The valkyrie rubbed at her eyes. “I will see if I can get us added to any lists of volunteers. And I will ask Nith. But I cannot guarantee anything. They took me off the Persian front and told me to go back to Praetorian work, and I fully expect to be sent north into Germania again shortly. Polania was just overrun, completely, by the ettin and grendels, and Rome and my gods are trying to reinforce the eastern border of Germania now.” Sigrun’s fingers hadn’t left her eyes. “All of which is a long way of saying, Min, that I’m being pulled about four directions at once. And I won’t go into this without appropriate backup.” When Sigrun was tired, her diction slipped from its usual crystalline precision in Latin.
Minori nodded. “I don’t suppose any of the naiads and tritons would be willing to go scouting out there?” It was a feeble hope.
“I wouldn’t willingly enter waters where I knew that thing was, were I them.”
It took a few weeks for them to be told of a sighting where the Roman fleet had ships in place. Minori awoke that day at dawn, as something dark blocked her east-facing window, and as her lids fluttered open, she saw an enormous eye staring in at her. She leaped out of bed, and reached, hesitantly, for the sword, which lay across her desk. No. It’s not mine.
What happened to Yamato Takeru when he failed to take the sword with him? Amaterasu chided her.
He died. Yes, on reconsideration, and with your permission, I will take it with me, thank you.
Minori wasn’t as adept at creating devices and storage crystals as Kanmi had been, but Erida was a master of that craft. And Erida had provided, with raised eyebrows and a comment on Minori’s healthier appearance, a ring set with a diamond that should be capable of warding Minori against damage taken if she happened to fall from Nith’s back. She’d also offered Minori one set with a topaz, saying, “You’ll need to stay warm, if half of what I’ve ever heard about that beast is true.”
Minori had declined the second ring, smiling a little, as Amaterasu sniffed a little at the back of her head. But she made very sure to put the diamond ring on, as she climbed over the railing of her balcony and onto the leather straps wrapped around the beast’s enormous neck. Niðhoggr swiveled his head around to snuffle at her, and the huge, silver-white eyes narrowed as he stared at her.
“Yes, Nith, I told you. She currently serves as a conduit for her sun goddess.” Sigrun slapped the creature’s shoulder, gently. “If I make her promise not to burn either of us, will you relax?”
Niðhoggr snorted, and Minori finished, gingerly, buckling the various straps around herself, feeling extra warmth course through her body, particularly any part of her that was exposed to Nith’s scales. Thank you, she told the goddess-within, and felt an inner smile warm the rest of her, in return.
Sigrun had developed the system of harnesses over the years, but this was her first test-flight with another passenger. Some test-flight, Minori thought. “A pity Adam can’t be with us!” she shouted over the roar of the wind as the enormous dragon leaped into the air.
“He looked vexed with me this morning,” Sigrun shouted back as the wind howled around them. “I told him the best I thought we could do would be to drive the damnable creature out of the Mediterranean. Let it eat fish and sulk in the Marianas Trench in the deepest part of the Pacifica, for all I care, so long as it stays away from humankind!”
Soon, they were speeding through the sky so fast that Minori’s breath was taken away, and her hair fell out of its usual neat bun, streaming out wildly behind her. Sigrun’s braid stayed neatly bound, and a good thing, too, else Minori would never have seen the coastline appear ahead of them . . . and then rapidly recede behind them as they got out over open water. “Where are we going?”
“West of Cyprus. There are shipping lanes there, and the creature’s apparently realized that humans have more meat on them each than most of the fish it’s been emptying from the trawlers.” Sigrun twisted around a little to address Minori, and Min could feel the muscles in the woman’s back move, as closely as she was pressed up against her. “I have a radio for you. It’s already set to the right frequency.”
Minori grimaced, and settled the earpiece into her right ear canal, and slipped the radio itself into a pocket. “I’ve never gotten used to the earpieces.”
“Better than some of the older models, that went over the ear. Those always fell off at the wrong moment.” Sigrun’s tone was practical, and then she pointed down. “I see the ship wakes.”
Nith veered, aiming for lines of white in the surf behind massive metal warships that had been painted haze-gray. An aircraft carrier, a Judean or Hellene contribution to the fleet, floated at the center of a screen of smaller destroyers, all moving at a good clip for the same area that they’d been heading.
Without much warning, a pair of jets eased into position on either side of them, flanking the dragon. Minori’s eyes went wide; these were Lish-5s, top of the line fighters designed solely for being ‘projected’ from carriers like the one below. She knew they had on-board calculi to help regulate the engines and keep the plane’s odd wings—which changed position in flight!—under perfect control. Kanmi would have loved to see these. They’re loud, though. Gods.
Sigrun had raised her hand, holding up her spear. “I take it they recognize you,” Minori shouted.
“They recognize Niðhoggr!” Sigrun shouted back, and tabbed her radio, the earpiece of which was tucked away in her right ear canal. “They say that they are getting a lot of wind noise on my microphone—”
Minori smiled, and lifted a finger, and the flow of air neatly diverted around them. Sigrun nodded her thanks, and she verified her identity, and they all veered to the west, chasing after a fishing boat that had sent out a distress signal.
She hadn’t been prepared for just how large the damned thing really was. It was in the process of lifting the fishing boat out of the water as they approached, half a dozen jets now in the air around them. “Steady,” Sigrun said, as Minori’s fingers clamped down on the valkyrie’s shoulders, and clouds began to form over their heads.
“It’s a mile tall!”
“I doubt it! Sounding charts around Cyprus say the waters in this vicinity are only sixty feet or so. Look at how light the waters are here, Min!” Sigrun lifted her spear. “The kraken is no more than seventy-five, eighty feet in height, I think. It might be shorter than Niðhoggr is long . . . but it might have more mass. It looks bigger because it’s bipedal, and it’s taller than the boat—oh, gods.” That, in a tone of awe as the creature looked up, caught sight of them all, lifted its massive head to bellow a challenge, all its tentacles writhing around its body and mouth . . . and heaved the boat up into the air at them.
It fell far short, of course; they were over a mile in the air above it. Minori closed her eyes for a moment. “Too late for the sailors,” she said, putting distance into her mind and voice.
“It was too late from the moment their distress call went out,” Sigrun agreed, tightly. “Nothing left but to avenge the dead.”
She began to call down lightning on the kraken as Niðhoggr set up for an attack run, and dove in, and massive, tendril-like appendages, each the width of tree-trunks, coiled up out of the water, trying to seize them on their way past. The dragon pulled his wings in tight, and the only thing that kept Minori attached to him was the leather harness, which she swore she could feel stretching. She incanted rapidly, diverting the air cleanly around them, except a localized breathing supply. As Sigrun brought down another massive charge of lighting from a sky that was growing increasingly dark, and Nith exhaled a blast of white deathfrost at the creature, Minori considered her options, and incanted again, adjusting for the continuously changing aspect and bearing of the creature as Niðhoggr circled it, dancing in and around the lashing limbs. One pass tucked them so close to one of the undulating, green-scaled, tentacle-like arms, that water splashed her face.
Her target was far too large to affect in its entirety. It was reacting in pain and anger to
the lightning, and the cold. She couldn’t reach into its body and turn its enormous volume of blood to sludge. But she could reach out and slide whips made of wind along its body, scything off its scales and armor. Minori incanted again and again, picturing the mechanical movement of a rotating blender, grinding and tearing at the creature’s body. Nith snorted and rolled away as one of the winds almost cut him as he came in too close. “Sorry!” Min called, and reached into the ocean water. Kicked up the salt spray, and turned that into blades of ice that spun in behind her wind-whips, and let them all dance up and down the body, as Nith finished his first attack run and flapped his wings powerfully to regain altitude. She had about a dozen blades working at the moment, all of which required her intent concentration.
At that point, the Lish-5s engaged, their pilots noting, quietly, over the radio, “Missile lock. Firing.”
Minori looked back in time to see a half dozen fiery craters on the creature’s sides, which wounded it, surely. She could see black blood pouring out of the impact wounds. But no scorching. She tabbed the radio. “Fire is ineffective. Impact still works.”
“Thanks for the confirmation, Gothic flight.”
Min would have found the terse appellation amusing at any other time. “Try white phosphorous rounds from the underbelly cannons. Those provide a different kind of thermal reaction, and won’t be extinguished even if it submerges.”
Another bolt of lightning crashed down on the kraken, which roared, and dove down under the water now. “I have no visual,” Sigrun called into her radio now. “Does anyone have a radar lock . . . ?”
The radio crackled in both their ears. “Submarines are firing torpedoes and moving away. Destroyers prepare depth charges . . . .”
Sigrun pointed down again. “I can see wakes!”
Minori stared down at the ships, and suddenly, one of the destroyers listed sharply to the side, as if struck, and savagely, by something. “Ah . . . that doesn’t look good.”
“I don’t think it’s lifting the ship,” Sigrun said. “A destroyer weighs thousands of tons. I don’t know if Dagon could have moved one on his own . . . .” Both of them fell silent as the ship began to lean even further to its port side.
The radio crackled to life once more, as the other ships demanded to know what had happened to the injured vessel. “Lower decks are flooding,” came the terse reply. “Dropping bulkheads to try to contain it; damage control teams are reporting in. No idea what it hit us with—”
“There!” Minori said, and pointed, as the creature breached the surface once more, this time seizing the aft quarter of a different ship. And then it simply leaned all of its enormous weight on the vessel, tipping the boat up, to almost a forty-five degree angle. “Sigrun—”
Niðhoggr had already tucked his wings in for a dive, his jaws gaping open as he blasted at the creature with deathfrost once more. The clouds above churned, and the surface of the sea turned leaden to reflect them, and rain began to pour down. Minori deflected the water droplets from them, as at this speed, each of them would hit with what felt like the impact of a rock. She concentrated, unsheathing the sword that she’d been carrying, making sure that no errant gust of wind could tear it from her fingers. To her surprise, it ignited in her hand, the blade glowing more brightly than an acetylene torch, and she unbuckled herself from the flight harness. She muttered under her breath, working a very complex series of spells. As she had in the café in Alexandria, years ago, she took the water raining from the heavens, and made it a weapon. Increased local surface tension, making each droplet a bullet of what should have been the creature’s native element. Increased the surface tension of the waves, and then added a second layer to the spell, creating a self-sustaining matrix as she took all the heat out of the sea water, and drove that energy into removing more. The waves became immense blades of ice, spinning and churning at the kraken’s legs and belly, and the spell’s reaction worked further and further down, reaching for the seafloor. It needs to be distracted. It needs not to move for the moment. “Sigrun! Get its attention!”
Sigrun turned in time to see Minori, her face a mask of concentration, let herself fall from Nith’s back, a sword that looked like a piece of the sun in one hand. The sea below them had turned into a jagged, crystalline surface, pure ice, and she could only imagine how much power Min must be using for this. Min? Or Amaterasu? Sigrun unbuckled her own harness, and let the wind peel her off of Nith’s back . . . far more gracefully than a few years ago in Judea.
In those five seconds, the kraken had allowed the tipping ship to slam back down against the surface of the water—the ice field only surrounded the kraken itself, so the water received the ship’s weight back as gently as possible. But still, the destroyer wasn’t built for this kind of punishment, and its body cracked. There was now a distinct chevron shape to its hull configuration. Sigrun could see sailors running frantically around on the deck, and alarms blared feebly through the rush of the wind around her. She ducked and dove and wove her way through the kraken’s arms—every sucker on the scaled things looked like a writhing mouth—and brought lighting down again to blind it as she landed on its head, and jabbed a spear-point into one eye. Remembering, as she did so, that this was the very strike she’d used on Dagon.
The creature screamed and batted Sigrun away with one of the massive tentacles. She had a brief impression of gray deck plates, and then she landed, hard, knocked ass-over-teakettle. Pain of broken bones, all too familiar, and then blackness.
Minori was by no means as fast as Sigrun in the air. It took effort and intense concentration for her to wrap the wind around her. Which was why she’d badly needed Sigrun and Nith to distract the kraken. It was mired by her ice, which had reached the seafloor, trapping its legs and lower body in place, while continuing to grind at armor and flesh like the rotors of a garbage disposal. The loss of foot and hip movement lessened its power. A humanoid body, however large, was still a humanoid body.
So as Nith roared in anger and dropped onto the creature’s back from behind, ripping and tearing, Minori circled around to the front, just under the gaping mouth. Its head lurched up and back as it fruitlessly tried to bite at Nith, as the dragon vengefully dug in its claws and clamped down on the back of the massive neck. This, of course, exposed the creature’s throat. Minori again felt safe in making some assumptions about its anatomy, given again, that it wore a humanoid form, and darted in, sucking in a breath as the tentacles bent backwards, reaching behind its body for Niðhoggr, the kraken ignoring her. It wrapped the dragon in a seething mass of its own flesh, tentacles tightening around body and wings, even as the kraken struggled to free itself from the ice, so it could dive into the waters once more. And take the dragon with it.
And then she was in position. Minori swung the sword, once. This was not mere fire, but plasma. Part of the sun, though the hilt was perfectly cool in her hands. And whether impelled by inertia or her own need, the plasma-like blade, formed as it was by spirit-based magic, lashed out like a solar prominence, and cauterized its way through the kraken’s throat and neck. Niðhoggr, already pulling on the head, slipped as the head toppled backwards and the tentacles slackened their grip. The dragon fell with a shattering sound, half on Min’s ice shelf, and half off, and the kraken’s head dangled by its sinews for a moment, before plummeting down to land on the dragon’s exposed belly, far below.
Minori watched as the kraken’s body fell, shattering the ice, and then lay atop the floating chunks. Its black blood pooled on the surface like some kind of oil, thick and greasy, and as she hovered far above, she could hear klaxons sounding on the vessels around her. She held the sword in awed, reverent hands, smiling to herself, and looked around for Sigrun . . . only now realizing that the valkyrie hadn’t returned to the air. Where is she?
Radio chatter in her ear. “There’s half of some old statue sticking through the hull down here. That’s the source of the hull breach. The creature must have found it on the bottom and used it
as a weapon—”
“We’ve got at least twenty men who were swept overboard, and are out in that thing’s blood. Get the rescue divers out there, rafts, anything. Gods only know if sharks will be attracted to that black shit that’s in the water—”
“We have damage to all decks, and are taking water on both sides. Captain has given the order to abandon ship—”
Minori sighed. It seemed to unfair that victory always seemed to have such a price tag attached to it. She exhaled, and dipped through the air, looking for ways to help out. But first and foremost, she had to find where Sigrun had landed. She didn’t particularly want to have lost another friend. Not on account of a . . . relatively small battle like this.
As she moved forwards, Nith managed to right himself and leaped out of the water, heading straight towards another ship, on which he promptly landed, causing its hull to sink noticeably deeper in the water. Minori followed him, thinking, He probably knows precisely where Sigrun is . . . as she tried to encourage the sword to shrink back down again. Douse itself. Go in the sheath without burning the scabbard, or her fingers. And she then set down on the deck, watching as young sailors ran past her, clearly trying to stay out of the line of sight of the enormous dragon.
The Goddess Denied Page 116