Defender of the Future
book one of
The Tidesinger Trilogy

Chapter Sixteen

The otherworldly starry sky of Lunar Bay blurred into the late evening of the real world as Ecco and Karkol passed back through the illusory wall. Ecco was more or less comfortable with the idea of a wall that wasn't-really-there now, but all the same he felt very odd as he passed right through the rock. Karkol wasn't so confident--the shark came through with his eyes tight closed and his fins drawn in, and Ecco had to nudge him to tell him to stop swimming.

The Foe were out on the reef somewhere, and by the baffled sounds of their screeching they were having plenty of trouble finding their way through the enchantments. Ecco wondered what sort of snares the lone-swimmers had laid for them--if the rock wall was any example, it would be pretty impressive. He thought of mazes of stone, of the Undercaves, of illusory sharks with teeth that were real until you disbelieved.

"They will take days to escape from here without a guide," Afarellan said, appearing soundlessly beside them. "You are safe enough. Swim south from here, following the coastline. If you run into any more Foe, Ecco, use your Power--you should learn to use it swiftly."

Ecco blinked. "How do I, uh..?"

"The Power of Song allows you to command," Afarellan explained. "Simply call the Foe to stop, and they will--they cannot help obeying, though they will fight it. Attack swiftly while they are stunned. That is how Tidesinger did it, long ago." The old dolphin rose, breathed and then came back down again. Ecco realized that he hadn't breathed himself for twenty minutes or so, and that he simply didn't feel as if he needed to.

"Come on," Karkol said quietly. "Like he said, we need to get going. The sun's nearly set."

"Right." Ecco swam forward, taking up his place beside the shark. He turned doubtfully. "Afarellan... we'll see you again, won't we?"

"Perhaps," the old dolphin said, and then sighed. "I am old, Ecco. I waited for you because I knew I had to. I needed to tell you so many things, about your father, and the lone-swimmers, and your heritage. Now there is no time for all of that. But, if you return, I think I shall be here waiting for a little longer."

Ecco just nodded, not too comfortable about the 'if' in that statement. Afarellan favored him with a long, appraising look, and then turned away without a word. They watched silently as the old one swam away and disappeared back through the rock wall--returning to the hidden Lunar Bay.

"Hi-ho, we're off again," Karkol sighed.

"Never mind, just think how fit we'll be after all of this," Ecco answered with a grin. "What did Afarellan say, south?" He began to swim slowly forward, down the coastline. Karkol kept pace with him. The sun was almost gone now, a spark low in the water from whence they had come. They swam fast by mutual consent, both feeling an urge to cover as much distance as they could. Ecco found it strange to swim without surfacing constantly for air--several times he did it automatically before realizing that he didn't actually need to breathe.

When the moon rose, it was a great globe of silver, nearly complete save for a slight flattening of one side. The sight of it did nothing to quell the unease in Ecco's heart--its light was only another reminder of how little time they had left. There would be one more moonrise after this, and then it would be time for the song--whether they were ready or not. They still had a lot of distance to cover. He thought of the great white albatrosses winging their way to every corner of the globe, and wondered how the birds could possibly spread their message far enough in time.

Yet, there was not a sound in the water around them--at least, not a sound of Foe. The natural sounds of the coastline were all around them--soft splashing as schools of small fish leaped from the surface, the cries of seabirds, even once or twice the singing of dolphins. Ecco thought for a moment about tiger sharks, and then he glanced at the big gray shape swimming strongly by his side and grinned to himself. Who was he kidding? There wasn't much sense in being afraid of a tiger shark when you were swimming with a great white... Ecco grinned again, deciding to remember that saying.

They swam on under the moon, comfortable together in silence. Above them the sky turned slowly, and the five stars of Delphinius glittered like the moonlit stars on Ecco's head. The dolphins were no longer anywhere to be heard. A stillness seemed to be creeping over the waters... a stillness caused not by Foe but by a simple absence of sound. They saw fish, many of them, gazing at them as they passed from round moon-silvery eyes, but nobody spoke.

Ecco began to dream again, in fleeting images.

A dusk-and-white body slips through midnight waters, stars gleaming on its sides. An eye, pale blue like the winter sky, gleams in the sooty black. It searches...

Black shapes fade out of the water all around. Silent for the moment, jaws open in anticipation, moonlight flashes off insectoid chitinous armor plating. The white one stops, and sings a single pure, wild note... a note of greeting.

The dark ones pause...

The white one sings again. And the tone is changed... no more is it pure and beautiful, but fell and terrible. A song of hate, a song of blood. A song of death. The dark ones advance...

The white one turns and begins to swim off, sliding through the dark waters. All around it the dark ones cluster like a guard of honor. Shadows cross over them all like bars. Far above, the moon slips behind clouds of velvet blackness. The stars on the body of the white one flicker and go out, and it is a pale ghost, a death-dolphin, guiding the Foe...

It sings again, and the Foe join in, weaving their screeching alien voices around its own in a hideous lullaby of joy and death...

Ecco jerked into wakefulness, his heart pounding. Syuuii!! What had that been? He had never had a dream like that--never! He could feel his entire body tingling with the aftermath of the horror. Glancing sideways he saw that Karkol was watching him, but the shark said nothing. He attempted a shaky laugh. "Just a dream... I guess I dozed off there."

"I dream sometimes," Karkol said carefully. "Looked like you were having a bad one..."

He sighed. "It wasn't anything really. Never mind." Suddenly remembering the last time he had dreamed of Foe, Ecco became very alert and listened hard--there was no sound of them in the water, and certainly no sound of that dreadful choir. He shivered at the very thought of it--the way the dolphin's sweet voice had mingled so readily with the wailing of the Foe. Ecco glanced up at the moon, seeing that it was slowly setting--the night was half over by now. He swam on without saying anything more, wanting to make more headway against the distance they still had to travel.

It was amazing how time seemed to kaleidoscope in on itself, as if hours and minutes had no meaning any more. Ecco and Karkol swam on silently, exchanging only a few words, and above them the moon set and the sun rose, inscribed an arc across the sky and then set itself to make way for the great pale moon. It waited for them in the southern sky, huge and immense, a perfect globe of frozen silver with just one tiny fragment chipped from the right hand side. The moon hung there in the darkness for a while, above their tireless bodies, and then began to slide down the slope of the sky towards the waves again. And then, one last time, it was the turn of the sun.

The morning of their final day dawned unlike any other Ecco had seen. It was calm--perfectly so--and there was barely a ripple to move the still surface of the water. It was unnerving, swimming through that. Ecco felt as if he were in the eye of a hurricane and that this was only the calm before the storm. He could sense that Karkol was uneasy too, from the way in which the big fish moved: pectoral fins stiffly downward, head up, back arched. Karkol's eyes were active, glancing this way and that as if he expected to be rushed any moment. Yet nothing moved, and there was no sound. There was a dead quality to the air, a sensation as if the head was muffled and packed full of seaweed. As if, somewhere far off, perhaps very deep down, something unimaginably vast and terrible was beginning, very slowly, to move.

The sea rolled out before them, carrying them ever south, towards the stone that would be their goal.

Presently Karkol glanced sideways and said simply, "Water's bad."

It was the first thing he had said in many miles, and Ecco favored him with a surprised look before opening his mouth and testing it himself. There was a coppery, indefinable taste in the water that mirrored the strange metallic tint to the sky--it was not something Ecco could immediately pin down. He whistled softly in irritation.

"I can sense it, Karkol, but I don't understand it. It's like..." He took another hesitant taste of that feeling, more of an intuition than a sensation, and shuddered suddenly as the full force of it hit him. "Syuuii! It's something bad, but I don't know what!"

"Death," Karkol said, in an odd flat tone. Ecco stared at him, but the shark's eyes were fixed on some distant point which he could not see himself. Karkol swam on automatic. "There's death ahead of us for somebody. I can feel it in the water." His voice was a low monotone, devoid of feeling.

"You think--you think the Foe know?" Ecco trembled.

Karkol blinked, and looked at him again--the strange distance in his eyes seemed to fade away, and he was Karkol once more. "What? Oh... no. No, I don't. They're far behind us, Ecco. The singers will have seen to that." The shark attempted a grin, which didn't get much further than the corners of his mouth. "I guess we're safe enough for now." The distance stole back into his eyes for a moment. "I just wish... I wish I knew..."

"Knew what?" Ecco asked, rising automatically to breathe before remembering. He came back down and swam at the shark's side.

Karkol closed his eyes for a moment. "I don't know," he said. "That's the problem. It's something we sharks have in common--we can sense things a long way off. I don't know why, but there's something bad ahead of us. Maybe at the Stone. I don't know." With that, he lapsed into silence and wouldn't speak further even when Ecco pushed him to.

They swam on. Above their heads, for a short while, one of the great white birds circled. It called out to them once in a sad, eerie voice, and then swept off across the still waters and headed west towards land. Whatever the message was, it passed them both by. Ecco poked his head out of the water to watch the albatross go, conscious that the little ripples caused by his small snout were the only ones on the surface of the water for many miles. He was glad that he didn't need to breathe--the air felt funny, almost oily on his body.

Nothing moved all day, save for them themselves. They saw few living things, though they managed to make some sort of midday meal on a small school of sardines. The few large creatures that did seem to be about never spoke to them. There was an undercurrent of fear in the water, that seemed to be carried on that strange metallic taste. Once they saw a tiger shark which was larger than Karkol--the predator just cast them a haunted glance and swept away into the open sea. Ecco remembered what Castor had said so long ago about whispering in the deeps. Now there was whispering even at the surface. The storm was about to break. Above them, clouds began to gather and the sun faded from view.

At last, in the late afternoon of that day, they reached a place where the water grew shallow. The sun was invisible by now behind thick black clouds, and at last there was a wind to ruffle the surface of the sea. Occasionally heat lightning flickered far up in the heavens, momentarily illuminating the water that had grown dark around them. Fine mist hung on the surface of the waves, an odd gray color, like smoke.

"I've never seen weather like this before," Ecco muttered to Karkol.

"Me neither," the shark admitted, glancing at him for a moment. "It's creepy."

Ecco paused for a moment, trying to think. The odd pressure in his head seemed to stifle the thoughts before they could become fully formed. "Karkol--" he began, having some unclear idea to tell the shark about his dream, but then Karkol swept ahead of him with a triumphant cry.

"Ecco, look! Look! The Moonsong Stone! We made it!"

Eyes widening, Ecco chased after the shark. Karkol dashed to the surface and spyhopped, sticking his head out of the water to take a better look through the clearer air--he had to struggle to clear the mist, which lay several inches above the surface. Ecco followed suit, tailwalking to get a good look for himself.

Less than a mile away, a high pinnacle of stone protruded from the water like a spear, reaching over a hundred feet into the sky. A shaft of stray sunlight gleamed on the stone, lighting it up brighter than the darkened air around it. The narrow entrance to the lagoon was just ahead.

"Let's go!" Ecco yelled, surging forward and even throwing one or two jumps and barrel rolls in his excitement. Karkol followed with, for the first time in many days, a big grin on his face. Together the dolphin and the shark swept through the opening, side by side, and then they were into the lagoon itself. The sun was nearly set--the moon was about to rise.

They swam right to the base of the Stone itself. There was a sense of ancient peace in this place that not even the terror of the Foe had penetrated. Ecco looked around, wondering where the others were--who was going to sing the song? Carefully he let out a few brief notes, letting the music shiver through the water--a message to whoever was listening that Ecco was there and waiting. Karkol glanced at him, and grinned.

There was silence for a long moment, and Ecco got to the stage of opening his mouth to say, "Maybe we're early--" when from a distance away the song was answered. The high whistle of another dolphin fluted thinly to them, a greeting call. Ecco frowned slightly--there was an odd twist to it that, somehow, didn't seem right.

A pale shape coasted towards them through the water that was now becoming choppy. Ecco sighed as he recognized the by-now familiar visage of Mallidith, and then he blinked, wondering what the dusky dolphin was doing here in the first place. "Mallidith?" he asked softly as the other dolphin came towards them. "Aren't you supposed to be back in Lunar Bay?"

The white dolphin's pale blue eyes were cool, and he wouldn't look at them head on. "Afarellan sent me after you," he said carefully. "I am to deliver a message." A flash of heat lightning far above them lit Mallidith's body bright white for a moment, and sent sparks into the odd blue eyes.

"Well, what is it?" Karkol asked, barely keeping the scorn out of his voice. He strongly disliked the white dolphin.

Mallidith's pale gaze flickered towards Karkol for a moment, then flickered away again as he dismissed the big shark as something of no consequence. "Ecco," he said quietly, and now there was a tone of menace in his voice. "Leave this place."

"What?" Ecco stared, his mouth falling open. "You can't be serious!"

"I've never been more serious." Mallidith's eyes were hot now. He seemed to be keeping his body under very tight control, as if he would rush them any minute. "Go away. Leave the Stone. Find a place to hide. The descendants of Tidesinger will deal with this in our own way."

Ecco and Karkol exchanged astonished looks. "I can't believe this," the shark said after a moment. "What are you, crazy? Afarellan didn't say anything of the sort! Ecco's the only one who can defeat the Foe! The marks proved it!"

"We're not leaving," Ecco added firmly, sounding as fierce as he could. "We don't have time for this, Mallidith."

"Then you leave me no choice," Mallidith answered softly. Without turning away from them, the white dolphin let out one long, low note, a soft summons.

Heat lightning flashed once more, high above... and illuminated dark shapes fading into sight all around them. The Foe were silent, watching, waiting. They surrounded the stone and the three swimmers without a sound. Lightning glittered on shimmering black carapaces and on the pale teeth in the eyeless jaws. Hundreds of them...

Ecco felt a slow, chilly hatred begin to spread through his body. "You sold us out," he whispered. "You went over to them."

"Yes," Mallidith said softly. The Foe began to close in around them. "I guided them through the reef. I took them down to the Moonsong Stone, following your trail. We were close behind you all the time. We had you in sight. And you never looked back." The white dolphin's pale eyes glowed bright with hatred. "We made a deal, Ecco. I give the Foe what they want, they give me what I want. Power, Ecco. They'll make me truly powerful. This world will be under their sway, and I... I will be its overlord. I will serve the Foe!" His voice rose to a scream at the last, high and thin and tearing.

"You're mad," Karkol said, struggling to get the words out. He stared at the dolphin with wide black eyes. "Carcharodon's teeth, you're mad!"

"Perhaps," Mallidith whispered, smiling terribly. "But tell me, murderer--who is the more mad? I gave you a chance to run. You didn't take it. Now the Foe... will take you." He began to laugh. It was a terrible sound, high and lonely. In that moment Ecco understood Mallidith more clearly than he had ever done. The white dolphin knew fully what he was doing--knew that he was condemning himself to a terrible, lonely death among the Foe. He wasn't mad--he was perfectly sane.

And that was the most frightening thing of all.

Mallidith backfinned gracefully as the Foe closed in, and they parted to let him through. Karkol growled deeply, preparing to fight.

Ecco tensed.

The Foe rushed them.

With all the power in his small body, and all the determination in his heart, Ecco screamed out one word.

"Stop!"

The monsters froze dead, for just that one moment--but it was enough. Karkol roared and exploded into action. His jaws came down on one Foe, crushing its body--without even waiting for it to expire the shark turned on another, and then another--taking huge terrible bites, bites intended to cripple and maim. Shouting out in rage, Ecco charged them himself, and felt his hard snout ram into one body. Acrid blood flooded the water--he struggled through it, having no thought in his head but that of reaching the treacherous Mallidith. But there were too many of them--far too many. A Foe claw tore into Ecco's side, and he screamed in pain as two more of them fastened their jaws into his body. His own blood, bright crimson, clouded his sight. Outside the circle of writhing Foe bodies, Mallidith was laughing--his high, mocking tones easily penetrated the shrieking of the Foe.

It's all over, Ecco thought dully as the pain began to slip away.

Then a giant, pale shape appeared through the water, sliding gracefully into the shadow of the Stone upon outstretched pectoral fins. Karkol, mortally injured, was pushed casually to one side as the huge jaws closed delicately on two Foe at once.

The Foe relinquished Ecco and backed off, then fled from the sight of the monster shark. Mallidith made to fly in another direction, but Foe jaws snapped at his tail and pulled him back. With a terrible wail, the white dolphin fled alongside the Foe, gleaming like a pale ghost in the blood-tinged water. He faded away into the night.

Barely conscious, Ecco turned towards their rescuer, and froze. A giant white bulk hung in the water before him, surrounded by pieces of animal matter that once had been Foe.

"We meet again, Ecco," the Slayer said softly, and heat lightning flickered in her flat black eyes.

Ecco would have said something, but his eyes were closing despite everything he could do. The water around him was filled with blood, much of it his own. He whimpered softly, feeling as if he were drowning, and let the darkness close slowly over his head.