Mantis and her charges stood huddled together at the bow of the ship for the remainder of the trip. She felt uncomfortable in all sorts of ways, and could almost hear her own composure wearing thinner and thinner. At the slightest of provocations, she could snap. It had taken control Mantis didn't have in her to warn the men off rather than to defend, to just eliminate the threat. But that would have been a poor decision however she looked at it. She, and the children, needed the men. And not all the fishermen aboard the ship deserved to die, she forced herself to recognize.
The remaining Seamen had returned to their posts but kept their furious gazes on her. She'd feared they would try to avenge their fellow, forcing Mantis to fight them whether she considered it a wise decision or not, but, luckily, one of the dead man's companions had spoken up to the angry captain, saying that he'd seen what Mantis could do, and didn't doubt the veracity of her threats. He reasoned that he had a family to provide for at home, and several others joined him in his attempt to cool the tensions that had built among them.
Teela seemed fine. She stood with her hands cupped around her little sparrow, asleep, over her chest, and stroked its head with one finger, Mantis's cloak's hood pulled over her head. It was a wonder that she hadn't wanted to discuss the incident, and Mantis felt a prick of concern about what that could mean. Had she been more affected by the man's assault than she'd let on?
It was Leroh who broke the long silence. "Was he a…rapist? A bad man?" Mantis did not reply, and he dared to push her further. "Or did you kill that lad for what he did to Teela?"
At that, the girl turned to give Mantis a sideways look freighted with pain and disbelief. When she remained silent, Teela answered for her. "She killed him for his offense to me."
Leroh glared. "Is that true? That was all it took for you to end his life?" His tentative accusation was rapidly growing into outrage.
"It was enough," Mantis told him, and looked away.
Her fists were clenched at her sides. The souls in her chest kept giving agonizing bursts of increased pressure, and her anxiety for their meeting with the Sea combined with the lingering rage from the incident with the sailors were building to a dangerous level of strain to her already teetering emotional balance. Not to mention her Goddess's never-ending, excruciating push.
She had not perceived any targets among the Sea folk. It seemed the town as a whole was clear, including the unlucky sods that had agreed to transport them. However, she did feel a light but constant tugging eastward following the line of the coast. A village or settlement of some kind, she guessed, where a target or perhaps two awaited her. Ombira's patience was wearing extremely thin.
Mantis could find a safe place to put Teela upon their return to shore, and ride out and back within a few hours or maybe a day to quench the thirst, she thought. If she was quick enough, the girl would not have to know where she'd gone, or what she'd gone to do. It could work, maybe, if she could find a place to leave her. And her brother, she supposed.
"I don't think…I don't think he deserved to die for that, Mantis." Teela spoke in a small, hurt voice. "I can forgive it. What he did. It did me no harm and, if he had a family, I don't want to be the reason—"
"I don't forgive," Mantis cut her off. "He chose his own fate, and I helped to seal it. You bear no blame here."
"I disagree," Teela argued. "I blame myself. And you." At that, Leroh'ss eyes widened and his mouth pinched into a tight line. "Could you not…bring him back? Like you did with me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"No more questions."
The girl gave her a wounded look for a long moment, and then buried her face in her cupped hands. She started crying.
Mantis felt the tears sliding down Teela's face like strings pulling at the cold, dark corners of her heart. If she had been able to bring the piece of filth sailor back to life, she might have even considered it at that moment, only to quench the girl's sadness. He did not deserve to live, Mantis knew, and it was a kindness to humanity that he be removed from their midst, but Teela would have to carry, for the rest of her life, what had transpired on that boat, and that tragedy had the power to almost rival Mantis's rational thinking.
She felt the weight of her self-loathing hang just a little heavier than it had, like a scale when another fat grain was added to the pile of wheat.
Ennet had never gone so far as to force himself on another. That, she knew from her God-given sense to point out her targets. But she'd learned there were indicators. Bad men often took smaller steps before that final leap, and she delighted in preventing it ever happening at all. If she was ever lucky enough to catch a man before he could wound another irredeemably, she nipped him in the bud like one would an invasive weed. It was ideal to do away with them at the earliest sign of wickedness.
This one had been well on the path to abusing those he considered lesser than himself. The signs were clear. When he chose to distinguish himself in front of his comrades at the expense of an outnumbered woman, when he took a convenient chance to exploit someone he perceived as defenseless, he'd shown his nature. He'd likely thought, if the man with her gets aggressive, there's ten of us. If he doesn't mind, here's two women, prone, weak, sweet as low hanging fruit. What's the worst that can happen?
Men with that mindset, those who measured their actions by the likeliness of their negative consequences, took as many liberties as were allowed to them, always. It would not have been long before another easy prey came into his path, and he, again, saw an opportunity to feed his desires and purposes. It was only a shock that he'd not done so already before that day.
Mantis was satisfied with herself to have killed him. But, for Teela, she might have humored the thought of taking it back, if that were possible. It wasn't, of course. His soul remained in his body, and would rightfully be consumed by the Sea, along with the rest of him.
The human soul burned inside one's chest like a flame, she'd always said. Mantis could shoot a link into someone's heart and steal the flame, carrying it away inside herself as if with a candle, to later deliver to her Goddess. If a person, servant or otherwise, simply perished, the flame went out with their life, but the deities could still consume the embers that remained of that fire, if only for a short period of time before decomposition extinguished them forever. They made no distinction between the living and the dead, as long as they could be consumed, for the human soul was akin to water to the Gods, as crucial to their survival as breathing was to humans.
The mind was another thing entirely, however. A person's brain and dark matter held a different sort of power, one the Gods chose to consume. The memories, knowledge, and essence of an individual were stored in one's mind and, different from the vital energy of the soul, the nourishment that the Gods could get from consuming a full body was rather like an addiction for them. They loved and craved that richness and strength, rather than needed it.
The flame inside of Ennet had been forever put out and the lingering embers now awaited his master, as did the life essence of his mind. As it turned out, Mantis would have three souls, not two, to present to the Sea.
"We're there." Leroh interrupted her thoughts with a trembling voice. His eyes were wide and locked on the soft waves. "The waters are darker here. This must be his lair."
"Don't call it that, you hapless idiot." Mantis scowled at him.
"You think he can hear?" He'd gone pale and still.
"They can hear when you talk about them, yes, and now's the worst possible time to say, or think, anything he might find insulting. You're like a fine bit of meat dangled in his face, right now. So keep your words and thoughts…flattering." This, she said to Teela. She almost didn't care what happened to the boy, but the girl could do with a clear warning.
They were slowing in speed as the Seamen rushed to back the sails, positioning them so that the Wind would push the ship backward and to a slow stop. She heard the chain of the dropped anchor and saw, from the corner of her eye, how violently Leroh shivered at that sound. He understood that the heavy weight would be far less effective there than in shallower waters. The color of the Seas around them, crystalline and blue up until that point, had turned a darker shade, almost black, from the sudden drop in the Sea floor below them. They'd gone over the edge of the cliff, and now floated above an immeasurable depth of water that harbored the Sea God in its darkness.
It was common knowledge that he resided somewhere in the lightless pit of an underwater chasm, his entire anatomy seemingly designed to inhabit the cold, empty environment.
In a brief moment of self awareness, she acknowledged to herself that she felt a flicker of curiosity to finally see him with her own eyes. The rumors of his physical form had always sounded to her rather vague and far-fetched, so now she'd be able to judge for herself if he truly was 'unfathomably large and formidable'. For obvious reasons, Mantis had not gotten a chance to see the Sea God the one and only time Ombira had steered her toward Okedam. The bastard lived at the bottom of the ocean, after all.
She'd been glad to leave the coastal town behind, and never wished to return, and, strangely, her wishes had been granted until then. For that, Mantis could thank the fact that the Sea God's men were less rotten than those among the free folk. With the exception of Ennet, who rested unmoving where he'd fallen, Mantis had not had a reason to deploy her weapons against any Sea followers, ever. Or any other God servants at all, for that matter.
Her Goddess had brought her to the port town only once, early in their acquaintance, and the few she'd taken then had been unsworn men, too. Mantis reluctantly gave credit to the Gods for the lack of vile men in their service, for she assumed some command was in place to stop them from violating others in the brutal way those without a God tie tended to do.
A wave larger than any before it rocked the meager vessel all of a sudden, and Mantis walked over to the waist-high roughened oak railing to peer out at the open water. Teela was at her back, and Leroh behind hers, watching all with eyes as wide as plates. The boy was shivering and hyperventilating with panic, but the girl looked surprisingly calm, more intrigued than frightened. Mantis gave a sigh of frustration.
Then she saw him, ascending toward them from within the dark abyss.
"Sun's balls…" Mantis muttered, and the children gasped at the blasphemy in her words, not seeing what her God-enhanced vision allowed her to perceive first.
A face, dark but undeniable in its human likeness and with eyes fixed upon them, was approaching rapidly. The Sea God continued to grow clearer and larger, until Mantis swore he could not possibly become any more immense, and then he rose higher still.
He would have been practically invisible to the eye until he was almost at the surface, if not for her atypical eyesight. At a distance, the top half of his body could have been compared to a human man's, his coloring the only visible difference. The same shade as the deep water in his monstrous entirety, dark indigo all throughout, he blended into his surroundings to make him look like just another patch of fluid, cold nothingness. His eyes showed no iris or white to them, only a solid, eerie darkness. His face was human-like in its shape, but held a remarkable resemblance to that of a deadly Sea animal, with flat planes and smooth, streamlined skin. His tail spanned much longer than the bottom half of his body should, outstretching far below where Mantis would have thought it to end, and she caught sight of its nearly imperceptible serpentine movement propelling him upward as effortlessly as the beating of a heart. The natural curve of his animalistic mouth created the illusion of a small smile that sent a shiver up Mantis's spine. He was right beside them in less than a full breath.
A loud gasp at her shoulder informed Mantis that Teela had finally seen him, then came a shriek from Leroh, and a thump that she assumed was his bottom hitting the planks of the deck. Hopefully, this time, he would not piss himself.
The Sea poked his head and then his never-ending torso up into the open air and looked directly at Mantis. His unnerving stare pierced through her like a spear. He was impossibly motionless, and she noticed the strange way in which water did not cling to his skin at all, like he was made of dark blue velvet, his outer layer rejecting any lingering droplets. His head alone was bigger than a two-story building, his eyes spanning wider than the body of a grown horse. The rest of his frame presented no variation in color whatsoever, seeming to repel the light that tried in vain to illuminate and reveal the finer details of his features.
Mantis struggled to take it all in at once. He was muscled, and smooth, beautiful in the way a majestic beast could be described as beautiful.
She spoke. "I have come to return two souls, accidentally taken." He continued to observe her in complete stillness. "I apologize for my mistake." After several breaths of silence and when she received no indication that her words had been heard at all, she decided to offer further explanation in the hopes that that might satisfy him. "I was claiming a soul for my own God, and two previously unsworn men tried to stop me. I killed them in self defense, thinking to bring them to my Goddess, but they'd given themselves to the Sea, just before, to gain the strength to defeat me. I wasn't aware that the transition could be so swift. I would not have taken them, if I'd understood. But I brought them here now, to return them to their rightful owner."
The God said nothing for a long time, and Mantis stood at the railing of the swaying vessel with a straight face. She was out of words. She could add nothing else that would benefit her cause.
He spoke. His voice was a high pitched, grumbling sound that resembled human speech in no way, and put all Mantis's hairs on end with a full-body shudder. As his mouth opened, it revealed endless rows of pointed white teeth and a sleek back tongue. Somehow, the meaning behind the thundering, nearly deafening animalistic sound was clear.
"The flesh."
She blinked, took a deep breath, then blinked again. "I do not have the bodies. Their loved ones burned them."
The unstable ground beneath her feet shook and ripples in the water's surface spread as far as the eye could see all around them. He was angry. Mantis thought to pile the shit high while the shovel was filthy. "I've got a dead fisherman, too. I killed him on the way here, in the name of my Goddess."
"Return the three!" he ordered in his distorted, piercing voice.
Mantis swiftly obeyed, walking first to pick up the dead sailor a few paces away. She lifted him in her arms, his weight heavy but manageable, and dropped him overboard before his God. Ennet's body started to sink immediately, the splash of his hitting the water the last sound he would ever make.
Mantis pushed her index link out through her pointed finger and aimed it at the Sea's colossal chest. She would deposit her cargo directly into his heart, she decided, as it was really the only way she could think of to accomplish the transfer.
The sailors watching the scene unfold exclaimed with horror when her long limb penetrated his flesh, and, to Mantis's surprise, the Sea himself widened his inky eyes and bent his head to observe their point of contact above his heart.
Mantis felt nothing. She blinked and shook her head with confusion at first, surprised by the emptiness that met her black appendage. There was nothing inside him. She could not feel the God at all, like she'd gone through air alone, but her eyes showed her a vivid image of her own link, undeniably inserted into the dark mountain that was his chest.
While she'd been standing there, addled, with her hand pointed at him, he'd plunged a gigantic hand down and collected his sailor from the cold waters below. He raised him up to his mouth and deposited Ennet inside that dim cave fenced with sharp white daggers. Then the fisherman slid down the Sea's throat in one short swallow of his enormous throat like a sip of wine.
Mantis felt a tickle of brightness in her heart, a sensation most unusual. Her link was touching something, a thick sludge of life, and she tried to retreat from it out of instinct, but the Sea God lifted a hand and grabbed the long black strand with a fist to stop her. In his grip, her link looked thinner than a single hair. He grabbed hard and locked eyes with her, commanding her to fulfill his order.
Her extremity was stuck somewhere solid at its point, similar to what she'd expected from their initial contact, but also different in a most unfamiliar way.
When she harbored a foreign soul within herself, she was able to feel its vigorous thrashing inside her chest, so Mantis was familiar with dead men's souls, and their abhorrent memories. They were separate things, and felt like it, the soul and the mind. She could see through a dead man's eyes to his past when she consumed his mind for Ombira, and feel the writhing light of his soul's flame once she'd stolen it. What she encountered at that moment within the Sea God's heart resembled nothing she'd ever experienced, however.
It was life, thinking, breathing, flowing life. Souls, thoughts and the bright, powerful radiance of hundreds of lives congregated in the now tangible tissue of the Sea God's heart.
Mantis willed the two Sea souls that had inhabited hers for too long to move through her link and out the opening at the end. They slid eagerly, and soon exited her body in a sweeping rush.
She closed her eyes and gave a great sigh then, not even noticing when the protruding link, of its own accord, retreated and was sucked back into her hand. The sensation of ridding herself of her stowaways was akin to dropping a boulder she'd been carrying, or finally releasing a breath she'd been holding. Her mind felt instantly unclouded and she regained the ability to think clearly and loosen her tensed muscles.
The Sea God was looking at her.
"Repay your debt," he commanded in his thunderous grumble. "A full life shall compensate for the flesh that is owed."
Mantis had expected as much. "That can be arranged. I will bring you another. All I need is a few days—"
"Choose from among your own. Repayment shall be claimed now."
Mantis glared at him for a moment, then turned to assess the children's reactions. Leroh stood with his shoulders hunched, cowering beside his sister, if a step or two behind her. The girl looked scared, sick and pale, but her back was straight and her gaze bravely locked on the Sea God towering above them. Before Mantis could do or say anything, Teela spoke. "Take me."
"No," Mantis said.
"No."
She turned to look at the Sea God, both confused and relieved that he'd said it. He cocked his head to the side, and studied the girl with an ugly expression of distaste and offense.
"That one is dirty."
"Dirty?" Teela had the nerve to repeat in a trembling little voice.
"DISGUSTING!" he screeched, the sound threatening to blow out all human ears in his vicinity. "You bring a marred soul to me." He directed a blood-curdling look of revulsion at Mantis and lifted his long fingered, smooth hand out from below the waves. Bucketfuls of salty water poured down onto the deck of the small fishing vessel as the Sea God reached over to pluck Leroh by the torso between his thumb and index finger and lifted him up to his chest to inspect. "This one is adequate."
"No! Leroh!" Teela was screaming and pulling at the dark locks of hair at her temples. She'd fallen to her knees on the ground. "Please, please! Take me, take me, please! Don't kill him! Leroh, no, please!"
Mantis reached out with a lightning-fast strike of a link and wrapped the sturdy strip of flesh securely around the boy's waist. The Sea snapped his head up from his improvised meal and fixed her with a stare that conveyed, of all emotions, trepidation. She thought perhaps she'd misread his odd expression, for he quickly turned it into a predator's snarl, baring his hundreds of blade-like teeth and frowning deeply at her defiance.
"I will get you a full life. Two, if you want. But return that boy to me. My God traits allow me to move extremely fast, to absorb any soul into myself within an instant. I will stop you from eating that child if it's the last thing I do, so let me find us both a better outcome."
She was entirely prepared to sacrifice Leroh's life to stop the Sea from consuming him. Killing to avoid a worse fate for others was her burden in life, and she'd gotten comfortable bearing it. The Sea would not claim that free soul.
If she took the boy into herself, the God before her would have no way to claim him, ever. Even if he killed and ate Mantis, no good would come to him from the whole ordeal, as no God beside her own could reach her sworn soul. It would all have been a waste of his time, and an infuriating affront with no chance of retribution. Mantis hoped he could see how much more mutually beneficial her alternative solution was, and allow them all to leave with their lives.
She was aware that she was putting Teela's life at risk with her bargain, but Mantis hazarded a guess that the brave and near suicidal girl would have likely agreed to it. She'd wanted her brother alive over herself, anyway.
The Sea God looked down at Leroh one more time, clutched loosely in front of himself with his minuscule legs dangling in the air. The boy was crying, sobbing and gasping for breath, while he hugged himself with his arms wrapped around his shoulders.
The God's depthless eyes followed the trajectory of her link wrapped around Leroh's body all the way over to her pointed finger. His brow knit deeply and he produced a booming growl that caused the waters to vibrate with his ire again. The wooden floor trembled under Mantis's feet.
Then the Sea flung Leroh across the air and onto the small deck of the ship.
"Leroh!" Teela shouted as she ran to crouch beside him. He'd landed poorly, with a hard knock, and she ran her hands over his arms, torso, and head to feel for blood or signs of injury. She continued to cry as she consoled him, and herself, with her useless words.
"Two days. Two full lives." The Sea God's petrifying gaze was on Mantis as he spoke those final keening words.
Then he simply turned and disappeared into the cold waters of his realm, the gargantuan cartilaginous flap of flesh of his tail fin giving a slap against the surface of the water on his retreat and throwing a violent wave crashing against the anchored boat.