“She’s pretty … forceful,” I said.
“I didn’t expect Pa to hear about it and come down to the dock. And then…”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tragedy all around.”
* * *
We bucked the waves for another half hour, and then Lydia said, “Lights!”
Up ahead, the rain had stopped. A hole had opened in the sky, and the clouds rotated around that void. The eye of the storm. The water below gleamed with moonlight. The running lights of the Albatross were faintly visible on the far side of that clear patch of water.
“There something else out there,” Hallgrimsson said. He raised his binoculars. “A small boat. No, a raft, and there’s…” He lowered the binoculars, squinted, and raised them again. “There’s a person on it.”
I pushed past Hallgrimsson and stepped out of the pilothouse. I gripped the rail with both hands and forced myself to move toward the bow of the ship. Lub came up behind me.
“That’s her,” I said, though we were still too far away for me to see the figure on the raft clearly.
Lub said, “The Elders are here. Hundreds of them.” He pointed at the water, but I saw nothing but the gleaming surface. His eyes were so good in the dark.
“We’re not all like this,” Lub said. “The young ones of the First, we don’t want to—” He made a noise in his own language.
“Yeah, well, they don’t seem to be bothered by your lack of participation,” I said angrily.
Lub frowned, and his gills flapped tight to his neck.
The raft floated perhaps two hundred yards away now. I looked back through the rectangular windows of the pilothouse. Hallgrimsson was at the wheel, Lydia beside him—and now she held the binoculars.
“Get closer!” I yelled.
The pilot nodded. Then suddenly the boat lurched. I grabbed the rail again.
The engine had cut out. I’d grown unconscious of that diesel throb until it was suddenly gone. In the pilothouse, Hallgrimsson had his head down, doing something I couldn’t see. Lydia was saying something to him.
We’d stopped moving forward. The Muninn drifted sideways toward the raft, then backward. Lub and I ran to the back deck. The high stacks of lobster pots, strapped down with ropes, had somehow survived the wild trip without tipping over or sliding off the boat.
Through the windows at the back of the cabin, I could see Hallgrimsson’s hand moving on the control panel. “What’s wrong?” I called.
“Working on it!” he yelled. “The prop’s been fouled.”
The raft was farther away now. “Lub,” I said. “You’re going to have to swim to her. Can you do that?”
He grinned. The bandage gave him a jaunty, piratical look. “I can do that.”
“Can you do it?” a voice said. “Perhaps.”
A man-shaped figure seemed to pour over the top of the back rail. It straightened, and water ran from its dark gleaming coat.
“But may you do it?” the Scrimshander said. “That’s the question.”
21
Under the keel nine fathom deep,
From the land of mist and snow,
The Spirit slid: and it was he
That made the ship to go.
“Go get my mom!” I shouted, and shoved Lub away from me, toward the bow.
The Scrimshander moved so fast. In an eyeblink he was past me and upon Lub. He seized the boy by the back of the neck, then threw him against the wall of the pilothouse. Lub’s head smacked against a window, and then he slid to the deck, limp.
“We have rules,” the Scrimshander said. He looked down at Lub’s body and shook his head. “The First stay in the water. The humans stay on the land. Only a few of us are allowed in both realms.”
He twitched his fingers, and the long knife appeared in his hand like a magic trick. Perhaps a dozen feet separated us. The Scrimshander stood on the bow, and I was at the stern with the wall of lobster pots behind me.
“Soon, though, we’ll have new rules.” His smile, in the lights from the pilothouse windows, gleamed like a box of razors. “And new rulers.”
He walked toward me, gliding along the narrow deck. The tip of the knife flickered in the moonlight like a flame. “Urgaleth will soon be—”
The pilothouse door slammed open, into the Scrimshander.
Erik, son of Hallgrim, closed the door and planted himself between me and the Scrimshander. In his right hand he held Lub’s trident. “Get off my boat, Scrimshander.”
The creature looked surprised. His hand was empty now; the knife had been knocked from his grip. “Oh, northlander.” His sly smile returned. “I’ve always admired you. For your bone structure.”
Suddenly the wind roared, and the Muninn spun like a toy boat above a bathtub drain. I was thrown to my knees.
The Scrimshander lunged at Hallgrimsson and batted aside the trident. The two of them crashed to the deck. Hallgrimsson yelled, “Run, Harrison!”
I jumped to my feet and ran, skidding and swaying, to the other side of the boat. Lydia stepped out of the other side of the pilothouse, the wind whipping her hair, and pointed.
The water under the cloud break seemed to boil, churning with white tops. The Muninn was caught in the outer rim of a huge whirlpool, circling at great speed and rotating at the same time, like a spinning planet caught in the orbit of a sun.
The center of the whirlpool was a circle of smooth water like the center of a roulette wheel. The raft floated in that eddy, spinning slowly. Mom lay on it on her back, unmoving and seemingly unconscious. She still wore the clothes I’d last seen her in, two weeks ago. But her arms and legs were splayed, tied down. If the raft flipped, she’d drown.
I ran past Lydia, circling around the front of the pilothouse. The Scrimshander’s knife lay on the deck. I picked it up.
Lydia caught up to me. “Look!”
The Albatross was stationed well back from the whirlpool, Montooth standing at the bow. But that wasn’t what she was pointing at. Between the Muninn and the Albatross, on the outer edge of the whirlpool, the water seemed choked with fish.
No, not fish. Dwellers. Hundreds of gleaming bodies swam with the wheel-like current.
Lydia put her mouth to my ear. “Can you hear them?” she shouted. “They’re singing!”
Somehow, the strange pitch of their voices carried through the roar of the wind. I thought I recognized the song.
“It’s ‘Rise, Oh Rise’!” Lydia said. Right. One of the hymns from Voluntary.
The Muninn spun again, and my mother’s raft skidded into view, then just as quickly zipped away again. I looked at the knife, then jammed the hilt under the straps of my life vest. It would have to hold. Then I grabbed the rail and levered my non-meat leg up over the side.
Lydia grabbed the back of my vest. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve got to get out there!”
I looked down at the churning water. It was impossible to see below the surface.
“Help Erik!” I said. The Muninn spun like a compass dial. I hung on, and then the raft appeared, perhaps a hundred yards in front of us. My vision narrowed. The night curled in on me until I could see nothing but the raft and the length of water that stretched before me like a silver-black road.
I gripped the hilt of the knife, and jumped.
* * *
The freezing water crushed me like a fist. The cold squeezed shut my throat, burned my nostrils, roared in my ears. Then I popped to the surface and gasped.
I tried to take a breath, but my chest had seized up. My jaw felt like it was trying to grind my teeth to nubs. I pawed at my chest and was relieved to find the knife still there.
A wave carried me up, and I looked around frantically. The Muninn was less than ten feet from me. Then I spotted the raft, much farther away, and my mother, strapped to it.
Breathe, I told myself.
Swim.
Mom always said I could swim before I could walk. A real water baby. Somewhere, down at the muscle level, I must hav
e remembered something, because my arms churned, my legs kicked.
Don’t think about what’s under the water.
Waves slapped me in the face. The Muninn was somewhere behind me, the Albatross even farther out on the edge of the whirlpool, but I didn’t look for them. I blinked away the burning salt water and focused on the raft. I needed to power through the rough water at the edge and reach that smooth center.
Something tugged on my leg. I would have screamed if I was capable of moving my jaw.
Then I realized what was happening—my carbon-fiber leg was filling with water. I stopped swimming, letting the life vest hold me.
Detach the leg, Harrison.
But it’s really expensive.
Detach the leg!
Okay, but Mom will kill me.
The snaps were under my jeans. I bent at the waist, trying to reach my ankle, and dunked my face into the water. A strangled noise escaped me. There was no way I could lift the jeans high enough. I’d need to kick off my shoes, then peel off my jeans.
Or …
I pulled the knife free. With one arm I stabilized my position, then jammed the blade into the side of my “calf.” The blade tip stuck into the carbon fiber. I tugged upward, splitting the denim. A wave knocked me, and the blade jumped up almost to my knee.
Easy there.
If I hit meat, I’d bleed out in the water. Though I might not feel a thing in the cold.
I moved the blade down, across the point where the nylon strap should have met the plastic lock. I couldn’t tell if I was there or not; it was like trying to tie my shoes while being thrown around in a washing machine.
I reached down with my other hand and pulled. The leg resisted me, then popped free of my stump. I pulled it out from the leg of my jeans and let it go.
Goodbye expensive leg. Goodbye cheap shoe.
Where was the raft? The current was twisting me.
Many yards away, the Muninn lurched into view. The Scrimshander’s arms were wrapped around Erik. He’d lifted the man off the deck, and seemed to be squeezing the life out of him. A few feet away from them, Lydia stood with her feet apart, gripping Lub’s trident, but the man and the creature were too entwined for her to strike. Then just as quickly the tableau spun out of my view.
I couldn’t see the raft, but I could see the cloudless patch of sky at the center of the whirlpool. I’d aim for that. I pushed the knife into its makeshift scabbard in my vest and began to swim. A few seconds later, the Muninn came around again, farther away from me. The Scrimshander still had Erik locked in that bear hug. But then Hallgrimsson yelled, a war shout that carried over the water and wind, and brought his forehead down into the Scrimshander’s face. The creature released his grip on the man, stepped back—
And Lydia stabbed him in the spine.
The creature screamed—a high, gargling squeal. He bent almost backward, then twisted to face Lydia, as flexible as a snake. The trident was still embedded in his back. The Muninn slid away to my left. I spun to follow its movement.
The Scrimshander leaped toward Lydia, and then froze in midair, his arms outstretched in a strange paralysis. Then he began to levitate. His feet twisted in the air, and then he rose higher.
Hallgrimsson had grabbed the trident, and the Scrimshander was impaled on it like a fish on a fork. The lobsterman raised the creature above his head, and with a heave sent him flying over the rail behind him—away from me, thank God.
A thrill ran through me, a hot jolt of energy better than Aunt Sel’s tea. I turned about, spotted the patch of clear air. When the next wave came, I dove into it. I kicked hard with my meat leg, and then the buoyancy of the vest pulled me to the surface.
Swim. Don’t think.
Some time later I realized that the wind had ceased howling. I stopped and treaded water. The surface was as glassy as a lake, and the raft was only fifty feet away. It was a flimsy thing, just a bundle of logs barely wide enough to hold her. My mother’s face was turned away from me.
The voices of the Dwellers called across the water. The circle of black storm clouds still surrounded me, but the sky directly above was a deep, cloudless black, bristling with stars. The moon was a bright crescent. Tucked almost inside the cradle of the moon was a bright star that seemed to pulse with a faint green light.
The horned moon. And the star within its nether tip was the evening star—Venus, glowing with the Ashen Light.
I threw myself across the final yard to the raft. The fingers of my left hand smacked against the wood.
“Mom!” My voice sounded faint even to me. She didn’t move.
My every muscle shook. I’d never been so tired. I took a deep breath, then another. Still holding on to the raft with one hand, I let myself sink until my arm was almost fully extended. The black surrounded me. My brain suggested, in a reasonable voice, that I could just let go. Wouldn’t that be more relaxing? Suddenly frightened, I drew the blade and hauled myself upward.
I broke the surface, and the raft tilted toward me. I pulled myself a few feet out of the water, and before I could slip back I plunged the blade into the wood.
I hung there for what seemed like a full minute, clinging to the raft and the knife handle, breathing hard. Then I worked first my left shoulder, then right, onto the surface of the raft. I threw one arm over my mother’s stomach and used her body to climb up.
I lay beside her. The raft bucked and dipped, as if trying to throw me off. Her face seemed so pale in this light, her lips almost blue. I put my hand on her chest, just below her throat. She wasn’t breathing.
Don’t panic.
Her chest rose. Or else it was my hand that moved? I waited, my brain thudding, and then her chest rose again. She was breathing. She was breathing.
I went weak with relief and almost collapsed on top of her. But I had to free her before the raft tipped. Her wrists and ankles were tied to the timbers with thick ropes. I reached behind me, found the handle of the Scrimshander’s knife, and yanked it free.
I started with the rope binding her right wrist. The rope parted with an ease that made me newly frightened of that blade. I leaned across to her other wrist—and saw a shadow move over the water.
No, not over.
A shape rose out of the depths. The raft tipped up, and I plunged into the water.
* * *
The thing filled the sea below me. Its body was too big to see at once; I only sensed its size, the way the shadow of a mountain tells you of its mass. The body moved beneath me, a vast expanse of dark flesh just under my left foot.
And then it was past me. Still my limbs refused to move. I sank into the black depths, lungs burning, ears pounding.
And then, a sliver of light to the right, like the reflection of the crescent moon. I stared at it, and the crescent swelled, filled with white, and became an alabaster disk: the milk-white eye of the beast. The tentacles bloomed in front of me, then wrapped around themselves again, as if hugging themselves in excitement. The great eye drank me in.
I recognized it. And it recognized me.
The knowledge shuddered through me. This was the thing that had touched me. The thing that had taken my father. And it somehow knew that I was that child.
I should have felt nothing but fear. I should have sunk into the dark, or been swallowed by the beast. But then static roared in my head, and the black hole of rage I’d carried with me my entire life—that rage that I’d stoked ever since my mother disappeared—blossomed into something like heat.
I screamed at the creature. Or maybe not. Maybe that was a false memory generated by an oxygen-starved brain. Because how could I scream when I was out of air?
My paralysis, however, was broken. I kicked for the surface, and it seemed as if two legs propelled me. I swam blindly, instinctually, not sure if I was moving in the wrong direction. Then my face broke the surface, and I gulped air.
The raft was a dozen feet away. I took another breath, and swam to the raft, to her. My hands slapped against th
e wood, and this time I hauled myself onto it with idiot strength. The knife was gone. It must have been knocked from my hands when the raft tipped.
Mom was still unconscious. I got to my knees, scanning the water. The raft still stood in the center of a glassy lake. The Muninn still orbited at the edge of the whirlpool, along with the scores of Dwellers, their heads still visible, singing in those warbling, disturbing voices. Behind them, safely outside the whirlpool, was the white bulk of the Albatross. I could see a huge figure on its front deck: the Toadmother, taking in the show.
A hundred yards from me, the glassy surface of the water swelled, becoming a great dome. Then the shell cracked, and Urgaleth thrust upward. Water poured from its knuckled spine. Gripping its back was a lustrous oil-black blob the size of a man. It could have been some tumor, or a weird external organ—but somehow I knew that it was something that rode on Urgaleth, like a lamprey. Or a parasite.
Urgaleth had delivered its precious cargo. The Blood Pilot had made it to our world.
The bulk of Urgaleth surged toward the raft, and the black thing leaped from its back, or was flung from it. It seemed to glide through the air, flattening like a manta, a blot of deeper black against the star-fuzzed sky. Its arc would take it to the raft.
I cried out and threw my arm over my mother. Then the blob splashed into the water, inches short of the raft.
The wave of Urgaleth’s surfacing rose like a wall. The raft went near-vertical. I latched onto Mom, thankful that she was still tied down by three limbs, and then the front of the raft dropped, skating fast along the back of the wave. My mother’s free arm flopped like a bronco rider’s. I couldn’t do anything but hold on.
Another wave, smaller than the first, tossed us up. The raft bucked and slid, but did not flip. The next wave was smaller still. Were Urgaleth and the parasite gone?
I moved across my mother and felt for the ropes that held her left wrist. The knot seemed like a solid lump. I’d lost the knife. How was I going to free her?
The back of the raft dipped, and water splashed over my ankle. I glanced back.
Harrison Squared Page 22