Under Fallen Stars - Mel Odom [143]
The living sahuagin worked among their dead, sharp claws and huge teeth stripping meat from the corpses for meals. The scent and taste of scalded blood and boiled meat hung in the water, constantly touching Laaqueel's nostrils.
"You are troubled, priestess?"
Slowly, not knowing how to properly broach the subject, Laaqueel turned to face Iakhovas. Her eyes met his even though she still wanted to show him deference. No matter what, she knew she couldn't lie. He would know and she didn't want that between them.
"Yes," she said simply.
Iakhovas walked to the railing and closed his hands over it. His face remained stern and hard. "Why?"
"So many lives of We Who Eat have been forfeited." She gestured out at the seabed. "They have lost their homes."
In the distance, the Ship of the Gods still simmered. White, foamy bubbles from superheated water spiraled to the surface. The currents threaded hot waves in with the cool ones that coiled around Laaqueel. Still, the volcano appeared to be in little danger of spewing deadly lava again.
"Ah, little malenti, your perception of things is off and you don't even know it."
A sudden flush of anger flooded Laaqueel. She turned to him.
"You forget, my priestess," Iakhovas continued before she could speak, "they didn't choose to make their lives here." He gestured at the heaps of rubble. "That's no home, no village lying out there strewn about and destroyed. This parcel of unwanted land is what the sea elves and mermen grudgingly gave this tribe of We Who Eat after the First Seros War over ten thousand years ago. They drove them here, then penned them in, and they've kept them here ever since." He held her eyes with his solitary one. "This was no home, priestess. This was a prison."
In her heart, Laaqueel knew he spoke the truth. Everything around her, including the Alamber Sea, was a cage. The Serosian sahuagin had lived very small lives.
"I had not intended for so many to die," Iakhovas stated quietly. "In truth, I didn't know that our arrival here would cause such an upheaval."
Despite his flat tone and the fact that she knew he wouldn't have wanted her to know much of his private thoughts, Laaqueel believed the note of regret she heard in Iakhovas's voice was genuine.
"It was not your will, Most Exalted One," she said, speaking with the certainty of faith. "It was the will of Sekolah. These deaths are the result of the fury of his claws and teeth reaving the weak from the tribe, making his mark on his chosen people."
He stayed silent for a moment, not looking at her, as if weighing her words carefully. It was the first time Laaqueel could ever remember him doing that. "Do you truly think so, Most Sacred One?" His voice was almost a whisper.
Laaqueel shoved aside the tiny seed of doubt that stayed relentlessly within her. Even by Iakhovas's own admission he hadn't known the explosion was going to happen, but it had. Her training taught her that it had to be by the Great Shark's will.
'Yes," she said. "The sahuagin who lived here have stayed in one place for so long, it would have been hard to convince them to leave."
"Or to convince them to challenge the sea elves and mermen who sentenced them." Iakhovas glanced at her, a small smile twisting his lips. A dim golden light gleamed in the hollow of his missing eye. "I find your words, your thinking, very comforting, my priestess."
Laaqueel bowed her head, not prepared for the onslaught of emotions that whirled within her. She had never thought in her whole life that she'd be completely accepted. She was too much of a freak to expect that. She could only hope, and even then that hope was always dim. A surge of embarrassment filled her, one of the few times that it came from something she'd accomplished instead of something she'd fallen short on. She tried to think of an appropriate