by Ben Galley
As Kinsprite wheeled to chase the leviathan, the bookship opened fire. Arrows peppered the ocean, turning the leviathan’s scales into a small forest of fletching. The arrows drew no blood, broke no scale. Spells turned the water into a churning mess of lightning and fire. Hereni led the volley, blasting the sea with her fire spells. Clouds of steam amassed in the Fury’s wake, and even so. the leviathan continued to chase them.
The dragons swooped together, hovering to blanket the leviathan’s back with dragonfire. The sea bubbled now, but the leviathan was always ahead of the heat, pressing on after the ship.
Again and again, the dragons made their attacks until they ran themselves breathless with the effort. The leviathan was now practically gnashing at the Fury’s stern, only feet away. Hereni and her mages poured spell after spell on the beast, but nothing seemed to halt it. Bull saw the answer plain as the ocean before him. The creature had learned. Without emerging from the sea, the ballistae and spells were half as effective.
Bull caught sight of Elessi and Lerel as Kinsprite skimmed the Fury’s bridge. Their faces were not as confident as they were before. Lerel was baying at the mages for more wind.
Bull grit his teeth as they swooped. He saw the creature’s fierce eyes just below the roiling wake as Kinsprite held level. Shivertread lashed out with flame. Bull waited, his hands trembling with effort at keeping his longbow drawn. The seconds dragged out, and yet still he waited. Even when the leviathan had sprung for a mad lunge at the stern of the Fury, he held off. Bull even waited for its jaws to sink into the rear cabins, for the pristine moment where the leviathan paused, still, and clinging like a bloodthirsty wrackle.
The string of the bow scraped Bull’s cheek. The tension in his arms popped. He watched the arrow embed itself deep below the leviathan’s eye. The creature let go of the ship immediately before thrashing into the water.
‘Well done, boy!’ cried the dragon.
Fallen back though it had, the leviathan was undeterred. Once again it began its chase, making up the distance quickly now that it had stalled the Fury.
‘This isn’t going how I thought it would!’ Bull yelled.
‘I think that feeling is mutual.’
Lerel was shouting increasingly high-pitched orders. Elessi was observing the ship’s wake with arms crossed and face white as ice.
Bull felt a frustration growing within him. He began to fire madly at the leviathan. Half his arrows trailed behind in the ocean.
‘Oh, what is this now?’ he heard Lerel’s cry across the water.
Look ahead, boy.
Bull’s head shot around. Betwixt the churning sea and a bank of clouds that looked like the walls of Scalussen, he saw them. Ships. At least six of them if his windswept eyes didn’t lie. They had the same green sails as the vessel that had run from them. They were spread in a short line across the sea, stretching from the coast like a net.
‘Who are they?’ yelled Bull from the dragon’s back.
The shout was muffled but unmistakable. ‘Pirates!’
‘Pirates!’ bellowed Lerel. ‘Now, of all times.’
Elessi could have screeched her curses to the blackened sky. She was about to, her throat brimming with anger, when an idea burst into her mind. ‘This could work in our favour!’
Lerel stamped her foot on the deck. The admiral’s conviction seemed to be collapsing fast. ‘How the fuck, exactly?’
‘I bet those pirates won’t be expecting a leviathan as well as a ship,’ Elessi hissed. ‘We kill our magick and let it feast on the confusion.’
‘You brilliant bitch,’ Lerel said, admiring her madcap notion. ‘It’s better than nothing!’
Elessi wholeheartedly agreed.
The admiral bent her back to the wheel, turning the bookship directly for the centre of the pirate fleet and the stormy waters. ‘Full speed, mages! Don’t you let up on me now!’
Elessi hung on to the railing, her head flitting back and forth as she watched their enemies close in from either side. With the pirates’ riding the storm-front at full sail, expecting a fine catch, they closed the distance as fast as the leviathan did. Thunder rolled at their sterns.
Running to the bow to look upon the sails of the pirates, Elessi saw the faded symbols of the Arka Empire in the day’s last light. Even as freezing rain started to lash her face, she found herself grinning, the madness of the situation getting to her. At very least, she thought, they might fulfil the promise she had made to the Jar Khoum. Either that, or all of them would be at the bottom of the Cape of No Hope within the next hour, a leviathan feasting in their remains. Elessi steeled herself. This is what she had chosen. This was her gamble. There was naught to do but cling on, and hope. Not a prayer to the gods escaped her lips or ran through her mind. This was her fate, not theirs.
Within half an hour, they could hear the beating drums of the pirates over the roar of wave and wind. Their ships had closed their net, drawing closer together as the Fury approached. The bookship aimed straight for the largest ship at the centre. They were motley vessels, patched and repaired over and over, bucking wildly on the towering waves, but they were formidable enough. More than enough, even for a single bookship.
Figures could be seen crowding the railings, enduring bucket after bucket of spray. Torch and brazier-fire shone orange on their readied blades. Grappling hooks spun in hands. Bows were trained. Elessi stared at them through her spyglass and urged them closer. Behind her, she heard ballistae crews standing by. She felt the magick swelling across the deck. The Summer’s Fury was set for battle.
‘Something’s wrong!’ yelled Lerel from the bridge, shattering Elessi’s hope in one fell swoop.
Elessi ran as fast as her tired feet could carry her. Breathless by the time she reached the aftcastle, she gasped at the admiral, who only pointed aft.
After a day of chasing them ragged, the leviathan had turned tail and fled. The vexation scored Elessi deep. ‘I…’ she gasped. Terror fell like an avalanche. She had made the wrong decision yet again. The bookship was doomed on its first day. Imagined or not, she felt the eyes of the sailors and mages on her, silently blaming her.
The dragons dragged her gaze up and over to the pirate fleet waiting with open arms.
‘Get ready to fight!’ was all Elessi could shout, her voice cracking. ‘No rest ‘til just—
The mood on the pirate ships switched all too suddenly. She saw the figures on the bulwarks turn, saw bows dropped and heard distant shouts fill the air. Ahead of their ships, the waves began to bubble furiously.
‘I thought we killed the other leviathans!’ Elessi yelled to Lerel. The admiral had no answers, just wide eyes and a snarl frozen on her lips.
Hereni rushed to their side to see what was happening. ‘We did!’ cried the mage.
Whatever was happening, it panicked the pirates as much as the bookship. They were frantically trying to come about, as if scuttling out of the bookship’s way. Without the leviathan in tow, it made no sense. Elessi blurted to the others without hesitation. ‘What’s going on?’
Every soul upon the Fury stared aghast as some… thing began to emerge from the roiling sea at the pirates’ stern. First, the lance of an enormous bowsprit, coiled like a horn, burst from the waves. Behind it came the encrusted prow of a ship that almost rivalled the bookship in size. The rest of it rapidly surfaced in a detonation of sea-spray. Not a sail beyond rags hung on its huge and barnacled masts. Not a sailor or captain manned its deck. Elessi looked on, horrified to her core, as the planks of the ship’s hull kept rising, revealing a flat expanse of what looked to be green rock. It enveloped its very keel as if the ship had sprouted from it.
Yet it was no rock. Ahead of them, the surface of the sea lifted as if the hand of a giant cupped the ocean to drink. Two of the pirate ships seemingly ran aground on the hellish ship’s bedrock, capsizing immediately as the waters kept rising. Beneath its roiling surface, Elessi saw the honeycomb patterns of black stretching across the green like a t
ortoise’s shell. Scarlet tentacles thick as trees surfaced, reaching up like the curled spires of a city, far above the bookship’s mast.
‘All hands, HOLD!’ Lerel bayed over the roar.
The giant tentacles went to their brutal work. One of the pirate ships was pulverised into splinters while another was strangled until its two halves collapsed into the ocean. The Summer’s Fury careened helplessly towards the maelstrom of tentacles.
For all the fear of the leviathan, Elessi felt herself paralysed by the scene she watched. She could only hold on for her dear life as Lerel manoeuvred the Fury between the storm of water and tentacles. Waves drowned the decks. Elessi heard the iron hull of the ship grate on the shell with a piercing scream. The whole bookship leaned to one side as it teetered on the edge of the creatures shell. In a stomach-swallowing moment, the Fury fell back to the ocean. By the time Elessi could bring herself to look, the bookship was in quieter waters, spinning on a wake not of her making. With bated breath, the whole crew stared at the carnage behind them. The monster reared from the ocean like a submerged island taking breath. Its squid-like tentacles had sunk almost every ship in the pirate fleet within seconds. Unperturbed, it left the sinking wrecks behind. As soon as it had appeared, the monster disappeared in the direction of the leviathan. The skeleton ship stacked on its shell was drowned once more.
The storm wound on as if it had all been some grand, shared hallucination. A silence overcame the crew. Even as the rain and wind thrashed them, one by one, hands were prised from ropes and railings.
Elessi turned shaking to Lerel.
‘What…’ she breathed, ‘… just happened?’
The admiral took a while to find her voice. Her knuckles were as white as the bone beneath. ‘I don’t know,’ Lerel admitted, shaking like a leaf in winter gales. ‘But I’m worried if I question it, it won’t have happened.’
Unlike Elessi, she refused to look back and turned the wheel of the bookship closer to the wild shore of the Cape of No Hope. Compared to what they had just witnessed, the storm’s frenzy seemed like a millpond.
It was with shaking hands and a trembling lip that Elessi drew up her hood, and watched the night swallow the strangest of days while the Summer’s Fury set her bowsprit to the east at last. The Silent Sea beckoned to them with beckoning forks of lightning.
PART FOUR
TASKS EVEN GODS FEAR TO FACE
CHAPTER 27
THE THIRD TASK
Many believe life to be exploring the known world around us and the limits of mortal threads. In truth, life is no more than surviving the world around us.
FROM THE PHILOSOPHER FRENNETH
It had taken a whole night of travelling through dark sand-dunes and tors shaped like tree-stumps to find the roaring waters of the Doomriddle. The Spinning Sea, or the Thundershores, as the Chanark had named them. The dawn brought their roar to their ears.
It appeared the shores were somewhat of an attraction to the sweltering region, that incidentally, was comprised of sand, pebbles, and hardly anything else. By the time Mithrid had walked far enough to hear the Thundershores, the sun was barely a thumb’s length above the horizon, and she was already intensely bored of this newfound heat and dust. Under the morning sun, she found herself longing for the ice of the north. At very least, for the tepid winds of the Rivenplains. Her northern blood was not fond of this scorching sun.
From where they had beached the ship, the Thundershores were a straight shot due south. The strangers had walked unbothered for most of the night until they had come across the roads. There, they found the bustling caravans.
Given the uninhabited theme of the rest of the Chanark country, Mithrid had been expecting nothing upon the roads. The sandy paths reminded her of the Sunder Road, but instead of a handful of wagons and traders, these roads teemed. Caravans of sheltered wagons and carts ran in trains miles long, back and forth across the road. Some were so long, they tangled with other caravans and caused bitter arguments. Trade was so ubiquitous, half the caravans didn’t wait to reach their destinations to set up shop and stall. They spread along the road in impromptu markets, hawking at the other passengers of the road with unrelenting ferocity. Kites crackled above their fabric roofs. Spices blew in the wind from dishes, yellows, reds and blues. All kinds of creatures hung from hooks, smoked or roasted. Garments and fabrics turned the road into a tunnel through kaleidoscope colours. There were even merchants selling replicas of the Thundershores by the dozen: small rings of carved wood and stone. Maybe it was the craftsmanship, but they did not look like much.
It had taken an hour to extricate themselves from the markets. The road was less busy but no less congested by wagons and beasts. Tall, straw-coloured creatures with humps on their backs gargled and groaned with every touch of their rider’s switches. Coelos and the scaled persnippen birds were common, along with the lizard hybrids they had seen outside the Spoke.
As many people made the pilgrimage to the Thundershores as left with awe on their faces. Two columns moving in opposite directions ruled the road. Mithrid, Farden and the others fell in with the slow step of the caravans.
At last, they came to the ocean’s edge. A line had formed for viewing, corralled by ribbons between sticks. A man in a violently green hat was shepherding people along one by one, taking coins for his service. Farden didn’t bother with the guide, and instead, much to the man’s vitriolic complaints, led the others towards the shore himself.
The ground beneath their feet rose up as if to meet the arch of cliffs. The closer they came to their apex, the more the wind howled, the louder the roar became, and the more Mithrid noticed the rumble under her feet.
Finally, squeezing between the crowds, they stood upon the brink of the Thundershores. Instead of a vertical drop as Mithrid expected, the cliffs sloped away in jagged intervals to the shape of a bowl. It spread into an almost perfect circle several miles across. Only one entrance to the bay existed, and it was a narrow mouth guarded by sharp rocks. Mithrid soon realised how the Thundershores had earned their name. The sound blasting her eardrums was enough of a clue. The cobalt waters within the circular cove whirled and churned madly. The spiralling waves smashed themselves against the rounded shores over and over, sweeping in a circle until they clashed with the fresh waters entering the bay.
Durnus seemed fascinated. The old man even began scribing notes in one of his books.
‘Not impressed, Mithrid?’ Farden grumbled next to her. He had not spoken to her since the Seventh Sister.
Mithrid had to admit she was. The haunting eye of water at the centre of the Spinning Sea was a dark sapphire and bewilderingly still. ‘I am, but why do so many come? Ruins it.’
A willowy Chanark stranger clad all in yellow satin nearby decided to take it upon himself to answer. He too wore a green hat that clashed with the cloudless sky. ‘It is the touch of the very God’s Rent itself!’ he said in accented but perfect Commontongue.
‘I have no idea what you’re saying,’ admitted Mithrid.
‘Far-travelled you must be! Worry not: we tolerate all and accept all, as long as they come in peace,’ he explained. ‘The great whirlpool beyond these shores is the God’s Rent. Its grand churn echoes here in these Thundershores. It is as if you can hear the voices of the very gods themselves in its roar. Many come not just to see such the waters, but to pray, pilgrimage, some to offer their dead, believing the gates to the afterlife are here, at our feet.’
Mithrid looked closer around the ring of rocks and water. She saw all manner of groups within the crowds, denoted by varying shades of skin or different coloured cloaks or hats. There seemed to be a keen interest in headwear in the south of Easterealm. A dozen or so masked priests and conical hats wore all black. They must have been roasting. A stretch around the shores, another group in deep purple robes fed cotton-wrapped body after body to the punishing waters below.
Mithrid tried listening, but like the others, a constant air of urgency kept their minds distant. Fa
rden’s eyes persistently snuck to the west, as the riddle had dictated. The Thundershores were a signpost only, yet a poor one. The country of Chanark had proved itself nothing but a vast wasteland of bleached sand and rock, bordered by an endless range of distant mountains. Even the few settlements they had seen were flat, small, and tangled, with no architecture but plaster and adobe domes. The west was far too ambiguous, even with Durnus’ map.
‘Have you heard of Utiru, my good man?’ ventured the vampyre, trying to put the stranger to use.
‘You speak of Utiru the demi-goddess, yes?’
‘Absolutely,’ Durnus said, unflinching. Mithrid could have chortled.
‘Her grave lies to the west,’ he said, confirming the riddle’s truth. ‘A great er, rift – or canyon, as you say – lies in the Diamond Mountains. It is where she threw herself to die upon the shards of their peaks in rage. The tales tell of her displeasing the goddess of magick, Haspha, you see—’
Farden cut him off. ‘Rage, you say?’
The guide bobbed his head, eager to have an intrigued ear. ‘The canyon is near my town. Cursed, they say. Haunted. You can still hear Utiru’s cries on certain nights. Where are you from, strangers? We’ve seen more and more of your sun-shy kind in recent years.’
‘We are from places you likely have never heard of,’ said Durnus, uncharacteristically impatient given his love for lore. Mithrid caught him glancing at Farden. ‘Far to the west. A land called Emaneska.’
‘You’d be right. Never heard of it! I would have said you were from Hartlunder if it weren’t for your armour. Now, you should be careful journeying that way. South lies the Narwe Harmony, a great alliance of countries to the south grow restless and itch for war. Pale faces are coming down from Lezembor and further north, mining the richness of the Khandri’s Diamond Mountains with no right or blessing from the Khandri or the Harmony.’
‘Ack, kansa behet al,’ hissed a nearby eavesdropper in Chanark paint. He showed his tongue to Mithrid and Farden.