"Alone?" I asked, unsure if I'd genuinely understood.
"Alone," confirmed Greatmother Zurian. The current at the mouth of Lower Reed Cave let her keep the perfect poise I'd admired so much while growing up, and so failed to ever master myself.
"Of course," I said. "As Undine wills and the tribe needs," I added the formality to make it clear that I was thinking as well as feeling, even if thinking hastily.
=-=-=-=-=
It was a week after the battle with the lava-swimmers ended. There was still an occasional tang of ash and burned coral, when the currents flowed from east and down. I'd been to look at the remains, once, but found the damage too terrible, and swam away again in search of less death-ruled spectacles.
The whole war with the element-swimmers had taken two years, including the scouting, raiding, and amassing of armies. Some curious loner like me discovered a new lair of rock-swimmers entirely by accident, and alerted their tribe. From there one thing led to another: the role of the rock-swimmers in inciting a variety of local monsters, the skirmishes and then massed battle in the rock-swimmers' warrens, the discovery of ice-swimmers among the methane ice veins at the bottom of Greentide Deeps, the use of rock-swimmer magic by two tribes' kahunas and summoners to infiltrate the ice veins from below, the massive battle in and around the Deeps that followed, the discovery of yet another lair of the swimmers in the ruins we called Elder City of the Leftward Clouds because of the murals its unknown builders left, and the gathering of four tribes' warriors to deal with the lava-swimmers' own growing legion.
I knew that most of my own tribe and most of the kahunas from all the local tribes found it all wonderfully glorious in various epic ways. The cults of war flourished, of course, and the other temples wove warlike ways into their own rites. Those of us who remained peace-sworn found ourselves increasingly on the rocky shallows of tribal life. Some of my comrades left the area entirely, heading north to the Shoals Under Ice or south to the Coral Greatland or east to the Thousand Spines, and there were nights when I drifted near the surface, watching the clouds and stars wheel so far above, and thought that perhaps I should go, too.
But I hadn't yet, and so I was at home when Greatmother Zurian came calling. At first I wondered what I might have done to get in trouble, since that's usually behind any visit from the tribal ladies to someone like me. I couldn't think of anything, though, so I made the welcoming rites as confidently as we could, and soon the two of us were resting congenially at the entrance to my warren, filtering the current through a fine kelp-weave I'd made myself from strands gathered deep in the Upper Reed Caves.
"Deepleaper," she said at last, "tell me what you know about the military status of the Twelve Old Tribes."
"Er, by 'status', you mean, what they're doing right now?"
"That's right," she nodded.
"Well.." I pondered. "I know that there's a large force trying to deal with the remains of the city..." I thought some more. "And I know that there's still a lot of patrolling going on, and if there's been a general standing-down order, I haven't heard about it yet..."
"You haven't missed any such order," she said, and there was no hint of her usual gentle cheer in the words. I picked up on her tone.
"You mean that the threat isn't over yet?" She kept silent. "Are there more element-swimmers out there that most of us don't yet know about? More survivors of the three kinds than most of us know about?"
"That was good thinking," she said. "Not many, even among the elves and nommo, have really noticed it, or asked the question you just did."
Now that I had the fear, though, the compliment wasn't doing me any good. "Yes, but what about the threat? What's going on, Greatmother?"
She delicately wound her kelp-weave around one of the warren's many hooks. "Yes, there's a threat. No, there aren't more than a few shoals of element-swimmers loose, that we know of. It's something else." She opened up her fin harness and drew out a long strand of message beads, and handed it to me. "Read this and tell me what you think of it."
I know that some sages like to say that every message string tells a story in its composition, but often the story is no more than "I needed to send a message, and these are the beads I had handy at the moment." It's certainly true, though, that people do say things—intended and otherwise—in their choice of beads' materials and styles when they're putting more care into a message. These beads told an interesting story in the absence of a story. If you deliberately set out to pull together a completely representative set of beads for the Twelve Old Tribes, you could scarcely do better than this message-maker had done. A little clay, a little gemwork, a little coral, a little deep weed plating, a little obsidian...as I handled them, I let my inner eyes roam, and a terrible vision came to me.
It's a very dark space, lit by a single glow-worm somewhere above me. I see dark-scaled hands making the knots and stringing the beads to spell out this message, word by word, phrase by phrase. And I look up as the maker chooses more beads, and what I see is a chamber of the dead. There are two of every race of the Twelve Old Tribes that sends messages, every one slain at a time its hands were full of complete or fragmentary messages. The maker takes a few beads from each in turn. Our representative dead make this bland composition.
I shuddered, and told the Greatmother about it. She nodded, and said, "We've had other visions like that. I didn't want to guide you astray with the warning. My pardons for the hurt to your heart; may the new tide restore your joy." She gave my fin a gentle caress. "And what do you make of the message itself?"
I read it now, trying not to receive any more senses of the maker just right then. It was an awkward thing. "Whoever wrote this isn't a native speaker of our words." I continued studying it. "There's a lot of jargon here I don't understand, but...this is from some overlord to the leader of the lava-swimmers." I looked at the Greatmother. "But I thought they were the generals of the element-swimmers?"
She sighed, with a troubled flick of her tail. "In most ways they were. But there were scattered signs of an unseen rudder almost from the beginning. We warned the troops to keep alert without telling them more than that there's always more to learn about the enemy's dispositions, which is true as far as it goes. The clues continued to come, and then there's this now, taken from the collapse of the city. And just today we found the final piece of the puzzle we need..."
She looked me up and down. "You will keep this in confidence?"
I nodded solemnly. "As closely as you wish me to, Greatmother."
"You know, I presume, that there are many small tunnels leading off in all directions from the city." She smiled, just for a moment. "I imagine you dream of swimming them, once the area cools again." I could only flush and nod. "You see these final words in the message, about the Great Queen's Haven? One of those tunnels is marked with runes that say the same thing in carving-language."
"Deep warrens..." I started to say something, lost my train of thought, and fell silent.
"The generals have sent three scouts down into it so far. They felt the death-cries of each one, not very far in."
"That's terrible," I said, without any conflicting feeling. I would never approve of war-making, but good scouting reduced the burden and damage of war—the loss of any scout was a gift only to the mindless gods of carnage.
"It is," she agreed. "The generals came to us and asked if we could suggest someone better able to scout in the midst of that kind of uncertainty, and who'd be willing to do so." She paused. I waited. "You were the very first one we thought of, Deepleaper." I flushed again, with joy this time, but waited still. "We want you to go into the tunnel and see what you can see, and let us know as much as you can."
"Alone?" I asked, unsure if I'd genuinely understood.
=-=-=-=-=
And so here I am, voluntarily swimming back to the ruins of the Elder City of the Leftward Clouds. I have a harness laden with supplies, and two of my favorite eels swimming alongside me for company.
It is not purely a pleasure trip. The last thing the Greatmother told me was that the elders have agreed to rouse the Kraken Legion. If those things join the fray, the destruction will be truly terrible. I must learn and do what it takes so that they're not needed. Or rather so that my people's leaders understand that they're not needed.
It is a grand and glorious burden.
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