Adrian shrugged, as Eric leaned close and whispered into Cheba’s ear.
“I don’t like it either,” Adrian said to Ellen. Then he smiled slightly. “In a sense, we’re not—I am still in the stateroom.”
She prodded him with a finger. “Don’t you try to soothe me, buster,” she said. “That’s you, and I don’t want to be married to a comatose body.”
He was nightwalking, of course, but with his aetheric body this palpable the finger felt just as it would to his physical one.
“We need the data. Harvey is concealing himself far too well, Peter’s device is working very well indeed…and I think some other force is seeking to thwart me as well.”
“Her.”
“Probably. But I cannot be sure.”
She sighed and stepped back. He stroked a strand of bright hair from her forehead.
Peter had an aluminum case in his hands, attached to an improvised harness of webbing. “This is ready to go,” he said, as Ellen took it from his hands. “It’s fully waterproof to two hundred feet and it’s powered for twelve hours.”
Adrian looked up at the sky. “Just put her nose into the wind if the weather turns dirty; and that can happen very quickly this time of year. There’s that sea-anchor ready if necessary.”
The slight blond man nodded. “We’re taking turns monitoring the weather channels.”
Adrian kissed his wife lightly on the lips, smiled at them all, turned, and ran out the bowsprit. A leap, the whisper of Mhabrogast through his mind, and he twisted…
And a dolphin clove the water. Down into the mild warmth…up again, soaring, his eyes flexing automatically to see through air as well as water, down again, threading air and water like a needle, a delirium of fluid speed, the water tasting of fuel (foul) and not-quite-salty enough and fish (fish! fish!). Vision was sharp, but hearing was the world. He hung in infinite space, and around him was a galaxy of sound-stars, the dull red booming of ship’s motors, the creaking hiss of the wooden sailing ship, the distant rumble of waves on shores, the creaking whistling surging tide of life down to the voices of far-distant swimmers and the song of a distant pod of his own kind.
Sound not through ears, but heard with his whole body as its instrument. Sound like the touch of feather-light fingers on every object, even the surface of the abyssal depth below.
“Adrian!”
He heard that too. Ellen’s voice was a thing of richness, a sculptured solidity of rolling form, a tower of location that was precisely there. There was no gap between the sound of a thing and the thing itself; they were one, as scent was to a wolf. He soared out of the water again in a twisting leap that was a dance of love and longing.
“Here, Adrian!”
He remembered being a man; that was easier in this form than in many, simply because there was so much more brain to work with. The problem was that he didn’t remember it in the same way, while the Shadowspawn consciousness curled at the base of the brainstem struggled to assert itself. After a moment it did, and he rose out of the water, dancing on his tail with more than half the sleek torpedo-shaped body in the air, rolling an eye at her and grinning. She leant down on the ladder that had been thrust over the side, and extended the harness.
He hated the thought of it interfering with the flow of the water over his skin, but it was necessary. She slipped it over his head and cinched it around his trunk behind the forefins with a single movement, and he nuzzled at her. She had no scent—disconcerting to his memories, for most forms had better noses than men or even Shadowspawn—but the very sound of her heart outlined her form. He felt an overwhelming impulse to passionately bite the saucy flauntingness of her beautiful dorsal fin, which caused a momentary mental stutter, starting with the fact that he still knew at some level that she didn’t have one. The dolphin part of his consciousness then decided it didn’t care…
A hand smoothed his head; he whistled and dove.
Ellen stared out over the ocean and took another bite of the burrito without bothering to taste it. She supposed it was a burrito; there were various things including meat inside something like either a tortilla or a pita. She needed fuel if she was going to worry effectively.
“Thanks, Cheba,” she said. “I should take a turn at that. So should Peter—he’s not busy with the engines.”
“I cook better than you do,” Cheba pointed out, and handed her a cup of strong coffee to go with it. “None of the men can cook, except the jefe, and he does not have time even when he is not turning into something strange or fighting or doing the things he does.”
“Peter can cook.”
“He can cook things I do not like, they’re all…what’s the word, food with no real taste, too smooth…”
“Bland.”
“Sí, bland. I need to have something to do, anyway.”
Ellen’s mouth turned up wryly. She hadn’t had time to get really worried yet; Adrian had only been gone for an hour or so…
“But I don’t like the look of that at all,” she said suddenly.
A fin had just broken the surface for an instant, creamy off-white in the moonlight, with a little curl of foam to either side. Then it turned and bored towards the Tulip, the fin vanishing and nothing but a huge pale streak showing through the water, fading as it went deeper. She went to the rail and looked over. Then the whole ship lurched and shook, as if it had brushed over a rock…though she knew that there was nothing below but very deep water and the seabed. She dropped the half-eaten wrap and the coffee cup overboard with a yell as she pitched forward and the rail struck her across the waist and she started to topple. Cheba grabbed her by the back of her jacket’s belt and heaved backward, enough for her to stagger back to equilibrium.
“Thanks!” she said fervently. “Whatever that is I sure don’t want to go swimming with it!”
Eric came boiling out of the hatchway. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Peter came out of the deckhouse as she pointed to the other side of the vessel; the little ship had an effective autopilot. The fin showed again, and he leveled his binoculars.
“That is a big shark,” Cheba said. “A very big shark. There are sharks like that off Veracruz—one of my mother’s cousins saw them there and there was a picture in the newspaper of one that ate some touristas.”
“Uh, guys, are those things supposed to live around here?” Ellen asked.
“Fuck if I know,” Eric said. “That’s a big-ass shark, right? As in Jaws?”
“It’s a Great White,” Peter said. He let the binoculars hang on their strap, and his fingers danced across his tablet doing some impromptu research. “Ah…no, they don’t have them in the Black Sea. Not more than a few miles away from the Bosporus, at least.”
They all looked at each other. The children came out, sleepy in their pajamas, and the three adults made simultaneous preventative grabs as they headed for the rail.
“Hello, Maman!” Leon called, and he and his sister waved.
“Mierda,” Eric said.
“That’s Mom,” Leila said cheerfully. Her small, still slightly chubby face went abstracted for a moment. “She’s feeling…well, she’s a fish, she’s really funny when she’s a fish. It’s Maman, but not, you know? She said you have to be always careful with her when she’s a big fish.”
“Big fish just bite without thinking about it,” Leon amplified, reciting his safety lesson. Then he snapped his teeth together: “Chomp! Chomp!”
Peter began whistling a tune; after a moment Ellen recognized it as “Farewell, Ye Ladies of Spain.”
“Stop that!” she said.
“Okay,” he said equably and shifted to the theme from Jaws.
“Dammit, I know I started it, Peter, but my husband is in the water with that thing!”
“Except for this boat, we’re in the water with it,” he said soberly.
Eric smiled, or at least showed his teeth. “Or vice versa,” he said, and disappeared as the fin
circled, easily keeping pace with the ship.
The half burrito lay heavily on Ellen’s stomach. A few minutes later Eric emerged again, taking something wrapped in a length of plastic out of a sack of the same improvised-looking devices.
“Cousin of mine used to go midnight fishing for rainbow trout this way in Lake Bonito, over by Alamogordo,” he said. “That is one honking big fish, but the principle’s the same. I made up these on general principles ’cause we were on the water.”
He did something to the package, a jerking motion, shouted: “¡Oye, tu! ¡Puta! ¿Qué es tu pinche problema?” and threw it with a hard snapping motion that showed he’d played baseball once.
“Uh, Eric—” Peter began, as Cheba stifled a startled giggle. “Maybe that’s not—”
The fin darted away abruptly; then there was a muffled booming and the dark water behind the Tulip abruptly rose in a shattered bulge of white a dozen feet across. A huge pale shape tossed ahead of it, writhing.
The children winced and Leila put her hands to her head. “Ooooh, that hurt,” she said. “That really hurt, vraiment.”
“Maman is mad now,” Leon said. “Really, really…”
A grating sound came up the hatch from the engine room. Eric’s grin—shark-like itself—turned to alarm, and he dashed for the hatchway, swinging below. The three adults peered through the moonlit night, and something heaved below the water astern. Not a shark this time…but it was an even paler dead-white.
“Oh, that’s not right,” Peter said. “That’s just not right.”
“What is it?” Ellen asked; he had his binoculars to his eyes again.
They were a type with wide lenses, designed to trap the maximum amount of light, and as he put it unbuggerable, since there were no electronics.
“That’s a sperm whale,” he said. “Physeter macrocephalus.”
“You mean—”
“Moby Dick-style whale. The giant-squid-eater. An albino Physeter macrocephalus. Melville got the idea from the one that sank the whaler Essex in 1822 by ramming it with its head, that’s the way the bulls fight each other. That one was supposed to be eighty feet long and would have weighed about seventy tons, which is a bit less than half what this ship displaces—”
“Jesus, will you stop lecturing!” Ellen shouted, as a tall spout of water and air plumed into the air at a forty-five-degree angle from the huge pale bulk.
Immense flukes lifted and struck, and the sea fountained away from them. The noise of the diesels turned to a tooth-grating howl for an instant and then died away into grinding and clashing sounds, then silence. Eric reappeared.
“Cylinder blew. Freak accident,” he said bitterly, wiping at a grease-mark on his cheek. “What the—”
The stern of the ship heaved upward. Cheba grabbed a child, and Ellen did too. All of them were thrown to the deck with bruising force; Leila squealed, then called:
“Wooooopsie!” in a voice filled with innocent glee.
The Tulip heaved again as the great bulk rose close enough to the bow to throw a chaos of white water along its flanks and over the rail.
“Don’t worry, she won’t do anything that would hurt the children,” Ellen gasped as cold foam drenched her.
If she’s thinking straight. If not, she may be very sorry when she shifts back to human…humanoid…form after she’s smashed the boat and swallowed us all whole.
From what Adrian had told her and what she’d experienced while he was soul-carrying her, a nightwalker wasn’t just wearing an animal suit. The Power manufactured an aetheric body based on a DNA sample, from blood or a bite of flesh or any body fluid that had cells in it; adepts called it taking on the beast. You got the animal’s senses and strengths, but you also got a lot of its basic nature, and you had to think with its nervous system. The adept’s personality and memories remained, but they had to work through what the form provided and maintaining a sapient’s purposes could be hard in some of them.
That’s why she switched to the whale. Sharks have tiny little brains. They swim, and they eat, they make little sharks, as Peter would remind me. Cetaceans have big brains, they think better, especially the types with teeth. She probably memorized a note to herself: if anything strange happens and your tiny shark brain feels things are getting away from you, turn into a whale.
“Can you get the engine running again?” Ellen asked.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “I’ll take about an hour, with someone to give me a hand.”
“Look on the bright side,” Peter said. “That thing could smash the boat, but she doesn’t want to. And she’ll have to go away before dawn, or at least turn into something that breathes water and go deep. Whales don’t have hands.”
The white whale had dived; everything was silent for a minute, and Eric turned to go below again and begin his repairs. Then Tulip lurched again, more softly this time. The stern dipped and stayed down, as if a heavy weight had been attached to the keel at the rear.
“What the hell…Much as I hate to say it, maybe you should get another of those little explosive fishing devices,” Peter said.
“I’ve got plenty of them—” Eric began.
Something came over the side of the ship, rearing into the air like a giant questing snake. Ellen froze for a moment before she realized what she was seeing. It was a tentacle, three times the length of her body and thicker than her ankle. She stared at it wide-eyed and open mouthed until it fell like a living rope. Then she screamed, as it fell across her leg and the barbed hooks that lined it bit. The suckers gripped with agonizing force, and the living cable began to pull her towards the rail.
She tried to draw her revolver, but her eyes were streaming with the pain and the salt water that had surged across her face moments before, and she knew she was just as likely to shoot her own foot. Something flashed through that haze; it was Cheba and her silvered machete, hacking at the tentacle and screaming:
“¡Muérete, tú! ¡Pinche cabrona! ¡Muérete!”
That wasn’t just the needs of the moment. Cheba didn’t remember her time at Rancho Sangre very fondly. Something went click behind Ellen’s eyes; she had a weird sensation of feeling pain twice, in her leg and in her outstretched tentacle, of feeling her rage doubled and going both ways…
My tentacle? Do I have tentacles? Lots of them, and I’m seeing the ship from below, and the water’s too warm and the light hurts and…Oh, God, I so did not want ever to be touched by her again! And this is one of the reasons, the way it fucked with my head!
Cheba and Peter were hauling her back as the tentacle let go and whipped away. Eric took one look at her leg and started bandaging with skilled speed.
“Don’t knock me out!” she said, though the hypodermic he pulled out of the medical kit looked very tempting. “I am not going to be unconscious with that around!”
“It won’t, just takes the sting out at this dosage,” he said, a little indistinctly.
That was because he was pressing the bandage down with one hand and pulling the cap off the hypo with his teeth. He spat it to one side and administered the painkiller with brutal dispatch, simply jabbing the needle into the thigh of her injured leg through the pants. It was rough, but at this point she scarcely noticed the sting. She did notice the wave of relief; the pain didn’t go away, but it became a lot less important. With both hands free Eric finished dressing the wound quickly.
“Not as bad as I thought—” he began, then snatched up his coach gun and shot again, deafeningly right over her head.
She looked up and felt her mouth drop open. A mass of tentacles gripped the rail and slid forward like writhing black pythons to seize anchor-points, securing themselves with the adhesive suckers and the barbs and hooks that lined them. Something huge was pulling itself over and onto the deck, something like Cthulhu on steroids. Its glaring eyes were the size of bowling-balls a foot across, pupils like S-slits of blackness. The curved beak like a giant parrot’s gnashed in the midst of the whirling chaos, and the central mass w
as bigger than a bear, with weight enough to make the drifting Tulip heel and loose things slide and bump as they tumbled across the deck. Cheba was shrieking Spanish maledictions again and hacking as the tentacles came probing, and Peter was struggling with a shotgun and shouting as well. It took an instant before she realized he’d been shouting something in Latin:
“Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni! Colossal squid! Fifty feet long, weighs tons, fights sperm whales! Damn! Darn! Shit!”
Both barrels of the shotgun blasted silver buck towards the monster. Ellen realized the anesthetic was affecting her when she heard herself ask:
“You’re a physicist, Peter…why do you know the Linnaean names of giant squid?”
“It’s a hobby, it’s a hobby, die, you bitch, die!”
That was directed at Adrienne-the-monster-squid, not her: he fired again. There was another soundless blast of noise inside her head, and the tentacles abruptly withdrew like a video being played backwards. The colossal squid—something deep in her mind noticed how appropriate the name was—slid away, and the ship rocked upright again. A sudden silence fell, and they could hear the waves lapping against the hull beneath the brilliant stars.
“Wow!” Leon said softly; the children were clinging to each other near the door to the deckhouse. “Maman is really angry with you, Ellen! Not just playing!”
“I should get the engine going again—” Eric began.
Then the Tulip lurched once more. It felt different, more of a monstrous tugging. Noises came through the hull, as much felt through her body as heard, sharp metallic rending and crackling sounds and then something like a big taut wire breaking. Then a tentacle broke the surface again; it was hard to see by moonlight, but it seemed to be brandishing something. It flexed like a whip, and the object turned through the air and thudded into the forward mast with a heavy metallic clatter and fell to the deck. It was round and disk-like, a couple of feet across, lobed…
“Son of a bitch!” Eric shouted, then a long sentence in Spanish, then: “She twisted the fucking propeller off the shaft! So much for no hands, professor.”
Shadows of Falling Night Page 30