Even having spent the bulk of his life under the long shadow of the great mew at the heart of their empire, Banon’s mind swam every time he saw one of the Pyathen spires up close. Right now, he and his three best men were hidden on the edge of the treeline, just outside of the massive clearing that surrounded the Donai’s spire city. The city was built around the skeleton of a dead mew tree, and its proportions reflected as much. High above the ground, where the first branches began, massive, seamless white discs were cradled within them, layer after layer, until the very top, where the teardrop-shaped royal palace pierced the heavens. Most everything was fully enclosed, with the exception of several sparsely placed ballista installations, shooting floors, and placed just above the end of the anticlimbing spikes; a few small spotter posts on the outside where a skeleton crew of spotters was halfheartedly performing their duties.

  It wasn’t as if anything, Ooura or animal alike, could climb past the hundred-foot-tall section of spikes. So why would they worry?

  Tonight, the watch was even more sparse than usual due to the celebrations taking place inside that, on occasion, could be heard in the form of muted choruses of cheering, even all the way out here. There were only three Pyathen spotters with a line of sight to their position now. The four Ooura had just finished setting down the ballista and unpacking the rest of their supplies.

  “When I get back, be ready with my armor. I want to be outfitted as quickly as possible.”

  Tyube and Cloxam nodded while Omah squinted up at the spire with a skeptical look on his face. Banon turned to Omah. “Worried the rope isn’t long enough?”

  “No,” he replied. “It’s long enough. Doesn’t make you any less crazy than a bag of beetles.”

  Banon placed a hand on Omah’s shoulder. “Our success tonight is just as much in your hands as it is mine. I trust your rope to hold.” Banon placed his other hand on Tyube’s shoulder. “And your reeds to keep me breathing.”

  Banon looked at Cloxam. The huge man was impassive as always. “And you, I’ll trust to beat the bad ideas out of both of their heads should they get ancy, and I think we both know that’s more of a when than an if.”

  “They are already ancy,” Cloxam’s deep voice agreed. “Won’t be by the time you get back. You can trust me.”

  “Good,” Banon said, then motioned at the ballista. “Make sure the spool is set up and everything is secured properly before I get back as well.”

  That done, Banon approached the edge of the treeline. The Donai’s spire city was situated in the middle of a huge sub-mat lake, quite similar to the layout of his own home village. Only in this case, the spire city and the mew encased within it stood alone. All other lesser trees and foliage had been utterly wiped out for hundreds of feet in all directions, making a ground approach, even at night, a sure way to be spotted.

  Which was exactly why Banon stopped short of revealing himself in the open and began digging down into the weedy mat instead. Some five or six feet down, he hit water, deep water. Even here at the edge of the lake’s clearing, he could not see the bottom.

  Banon checked the loaded crossbow and the case of bolts fastened to his hip one more time before pulling himself underneath. It was total blackness. Banon had to operate purely on his own remembered orientation to the world above. Thankfully, keeping course came as naturally to him as breathing. Unfortunately, breathing for the rest of this venture would be both tedious and have the highest potential for danger of this whole part of the operation. Tyube’s breathing tubes were remarkable in that they were impressively durable considering their thin profile. The real problem was that every time Banon pushed one up through the mat, there was a chance pieces of mat would get lodged inside the tube. There was a workaround for this. Before Banon sucked in breath, he would first blow out hard to, in theory, clear out any bits of weedy sludge that had gotten lodged.

  There were two problems with this, and they were exactly why, up until this point, Tyube’s invention had never evolved beyond testing these things without venturing far from the hole one dug to get underneath the mat in the first place.

  Reason number one was simple. Sometimes, there would be a blockage so solid it could not be blown out. This rarely happened, but so far, they had come up with no backup plan besides swimming for the exit hole, which would not be possible during such a long-distance swim as this one. The second problem was far more common. No matter how forcefully you blew out the first blockage, there were always tiny amounts of lingering material stuck to the inside. This was no problem… as long as they stayed stuck.

  The problem was they usually didn’t, and even the tiniest bit of solid material being inhaled tended to result in an involuntary convulsion. Hundreds of feet away from the opening to clean air, as Banon was going to be soon, even a single handful of inhaled water would spell death. There was a workaround for this problem, fortunately. As long as he breathed through gritted teeth, any lingering bits of mat would have a much harder time making their way down his throat.

  But it wasn’t perfect. There were gaps. And even a tiny piece inhaled in just the wrong way could become a very big problem.

  The other, much smaller issue in terms of practicality was just how cumbersome these things were. They were each about one and a half times the length of Banon’s body, and he was forced to use one of his hands to carry the three, bundled-up up breathing reeds, rather than use that hand to aid in pulling himself along the underside of the mat. It sacrificed a lot of speed and almost all his maneuverability in exchange for the ability to, up until this point, only in theory, traverse the world underneath the mat indefinitely.

  There, of course, were other potential problems with spending extended periods of time under the mat of a more… active nature.

  Just as Banon’s lungs began to burn enough that he moved to make his first breathing hole, he noticed the dull yellow glow of one of those very same potential problems in the distance. The jungle kraken, thankfully, was so far away he couldn’t even differentiate between the many individual glowing lures that hung off of it, and instead saw it as merely a smudge of color far away, all but consumed in the pitch black void of the subsurface lake. Hopefully it would stay that way.

  The reed pierced the mat without issue. It seemed to be about ten feet thick already. Banon blew out hard, feeling the resistance give way as the weedy bits vacated the other end of the tube. He gave himself more than a few breaths. There was no reason not to take the opportunity to fully regain his stamina.

  After that, he retrieved the reed and pushed onwards, taking two more breaks that went similarly smoothly before deciding he was close enough. Banon pushed a reed up through the mat again, but this time left it in place and did not move on from his position. He began digging upwards, scooping the sludgy tangle of weeds by the handful. It took him long enough to dig up to the surface that he had to take several breathing breaks in between, but thankfully the reed he left lodged in the mat just a few feet away made things simple.

  Finally, Banon felt his hand break through to open air. Slowly, Banon eased upwards, forcing the cavity to widen to fit him, until he stopped with only the top half of his head breaching the surface through the same hole his fist had punched. His judgement of distance and angle had been true. He was well within the range to make an easy bow shot at one of the two watchmen he needed to kill. Unfortunately, Banon only had the tiny Pyathen crossbow. Still, he should be within range to make a consistent shot with it.

  Banon had spent several hours testing the limits of the crossbows after receiving them, and he’d found that an Ooura greatbow outclassed them in both raw distance and precision, though the latter was more due to his level of skill from a lifetime of practice than the ease of using a greatbow in comparison to the crossbow. The problem, when it came to this particular mission, was that a greatbow took a lot of room to operate. He’d have to stand up straight on the mat to use it. With the tiny Pyathen-sized crossbow, he only needed to widen the hole he’d already made by a few feet. He suspected he’d even be able to make the shot without raising himself above the level of the mat’s surface.

  Despite the weapon being tiny, it had a mechanical output far exceeding what it should have. A greatbow might outclass it at its current size, but Banon’s mind itched with the possibility of what an Ooura-sized crossbow might be able to accomplish. If the ballista had been about half its size, it could have likely been altered to do just that. But the real prize would be in deciphering how to build them from scratch. Banon placed that idea atop the pile of the dozen other similarly time-consuming projects he would eventually get to, reorienting to the present.

  True to what he hoped, he didn’t need to widen the hole much more than what it took to fit his own shoulders through to get enough room to take the shot. The bolt loosened with snap, and a few moments later, the elf’s silhouette dropped like a sack of rocks. Banon breathed a sigh of relief as the seconds passed and no more sound came from the watch post. He’d been at the right angle to take a shot that was more or less guaranteed to hit the left lung, though he suspected it was a full pass through to the heart, since there wasn’t even a death rattle to be heard. Banon slipped a new bolt out of the case and reloaded the weapon. It had a remarkable ability to hold the bolt in place while primed to fire. You could hold it upside down and the bolt would not fall out. There wasn’t a rational reason to carry it loaded while he went underneath the mat again, but he did it anyway. As much as anything else, he was testing the limits of the mechanism, even now. If he lost the bolt somehow during the crawl, he’d have plenty more to replace it. A small part of him wanted it loaded in case he was attacked by an aquatic predator, even though he knew his knife was far more the practical option in that situation since he could stab indefinitely, while the crossbow only had one charge.

  Banon attempted to slink back down the hole he’d dug, but the cavity was slick. He slipped almost immediately, plummeting a short distance and pinging between the walls twice before hitting the water hard on his back. After some fruitless scrambling, he managed to reorient himself. Banon retrieved the breathing reed and went on his way. This time, he wasn’t swimming directly towards the tower any longer, but rather in a radius around it. The second watch post was just far enough around the curve of the spire that he would need to dig another hole all over again.

  Banon paused after a short distance. He hazarded a glance towards where he had last seen the kraken. He couldn’t see it any longer. Looking around, the glow seemed to be gone from his field of view completely. There were plenty of places the creature could be by now. Most lakes had thick enough weed beds for smaller krakens to hide completely within. The trunk of the mew that the spire was built upon could even be obscuring it, if it had moved far enough in that direction. Banon tried to ignore it as he kept on swimming, but the worry nagged at him enough to make him check and recheck the presence of his knife and crossbow on his waistline multiple times.

  He picked a spot and set up his breathing tube in place before he began digging, just as before. Only this time, when he tried to blow out the initial blockages, he couldn’t force a passthrough. Remaining calm, Banon pulled out the first of his two backup reeds and shoved it up through the mat next to the first. To his horror, this one couldn’t be cleared out either. Banon experienced a moment of panic while frantically orienting his last reed before he realized he couldn’t possibly be that unlucky. The mat must just be that thick in this spot.

  He left the two reeds already lodged in the mat behind. His air was not going to last long enough to worry about them. He swam further away from the center of the lake, hoping the mat was thinner out here. The reed slid through the squelching muck fast, too fast. He had to force himself to slow down. Break the fragile reed now, and it would be over.

  Mercifully, he felt the resistance end as the reed pushed through the top of the mat. Banon frantically pushed air up through the length of the tube, and he felt a relieving pop as the minor obstruction shot out the other end. Inhaling eagerly, Banon relished.

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  Until his breath caught.

  He’d inhaled a piece of mat. A tiny, tiny piece. Not enough that he coughed reflexively, but it was close. Banon continued to breathe without incident, but every single push and pull of his lungs was now deliberate and cautious, fearful of the moment that tiny piece of solid mass might move just enough to spike his sensitivity. If he hadn’t been submerged underwater, he was sure there would be sweat pouring down his face.

  Eventually, Banon decided he had to make a move. He couldn’t simply keep breathing safe breaths. He needed to dig upwards. His mind continued to nag about the kraken, urging him to look below, but his need to be above the mat again was rabid, forcing his thoughts into a one-way tunnel. He clawed and scraped large chunks away, only taking the briefest of breaks to shirk in a single breath at a time from the reed.

  At last, he hit the surface, immediately taking the opportunity to push his head into the open. It took longer than Banon would have ever admitted for him to remember to look up and scan for the spotter. And when he did, his heart dropped, because it was clear he had already been spotted. The elf was leaning over the edge, squinting as if he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Banon brought up the crossbow. The elf’s eyes went wide.

  The body tumbled forward over the railing. The strangled gurgling didn’t stop until the elf hit the mat with a tremendous slap. Banon swallowed. That was loud. Too loud. But at least he was dead. If Banon hadn’t preloaded the bolt beforehand, he might not have gotten the shot off in time.

  Without hesitating for an instant, Banon slid back down into the lake water and began scrambling along. He stopped dead and then turned back when he realized he’d almost forgotten to retrieve his one remaining reed. He was growing more and more single-minded to the point where it might cause him to make a grave mistake. But he couldn’t help it. He was never as comfortable in the water as he was above the mat or in the tree canopy, and this was a whole other level. He was an outsider in this environment, and he felt it more and more every moment further he spent in it.

  Thankfully, the third and final location had mat thin enough for Tyube’s breathing reed to work on the first attempt. The hole digging went without incident as well, though Banon wished he could get himself to slow down just a little.

  He peeled away the top layer of mat just wide enough to aim the crossbow and peered upwards. He found he’d been a bit off in his judgment this time, coming a hair too close to the tower. He could only see the last Pyathen spotter from the neck up over the white clay railing. He didn’t care. This needed to be over with.

  Despite the night being far from over, the fire of ambition surged within him. He was only a few small steps from the prize. And now, finally, it felt within reach. Over the years, he had decided there were only two ways into the upper levels of the spire. The first and most obvious was through the metal reinforced gate at ground level, but even if it could be breached, Banon had intel that throughout the entire spiral staircase it led into, all the way up to the first habitation level, the inside was dotted with murder holes and strategically placed acid launchers. The other option, the one that he had always known was the only real hope, was to ascend from the outside. The problem there, that had been insurmountable until this point, was the hundred-odd feet of anti-climbing spikes that spanned halfway up to the first habitation layer. The spikes, besides being sharp and barbed, were poisoned. Banon knew that, because he had failed to climb it once before, when he was just sixteen and no less brave than he was now, just far less forward-thinking.

  He smiled as he acknowledged that for all that the younger version of himself had been naive and borderline suicidal, he was now about to carry out one of his earliest wishes, conceived in the wonder-filled mind of a child, the kind that normally fade into submission with him. Not this dream. Not this time. Banon took aim.

  Something wet and rubbery latched onto his ankle and immediately yanked him down.

  Banon scrambled, clawing for purchase, but it wasn’t enough. He may as well have tried to pull against a mountain. He splashed into the water, and for a moment, the pull loosened. He spun, turning to face the creature that had its barbed suction cups firmly wrapped around his leg. The massive, purple jungle kraken was covered in dangling bits of flesh that glowed a vibrant yellow. The aquatic monster took up almost his entire field of vision, with its two beady eyes staring back at him like stars piercing through the night.

  The kraken shifted, or maybe it was Banon who was being moved. Before he could hardly think, he was underneath the monstrous creature, its fleshy skirt spread out in front of him with tentacles closing in from the sides. At the very center of its underside was a huge, dark colored beak.

  Banon aimed at a random spot on its center mass and pulled the trigger of the crossbow he still had in his hand. Nothing happened. The damn weapon must have gone off on its own in the chaotic few moments while he was being pulled down through the mat.

  He slipped the longer of his two obsidian knives out of his waistband. Just as he went to swipe at the tentacle that had the strongest hold on him, he flinched and missed, screaming out in pain as the beak closed around his ankle.

  Banon heaved his upper body towards the site of attack, slicing and stabbing wildly. He felt the kraken react as his blade struck through soft flesh. But the beak wouldn’t loosen its grip. In fact, it was getting tighter, biting through the flesh to the bone. Banon growled, but forced himself to stop, as every involuntary noise he made would expel precious air.

  He continued to stab but was making less headway than before since more tentacles were worming around his body and obstructing his movement. He pushed himself further, overextending his strength rather than focusing on precision. He managed a few more strikes, though he couldn’t tell what or even if he was hitting anything anymore. Desperate, Banon focused his attacks, narrowly missing his own ankle as he attempted to cut away the tentacle holding it in place. He accidentally hit the solid bone of the beak, and to his horror, he felt the obsidian snap and shatter in a dozen places. No!

  He tried to pry the beak apart with his bare hands, but it wouldn’t budge. Every moment further, the tentacles closed in more and more until Banon felt like he was inside a dome made entirely of flesh. An idea struck him. Using what little open space he had left, he reached to his waist and pulled a bolt out of the case.

  He was pretty sure he tore the case itself from his waistband in the process but there was no time to flail about in attempt to catch it before it could sink. His leg was going to snap any moment. He dropped the mangled handle of a knife that had been passed down for generations and focused both hands on a new task. The crossbow’s string pulled back until it clicked into place, and then he seated the bolt in place. Gritting his teeth against the pain so he wouldn’t scream, Banon grabbed the top half of the beak and pulled himself towards it. Using the other hand, he jammed the crossbow as far inside the beak as it would fit, hoping he wouldn’t hit his own foot when he fired. Banon pulled the trigger. The thrum jolted his wrist underwater much more than it did when shooting the weapon in the open air.

  The body of the kraken went utterly limp.

  Banon’s eyes shot wide. That was lucky. But there would be time to marvel at his good fortune later. Right now, he was still stuck in a cage of flesh. A cage that outweighed him by many times, and was now slowly sinking towards the bottom.

  Somehow, with just his second, stubby skinning knife, he managed to cut himself free and get back to the surface before he drowned. He raked in breath, wedged awkwardly between the walls of mat in the hole he’d dug. He could hardly even remember doing it. Just a blur of slicing away, bit by bit, until suddenly he was free. Banon held the skinning knife up in front of his face, even though it was too dark to hardly see it. The blade was no longer than the distance across his palm. “Thank you, little brother.”

  He still had dozens of mutilated suction cups attached to him by the little barbed spikes at their centers. His ankle was bleeding profusely, but at least it hadn’t been broken. He pulled his head above the mat. The spotter was still there, and thankfully hadn’t noticed anything, but it didn’t matter. Banon had lost the bundle of bolts in the chaos.

  He needed that bundle of bolts, but he knew in this darkness he would never find it on the bed of a lake so deep. But there was one thing he could find. Banon slid back into the water.

  The yellow glow of the kraken was like a beacon.

  He descended towards it until he was upon the glowing corpse. The body hadn’t yet settled on the floor of the lake, and Banon doubted he could hold his breath long enough to make it there and back if it had. As it was, this was his one and only chance to retrieve the one bolt he knew he could find.

  He pushed past the lifeless arms until he found the beak. His arm went in up to the shoulder before he felt it. Banon ripped the bolt out and left the corpse to find its resting place.

  It was only when he got back to the surface and checked it that he realized his plan had been a failure. The bolt was broken.

  ***

  Banon emerged from the mat all the way back at his starting place. He limped towards the dark shape of the ballista and the three sihhlouttes surrounding it.

  “You look like a dead swamp witch,” Omah said.

  “That is a lot of blood,” Tyube added. “What happened to your leg?” Both he and Omah immediately crowded in on either side.

  Banon collapsed down onto his haunches, propping his back against the ballista. “There’s still one spotter alive,” he said, ignoring Tyube’s question.

  “Are we found out?” Cloxam’s deep voice asked from behind him

  “No. I lost the bolts before I could make the last shot.”

  “Shit,” Omah hissed. “Are you going back under again?”

  “No,” Banon said. “No time. There will be a new shift of spotters too soon. They’d likely find the dead ones and raise the alarm in the middle of my ascent.”

  “Then… what?” Tyube asked.

  Banon’s eyes traced the distance along the mat. He didn’t have nearly enough practice with the ballista as he would like to make such a precise shot, but now there was no other option. Grunting, he pulled himself up to his feet and looked over the preparations the three of them had made while he was gone.

  They’d set up the spool to face towards the line of fire with all the shooting rope looped around it, the end of the rope was attached to the massive ballista bolt, and the ballista itself had been tied off to three trees behind it by the strongest points on the frame using several shorter lengths of rope. The spool was tapered, allowing the shooting rope to feed smoothly enough that the huge bolt would fly true. They’d tested it multiple times in the past two days, and while the trajectory of the bolt was much steeper with the rope attached, they knew it would fire far enough to hit the spire above where the anti-climbing spikes ended from this distance. But hitting it alone was now no longer the only requirement.

  Banon slid into position behind the massive weapon. He grabbed onto the two cranks that were responsible for adjusting the aim and began to spin them.

  Omah was shaking his head. “I don’t understand. The spotter who’s still alive will see you shoot. And if not that, he’ll hear it and then see the hundreds of feet of rope hanging off the spire that wasn’t there before.”

  Tyube had a harsh expression. Banon expected his younger brother had already figured it out.

  To his surprise, however, it was Cloxam who spoke it out loud first. “You’re going to shoot him.” The bulky Kothai had his arms crossed, and his face a mask of resolve, but Banon could see the subtler tells. He didn’t think it would work.

  Which was exactly why Banon trusted him. He was reasonable, and what Banon was about to attempt was desperate, bordering on insane.

  But it was also necessary. They couldn’t simply call this mission off and try again. After the elves found their guards dead on their posts, the alarm would be raised for days, if not weeks on end. Banon didn’t have that time. The princess had eaten the dragon eagle at the negotiation feast just over a week before this moment, just as Banon had planned for. Eating the flesh of that particular avian creature caused one’s skin to exude a pungent aroma of sweetness for roughly two weeks, and that combined with Banon’s superior senses as an Ooura was the only reason he could attempt this in the first place. Once he was past the anti-climbing spikes, the interior of spire was too large for him to find her by guesswork alone. He’d be caught long before he found her unless he stayed on the outside of the spire until the scent led him directly to her rooms. Even then, there would likely be bloodshed should any of her attendants or guards be present at the time. And he could only assume there would be, given her imminent betrothal to the Enka prince. But there were only a few days left where he could still track her in this way. It was now or never.

  “Shoot him? With what? Your great bow? It’s an impossible shot from here…” Omah trailed off. It was only now that Omah seemed to notice what Banon was really doing.

  Banon felt the horizontal aiming crank click into place as he finished setting the new aim. The sights were adjusted to their maximum vertically. Even then, the pinnacle of the triangular aiming reticle was lined up with a spot on the empty wall some double the height of the lounging elf he was hoping to hit. The silhouette of the spotter’s body was a blurry dot, even to Banon’s eyes.

  Banon slid his fingers along the mew wood balista bolt. It had a metallic sheen to the wood grain, hinting at its superior strength compared to any other wood in the jungle. Dryad, I do not ask of you things often. Banon leaned back into place behind the huge ballista. But I really need this to work.

  Now or never.

  Banon pulled the bolt-release.