Dream Storm Sea (13 page)

“There appears to be a white circle of water ahead of us.” Hiresha found herself scooting back into the rear of the boat.

Tethiel rested a hand on his head, perhaps to stop his wig from flying off. “How terrified should we be?”

The boat skid to the side as a dark wave passed. The sea ahead turned like soup stirred in a bowl. Foaming crests spiraled from a center of whitewater. Mist whirled into the air in the beginnings of a vortex.

20

Walls of Wind and Storm

A vine of vapor grew from the sea, a waterspout. Waves spiraled from it and pushed the boat away, while the rush of wind pulled the seafarers back toward the funnel. It had a skirt of mist churning around its base. Hiresha expected the waterspout would tear
The Paragon
apart, despite the boat’s grand name.

Emesea laughed louder than the wind. She pumped an oar upward and shouted. “There they are! Sky skates.”

Fins circled around the cyclone and upward. Between the blue flippers, spines of yellow stuck out from the waterspout.

Hiresha could not imagine what manner of sea creature would swim in a cyclone. Then she saw one turned on its side. A kite-shaped creature with a whip tail, it flapped its body and wove back into the revolving column of air.

“Stingrays,” Tethiel said.

“No. Sky skates.” Emesea dipped an oar and started turning the boat.

“Not so frightening,” he said.

“They’re mating in the air.” Emesea winked at Tethiel and punched him in the shoulder. “Think of that ride. Too cold for men, maybe, but not for me.”

He lost his balance and tumbled to the side of the boat. Whether he gagged in jest or in true sea sickness, Hiresha could not say. She gripped the tails of his coat lest he fall overboard.

“I would swim into it,” Emesea said and nodded to the funnel, “but that would be leaving you two blind baby bats alone.”

“Into a tornado?” Hiresha asked. “That can’t be the reasoning of a sound mind.”

Emesea snorted. “You’re such a soggy rag. Bet you’ve never even danced in a rain puddle.”

“This hardly compares.”

“Listen to the wind. It’s not screaming. Not even blowing fast enough to pull a hair from a jaguar’s rump.”

Hiresha had to admit that she could still hear other people speaking. She was no expert on tornadoes, but she guessed the violence of a true one would have stopped Emesea from rowing around it with such ease.

“Want to hear a real tornado?” Emesea asked. “Remind me to call for my dragon.”

“We can live without that,” Tethiel said, his face green and blotchy.

The boat rode the waves around and away from the waterspout. With Emesea facing backward to row, her heart-stopping smile warned Hiresha to look behind. And above.

The funnel was leaning. Fins sawed around its length. The waterspout narrowed at its base, stretched, then burst at the top. Hundreds of sky skates flew along the underside of the cloud. They trailed lines of condensation. The flock of fish cut a corkscrew pattern through the air.

Emesea hollered after them. She jumped and tipped the boat.

Clinging to the planks, Hiresha said, “Quiet! You told me to tell you. Be quiet.”

Thumping back to her seat, Emesea said, “So the storms closed. We’ll have to sail around.”

If
The Paragon
had ever had a chance to slip between the essence tempests, the detour for the waterspout had stolen it.

Within the rolling sea, streams of silver fish coursed. Countless sardines surged and swarmed, boiling at the surface of the water. Flocks of birds dove after them, and their wings transformed underwater into fins. The birds swam. When beaks reached for the sardines, that section of the shoal solidified into a metallic wall.

“Emesea,” Hiresha said, “tell me the names of the fish. On the off chance I survive I wish to have learned something.”

“That sleek darling is a great platehead.”

Emesea would point out many other creatures on the voyage but few so massive. The magic defenses of the sardines proved no match for a giant with bony growths on its brow. Its finned tail blasted froth. The great platehead rammed the swarm, breaking off pieces and sucking them into its rocky jaws. The sardines caught alone were snatched up by the swimming birds.

Hiresha crouched in the boat, trying to look as untasty as possible.  Above the mayhem of life and magic, the dream storm dyed the air green. It swayed and pulsed closer.

Emesea’s hands were lined with tendons. Her oars flicked into the water then rose again with streaming arcs of droplets. With every stroke, the boat jerked to a faster speed until they started overtaking waves.

When
The Paragon
had cleared the storm’s surf, Emesea bounded up to attend to the sail. Hiresha noticed blood on the oar handles.

The enchantress cut two strips out of the red dress with the obsidian knife. A squirt from the waterskin washed the fabric for a clean bandage.

“You’re relentless to a fault,” Hiresha said. She motioned Emesea to yield up a hand for treatment. The enchantress dabbed the wound then pulled a bandage tight. She knew it would pain Emesea, but the woman did not even blink. “Does eating fish from the sea make you so robust?”

“Ha! A little magic is enough to harden the cocks of nobles, but true strength comes from something else. You want to hear?”

“Actually, I’m losing interest.”

“Philosophy.” Emesea tapped her salt-crusted temples.

That’s certainly not the answer I expected.

“People dodder through their lives afraid they’ll hurt someone, probably themselves.” Emesea wrapped her bandaged hand around the enchantress’s neck and pulled her closer. “A warrior grabs life by the throat. She holds nothing back. You have to risk everything, or you risk more.”

“There’s truth in that nonsense.” Tethiel tilted his head as if unsure what he had just said. He sat on a bench in front of the mast, trying to grip an oar between both hands.

Hiresha tied off the second bandage. She said, “Then, Madam Warrior, don’t use your hands for the rest of today, and keep these clean.”

“Uh-huh,” Emesea said as she watched a school of rainbow mackerel go by. She dunked her hands in the bilge water, pulled out the fish net, and threw it overboard. The water lit with dazzling lights from the trapped fish.

The enchantress shook her head.

“Hiresha,” Tethiel said, lifting an oar, “I need you to tie these to my arms. We have a longer way to go to shore.”

“An impressive request.” Hiresha wrapped rope around an oar and his wrist. His face had a strange expression, in that it had one. Most often he wore a mask of indifference.

“I shouldn’t have eaten that fish. A Feaster’s appetite is best kept keen.” He could not seem to stop his face from shifting from a boyish smirk to teeth-clenched alarm.

Hiresha looped the rope around itself then frowned. “Emesea, would you check my knotting?”

“Whoa!” Emesea strained against the net. “Did I catch a dead-weight fish?”

Tethiel inhaled with a hiss. “It’s the—”

The rope tore out of Emesea’s hands. A bandage ripped. She spun around, whisking her sword up to the ready.

“—Murderfish.”

21

Ill Company

The sky gripped the mast, tipping the boat. Emesea leaped. Her swing was a sweep of obsidian.

The green shimmer of the dream storm reached forward and smacked the sword from the warrior’s hand. The weapon spun into a wave then began to sink.

The warrior yanked her knife from her belt and dove into the sea.

Who jumps into the kraken-infested waters with only a knife?
Hiresha could not help but think it.
How is that a possibility?

The Paragon
capsized, and the touch of the sea electrocuted Hiresha with fear. Her skin crawled and burned, knowing that any second an unseen tentacle could constrict her.
Scarce little I can do about it.
Awake.

“My heart.” Tethiel stood atop the boat, the half above water. He held a length of oar to her.

She gripped it. He pulled, and she clambered to the top of
The Paragon
. Their combined weight tilted the boat. Tethiel and the enchantress gripped the side until their craft was righted.

Emesea was swimming after her sword. Ducking under a wave, she reached towards its shaft. The weapon scooted away as if towed by an unexpected current.

The Paragon
now held a tide-pool of water, complete with a few of the rainbow mackerel. Hiresha waded in, leaned back. She bobbed with her eyes closed, and water stung her nose with salt. She descended her mental stairway toward sleep. Sea foam cascaded down the steps. It did not stop her.

Inside the dream laboratory, Intuition was hiding behind the operations table. She said, “Oh, we wish we had a fox to hug. Wait, no! We wouldn’t want Mister Black Whiskers trapped with us.”

The enchantress channeled the water from the boat then regarded a mirror. Now she could see the Murderfish’s arms. Its skin shifted from the greyish blue of the sea to the blue-white of the sky, with pigments even mimicking the shapes of birds flapping in the distance.

“Its camouflage is perfect and perfectly dreadful,” Hiresha said.

She guessed the only parts of the Murderfish visible to her waking eye would be the stray fishhooks stuck in its skin, blurry lines on its hide that could have been scars, and perhaps its eyes.

Hiresha held a garnet pin between her fingers. She had Attracted it from the boat planks. “The difficulty is,” she said, “I can think of no enchantment that would do more than anger the Murderfish.”

“Have the pin turn flesh to poison.” The Jeweled Feaster appeared in her mirror standing atop the beached carcass of a kraken, a black sword half buried in its flesh. “Then give it to Tethiel and shove him over. When the Murderfish eats him, it’ll die.”

“First of all, no,” Hiresha said. “Second, this garnet could not hold an enchantment of that complexity.”

Hiresha settled on an enchantment of desiccation. It would kill a man. It might scar a kraken.

Soon as she awoke, fear returned with a reek. The scent was a noxious fume of seaweed, an eye-smarting of salt, and a burial in fish. To breathe it was to choke.

Mackerel flopped in the bottom of the boat. Hiresha squatted and saw the warrior swimming once again to her sword. Emesea’s arm snapped out of the water to grasp it. Her fingers touched the haft.

The weapon plunged from her grasp.

Hiresha struggled to draw in breath to call out. “The Murderfish is pulling it away.”

“She’s a trickster, ain’t she? Wish I could see how long her legs are. And how shapely. Ha!” Emesea peered down as she treaded water. She dropped below the surface, either from a fast dive or a tentacle pulling her under.

“My heart, open the sail.” Tethiel was heaving back on the oars. “Let’s leave Eme and her sea monster.”

“The sail won’t help us.” Hiresha knelt in the back of the boat. The rope that led to the net in the water was taut. Hiresha touched it, felt the quivering tension. “We’re being held.”

Hiresha started to turn to find a way to cut the rope when she saw it. A mouth hung above the water, a wide black slit in the blueness. Its size resembled a shark’s grin lunging for her. Except it had no teeth, only a glistening emptiness. And it was attached to no body she could see.

The horizontal void widened. Only then did Hiresha realize.
It’s a pupil.
She was staring eye to eye with the Murderfish.

She had never seen such an inhuman eye. It strained belief that it could even belong to something living. Hiresha felt the sea itself watched her. She felt judged. Malice flooded over her.

The enchantress flung her garnet. The pin flashed as it turned end over end.

Let it hit. Let the Murderfish be blinded.
Hiresha had spotted but a single eye.

The pin arced toward the pupil. The garnet dropped below. It landed in a wave and made not even the ripple.

“Confound!” Hiresha had misjudged the distance. The eye was further than she had thought.
And bigger.

The black bar of the eye had shifted downward to regard the pin. It gazed back up at the enchantress. Then it disappeared in a splash.

The sea rose and sagged as the kraken moved beneath. Hiresha’s insides squirmed.

Tethiel choked off a gasp. “Hiresha!”

The oars jerked vertical, hauling Tethiel above his seat. His arms stretched outward, roped to the oar butts. He was being held like a puppet in the hands of a cruel child. His legs pumped and twisted in agony.

Hiresha heard the rip of fabric.
The Murderfish will tear his arms off.

She raced to one oar, reaching up to try to slip the rope from the end. The boat canted, and she fell against the wooden pole. The sea held it so tightly that it might as well have been imbedded in a castle’s foundations.

Tethiel made a throaty sound of pain, and he fell down as one oar was pulled away. Hiresha glanced up, expecting to see a dismembered arm or at least a bloody hand. The rope hung loose on the oar. Her knot had come undone, and she thanked the Fate Weaver for her poor tying skills.

He was dragged overboard. Hiresha flung herself after Tethiel and caught his bare foot. His arm extended, and the rope slipped off the end of the submerging oar.

“Ha!” Emesea shouted. Her hand had closed on her sword. “Wait. Feels squishy.”

The weapon lunged from the water to smack the warrior in the face. Then it disappeared into thin air. Emesea laughed and knifed the sky.

“Teach you to toy with me!”

The black blade vanished to the hilt, and Emesea was carried out of the sea. The warrior grappled and yanked on her knife. It opened a rent that sprayed a fluid, blue as paint. The liquid splattered into the sea and sank in jiggling globules.

It’s blood,
Hiresha realized.
‘The spirit of the sea,’ indeed.

The warrior had stuck the kraken. There was no roar. The sea only churned.

Redness flared in the sky, a length of tentacle that flicked the warrior away. The arm of the Murderfish had turned crimson. It bled another spurt of blue before sliding out of sight beneath the waves.

Hiresha had pulled Tethiel back into the boat. She ran her hands over his arms.

“Nothing is broken,” she said.

“Only my dignity.”

A coat sleeve had torn off. Red satin covered his left arm, his right, black silk. His face was a healthy color, and he stood with none of the morning’s wobbliness. Eating the fish seemed to have cured him.

“She took our oars.” He pointed with a crooked finger toward the sea. “My heart, drop the sail.”

Before Hiresha could lay a hand on the rigging,
The Paragon
lurched backward. Its prow climbed into the air. The rope attached to the net creaked with tension.

“She’s dragging us.” Tethiel clutched his throat. “And what’s worse, I can’t seem to resist saying the obvious.”

The netting rope looped in ties around the mast. Hiresha tugged at the knots, but they were a fisherman’s labyrinth. Salt and algae crusted the hemp cord.

“Find a knife,” Hiresha said.

“I’ll find Emesea. Or was she drowned?”

Hiresha searched an oilskin sack tied down in the hull. She pushed aside a blue dress, found pouches carrying what felt much like ballast stones and little like anything thin and sharp.

The boat skewed, gaining speed and bouncing off the surface of the water in bursts of hissing froth. Hiresha rolled into the prow, clinging to a bench. The spinning force threatened to fling her overboard, and she worried that would be better than whatever came next.

The Paragon
lifted from the sea. It whirled through the air. The rope that held them was screaming.

Let it break,
Hiresha thought.
Let one cord of fate spin in our favor.

Tethiel wrapped his arms around the mast. His legs swung to the front of the boat, and by intention or not, his feet pressed Hiresha down into the hull. She had started to slide out.

The sky careened by from blue to pink.
We might be thrown into the dream storm.
Hiresha felt her heart and guts pressing upward into her throat.

She could not tell which of their voices rose in a shriek.

Something slapped the side of the boat. Hiresha saw brown fingers clenching, their tips white from pressure. A woman with a blue-serpent tattoo flipped herself aboard, knife still in hand.

Hiresha had never been so happy to see a wicked shard of black glass. “The rope!”

In the time it took the enchantress to cry out, the warrior had already rolled to the taut cord and lifted her knife.

“Wait,” Hiresha said, “the dream storm.”

The razor edge touched the rope. Half the cord disappeared, frayed strands drifting from the torn end.

They flew. The boat spiraled. Air tore at Hiresha’s hair. A wig of black tresses bounded overboard. The sky blinked between pink, blue, and green.