As first the light was like new leaves and old amber. Soon it grew murky, soon afterward blackness ate the last of it. No matter their state, the siblings felt cold. Silence hemmed them in. They were bound for depths below any in Kattegat or Baltic; this was the Ocean.
“Hold,” Tauno said, in the dialect of the mer-tongue that was used underwater, a language of many hums, clicks, and smacks. “Is she riding steady? Can you keep her here?”
“Aye,” answered Eyjan and Kennin.
“Good. Let this be where you wait.”
They made no bold protests. They had worked out their plan
and now abode by it, as those must who dare the great deep.
Tauno, strongest and most skilled, was to scout ahead.
Strapped on the left forearm, each of them carried a lanthorn from Liri. This was a hollowed crystal globe, plated with varnished silver on one half and shaped into a lens on the other half, filled with that living seafire which lit the homes of the merfolk. A hole, covered with mesh too fine for those animalcules to escape, let them be fed and let water go in and out. The ball rested in a box of carven bone, shuttered in front. None of the lanthorns had been opened.
“Fare you lucky,” said Eyjan. The three embraced in the dark.
Tauno departed.
Down he swam and down. He had not thought his world could grow blacker, bleaker, stiller, but it did. Again and yet again he worked muscles in chest and belly to help inside pressure become the same as outside. Nevertheless it was as if the weight of every foot he sank were loaded on him.
At last he felt-as a man at night may feel a wall in front of him-that he neared bottom. And he caught an odor. . . a taste …a sense.. .of rank flesh; and through the water pulsed the slow in-and-out of the kraken’s gills.
He uncovered the lanthorn. Its beam was pale and did not straggle far; but it served his Faerie eyes. Awe crawled along his backbone.
Below him reached acres of ruin. A verorn had been large, and built throughout of stone. Most had toppled to formless masses in the silt. But here stood a tower, like a last snag tooth in a dead man’s jaw; there a temple only partly fallen, gracious colonnades around a god who sat behind his altar and stared blind into eternity; yonder the mighty wreck of a castle, its battlements patrolled by spookily glowing fish; that way the harbor, marked off by mounds that were buried piers and city walls, still crowded with galleons; this way a house, roof gone to show the skeleton of a man forever trying to shield the skeletons of a woman and child; and every-where, everywhere burst-open vaults and warehouses, the upward twinkle of gold and gems on the seabed!
And sprawled at the middle was the kraken. Eight of his darkly gleaming arms reached into the comers of the eight-sided plaza that bore his mosaic image. His remaining two arms, the longest, twice the length of Herning, were curled around a pillar at the north side which bore on top the triskeled disc of that god he had conquered. His terrible finned head sagged loosely over them;
Tauno could just glimpse the hook beak and a swart lidless eye.
The halfling snapped back the shutter and started to rise in lightlessness. A throbbing went through the ocean, into his bones. It was as if the world shook. He cast a beam downward. The kraken was stirring. He had awakened him.
Tauno clenched his teeth. Wildly he dug hands and feet into that frigid thick water; he ignored the pain of pressure too hastily lifted; yet icily with merfolk senses he noted which way he moved. It rumbled below him. The kraken had stretched and gaped, a portico had been knocked to pieces.
At the verge of daylight, Tauno halted. He hung afloat and blinked with his lanthom. A vast shadowiness swelled beneath.
Now, till Kennin and Eyjan got here, he must stay alive-yes. hold the monster in play so it would not go elsewhere.