On the appointed day, Ash, Faith, and I arrived early at the Moon’s Embrace Spa to watch Captain Rye pole his gondola up the canal. Behind the boat bobbed a string of rusty, half-submerged cages crammed with gelatinous lumps and blobs. From time to time, one of said lumpy blobs would fling a tentacle around the nearest mooring post and hang on until the motion of the boat tugged it free with a little sucker-y pop. Once he docked the gondola, he ordered us out of the way so he could carry the cages into the spa himself and transfer each leviathan spawn into its own pool.
“There ya go, Spike,” he murmured affectionately, very carefully tipping one creature into the (mercifully rose-petal-free) water in the Opal Room. Little tendrils of darkness swirled around the monster as it slowly un-compressed and extended those eponymous spikes, using the longest ones to probe the tiled pool bottom. The water immediately turned just the slightest bit murky.
“Here, now, Cuddles, yer gonna like this.” Into the Emerald Room pool went the next atrocity, from the looks of its tentacles the same one that had been so inquisitive about the mooring posts. This slimy mass sank straight to the bottom and crouched there, throbbing like a tumor. One coiled antenna slowly unfurled into a slender tentacle that swept through the water, as if testing it for something.
During the entire process, the bath attendants looked on with simultaneously appalled and resigned expressions – except for Una, who watched the three of us instead, assessing how much she could extort if anything dubious happened this time. I shrugged to myself. If everything went as planned, Marne Booker would show up, ooh and aah over the beasts, and leave again. Una would never learn that one more Marne left the Moon’s Embrace Spa than entered it.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just Marne who strode into the foyer. Behind her trailed five burly thugs, their shirtsleeves rolled up around their biceps to reveal bees tattooed all over their hairy arms.
Oh dear. Maybe we would have to pay off Una after all.
Captain Rye, however, had different concerns. He hurried forward to intercept the thugs, protesting, “Pardon me, sirs, this is supposed to be a private viewing!”
Marne cut him off with one raised hand. “Ah, but you have given me – as one of your top donors – a number of guest passes, and I’m calling them in.” From a coat pocket, she produced a sheath of coupons and conspicuously counted out five. “You understand. Things are very tense in the Hive right now.” She stressed “Hive” just the tiniest bit, reminding him whom she worked for – and what she controlled.
“Oh, um, yes. Yes, of course.” Obviously feeling cheated, the Captain flipped through the coupons and ascertained that they were, indeed, valid. He grudgingly accepted them. “That way, please.”
He waved Marne towards the back hallway, the one adorned with those awful, turban-shaped lamps that Una and I both found so objectionable. Hands shoved in pockets, her entourage swaggered after her, relishing the chance to get off their island, stretch their legs, throw their weight around, and gawk at the horrible monstrosities pulsing their way through what had been crystal-clear water. As planned, Captain Rye himself stayed in the foyer, regaling the bath attendants with his adventures on the Void Sea.
Come on, Ash hand-signed at me.
Leading the way to the wine cellar, he selected and spiked a bottle of red wine with enough demon blood to induce hallucinations, then poured it into elegant glasses from the spa’s kitchen. (He remembered where they were from the last time he’d played sommelier here.) I arranged them tidily on a silver tray, adopted a half-servile, half-flirtatious air, and circulated among the Hive members. “Drink, sir?” I asked over and over, proffering the tray with a smile and a wink.
Meanwhile, Ash plunged into circus-ringmaster-showman mode. Planting himself at the head of the Opal Room, he flung wide his arms as if to embrace his audience and trumpeted, “Lady and gentlemen, behold these strange wonders from lands unknown!” Sweeping his arm downward, he stabbed a dramatic finger at Spike. “Look at this marvel from faraway Tycheros! See how it flares its unilateral dorsal spikes as a sign of contentment!”
Marne had been standing at the edge of the pool, hands clasped behind her back in a relaxed attitude as she contemplated Spike’s spikes. But now her head jerked up.
Ash blundered on. “But do not be deceived by its peaceable air, folks! This beast is vicious and capricious and can turn on you at a second’s notice!”
(Spike or the Hive? I wanted to ask. To which Faith would reply, Yes. Gods, I was spending too much time around her if I could carry on both sides of a conversation with her in my head!)
“And as a special treat,” Ash finished with a conspiratorial air, “later tonight, folks, I will present the most dangerous beast that is yet to come!”
Unfortunately (a word which was rapidly becoming the slogan for this score), Marne had memorized every single fact there was to know about her beloved leviathan spawn. She glared straight across the room at Ash (whose cat ears, encrusted by Faith with iridescent glitter for the occasion, probably weren’t helping his display of authority) and made a very pointed comment, “No, those are bilateral.” She began to lift a hand, most likely to command her bodyguards to seize the imposter.
This whole time, Faith had been lounging on the ledge that normally held little white candles, one foot dangling, the other drawn up on the ledge, with an elbow propped on her kneecap. Now she bestowed a beatific smile upon the monster in the pool.
All of a sudden, Spike leaped out of the water and turned a joyous backflip, as if luxuriating in the cleanest water it had ever seen in its nasty, brutish, little life.
All suspicion flew clean out of Marne’s mind. She clasped her hands in front of her chest, mouth open in an O of delight. “Such beauty!”
Much less impressed by the creature’s acrobatics, her thugs blinked.
Good humor restored, Marne chose to be forgiving. “We don’t need commentary,” she informed Ash. “We’ll observe the rest of the rooms ourselves.”
Turning on her heel, she strode out of the Opal Room. The thugs bunched up in the doorway and scowled at us until we stopped trying to follow them.
So – again, unfortunately – that left Ash, Faith, and me alone in a room with a leviathan spawn, while our target was in a different room with a different leviathan spawn.
Logistics, of course, were no concern of Faith’s. She hopped off the ledge, skipped to the edge of the water, and crouched there, admiring the slimy, splotchy form that drifted around the pool and tested the walls with its protrusions. “Awwww, who’s an adorable little void monstrosity?” she cooed. “Who’s an adorable little void monstrosity? It’s yooooou!”
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Since she wasn’t attuning this time, Spike ignored her.
Ash just shook his head. “I think the wine should have taken effect by now.”
We tiptoed out, with Faith trailing behind us and waving back at Spike. “Alas, farewell!” she mourned. “Perhaps we shall meet again one day!”
Meanwhile, Marne and the thugs were bunched around the pool in the Emerald Room, marveling at the creature known so incongruously as “Cuddles.” To me, it was obvious that the thugs were already hallucinating, but since everything they’d seen tonight was so nightmarish anyway, they hadn’t noticed yet that not all of the spines they were admiring were real.
That was my cue to lure the beast out of its pool to scare off the bodyguards. Slipping through the doorway, I positioned myself behind the thugs and held up a single glass of demon-blood-spiked wine. In the water, the blob that might have been Cuddles’ head glooped in my direction.
Meanwhile, Faith attuned and started regaling the creature with tales of its leviathan kin in the Void Sea, and how many tentacles they had, and how they’d encounter humans and eat them because humans were absolutely delicious – especially ones with bee tattoos. “Look, dear one,” she cried, “it’s your prey! Just above the surface! They want to come join you in the water!”
In a flash, Cuddles went berserk.
All of a sudden, it was a lot bigger. It had a lot more tentacles, and the tentacles had spines and mouths and whiskers that were themselves little tentacles with spines and mouths and whiskers that….
I snapped out of my trance when one tentacle bristling with razor blades lashed out of the water and slashed a thug all the way across his neck and torso. He collapsed, gurgling and choking on his own blood and dying messily on the patterned tiles. His comrades turned tail and fled, tripping over one another in their panicked, drug-addled state.
Unfortunately – that word again – Marne had been too busy gawking at the leviathan spawn to take more than a couple sips of wine, which meant that she wasn’t hallucinating as hard as her bodyguards, which meant that she stayed right where she was – that was, until Cuddles wrapped another tentacle around her waist and started to reel her towards its many gaping, sharp-toothed mouths. Shouting incoherently, she kicked and pounded on the tentacle with both fists.
“Who’s a good boy?” came Faith’s voice from behind me. I spun around to see her draped against the doorjamb, thoroughly enjoying the show. “Awww, who’s a good boy? Yes, you are!”
Whether or not the monster was a boy was both indeterminate and immaterial, but “good” it most certainly was not. I padded around the pool, trying to figure out how to force it to release Marne without killing it. “No!” I snapped, in the exact same way I scolded Sleipnir. “Bad boy! Drop it!”
Drawing his own conclusions about how to train leviathan spawn, Ash started dragging the dead thug away from the pool enticingly. “Are you sure you want that one?” he called. “But this one seems so tasty!” He even attuned to enhance the demonic-ness of the blood so the body would be extra delicious.
Cuddles hesitated. Ash’s human, indeed, smelled much tastier – but this human was right here.
Wrapping both of my arms around Marne’s legs, I tried to yank her free, but Cuddles only tightened its coils while it agonized over which human it wanted to eat first.
Faith gave me a very pointed glance. “Oh, even in such dire circumstances, I do so hate to damage the most dashing creature in this room.” She heaved a theatrical sigh. “Only for you, Isha.” Darting forward, she smacked at the tentacle with her lightning hook, loudly and conspicuously rather than hard. “Bad Cuddles!” she chided. “Bad Cuddles! Drop it!”
At the same time, Ash bodily hurled the corpse at Cuddles. “An offering, great demon lord, with the promise of many more to come!”
Faith’s lightning hook froze mid-spank. She cast an incredulous look at Ash, demanding why he thought this insignificant leviathan spawn deserved such reverence.
Unapologetic, he shrugged back. This insignificant leviathan spawn seemed plenty impressive to him.
At any rate, no matter what Faith thought of it, his ploy worked: Cuddles stopped trying to drag Marne in long enough to wrap a different set of tentacles around the corpse. Taking advantage of its distraction, I hauled harder on Marne’s legs and felt her slide down, just a little. Faith smacked at the tentacle again, scolding, “Bad Cuddles!”
This time, she managed to strike exactly the right spot at the base of the tentacle that made it loosen on reflex. However, at that exact moment, Cuddles jerked the corpse into the pool with a great splash, showering us all with water. An electroplasmic arc leaped from the tip of the lightning hook to fry Faith, who went completely rigid, all her hair standing on end.
At the same time, I wrenched Marne free. She fell onto me heavily and then sagged to the floor, bloody sucker marks all over her legs where her trousers had rucked up.
Cuddles flailed in our direction, but only half-heartedly, as it started to devour the corpse.
Just to be safe, I pulled Marne out of reach, then knocked her unconscious.
At last, I inhaled deeply and surveyed the Emerald Room, registering the carnage. Bits of shattered tile lay everywhere, crimson blood streaked the floor and eddied in the now-murky water, and gore splattered against the walls as Cuddles tore into the thug.
“Come on,” Ash reminded me.
Leaving Faith to cluck and coo over the monster, Ash and I ducked into the closet where he’d hidden all the instruments he needed to transform me into Marne Booker. With even greater reverence than he’d shown Cuddles, he opened a satchel and produced a series of ink bottles. Inside sloshed liquids that glowed in a spectrum of blues.
“You’ve seen me collecting raw life essence. This is the refined life essence,” he explained. “Roll up your sleeves.”
As I obeyed, he dipped a brush into the ink so pale blue it was almost white, and delicately traced the ancient Hadrathi rune for “Change” on each of my shoulders.
“Usually we use this ritual to transfer attributes – such as strength, or not being crippled, or looking nicer – from one person to another.”
There was a faint, tickling sensation in my bones, as if they were quivering in anticipation. Capping the bottle, Ash unscrewed the one with the next-darker shade of blue and copied the same rune just below the first on both of my arms
“Obviously we can also use it to steal people’s faces, but my mother doesn’t do much of that. She thinks it’s beneath her.”
The tickling sensation grew stronger. Ash repeated the procedure with successively darker shades of blue until two lines of runes ran down my arms from shoulder to wrist. By the time he wrote one at the hollow of my neck, using a blue so dark that it was almost black, my entire body was buzzing and shaking. As soon as he lifted the brush from the final rune, blue light blazed across my vision, I felt a weird, fizzy shift, and when I could see again, my body had melted into Marne’s form.
I held up Marne’s hands before my face, opened and closed Marne’s fingers, and shuddered.
When I stumbled back into the Emerald Room, still unsteady in a body that wasn’t my own, Faith was crouched by the real Marne, admiring the two lines of glowing blue runes that now ran down her arms. As I peeled off my clothing and donned Marne’s, I noticed that Ash’s ritual hadn’t transferred her injuries to me. Thank goodness. With stiff fingers, I fumbled the last button through its hole, brushed down the shirt, and straightened.
Time to act like the almost-second-in-command of the Hive.
Throwing back my shoulders, I stormed out to the foyer, where I found the remaining four thugs cowering behind the reception desk, babbling incoherently at Captain Rye and cringing every time they brushed against a palm frond.
“Miss Booker!” one of them gasped. “You’re alive!”
I slapped him across the face, hard. “You think you’re worthy of the Hive?” I hissed. “A tiny leviathan spawn waves its tentacle at you – and you run away? That’s all it takes?”
“But Miss Booker! It killed Bricks!” a different thug protested.
“Yes,” I snapped, injecting contempt into my voice. “At least Bricks stayed and fought. Unlike the rest of you cowards.”
The thugs looked suitably chagrined – and not at all suspicious that I wasn’t addressing any of them by name.
In a scathing tone, I informed them, “This one time, I will overlook it and not report it to Djera Maha. This once. There had better not be a repeat.”
“Yes, Miss Booker,” they whispered. “There won’t.” “We promise.” (The first thug was still too cowed to speak.)
“Good.”
And I turned on my heel and strode out the door of the Moon’s Embrace Spa, the Hive members falling in behind me like so many ducklings.