The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series)

by Marian Perera

  His muscles burned and hairline fractures snaked along the oar but the boulder started to shift. Then the deck splintered and cracked beneath the crushing weight. Darok jerked back, almost losing his balance on blood-slicked wood before someone pulled him to safety. The deck gave way and the boulder crashed down, taking dead and living men alike with it.

  Darok stared at the gaping rent before him, and the oar clattered to the broken planks as he finally loosened his grip on it. He turned to deal with the rest of his ship.

  “Sir, the foremast—”

  “Captain, the hold’s taking in water—”

  “What the hell are they howling for?”

  That was Alyster, and Darok heard the sounds rise over the clamor on his ship. The wails of Turean shellhorns were higher and more long-drawn-out than Denalait conches, but they were just a heralding of battle, not that they needed to warn anyone about Daystrider any longer. The sound was meant to demoralize his crew further, but he wouldn’t let that happen.

  “Forget the hold,” he said. “Evacuate the lower decks.” He pushed forward and got his first glimpse of the foremast. It was cracked at the base, a dark line angling sharply across it, and it swayed like a willow in a storm. His mouth went dry. In a battle, he was usually too preoccupied watching his opponent and planning his next moves to think about his safety, but now he realized how close he was to being crushed to death.

  He took an involuntary step back before catching himself. The mast couldn’t be repaired, especially not if the hull was breached too, but as Daystrider had coasted on inertia to the inlet’s mouth, the galleys had retreated into the open water. The boats could be rowed back to Rosefall.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Abandon ship.”

  Alyster echoed the order in a shout. “All hands, abandon ship!”

  The men had been prepared for that eventuality, but the Lastlanders were less disciplined—or resigned. Darok heard shouts and shoves, but he might have been watching the panic through a spyglass. He knew he couldn’t just remain standing there, but he kept noticing further hurts Daystrider had taken in the barrage. The hourglass had cracked as well, scattering pale golden sand on the new boards beneath it.

  The ship’s bell clanged, startling him back to his senses. The first boat was being lowered—not very far, since Daystrider was beginning to sink—as he bolted down to his cabin. The logbook and his written orders went into a waxed canvas sack. There was no time to take anything else, and he didn’t want to be weighed down if he had to swim.

  If? He hurried back topside. Even if he hadn’t brought his crew into the Iron Ocean to die, he had to be the last man off his ship, and he felt like going down with her. He hadn’t reached Lastland in time. Jash Morender had released half the prisoners and killed the other half. He’d lost both his ship and the woman he loved. There didn’t seem to be much to live for.

  The second boat had been lowered and the third filled when he reached the deck. Even that he owed to Jash Morender, he thought bitterly, the fact that they had a surplus of boats for once.

  Daystrider tilted, listing to port, and an earsplitting crack echoed from the foremast. It broke at an angle, and the ship reeled with the impact as it fell. Two of the Lastlanders were thrown from the gunwale. The ship’s bell continued to clang and the battlehorns wailed a dirge.

  “Get everyone away!” Darok shoved the canvas sack into his brother’s hands and went to the prow without waiting to see his order obeyed. Something was wrong on the Turean galleys—Yerena’s doing, maybe? He was a fool to keep hoping he would see her again, and yet he couldn’t stop doing so, although his rational mind told him it was something else entirely, something that had scattered the flotilla’s formation into disarray.

  They’re just keeping their distance so they won’t be sent sky-high when I blow this ship up, he thought, before he saw the sail in the distance, perhaps four points off the port bow. Two or three miles away, it was grey and triangular, a sail without a flag or any boat that he could see, unless the boat was hidden in the waves. Out of sheer habit, he took the spyglass from his belt and put the end to his eye.

  That was more than enough to show him the smaller sail forty feet away—the tip of a tailfin. Then the tall dorsal turned edgewise as the megalodon changed direction. With the Turean galleys scattering, that left it a clear path through the sea towards Daystrider.

  For a moment Darok’s heart stopped beating. He had never seen anything so huge, easily twice or thrice the size of Yerena’s shark. Unity. It’ll kill us all.

  “Get off the ship!” he shouted.

  Cries rose from the men still on board. The fin accelerating towards Daystrider was close enough that no one needed a spyglass now. The last boat hit the water.

  Darok stood where he was, watching as the megalodon closed the distance between them. He heard someone yell his name, but that didn’t matter either. If the Seawatch rogue was looking through the beast’s eyes, he’d be clearly visible on the ship’s prow. The bell had stopped clanging, but his heart beat like thunder in his ears.

  Fifty yards away, the dorsal fin sheared through the sea, foam streaming white in its wake.

  Thirty yards away, the megalodon’s head broke water, opening jaws wide enough to engulf a rowboat whole.

  When it was ten yards away, Darok leaped up to the gunwale. The ship yawed wildly, reacting to a wave of pressure from the megalodon’s sheer size, but he kept his balance for the second he needed to dive off. In the instant before he struck the water, the megalodon’s bulk slammed into Daystrider in a broadside collision.

  The ship split apart.

  “I’ve won.”

  Holding on to the table for balance, Yerena had moved in front of Julean when the door opened, but she realized Quenlin didn’t notice him. All his attention fixed on her and the two words he spoke revealed something that hadn’t occurred to her before. They had been part of a battle fought between two different fleets and races and ideologies, and yet for Quenlin it had always been him against her.

  She had never felt the same way. He certainly had far more talent than she did. Even if her mentor had not told her so in repeated attempts to spur her on, the Kovirs and Yerenas in Whetstone whispered, and one of the tales they told was of how this particular boy easily mastered what the rest of them struggled to learn.

  But where did it all get him? No matter what he had done to the shark, he had not been able to break the bond that held it and her together, and even if he could raise a megalodon, it would have no real loyalty towards him. It would not play with him, swim with him at night or carry him to safety despite wounds that were killing it. The shark did what it did out of love for me, she admitted for the first time.

  Just as Darok loved her. The memory of him straightened her spine. I won’t let anyone harm him either.

  Keeping half of her consciousness aware of Quenlin, she extended the other half, reaching for the shark. Senses merged and minds came together. She still saw the room before her, the door to the deck of a Turean galley and the man in black-and-white leathers who faced her, but she saw it all through a wall of water. In the distance she smelled blood and rotting wood, and lines of sensation prickled along her skin as the shark felt thrashing blows that displaced tons of water.

  Quenlin saw what she was doing at once, and his smile broadened to a grin. “Oh yes. Pit your pawn against my champion. It’s hungry.”

  Yerena had been half-afraid he would take advantage of her distraction to bury a blade in her chest, but she knew then that he wanted most of all to defeat her in the element they had been trained from childhood to master. The room fell away from her, dissolving in seawater. She heard Julean moan in pain, but the sound was distant, unimportant, irrelevant beside the greatest battle she would ever fight.

  She looked through the shark’s eyes. Relief surged into her like waves of honey—thick and slow with weariness but sweet nevertheless—as the shark sensed her presence and knew it was
no longer alone. You never will be. I won’t abandon you again.

  The shark flicked its tail and cut through water. Holding on, Yerena channeled its pain and exhaustion into her own body, taking on as much as she could as the shark swam the length of the inlet. Ahead, wood cracked and split. Vibrations thudded through the water as something top-heavy crashed down.

  The megalodon was already turning, leaving the ruins of Daystrider as Quenlin’s mind locked with its own and steered it towards its new prey. The shark’s fear tasted like ice sliding down her gullet to fill her stomach, but one thought kept her control from breaking: she had given Darok a chance to escape. If he wasn’t already dead.

  The water grew colder as the sea met the inlet. The shark checked its onward rush, wanting to stay close to the safer shores, but she urged it on. Above, the dark shapes of drowning men were jerky, disembodied shadows against sun-clear water. There was more than enough light for the shark to see the shape ahead, so huge it didn’t seem like a living thing. More like a mountain or a tidal wave.

  This would not be like fighting the killer whales. Even if she distracted the megalodon somehow, the monster was far too huge for the shark to incapacitate or to even hurt with a bite. More likely that would just anger it. And all it needed was a single opening, a single chance, for its own ten-foot-wide jaws to close like a bear trap around the shark’s tail or side. She needed to strike once and to make that strike count.

  She had no idea how.

  The megalodon closed the distance between them.

  Yerena took the shark down fast, its pale belly to the mud of the seabed. The megalodon’s jaws overshot it and the shark’s tail thrashed as it fought to get away. It was terrifyingly aware of more than twenty tons of flesh passing above it, of the rush of displaced water stirring up clouds of silt. Briefly Yerena thought of turning it, directing its own teeth against the megalodon’s undefended belly, but the shark would need to bite again and again to reach internal organs, holding on like a remora. The megalodon could simply stop swimming and sink, crushing the shark beneath its weight.

  And it was too late in any case. The shark’s fear drove it on, overriding everything else.

  Just a little further. Nerves twinged along the shark’s sides. It sensed the megalodon’s muscles contracting, slowing the huge body and twisting it into a half-circle. Just a—

  Her thoughts stuttered to a halt as she saw what was left of Daystrider. Half of the warship’s hull sank slowly but was almost unrecognizable, overgrown with branches of coral. Bubbles drifted up from broken windows. Trapped air and the great sheets of sails delayed but couldn’t stop the ship’s descent, while the body of a man trailed behind, snagged in the rigging.

  Stunned, Yerena directed the shark’s snout upward, searching for the ship’s other half. Debris filled the sea and blood stained it as though there was a raw sunset beyond the water, but she could make out the dark shapes of corpses floating overhead. The broken-off foremast turned end-over-end as it tumbled down. Daystrider hadn’t just been sunk, it had been shattered.

  Darok, where are—

  The megalodon turned. One slap of its tail propelled it thirty feet forward, teeth first, and Yerena saw her only chance.

  The shark shot forward past the sinking half of the warship, and veered hard to its right, using the wreck as cover. The megalodon’s own senses were as finely honed, but in water filled with the vibrations and scents of so much potential prey, it took a moment to detect the shark’s change in direction. That was enough for its body to slam into the ruins of Daystrider, smashing them to fragments.

  In that moment the shark’s jaws snapped shut on a column of wood thicker than Yerena’s thigh, its teeth sinking deep. Move! The ragged cloth of a torn flag rubbed against her tongue—the shark’s tongue—as it obeyed, the crushed crow’s nest just inches from its snout. The rest of the foremast stuck out before it for almost a hundred feet.

  The megalodon spun in a cloud of splinters and coral, turning to the right. But the shark had turned as well. Smaller and more maneuverable, it twisted in a hundred-and-eighty-degree change in direction. Now, beautiful one, Yerena thought, for the last time, go!

  Tail scything the water, the shark accelerated, running on the last of its resources but throwing all of those into its final desperate charge. It came at the megalodon from southeast, aiming for just forward of gill slits as long as its own fins.

  The megalodon sensed it and started to turn again, to bring its own teeth to bear. The shark’s speed turned it into a grey spear flying through the sea, but the megalodon could still have met jaws with jaws. Except the shark’s length was effectively quadrupled by the makeshift weapon in its mouth, and that weapon reached the megalodon first.

  The splintered end of the foremast, broken off at an angle that made a point four feet long, rammed into the megalodon’s eye.

  Jash saw why the battlehorns had sounded a warning, but it no longer mattered. With the unstoppable force of the megalodon on their side, they need not have feared any number of enemy ships. She hated being so indebted to a Denalait, but she had to admit the battle was won—with no Turean losses. Besides, whatever her captains might say about her reliance on a mainlander, the fact remained that Quenlin was her mainlander; he obeyed her and the monster obeyed him. It had shattered the warship, and that had been a beautiful sight to behold.

  She gave orders to Parras. Once the beast was well out of the way, Dreadnaught would enter the inlet again to gather up surviving Denalaits, and from there the galleys would proceed to Gullcastle to take on supplies while she planned their next strike. With a megalodon as its spearhead, her flotilla would destroy the remains of the Denalait navy and bring the mainland to its knees.

  She turned to look with satisfaction at the place where the warship had been. Nothing was visible except for broken wood bobbing on the surf and corpses in Denalait uniforms. A weight lifted from her shoulders. She’d done her part, too, because if she hadn’t weakened the warship with coral and battered it with catapults, it wouldn’t have gone down so swiftly when—

  The water boiled.

  For a moment Jash wasn’t sure what was happening, and then the great grey-and-white mass breached, twisting violently in midair before it splashed back down. Something jutted from its head like a bizarre harpoon, trailing shreds of sails from horizontal spars, and none of the megalodon’s increasingly frantic struggles dislodged the impaling mast. The foam flying into the air was stained pink.

  The wedge of the tailfin, easily Jash’s own height, lashed wildly and the monster made for the nearest target—the galley Lynx with her figurehead of a snarling cat.

  “No!” someone shouted. Jash had no idea who it was, only that it wasn’t herself. Her voice was locked in her throat, strangled there. She turned, searching for Quenlin on the crowded deck, but not finding him.

  As jerkily yet inevitably as a puppet pulled by strings, she turned back to see the megalodon crash at full speed into Lynx.

  The force staved in the side of the galley. The megalodon pulled away, snout criss-crossed with red lines, and the sea rushed into the gaping rent in Lynx. A catapult on Speared Lord flung a boulder as the megalodon veered away from the crippled galley. The stone missed by a few feet and smashed into the water, sending up a froth of spray. The great bulk turned in that direction at once.

  Vibrations, it senses vibrations as well as blood. If she could make it stop long enough for her to drop another boulder on its back—

  The other galleys struck first, hurling stones in an uncoordinated attack, and Jash all but cringed, expecting the creature to charge blindly at the enemies which surrounded it. Instead it twisted and plunged. The last thing she saw was the tailfin, and then that disappeared beneath the waves.

  No, she couldn’t hope they had escaped so easily. “Find the Denalait,” she ordered Parras. “Drag him onto the deck if you have to.”

  “Captain!” a lookout screamed. “There!”

  Jash had no
idea which direction he meant, but the cries from Steel Rain were warning enough. The company of archers on that galley’s deck shot at something on the other side of Steel Rain, shot again and again in the training that had given the vessel her name. Jash couldn’t see the megalodon with Steel Rain in the way, but she knew the hail of arrows would have no effect. She braced herself for the galley to rock violently as it was rammed broadside.

  Instead the megalodon surged up from the depths like the fist of a sea god, left the water entirely and slammed down on the galley’s stern. Steel Rain’s fore half jolted up, flinging men sixty feet away. Then the stern broke away under the crushing weight and the megalodon plowed back into the ocean.

  On Dreadnaught, Jash heard someone retching.

  Gods. What am I going to do? She looked around desperately but Quenlin was nowhere in sight. The coralhost leaned at a gunwale, watching the destruction, but Jash couldn’t think of any way it could save them. Not only was self-preservation paramount to the coralhost, it didn’t have blood to attract the giant predator.

  Snout bristling with dozens of arrows, the megalodon charged at Bowhead’s stern, jaws gaping. Stamat Corving had seen it coming and his galley started to turn. As it did so, the foremast’s jutting tip raked Bowhead’s hull with a raw scrape. The megalodon thrashed. Its jaws snapped shut, barely missing the galley’s stern, and there was a crack of splitting wood to tell Jash Bowhead’s rudder was gone.

  If she didn’t distract it, it would take the rest of her ships down. She pointed at the nearest weight, a cask lashed to the gunwale and half-filled with rainwater.

  “Throw that overboard!” She pulled a shortsword and drew the blade along the inside of her forearm.

  She didn’t feel the pain, only a hot wetness dribbling along her skin to smear the steel red. The water cask smacked into the sea and she flung the sword over the gunwale. If fresh blood and vibration didn’t work, nothing would.