Oshenerth by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page A

darting in to cop exploratory feels of her emerald green swimsuit and its contents.
    She realized with a start that she was no longer cold. She ought to be on the verge of hypothermia. The water surrounding her might be bathtub warm, but body heat would still migrate from ninety-eight point six degrees internal to dissipate in eighty-eight degree seawater. Everything about her body had been altered. No, not altered, she corrected herself. Adjusted. Fine-tuned. In the most literal sense of the term, she had undergone a sea change. The alternative having been a slow death from exposure or drowning, she was in no hurry to question the transformation.
    His skin color darkening to a black-flecked beige, the octopus appeared to be consulting with the two squid. That was insane, of course. Almost as insane as her male counterpart swimming suddenly toward her, halting, and asking in clipped no-nonsense tones, “What happened to you, demon?”
    She understood him. Clearly. Underwater. She was not sure which was more remarkable: the fact that she could now hear clearly at depth, that his words were comprehensible, or that she hardly reacted at all when he lifted up the patch that covered his left eye and began to use a finger to wipe out the empty socket. Was she capable of replying? Surely her words would not be understood. Shaping her lips around a response, she found that when she opened her mouth to speak she did not drown. This was reassuring.
    “I—I’m not a demon.”
    Lateral fins rippling to propel it forward, the big cuttlefish let the dead blacktip it had been holding float free. Though its tentacles made it longer than she was, it weighed considerably less. Of course weight here, she reflected, did not have the same meaning as it did on land. Was it going to grab her again? And if so, should she resist?
    Glint did not grab her. “If you’re not a demon,” he declared, “then what are you?”
    She could understand cuttlefish chat. Why should she be surprised? Was this all a heat-induced dream from which she would shortly awaken, to find herself floating once more alone and abandoned on the surface of an apathetic sea? Until then, she decided, she might as well go literally with the flow.
    “Yes.” The male with the spear confronted her in a manner brusque enough to be considered threatening. “You must be a demon. You were found breathing void.”
    “Void?” She looked bewildered. “Oh, you mean air . Yes, that’s what people breathe. Or rather, that’s what I used to breathe.” She looked over at Oxothyr. “That thing did something do me.”
    The shaman’s boneless mantle bobbed slightly toward her—an octopodian bow. “The ‘thing’ respectfully acknowledges your thanks,” he replied dryly. “Without my intervention you would have surely suffocated.”
    A talking octopus. A talking cuttlefish. I’m dreaming for sure, she told herself. If only she didn’t feel so—so—overtly wet . Could she be sweating in her sleep, inside her restrictive diveskin?
    “I’m a human being.” A hint of desperation had crept into her voice. She turned to the spear-carrier. “A person, just like—well, maybe not just like you.”
    “A merson?” Chachel frowned. “It is true that you look like one now, but that is thanks to Oxothyr’s miraculous intercession. Before, you looked like a demon. The dead of your kind are known to us, albeit they are found very rarely.”
    “Dead …?” It was her turn to look confused. “Oh, you mean drowned. You call yourselves ‘mersons’?”
    “We do not ‘call’ ourselves anything.” Be it demon or mage-inveigled changeling, he was finding this creature less and less to his liking. “Merson is what we are . Do you have a name, dem—do you have a name?”
    “Irina.” She did not see any point in giving her full name.
    “I am Chachel.” He gestured to his left. “This is my friend and hunting companion, Glint. You have been save-transformed by the esteemed