“Hurand!” Yemi shouted, spinning in circles and searching for movement, any sign the chase was still on. But the city was asleep. Only the pinkish driftings of plankton blooms swirled upward from the depths and into the current. She heard nothing but her own panting. Her pulse still raced, either from the adrenaline of a promised fight or the memory of blood.
The blood.
She could track him. She made her way around to the side of the palace where her bedroom had been, inhaling deeply until she met a cloud of bloody scent and the hissing began again in her head. She shook it off, determined to focus as the blood trail revealed itself, carving its way crudely through the city’s pathways. She followed it downward past weathered white stone monuments and sleeping neighborhood clusters until they gave way to walls of rock and the unending black abyss beyond.
“Please be alive,” she muttered. Hurand’s was a friendly face she hadn’t known she needed so far from home. But even more than that, she needed answers to the hundred questions pressed against the inside of her skull.
She was his queen. She would see him rescued.
She realized she’d lost the light and stopped to listen in the dark. The vaguest hint of moonlight and night sky remained high overhead, but it didn’t reach the place she found herself now.
She hummed a few staccato notes, but they illuminated nothing but the walls of the trench.
“Hurand!” she yelled again. Silence answered, comingled with dread. The skin-crawling screech of the Hollow filled her ears seconds later. Without another thought, she descended to follow it, letting out low, barely audible grunts and hoping the sound turned into something she could see.
A scream rang out from below, rattling the water around her and illuminating startled, skeletal creatures made of blinking lights. And in the distance, the moment before she was plunged back into darkness, the waters churned. Before the mouth of a cavern, a swarm had knotted themselves, raucous and snarling, the sea around them frothing the way it had that day on the island where they’d discovered the body fragments.
“No!” she cried. Yemi snatched the core of her spear, casting a little of the world in orange light, and dove at the heart of the knot, scattering the Hollow who noticed her and spearing the ones who didn’t.
Hurand, the poor man, was now little more than an idea. He floated around her in chunks, a cloud of viscera while what flesh remained committed to his bones sank against the rocky bottom. Answers sank with him.
Home sank with him.
Furious, Yemi turned to stare down the pale, gaunt faces of the Hollow where they hovered at the edge of the light, all gnashing teeth and dark, sparkling eyes. There were seven of them as far as she could tell, some armed with spears made of bone, others just twitching fists. The water around her spear fizzed with a million heated bubbles. The sound was soon drowned out by the beating of her own heart, the voices hissingFleshin her head, the impatient clicks and menacing chirps of the Hollow as they spread themselves out around her.
One of the creatures, an older male with a scarred body and distended jaw, drew himself upward before her. The presumptive leader. He poked out his chest, spread his clawlike hands, and inhaled through flared nostrils until he couldn’t anymore. He opened his gaping maw of serrated teeth so far it seemed his jaw would detach completely, and he screeched, rattling the caverns around them. His kin did the same.
Yemi did not flinch, but flexed her grip around her spear and fell into herself again. And the rage of gods took her place.
“Come on!” she roared back.
The swarm attacked. Their wild slashing was aimed at her tail, the part of her she was least experienced with defending. And their reach was longer than any man’s. But splitting one of them cleanly from navel to neck with the lava-hot spear gave them pause just long enough for her to take cover behind a curtain of bubbles it produced and back against a rock wall to keep them from flanking her. Her mouth twitched involuntarily into a smile. There was a morbid, delicious sort of glee that came with every thrust, every sinking of her spear tip into their emaciated bodies.
The elder was taunting her, just beyond the reach of her spear but close enough to bat away each thrust. Yemi roared in frustration and pursued, too zealous to realize she’d opened her back to one of the younger creatures. Her eyes fixated on the elder’s maddening smirk until the younger snatched her head back through a handful of braids. Before Yemi could turn to swing, the elder knocked her spear from her hand. Panic flitted only briefly across her mind as she watched it sink to stand in the sand beneath them. The creature on her back was swiping wildly at her throat and had to be dealt with before the elder found his opening.
Yemi propelled herself as hard as she could backward into the rock wall, trapping the creature between them. A snap and her braids came free of their tie and the claw gripping them. She turned and held the creature to the wall by the throat and, like the scene from her nightmare, punched a hole in the soft space beneath their ribs and pulled out whatever viscera her hand happened to wrap around.
The creature cried out in pained defeat as Yemi released them to sink to the seafloor and turned her attention back to the elder already closing the gap between them. He tackled her against the wall as well. But rather than wait for whatever terror would come next, Yemi decided on becoming the terror herself. Every fiber of her being was screaming for flesh, and this creature had elected himself her tribute.
He tried to pull back for an assuredly final strike, but Yemi held him to her. She had never felt so strong. And then she sank her teeth into his throat and gulped down the rich blood that issued forth until she tore the flesh away completely.
The elder dropped back with a hand pressed futilely to his throat before taking off, disoriented, through a tunnel.
Something like adrenaline but hungrier, more dangerous, rose in Yemi as she swallowed the bit of neck in her mouth. She dove to retrieve her spear and the medallion on its broken leather string and took off after him, following his blood trail through a honeycomb of caves. He screeched desperately in the distance, the sound reverberating off the dark walls and buffeting her violently about the ears. He was calling for backup. And Yemi was salivating at the thought.
She trailed the iridescent wisps of blood leaking from her prey when another screech rang out, illuminating the gigantic cavernous space into which she’d descended. In it, other structures were revealed and stopped her in her tracks.
The sound waves faded, casting her back into darkness, but not before she made out the prows, towering masts, and furled sails. Entire ships rested on the seafloor in ghostly silence. Yemi’s vision went in and out of focus, as if the two parts of her warring inside her mind were vying for their preferred focus: the thrill of the hunt or making sense of the scene before her.
“Agh!” she roared in frustration, shaking her head as if it would free her lucid mind of whatever feral goals demanded her attention. The starving voice went silent, leaving her alone with the glow of her spear and the shadows of ships looming before her.
“What is this?” she muttered. Her chest still heaved from the chase. She retied the medallion around her neck to free up a hand and swam closer cautiously, holding her spear aloft for the light it provided. There were no signs of damage to the first ship’s hull as she inspected its sides. The deck, too, was completely intact as she swam over it from stem to stern, apart from being hauntingly empty. Heavy chains strewn over the sides anchored it to the grotto’s rocky bottom. This was a gunship. Whose was impossible to tell since the sails were all bundled, all portholes sealed, all deck passageways closed and locked so that there was no way inside.
Her breath caught in her throat as she peered over the aft end, backing away to make out the entirety of gold lettering etched into its iron side.
The Clodion.
“TheClodion?” she said. But how? Why?
