Fastened to a Dying Animal

Rufio sprinted along the beach now, leaping up and pressing forward in bounds as it changed from gravel to knee-high stones to taller boulders still, but the eyes of the other hunters were on Chrysos, swimming parallel and eyeing him hungrily.

He dashed past Atia as his path came beside the water, and Chrysos heaved its bulk into the waters above the shelf, bringing its head to the surface and opening its jaws wide.

Valens took hold of the scorpion and aimed. “Now!”

Atia had a chain and a rope fastened loosely around a tall boulder next to her. She took the rope and threw her weight backwards. The line snapped up out of the water. Along the rocky edge of the underwater shelf, the chain had been laid as an anchor for a string of twenty or so large clay jugs, their stoppers attached by strings to the rope, and with this motion, they were opened. Rhatian Fire, oily and buoyant, poured up out of them, and where it breached the surface, flames erupted on top of the water, catching the fish’s tailfin and sending up a smell at once like a great quantity of burning fish-slime and hot metal.

Hadrian pulled on a heavy chain, fastening it taught about a standing stone such that it stood just out of the water. Dangling from this chain were the smaller, spherical pots of Rhatian Fire, not quite five cubits up off the far edge of the shelf and leaving the great fish, its broad head at least six or seven cubits tall, penned in by fire behind it and a chain ready to burst with more fire in front.

The triangular area left Chrysos little room to maneuver. While it stopped to take in these new developments, Valens took aim just behind its enormous skull and loosed his harpoon from the scorpion.

The whole triangle of water above the shelf seemed at once to come to a rolling boil, so violently did Chrysos thrash and churn. Alas that that there was not Rhatian Fire enough in the entire inventory of the Empire to bring that whole space to a a true boil.

The beast thrashed its tail across the chain Hadrian had raised. The length held, and half a dozen of the pots tied along it burst, setting its whole tail alight. Bringing it below the surface doused the flames, at least as long as the monster kept its tail completely submerged, but any part of it that broke the surface burst again into flames. Even if the monster perceived this in its blind fury, it now was wedged with its tail in shallow water, where any movement required exposing at least a little of its tail to air.

Its jaw made a metallic clink as it ground in frustration. Chrysos began to roll in the water, like the crocodiles in the rivers of Kamut when they seek to tear pieces from their prey. Valens smiled; he had dared not hope for such a maneuver. Still impaled through the back of its neck with a harpoon, and that harpoon still affixed with a well-made chain to the pillar of rock where Valens stood, that chain began to wrap around the great fish’s body, the slack being taken up quickly, until something– in all likelihood, the fish’s own flesh– had to give, and…

The chain snapped taught, and the rock shifted beneath Valens.

Reflexively, he made an Earth Sign for a spell to hold unstable ground steady, though this was better used on the ground directly beneath the caster’s feet, to solidify quicksand or keep a crumbling hill-slope from dragging a man to his backside. The break was further down the column, in some softer sandstone near the waterline, and the spell only very slightly slowed the expansion of the forming crack.

Valens released the spell, and took hold of a harpoon, coiling the attached rope around his forearm. He went to a low crouch as the rock tumbled toward the great fish, and just before impact, he leaped.

The top of the tumbling rock impacted Chrysos’ left flank. The box of Rhatian Fire pots spilled its contents across the monster’s back, which shattered and went up in flames. Valens tumbled into the water on the fish’s right, shoreward side. After a moment of flailing, he broke the surface, and threw his harpoon into the fish’s side.

It was not the strongest of throws, for he made it while treading water, without any purchase on the seafloor or the rocks of the coast. Still, it broke the fish’s skin, and its barbed and hinged tip held fast in its flesh. He gauged the distance from that point to the fish’s mouth, and pulled the rope tight around his left bicep and chest with slack just shorter than that length.

Though being struck just behind the head with multiple tons of rock had momentarily stunned the fish, it resumed its chaotic spasms, and as Valens reached for the sword on his back, Chrysos’ cheek rose out of the water to meet him, his rope tether narrowly keeping him out of reach of those golden teeth.

He felt the monster’s jawbone against his shoulder, and it did not give like the flexible bones of mundane fish, but felt hard and… metallic, he could have sworn. The thought passed as the beast twisted the other way, pulling the rope tight and swinging him and its burning tail in converging arcs.

He grasped his sword-hilt, and pulled the scabbard’s sling over his head and off his back. He let his arm fly out sideways under the force of the swing. The scabbard slid free of the blade, and then he tucked the pommel under his armpit like a couched lance.

Hardly had he gotten the blade straight when the tip slammed into the burning flesh of Chrysos’ tail. The fish’s own immense strength drove the blade in, all the way to the short pair of spikes above the blade’s ricasso.

Flames licked at his face. Then the tail slid down into the sea, and saltwater filled his mouth and stung his eyes. Then he was dragged back up by the hilt of his sword, and he was back to desperately holding himself out of reach of the sticky burning substance.

The fish twisted its head and tail around again, but more sluggishly this time, perhaps realizing how badly-injured the tumbling pillar of rock had left it. Still, holding on for dear life as he was, Valens’ own senses afforded him little but the sensations of splashing, stinging, and burning, and he tried to glean the lay of the battlefield instead through his psychic links to the other hunters.

Its head, he saw through Atia’s eyes, swung to face the beach. Rufio held the treasury-key aloft with one hand, and under his other arm he held one of the wooden boxes they had arrayed on the beach, holding on a bed of straw a half-dozen round pots of Rhatian Fire.

Chrysos’ mouth opened wide, but it came on Rufio slowly, the cumulative damage of a harpoon buried deep in its neck, a ton or more of rock crashing into its flank, and a tail scorched and impaled by Valens’ sword finally serving to stymie, rather than spur on, its violent motion.

Rufio shoved the key into his own mouth, clenching the fish-handle between his teeth, and with a two-handed throw flung the contents of the box into the fish’s gaping maw.

Straw and Rhatian Fire went up in a burning ball. Rufio then dropped the crate, letting it shatter on the rocks of the shoreline, and held up his gauntleted hand. He made a Fire Sign to manipulate an extant flame into an intense, tapered point, the very same one he had been taught for fine woodburning and gilding in creating a religious icon.

The flames licked up and drove to a single spot on the roof of Chrysos’ mouth. Blood boiled, then when all watching expected the flames to come against bone, instead molten metal poured from the hole, the pale straw-color of electrum pooling on the monster’s tongue and separating into rivulets of gold and silver near the edges. Finally, the fluids of its brain-case poured boiling from the hole, and the jaw slammed shut within arm’s reach of where Rufio stood.

Valens pushed off from his buried sword and swam to shore, salt stinging the burns on his chest and arms. The corpse of Chrysos fell sharply, as though in lieu of a natural fish’s swim-bladder it had been held buoyant by a spell that now broke. He pulled himself onto the rocks where Rufio stood, as the younger man now held the treasury-key and watched its Motive Stone pulse with light.

Chrysos’ jaws snapped back open, and the hunters stepped back in alarm, but the fish still lay motionless, its throat now held wide by a tunnel of air emanating from the key. The contents of its stomach were laid bare to the morning sun.

Glistening in its very center was a pile of gems and Motive Stones, surrounded by piles of gold and silver coins and ingots, some fused into a metallic coating in the stomach-lining as though partly digested.

Rufio muttered something in the Nephilic tongue, then closed his eyes and repeated the incantation more carefully. “This is it. This is what the key unlocks. Euphemios sunk his treasure to the bottom of the Strait of Aureliopolis, inside a monstrous fish controlled by sorcery. When the spells holding it in check began to fade, it began to attack ships, though it retained the purpose of gathering and storing wealth.”

Valens stepped onto the fish’s scorched tongue, sidestepping the still-soft disk of metal from the melted hole in its skull. The gullet was held wide enough for him to walk into the fish’s belly, and with the sun shining through its flesh, he made out that the entire skeleton was made from an alloy of gold, silver, and other precious metals it had digested over the decades.

Inside the stomach, amid the heaps of unmarred gems, was a cylindrical box lined with white amianthus, that fine, fireproof, incorruptible mineral-cloth woven from fibers of asbestos. Carefully, he twisted off the threaded lid, and preserved within from all the deforming effects of Chrysos’ digestion sat a crown.

Valens opened his mental tether to Petrus, as he lifted the Crown of Aurelian. The crescent moon cut from silver dangled from a chain at the left ear, and the sun wrought from gold dangled at the right, and about the brow were three icons of gold and platinum and adamant. On the left– lunar– side sat the portrait of Saint Irene, the emperor Aurelian’s own mother, who had overseen the transition of the Imperial state religion from a syncretic mire of animism and ancestor-worship to the monotheistic worship of the King on High. On the right– solar– side was Saint Alexios the Dragon-Slayer, one of the last martyrs killed for the faith before its rise to preeminence. The center icon had only a red droplet formed from rubies, the Blood of the King spoken of in a cryptic prophecy of events in an age yet to come, another turning of the Wheel of Creation as it rolled all that was towards its perfect end.

Valens raised the crown, and set it on his head. By all rights, he should have cut a ridiculous figure, the emperor in his proverbial new clothes, stepping out the mouth of a dead fish in the finest crown ever wrought by Man and naught but a loincloth besides, but this any shame or self-consciousness this thought might have invited died even as it entered his mined. His companions stood in stunned silence, and then, without a hint of irony, genuflected, each with bent knee and tipped head acknowledging their emperor.