The Salmon-Falls, the Mackerel-Crowded Seas

Valens reached out with his mind, digging for the correct psychic tether. He had spent sixty years with only one, and it had been inactive for most of that time; now, distinguishing between four forced him to learn aspects of this ability he had never needed give thought to. Each had an impression tied to it, and he took hold of the one that emanated confusion and trepidation, but also resolve. These were the constant buzzes in the background of Rufio’s mind, and Valens could make them out even while the younger man slept.

“Rufio.”

“Hm? Five more minutes, please, father.”

“You still have a few responsibilities to take on before you can call me that, boy. Get up. We have work to do.”

Rufio’s eyes snapped open, and an image came over their tether of a sand beach and a cyan sea.

In the dark of the night, Valens had sent Rufio by ancient passage connecting the Nephilic ruins beneath the palace to the cliff on the other side of the Strait of Aureliopolis. He had taken the treasury-key with him, and used it to lure Chrysos northward along the beach until he had come to a long sandy stretch. Here, the land gave way at such a shallow incline to the sea that the high tide washed in over a quarter of a mile, compared to the low point. Here, Rufio had made himself comfortable in the sand, in plain sight of, but not too close to, the water.

Looking through his eyes now, Valens saw Chrysos circling just out of the shallows. They had hoped, by some remote chance, the monster would beach itself in the night, but whatever impulse spurred it into pursuit of the Motive Stone key didn’t seem to overtake whatever bestial intellect it had. They would need a more subtle trap then merely putting a natural hazard between the fish and their lure. Their true hope, in sending Rufio out to lure the fish northward, was to keep it away from the spot they had selected to build their trap while Valens, Hadrian, and Atia put it together, and to draw it into the trap from the north when they were ready.

“Did you at least learn anything about why it’s so attracted to the key?”

“It was good that I had most of the night to attempt and re-attempt that spell Petrus taught me, the one for revealing the connections between things. Eventually, I was able to sustain a cast long enough to determine that the key was, in fact, tickling some supernatural sense the fish had, an attraction to objects cherished for beauty and permanence, but no more strongly than a coinpurse full of gold or a handful of gems, not enough to explain why it broke away from stalking trading vessels to rush here as soon as we brought the key to the beach. However, compounding this otherwise minor attraction, the key interacts with a spell someone placed on Chrysos. If I had to guess, this spell was cast decades or centuries ago, its caster is long-dead, and it may well have originally had a complicated interweaving series of effects, but it has eroded over time, to the point of doing little save to draw Chrysos more strongly to the key. If we fail to kill it today, we might be able to solve the problem by sailing past Ethperra and casting this key into the deep ocean.”

“An impressive read on the magical forces at play, even if it did take you many attempts to do it. But, I would like to avoid needing to choose between letting more ships be sunk, or ensuring Euphemios’ gold is lost forever. We kill Chrysos today. Bring it in, Rufio.”

Valens stood on a steep rocky islet, a column jutting maybe twelve cubits up from the sea which might have been a natural formation, or a scar on the coastline from powerful spells wrought in one of the great battles of the archaic epics. Under the water, this formation stood at the tip of a steep triangular shelf coming off the shore westward, with the water about fifteen or twenty cubits deep over most of this triangle, though it rose sharply before its southern dropoff to less than four cubits, just deep enough for a tall man to stand on the edge with his head above water and peer into the dark depths below. The shoreline across from Valens was a steep tumble of boulders, and along it at the shelf’s other two corners stood Atia to the north and Hadrian to the south.

Given that the monster they now faced lived in the water, and had metal teeth long enough to impale them height-wise, the monster-hunters had to varying degrees eschewed armor. Through Rufio’s eyes, he had seen the man’s reclined form garbed in a long-sleeved tunic, sandals, and some kind of breeches or trousers that came down just below the knee. His antiquated helmet rested on his chest, but his mail was nowhere to be seen. Hadrian had eschewed metal armor, but still wore a thick gambeson and arming cap of quilted linen, should the monster’s writhing body dash him against the rocks.

Valens and his daughter, however, had taken this to the extreme.

Atia wore loose, knee-length braies, a long cotton band about her hips and waist as a sort of sash or girdle, with her sword-belt over this, and a tightly-knotted breast-band, all simple beige articles and accompanied by nothing else, not even the white Air-gauntlet she had brought from Lyria. Its effect on her Air spells was marginal, in any case, and Water was likely to be the more relevant Discipline here.

While practicality was not something Valens was capable in his mind of subordinating to propriety, once a hunt was underway, her wearing this little did put him an uncomfortable position, when he was newly bound in mind to two younger men, who as yet had developed little control over which absent thoughts drifted through to him.

It did not help that their reactions were not as disgusted as he would have hoped, to his wearing less still. A wrapped loincloth such as a gladiator may have worn of old, with a long rondel dagger tucked into the belly-band; his greatsword in its loose-slung scabbard over his shoulder; and their Earth-gauntlet on his right hand. He may not have been as agile now as fifty or a hundred years ago, but he was still every bit as strong, and the figure he cast from atop his stone perch displayed this in full.

Up on that stone pillar with him, sharing a space not quite four cubits across, stood a scorpion– a cruciform, torsion-powered, tripod-mounted piece of field artillery occupying the gap in size between a shoulder-aimed crossbow and a siege ballista. Loaded into it was a harpoon such as a whaler might use, save for the iron reinforcement bars running the length of its shaft, and from the end of it a chain ran to a coil behind the weapon, the end of its length looped firmly around the rock formation below his feet.

More chains spanned from this islet to the shore, laying slack along the edges of the shelf, but tied off such that, were the hunters ashore to pull them taught, they could be held that way simply by winding them for a loop or two around a nearby rock. Ropes were similarly arranged, with clay pots of Rhatian Fire tied to them in a few different configurations.

On Valens’ rock were a few extra harpoons, some chained to the rock, some with unsecured lengths of rope, and some bare of any tether, for him to use as needed. He also had a straw-lined box of Rhatian Fire pots, and similar munitions were arrayed here and there along the shore between Atia and Hadrian.

Along the beach to their north, Valens faintly made out Rufio’s silhouette, picking his way along the coast with the treasury-key held high.

Chrysos followed, a dark shape in the water, the gold glint of its teeth occasionally showing through.

“Here they come!”