Shvaughn was a bit surprised when her descent through the Rift suddenly morphed into being swept along a mighty undersea river and getting sent over a gargantuan underwater waterfall.
The waterfalls continued, cold and powerful, enough to easily batter any normal human to death, but in sirine Elemental form, it was no different for her than enjoying a brisk wind.
The rivers of sea water separated in all directions, probably following paths all over the place, and inevitably down to the Hollow World. How it all came back was a different story.
She noted the number of fish and living organisms was almost non-existent, and even the salt tang was dissipating as the current flowed along. An inbuilt mechanism to purify the waters down here, and for the planet as a whole? Interesting ramifications...
Consuming intellectuals meant questioning things, always learning. Doing it to children meant being ready to learn forever.
Doing it to an erinyes meant nigh-infinite memory capacity. The Fey could have long lives, but it wasn’t the same as the rulers of the realms of the dead souls. They might forget the mortal lives of the souls they were made from, but their own lives could outlast anything save any native gods sitting around... and perhaps even them, if the things she’d seen in Remarriu’s memories were valid.
Hell had certainly been around longer than mere Christianity and Judaism... or the Chinese versions of them.
She was following a group of muuk who had been released from their duties, or were ferrying scrolls or something away from the falls, which meant they needed someplace to store them. Her Detect Location was reading twenty-six miles down from the surface, but could only reference her private Visual File, as The Map of the whole Allegiance’s view of the world was not available.
What an astonishing and wonderful tool that was, in all the ways. She was still adding temporal episodes to it on the sly, creating timelines within the worldviews for those curious enough to watch the changes over time, and naturally enough, her own Lived-Lines extended all over the place, including into locations a great number of people wouldn’t believe she had been.
She picked up a lot of things when she Consumed people, and Consuming those who Consumed others was even more efficient. Alas, she wasn’t permitted to make some Pact-fools to do some work for her... which led to that nasty slide Down, so not a Bad Thing at all.
With no wake or pressure wave, she followed the muuk easily, able to track the fish-men easily in the darkness and rapid currents. She could probably have stayed almost on top of them, but there were times to be daring, and there were times to just do the job. She wasn’t raiding, so daring wasn’t necessary.
She felt the waterfall coming up, judged it not all that large compared to those behind, and followed the muuk over the edge a few seconds later.
She saw the lights and the towers on the way down, and immediately slowed her plummet despite herself, letting the tons of water slide right on past her as she did so, catching glimpses of quays and pillars below, and having an idea of what might be going on as she hit the pounding rush, was pressed down towards the bottom of the chamber, and heard a ringing sound.
She couldn’t see with all the bubbles, but she kept right on going down, below the flow of the water, feeling ahead of herself carefully as the foam from above dissipated, and she finally came to a stop over two hundred feet below.
A long net had been erected across the entire river, designed to catch anything that might want to cross into the waters beyond. The bells sounding probably indicated the muuk had swum into the net, alerting those here of their presence, and they were either going over it the hard way, or simply coming to the surface and waving at the alert guards.
She drew on her sirine ability and dissolved completely into water. Totally liquid now, she flowed through a two-inch square on the wire-bound net without touching the sides, which definitely carried some kind of warning effect. Most Elementals would simply flow around all sides of the net, letting it pass through them, instead of vice versa.
Her other alternative was using invisibility and flying up out of the water, but she didn’t doubt that spotters with inhuman patience were looking for just that kind of thing. Likewise, she was pretty sure the psychic vibe in the air would react to dimensional movement.
She noted the water here was several grades fresher than the ocean water outside, part of the active filtering effect which seemed to be centered on the waterfalls. She shoved it all to the back of her head as she regathered herself from a long, narrow stream of water into an operating form.
Staying in stealth, and noting that there were now fish swimming through the waters around her, Shvaughn headed for those towers, and the lights.
---------
As she expected, it was a slave colony in the deeps.
Sirine memories considered it similar to those of the Deep Ones, although those tended to use artificial chambers, as opposed to these vast, low caverns in the Felldeep. There were neandrathalic, simian bipeds there, possibly inbred or mutated humans from the surface, possibly natives of the Felldeep. They had a bulbous, long-jawed look to them that confirmed they were muuk-spawn, and when their humanoid bodies died, they would rise again as unaging muuk to serve the lethomorg, a tidy and efficient process.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
In the meantime, they birthed more proto-muuk humanoids to make more muuk.
Shvaughn painted in the towers and their vacuous, dim light; part phosphorescence, part psychic gleam, letting her Visual File store it all as she drifted in best sirine fashion with the waves from the waterfall behind her, watching fish-faced scaled muuk interacting with hairy, bent ape-men in the fashion of rulers to servants, or elders to children.
Her job was to scout and survey these places, not to engage, although her fingers itched at the chance for some unmitigated slaughter of unnatural things.
She didn’t dare Consume these wretches, for fear of the gene-twisting typical of elder races. They had no business existing, and she could very definitely feel the Land’s standard antipathy for the Aberrant focused on these creatures.
She filled her Mask of Clarity with ki, Legion having etched the Tattoo on her personally, letting the magnification leap forwards as she rose out of the water, returning to flesh as her wings came out, but staying Invisible as she did.
She wasn’t worried about being attacked from the water or the air, although she’d seen things that weren’t bats moving around between massive dripping stalactites above, crawling, gliding, flying, or moving along webs. There were inordinate amounts of fungi growing in clusters on the ceilings here and there, and they all seemed to be homes to things... another sign of Elder Races who couldn’t keep their tentacles out of any local genepools.
Taking swift and silent wing, and able to switch between sea and flight as needed, Shvaughn commenced stage two of her scouting.
-----------
Legion considered the information they and the Cohort were receiving from all their Pacts as they sped silently and invisibly over the waters.
The number of people who could do a reconnaissance in force for extended periods of time like this were not numerous. The world’s two Warlock Grandmasters were among them.
Their scouting assignment in the deeper parts of America had evolved rapidly, and the discovery of the Strata had been part of it. Mountainhammers, Ancientaxes, Mindrings, and Shadowknives were stepping up the process of investigation of the Felldeep now. The Void Brothers were much better equipped to find and follow the hidden flows of energies through the land to the hidden tunnels and concealed passages and chasms that led to the Underdeep and the Deepsea below.
There seemed to be a Deepsea below every continent, with flows coming into them from the oceans, and going out into the Hollow World, which in turn sent the circulating water out through polar rifts, driving the currents of the world.
They couldn’t take down the Strata without taking down some of the Warded settlements and caverns that seemed to anchor it, and then only in the immediate area. That basically meant that entire swathes of the Deepseas were going to be immune to Scrying or Divination, which meant it was almost a given that something deep and dangerous was going to be lurking in there, if it knew of the Strata at all.
They could only find the dark spots if they could find the settlements, and the fastest way to find some of the settlements was to map the borders of the Deepseas, as so many of the Underrealms here bordered on it.
The Strata blocked Scrying, but tellingly, did not block teleportation or telepathy, although the range of the former through stone was very restricted, save by Earthjump. However, telepathy crossing the Strata was detectable if you were sensitive enough to it, or the volume was high enough... which an Allegiance Markchat definitely was. Teleportation was effectively blind; you either knew where you were going, or you were following a Lived-Line.
Or, you know, maybe someone set up a Focus Seal somewhere on the far side, so you could Earthjump to it with confidence.
That was one of the jobs of the scouts. Legion was setting down around every ten miles and inscribing unique Focus Seals for Earthjumps to home in on as required as they swept over the almost-lightless depths of the Deepsea here, so many miles under the continent.
There was light in the form of bioluminescent growths and radiant minerals of one sort or another out here, more like spots of light in the darkness. Sometimes they were crawling over stalactites, stalagmites, and columns the size of mountains, sometimes they were just blots and blotches on the ceilings. The heated-flow style of ceilings seemed to be limited to caverns away from the Deepsea, as even the higher darkseas had burning ceilings.
No doubt the colors and size of some of the fungoid colonies served as way markers, and Legion had noticed many artificial Lights of various kinds left here and there as pseudo-lighthouses on the larger columns, with some even bearing massive carvings of unknown events, ages, and beings carved into them in forgotten pasts.
Shvaughn had come out of her first scan of the Deepsea blank spots with a picture of a massive slave colony of the lethomorgs and their muuk slaves, multilayered caverns in the area of one of the Felldeep water sources that poured beneath and across the oceans in massive rivers towards the Deepseas. The darkseas were fed by runoff from the lands above them, but the Deepseas were mainly fed by the oceans.
There wasn’t much wind across the Deepseas, which meant travel was powered by oars or motors of some kind, and the low tech-level meant galleys were the main ships they had sighted working the place. The ships of Leng were powered by magic, of course, and oars were merely used to increase speed.
They weren’t sure what to expect down here, but there were no humanoid realms so far.
Ships of the Merchants of Leng sailed out into the depths of the sea without fear, and seemed the biggest mercantile power, dealing mostly in slaves in their dark covered galleys.
They had passed two cephalid settlements, and a ship shaped like a nautiloid hovering on psychic force as it levitated over the still black waters of the Deepsea had passed them by once.
Oddly enough, despite Shvaughn’s discovery, there were no muuk bases here, nor Deep Ones, or even sahaug. There were, however, multiple scattered settlements of Nau-merg, yet another fishman race, a weird combination of piranha and lobster in appearance, and known as the Mad Idolators for their veneration of Old Gods and a racial tendency towards going totally barmy.
They didn’t have any large cities, but they had the equivalent of monkish cloisters all over the bloody place, giving them a presence on mid-sea columns and stalagmites that other races without aquatic ability didn’t have, and they obviously had the power to hold them against the creatures of the Deepsea...