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Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: KDP
ISBN-10: 1311166289
Type: Fiction
Pages: 69
Copyright: July 4, 2015
ISBN-13: 9781311166289
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
Poseidon. Atlantis. Murder. Humor. Priestess. Good stuff.
Someone took the tip of a trident tine from the sea god’s statue and Poseidon is pissed. High Priestess Shuretra (actually a Fair to Middling Priestess) has exactly one week to apprehend the perpetrator before everyone in Atlantis goes glug, glug, glug. But can she solve the crime and still find time to run some errands for her mother?
Excerpt
If you see a crystal skull at a garage sale and you think to yourself, “Gee, this’ll make a nifty paperweight,” so you buy it for ten bucks and take it home and find yourself gazing into its eye sockets for hours at a time for no good reason, don’t be surprised if strange things begin to happen, especially on the night of the full moon. It’s quite possible your mind will be sucked out of your own bony skull and enter the crystal one, where it will be flung across the astral plane, piercing the mystic veil enshrouding the ancient past and plunging you into the fabled kingdom of Atlantis.
That’s exactly what happened to me not long ago -- except I think I ended up in ALT-lantis, since it was a little bit different than the one Plato and Cayce talked about. But wherever I was, it was cool. Picture, if you will, the throne room, where tapestries of faerie cloth graced amber-paneled walls, and marble columns soared up to ceilings adorned with pictures of chuckling cherubs and brooding gods, painted by the finest artists of the ancient world. Picture the chairs, made of burnished orichalcum, and the tables, carved from monstrous diamonds and emeralds. And reposing in those chairs were the silk-clad butts of finely coifed courtiers. And there, in the center, seated on a throne fashioned from the fused skulls of Greek philosophers, sat Atlas himself, ruler of the greatest nation the world has ever known!
Picture the banquet table, piled high with rare and succulent...
On second thought, don’t picture any of that, because just as I was getting accustomed to my glorious and splendid surroundings, my spirit was unceremoniously yanked away and sucked a thousand miles south to another palace in another Atlantean city, the residence of Elasippus, who was also a king, but not the king, and ruled a fiefdom, not the whole shebang. And right after I got there, another visitor arrived at the palace, a flesh-and-blood visitor who scurried into the throne room and prostrated herself before the dais -- accidentally, because the marble floor was slicker than she thought and she’d worn the wrong slippers, the kind with little traction for stopping on marble floors, so she fell on her face, banging her chin and knocking herself cold.
Elasippus sat before her on his throne -- made of peasant skulls, I might add, and not a philosopher among them, Greek or otherwise -- and he tried not to smile at her pratfall, and when she regained consciousness he said somberly, “You may rise.”
And the young woman rose to her knees, rubbing her bruised chin. “You summoned me, oh mighty king, and I am here. How may I serve you?”
The king’s eyes flitted over her light-gray robe, which clung to every curve of her shapely body, and a rude thought darted through his head. But he had not summoned her to the palace to serve him in that manner. Perhaps later, when the crisis was over.
He held up a piece of parchment. “Do you know what this is, Priestess Shuretra?”
“Yes, your majesty, it’s a piece of parchment.”
“Obviously. I’m referring to the drawing on the parchment.”
“Oh. It’s a pitchfork, your majesty.”
“Wrong. It’s a trident.”
“Oh.”
“This drawing is part of an incident report written up by one of my soldiers five days ago. A portion of this trident has been stolen.”
“Part of it?”
“The tip of the middle tine.”
“The tip of the middle what?”
King Elasippus sighed. “A tine. A trident has three pointy things at the top. Each one of those pointy things is called a tine.”
“So why don’t they call it a tri-tine instead of a tri-dent?”
“Because ... um ... never mind. It doesn’t matter. Try to focus on the issue at hand.”
“Yes, your majesty. Would you mind telling me why someone would want to steal the tip of a trident tine?”
“It’s made of solid gold. Worth about thirty thousand sovereigns on the metals exchange if it were melted down.”
“I don’t understand. Why would someone make a trident of solid ... merciful gods! You don’t mean His trident, do you?”
“Yes. The one from Poseidon’s statue.”
“There are lots of Poseidon statues in Atlantis, your majesty. Which one specifically are you referring to?”
Sigh. “Which one do you think?”
“The statue in Capital City where he’s riding in a chariot pulled by six winged horses?”
“No, not that one.”
“You mean the really, really, really tall statue out in our harbor?”
“That’s the one.”
“That’s a helluva big trident.”
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