The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,78

we were going to find Helmi holed up with Peter somewhere in the palace, it would be in the storerooms of the lower levels. If they weren’t there . . .

Saltmist was a Duchy. It spanned miles, and all that territory was unfamiliar. I’d been here once before, and most of my time had been spent in the palace. Quentin didn’t even have that much to go on. If Helmi and Peter had been moved, or had fled, we were going to be hard-pressed to find them before our time ran out.

We were almost to one of those entrances when something moved, warning us we were not alone. I drew myself back in a hard stop, putting out an arm to force Quentin to do the same, and watched as what I had taken for a piece of masonry uncurled itself, becoming a Cephali man.

He looked like a Merrow from the waist up, and like an octopus from the waist down. The skin of both halves was lemon yellow, although large blue rings marked his octopus half. His hair was an even brighter blue, verging on neon. He looked at us warily, hands moving in a quick, interrogative gesture.

Shit. It made sense that there’d be some sort of sign language in the Undersea, for use when having every word broadcast for miles wasn’t a good idea. But if I couldn’t speak their verbal language, there was no way I could fake their silent one.

Cephali. Dianda had several Cephali in her employ, including the missing Helmi. Here goes everything, I thought, and mouthed, with exquisite care, ‘Duchess Lorden sent us.’

It felt silly, like trying to perform a mime show where the price of failure was death. But slowly, the Cephali man nodded. He indicated Quentin with one tentacle.

I nodded back, with substantially more enthusiasm. ‘Yes,’ I mouthed. ‘Both of us. Looking for Peter.’ Grammar seemed less important than getting my point across.

The Cephali man nodded again before withdrawing up the wall, into the shadows. The yellow and blue faded until he looked like part of the wall once again, just another piece of decorative molding.

We didn’t have time to wait and see if this was a trick. I dove for the hole, Quentin close behind me, and tried to ignore the way the walls pressed in against us. There was always the chance that we were swimming into a dead end, catching ourselves like crabs in a pot.

I didn’t think so. From everything I’d heard, Saltmist was considered a thriving Undersea domain, and part of that could be credited to Patrick’s presence. Yes, being married to a Daoine Sidhe meant Dianda wasn’t as socially high-ranking as she could have been, if she’d married another Merrow and kept to the standards of her own kind. But it also meant Saltmist was less cruel than it might have been. Her people liked her. They liked her family. They might not be willing to fight against Torin, but did that mean they were going to turn on the people who had taken care of them for so many years?

I didn’t think so. And so I kept swimming, until I had to stop kicking my tail and start pulling myself along with both hands. Quentin was so close behind me that the top of his head kept brushing the sensitive edge of my flukes. I was almost grateful for that, since I couldn’t turn around and check on him anymore, not with the walls pressing in around us. As long as I could feel him, we were okay.

Unless that wasn’t him, and he’d been grabbed by one of Torin’s people while I’d been swimming. I started pulling myself along faster, gripped by the need to see my squire. When we reached the top, we’d be all right. I’d be able to confirm that it was him, and we’d be all right.

There was no way to know how long we spent forcing our way through that tight, unforgiving space before my questing hand broke through the surface of a still pool and into the air. I grasped the pool’s edge and pulled myself up, gasping as water ran from the gills on my neck and my lungs suddenly ached for air. That transition might have felt natural to a true Merrow, but to me, it was disconcerting in the extreme.

All things considered, the heavy object slamming into the back of my skull was even more disconcerting. Something cracked, bone giving way under the brutal force of