Fathomless (34 page)

Weird as it already was for Elspeth to speak through Daniel, it got weirder when she used his own mouth to talk him down: “He'll meet her when he's begun to Change again. My sister wouldn't want to see him in this condition. Unnatural, shameful.”

Much more Daniel bashing, and Eddy was going to lose it. Sean snuck in a suggestion: “Couldn't you just tell Aster that Daniel's here? Then let her decide whether she wants to meet him.”

Elspeth again swept her hand toward him. Daniel said, “Is that the favor you'd ask from us, as a fellow in magic and Reverend Orne's apprentice?”

Two toots on the whistle to prove he was magical, and he got to ask for a favor? Sean transferred the whistle to his left hand so he could wipe the sweat off his right. “Yeah, let Daniel go to the reef, tell his mother he's there, and we're good.”

“Then I'm sorry to say—,” Daniel began for Elspeth. For himself, he shouted, “Sean, behind!”

As Sean wheeled, one of the Deep Ones hanging on the bow railing finished climbing aboard. Ducking below the console, Sean jammed the whistle into his mouth and blew a panic blast with the magical residue from his last gathering. It didn't produce much, one bleat, but that went straight into the sneak's face as he peered over the console top. Obviously it made a difference how close the target was to the whistle, because the sneak yowled and backflipped over the railing, raising a mighty splash. The other Deep Ones on the bow let go, more splashes; Elspeth and Buddy and Transom took steps back, then held their ground.

Wincing, Daniel bowed to the deck. Too obviously, the whistle hurt his ears as much as it hurt the fully Changed Deep Ones. This time Eddy was able to get to him, and she bowed her body over his.

The single tone faded fast. Sean dived into his darkness and snatched a brass knob's worth of lightning. Accessing the magic began to exact a payment, electric pangs shooting into his skull through his temples and eye sockets. Between practicing with the whistle earlier and using it to quell attacks, he was getting close to magical exhaustion.

He couldn't let the Deep Ones know that, though. He opened his eyes, stood up, faced Elspeth. A filmy Raphael hung between them, flinging all its tails to starboard; it vanished when Sean looked in that direction. Gliding dark and quiet toward the Montauk was a big red cutter with
INNSMOUTH PATROL
stenciled in white on its hull. And if that wasn't enough to make Sean slump with relief, riding the flybridge was Abel himself. Elspeth saw the cutter, too, but she didn't seem worried about it. Well, why should she worry? Abel and his patrol guys—five Changers in the cutter's bow—would just order her gang off in the name of Old Man Marsh, and away they'd go, living to get their dorsal fins in a twist another day.

Daniel and Eddy had knelt up and were watching the cutter's approach. Eddy got off a fist pump before Daniel shook his head like they were screwed. Didn't he see Abel?

Or did he see what Sean had missed at first? That Abel's hands were behind his back and bound to the flybridge railing. That three of the Changers in the bow were the ones from New Church Green. They weren't the cavalry. They were backup for Elspeth.

Her downturned mouth couldn't manage a smile, or else she'd be grinning at Sean big-time. She had to content herself with extending a long arm, fish-hide palm upward and eloquent:
Give me the whistle, then. You can't keep us all back.

He sucked in air and the whistle mouthpiece, intended his gathered magic outward. This string of tones was like the second one he'd produced, just a little louder. Elspeth hissed and withdrew her hand. Daniel bowed again to the deck and Eddy with him. The resonating chord must have reached the cutter—the Changers batted hands at their shriveling ears, while Abel hunched his shoulders as high as his bonds let him. The chord couldn't last long, though, and the cutter came on in spite of it, turning so that it would reach the Montauk side by side, with its boarding ladder in play.

Sean had a minute, maybe two. He could gather and produce another chord like the fading one, but that would be it before the Changers crowded onto the Montauk. They'd get the whistle. Then they'd get Daniel.

No. He was the one who'd brought Daniel out here, into danger. So what if Daniel had wanted it? Sean had made it happen. Through Orne, he'd been the key.

And he
had
the key: Ben Franklin's, long shanked, ornate topped.

Reentering his darkness, Sean felt the key safely caged within his mental fist. Exposing more than the crowning knob was a bad idea, no telling what he'd blow up. Yeah, on his own, but he had the whistle now, which Elspeth claimed Nyarlathotep had made. If that was true, it could handle way more magical energy than Sean could ever puff into it.

Right?

Outside his sphere-egg, guttural voices drew close. The Changers on the cutter.

It had better be right.

Sean pushed out the whole top of his key. Through his darkness, through invading waves of Deep One telepathy, a torrent of braided lightning flashed into the brass. When he absorbed it into himself, pain seared his hand, shot up his arm, speared his skull through. Wicked as the pain was, the energy brought him exhilaration, too, the way it had at the summoning, but he couldn't hold on to it. In seconds it would fry his brain.

He opened his eyes. “Eddy.”

She lifted her head from Daniel's shoulder. Daniel still clutched the sides of his head.

“Cover his ears,” Sean gasped. Then he blew the whistle, willing the torrent of lightning into it, intending terror, intending
Get the hell out of here and leave us alone!
Thundercrack music exploded above the Montauk, the ride of the Valkyries on bad acid, adding up to a discord that made him slam his own hands over his ears as hard as Eddy was slamming hers over the backs of Daniel's hands, giving him double shielding, but he writhed anyway, Sean could see that.

Elspeth and the Deep Ones dived for the water like they meant to hit the ocean floor and drill into it. Every Changer dived, too, including two who stumbled out from the cutter cabin, but they surfaced before long, arms lashing and feet churning wide wakes as they fled toward Innsmouth. Sean got to watch their retreat while he hung over the starboard railing, throwing up everything he'd eaten for the last week. Emptied out, he kept hanging. Until the pain stopped ricocheting inside his cranium, straightening up was no more in the cards for him than it was for Daniel, who lay flat on his back, panting.

Eddy, on the other hand, had already found the spare key, veered the Montauk out of the path of the drifting cutter, and maneuvered it close enough to jump to the boarding ladder. In fact, she'd already made it to the flybridge to cut Abel free and lay him down to pant it out like Daniel. Then she disappeared inside the cabin.

With Eddy on top of things, Sean dared to drop his forehead onto the railing and space for a while.

When he lifted his head again, the cutter had come to a stop fifty yards east, and Daniel had made it to the aft bench. He looked like he'd live, so Sean pushed off the railing and drove the Montauk over to the cutter. As he slowed to an idle beside it, Abel climbed down from the flybridge. Eddy stood at the main deck railing, next to a Deep One who stuttered into an undertaker a few times before he got his illusion to stick. “Quite a demonstration, Sean,” Barnabas Marsh said. “I came in for some of it even in the cabin, but I'm glad you did it.”

Sean wobbled to his feet. “They got you, too, sir?”

“I'm ashamed to say they did. I suspected Daniel might try to reach Aster on his own, so I joined Abel for this evening's patrol. Elspeth stopped the cutter. She wanted to talk, she said. My own daughter, but I still shouldn't have let my guard down enough for her partisans to swarm us. Well. I didn't rightly plumb the outrage over Daniel's situation, and so—” Marsh bowed his head. “—I'm indebted to you, magician to magician.”

Daniel had come to stand beside Sean. “So am I,” he said.

Mass adulation was more embarrassing than Sean had imagined it would be. “Dude, no problem,” he said to Daniel. “Unless I blew your ears out.”

“They're ringing like crazy. I can hear, though.”

To Marsh, Sean said, “The magician-to-magician thing. Does that mean I could ask you for a favor?”

“For yourself or for Daniel?”

“After everything, I guess it's for us both. Let us finish what we came to do.”

Marsh considered. “Repaying debts is part of the Shn'yeh code of honor. So is acknowledging when one's been beaten. I don't think Elspeth will interfere with Daniel again. Not immediately. She'll let him win this round.”

“Does that mean yes, Grandfather?” Daniel asked.

“I hope so, Mr. Marsh,” Eddy said. “I want to finish what we've started, too.”

After a nervous minute, during which Marsh studied each of them in turn, he finally nodded. “I'll go talk to Aster now.”

 

23

They
moored the Montauk to a floating dock on the landward side of Devil Reef. Iron rungs had been hammered into the slick black rock; though rusted, they were sturdy enough to get Sean and Eddy and Daniel to the top of the reef. With the tide falling, it rose ten feet above the water and overlooked a gentler oceanward slope with a snug collar of tidal pools at its base. Gray seals lounged beside the pools. Real seals, Daniel said, but like the porpoises that had chased them earlier, they were probably Deep One watchdogs. If so, they'd gotten word to stand down, because after a twist of their rubbery necks and flash of their teeth, they went back to the more important business of scratching themselves with their flippers.

Poised in the stern of the patrol cutter idling off the reef, Marsh was the only Deep One in sight. He raised a webbed hand. When Daniel returned the salute, he dived for Y'ha-nthlei. Abel manned the flybridge again. He shook his head from time to time as if he had water in his ears; otherwise, he appeared to have recovered from Sean's sonic assault. Same with Daniel, the occasional head jerk or dig at his ears. Sean had expected to see liquefied brains after that final blast. Luckily he seemed to have gotten the worst of it himself: a nag of a headache and a queasy stomach. He parked on a flat boulder and combatted nausea with tiny sips from his water bottle.

The adjacent boulder was big enough for three. He'd left it for Eddy and Daniel, and they took it, but left space for the nonexistent third between them. That was pretty cold after the way Eddy had wrapped herself around Daniel back on the boat. The emergency over, they seemed back to where they'd been in the dunes: not broken up but not totally together, either.

Nobody talked. Eddy had the binoculars, and she kept busy scanning the ocean in all directions. Sean fixed his own eyes on the stretch of water between reef and cutter. Presumably that was where Aster Marsh would emerge, if she came up tonight. Marsh had warned them she might need time to think about his news. Probably, too, Elspeth had gotten to Aster first, to complain about how her son and his friends had attacked Deep Ones who'd only been trying to help.

Sean patted the whistle hanging under his shirt, heavy and cool. Body heat didn't affect it, though magical energy did—his last desperate effort had left it almost too hot to hold. He wasn't sorry he'd used Orne's gift, but it worried him how much energy his key image could gather. The whistle had modulated it into a musical blow powerful but nonlethal. What if he'd deployed the same amount of energy unfiltered? Boom?

That or he'd have been unable to conjure any effective defense, in which case, Elspeth would have gotten Daniel. Crappy outcome, either way. Marvell was right, saying Sean was a hazard. Marvell was also wrong, not giving him a mentor. Sean had told Elspeth that Orne was his mentor, and it didn't have to be a lie. Not if he wanted to make it the truth.

“I still don't know,” Daniel said, not shifting his eyes from the water. Eddy lowered the binoculars.

Daniel looked up at her, then at Sean. “Before things got crazy, my aunt was telling me—showing me—all this incredible stuff about the city down there. Caverns branch off from the abyss it's in, and they go on for miles, but there are these bioluminescent plankton and corals that light them up, no night anywhere except in the shoggoth pits. It's like another whole planet, animals we've never seen, thousands of Deep Ones. Shn'yeh. And with them, magic's normal. I can see why my mother stays below.”

“You wish you could go,” Eddy said.

Daniel took a deep breath, then said, “Yeah. A lot.”

“And I don't blame you.
I
want to go.”

“Me, too,” Sean said. “Don't they ever let humans in?”

“No, only Shn'yeh, and only when they've Changed all the way.”

That didn't seem fair, when the Deep Ones got to come up into the human world. “The Order should try to get along better with Innsmouth. Then they could set up, like, an exchange student program.”

From Daniel and Eddy's silence, either the idea didn't go over or they had more personal stuff to worry about. After a minute, Daniel said, “Back on the boat, Elspeth kept insisting Geldman's treatments wouldn't work, that I'd end up stuck between human and Deep One, good for neither side. And she didn't play fair. She used mind magic to convince me. I guess you guys figured out what was happening? I hope you did, anyway.”

“I did,” Sean said, and Eddy nodded.

Daniel picked up an oyster shell studded with barnacles. “I know one thing. If the treatments start harming me, Geldman will stop. He made sure we understood that, me and my father. Until then, he won't give up. He'll try to keep me human, as long—”

Eddy met Daniel's eyes but forced him to finish the sentence for himself: “As long as I want him to.”

“And that's what you still don't know,” she said. “Whether you want to stay human or Change to Shn'yeh.”