“Oh, and I suppose the whores you visit find you fascinating.”
“When you’ve got a sack full of gold on your belt, they certainly act like you’re the most interesting man in the land,” Terian said, feeling the heat fade from his cheeks. A cold settled on them.
“I don’t see a difference in the arrangement I propose,” Sareea said. “I’m merely allying myself with power instead of asking for petty coin. I’m already in the favor of your father—”
Terian let a low sigh. “I know you’re doing this for the wrong reasons, but I don’t think you’re aware of the consequences. My father would never consent to a marriage—”
“Between us, I know,” Sareea said. “Assuming you even wanted such a thing, I’m a social inferior who is already in the service of your house.” Terian looked over at her, alarmed. “I told you—I know how the game is played,” she said with a smile. “I harbor no illusions about what our dalliance might bring in terms of long-term benefits. I suspect I can convince you of my short-term worth, though, and that has its own rewards.”
“Uh huh,” Terian said. “Some trade contracts of lesser import thrown the way of your house. A job in the customs office with a fat stipend for one of your relatives. Better standing at the next ball.” Terian shook his head. Predictable.
“Those are the sort of things your father can toss as easily as a bone to a dog,” Sareea said, and he could hear her rowing still, with the same steady rhythm. “Yet to us dogs, they are everything.”
“This is obscene,” Terian said. I’m not sure if it’s my sense of propriety that’s offended, but something is definitely breaking inside me right now, because I’m feeling ill at this suggestion. And that takes some doing for me.
“But you feel good about throwing gold to a girl from the Back Deep who’s selling her body to you for a night for much less reward.” That got him to turn his head, and his cheeks were burning again. Sareea did not even look at him as she rowed, but she wore a placid smile. “It’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“What?” Terian heard his voice crack, unintentionally.
“The little lies we tell ourselves to explain our own hypocrisies.” She rowed, and he saw a bead of sweat trace a slow line down her forehead to her temple, tracking its way down her dark blue skin.
“You think I’m a hypocrite?” Terian asked. His voice felt stronger. His anger had faded, replaced by a sort of gut-level weariness, wrapped in a feeling that something horrible was about to happen, completely unrelated to where they were.
“I think your attitude toward using women is hypocritical,” Sareea said. “The thought of using me with my full knowledge and consent to the barter bothers you, but using a woman in far more dire straits does not.” She smiled as she turned her head to him. “Does that not strike you as the worst sort of hypocrisy?”
Terian made no reply because he had no immediate reply to make. The gentle quiet of the oars hitting the water in time was interrupted by Bowe’s deep voice somewhere behind him. “It comes.”
Terian blinked and held fast his oar. “Wait, what?”
“I hear something,” Sareea said, suddenly still. Terian could hear the drip of the water off his oar into the Great Sea in the silence. All were still on the boat, still as death.
Then, in the dark, in the quiet, he heard it too. A rippling in the water, something beneath the surface making its way … up.
Chapter 31
“Brace yourselves,” Terian said, pulling his sword from the scabbard on his belt. He felt nearly naked in only his underclothes. The sword helps, but armor would be better. Until I sank to the bottom with it weighing me down. I can’t believe Father never got me a set of mystical armor like—
Something jarred the boat, hard enough that Terian had to brace himself against the bench in front of him to keep from falling. There was something else added to the dank smell now, something worse than fish: deep, like blood but heavier. He listened and heard the water rippling as though a stream were flowing nearby. He cast a look around and saw nothing but the Great Sea in all directions, the sea and water that was beginning to churn off the bow of the boat.
“That way!” Xem shouted, pointing off the left side of the ship. Terian stood, still hunched enough to brace himself on the bench, and readied his sword. He could see what Xem had pointed to, the same spot in the water that looked as though a tornado was moving beneath the surface.
“What foul beast is this?” Grinnd said from somewhere in the back of the boat.
“It is your overdeveloped sense of drama,” Verret snapped back at him, “run completely amok and split loose of any semblance of common sense to ground it.”
“I would have said sea monster, myself,” Dahveed said with a calm Terian most certainly did not feel. “But I think I’d find Grinnd’s sense of drama a welcome departure from my expectations.”
A quiet fell as the churning water burbled. Bubbles broke to the surface with pops as though the water were boiling. It held its place, just off the bow, waiting.
“What the hells is it?” Xem asked. Nervous tension shot through his voice, and his hands grasped his daggers and held them in front of him as though it were going to leap out of the water for him to strike.
“I’m afraid we’ll find that out soon enough, whether we want to or not,” Dahveed said.
The bubbling stopped, and silence reigned. Where did it go? Terian wondered but kept his question to himself. It was just sitting there, and now it’s gone?
The boat bobbed from the water’s disturbance, and Terian could feel it gently swaying back and forth beneath his legs. He waited. Xem was frozen at the front of the ship, staring into the dark waters with a look of horror. Sareea stood directly across the aisle from him, her curved sword now drawn as well.
She caught his eye and nodded at him. He wondered at her meaning but had no time to decipher it before something bumped the boat.
It was a gentle bump, one that jarred Terian only slightly. His breath caught in his throat as he kept his balance.
The lapping of the waters at the hull grew more insistent—a steady, maddening sound as though the sea were trying to slowly consume the boat.
Another thump drove Terian to his knees. Angry screams of the wooden hull, tested for its strength, filled the air. A few cracks followed as timbers met their match, and a trickling noise of water streaming into the boat washed over them.
“Not good,” Verret said. “This boat is not going to make it back to shore like this—”
“I don’t think this boat was ever going to make it back to shore,” Terian said and turned his eyes toward Sareea again. Her gaze met his and she nodded again, just once. In agreement.
The boat rocked again with the full snapping of planks this time, and Terian was thrown against the side. Something broke through the bottom. Tall and dark, like a mast sticking out of the middle of the ship, it writhed.
Terian stared at it from where he lay. Water was pouring in from the hole it had made. He could feel it wetting his back, his hands. He started to force himself back to his feet but the ship was jarred again.
It’s a tentacle.
He realized it with a certain amount of shock. He’d seen the squids brought into the Reikonos market. Little things, most of them, no more than a few feet long for the biggest of them.
Except …
There had been one. He’d heard about it, years ago, and had gone to Reikonos with some other members of Sanctuary to see it. Niamh had carried them there on the winds of a teleportation spell. It was the talk of all the land. A sea beast so large that it hung as tall as a titan across a beam planted at the docks. People were crowded around it in amazement, teleporting in from as far away as Oortrais, Pharesia and Fertiss.
A squid bigger than a giant.
Terian felt himself groan in pain and anticipation. The boat lurched as the tentacle moved. It slid down and withdrew, shaking the boat as it did. Water gushe
d in through the hole it had made at the bottom of the hull.
“This is all wrong!” Grinnd said. “That looks like a saltwater squid, but this is fresh water—”
“Save the analysis for after it kills me, please,” Verret said, his voice muffled. Terian looked back to see his face buried in the deck. Dahveed was the only one still on his feet.
“Should we go overboard?” Sareea asked, and he fixated on her. She was watching him.
“I don’t know,” Terian murmured. It’s so big. How do we fight that?
“You’re the leader,” Sareea said to him, so softly that no one else could hear her. She was looking in his eyes, whispering, and she wore no shirt to cover her …
Terian felt his fear dissolve, replaced by a flash of lust, then a hard sense of reality crashing down on his gut drove even that out of him. I’m failing. I can’t fail. If I fail, they die. “Everybody out of the boat before it sinks!” he called. “We need to kill that thing, now!”
There was not even a pause before he heard the sound of bodies hitting water. Terian vaulted over the edge himself, though his feet had already been nearly up to the knees in the deepening water. “We’ll need to submerge—” he started, and felt air fill his lungs even though he was not taking a breath.
“You can now breathe underwater,” Bowe’s calm voice reached him. He glanced back and saw Bowe hovering above the sinking ship, the water a foot below his feet. His hands were moving in a frenzy, and at the end of each motion he indicated another member of the crew. Casting Breath of the Aquatic spells. Sovereign bless you, Bowe.
I should have ordered those as soon as this menace appeared.
“Let’s see what we’re dealing with,” Sareea said, and he watched her pearl-white hair disappear underwater. Her feet broke the surface for a second before dipping below with her.
“Let’s go,” Terian said, feeling far behind. She’s leading right now. Leading me. I need to get moving, get my mind moving. I was an Elder of Sanctuary, for the gods’ sakes—and I’m being led by a newly graduated dark knight. What is wrong with me?
Terian dove without waiting to see if anyone else followed. The depths were dark, scarcely any light penetrating them. He felt a tickle in his vision and he could see. Eagle Eye. Bowe, you are truly an indispensable man.
He could see Sareea swimming beneath him. The dark, rocky bottom of the cave was visible now, covered over with some thin lair of algae.
Something was moving, something big.
He could Sareea swimming toward it. She’s fearless, that one. Or crazy.
Or both.
He followed her, his strokes of middling effectiveness. Something passed him on the right, and he realized it was Grinnd. He was paced a moment later by Verret.
Terian swam faster, flailing his arms and legs while maintaining his grip on his axe.
Grinnd and Sareea reached the beast at the same time. Its tentacles swept upward around its center like spikes driven in a circle around it. It aligned itself to use the tentacles as a fence between it and its foes, and Terian knew with horrible certainty that this thing was a predator of the worst sort.
It’s ready for us.
A flash of something cut through the water leaving a hard trail behind it. It streaked over Terian’s head and snaked between an open space of tentacles to strike the beast in its oblong head. Terian watched the tail of the spell drift slowly downward, dissolving as it went, and he realized it was a burst of ice.
Whatever my father is paying Bowe, it’s not nearly enough.
The monster swayed with the strike of the ice, tentacles flailing in clear anger. One of them shot at Sareea, another at Grinnd. Terian felt bubbles escape his mouth as he drove his muscles to take him down.
Grinnd met the tentacle with the blade of one of his swords, and dark blood stained the water. It went cloudy and opaque, as though a well of ink had been dropped into the Great Sea. Terian watched the edge of the tentacle continue to flail, a four-foot section of it severed. It drifted out of sight as the beast pulled the rest of it back toward itself.
Sareea cleanly dodged the one flung at her. She managed no counter blow, spinning in the water to reach the inside of the squid’s defensive perimeter. She plunged her sword toward the bulbous head, but the tentacles moved as one and it shot upward as though it had been launched.
Sareea spiraled down like she had been caught in a whirlpool. Terian watched her legs spin until she seemed to catch her bearings and reorient. By then, he was almost upon a tentacle of his own.
He bore his axe in front of him. Verret was alongside him now, aiming for another tentacle, and Grinnd was only just behind them. Another streak of ice pelted the creature but from closer this time.
Ugly monster. Terian swept his axe back to strike, feeling the resistance of the water as he pushed through. He struck the tentacle that came at him squarely in the middle.
And the axe hung in place.
The tentacle pulled back as though he’d burned it. It dragged him along with it holding the handle of the axe as though it were a rope that would pull him back to the clay beach. The strength of the beast was astounding, and Terian could feel the tug of the water’s resistance to his passage as though it were trying to rip him free of his weapon.
This is not going to be as easy as I’d hoped.
A flare of ice blasted the squid in the side of its head. It was a dome-shaped monstrosity, pointed and almost phallic. Terian ripped his axe free of the indentation he’d made in the creature and swept it into the beast’s head, trying to cut his way in. He made only a thin mark before the squid blasted upward again, knocking him asunder with the sweep of its tentacles.
Terian spun in the water, tossed and disoriented. Up and down became meaningless, concepts he felt he’d once learned but now had forgotten. His head spun with the rest of him and a sudden nausea crept in. His breakfast crept up his throat and he tasted the bile and nastiness of it through the water trying to force its way into his nasal passages.
This was the worst idea in the history of terrible ideas. Who fights a sea monster in the middle of the sea?
A moron, that’s who.
It lingered above him, hanging between him and the surface of the water. He could see it rippling, tentacles moving in time like a dress being spun at a ball.
Something swept by him in a flash. Terian’s head was still swimming while he was holding his position in the water. It took only a moment for him to realize that it was Verret.
Verret swam with long strokes, long sword in one hand and his legs carrying him upward in powerful scissoring motions. Terian could see the underside of the creature, where some aperture waited to spit hard water out and send it upward again.
He watched Verret’s approach almost helplessly, trying to marshal his own limbs to work to push him up as well. After a moment he managed, using his legs to propel him toward the surface.
Verret had a long lead, though, and Terian was moving slowly. Sareea and Grinnd passed him, and another blast of ice came from somewhere above, the trailing edge looking for all the world like someone had made a long pillar of frost with which to stab the creature.
Terian watched them move toward it, and he saw the bottom aperture of the creature open at Verret’s approach. Something bothered him about it, something tickled at the back of his mind.
It was not until he saw the teeth that he knew what he had feared.
The tentacles pushed upward in a solid motion, driving the creature down toward Verret, who was still swimming up to meet it. The dark elf did not have time to react to the beast’s motion, and it came straight for him.
It was a mouth that had opened, and Terian watched it shut again upon Verret’s torso. Teeth shredded through the man, ripping him solidly in half. His upper body disappeared, followed by his lower body in the next motions.
Blood darkened the waters around the mouth, a black cloud hanging beneath the sea monster.
But before it disappeared it the mist of the blood, Terian would have sworn its face was creased in a bizarre, twisted grin.
Chapter 32
He wanted to scream, wanted to yell, but the water would come flooding down his throat so he did not. He tightened his grip on the axe handle so that his knuckles cracked. He could feel the pressure of his grip and wished for his gauntlets so he could sink those taut, metal fingers into the skin of the creature.
I want to hear it scream. I want to hear it cry.
It shot through the cloud of Verret’s blood still hanging between it and the rest of them. It snaked toward Grinnd with three tentacles and each one of them met an end so vicious that Grinnd might have been hacking off his enemies’ heads for the fury with which he treated them. His motions, so normally relaxed and languid, looked merciless.
Grinnd flung himself at the head and buried his swords into it as another blast of ice, larger this time, spiked into the creature and drew blood. Sareea swept through the hole in its defense created by Grinnd and buried her blade several inches in its skull.
The sea monster shook but showed little response to all that was happening to it. The remaining tentacles still moved in a light, swirling dance.
Terian shot toward the head as the creature turned to place its mouth toward its attackers. He did not halt as it opened wide to devour him, and he swept the axe in and hit it squarely in the soft tissue above the teeth.
Three of the pointed things broke free and fell out of the mouth with a swirl of cloudy blood. The monster recoiled from him, dragging Grinnd and Sareea along with it as it tried to escape.
Terian felt a solid jet of water push against him, expelled by the thing’s mouth. He felt it and pushed back, swimming against the current it made. This time he did not spin, though he felt it try to push him away.
You won’t get rid of me that easily, you son of a bitch. I’ll see you hanging on the docks for what you did to Verret!
Grinnd attacked again with a mighty blow that opened a wide gash in the squid’s skin. It split open and Terian saw Sareea plunge her blade into the hole that Grinnd had made while the warrior sliced another on the top of the bulbous skull.
Thy Father's Shadow (Book 4.5) Page 18