The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (36 page)

She gave orders to Parras. Once the beast was well out of the way,
Dreadnaught
would enter the inlet again to gather up surviving Denalaits, and from there the galleys would proceed to Gullcastle to take on supplies while she planned their next strike. With a megalodon as its spearhead, her flotilla would destroy the remains of the Denalait navy and bring the mainland to its knees.

She turned to look with satisfaction at the place where the warship had been. Nothing was visible except for broken wood bobbing on the surf and corpses in Denalait uniforms. A weight lifted from her shoulders. She’d done her part, too, because if she hadn’t weakened the warship with coral and battered it with catapults, it wouldn’t have gone down so swiftly when—

The water boiled.

For a moment Jash wasn’t sure what was happening, and then the great grey-and-white mass breached, twisting violently in midair before it splashed back down. Something jutted from its head like a bizarre harpoon, trailing shreds of sails from horizontal spars, and none of the megalodon’s increasingly frantic struggles dislodged the impaling mast. The foam flying into the air was stained pink.

The wedge of the tailfin, easily Jash’s own height, lashed wildly and the monster made for the nearest target—the galley
Lynx
with her figurehead of a snarling cat.

“
No!
” someone shouted. Jash had no idea who it was, only that it wasn’t herself. Her voice was locked in her throat, strangled there. She turned, searching for Quenlin on the crowded deck, but not finding him.

As jerkily yet inevitably as a puppet pulled by strings, she turned back to see the megalodon crash at full speed into
Lynx
.

The force staved in the side of the galley. The megalodon pulled away, snout criss-crossed with red lines, and the sea rushed into the gaping rent in
Lynx
. A catapult on
Speared Lord
flung a boulder as the megalodon veered away from the crippled galley. The stone missed by a few feet and smashed into the water, sending up a froth of spray. The great bulk turned in that direction at once.

Vibrations, it senses vibrations as well as blood
. If she could make it stop long enough for her to drop another boulder on its back—

The other galleys struck first, hurling stones in an uncoordinated attack, and Jash all but cringed, expecting the creature to charge blindly at the enemies which surrounded it. Instead it twisted and plunged. The last thing she saw was the tailfin, and then that disappeared beneath the waves.

No, she couldn’t hope they had escaped so easily. “Find the Denalait,” she ordered Parras. “Drag him onto the deck if you have to.”

“Captain!” a lookout screamed. “There!”

Jash had no idea which direction he meant, but the cries from
Steel Rain
were warning enough. The company of archers on that galley’s deck shot at something on the other side of
Steel Rain
, shot again and again in the training that had given the vessel her name. Jash couldn’t see the megalodon with
Steel Rain
in the way, but she knew the hail of arrows would have no effect. She braced herself for the galley to rock violently as it was rammed broadside.

Instead the megalodon surged up from the depths like the fist of a sea god, left the water entirely and slammed down on the galley’s stern.
Steel Rain
’s fore half jolted up, flinging men sixty feet away. Then the stern broke away under the crushing weight and the megalodon plowed back into the ocean.

On
Dreadnaught
, Jash heard someone retching.

Gods. What am I going to do?
She looked around desperately but Quenlin was nowhere in sight. The coralhost leaned at a gunwale, watching the destruction, but Jash couldn’t think of any way
it
could save them. Not only was self-preservation paramount to the coralhost, it didn’t have blood to attract the giant predator.

Snout bristling with dozens of arrows, the megalodon charged at
Bowhead
’s stern, jaws gaping. Stamat Corving had seen it coming and his galley started to turn. As it did so, the foremast’s jutting tip raked
Bowhead
’s hull with a raw scrape. The megalodon thrashed. Its jaws snapped shut, barely missing the galley’s stern, and there was a crack of splitting wood to tell Jash
Bowhead
’s rudder was gone.

If she didn’t distract it, it would take the rest of her ships down. She pointed at the nearest weight, a cask lashed to the gunwale and half-filled with rainwater.

“Throw that overboard!” She pulled a shortsword and drew the blade along the inside of her forearm.

She didn’t feel the pain, only a hot wetness dribbling along her skin to smear the steel red. The water cask smacked into the sea and she flung the sword over the gunwale. If fresh blood and vibration didn’t work, nothing would.

The megalodon wheeled. Its tail slammed, and although the tall fins didn’t touch
Bowhead
’s hull, the pressure wave of dislodged water made the galley list, rolling in the waves. Then the megalodon came at
Dreadnaught
instead, aiming for the cask bobbing just beside the galley and the blood spreading through the water.

Except when it found no prey or enemies there, it would turn on her galley.

Jaws open so wide it could have swallowed the largest catapult-shot effortlessly and gulped down the catapult as well, the megalodon swam parallel to
Dreadnaught
, searching for the prey it both felt and smelled. Jash pointed at the coralhost’s back.

Parras and Skur threw themselves at the coralhost, grasping its legs and lifting it off the deck. Unbalanced, it teetered on the edge of the gunwale and fell. As it did, though, one leg bent forward at the knee, supple and unjointed as a tentacle. From thigh to ankle it wrapped around Parras’s arm. The coralhost’s weight pulled him over the gunwale and he screamed as their bodies hit the water, as the megalodon’s jaws closed on them both.

Quenlin staggered back. What felt like a red-hot skewer was in his eye, and the shock was so great he couldn’t even cry out. He wrenched his consciousness free from the megalodon’s and caught at the doorframe for balance. The mast, she’d used the broken mast against him, and he hadn’t considered that possibility because…because it had never been done before.

Her eyes were glazed—one of them, because the other was swelling shut and made her look even worse than usual—and she looked at him without seeing him, so he dropped back into the megalodon’s mind. He was braced for the pain now, able to rise above it, and the megalodon wasn’t fatally injured anyway. The yardarms on the mast prevented the pointed end from sinking any deeper. She’d startled him with that trick, but he would rip her apart.

The megalodon bucked and twisted, the foremast jerking with every movement. The shark’s teeth clamped on the other end, so a hundred feet of wood held it out of reach. Its wounds had opened again and the smell inflamed the megalodon further. He could make it swim towards the rocky sides of the inlet, driving the shark against an undersea cliff-face, but he had a sudden image of the shark releasing its deathgrip at the last moment. And the resulting impact somehow sending the foremast all the way into the megalodon’s brain.

He fought to hold back his emotions, to impose control on himself and through him the megalodon. If he could just be calm, just find the eye of the hurricane, he could think what to do.

The megalodon’s head tossed violently to one side and the stresses on the foremast took their toll. Wood broke just below the crow’s nest. The shark was flung away, struggling to turn its weaving path into a straight fast line, and exultation made Quenlin’s pulse beat faster.
Kill it
,
go after it and tear it to shreds—

His hold on the megalodon’s mind slipped.

Startled, Quenlin tried to sink deeper, into the lock he’d maintained as the megalodon smashed
Daystrider
. It didn’t work. He couldn’t get a grip on the churning fury and pain, couldn’t suppress them. The megalodon had been hauled out of its home and into an alien environment, forced to obey someone it didn’t know and didn’t trust, and now it fought him.

Quenlin fell back on Seawatch breathing techniques and imagined himself in the black room, but none of it gave his mind the clean empty blankness that would impose obedience on animal chaos. His calm had been shattered since his mother had tried to murder him, and he needed time and rest to recover. Time he didn’t have. He saw through the megalodon’s eyes, but that was the extent of his control, and he was pulled helplessly with it as it surged to the surface.

He dissociated the moment it rammed
Lynx
. Jash would want him dead for that. He’d been so close, he’d even sunk the warship and none of it would be any good with the megalodon rampaging among the galleys.

For that matter, the megalodon might kill
him
. He went cold down to the marrow of his bones.

Whatever happened, Yerena wasn’t going to win. The man she’d been trying to shield had dragged himself to his feet, looking like a corpse left standing, but she was still glassy-eyed, locked with the shark. Quenlin saw a bloodstained cutlass lying on the floor and made a dive for it.

“Look out!” the man said. Yerena’s eyes snapped back into focus. Quenlin sprang up with the cutlass in hand, and she broke into a half-limping sprint for the door. He’d left it open and she stumbled through the doorway as he came around the table. There was nowhere on the ship she could hide, and she would never get off the deck as long as the Tureans were there.

He ran to the door. A Turean at the other end of the passageway shouted his name, but he ignored that. Yerena clambered up the nearest hatch to the deck, and he went after her, swinging the cutlass in a slash that would have hamstrung her.

The Turean grabbed his arm at the last moment, and the tip of the cutlass only caught her across one calf. She staggered but didn’t fall, and Quenlin turned on the Turean, furious.

“The captain wants—” the Turean began. That was as far as he got before Quenlin drove the cutlass deep into his belly. He wrenched it free as the man crumpled. Another Turean roared, slashing back at him, but the ship lurched as he did so and the blade buried itself in the wall instead. Quenlin bolted up the steps towards the deck.

He had expected it to be a scene of panic, but none of the crew seemed to be watching the water. Whether or not they had driven the megalodon off, it didn’t matter. Yerena stumbled towards the prow and he turned in that direction.

One of the men started forward, but another one pulled him back. The crew seemed to have drawn away, tightening their ranks against the gunwales to form a wall that closed him in with Yerena. That was fine. He started for her, his long strides much faster than her halting steps, and the cutlass in his hand left a trail of drops behind him.

He caught up with her just as she tripped over a length of chain thick as her wrist. The huge fist of the prow, banded with iron spikes and clutching the broken chain, had been nearly snapped away from the ship by
Daystrider
’s catapult shot. After that it had been hauled on board before it could break off completely. Yerena went down hard across the coils of cold iron, beside the fist that matched her in size, and Quenlin stood over her.

He put the cutlass to her throat and glanced over the side to see if the battered remnants of her shark were lurking anywhere near. Nothing in the water, not that he could see a great deal through debris and jetsam and the glimmers of sunlight on the waves. Behind him, he heard the crew creeping up, but only Yerena mattered.

He looked down to see her eyes—one plain, one surrounded by the Seawatch mark, just like his own face. “Want to beg for your life?”

“No.” Her voice was hoarse but there was nothing in it except for a simple statement of fact, as if he had offered her a drink. Though if he had, he knew she would have added
Thank you
as Seawatch required. Comportment and deportment above all.

He kicked her in the side and she doubled up, but there was no other reaction. She wore an iron chain around her throat too, and he wanted to twist that until the links dug into her flesh, making her face turn as black as the damned tattoo, but it would be like strangling a corpse. What would it take to break her, to make her plead and crawl and cry?

Then he remembered the rumor he’d heard in Whetstone, the whisper that this particular Yerena was afraid of drowning.

He shoved the cutlass into the deck beside her, point-first, and caught the iron links trailing from the wooden fist. They were heavier than he had expected, and the fist itself would act as an anchor. Yerena was struggling to breathe as he wrapped the chain around her arms, pinning them to her body. He locked it tightly and her eyes widened.

“No,” she said again, but now there was something more than expressionless courtesy in the word. He pulled her to her feet and towards the gunwale, the fist trailing behind her on its chains. Very apropos, that she would be dragged to her death by something so Turean.

“No!” Even with her hands trapped against her body, she tried to clutch at him, but although she wore her sharkskin gloves, he was in his black-and-white skins. Her grip slid away as he shoved her against the rail. “Kov—Quenlin, don’t, please—”

Quenlin savored the terror in her eyes and made sure no fins were in sight. Not that it mattered if they were, since Yerena didn’t seem in a fit state to control herself, let alone her shark. Seawatch operatives weren’t taught mummers’ skills, and he knew real terror when he saw it. There was nothing between
Dreadnaught
and the island except for a Denalait rowboat half a mile away.