‘So many,’ Ianthe said.
Paulus glanced round at her. ‘Do you sense the Haurstaf witches? Nera says they’re keeping them out to the rear of the armada. Two vessels, both frigates: the Warhorse and the Castle Sky.’
‘Those ships probably won’t engage,’ Howlish said. ‘They won’t risk losing psychics.’
Ianthe glanced at Nera, but the other girl wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘I’ll look for them,’ she said.
Ianthe cast her consciousness out and saw the armada as a bright patchwork of decks and sails and pools of ocean all hung in nebulous darkness. These were the collected perceptions of thousands of sailors and she raced through their minds, skipping from one to another like a vengeful spirit hunting for a body to possess.
But she could not find either psychic.
‘They’ve kept them away from the crew,’ she said.‘If nobody out there can see them, then I can’t. I don’t know which ships are which, I have to look for someone who’s alone, and . . .’ And just as she said it, she found someone who was apart from all the others. A solitary figure in a small cabin situated near the stern of one of the frigates. ‘I’ve found one,’ she said. ‘I think . . . it has to be.’
‘Find the other,’ Paulus said.
Ianthe sent her mind out again and a few minutes later she located a second person, similarly hidden from the sight of the crew. This passenger was located in a midships cabin of another frigate. Short of glimpsing them looking into a mirror, Ianthe had no way of knowing for sure if these two minds belonged to the Haurstaf witches she sought, but it seemed likely enough, as every other crewmember was in plain sight of another. She hurled her mind above decks, flitting through the ship’s crew. Was this the frigate she sought?
She couldn’t be sure.
Her assumption had to be good enough. Now that she had the position of the two witches, she could shuttle back and forth between their minds, ready to crush any psychic attack they might unleash against the Unmer.
‘Are we set?’ Paulus said.
‘I still don’t know which one of them is on our side, I don’t know who to—’
‘But you know where they are?’
She nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘Then kill them both if you have to.’
She was about to protest, but then stopped herself. It was best not to question Paulus in public. If it came to it, she would find a way to tell which one of her targets was the enemy. She’d have to.
The prince turned to his uncle and gave him a grim nod.
Duke Cyr held up the third of his patron’s sorcerous bottles. The glass glinted in the sun, and the tiny maggot within floated in clear liquid. ‘Once this begins,’ he said. ‘There’s no going back.’ He glanced at Howlish. ‘You know what you have to do?’
The captain nodded.
‘In that case, gentlemen,’ Cyr said, ‘let us proceed.’ He removed the stopper and flung the bottle into the sea.
Nothing happened for a few moments, and then a sudden cataclysm of light erupted in the watery depths ahead of them. For a heartbeat the whole ocean was awash with flickering amber luminance. Ianthe’s teeth thrummed. She thought she heard a high-pitched tone at the very limits of her perception, although she couldn’t be certain. Bolts of energy tore through the brine, fathoms down, turning from yellow to angry red. In those few moments it seemed to her that a great swathe of the ocean before her had turned to fire.
The sea became dark once more, and yet the event elicited a response from the imperial armada as ships immediately began to manoeuvre around the affected area, clearly anticipating some Unmer trick.
Paulus looked at his uncle.
‘It’s coming,’ Cyr said. Suddenly he pointed ahead of them to where a vast cloud of mist or steam had begun to rise from the surface of the waters. ‘There! You see the shift in entropy?’
‘Then it is Vadra?’
The older man nodded. ‘As we thought.’
Ianthe seized Paulus’s arm. ‘The worm?’
‘The Uriun,’ he said. ‘The Worm of Vadra.’
The sea ahead of them began to bubble furiously. And then an acre of surface swelled upwards suddenly, rising ten or more feet before collapsing back downwards and forming a great circular wave.
Ianthe clung to Paulus. ‘It’s vast.’
He grinned. ‘This is but a tiny piece of it.’
Howlish let out a growl. ‘Two degrees to port,’ he cried, signalling frantically to the helmsman to bring the ship’s bow more precisely into line with the oncoming water.
But there simply wasn’t time. The St Augustine’s bow pitched sharply upwards as the wave passed under her hull, and then she plunged down again. To port, the Ilena Grey’s mast tilted as she also rode the wave, her hull rocking sharply before settling.
The expanding circle of seawater passed beneath the armada without upturning any of Hu’s ships. They were still beyond cannon range, turning now to flank the two Unmer ships.
‘I would have expected a psychic attack by now,’ Duke Cyr remarked.
Paulus shrugged. ‘You think the other witch has turned?’
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’
From under the sea there came a series of flickering lights, as silent as a distant lightning storm. Ianthe could see a massive shadow down there, a mountainous ill-defined shape rising up towards the surface. It was pulsing with strange jellyfish luminescence, silent explosions of blue, green and red that spread across a great expanse of the sea. The sheer size of the thing afflicted her with awe. It seemed larger than the whole of the imperial armada.
And then suddenly it broke the surface.
A great mass of writhing coils appeared on the face of the waters. The creature was worm-like, but throbbing with colours that streamed across its darkly gelatinous skin. As it uncoiled, Ianthe first thought that she was looking at a great number of serpents, but then she realized that it was merely one creature with many heads and tendrils. They rose now above the sea, bursting up through the waves, dripping brine: hundreds of fat eyeless stalks, each with a vertical slit for a mouth, and each mouth glistening with tiny red teeth; and still hundreds more tentacles, slender and rippling with bright colours.
But then Ianthe noticed something odd about the creature. Its many heads and tendrils were, to different extents, translucent. While some appeared ghostlike, ethereal, others were more solid. As she watched it untangle itself and extend its reach across the steaming seas, it seemed to her that these lashing appendages left gaseous trails behind them, or else faded out entirely, only to reappear again, giving the overall impression of a mirage.
‘Why does it seem to blur and vanish in places?’ she asked Paulus.
‘The worm’s body loops through time as well as space,’ he replied. ‘The necks and tentacles . . . the . . . ah, you see there, the light shining through that cluster of heads? It is merely the same head revisiting the present moment many times over.’ He smiled. ‘It is one of several . . . unusual defences the worm employs. Such powers make it almost impossible to kill.’
She shivered.
He placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘We have nothing to fear from it,’ he said. ‘But we must be ready for reprisals.’
She nodded.
Several ships of the armada had turned to bring their cannons to bear on the Uriun, and Ianthe now saw a series of bright flashes from their scale- and metal-clad hulls. A moment later the air shook with multiple concussions. Crack, crack, crack. The Uriun shuddered and writhed amidst the drifting smoke, and yet the attack did not appear to harm it in any way.
Its tentacles had by now reached the first of the emperor’s ships – a galleon armoured in bright copper. The ghostly appendages wrapped around masts and yards, ripping through sailcloth and snapping rope. A larger tentacle coiled around the hull. Crewmen ran, screaming, to the quarterdeck. Rifles flashed. And then the creature pulled hard.
The galleon toppled and crashed into the sea. There was a great cracking o
f timbers, an implosion of foam and debris, and then suddenly the ship was gone, dragged under the boiling waters.
All around them other ships were being destroyed as the great worm’s tentacles reached further into the armada and smashed through vessels and dragged them down into the stinking brine. Its many mouths lashed out and seized crewmen and lifted them high, only to devour them whole and screaming. Larger it grew, and larger yet with each passing moment, until it seemed to Ianthe that its tentacles and necks filled an area of ocean much larger than the entire imperial armada.
Warships opened fire. Their shells and cannon shot caused no visible damage but only drew the Uriun’s glutinous arms towards the offending weapons. As the creature continued to destroy the emperor’s ships and dash them apart upon the dark waters, a queerly pregnant silence fell over the scene, punctuated now only by the occasional distant cry or cannon report. And then even those sounds finally stopped. Not a man of Howlish’s crew spoke.
The Uriun’s thrashing slowed and then it paused, as if finally sensing the quiet that had descended upon the ocean. And then, slowly, it began to coil itself inwards again. Thousands of tentacles and necks became hundreds and then scores and when it had shrunk to the size at which it had appeared from the depths, it slipped below the debris-choked waters and waited there several fathoms down, those odd lights still rippling across its flesh.
Where minutes ago the sea around them had been filled with ships, now nothing remained but a few scraps of wood and cork and sailcloth.
‘The Haurstaf didn’t attack,’ Ianthe said. ‘Even when that thing—’ She stopped suddenly.
Nera was sobbing into her hands.
‘You heard them?’ Ianthe said. ‘What did they say?’
‘They begged us to pull the creature back,’ she replied. ‘They begged.’
Paulus grunted. ‘By the time the Uriun got hold of their vessel,’ he said, ‘it was too late. They had moments left. A psychic attack against us would have been futile, vengeful at best.’
‘You betrayed them,’ Ianthe said. ‘You used them.’
He wheeled to face her, his expression hard. ‘This is war, Ianthe. We must use whomever we must.’
‘Including me?’ Ianthe said.
Her question stopped him. He stared at her for a few moments, then blinked and said, ‘Of course not. Ianthe, why would you think that?’
But she had already seen the glimmer of fear in his eyes.
‘We are not landing in the imperial palace,’ Ygrid said.
Siselo scrunched up her face and whined, ‘But it would be amazing.’
‘It would attract considerable attention,’ the dragon replied. ‘My decision is final.’
They had been flying all night through the freezing air. Conquillas’s daughter had wrapped herself in a woollen shawl, lashing it to the dragon’s alloy saddle hoops to form a sort of crude papoose. The garment had seemed woefully thin to Granger, and so he’d covered her with the remains of his cloak. Siselo had slept soundly enough, although he had endured a bitterly cold night hunched against the serpent’s spine.
Now he welcomed the warmth of the morning sunlight on his face. He could see the Anean coastline ahead of them and noted with satisfaction that Ygrid had not flown directly for the capital, but had brought them to a wild and unpopulated stretch of the country. Ahead, the land rose sharply from the sea, the steep slopes grizzled with forest but thinning to ochre grass and scree and bare rock higher up. Wisps of mist still rested in small bays and inlets along the shore or pooled in the valleys between the hills, but it was lifting fast. Clouds tumbled over scoured rock summits, ragged and cotton-like with pockets of blue sky showing through the greys and whites.
‘There is a mine up ahead,’ Ygrid said. ‘But the earth was spent many years ago and the road is hardly used now. I will set you down there.’
Siselo looked indignant. ‘Are we supposed to walk all the way to Losoto? How far is it?’
‘Eight miles,’ Ygrid said.
‘Eight miles!’ the girl wailed. ‘But that will take forever. Can’t you drop us closer, Ygrid, please?’
‘That’s fine,’ Granger said. ‘We’ll reach the capital by noon.’
‘But I don’t want to walk all that way,’ Siselo protested. ‘Why do we have to walk when we can fly?’
The dragon ignored her protests. She swooped over the tops of the waves and reached the shore. Her vast green wings rippled in a sudden wash of sunlight as she soared over the treetops, rising to follow the sweep of the land so close beneath them. Granger glanced back to see vortexes of mist uncoiling in their wake. The highest forest branches swayed. Now the rushing air carried the scent of blue pine and fresh rain.
Ygrid banked to her right and skirted the top of a forest ridge. The land below them fell away again. She turned left, now moving inland along a narrow valley through which a stream flowed. At the head of this valley, above the tree line, Granger could see a trail running east through a natural cleft in the hills. The rock walls on either side were peppered with rectangular mine entrances.
With a series of great thumps of her wings, the dragon landed on a broad scree-strewn slope before the cleft, rearing back as she did so. Then she crouched and allowed her two passengers to dismount.
Granger was grateful to have solid earth under his feet once more. He let his kitbag slide to the ground and stretched, trying to massage the pain from his neck and shoulders. His power armour hummed lightly and the engraved whorls on his boots began to alter subtly as they drew power from the very land itself.
Siselo walked a few yards up the slope, then turned to Ygrid. ‘What if I need to call you?’
Ygrid huffed oily fumes. ‘Then call me,’ she said. ‘But never for trivial reasons, child.’
‘How do I know what’s a trivial reason?’
The dragon lowered her head until her snout had almost pressed up against the girl. ‘Call if you are about to die,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, don’t.’
Granger frowned. ‘How can the girl contact you?’
Ygrid’s eyes narrowed on him. ‘There are . . . secret means. You need not trouble yourself with the details.’
‘It’s a whistle,’ Siselo said. ‘My father gave it to me. All the dragons nearby know to come when they hear it.’
Ygrid glowered at the girl and growled, ‘You are too quick to trust people, child.’
Siselo rolled her eyes. Then suddenly she grinned and ran forward and threw her arms around the serpent’s foreleg.‘Thank you for carrying us here, Ygrid.’
Ygrid grumbled and huffed and raised her head, tilted her chin to peer down at the child. It seemed to Granger that the serpent smiled. But then her expression darkened and she swung her equine face down again until her huge yellow teeth loomed before Granger like an impenetrable gate. ‘If any harm comes to her,’ she said. ‘You will answer to me, Colonel.’
Granger nodded.
Siselo was already making her way up towards the mine road, so he picked up his kitbag, slung it over his shoulder and followed her.
The Uriun accompanied the St Augustine and the Ilena Grey to Losoto. Ianthe could see the worm down in the brine below the two ships, a great dark mass that did not so much follow them as they approached the Anean peninsula, but rather grew to keep pace with them. By nightfall its shadow stretched behind them for as far as she could see, and also extended to port and starboard so that it seemed as if they were riding the crest of some strange undersea wave.
This is but a tiny fragment of it, Paulus had said. Any larger and it could easily devour the whole world. The worm that had grown so large around them now represented seven years of the full creature’s life. It was, Cyr explained to her, the part of the creature that had grown in the last seven years. Or would grow in the seven years to come. Ianthe wasn’t quite sure. But she understood it to mean that for every heartbeat during a particular seven-year period, the creature’s head or tentacles revisited this current moment in time – what Iant
he regarded as the present. The duke called the process recursion.
But you must not fear it, he said. For it will always obey its creator’s will.
The sight of the monster had so overwhelmed Ianthe that she had taken to watching their progress from the St Augustine’s bow, where the winds filled her lungs with clean cold air from the north. And so she was there the next morning when the lookout sighted land, gazing out at the grey horizon and warming her hands around a mug of tea.
Paulus must have heard the cry too, for he joined her shortly afterwards. He was clutching the fourth of Fiorel’s ichusae, the bottle filled with amber gas. He rested a hand upon her shoulder, but Ianthe thought the gesture seemed forced. There was a nervous tension between them that she sought to alleviate.
‘Do you suppose it gets cleverer each time?’ she asked him. ‘The worm, I mean.’
‘Cleverer?’ he said. ‘In what sense?’
‘When a future head revisits the past,’ she said. ‘It will have two minds.’
‘Being in possession of two minds does not grant a creature more intelligence,’ he said, ‘particularly when they are both the same mind at different times in that creature’s life. It would be wise beyond imagining, however, if Fiorel had given it the capacity to acquire wisdom.’
‘It can’t acquire wisdom?’
‘A pack of dogs can’t learn to read any better than an individual dog.’
For the rest of the morning they sailed on with the Uriun beneath them and by noon they could make out a great white city on the shore of the Sea of Lights. Losoto was larger than any city Ianthe had seen before, although most of it appeared to be flooded. Acres of partially submerged buildings sat in shallow water. Most were mere shells, roofless and window-less, with their foundations steeped in brine and their walls crusted with brown ichusae crystals. The streets between them had become canals. East of this there loomed a massive industrial building, the city harbour, and an ugly stone fort situated atop a rocky promontory. The harbour was empty of ships. Not even Losoto’s fishermen had elected to stay.
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