The megalodon wheeled. Its tail slammed, and although the tall fins didn’t touch Bowhead’s hull, the pressure wave of dislodged water made the galley list, rolling in the waves. Then the megalodon came at Dreadnaught instead, aiming for the cask bobbing just beside the galley and the blood spreading through the water.
Except when it found no prey or enemies there, it would turn on her galley.
Jaws open so wide it could have swallowed the largest catapult-shot effortlessly and gulped down the catapult as well, the megalodon swam parallel to Dreadnaught, searching for the prey it both felt and smelled. Jash pointed at the coralhost’s back.
Parras and Skur threw themselves at the coralhost, grasping its legs and lifting it off the deck. Unbalanced, it teetered on the edge of the gunwale and fell. As it did, though, one leg bent forward at the knee, supple and unjointed as a tentacle. From thigh to ankle it wrapped around Parras’s arm. The coralhost’s weight pulled him over the gunwale and he screamed as their bodies hit the water, as the megalodon’s jaws closed on them both.
Quenlin staggered back. What felt like a red-hot skewer was in his eye, and the shock was so great he couldn’t even cry out. He wrenched his consciousness free from the megalodon’s and caught at the doorframe for balance. The mast, she’d used the broken mast against him, and he hadn’t considered that possibility because…because it had never been done before.
Her eyes were glazed—one of them, because the other was swelling shut and made her look even worse than usual—and she looked at him without seeing him, so he dropped back into the megalodon’s mind. He was braced for the pain now, able to rise above it, and the megalodon wasn’t fatally injured anyway. The yardarms on the mast prevented the pointed end from sinking any deeper. She’d startled him with that trick, but he would rip her apart.
The megalodon bucked and twisted, the foremast jerking with every movement. The shark’s teeth clamped on the other end, so a hundred feet of wood held it out of reach. Its wounds had opened again and the smell inflamed the megalodon further. He could make it swim towards the rocky sides of the inlet, driving the shark against an undersea cliff-face, but he had a sudden image of the shark releasing its deathgrip at the last moment. And the resulting impact somehow sending the foremast all the way into the megalodon’s brain.
He fought to hold back his emotions, to impose control on himself and through him the megalodon. If he could just be calm, just find the eye of the hurricane, he could think what to do.
The megalodon’s head tossed violently to one side and the stresses on the foremast took their toll. Wood broke just below the crow’s nest. The shark was flung away, struggling to turn its weaving path into a straight fast line, and exultation made Quenlin’s pulse beat faster. Kill it, go after it and tear it to shreds—
His hold on the megalodon’s mind slipped.
Startled, Quenlin tried to sink deeper, into the lock he’d maintained as the megalodon smashed Daystrider. It didn’t work. He couldn’t get a grip on the churning fury and pain, couldn’t suppress them. The megalodon had been hauled out of its home and into an alien environment, forced to obey someone it didn’t know and didn’t trust, and now it fought him.
Quenlin fell back on Seawatch breathing techniques and imagined himself in the black room, but none of it gave his mind the clean empty blankness that would impose obedience on animal chaos. His calm had been shattered since his mother had tried to murder him, and he needed time and rest to recover. Time he didn’t have. He saw through the megalodon’s eyes, but that was the extent of his control, and he was pulled helplessly with it as it surged to the surface.
He dissociated the moment it rammed Lynx. Jash would want him dead for that. He’d been so close, he’d even sunk the warship and none of it would be any good with the megalodon rampaging among the galleys.
For that matter, the megalodon might kill him. He went cold down to the marrow of his bones.
Whatever happened, Yerena wasn’t going to win. The man she’d been trying to shield had dragged himself to his feet, looking like a corpse left standing, but she was still glassy-eyed, locked with the shark. Quenlin saw a bloodstained cutlass lying on the floor and made a dive for it.
“Look out!” the man said. Yerena’s eyes snapped back into focus. Quenlin sprang up with the cutlass in hand, and she broke into a half-limping sprint for the door. He’d left it open and she stumbled through the doorway as he came around the table. There was nowhere on the ship she could hide, and she would never get off the deck as long as the Tureans were there.
He ran to the door. A Turean at the other end of the passageway shouted his name, but he ignored that. Yerena clambered up the nearest hatch to the deck, and he went after her, swinging the cutlass in a slash that would have hamstrung her.
The Turean grabbed his arm at the last moment, and the tip of the cutlass only caught her across one calf. She staggered but didn’t fall, and Quenlin turned on the Turean, furious.
“The captain wants—” the Turean began. That was as far as he got before Quenlin drove the cutlass deep into his belly. He wrenched it free as the man crumpled. Another Turean roared, slashing back at him, but the ship lurched as he did so and the blade buried itself in the wall instead. Quenlin bolted up the steps towards the deck.
He had expected it to be a scene of panic, but none of the crew seemed to be watching the water. Whether or not they had driven the megalodon off, it didn’t matter. Yerena stumbled towards the prow and he turned in that direction.
One of the men started forward, but another one pulled him back. The crew seemed to have drawn away, tightening their ranks against the gunwales to form a wall that closed him in with Yerena. That was fine. He started for her, his long strides much faster than her halting steps, and the cutlass in his hand left a trail of drops behind him.
He caught up with her just as she tripped over a length of chain thick as her wrist. The huge fist of the prow, banded with iron spikes and clutching the broken chain, had been nearly snapped away from the ship by Daystrider’s catapult shot. After that it had been hauled on board before it could break off completely. Yerena went down hard across the coils of cold iron, beside the fist that matched her in size, and Quenlin stood over her.
He put the cutlass to her throat and glanced over the side to see if the battered remnants of her shark were lurking anywhere near. Nothing in the water, not that he could see a great deal through debris and jetsam and the glimmers of sunlight on the waves. Behind him, he heard the crew creeping up, but only Yerena mattered.
He looked down to see her eyes—one plain, one surrounded by the Seawatch mark, just like his own face. “Want to beg for your life?”
“No.” Her voice was hoarse but there was nothing in it except for a simple statement of fact, as if he had offered her a drink. Though if he had, he knew she would have added Thank you as Seawatch required. Comportment and deportment above all.
He kicked her in the side and she doubled up, but there was no other reaction. She wore an iron chain around her throat too, and he wanted to twist that until the links dug into her flesh, making her face turn as black as the damned tattoo, but it would be like strangling a corpse. What would it take to break her, to make her plead and crawl and cry?
Then he remembered the rumor he’d heard in Whetstone, the whisper that this particular Yerena was afraid of drowning.
He shoved the cutlass into the deck beside her, point-first, and caught the iron links trailing from the wooden fist. They were heavier than he had expected, and the fist itself would act as an anchor. Yerena was struggling to breathe as he wrapped the chain around her arms, pinning them to her body. He locked it tightly and her eyes widened.
“No,” she said again, but now there was something more than expressionless courtesy in the word. He pulled her to her feet and towards the gunwale, the fist trailing behind her on its chains. Very apropos, that she would be dragged to her death by something so Turean.
“No!” Even with her
hands trapped against her body, she tried to clutch at him, but although she wore her sharkskin gloves, he was in his black-and-white skins. Her grip slid away as he shoved her against the rail. “Kov—Quenlin, don’t, please—”
Quenlin savored the terror in her eyes and made sure no fins were in sight. Not that it mattered if they were, since Yerena didn’t seem in a fit state to control herself, let alone her shark. Seawatch operatives weren’t taught mummers’ skills, and he knew real terror when he saw it. There was nothing between Dreadnaught and the island except for a Denalait rowboat half a mile away.
“Give my regards to my mother.”
He lifted the iron-banded fist in both arms. It felt wonderfully heavy, like a sack of lead ingots, and he grunted with the effort as he tossed it overboard. Yerena gasped as the weight hauled her halfway over the gunwale, and Quenlin pushed her the rest of the way. The sea closed over her before she could make another sound.
A great burden had slipped away from him as well. The muscles in his back and shoulders ached, but it was a sweet pain. I’ve won. He felt himself smiling as he turned. I’ve won.
And he saw Jash Morender smile too, as she drove a shortsword forward with all her strength behind it.
I’ve—
Darok broke the surface. Disoriented, he treaded water and looked around through strands of hair plastered over his eyes. All he saw of Daystrider was her prow jutting up into the sky, and the figurehead of the shieldmaiden holding the sun. The rest of the ship was no longer in sight, and the prow was sinking.
He swam away from it as fast as he could, grief at the loss of his ship paling beside the awareness that he would be sucked down when she finally sank. At first he wasn’t sure where he was headed, because the inlet was just behind him. Had he been carried out to sea, and where the hell was that beast?
Oddly enough, he didn’t feel afraid. He would have feared a shark, certainly, but the megalodon was so huge it seemed unreal. Anyway, it was the kind of monster better suited for battle with towering warships rather than with single men. He’d be an ant to it, a speck of dust.
Keep telling yourself that.
“Captain!” The voice was carried to him on the wind, and when he lifted his head, blinking his vision clear, he saw the rowboat fifty yards away. An uplifted arm wore a pale-blue sleeve. Alyster.
He began swimming in that direction, and the sea heaved beneath him.
The surge felt like an underwater quake. Darok jolted with the impact, tossed aside by the displacement of tons of water like a splinter on the surf. Claws of ice closed on his guts, because he knew it was the megalodon. It had to be. But was it simply passing below him on its way to further prey—like the shark? Yerena’s shark?—or was it rising with abyss-wide jaws open?
He wasn’t sure whether to keep swimming or lie still and feign death. He could float on his back, but every instinct screamed at him to move.
The sea rocked again, violently. Darok lurched with it, but he dug his hands into water, spat out more of it and kicked hard. Barely ten yards from him, something flashed into view—the tip of a grey fin, streaming froth—before it was gone beneath the waves again. Yerena’s shark. At some point during their voyage he’d learned to recognize it. Some battle was taking place deep underwater, and he could only hope the combatants would ignore him.
To his surprise he found himself hoping the shark would survive too. At least for Yerena’s sake.
The sea churned behind him, something breaching and thrashing the waves, and he didn’t dare turn to look. It took him what felt like hours to reach the boat’s side. He didn’t have the strength to pull himself overboard, but thankfully hands hauled him over the side, and he sank down on a thwart, trembling with exhaustion.
Not that he could rest. The cliffs of Rosefall rose up a mile away, to his unease. The currents had carried the rowboat farther than he had expected, and the Turean galleys were close. There were six of them, strewn in a crude ring formation where they had scattered at the threat of Daystrider emerging from the inlet, but more than capable of coming back together fast. He saw their figureheads: whale and seahorse, archer and impaled man.
“Sir,” Alyster said, “shall we retreat.” That was obviously not a question. “The other boats have reached Rosefall. We can hide among the rocks.”
“Not yet.” Darok didn’t look away from the sea. The water moved, streaming aside as a massive shape surged beneath the surface and headed towards the galleys.
The fins broke water like blades cutting the sea open, the sail-sized dorsal and the tail sweeping powerfully from side to side, but even that sight didn’t distract him from the jutting mast. He only knew it had once been a mast because the rags of sails hung from yardarms, but the crow’s nest was gone. The mast’s other end was driven deep into a pit of red flesh.
His heart stuttered. Had Yerena done that? No wonder the beast was driven crazy. Crazy enough to ram a galley, he saw a second later.
The Turean vessels fought back, but even wounded, the megalodon was too large, too fast and in its element. Its bulk came down on the galley with the archer figurehead, and the other half of the galley flew out of the water entirely with the impact. Darok suddenly found himself more than capable of feeling fear, but that fear was for Yerena. She was on Dreadnaught, and if the megalodon crushed that galley as well—
Sailors struggled through the water or were dragged below by their own armor as they cried out for help. The megalodon surged alongside Dreadnaught and two figures—not Yerena, thank the Unity—fell overboard, locked together. Jaws came together so hard that teeth snapped.
Then the megalodon sank down, writhing and jerking as it did so. One toss of an arrow-studded head that could have swallowed a horse whole, and Dreadnaught jolted in the water, listing hard to starboard before she righted herself. The great grey fin disappeared like a banner being drawn down from a castle’s ramparts.
Whether or not the Tureans had managed to get the better of the beast, Darok neither knew nor cared, because by then he had seen the figure struggling over the galley’s deck to the prow. A rising wind turned her loosened hair into another banner.
“Take us closer,” he said to Alyster.
“What?”
“That was an order.” Darok didn’t look away from her.
Alyster knew better than to say You’re going after her, aren’t you? before the men, but Darok knew he would try to rephrase his objections. “Sir, we can’t fight a galley with a rowboat—”
“I have no intention of fighting a galley, Lieutenant. Now take us closer.”
The galleys did not seem in the mood for battle either. They were milling and undisciplined. Two of them moved to rescue drowning men, but two more spread their sails to catch the wind, and seemed about to make all speed west. Of those who remained, Darok knew it would take them a while to gather up all the survivors. Men had been tossed through the air like corn at a sowing when the second galley had been flung high. No, the galleys weren’t likely to bend their oars to attack one rowboat.
But he couldn’t save Yerena. He watched in futile rage as she staggered to the gunwale. Sunlight gleamed on thick iron chains and he knew what was going to happen—her nightmare, made real.
He had to do something, but what? He couldn’t order the boat close enough without drawing Dreadnaught’s attention, and no matter how fast they rowed, they wouldn’t reach her in time.
“Look out!” Kaneth cried, and the boat rocked as everyone shifted at once. Darok turned in the opposite direction. Six feet away, a grey fin rose out of the water.
It was the shark, though, he knew that at once from the size. And the fact that it didn’t have a foremast embedded anywhere. Obviously ground down by injury and exhaustion, it seemed not so much to be swimming as coasting beside the boat, allowing the current to carry it, and he thought it was dead.
Then the triangular head lifted in a tired twitch that brought the shark’s eyes above the waterline. One of them, black as an
obsidian disk, studied him with no interest before it revolved to Yerena’s small slender form in the distance. Darok glanced at the galley again, just in time to see a man shove something overboard—the broken fist off Dreadnaught’s prow.
The chains binding it to Yerena dragged her with it and the water swallowed her up. Darok spun back to the shark. It had seen that too, and he remembered what Yerena had once told him about a game they’d played.
“Fetch!” he shouted.
The inkspot eye swiveled back to him and the shark submerged. He leaned over the side of the boat but of course nothing was visible. There were only ripples where Yerena had been, and the water was full of shards, corpses, the remains of ships and men alike. Something bobbed on the surf nearby, something he recognized. He forced his fingers to release the thwart—they’d been gripping it so tightly his hand was numb—and plucked the small soaked effigy from the water. There was no other sign of Daystrider’s master carpenter.
He shoved the effigy into his belt as the shark’s head rose slowly from the water. The grey-and-white body tilted as it moved parallel to the boat, jaws yawning to expose the iron-spiked fist jutting from its mouth. Iron chains trailed over its teeth, along with one of Yerena’s arms, limp and streaked with blood. The rest of her body disappeared inside the great gash of a mouth.
Darok heard the men on the boat breathing hard, and someone was whispering a prayer to the Unity, but no one moved as the shark came almost to a halt beside the boat. Its jaws opened wider.
“Hold the boat steady,” he said to Alyster and leaned out as far as he could. More of Yerena’s body hung from the other side of the mouth, over teeth that had to be piercing her flesh. It was a miracle the shark hadn’t reflexively bitten down at the smell and taste of blood. A miracle, or love. He wasn’t going to argue with either as he grasped the collar of her suit and her belt. Teeth clenched, he hauled with all his strength.
The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) Page 27