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Sivard spoke no more. Ranild decked him with a blow that brought nosebleed. Man the tackle, you
whoresons, the captain rasped, or Satan fart me out if I don t send you to the kraken myself!
They scurried to obey. He does not lack courage, Eyjan said in the mer-tongue.
Nor does he lack treachery, Tauno warned. Turn never your back on any of that scurvy lot.
Save Niels and Ingeborg, she said.
Oh, you d not want to turn your back on him, nor I mine on
her, Kennin laughed. He likewise felt no fear, he was wild to be off.
Using a crane they had fitted together and braced against the mast, the sailors raised that which had been
readied while under way. A large piece of iron had been hammered into the boulder till it stood fast;
thereafter the outthrusting half was ground and whetted to a barbed spearhead. Elsewhere in the rock
were rings, and the huge net was secured to these at its middle. Along the outer edges of the net were
bent the twelve ship-anchors. All this made a sort of bundle lashed below a raft whose right size had
been learned by trial and error. The crane arm dangled it over the starboard bulwark, tilting the cog.
Let s go, said Tauno. He himself was unafraid, though at the back of his head he did think on the fact
that this world-that entered him and that he entered through senses triply heightened by danger-might
soon crack to an end, not only in its present and future but in its very past.
The siblings took off their clothes, save for the headbands and dagger belts. Each slung a pair of
harpoons across the shoulders. They stood for a moment at the rail, their sea ablaze behind them, tall
Tauno, lithe Kennin, Eyjan of the white skin and the comely breasts.
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To them came Niels. He wrung their hands, he kissed the girl, he wept because he could not go with
them. Meanwhile Ingeborg held hands and eyes with Tauno. She had braided her hair, but a stray brown
lock fluttered across her brow. Upon her snub-nosed, full-mouthed, freckled face had come a grave
loneliness he had never known before, not ever among the merfolk.
It may be I will not see you again, Tauno, she said, too low for others to listen, and sure it is that I
cannot and must not speak what is in my heart. Yet I ll pray for this, that if you go to your death, on your
errand for a sister s sake, God give you in your last moment the pure soul you have earned.
Oh. . . you are kind, but-well, I fully mean to come back.
I drew a bucket of sea water ere dawn, she whispered, and
washed myself clean. Will you kiss me farewell?
He did. Her pretense of dislike was no longer needful, he supposed; his alliance could guard her, as well
as each other, on the homeward voyage. Overboard! he shouted, and plunged.
Six feet beneath, the sea took him with a joyful splash. It sheathed him in aliveness. He savored the taste
and coolness for a whole minute before he called, Lower away.
The sailors cranked down the laden raft. It floated awash, weight exactly upheld. Tauno cast it loose.
The humans crowded to the rail. The halflings waved-not to them but to wind and. sun-and went under.
The first breath of sea was always easier than the first of air. One simply blew out, then stretched wide
the lips and chest. Water came in, tingling through mouth, nostrils, throat, lungs, stomach, guts, blood, to
the last nail and hair. That dear shock threw the body over to merfolk way; subtle humors decomposed
the fluid element itself to get the stuff which sustains fish, fowl, flesh, and fire alike; salt was sieved from
the tissues; interior furnaces stoked themselves high against the lamprey chill.
That was a reason why merfolk were scarce. They required more food afloat than men do ashore. A
bad catch or a murrain among the shellfish might make an entire tribe starve to death. The sea gives; the
sea takes.
Vanimen s children placed themselves to manhandle their clumsy load and swam downward.
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.
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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
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