by Dante King
I pulled all of this Death energy up, channeling it through myself, and started to pour some of it into the ballista. It was as if I had a giant cauldron full of rotting corpses, and I was pouring out the black sludge of putrefaction into the weapon. As with Drok’s axes, I felt an intense cold blast through the ballista and knew the enchantment was complete.
When I opened my eyes, the entire ballista, made of steel and wood, had now turned a glossy black; one down, something like two dozen more to go. It took me another hour or two, and we were ready to hunt some kraken.
By now, the pirate ships had caught up with us, and all of the vessels were sailing together as one fleet. I called everyone together, the pirate crew too, for a meeting on the main warship, which I’d made the flagship of my fleet.
“All right people, listen up!” I said. “It turns out the Transcendent Sails is patrolling the sea around the coast of Yeng. Do we look like a bunch of weasels to you? No! Let’s give them exactly what they’re looking for; let’s give them a fucking fight! What do you say, who wants to hang some self-righteous assholes from the masts by their entrails?”
Everyone cheered enthusiastically.
“So, we have one more mission to take care of before we’re ready to take them on.”
“But Vance, time is running short,” Friya said. “The Blood God grows stronger with every passing minute. We must find the Dragon Gauntlet.”
“Everything we plan to do is necessary to get us to Yeng in the first place, and once we get there, we’ll be more than ready to face any challenge. What we need is a kraken.” I paused to chuckle and look around the circle of gasping faces. “Preferably two; three would be even better. Then I’ll resurrect it, and well, you know the drill. We’ll crush those Transcendent Sails ships like matchsticks.”
“Captain Chauzec,” Percy said warily, “I mean no offense, o’ course, but you don’t just go killing a kraken like ya would a shark or a whale. Even the strongest damned warship in all the Dozen Sears couldn’t stand a chance against a kraken. Sure, you’re a, well, a god, but you’re looking to send us all to a watery grave.” He paused to swallow a lump in his throat. “No offense,” he coughed.
“That’s why I’ve enchanted every ballista on my warships with Death magic. Each one can now fire a projectile enhanced with Death power. I haven’t tested them, but I figure they’re strong enough to blow a wagon-wheel-sized hole through a whale. And if there was another whale behind it, the spear would tear a hole through that one too.”
Everyone glanced at the newly enchanted ballistae, and awed murmurs broke out across my crew.
“I’m guessing krakens only attack at night because they can’t stand daylight,” I said. “They’re supposed to live down in the ocean depths, so their eyes can’t stand daylight. If we can get the kraken to fight in daylight, it’ll essentially be fighting blind, which would give us one hell of an advantage.”
“But, Lord Vance,” Rollar said, “if these creatures lurk far below the surface and only emerge at night, how do we get one to come up from the depths and fight in the daytime?”
“We need two things,” I answered. “First, bait. Second, a decoy. The bait will be my whale. As for the decoy…” I turned to Rami-Xayon.
“I… I don’t see any other ships around here,” Rami-Xayon commented, trying to determine why I was singling her out.
“No,” I said, “but you’re thinking in the right direction. You’re going to use your Wind powers to get me one. And you, Anna-Lucielle,” I added, turning to her, “are going to use your Charm powers to make sure the creature attacks the right ship.”
“I could do that, using Rollar’s Beast Helm,” Anna-Lucielle said, “if I could get close enough to the kraken to tune in to its mind.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll get you close enough when the time’s right.”
“You’d better hope that part of the plan doesn’t involve hiding inside a dead whale,” Elyse said to Anna-Lucielle, wrinkling her nose and shuddering with disgust.
“It won’t,” I said.
“You haven’t explained just how it is you think I can use my Wind powers to conjure up a ship,” Rami-Xayon butted in.
“Oh, you’re not going to be conjuring one up,” I said to her. “You’re going to be bringing a wrecked ship temporarily up from the ocean bed. There are a few down there, some more intact than others. I’ll use my whale to track down the most intact-looking wreck, and then you create a powerful waterspout to pull the ship up from the ocean depths. Hold it there for long enough for the pirate crew to repair the hull so that the wreck will float, and voila! We have our dummy ship.”
“Arr,” Percy said enthusiastically, “if your Wind goddess can haul a wreck up from the depths, we can fix it! We’ve got barrels o’ tar with us, and plenty of spare wood and nails!”
“There’s one problem with your plan, Vance,” Rami-Xayon said carefully. “It would work perfectly, but I don’t think my Wind powers are strong enough yet to do that sort of thing.”
“I thought about that,” I said to her, “and you don’t need to worry about it. Remember, you’re not the only one who’s able to use some Wind magic. I can work a bit of Wind magic myself, and if we combine our powers, I think we can do it.”
A smile broke across Rami-Xayon’s beautiful face. “Of course, Vance, yes!” she exclaimed.
“Everyone else is going to have to man the ballistae,” I said. “I want you all to spend the next few hours practicing shooting them so you’re ready and accurate when it comes to firing them in anger. Use the harpoon spears with ropes attached for practice; that way, we don’t lose valuable ammunition. I’ve already assigned my strongest zombies to each ballista to work the cranks and load them. All you lot have to do is practice shooting them. Float some dinghies in the water and use them as targets; we have more than enough of those.”
After a general murmur of assent, my fighters divided themselves among the ballistae.
“All right,” I said to myself, nodding with satisfaction as I watched my party practice smashing dinghies into splinters with each potent, accurate shot of the Death-enchanted spears. “It’s time to go kraken hunting.”
Chapter Fourteen
To set the kraken trap, we needed to find and raise a suitable shipwreck from the seabed. I’d noticed a large stretch of ocean nearby where the bottom wasn’t too deep, and there were a couple of wrecks scattered across the area as well. I sent my whale down, examined the wrecks, and chose one that was perhaps a hundred years old and was mostly intact. There was some damage around the hull, which my pirates would be able to repair easily.
“Rami-Xayon, all set?” I asked.
She nodded, furrowing her brow with concentration and preparing to push her Wind powers to their limits.
“I can’t see under the water like you can, so you’ll have to help me with the location,” she said.
“Easy enough,” I said as I sent my whale down to the wreck. Once it had found the location, I ordered it to make straight for the surface. “Create your waterspout in the exact spot you see the whale breach and send it down as deep as it’ll go,” I said to Rami-Xayon. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
The whale breached around a hundred yards from our ship with a spectacular splash, almost managing to hurl its entire body out of the water before coming down in a bellyflop that sounded like a thunderclap.
“Here it comes!” Rami-Xayon said.
The air above the spot where the whale had breached started to shimmer, then a large and powerful tornado appeared. I had to send the whale racing away; the tornado was easily strong enough to lift the huge creature out of the water and hurl it into the clouds. Not because that would have killed the undead whale but because any wastage of the tornado’s strength could ruin the mission.
“Is the tornado as strong as it can possibly be?” I yelled over the deafening howl of the distant wind.
“I’m using all of my power!” Rami-X
ayon yelled back. “And I can’t hold it long at this strength—hurry!”
“Send it down into the water!”
Beads of sweat were forming on Rami-Xayon’s forehead, and her whole body was trembling with the effort of maintaining the tornado’s power. She directed it into the water with her shaking hands. The moment it got within a few yards of the waves, it started sucking water up into its swirling vortex, becoming a waterspout.
Gritting her teeth harder and growling wordlessly with exertion, Rami-Xayon finally forced the tornado beneath the surface. It sent a madly whirling plume of frothing water up into the air, sucking everything in its path upward.
This was where Rami-Xayon needed my help. Pushing the tornado down into the water meant it encountered massive resistance, so I closed my eyes and began to manipulate sections of the air around the tornado, using the skills I’d developed with my Plague Storm magic. Once it was completely submerged, it became a lot easier, as the water around it started to form a whirlpool. Unlike other whirlpools one might encounter in the ocean, this one was sucking things up from the ocean and spitting them out.
Rami-Xayon and I pushed the whirlpool ever deeper, and the harder we pushed, the more momentum and power it gained. By the time it got to the depth of the shipwreck, it was easily powerful enough to rip the ship from the seabed and yank it up to the surface. The shipwreck was flung out of the ocean and hurled through the air, and it came down around 30 yards from the edge of the whirlpool in a massive splash.
Rami-Xayon was about ready to pass out at this stage, and she only just managed to stop herself from crumpling to the floor after she released the tornado.
Before the wreck could sink again, I sent my whale racing to it so that it could both prop it up and to lift it high enough above the surface for all the water to drain out. Soon, the pirates had rowed their way to the ship, and within the hour, they’d patched up the hole. This was enough to make the old wreck seaworthy again, after a hundred years of collecting barnacles and seaweed on the ocean floor.
Now that the dummy ship was ready, it was time to start the hunt.
As the afternoon faded into dusk, I sent my mind into the undead whale again. We had more or less an hour before the sun would set. I felt I’d have more chance of provoking the kraken into an attack if the light was dimmer rather than in the peak brightness of day. For a creature so accustomed to the blackest depths of the ocean, even the half-light of dusk would be blinding.
So, I dived down with the whale, the pressure of the water building around me once more. While the sharks’ senses detected movements in the water directly, the whale could emit low, rumbling sounds that traveled in all directions through the water. When they echoed off distant objects, I could tell how far the objects were and roughly what shape and size they were. It took some getting used to, but I understood it quickly enough.
Eventually, my whale calls located the presence of something truly massive lurking down in the blackest crevasses of the ocean. No light from the outside world filtered down, and everything existed in a permanent state of darkness. There was something sexy about the whole thing.
I swam toward the huge object, feeling the crushing pressure around me growing ever more intense. I was a mile below the surface, possibly deeper, and it started to feel like I was reaching the limits of the whale’s diving depth.
I rumbled out another call, hoping that the giant creature would respond, perhaps taking this foolish whale who had ventured so deep for an easy meal. There was no response though. I pushed deeper and sensed that the whale’s body was being slowly squished to bursting point. I couldn’t go too much deeper without destroying my undead whale.
“Come on, kraken; here I am. Come get me,” I said.
I sent one last whale call down into the black depths, and then stopped, hovering in the water. A few yards deeper, and my Death magic would no longer be able to hold the whale’s body together; the pressure would pop it like a rotten grape in an angry toddler’s fist.
There was still no response from the massive entity in the depths. Maybe it had eaten its fill already; maybe it wasn’t interested in the whale. But for whatever reason, it didn’t react.
I wasn’t about to leave without getting the beast to rise from the deep. If this resulted in my undead whale exploding, then so be it. Gritting my teeth, I rumbled out one final whale call, then started to inch deeper, yard by yard.
Then, just as I reached the point at which the skin on the whale’s nose end was at breaking point, I saw them: two tiny round lights, glowing bright blue, far below me. They grew steadily larger.
“Yes!” I roared up on deck, opening my eyes and jumping up to punch my fist into the air.
“What’s going on, Vance?” Elyse asked.
“Man your battle stations, everyone!” I yelled. “The kraken’s on its way!”
I closed my eyes and blasted my mind back into the whale’s body. I was using it as bait, but I didn’t want to lose it to the kraken unnecessarily. I needed to make the upcoming chase perfect, to give the kraken enough hope that it would be able to catch the whale.
The five warships were arranged in a pentangular formation, with the dummy ship in the center. As long as we could get the kraken to attack the dummy ship, we could pour ballista fire into it from all sides.
“Get ready,” I said to Anna-Lucielle, who was next to me. “You need to channel every ounce of your Charm magic through the Beast Helm the moment you sense the kraken’s presence.”
“I’m ready, Vance,” she said.
I sent my mind back into the whale, and I finally saw the kraken in all its monstrous glory. It was like an octopus and a squid had mated, and their baby had not stopped growing for a thousand years. The kraken had more tentacles than either of those two creatures, though—too many to count, in fact, and each was easily as thick as the trunk of an old oak tree, and a hundred yards long at least.
The creature’s skin was different, too. While squids and octopuses had soft, jelly-like flesh, the exterior of the kraken’s body looked spiky and rough, almost armored, in a sense. A number of bony horns riddled its gargantuan head, and a parrot-like beak gaped wide open, ravenous and vicious. Inside the beak was another set of jaws, these lined with sharp, serrated teeth. And then there were the beast’s glowing, bright-blue eyes, rushing toward my whale like two malevolent comets in a black, watery night.
Pumping my whale’s tail madly, I surged upward with the kraken in hot pursuit, gaining slowly but surely on me. With the position of the whale’s eyes on its body, I could see both ahead of and behind me, and there was no question that the kraken was gaining ground.
I pushed the whale harder, injecting fresh Death energy into its undead body. It couldn’t get tired, but it did have its physical limits, and as I pushed it beyond them, chunks of blubber and flesh were torn off its frantically beating tail. Despite my accelerated pace, the kraken continued to gain on me, reaching up with its grasping tentacles as it pursued me.
“Come on, come on,” I growled as I pushed the whale harder, the gap between it and the kraken growing dangerously small.
The first of the tentacles slapped onto the side of the whale’s tail. The suckers of the tentacle dug into the blubber and held fast, and I felt a tremendous pull hauling me backward. I fought against it, pushing upward, but my momentum had been drastically reduced, and my passage onward would be halted completely if the beast got a few more tentacles wrapped around me. If this had been a live whale struggling against the kraken , it wouldn’t have been struggling at all; one tentacle, and it would have been dragged back like a chick being pawed into a lion’s maw.
“Anna-Lucielle, can you sense the kraken yet?” I asked, my eyes still closed.
“Almost, but not quite,” she answered. “There’s an echo of something big down there, but nothing I can connect to yet.”
Another of the kraken’s tentacles curled around the whale’s beating tail and slowed its momentum further. I was pus
hing upward with all my might, thrashing the whale’s powerful tail as vigorously as I could, but I was barely able to inch forward now.
“Almost there, Vance, almost there,” Anna-Lucielle said.
Two more tentacles locked onto the whale, and its upward movement was halted. Now the kraken was slowly pulling the struggling whale toward it.
“I’m here,” Rami-Xayon said from beside me. I opened my eyes so I could see her on the deck, and she had both hands raised as she summoned another tornado. With gritted teeth and an exhausted cry, she slammed the tornado into the water. The roaring winds threw up water, but they also carried my whale to the surface. Two tentacles were still wrapped around my undead sea creature, but they had been severed from the kraken’s body and dangled limply.
Rami-Xayon collapsed with a sigh and crumpled to the deck. The tornado vanished, and the whirlpool it had created was subsumed under a flood of water, but not before I saw the kraken’s eyes, glowing brighter with rage as its prey escaped.
Before the water had a chance to settle, the kraken propelled itself upward. The tentacled monstrosity lashed out with its appendages, but it paused suddenly, as though frozen in time.
“I’ve got it, Vance!” Anna-Lucielle exclaimed through gritted teeth. “The Beast Helm is working together with my Charm spells. But it won’t hold forever.”
“Firing positions, everyone!” I yelled.
“I can’t control it completely,” Anna-Lucielle said. “So I’m directing it toward the dummy ship. The monster has a mighty will, but I’m trying to overcome it.”
The kraken unfroze and went beneath the surface again. A giant black shadow was all that was visible from the ship as the mighty sea giant surged toward the dummy ship.
I sent my whale out of the way and positioned myself in front of a ballista, my hand wrapped around the trigger. The water beneath the dummy ship started bubbling furiously, then the ship itself started rocking.
“Here it comes!” I roared.
The first of the enormous tentacles rocketed up out of the water, and others soon followed, shooting skyward like a group of sea serpents trying to take flight. It was like watching gigantic trees growing from acorns to hundred-year-old titans in the space of a second. The tentacles writhed and lashed and grasped, wrapping themselves around the ship’s masts and rigging and deck. In the frothy water below the doomed ship, I saw the glowing blue disc of one of the kraken’s eyes, far bigger than the largest wagon wheel I’d ever seen.