Luli immediately takes a different path down the rocks than I would. I follow closely, noting the choices she makes and trying to see what they have in common. It's something to do with the current, I think, but that's the best I get before night falls and we move too deep for me to get a comprehensive assessment. We're midway down the slope when Luli flicks off all her lights and loops back to tug my arm. We stay silent as she leads the way to a rocky overhang that directly faces the deep. It's not my definition of safe when that's where the sea-goddess tails come from, but I've told myself to trust her, so I keep my hands down and my mouth shut.
Just like yesterday, darkness has barely settled when the first call resonates up from the deep. They must do this every night. I shiver, its motion touching off a violent shudder as my body remembers the blasts of water through our hideout last night. A sea-goddess tail wouldn't even need to flush us out here. They could just reach under the rocks and bite. But the predatory shoal passes us by. They're rising through the water farther out, swimming overhead at some distance as they return to what must be their habitual foraging grounds. Luli waits for the bulk of their songs to congregate farther up the slope, then tugs my arm again.
When we leave our shelter, Luli's swimming style has switched. Now it's one I recognize: she's keeping obstacles between us and the sea-goddess tails upslope, and now I wonder if her technique before was to do the same thing in reverse. I'm so unused to hiding from anything deeper down than I am, I didn't recognize the pattern.
It's well into the night when the rock beneath us begins to do something strange. Over the course of several arm-lengths, it levels out, though we're nowhere near the ocean bottom. Then it begins to rise again. It's not until Luli's dim lights ahead of me illuminate a steeper upward curve that I realize we've reached the first of the stone pillars. I didn't think the stone forest grew directly from the island-side. It makes sense, given their proximity, but I guess some part of me always assumed that structures as imposing as the stone forest's "trees" must reach down deeper than my people swim. We're barely at the middle of our depth range here.
A faint flicker of light dances ahead.
It's my turn to grab Luli and pull us to shelter. The red signal squid emerge from behind what must be another pillar's base in the distance, flickering to one another. Their tails are the same size as their like-Kels', but their tentacles reach much farther than a Kel's human arms. We hold our breaths together and wait for them to move out of sight again, then wait that time again, for good measure. The squid don't reappear.
When we unfreeze, Luli casts about around her and comes up with a rock small enough to fit in her hand. She uses this to scratch a mark on the base of the stone pillar: a Karu swirl that doesn't say anything I recognize. I wince at the white scar it leaves. I know, logically, that the deep ocean must be full of these. I know they're probably all over innumerable eel-Kel ruins and other sacred spaces. But seeing any kind of disfiguration on a pillar of the stone forest feels a different kind of wrong. With the great symbols farther up their trunks dating back to before the days of the eel Kels, anything more contemporary feels like vandalism.
Luli gathers three more rocks and arranges them in a triangle just below the mark.
"What are those for?" I ask.
"Showing others where to find it." She taps the fresh scar. "This will grow over with algae within half a moon or less. If anyone wants to find it again, they need a bigger marker to know where to look."
"What happens if someone moves the rocks?"
She shrugs. "If you're deep enough, not many things can. Sea-quakes do a lot of damage to whole routes, but that's about it. In that case, it depends. Sometimes we can guess the trajectory of the marks from the last few, and know where to find the next one. Sometimes it's a search. Sometimes we just have to make a new mark and keep going."
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Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔
Fantasy[FULL KELS SERIES] When Ande wakes up on the bottom of the ocean with a fish's tail, she's not sure what she did wrong. Getting sacrificed by her island is a likely bet, but why---and why her---is a mystery. Out of her depth in an unfamiliar world...
