The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (26 page)

She woke with a jolt, disoriented and afraid. Sandgrains were embedded in her cheek, and when she brushed them away they left dozens of tiny indentations in her face. Most of her skin was still damp and wrinkled beneath the watersuit, because she couldn’t risk sleeping naked on a Turean island.

What bothered her far worse than the discomfort was a nightmare which made her wish for the old familiar dream of drowning. She had seen the shark ringed on all sides by nets. Men in boats surrounded it, the boats trailed weighted nets, and it was too badly wounded to fight. There was no escape.

She reached out through their link like a hand groping blindly through darkness. The shark’s open, uncomplicated mind meshed with hers, and she felt nothing out of the ordinary. It hadn’t been hurt, let alone trapped. It was safe, at least for the moment.

Pulling the flask from inside her suit, she drank the last of the water and got to her feet. In the distance a rooster crowed. She headed towards the north of the island, where the land ended in a steep dropoff, and the sun started to warm her as she climbed partway down that cliff. No one could see her unless they crept out to the edge of the cliff and looked down.

She sat on a shelf of rock and leaned back. When she slipped into the shark’s mind like a key into a keyhole, she began to search the waters around Rainstone methodically, keeping the shark only a dozen or so feet above the seabed as it moved in widening circles. Her hearing had fused with its own, but she heard none of the sounds of whales hunting. She didn’t bother relying on sight for a warning, because by the time they were in visual range, it would be too late to do anything except flee.

What she needed the shark’s sight for was to find a shipwreck.

The search took hours. The rotting skeletons of fishing boats lay half-buried in mud, but she needed a ship, and one that was still intact. The wreck she finally found was half a dozen miles from Rainstone, but it was large even for a war galley, lying on its starboard side. Almost hidden in sludge and sand, gold coins gleamed, scattered beneath the wreck like fishscales.

The shark swam around the decaying hulk, nosing into any holes that looked large enough and disturbing an eel that shot away in a streak of green.
Well done
, Yerena thought, amused.
Let’s—

A sharp click snapped in her ears, a sound so high-pitched it was almost painful, like a steel wire drawn out finely to the breaking point and beyond. A tremor, deep and instinctive, drove through the shark’s body.

They’ve found us
.

Just below the hammock in which he slept, Quenlin knelt beside a thick mat of woven palm leaves. His cupped hands were filled with what might have passed for rock-salt crystals if not for the gleam from near-prismatic surfaces. He scattered the fragments of broken glass over the mat, then stripped off his black-and-white leathers and the shirt he wore beneath them. Carefully, his teeth set, he lay down on the mat.

Even the scar tissue covering his back wasn’t thick enough to completely cushion him. A hundred small teeth bit into his flesh, and the nerves beneath took fire. The pain made it that much easier to free his mind from the torture-rack as he reached out to the whales. His plans had been temporarily postponed when the whales had towed the released prisoner’s boat, but Jash had promised him a purse of gold if he brought her the shark’s head.

And Jash always lived up to her promises.

Quenlin kept his contact with the whales light as the touch of fingertips, just enough to see the end results of their echolocation in images behind his closed eyelids. A silent sea opened up before him. Since water couldn’t echo any sounds, it was completely transparent, but rocks looked like three-dimensional shadows, and fish streaked away in all directions from the killers. A shoal of fleeing tuna made him think of a handful of dying leaves tossed on a fall wind.

Then a large shape veered away from a wrecked ship, a shape moving fast enough to shimmer with scattered echoes. The killers turned in that direction at once, clicking fast. Quenlin saw their prey from three separate angles, more than enough to tell it was the white death. A shark that size, prowling in Turean waters, could only be Yerena’s.

The killers homed in on it.

Fearing a trap, Quenlin held them back a little but kept the shark in sight as it put on a burst of speed. He had no fear of losing it, because the killers could swim faster. The shark circled Rainstone, moving nearer as the shore gave way to sheer cliffs. Quenlin let the whales begin to close the distance between them, though he kept them away from the cliffs. He was suspicious of the way the shark swam parallel to those, so close its fins all but scraped rock.

Then it rose abruptly to the surface and something about its shape changed, though it moved too fast for him to see exactly how. He held a killer back just enough for it to lift its head from the water. Yerena was seated on the shark’s back. Of course, she had dropped off the cliff to join her overgrown pike.

Quenlin let the killers loose, and wished for the first time that he was with them.

He had hated many things about Seawatch, but most of all he’d loathed being compared to Yerena Fin Caller. There had always been a subtle but bitter rivalry between his mentor and hers, so naturally he and Yerena had been weapons in that battle, and he knew from the start that he was more talented.

Except Yerena was more subservient, and that was shoved in his face over and over. Each time he rebelled, his mentor told him he could be the best Seawatch had ever produced, if he could only show he was superior to her with regard to obedience and duty as well.

Eventually he started thinking of her as the perfect puppet, someone who made up in slavishness what she could never have in skill. Half of him despised her and the other half longed to fit into Seawatch as easily as she did. Until finally he could no longer bear the crushing pressures of Seawatch—like being at the bottom of the ocean, with thousands of tons of water pressing down on him—and he decided to appeal to a higher authority, the highest in the land.

That was the end of any future he had in Denalay.

Now, almost two thousand miles beyond the borders of the land he had left, that land would not let him be. He wondered what might convince Seawatch to retreat. Jash had wanted the shark’s head, but she had said nothing about Yerena’s, and he felt sure Seawatch would recognize that if it was salt-preserved and sent back to them.

Letting the killers feel all his hope and hunger, he urged them on.

Even with the increased weight on its back, the shark flashed through the water at what Yerena knew was its top speed.
Terminal velocity
. She’d heard that term somewhere, but she wished she hadn’t remembered it, because “terminal” was another word for “fatal”.

And the whales were gaining.

Her free arm tightened around the huge smooth rock she clutched to her belly, a chunk of granite larger than a melon, and she craned her head back to look. One fin was less than half a league behind them, closing the distance faster than she would have thought possible, although the other two lagged just behind it. Was that a sign they weren’t working closely together? She couldn’t tell.

The only advantage she had was the one she’d seen when she’d looked down from the cliff an hour ago, looked down at the woman in the water. The wind had died, so the Rainstone fisherfolk would have dipped their sails and taken their masts down. She pointed the shark towards the cluster of tiny boats in the distance and it swam with desperate speed.

The distance between it and the fastest killer kept narrowing. A hundred yards, then fifty. Like an obsidian knife poised for sacrifice, the black fin would slice through them in minutes.

The fisherfolk had seen them by then, and men paddled frantically to get out of the way. Yerena guided the shark to the far end of the scattering line of boats, to one with a single man in it. His oar spun and thrashed the water as she dared one last look behind. The killer whale was so close she saw the white teardrop behind its eye.

Jump
.

The shark’s muscles bunched. It burst free of the water in a glittering spray and while it didn’t rise high—it was injured and tiring—the leap carried it over the boat. And at the highest point of its trajectory, Yerena threw herself off its back.

The shark’s heavy grey-and-white body fell. The boat rocked with the wash, and the fisherman’s scream was the last sound she heard before she plummeted into the sea. Water rushed past her as though her suit didn’t exist, and the rock she carried pulled her down far faster than she could have dived. Her lungs felt as though hot towels were wrapped tight around her chest.

Above her a dark shape eclipsed the sunlight shining down through churning water as the startled killer braked its forward rush. Now it had two targets, and one was easier.

She was still sinking rapidly through gelid water when the whale dived down at her. If not for her mask she might not have seen the pale flash of its belly, but that was warning enough. The rock slipped from her arms and sank. She kicked out with all her strength and rose through the water. The killer’s jaws snapped shut where she would have been a moment earlier had she been sinking, where it had expected her to be.

Before it could twist around and swim after her, the shark was on it. Yerena’s lungs burned in the constricting vacuum of her chest and her heart hammered in her ears so loudly she couldn’t hear anything of the struggle below, but cold training kept her mind clear despite fear and breathlessness. She had to get out of the water before the other two killers were on her—and the black oval of the fishing boat was just overhead.

She dug her hands into water, kicking hard. Bubbles spilled from between her teeth as she began to lose the struggle not to breathe, but her head broke the surface. Dead fish floated all around her as she gasped for air. Just a few feet away, the fisherman gaped at her.

Then he swung his oar down in a vicious arc aimed at her skull.

She flung her right arm up reflexively. The oar slammed into the flat of her forearm so hard that her vision blurred. She bit down on her tongue and her sight cleared. Her arm was numb, a dead weight attached to her shoulder, and the fisherman standing in his boat staggered from the impact himself. He lifted the oar for a second time.

She pulled her knife with her good hand and flung it at him.

It wasn’t weighted to be a throwing knife, nor did she have the kind of skill needed to skewer him through the heart. But he flinched back instinctively when the knife flew at him, and his foot turned on the slippery haul of fish in his boat. With a shout he fell backward, half in the water and half out of it, and the boat rocked again as his weight came down across its gunwale.

The numbness in her arm gave way to what felt like a rush of red-hot needles. Teeth clenched, Yerena grabbed the boat’s opposite side as it lurched in her direction, and forced her right hand to close over one of the thwarts as she struggled to lift her leg into the boat. Her muscles strained like ropes stretched to the breaking point, but one leg was aboard, and she shifted her weight, pulling the rest of her body out of the water.

Then the fisherman climbed into the boat from the other side—his weight had kept the boat from tipping over as Yerena had scrambled into it—and fury twisted his face. He snatched a fishing gaff from the bottom of the boat and sunlight glinted on barbed steel as he lunged forward.

Yerena grabbed the oar with her good hand. With no time to aim it, much less block the fisherman’s strike, she could only swing it in his direction—but he was so close she could not have missed. Even as the gaff’s curved tip scored through her watersuit, the heavy paddle smashed into the man’s head.

The boat lurched as he struck the gunwale, and she barely steadied herself, fighting not to retch. Despite everything she had done on Seawatch’s orders, despite her status as a Weapon of Denalay, she had never before directly harmed another person. She had taken lives—hundreds of them—but always through shark or sabotage, and she had been detached throughout.

Now she had killed a man. He had crumpled with blood oozing through his hair, and although he hadn’t stopped breathing, he was dead, because she couldn’t risk her safety by leaving him alive. She wondered if he had parents waiting for him on Rainstone, or children. Questions like those had never crossed her mind before, but they did so now.

Before they could hold her back, she picked up the gaff. She could have shoved him over the side, but she wouldn’t have wished drowning on her worst enemy, and the gaff was quicker. The tip, barbed in steel that could have subdued a marlin, tore out the man’s throat.

She tasted bile, but the shark’s situation reduced everything else to unimportance. The gaff had slit her watersuit and carved a red line across her thigh. That didn’t matter either. Not when blood billowed under the waves, diluted but still only too visible as it turned the water almost black beneath the surface.

The fishing fleet was widely scattered by then, and she dropped into the base of the boat so the whales would not be able to see her even if their heads reared out of the water. She closed her eyes, ignoring the stench of fish as she breathed hard and slowed her heartbeat. A cold wall rose in her mind, cutting off her emotions, and she felt nothing but her usual blank control as she reached out to the shark.