The sandy bottom disappeared suddenly, having dropped off some unseen cliff. Now they were cruising down through empty blue water. Aurelius saw a large shadow paint itself against the hazy blue distance, but it swam away before it could come into focus.
“Are there any dangerous creatures down here?” Aurelius asked.
“Ay, plenty, but we be safe in 'ere.”
Aurelius nodded, only slightly reassured.
A particularly loud groan issued from the hull and the captain called into the pipe beside his wheel. “Level out!” At the same time he threw a lever beside him, and the sensation of sliding downhill disappeared. Aurelius kept peering into the hazy blue, expecting a giant shadowy monster to come swirling out of the deep, but after long minutes of standing and seeing nothing to break the monotony of the empty water, he went to sit beside Reven. The wolfman was sitting like a statue, impassive and immobile. Aurelius jabbed him lightly in the ribs and nodded to the viewport.
“Pretty impressive, huh? I'll bet you've never been this far underwater before.”
Reven slowly turned to look at him, his green eyes glittering all the greener in the mossy light cast by the barnacle lanterns. “I’ve lived to see many things, human,” he said, and looked away.
Sensing that Reven didn't wish to talk, Aurelius contented himself with the silence. The minutes wore on into more than an hour, and despite the uncomfortable wooden chairs, Aurelius found himself lulled by the steady groaning of the ship. He was just drifting off to sleep when raised voices snapped him awake.
“I told ye, we canna go deeper! She'll implode!”
“And I told you to trust me. You and your vessel will remain safe.”
“An' how be that? Be ye a diviner of spirits that ye can see the future? I've set me sails above an' below this sea for nigh on thirty years, and ye be tellin' me which way the wind'll blow? Hah! Ye be mad!” The captain shook his finger in Gabrian's face. “If we crack this beasty open—” The captain stomped his good leg for emphasis. “—we'll all be crushed beneath the water!”
Aurelius could see from Gabrian's narrowed eyes and bloodless lips that he was losing patience with the captain. Abruptly his staff began to glow, and he whispered just one word, to which Captain Dagrell abruptly turned and threw a lever, while simultaneously calling into the pipe beside the wheel. “Take us down!”
The submersible shifted its momentum once more and soon they were heading into a deeper, blacker blue. They cruised quietly into the depths of the sea for long minutes before the captain broke the uneasy silence, “We be venturin' deeper than any hast gone a-fore.”
Gabrian nodded quietly.
“Be ye frightened?”
“No.”
The captain gave a grunt of laughter. “Ye should be.”
Visibility quickly narrowed to a few dozen feet. The water was pitch black all around them, and the ship's hull was groaning more loudly now. Aurelius heard a sharp
plink!
and watched a rivet bounce across the deck. He abandoned his seat to walk up beside Gabrian.
“Don't you think we should be careful?” he whispered.
“Of what?” the wizard asked.
Aurelius gestured helplessly to the groaning sounds which were rising all around them now. “Drowning? Being crushed by a thousand tons of water?”
Gabrian shook his head. “We'll make it.”
“Make it where?”
Gabrian was silent a moment before he whispered back: “To the bottom.”
“The bottom?” the captain asked. “Ay, ye be mad indeed! No one's seen the bottom. It canna be reached. We'll all die long a-fore then!”
Gabrian's gaze remained fixed on the blackening water beyond the glass. “Increase our rate of descent.”
And to Aurelius's amazement, the captain called into the pipe to the engine room once more. “Increase our rate of descent!”
The blackness grew around them until the bow lights were illuminating nothing but drifting bits of sediment against a dark wall of water. Visibility was dropping so sharply that Aurelius began to fear they wouldn't be able to see the bottom when they drew near and they would crash straight into it.
Several more minutes passed and the ship continued to groan ominously around them. Soon the sounds were so loud that they were impossible to ignore. Another rivet popped with a screech of shorn metal, and then another rivet, and another. One struck Aurelius in the arm and he yelped. They were bouncing off the deck like hail.
“We have to go back!” Aurelius shouted to be heard above the submersible's tortured screams.
Gabrian merely shook his head.
But the rivets continued to pop. One of them struck the glass viewport with a solid
clink!
Aurelius watched the spot in horror, but nothing happened. And then like a bolt of lightning splitting the sky, a jagged white line appeared. Aurelius shook Gabrian by his shoulders to snap him out of it, and the old man threw him off in a sudden move that sent him tumbling to the deck. He sat there gaping up at the wizard. “Are you mad?”
“Ay, he be mad,” the captain said in a disinterested voice. “We all be mad for followin' him.” But the captain made no move to correct their course, and they continued to plow deeper into the sea.
“We cannot go back, elder!” Gabrian shouted back, his eyes flashing in the dim green light. “This is a one-way trip!”
“What?!” Aurelius shouted back. He cast an appealing look to the captain, hoping for reinforcements, but Dagrell was too focused on driving them deeper into their watery grave. The captain's lips were set in a broad grin, his dark eyes sparkling with glee. He looked to be as mad as Gabrian sounded.
Aurelius was surer than ever that the captain was under some type of spell. He cast about quickly for something he could use to knock the old wizard unconscious and thus break the spell. Belatedly, he remembered the pistol holstered to his hip, and he drew it in a sudden move. Gabrian merely smiled at him. “Give that to me, elder, before you hurt yourself.”
“Take us back to the surface.”
“No.”
“Then I'm going to shoot you.”
Gabrian shrugged and turned back to look out at the sea.
Aurelius pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing happened. He frowned at his weapon and turned it over in his hands. Suddenly it ignited in cold blue flames. His gloves began to smoke with acrid fumes, and he dropped the weapon with a scream of fright. He bolted to his feet and stood behind Gabrian, panting with fury. “You!”
“Quiet, elder. I must concentrate if we're to make it to our destination without a swim.”
Aurelius turned his gaze out the viewport, trying to calm himself as he watched them dive deeper and deeper into the sea. Now that he thought about it, it made sense. Gabrian had to be protecting their vessel with magic. Nearly all the rivets on the bridge had popped, but there wasn't yet a single leak. The glass viewport had cracked, but the crack wasn't spreading.
A sudden hissing sounded and Aurelius spun around to see a sharp jet of water slicing down from the ceiling and shattering upon the deck. Even as he watched another weaker jet joined the first, this one diffuse and spraying them all like a sprinkler. The captain began to sing in a jolly voice:
“Oh, she be sinkin' in the water, she be sinkin' in the water, she be sinkin' in the water, and we'll a-drown! We'll a-drown!”
“He's right!” Aurelius yelled to be heard above the groaning hull and hissing leaks. He walked back up to the viewport beside Gabrian and stared hard at the old man, but Gabrian's eyes were closed and his brow furrowed. He gave no reply. Aurelius was tempted to knock the old man to his senses with his fists, but for the nagging doubt that maybe Gabrian's sorcery was the only thing keeping the ship from suddenly crunching up like an old tin can. Instead, Aurelius turned once more to look out the viewport. This time he saw something other than the darkening water. A colorful glow was growing in the hazy distance. They were diving straight for it. As they drew nearer, that diffuse glow began to resolve into countless pinpricks of light set against a craggy reef that seemed to stretch on forever. Apparently the water wasn't as murky as Aurelius had thought. It was pitch black, but otherwise relatively clear.
Captain Dagrell let out a gasp. “Well I'll be shipwrecked!”
As they drew still nearer, the finer details of the reef began to emerge. It was massive, like an underwater mountain range, and the glowing light was coming in all shades and colors, not only from the reef, but from waving fields of seaweed that stretched out across the seafloor in bright bands of green, blue, red, and even purple. Those fields seemed to Aurelius somehow to be too regular; no two colors were intermixed.
Giant fish glowing in all the colors of the rainbow were cruising low through the fields while glittering schools of minnows flitted by overhead. Aurelius frowned, peering through the glass. There were also darker shadows swimming amidst the glowing flora and fauna. He thought that perhaps one of those dark shadow creatures was what he had briefly seen earlier, swimming just at the edges of their visibility.
As they dove closer and closer to the reef, Aurelius's gaze skipped from the captain to Gabrian and back again, checking to see if either of them had noticed their collision course. He was about to point it out when Gabrian's eyes snapped open. He turned to the captain and gave him a rough shove away from the wheel.
Captain Dagrell staggered across the deck and bounced off the viewport to land with a splash in the growing puddle of water that was pooling against the glass. He sat there a moment, blinking and dazed while Gabrian took the wheel.
“I'll guide us in,” Gabrian said.
“Guide us in?” Aurelius asked. “In where?”
Gabrian nodded toward the reef as he steered them away from the rocks and toward the fields of seaweed. But Aurelius couldn't see what the old man meant. They neared the seabed and Gabrian pulled the appropriate lever beside the wheel while calling into the pipe on the other side. “Level out!” He barked the command in a perfect mimic of Dagrell's voice, while Dagrell himself stood off to one side with a dreamy look on his face.
The submersible's nose came up, and soon they were cruising around the base of the towering reefs. That was when Aurelius noticed it. Between the great craggy clumps of coral was a plain, slate gray surface, and every so often a clear rectangle of transparalloy would peek out from the glowing barnacles, showing a dim, featureless view of the interior beyond. Aurelius gaped as they passed close beside a whole bank of such viewports. He kept his eyes riveted to them, half-expecting to see a face pressed against one of those windows, staring back at him.
“What is this place?” Aurelius asked.
Gabrian gave no reply as they rounded the base of a hanging reef and then cruised in underneath the overhang. Then the old man called into the pipe beside the wheel. “All stop!” And their forward progress began to slow. They were rushing toward a craggy reef wall, about to slam straight into it. Aurelius held his breath as they drifted closer and closer to the rocks. Just an instant before they should have collided, the submersible stopped, and Gabrian called once more into the pipe, “Surface!”
There was a moment's hesitation and then the deck lurched beneath their feet. The wall of reef before them disappeared endlessly below them, and Aurelius had a minute to wonder exactly what Gabrian meant by
surface
before they suddenly popped out of the water. Through the furious streams of water running off the top half of the viewport, Aurelius began to see that they had emerged inside a giant chamber. The walls were gray, though streaked with dirt and rust, and they were uniformly shaped, clearly man-made. The interior was sparsely lit by clusters of craggy growths crawling down the walls in cool shades of green and blue.
“Where are we?” Aurelius asked.
Gabrian turned to him briefly. “I should think you would recognize it.” And with that he started back through the ship.
“What?” Aurelius asked, following. “Why should I recognize it? I've never been here before.”
Gabrian reached the ladder which led to the top hatch and he began to ascend. “That is as it may be, elder, but this place belongs to your time, not ours.”
Aurelius watched from below as the old man cycled the hatch open and then climbed out. Reven and Captain Dagrell came up beside Aurelius just as he was ascending the ladder himself.
“Where are we?” the wolfman asked.
Aurelius shook his head, “I don't know,” but when his head popped out the open hatch and he had a chance to look around, Aurelius realized with a gasp that that wasn't true. The walls were streaked with slime and rust, crusted with glowing underwater growths, but staring boldly back at him was the irrefutable truth: there, hanging above an elaborate archway was a faded sign which read,
Welcome to Thespia!
Thespia was the private getaway of the rich and famous, a whole underwater city. In Aurelius's time, thousands of years ago, it had been the go to spot for an unusual vacation, as well as home to its hundreds of wealthy full-time residents who preferred the quiet, murky depths of the sea to living in the noisy chaos on land. Aurelius felt Reven prod him from below and he climbed woodenly out onto the hull. Gabrian was already waiting on the slimy floor of the docking bay.
“Quickly, elder,” the old man beckoned.
“Well, I’ll be shipwrecked. . . .” Captain Dagrell whispered. “Be this the city of legend?”
They were all barely ashore when they heard approaching footsteps. A moment later a group of six large men bearing tridents appeared beneath the arching entrance to the city. They were all wearing strange, ropy clothes that appeared to be woven from plants, though they were bleached an off-shade of white. The group of men stopped beneath the archway, barring the entrance, and lowered their tridents in a wall of sharpened steel. Then a lithe figure wove between the men and emerged from the formation as a spectacularly beautiful woman with long black hair, a flawless white skin, and a figure that begged Aurelius's attention with every step. Her clothes were of the same ropy material as the men's, but much more revealing—little more than a swimsuit which left her midriff, neckline, and legs fully exposed.
The woman glided to within a few feet of Gabrian and stopped. “No one comes to Meria uninvited.” Her faintly glowing green eyes skipped over the group. Her voice was as silky and smooth as her skin. Her gaze stopped on Aurelius, and a light smile touched her lips. “But for you . . . we might make an exception.” Aurelius felt his mind clouding over, desire crowding out every other thought, urging him to bridge the gap between them and just caress her lovely face . . .
Then she looked away, and the feeling abated. Aurelius shook his head to clear it. “How did you come to be here?” The woman jerked her chin toward the submersible.
Gabrian shook his head. “By luck and skill, though fate alone knows how we survived. Our ship will not make it back.”
The woman snorted and her smile blossomed fully to reveal a perfect set of white teeth. “A pity. Are there any others aboard?”
“Trolls. A few human crewmen.”
Even as Gabrian spoke, one of the crew stumbled out onto the slippery hull of the ship with a loud
thunk
of boots on steel. The woman's attention was drawn for an instant, and the crewman shouted down, “Be me eyes deceivin'?”
She merely smiled and looked away. “Come,” she said. “You must all be brought before the queen to decide your fate.”
“And the trolls?” Aurelius asked, eyeing the entrance of the city and thinking that luckily for Gral it was just large enough for him to squeeze through.
“We have a few of their kind here, but the queen will not suffer the sight of them in her chambers. You must leave them here for now.”
“And if they try to follow?”
The woman shrugged and turned a smile over her shoulder as she led the way. “Then they will be killed.”
* * *
The walls were dripping with moisture and slime, the passages sparsely illuminated by clusters of coral, barnacles, and other living things. The real light fixtures were long dark, their energy spent. The old trappings of luxury were faded and torn; though some tattered shreds of carpet were still clinging to the scuffed and dirty floors.
Thespia, once the height of opulence, was now an eerie place with the sounds of dripping water echoing perpetually through the halls and the fishy smell of saltwater and seaweed ever-present upon the air.
They passed down a dark, pulsing red corridor, and then emerged in a large antechamber with a pair of staircases rising to either side of a silent crystal fountain that was now overgrown with brightly glowing coral, and even some stalks of phosphorescent seaweed. A large, craggy sculpture, which appeared to be carved from the same glowing coral rose from the center of the fountain. It appeared to pulse and glow in varying shades of blue and green. It was a sculpture of a man and a woman, their hands clasped and held above their heads, as if addressing a large crowd. Each of them was wearing a crown. Aurelius noted an inscription as they passed the fountain; it was carved in a surprisingly-familiar alphabet. The inscription read, “The first Queen and King of Meria.” To one side of the fountain was a bank of broad viewports looking out on a vast field of glowing green seaweed. There were a few women and children passing through the antechamber, but no men that Aurelius could see.