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere.”
His suggestion brought urgent muttering from the elders, all of whom leaned toward one another to confer among themselves. Ryan looked at the rest of his group and shrugged, earning puzzled looks from the others in return.
After a minute or two of impassioned discussion, the five elders turned back toward the group. “That choice has been discussed as well, and then, as now, we have decided to stay here, to try to find a way to stop this from coming to pass.”
Ryan halted the snort of derision rising in his head, turning it into a cough instead. He was still trying to find a diplomatic way to point out the folly of their decision when an urgent banging on the door startled everyone.
The doorperson walked over and opened it to see a new person, slick with sweat and panting hard, as if he had run a good distance to get here. He clutched a cloth-wrapped bundle to his chest, the lower end leaking some kind of noxious, black fluid.
“Elders, please, forgive my intrusion. There’s been another attack—Melob’s boat—and they have brought something back. You must see!”
He was waved into the room and entered hesitantly. When he reached the center, he knelt and unwrapped the stained cloth from what it had been holding.
On the floor lay the forearm and hand of some kind of lizard creature. The fingers were webbed, but each one also ended in a sharp, black claw. The arm was covered with thick, dark green scales, each as wide as a fingernail, and overlapping all the way down. Black ichor still oozed from the injury that had severed the limb, staining the floor.
The elders reacted with expressions ranging from anger to surprise to shock. There was a clamor of noise as each one tried to speak at the same time. Only when the sixth elder glowed brightly again, lighting up the room, did the rest quiet down.
“Tell us what happened, Qualen,” the elder on the left end said.
“Don’t know whole story. They were north of the harbor and set upon by one of these things as they were hauling in their lines. It was creeping up on one of the crew when it was spotted. Made a grab for him anyway, and that’s when its arm got cut off by someone with a ’chete. Dived off fast enough that no one got a good look at it. They hauled in their lines and sailed back fast as they could.”
Ryan had been keeping an ear on the conversation while he leaned over the limb, drawing his long knife to poke at it. The hand contracted sluggishly, fingers curling in response to the stimulus. Straightening again, he drew the toe of his boot through the black blood and waited for the elders to finish talking among themselves again.
“Yes, Ryan Cawdor.”
“Well, I don’t know what we can do about that wave that may or may not be coming at you, but this is a damn sight different.”
“Oh?”
Ryan’s answering grin was cold. “These things bleed, so they can be hurt. And if they can be hurt, they can also be killed.”
The conversation was tabled until after the communal meal was served. Ryan and the others headed back to the other hall, where they were served a thick seafood chowder, filled with chunks of fish, what looked like large crayfish, and an array of vegetables. Baked oat scones accompanied the dish, which many used to sop up the soup. Despite the wide array of mutations, the villagers were polite and civil to each other, with several stopping by the table where the attacked boatmen ate, to clap them on the shoulder or offer their commiserations.
Although the men and women ate separately, the ville didn’t request the same of Ryan’s group, and once they had helped themselves from the large tureen nearby, they sat together and discussed the situation.
“Well, what you think?” J.B. asked between bites.
Ryan blew on a spoonful of soup before eating it. “Donfil hasn’t changed a bit since we parted ways on the coast.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Been thinking about it all.”
“It’s just after that pretty speech you gave upstairs, I figured you’d be hell-bent to go out there and save them from whatever’s causing the trouble.”
Ryan stared at the bespectacled man over his soup bowl. “Mebbe we’ll just use you for bait, see what comes out to nibble on your toes.”
The corner of J.B.’s mouth twitched in acknowledgment of the joke, and he returned to his own meal.
“Donfil’s a friend, and that carries some weight. But if these people are about to be destroyed by some kind of natural disaster, what’s the point of helping them now? Hell, what we ought to be doing is packing up and hitting the road, before whatever’s coming for them catches us, too.”
Mildred stifled an unladylike burp behind her hand. “Yeah, but the elder said only some things the fish-man saw came true. What if our presence here is the thing that stops it?”
Ryan fixed her with his cold blue stare. “Yeah, and what if our presence here is the change that causes it?”
The woman didn’t back down, holding his gaze with her warm brown eyes. “Stalemate, Ryan. You can’t prove your idea is true, and I can’t prove mine is either. I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff since y’all thawed me out, and the only thing I can say with certainty is that there isn’t any certainty in this world. No one bats one hundred percent, not back in my time, and sure as hell not now. Maybe that doomie is right about the killer wave, but it might not happen for years, maybe long after this generation is dead and gone. And if you think you’re going to wipe out a town just by entering it, then you got a pretty high opinion of yourself, mister.”
Ryan’s face didn’t even change expression as he replied. “Tell that to the good people of Poynette.”
Mildred opened her mouth, then closed it again with a snap. Her lip curled like she wanted to cuss Ryan out, but instead she returned her attention to her bowl, scooping up succulent chunks of seafood and shoveling them into her mouth.
“Friend Ryan,” Doc said suddenly, “If these people are in need of our assistance, would it not be remiss to neglect them in their direst hour?”
Ryan tossed his spoon on the table, his appetite gone. “Fireblast! You know, lately between the three of you, it’s like I’m surrounded by walking consciences every minute of every single fuckin’ day.”
His eye fell on Jak, who was busy scraping the bottom of his second bowl. “What about you—you must have something to say about all this.”
The albino youth flipped a lock of lank, white hair out of his face and grinned. “Boats look like fun.”
“That’s about what I figured. What about you, Krysty, since this has suddenly turned into some kind of communal democracy?”
Doc opened his mouth, no doubt about to point out the impossibility of Ryan’s statement, when he winced and grabbed at his shin, his face grimacing in pain as Mildred, sitting next to him, smoothed her features into the picture of innocence.
“You don’t need my take on it. You’re going to do what you like anyway—just like Poynette.” Krysty turned her level green gaze on Ryan, and he felt that same strange flutter inside, just as he had the very first time he’d first seen those emerald eyes. “However, my mother always told me the sign of a true man—or woman—is when they see the path they want to take clearly before them, but they turn onto the right path whether or not it was what they’d wanted.”
“Hell, that’s just as bad.” Ryan ran his hand through his hair. “And I suppose someone here has a plan to take care of the problem, too?”
J.B. cleared his throat. “Not till you mentioned the idea of hangin’ me out for bait—”
“Even more tempting now,” Ryan growled.
“We’ll make a bait boat instead. Send out a couple, all within sight of each other, and put two or three of us on each one. Haven’t seen a decent blaster here yet, so ours should make the difference. Lizard men come up, we put a round into their scaly foreheads, and send the bodies back down to wherever they came from. Problem solved.”
“Works for me,” Mildred said.
Ryan held back the first remark he thought of—naturally she’d agree with J.B. The only problem was that he was inclined to agree with it, too. As usual, the pragmatic Armorer had come up with a very practical solution to the problem. If they couldn’t bring the lizard-things to them, then they’d have to go to where the lizard-things were.
He nodded. “We can stay here a day or two, help Donfil and his ville out. I suppose you all want to head right out there after lunch, see if we can’t mop this up before dinner?”
J.B.’s eyebrow lifted in surprise. “If you’re so all-fired up to get back on the road again, I figure that’d fit your plans just fine.”
“I think we’re forgetting one thing,” Krysty said. “What makes any of you think that just stopping these creatures on one or two boats will prevent them from coming back once we’re gone? If they are a threat to this ville, someone would have to track them back to their home and deal with them there.”
J.B. pushed his empty bowl away and picked up his fedora. “Not necessarily. If these things have at least rudimentary intelligence, the presence of a better-armed and capable force that stops them from attack
ing the boats could drive them to seek easier pickings elsewhere.”
“We wont know either way until we find out what’s going on.” Spotting Donfil walking toward them, Ryan pushed his chair back and stood. “Sooner we get to it, the better.”
The skinny shaman greeted all of them with nods. “I hope your meal was enjoyable?”
“Really good, thanks. Haven’t had anything like that in a long time.”
Donfil hesitated, rocking back and forth on his heels, as if unsure how to continue. “Ryan, I just wanted you to know that it was not my plan to get you involved in what is happening here. It’s just that, well…”
Ryan reached out and clapped the other man’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.” He let his gaze fall upon the rest of the group. “We’ve decided to see what we can do to help.”
The tall Apache stared at Ryan like he didn’t believe what he had just heard, then quickly nodded. “Thank you. Our thanks to all of you.”
Ryan cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Save it for when we’ve actually done something, okay?” He took a few seconds to outline their plan. “Why don’t you take us down to the boats so we can get a look at what we’re going to be riding on?”
Donfil’s face split into a genuine grin. “Your thoughts and ours are as one. I was hoping that might be your next request. I want you to meet the captain of the two boats that have already volunteered to serve as your decoys this afternoon.”
Turning, he waved to someone behind Ryan. A few seconds later, a relatively normal-looking man walked up to them, his face browned from exposure to the sun
and weather. Ryan was debating whether to say anything about his average appearance when he stepped into the sunlight. Under the bright afternoon beams, his skin gleamed as if he was covered in silver. After shading his eyes from the glare, Ryan blinking a couple of times and refocused on the man, who was covered in what appeared to be thousands of tiny fish scales that flashed iridescent in the light.
“Ryan Cawdor, meet Saire, the best fisherman in town. If he can’t find them, the fish are simply not to be found.”
Ryan extended his hand, finding the other man’s grip to be exactly as he expected—callused and hard from years of working on the lake. “Donfil told you it’s not fish we’re going after this time.”
Saire nodded. “Lost my first mate to those scaly bastards a few days ago. Been achin’ to get some payback.”
Ryan turned back to Donfil. “Well, then, let’s go fishing.”