The diamond raced after the swarm, but the swarm matched its pace. The gem would never catch up. Well, they’re fast enough.
The enchantress jumped too late. The Fanged Typhoon ripped through the air, leaving afterimages of green magic. Never before had the dark hue of mossy sapphires so unsettled her. Hiresha had the piercing feeling that she would be drowned in needle teeth, but she jumped clear of the deadly shoal except for her legs.
The enchantress willed the fish not to bite her. Some overcame her Repulsion magics, and their teeth felt like a sharp wind. Her calves came away torn, and one toe was gone. The pain lanced up her legs a second later.
Hiresha started closing her wounds with magic while bombarding the shoal with crocodile teeth. The supernatural speed of the fish made her miss. She had to launch her diamond so far in front of the swarm that they always saw it and dodged.
The Fanged Typhoon crashed over a winged boat, a mirror image of The Roost crafted by Tethiel. The swarm tore the illusions of people aboard to shreds of shadow.
Hiresha Attracted a sphere of water from the sea. It glowed like rose quartz when she placed her jewel in it. When the swarm charged her, she hid behind the sphere. Some of the deadly shoal swam through it in their hunger. Those that did were crushed against the diamond, their fish bones cracking. She leaped away from the rest.
And fell into the arms of the Murderfish.
The enchantress had expected the kraken to seize her when she appeared vulnerable, when she was far from her jewel. She was the one succeeding, the one in control. Nonetheless, seeing tentacles spring from the sea with red suckers the size of dinner plates was hardly conducive to tranquility.
A spark of lightning traced a jagged line downward from the storm. Hiresha’s mind moved faster.
The Murderfish reached to seize her with an arm on its right side. That won’t do. The spellsword’s spear was also on that half of the kraken. The enchantress wanted to be captured by arms on the opposite side, so she would puncture the most organs when she ripped out the spearhead.
The lightning touched the sea then exploded upward in a crimson bolt. Now bright as sun fire, it scoured its way back its prior path to the cloud.
The enchantress Attracted herself backward toward her diamond. She thumped into another waiting arm of the kraken. Left side. Much better.
Suckers sealed on her, and her dress and skin bowed outward. She clamped her hands on the arm, pushing her mind and magic up along its length. Soon she would sense the enchanted spearhead.
The Murderfish dove with her, away from the Fanged Typhoon. Its skin would be invisible to the deadly shoal. The water turned from clear to black with their depth. A shock wave still reached them with the thunder’s boom.
The tentacle tried to crush her. Hiresha had the resilience of a dreamer. Her will pushed against the kraken’s. As it compressed her ribs Hiresha’s magic pulled her bones outward with equal force.
The enchantress’s toughness had its limits. A kraken’s beak, Hiresha judged, would shear her in half. Tentacles billowed aside to reveal the black razors in question. The beak clacked, one side sliding over the other. It looked like a cockatoo’s, if that innocent creature had its mouth ringed by warty muscle and dribbling with blue-fluorescent venom.
Globules splattered Hiresha’s leg, and her reality shook. It’s antimagic. Her mental grip slipped. Helplessness and terror resonated through her in a sickening echo. Doom. Doom. Doom. Even as she regained focus and searched further in the kraken for the spearhead, she knew something was wrong. She sensed that somewhere an enchantress wearing a blue dress was in even greater danger.
I have to hope I’m in the real side of the dream inversion now. And what a handsome reality it is.
Suckers undulated out of the way. The beak stretched open, and Hiresha glimpsed a tongue serrated with black blades. Spikes protruded from the reaching mass of muscle.
The enchantress’s mind had penetrated the kraken. She reached across its net-shaped brain, its venom sacs, its water reservoir and gills, to its right-side heart, where she knew the spearhead to be.
It was not there.
Bubbles hissed from her mouth. She changed her mind with a screaming wish. Fate Weaver, hear me! Let the blue dress be real.
The spearhead was not near the heart she expected. It nestled above the leftmost one. Each thud pressed a wall of muscle against a cyst, and inside the fluid-filled pouch was a copper spine etched with rose designs. So slender and sharp, the weapon would not have made much of a scar. The web-shaped wound must have come from another fight.
At the least, I’ll leave a scar.
Hiresha ripped the spearhead out of the kraken sideways. Since she could only Attract the metal toward her, she missed most of the organs. The spearhead journeyed down the tentacle that held her, splitting the arm into halves and building speed.
The kraken’s skin flared with vermillion pain. Its surface puckered outward with scarlet horns. Seeing the creature’s torment did not fill Hiresha with triumph. At most, she felt relief along with a weight of sadness. She wished two sentient species did not have to battle.
What cruel creatures we are.
Her feelings of regret ended with a dousing of blue venom. The antimagic was as bright as liquid sky. Except that all her power boiled out; her eyes burned, and she could not breathe.
The tentacle she had mutilated still held her, and she waited every second to feel the bladed sides of the beak chopping off her head, the impaling spines of the kraken’s tongue. Hurry, would you? Or is a mercy killing utterly outside your repertoire?
The enchantress hoped first that death would release her from this nightmare. As spasms of air hunger ran up her chest into her twitching throat, she had a new thought. Maybe I should live, to be safe.
The Murderfish might’ve forgotten me. It’s in pain. I pull free of the sucker, and I swim away.
Her mind had fogged, and she could not tell if her thinking was sound. Pushing against the arm did nothing. Suckers had her by the dress and legs. So she flailed. She beat at the trunk of muscle.
Something gouged her hand. It’s the beak! Now I’ll lose my limbs one at a time.
But nothing more happened. She still could feel both arms. She had hurt herself on a metal point half-embedded in flesh. The spearhead. This she worried free. She stabbed at the suckers holding her, at their center where they connected to the arm.
With a squelching sound, one sucker let go. The other proved harder either because of the bucking of the tentacle or Hiresha’s desperation for air. She slashed and gouged with a frenzy, not knowing what she hit.
She floated free.
I shouldn’t swim into the other tentacles. But she could not think where they might be. She kicked through the cloudy waters toward light. Somehow, nothing grabbed her. Somehow, the surface was not as far away as she feared.
She breathed in, and her mouth filled with the tingling bitterness of venom.
It had not been the surface but a pool of bright toxins. She had swum the wrong way.
She spat venom. The Murderfish meant this to happen. It’s torturing me right now, and I won’t give it satisfaction.
The enchantress spread her arms and drifted. She had no magic, no hope.
She was also drowning, and the salt searing into her throat and lungs took away any chance of dying with dignity. Her arms pumped, and her legs kicked against her will. She hated herself for it. She was too deep to reach the surface. She knew it. Don’t even know which direction the surface is.
She broke free of the cloudiness and breathed again. It was still water, but clearer. Bubbles twirled by. She followed them. Bubbles don’t go down, do they?
A redness grew in her vision, spreading through the water in waves of light. My diamond? She reached out to it, grasped nothing.
Darkness folded around her. Her perception shortened to flashes. Three bubbles spinning around each other. A worm with red suckers was going alone out to sea. A hand closing o
n her arm. The flash of abalone shell.
Hiresha vomited water and gasped air.
She opened her eyes, found herself sprawled over the railing of The Roost. Tethiel pulled her, and Emesea pushed her in.
The warrior jumped aboard after her. “Did you kill it? The kraken? The poor beauty.”
“I don’t—” Hiresha spit and spluttered. “Don’t know.”
Emesea said, “She left an arm behind. You butchered it.”
Tethiel scratched away the hair from the enchantress’s eyes. Half of him lit red from lightning bolts. “The kraken is either dead or fled.”
“Is the storm near?” Hiresha heard rain, then thunder. She tried to sit up.
“Yes, a typhoon.” Emesea pushed the enchantress down.
Hiresha had seen it. The deadly shoal. The multitude of hungry mouths.
“Tell them, if you can,” Emesea stood over the enchantress.
“What should we tell?” Tethiel asked. He was pushed beside Hiresha at the bottom of the boat.
“That this dragon stood a thousand to one.”
The warrior squared her shoulders with the sound of incoming rain. Sunrise tinted the feathers above her in the sail. The daylight peeled away the opal sheen from her armor. Light dispelled illusion, leaving it the color of bloody mud.
Climbing from a whirlpool was not difficult. It was impossible.
Enchantress Hiresha would have preferred to live her life in ignorance of that fact. Clinging to a wet thread above a caldera filled with distilled essence tempest, she had to confront certain realities. Or unrealities, she hoped.
The rope curved with the flow of water, so Hiresha could not pull herself up and out, only around. With the current pressing against her, she made the most headway skimming on the surface with kicks. That effort gained her nothing. She slid further down the funnel with the rope because the barge was now caught in the sea vortex.
Grooves slanted down the whirlpool like roads cut into a valley wall. The boat spun sideways along one of these tracks of water. The rope had dragged it in.
Hiresha may have lost her acuity, but even she could see that it was hopeless. She clung to the rope and closed her eyes, willing an end to this travesty. Her efforts to save Emesea had also failed. Hiresha had thrown a length of rope to the spot where the warrior had disappeared in the seething magic. No one had grabbed a hold of it.
“Hiresha!”
Surprise forced her eyes open, and she saw Tethiel swimming to her. A grid of white scars crossed his chest. He wrapped her arm around his neck and started struggling to paddle his way straight up the liquid slope.
But you can’t swim, she wanted to say.
His hands scooped a frenzy of water. A memory skipped through her mind about a dream storm curing his fingers. A desperation of heat wafted from him, and they did not sink further in the whirlpool. With her help they may have even gained ground.
A dragon sliced past. The entity of opalescent scales and azure frills paid them as little attention as any of the fish caught in the current. One peach-colored specimen rolled fin over fin, and a school with black-and-white stripes looked lost.
The barge slid into view. Hiresha could not believe they would reach it, but Tethiel drove them against good reason. She grasped the mussels on the side of Pharaoh’s Wisdom. Tethiel pushed her aboard, and Hiresha hauled him in after her. She did not feel relieved, only baffled.
“Have to cut the rope.” He picked up a dropped obsidian axe. He took one step then collapsed.
Hiresha wondered if the exertion had killed him. She had always measured the Feaster’s strength of will greater than his strength of arm. Well, another reason that this is the less likely facet of my dream inversion.
He still had a pulse. The relief she felt was all too real, and she hated to disappoint Tethiel, even a falsehood of him. She picked up the axe.
“The rope’s enchanted.” Gold wire glinted up at her. “I can’t break it.”
One of his eyes flickered open. “The railing, my heart. You must live.”
The enchantress hacked through the seaweed-encrusted railing of the barge. The rope whipped away. The boat maintained its pitched course down the whirlpool. Hiresha glanced at the sails but knew it was too late to change their heading. The skewing boat slid Tethiel against her, and they both gazed to the base of the funnel. They would crash into the emerald maelstrom.
He gripped her hand. She did not want to look at him. Involving herself any more in this falsehood would only worsen the pain. A sensation of drowning caused her to choke, and she glimpsed a woman in red dying. She was floundering in water obscured by kraken blood.
My true self! With a jolt of clarity Hiresha heard the red-dressed enchantress hoping the other facet was real. Hiresha clenched the sodden folds of her blue dress. She felt as if a gem-carving chisel was hammered between her ribs, a coldness of metal in her chest. She wrapped her arms around Tethiel and held on.
They both gasped when tentacles wrapped around the boat. Iris-hued eyespots moved over a hide of tangerine. Skyheart was trying to tell her something, but the only pattern she caught was “dragons.”
The kraken hefted the barge out of the whirlpool, and Hiresha felt cloud-soaring relief. Sobbing, she reached out and touched Skyheart’s arm. A ring of pigment moved beneath her fingers, and the marvel of it all caught her breath. When the boat sat level on the sea, she wobbled to her feet.
“Skyheart, my friend fell into the wild magic. Could you—Skyheart!”
The kraken’s suckers slurped away from the boat, and Skyheart dipped underwater, her colors smearing out of view. Only then did Hiresha realize she had shouted. She had lost the diamond dust she needed to speak with the kraken.
“She can’t hear me.” Hiresha’s voice sounded dead.
“Words…” Tethiel wheezed. “…are perfect playthings but useless for communicating.”
The whirlpool shrank then disappeared into flatness. A wave flowed outward against the barge. Sky skates soared into the underside of the thunderstorm then dove out again. Deep below them, the sea mount fumed green. It looked every part a magical volcano.
Hiresha assumed that Skyheart must have told the dragons to bathe in the power. The enchantress imagined the serpentine creatures drinking in magic, the storm above darkening and growing into a cloud more massive and powerful than a kingdom. She thought it peculiar that something might yet go as planned.
Her hand jerked to her lips. “The flood! I have to warn Oasis City, and I can’t fly.”
“Can’t you?” Tethiel touched the gems implanted in her cheeks and her brow. “Where has your spark gone?”
The diamonds in her face might as well have been gravel. Their enchantments had died. She tried to reach out to her dream power. She only felt sleepy. Pacing across the deck grew too wearisome, and she slumped against the mast. Her hair blew in black fans across her vision.
Her locks fell slack when the wind softened. The thunderstorm broke apart into white clouds. The feeling of wrongness in Hiresha climbed to an even more shrill pitch. A lone sea serpent raced away toward the horizon.
“Where did the other dragon go?” Hiresha glanced to the seamount. Its summit no longer glowed. “What—”
Tethiel pulled the enchantress behind the barge’s canopy. She was about to demand an explanation when the boat quivered. Redness splattered across deck boards.
A dragon’s head rolled over the barge. Its eyes were milky. Its neck frill folded and wrinkled like so much loose skin. Strands of muscle and sinew dangled from the stump; this was no clean cut. The head looked like it had been ripped off the dragon. Why would Skyheart do that? Hiresha could not believe it.
The boat tipped. Hiresha's primal terror felt like an insect digging its legs and pincers into her brain.
A creature crouched on the railing. Her eyes were the green of fireflies in a dark wood. Her hair was a black current in the deep sea. Her face resembled Emesea’s. But, no. A cliff of pitted stone could l
ook more human, that crag like a nose, that cleft a mouth, that overhang a brow.
The being had a smear of lapis lazuli across her chest. Its color matched that of Emesea’s tattoo. The being wiped it off and flicked the blue slime onto the dragon’s blood. When she spoke, her voice sounded of tigers roaring, boulders grinding, monsoons gusting, and thunder echoing.
“The dragons wronged me.”
Those eyes of green sunbursts now gazed on Hiresha. The enchantress’s knees gave out. Only Tethiel held her upright.
“You wronged me,” the creature said. Something crossed over her face that almost looked like human confusion. “How? What could you have done to me?”
Tethiel squeezed Hiresha’s arm and shifted his chin side to side. Even without his warning, Hiresha was not about to remind this being why she should be angry. The enchantress understood that wild magic had changed Emesea into something feral. Even as Hiresha feared the being, she pitied her. It was Emesea who saved me from this.
Emesea’s lips drew back from her crooked teeth. The expression was anything but a smile. “You think to look at me?”
She stormed over the boat toward Hiresha. Boards cracked. Poles splintered, and the canopy of mangrove branches flew away. The enchantress had only time to think she should jump overboard when Emesea was lifted off her feet.
The air around her had a fishhook sticking out of it. Skyheart had grabbed the being.
Emesea slashed and clawed with a fury.
Gouts of blue blood came from the sky. Tentacles appeared, crimson with violet eyespots. The kraken held Emesea, but it looked as easy as holding a tornado of jagged rocks. She ripped off one of Skyheart’s arms, and the limb continued to flop and coil on its own between the waves.
Hiresha gaped in shock. Tethiel pulled at her, saying something about sailing the barge away.
“No, I have to help Skyheart.” Hiresha had one foot on the rail before she remembered her powerlessness. Once again she tried to reach for her dream magic but only felt emptiness. “Swim away, Skyheart. Throw her off and escape.”
Dream Storm Sea Page 25