Dream Storm Sea (25 page)

“A dragon deserves her armor,” Hiresha said to Emesea.

The enchantress lifted her hands, and a coat levitated between them of abalone shells. The enchantress’s magic had broken them into scales that slid over each other as Emesea slipped it over her head. The fit was perfect.

“Light enough to swim in.” The warrior rapped the armor with a knuckle. It made a clattering sound.

“And strong as enchanted bronze,” Hiresha said. “I can’t imagine why no one has thought of snail-shell armor before.”

“How did you?” Emesea took a few practice swings with her axe.

“A dream,” Hiresha said.

She had crafted it while waiting for the Murderfish to return. They had sailed from the murky waters where Hiresha’s fangs had slain the great platehead. The boat drifted above an atoll littered with abalone. The night’s stars had all but gone. A thunderstorm loomed black. The light of an essence tempest stood out in a sky greying from nearing dawn.

“By my bleeding liver!” Emesea ducked under the feather sail. She half-swung her axe and pretended to cut off Tethiel’s head. “This feels good enough the kill ten men in, then ride just as many.”

Hiresha frowned. “You’re only to use it against sea monsters.”

“My heart, this armor is most wounding.” Tethiel’s spindly fang fingers clicked over the abalone scales. They were all brown and drab. “You made it inside out.”

“The shells are rough on the outside,” Hiresha said. “I couldn’t very well have my armor chafing off skin.”

“Permit me to correct the situation.” With a sweep of Tethiel’s hand, the scales appeared to flip over. Redness from the dream storm rippled over the pearly surface.

The armor reminded Hiresha of a suit of opals. She loved that she had created something with Tethiel, but she would not let his flippancy go uncontested. “I am certain the next toothy leviathan lured to us by the Murderfish will be too overawed by beauty to attack.”

“In frivolous matters, beauty is of the utmost importance,” Tethiel said. “In practical matters, beauty is of the utmost importance.”

“In matters of severe impertinence….”

The enchantress spotted something in the sea coming toward their boat. Not a great platehead, or any manner of behemoth, it looked like a swarm of silver crickets leaping over the water. Fear itched its way in icy rivulets down her back.

“That shoal is taking a winding path this way.” Hiresha pointed. The throng reflected the moonlight like shimmering coins then dove back into the sea.

Beyond the incoming swarm, the crimson streams of an essence tempest wormed into the thunderstorm. The cloud lit from within as if it burned. The black storm had resembled a tower with a sweeping balcony; now it bulged with red tumors, and cloudbanks tore in wounds of light.

“They never bothered me before.” Emesea nodded at the swarm. It ate away at the distance between them.

“That’s a relief,” Tethiel said.

“…When I was a dragon with a full suit of scales. We’re going to be minced.”

“Mincing never ends well,” he said.

Hiresha squinted. “They are small fish?”

“Like this is a small sword.” Emesea flipped her obsidian knife. “Big enough.”

The school of fish whirred in and out of the water, leaping, plunging. They sounded like rain. They were too many to kill with the enchantress’s stolen crocodile teeth. Hiresha closed her hand over her red diamond, changing the magic to that of implosion.

“You might’ve even heard of ‘em,” Emesea said. “A little hunting school called the Fanged Typhoon.”

Over a thousand fish gushed toward the boat. Tails the shape of scimitars sliced through the water. Their lower jaws thrust out with an underbite of sharp teeth. Their fins buzzed like insect wings. Their eyes were specks.

Ahead of them, tentacles flickered in and out of sight, glowing, leading them on, vanishing inches ahead of the legion of jaws. Hiresha felt the Murderfish pass under the boat.

The enchantress dashed onto the water and hurled her jewel. The Fanged Typhoon parted around the diamond. A tunnel of silver scales opened.
Clever,
Hiresha thought. She Attracted the diamond backward to the rear of the shoal.
Not clever enough.

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?