Up came a pair of fish like bloated black bladders, one thirty times larger than its companion. Each had a single long, curving appendage like a thin filament fishing line attached to its forehead, from whose tip twitched a lure of irresistible intensity. Their eyes were so small as to be almost invisible, and they burned with the fire of a hundred natural lights. Nearby swarmed a school of a thousand small silvery fish, each flashing a thumb-sized soft blue light from just aft of its eye.
There were jellyfish larger than any the sailors had ever seen, their pulsing bells decorated with blue and green and yellow lights that trailed fifty-foot-long tentacles of unbroken luminescence. Deep-sea sharks swept tails full of sapphire light in steady arcs, like glowing oars in the water, and all manner of toothy fish darted to and fro in balls of intense yellow or green.
But it was when the tiny lanterns of natural luminescence finally arose that the sea around the Grömsketter turned from dark to light. There were billions of them, seemingly in as many shapes and sizes, many so small that even sharp-eyed seamen wearing spectacles could barely make them out. Ehomba could. The herdsman’s vision was particularly acute.
Then the mid-ocean merfolk arrived, showing oval, slightly protuberant eyes and gills that flashed gold around the edges. They displayed elegant patterns of light along their sides and fins and carried short staffs tipped with transparent crustacean bodies scavenged from the hidden places of the sea. These were filled with glowing krill individually selected for their color and brightness. A number of merfolk rode in shell chariots drawn by man-sized seahorses that glowed brown and were harnessed with kelp and sea-grass strips radiating an intense crimson.