In the Between Time Read online

  “Are you…well, Protector?” Daria asked, reaching out but not quite touching him.

  “I…think so.”

  He gave his tail an experimental twitch and gasped at what he saw. Yes, it was now the same metallic blue as Nuelo’s but more than that, even, were his fins, which were now the same solid hauyne crystal color. Then he saw one very noticeable detail that he’d not seen on Nuelo’s tail.

  He looked at Nino and pointed to the strange symbol. “What is that?”

  Nino smiled faintly. “The mark of the daris, my imo. It is called ditan.”

  “Ditan,” Jafo repeated, eyes moving to the mark again. It seemed embedded into his new scales as a design and rested halfway between his groin and the mid-joint of his tail. It was a sort of red that he’d never witnessed beneath the surface; the kind of red that blood was but…brighter, somewhow. It, too, seemed to have a metallic sheen.

  “You have seen a ditan in reality, Imo.”

  Jafo frowned. He’d never seen anything that looked like that before in his li— He gaped openly at Nino. The item he found in Sukag had been a straight metal pole with a crescent mounted upon it. But he hadn’t been able to see the whole thing, with some of it buried beneath the sands.

  Before he could even give proper channeling to the thoughts, the dari nodded at him. “You will need it. Be that the first journey you undertake.” He then allowed himself a smile as Jafo nodded in understanding…more or less. “I see I have made a fine choice,” Nino stated and then took a deep breath and looked over Jafo’s head. “It would seem your transformation did not go unwitnessed.”

  Jafo whirled around just as Daria screamed, “Father!” with her voice and darted past him.

  Ajibo looked like the resurrected undead. Jafo raced forward to help him. Pana twitched away, possibly unfamiliar with his visage and therefore frightened? Jafo wondered if his facial structure had also changed so as to make him unrecognizable, never mind all the rest of the things he knew for certain were different. Ajibo wasn’t even coherent when Jafo lifted him into his arms, head lolling onto his shoulder. He turned to swim to Nino, with the idea that he’d ask the dari to heal the injured man.

  Nino had vanished. The tidakam no longer floated, but instead rested on the chair which was etched with Nino’s name. Jafo remembered what that sphere had done, seemingly with Daria’s assistance, when it had patched Ajibo’s tail up just enough for him to stop bleeding. He wondered if the tidakam’s presence on Nino’s chair now meant there was time to effect a more complete healing and quickly darted to it with his burden.

  “Daria, take the tidakam.”

  She did as instructed, and Jafo carefully placed Ajibo into Nino’s chair. The man couldn’t even hold himself upright and slumped to the left, but Jafo kept him from floating off, his left hand upon the battered tail. With his right, he reached out to Daria.

  “The tidakam, please.”

  She handed it to him. A slithering sliver of doubt wound through his mind but Jafo refused to listen to it. He’d been made an imo to protect the merling. This was the merling’s father. If he became well enough to help defend her and raise her, it could only be a boon to the Protector and his charge.

  “Jafo?” Pana soom swam into view, to Jafo’s left. He nodded once, then looked to Daria as Pana exclaimed, “By the daris, was that the venerable Nino I saw?”

  “It was,” Jafo said over his shoulder, then to Daria, “Do you remember what you did when you helped the tidakam stop your father’s bleeding?”

  She shook her head, face falling. “I only remember looking into it as it grew bright, Protector.”

  So it was all up to Jafo, who’d been an imo now for all of maybe five minutes. He closed his eyes and tried to envision the tidakam brightening and bathing Ajibo in a solid wall of pink much like he’d been inside when Nino had transformed him. He allowed himself to focus on that one thing, the pink light bathing the injured man. Then he pushed further and ordered the tidakam to heal all of Ajibo’s injuries, both seen and unseen. The idea occurred to him that he perhaps should be saying something, though he knew nothing of modern prayers and ceremonies. Then an etching he had read several times on a small pyramid in Palim, just before the border with Sukag, leapt to the forefront of his mind. It seemed odd for him to want to recite it now, but he did as his heart commanded and spoke.

  “Great dari Nina, I beseech you to hear my prayer. May this soul be taken upon its rightful journey.” His outer eyelids opened. “May this soul be taken unto your bosom.” His inner eyelids opened and some part of him registered shock that Ajibo was indeed, at that very moment, surrounded by a bright pink light. It shielded him from view, and was protruding from a long, thick column originating from the very center of the tidakam Jafo held in his right hand. “I ask you, great dari Nina, to see this man for who and what he is and by your gracious and righteous hand you will see him to his end as befitting one of his loyal and deserving heart.”

  Jafo swallowed. Though the old fears he’d had while just a mundane mer, as Nino had called him, still roiled endlessly in the back of his mind, some strange inner core of peace radiated outward from his chest, staving off the desire to panic or flee or consider himself too young to take on such a monumental task.

  The pink light began to shimmer and swirl, and Jafo held his breath as it started dissipating. Slowly it bled away into the waters around them until at last Ajibo could be seen from his head to his dual tail fins. The tidakam returned quickly to its faint resting glow.

  Ajibo appeared whole. His tail no longer was mangled, or even scarred. His skin had returned to a healthy pallor and he appeared to be breathing normally. Still, he did not wake. But that didn’t keep Daria from sliding into his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and laying her head on his shoulder.

  Jafo shared a look with Pana, who simply stared alternately at him, Ajibo and Daria in wonder. He’d gotten the pink light around Ajibo and he’d said the only prayer he could think to say. Now all Jafo could do was wait to see if the whole thing actually resulted in Ajibo’s return to full health, or whether he’d just condemned Daria’s father to death.

  * * *

  By the time Mateo informed them, “We are nearly there,” Sirena was bearing the brunt of most of Omaro’s weight. She was very nearly ready to collapse trying to keep him stumbling along, but from a place she hadn’t really known existed somewhere deep down inside of her, a well of strength kept her from being the one that sent them both into a painful rendezvous with the uneven tunnel floor.

  A strange light shimmered around the next bend, which led off to the right of their current tunnel. For how long had they been walking, Sirena wondered, and what could that ethereal aquamarine glow be? Omaro tripped over his own feet, ripping her from her thoughts. His bulk sent him pitching forward, where Sirena only then realized Mateo had stopped at the bend. She cried out and Mateo whipped around, palms facing their direction. Against all reason an invisible force caught them both and slowly pushed them completely upright.

  She stared at Mateo, whose pink eyes now glowed from within. It reminded her of what her mother had always told her about her own eyes, how they seemed to be lit from within. Indeed, each imo she had seen, those who would allow what they considered a baruaization of their imohood into their presence at all, had eyes such as these. Now she was seeing them on a five-year old child.

  The pressure against her forehead and arms abated, but Omaro was so unsteady she still supported nearly his entire weight. “I must…put him down,” she grunted to Mateo. “He is…too heavy for me to support.”

  Mateo nodded and led the way. Sirena was practically dragging the large man now, having long ago forgotten he was nude except for how her grip kept slipping in his blood and sweat. Shortly the glow intensified and one last sharp turn to the left stopped her in her tracks. Her jaw dropped as she took in the cavern that lay before her.

  It went without saying that it was the largest cave she’d ever seen. The entire
ty of it was hued variations of greens and blues, and both large and small stalactites hung from the ceiling. She thought it was possible that half the entire population of merans might be able to fit inside the vast expanse shoulder-to-shoulder and noted in the far corner a hot spring the size of Mateo’s old cave’s first chamber burbling and steaming. The walls sloped as they went higher, forming a rotunda for a ceiling. Though the cave itself wasn’t round, it didn’t have any sharp angles or edges, telling her it’d been formed naturally by water, or possibly even lava, tens of thousands of years past.

  But it was the large pool of calm turquoise water abutting the curving wall to the far right that captured her gaze. Omaro at last became too heavy for her to bear and so she pulled him forward a couple of feet and made to gently lower him to rest against the near wall. Unfortunately, bending forward loosed his bulk upon the whims of gravity and he thumped to the floor in an unceremonious heap. He was still conscious – mostly – but didn’t seem to be aware of his surroundings at all.

  Her eyes returned to the pool of water. She marveled at how clear it was and felt it drawing her near. Sirena complied, moving quietly across a cave floor so smooth it didn’t seem at all natural to the soles of her feet. A few stalagmites dotted the floor here and there. She skirted around a fat one as she walked. Upon reaching the edge of the pool she looked down and saw many small ledges a little bit below the surface, close enough that she might’ve been able to seat herself on one and still have her head above the water. Below that, going down and down and down, more of these rock-formed benches jutted from the sides.

  The water pool contained a passageway that disappeared beneath the wall of the cave. Crouching to get a better look, Sirena wondered if it simply continued as an underground river of sorts, perhaps leading back to whatever the source of this water was, or if it led from wherever they were all the way to the ocean. She reached out and dipped her fingers into the water. It was warm to the touch. She tasted it and found it to be salty. It was definitely ocean water, then.

  “Protector?” Sirena looked at Mateo, who had come to stand beside her. “We must heal Father.”

  “I cannot heal, Mateo. And surely I am not your Protector, for what can I offer you in terms of safety and guidance when I am but a meranlan myself?”

  He smiled and held a hand out to her. Rising to her feet, she took it. “I have chosen you. Do you agree to the task?”

  Before Sirena’s mind even started sorting through what exactly Mateo meant with his request, and what it would entail for her, something that glowed rose from the placid pool. The only sound was water dripping from it. She turned and stared as a clear crystal sphere with a pink glow emanating from the center of it, pulled clear of the water and hovered there. Nothing was lifting it. There seemed to be no way for it to remain airbone. Yet it did.

  “What is that?” she breathed, feeling an urge to reach out and touch it. Her hand snaked forth. Instinct told her to flip it palm-up. The sphere started moving toward her. Something tried to tell her she should be afraid, but she wasn’t. Instead she felt the calm that always came from Aea’s presence as the sphere’s glow grew brighter and brighter the closer it came.

  At last it hovered over her palm. Sirena felt an odd tingle in her fingers. It quickly spread up through her arm to her head, shot down through her body and out to her other hand, and then passed by her groin. She felt a sensation there not unlike her own touches evoked and then the tingle spread down her legs until it bathed her feet in its oddity.

  The glow brightened, brightened still, and Sirena had to squeeze her eyes shut to avoid being blinded by its brilliance. She took a step back and felt Mateo move with her as though she could see his exact position.

  “You have found the tidakam.”

  Startled, Sirena’s eyes popped open and she whirled to face whomever had just spoken, for it was a voice she did not recognize. Standing before her was a tall woman with long, white hair and piercing blue eyes. She was clothed in pakan that didn’t look like it was made from anything you could find on Mera, and before Sirena could even open her mouth to ask who the woman was, she knew.

  “Aea.”

  Chapter Six

  Pana had decided to take on the duties of feeding what she insisted upon referring to as the Holy Trinity. While he was now an imo, and Daria was of course the prophesied child, he wasn’t sure where Ajibo fit into things other than being her father. Whether there was anything altogether holy about the three of them or not, it didn’t take long for Jafo to realize that as wise as she had sounded back when she’d rescued him from the taunting of his former rakos, Pana was actually a little bit…off. Well, okay, maybe a lot off. While she fully believed in the daris, the ancient texts and the prophecy, she also had somehow gotten the notion that since she’d seen Nino with her own eyes she was now conscripted to serving Ajibo, Daria and Jafo like a slave. For the moment Jafo allowed her the delusion, for though he didn’t believe in anyone acting as anyone else’s servant, Pana was nothing if not…he chose to call it persuasive and leave it at that. It still made him uncomfortable; those types of roles hadn’t existed in the keraj for many, many years, since before Jafo’s grandparents were birthed.

  Ajibo had not only awakened, but seemed to have fully recovered. When Daria explained to him what’d happened with Jafo and the tidakam, Ajibo had bowed low and offered himself in whatever way needed, to Jafo’s service. “You are her Protector now, not I,” he’d stated. “I follow your commands.”

  Pile discomfort upon discomfort with all this glorifying. An imo, yes. But an untrained one and still a merlan, too. Unless Nino had also aged him somehow. But there were other, more pressing things to worry about so he shoved all these doubts aside for the moment.

  He had to get his hands on the ditan in Sukag. After that, he wasn’t sure what to do other than possibly look for a safe place to keep Daria out of sight. Then he’d have to talk with Ajibo and set things straight about who was in charge of what. He was hoping Nino would return to tell him what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to learn the imohood while keeping Daria away from prying eyes. And what the ditan was, exactly. He also wondered about the bigger, larger picture that the prophecy activation encompassed: the receding of the waters of Mera.

  Would the ocean disappear completely? If so, what would become of mers? Of Daria? Mers could theoretically leave the water, but they would drown in the air and the sun would dry their tails too much if they stayed out of the ocean for any length of time. A memory surfaced. When he’d said as much to Nino about him breathing water and mers breathing air, and that he would drown, Nino had made the odd remark of “Would you now.”

  Was he implying that Jafo could breathe air? How was such a thing possible? One of the earliest anatomy educations a merling received was that they would die above the surface if they did not hold their breath. Was Nino indicating this to be false? Or perhaps it was only Jafo who could do so somehow?

  He wasn’t keen to find out. It wouldn’t help anyone if he went and killed himself only a few hours after becoming Daria’s Protector.

  Floating at the top of the grand staircase which led up to the pintu’s entrance from the ocean floor, Jafo heard and felt Pana returning. Odd. I can feel her presence. He then closed his eyes and noticed he could also sense Ajibo’s and Daria’s whereabouts. Fascinating.

  “I have many delicacies for the palates of the Holy Trinity,” Pana said brightly when she saw him waiting, making Jafo want to facepalm.

  “I have hunger, Pana, thank you!” Daria chirped as she swam toward the entry. Ajibo followed at a slower pace, a smile of wonder still on his face from when Daria had been animatedly relaying the story of his healing.

  A great swash of current hit Jafo, knocking him off-balance and into the side of the doorway. He jerked to his right, pushing himself off the stone and out of the pintu as Pana reached halfway up the staircase, which she insisted upon swimming above even though she could swim at any level and dept
h she wished.

  Strange woman.

  What had that surge been? He heard nothing. Saw nothing. Felt no more oddities in the current. Then a bizarre sound, a new one. He couldn’t equate it to anything he was familiar with. It sounded fast and sleek and…inorganic. Something whizzed past his left bicep. Then there was a violent mental scream. He whirled around to find blood flowing from Pana’s chest around a long pisada embedded in her flesh. It was a tiny one of a design he’d never witnessed.

  “Pana!”

  All the fish and umbas she’d been holding in her arms for their feast were released, swimming or falling away in seemingly slow motion as Jafo raced to her. She had lost buoyancy and floated down toward the stairs, eyes wide, hands surrounding the pisada. Blood filled the waters around him. Jafo heard Daria crying as he pulled Pana from the steps. Heard Ajibo take his daughter further into the pintu.

  Pana blinked, arms falling limply away to float upon the currents. Her inner eyelids slid shut and then Jafo heard the sound again, the same one. Now, at least, he knew what it was. Thinking quickly, he pulled Pana over the edging which lined the steps and raced into the shadows of the corner between the staircase and the front wall. The small pisada sailed past. Had he remained where he was, it would have struck him.

  A strange tingling sensation filled his chest and innately he knew it meant Pana’s soul was leaving her body. How he knew, he didn’t have a clue. He just did. “May the daris bless you for your sacrifice, elden woman,” he thought quietly. “And may you please forgive me for thinking of you as I did.”

  The tingling sensation stopped but before Jafo could start wrapping his mind around where those pisadas had come from, another tingling…this time in the back of his head…made it feel like the times when, as young children, Jama had ground sand into his hair. He shot directly up, Pana still cradled in his arms, and hid for a moment behind the gigantic column at the corner of the portico. He hissed as his arm scraped barnacles and coral. All was silent, but he could feel what that back-of-head tingle was: Daria. She needed him.