Amber and Ashes - Margaret Weis [133]
“I will call you if I have need.”
“And I will come, though I am at the ends of the universe. Wait for me here. I won’t be long.”
He swam toward the crystal wall, swam through the crystal wall. The darkness, warm and smothering, pressed down on her.
Mina kept watch on the star-like lights, focusing on them and not on her thirst, which was becoming acute. She counted eight lights scattered all over the tower, with no two on the same level, if there were levels. None of them blinked on or off but burned steadily.
She missed Chemosh, missed his voice. The silence was thick and heavy as the darkness. Suddenly, quite near her, a ninth light flared.
This light was different from the others. It was yellow in color and seemed warmer, brighter.
“I can stay here, thinking of nothing except the unbearable silence and the taste of cool water on my tongue, or I can go discover the source of this light.”
Mina pushed herself through the water, half-swimming, half-crawling, moving slowly and stealthily toward the strange light.
As she drew near, she saw that it was not a single point of light, as she had first supposed, but multiple lights, like a cluster of candles. She realized that the lights looked different—warmer, brighter—because they were outside the walls. She could see the light mirrored on the crystal surface. She drew nearer, curious.
The series of lights hung in the water as though strung together, like small lanterns hung on a rope. The lights were lined up in a row, jagged and irregular, which bobbed and drifted and gently swayed with the underwater currents.
“Strange,” said Mina to herself. “It looks like some sort of net—”
Her danger flashed before her in that instant. She tried to flee, but movement beneath the water was agonizingly slow and sluggish. The lights started to spin rapidly, dazzling her, so that she was blinded and confused. A net of heavy rope whipped out from the center of the whirling lights and, before she could escape it, settled over her.
She fought desperately to free herself from the entangling folds of heavy rope that fell over her head and shoulders, wrapped around her arms and hands and thrashing legs. She tried to lift the folds of the net, put it aside, shove it off her, but the lights were so bright that she could not see what she was doing.
The net drew in around her, tighter and tighter, until her arms were squeezed up against her chest, her feet and legs trussed up so that she could not move.
She could see and feel the net being dragged through the water with her inside, moving rapidly toward the crystal wall. The net did not stop when it reached the wall and it seemed that she must smash into the crystal. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the shattering impact.
A sensation of numbing cold, as if she’d fallen into bone-chilling water, was all that happened. Gasping from the shock, she opened her eyes to see that she had passed through a kind of porthole that had swirled opened to admit her and was now spiraling shut behind her.
The net’s movement ceased. Mina hung suspended in the water. Still entangled in the net, she could not easily turn her head and she had only a limited view of her surroundings. From what she could see, she was in some type of small, well-lighted chamber filled with sea water.
Two faces peered at her through a crystal pane.
“Fishermen,” Mina realized suddenly, recalling how the fishermen on Schallsea Isle would use lights at night to lure fish to their nets. “And I am their catch.”
She could not get a good look at her captors, for the net began to revolve and she was losing sight of them. The two were apparently as shocked to see her as she had been to see them. They began speaking to each other—she was able to see their mouths move, though she could not hear what they were saying.
It was then she noticed the surface of the water over her head ripple, as though air were being blown into the chamber. Looking up, she saw that the water level was starting to sink. The fishermen were pumping the water out of the