“Lies and damned lies,” the orca said smoothly. “Show me proof of this. I would be very surprised if there was any.”
“Well, I’d have to have access to Mother, wouldn’t I?” Edmund replied. “And if I did, you would question the access. But I was there when Dionys McCanoc destroyed himself in a rush of power. It was I that put him in his prison of energy, a prison that was breached with the power equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Of course, he’d neglected to shield himself, so the prison became his tomb. Where, I wonder, did he get all that power? He, the New Destiny tool, who was the sole surviving member of the Project council. All the other members suffered mysterious, or not so mysterious, deaths just prior to and after the Fall.”
“You call innuendo and supposition proof?” the orca asked with a blatted chuckle. “But we stray far afield. You want these good people to risk themselves in a doomed gamble. We but wish them to maintain themselves in neutrality. In proof of our goodwill we had brought goods to help them, nets, fishhooks, traps and harpoons. Unfortunately, all of them were destroyed by the Freedom Coalition. This is proof, not innuendo.”
“And, as I said, I’m sure that it was just a friendly meeting on the sea,” Edmund replied. “That your ship did not, for example, attack an unarmed clipper.”
“And if it was unarmed,” the orca snarled, “how did it sink our ship?”
“That, I’ll admit, is a puzzler,” Edmund said. “Honestly.”
“All I know is that they fired some sort of device off of the clipper,” the orca replied. “Black and small as a yellow snapper. But the ship stopped and the scuppers ran with blood.”
Edmund turned as he heard a liquid chuckle and looked at Bast, who was staring at him with merriment in her eye.
“Are you not glad, Duke Edmund,” she said, still chuckling, “that I brought that bedamned rabbit?”
Edmund started chuckling and ended up laughing heartily.
“You think?”
“Aye, methinks. A small object? Scuppers running with blood?”
“Poor doomed bastards,” Herzer said, chuckling as well. He turned to Jason and grinned. “Let’s just say that we have a secret weapon. It won’t usually work, but when it does…”
“Scuppers running with blood?” Jason said, gulping. “I don’t know.”
“You haven’t been through territory that New Destiny has ravaged,” Herzer replied. “You haven’t stood before their Changed orcs, come upon the ruins of buildings, and people, that they leave behind,” Herzer said, trying to check himself but realizing that the fury that lurked always just below his calm exterior was coming to the fore. “You haven’t seen the feeding pots, with the legs of children turning in the boiling water.”
“Lies and damned lies!” the orca bellowed, looming over the unChanged human. “Recant those untruths!”
“When you recant your lies, you… you… I can smell the flesh of dolphin on your breath like the evil stench of the lies you have been spouting!”
The orca blatted him with sound and hooked his tail around, hitting the lieutenant with a blast of water that struck like a full body hammer. Herzer was thrown backwards through the water, half stunned. But he was used to fighting half stunned and before he had ceased to tumble his knife had appeared in his hand and he circled up and to the right, turning to try to get in on the flank of the orca.
Suddenly the orca found two strong fingers pinching his blowhole and a long, slim, dagger pointed at his eye.
“Take a bite out of my boyfriend,” Bast purred, “and I’ll drive this all the way to your brain.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” the orca said.
“I’ve killed better orcas than you,” she whispered, staring him in the eye. “And what you are is a psychopathic monstrosity. But, then again, so am I,” she added and took a deep breath, letting it out in a long, unearthly sonar scream that echoed off the walls of the square.
Herzer shivered and froze as the reverberations of the unholy, multitonal shriek washed through his body. It was the most gut-wrenching sound he had ever heard, including the death shriek of horses, which was as close as he could come to identifying it with a known sound.
“Enough!” Bruce yelled. “Herzer, Bast, you’re no longer to come into this town! Ambassador Shanol, I am forced to permit your continued presence, but one more such outburst and I will have you barred from the village as well, and your pod with you. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” the ambassador said, blowing out bubbles as a sort of throat clearing. “I… regret my outburst. But the statement that I would eat the flesh of my good friends the dolphins… you understand.”
“Fighting will not be tolerated,” Bruce said. “That I understand. Duke Edmund?”
“Herzer is one of my staff,” Edmund replied. “And, I might add, has made valuable contributions to this community. But I accept that he is not to come within, say, one hundred meters of the town square. That means if we need to meet, it is a reasonable swim for one or both of us. As for Bast,” he sighed. “She goes where she wills.”
“I’ll not come back to this town until invited,” the elf said. “But those reshanool had better stay far from me or I’ll teach them what the myth of the food chain really means.”
“Agreed,” Bruce said. “And Ambassador Shanol, you and your pod are to stay away from the visitors from the mainland. The first sign of any further conflict and I am going to expel both groups.”
Herzer had already sheathed his knife and now nodded at Edmund, then turned and swam towards shore followed by Bast. As he passed over one of the canyons, Antja and Elayna popped out of a swim-through and Pete and Jackson popped out of another.
“This sucks!” Pete said angrily. “That damned dolphin-eater turns up and you just get tossed out. It’s not like you struck the first blow; he hit you solid.”
“Yeah,” Jackson added. “You okay?”
“I’ve had worse,” Herzer said.
“I’d noticed the scars,” Antja said. “But I hadn’t wanted to ask. Or about the hand.”
“Well, I think it’s time to tell you all about it,” Herzer said. “But not here. Up on shore where fish-face can’t come.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Herzer was actually glad to get out of the water. He had been losing weight, too, on the high-protein diet and constant cold. The warm sun of the Isles felt good on his back.
“After the Fall, I fell in with a guy named Dionys McCanoc,” Herzer said as the group dragged itself onto the shore.
“Met him,” Bast said. “Bastard.” She sat down behind Herzer and started massaging his neck. “Let me handle the orcas, lover. But if you have to fight one, remember they’re really sensitive about their blowholes. Get them by that and it’s like holding a man’s balls. I mean, in a fight, not, you know…”
“I know,” Herzer said, smiling. Bast could make everything a joke, which was just about the only way to live life he decided. “Anyway, McCanoc.”
“Didn’t Edmund mention him?” Pete asked, as Jason dragged himself out of the water.
“This sucks,” Jason said, crawling over to the group. “I wanted to stick a spear in that arrogant New Destiny fisker.”
“Didn’t we all,” Jackson replied. “Bast, that was unbelievable. I never saw you move, you were just there.”
“Bast is an elf,” Bast said, then raised a hand to forestall comment on the apparent non sequitur. “Everyone seems to think that elves are human. Not. Elves were constructed from ground up. No haphazard evolution for us. Look, somewhat, human, but are not. Better, stronger, faster, which is a very old joke. But also… happier. Less… serious than humans. Humans with their short lives always live in the now, which is good in a way. But elves are half the time in Dream, only way to spend a millennia or so. Me, I tend to spend most of my time in the now. Sometimes it hurts. I’ll live on when Herzer gets gray and dick goes all flabby and then he dies. And I’ll remember him, as I remember scores, hundreds, of others. And love them all. As long as Bast lives, they live on in one heart,” she said, tapping her chest.