The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (37 page)

“Give my regards to my mother.”

He lifted the iron-banded fist in both arms. It felt wonderfully heavy, like a sack of lead ingots, and he grunted with the effort as he tossed it overboard. Yerena gasped as the weight hauled her halfway over the gunwale, and Quenlin pushed her the rest of the way. The sea closed over her before she could make another sound.

A great burden had slipped away from him as well. The muscles in his back and shoulders ached, but it was a sweet pain.
I’ve won
. He felt himself smiling as he turned.
I’ve won.

And he saw Jash Morender smile too, as she drove a shortsword forward with all her strength behind it.

I’ve—

Darok broke the surface. Disoriented, he treaded water and looked around through strands of hair plastered over his eyes. All he saw of
Daystrider
was her prow jutting up into the sky, and the figurehead of the shieldmaiden holding the sun. The rest of the ship was no longer in sight, and the prow was sinking.

He swam away from it as fast as he could, grief at the loss of his ship paling beside the awareness that he would be sucked down when she finally sank. At first he wasn’t sure where he was headed, because the inlet was just behind him. Had he been carried out to sea, and where the hell was that beast?

Oddly enough, he didn’t feel afraid. He would have feared a shark, certainly, but the megalodon was so huge it seemed unreal. Anyway, it was the kind of monster better suited for battle with towering warships rather than with single men. He’d be an ant to it, a speck of dust.

Keep telling yourself that.

“Captain!” The voice was carried to him on the wind, and when he lifted his head, blinking his vision clear, he saw the rowboat fifty yards away. An uplifted arm wore a pale-blue sleeve.
Alyster
.

He began swimming in that direction, and the sea heaved beneath him.

The surge felt like an underwater quake. Darok jolted with the impact, tossed aside by the displacement of tons of water like a splinter on the surf. Claws of ice closed on his guts, because he knew it was the megalodon. It had to be. But was it simply passing below him on its way to further prey—
like the shark? Yerena’s shark?
—or was it rising with abyss-wide jaws open?

He wasn’t sure whether to keep swimming or lie still and feign death. He could float on his back, but every instinct screamed at him to move.

The sea rocked again, violently. Darok lurched with it, but he dug his hands into water, spat out more of it and kicked hard. Barely ten yards from him, something flashed into view—the tip of a grey fin, streaming froth—before it was gone beneath the waves again. Yerena’s shark. At some point during their voyage he’d learned to recognize it. Some battle was taking place deep underwater, and he could only hope the combatants would ignore him.

To his surprise he found himself hoping the shark would survive too. At least for Yerena’s sake.

The sea churned behind him, something breaching and thrashing the waves, and he didn’t dare turn to look. It took him what felt like hours to reach the boat’s side. He didn’t have the strength to pull himself overboard, but thankfully hands hauled him over the side, and he sank down on a thwart, trembling with exhaustion.

Not that he could rest. The cliffs of Rosefall rose up a mile away, to his unease. The currents had carried the rowboat farther than he had expected, and the Turean galleys were close. There were six of them, strewn in a crude ring formation where they had scattered at the threat of
Daystrider
emerging from the inlet, but more than capable of coming back together fast. He saw their figureheads: whale and seahorse, archer and impaled man.

“Sir,” Alyster said, “shall we retreat.” That was obviously not a question. “The other boats have reached Rosefall. We can hide among the rocks.”

“Not yet.” Darok didn’t look away from the sea. The water moved, streaming aside as a massive shape surged beneath the surface and headed towards the galleys.

The fins broke water like blades cutting the sea open, the sail-sized dorsal and the tail sweeping powerfully from side to side, but even that sight didn’t distract him from the jutting mast. He only knew it had once been a mast because the rags of sails hung from yardarms, but the crow’s nest was gone. The mast’s other end was driven deep into a pit of red flesh.

His heart stuttered. Had Yerena done that? No wonder the beast was driven crazy. Crazy enough to ram a galley, he saw a second later.

The Turean vessels fought back, but even wounded, the megalodon was too large, too fast and in its element. Its bulk came down on the galley with the archer figurehead, and the other half of the galley flew out of the water entirely with the impact. Darok suddenly found himself more than capable of feeling fear, but that fear was for Yerena. She was on
Dreadnaught
, and if the megalodon crushed that galley as well—

Sailors struggled through the water or were dragged below by their own armor as they cried out for help. The megalodon surged alongside
Dreadnaught
and two figures—
not Yerena, thank the Unity
—fell overboard, locked together. Jaws came together so hard that teeth snapped.

Then the megalodon sank down, writhing and jerking as it did so. One toss of an arrow-studded head that could have swallowed a horse whole, and
Dreadnaught
jolted in the water, listing hard to starboard before she righted herself. The great grey fin disappeared like a banner being drawn down from a castle’s ramparts.

Whether or not the Tureans had managed to get the better of the beast, Darok neither knew nor cared, because by then he had seen the figure struggling over the galley’s deck to the prow. A rising wind turned her loosened hair into another banner.

“Take us closer,” he said to Alyster.

“What?”

“That was an order.” Darok didn’t look away from her.

Alyster knew better than to say
You’re going after her, aren’t you?
before the men, but Darok knew he would try to rephrase his objections. “Sir, we can’t fight a galley with a rowboat—”

“I have no intention of fighting a galley, Lieutenant. Now
take us closer
.”

The galleys did not seem in the mood for battle either. They were milling and undisciplined. Two of them moved to rescue drowning men, but two more spread their sails to catch the wind, and seemed about to make all speed west. Of those who remained, Darok knew it would take them a while to gather up all the survivors. Men had been tossed through the air like corn at a sowing when the second galley had been flung high. No, the galleys weren’t likely to bend their oars to attack one rowboat.

But he couldn’t save Yerena. He watched in futile rage as she staggered to the gunwale. Sunlight gleamed on thick iron chains and he knew what was going to happen—her nightmare, made real.

He had to do something, but what? He couldn’t order the boat close enough without drawing
Dreadnaught
’s attention, and no matter how fast they rowed, they wouldn’t reach her in time.

“Look out!” Kaneth cried, and the boat rocked as everyone shifted at once. Darok turned in the opposite direction. Six feet away, a grey fin rose out of the water.

It was the shark, though, he knew that at once from the size. And the fact that it didn’t have a foremast embedded anywhere. Obviously ground down by injury and exhaustion, it seemed not so much to be swimming as coasting beside the boat, allowing the current to carry it, and he thought it was dead.

Then the triangular head lifted in a tired twitch that brought the shark’s eyes above the waterline. One of them, black as an obsidian disk, studied him with no interest before it revolved to Yerena’s small slender form in the distance. Darok glanced at the galley again, just in time to see a man shove something overboard—the broken fist off
Dreadnaught
’s prow.

The chains binding it to Yerena dragged her with it and the water swallowed her up. Darok spun back to the shark. It had seen that too, and he remembered what Yerena had once told him about a game they’d played.

“
Fetch!
” he shouted.

The inkspot eye swiveled back to him and the shark submerged. He leaned over the side of the boat but of course nothing was visible. There were only ripples where Yerena had been, and the water was full of shards, corpses, the remains of ships and men alike. Something bobbed on the surf nearby, something he recognized. He forced his fingers to release the thwart—they’d been gripping it so tightly his hand was numb—and plucked the small soaked effigy from the water. There was no other sign of
Daystrider
’s master carpenter.

He shoved the effigy into his belt as the shark’s head rose slowly from the water. The grey-and-white body tilted as it moved parallel to the boat, jaws yawning to expose the iron-spiked fist jutting from its mouth. Iron chains trailed over its teeth, along with one of Yerena’s arms, limp and streaked with blood. The rest of her body disappeared inside the great gash of a mouth.

Darok heard the men on the boat breathing hard, and someone was whispering a prayer to the Unity, but no one moved as the shark came almost to a halt beside the boat. Its jaws opened wider.

“Hold the boat steady,” he said to Alyster and leaned out as far as he could. More of Yerena’s body hung from the other side of the mouth, over teeth that had to be piercing her flesh. It was a miracle the shark hadn’t reflexively bitten down at the smell and taste of blood. A miracle, or love. He wasn’t going to argue with either as he grasped the collar of her suit and her belt. Teeth clenched, he hauled with all his strength.

The sinews in his back turned into taut cords held over flames, but her body slid free of the shark’s teeth with a wet ripping sound. He could only hope that was her suit rather than her flesh tearing away. There was a faint shriek of iron on enamel that made his own teeth hurt in sympathy, and then the chains came away too.
Thank the Unity
. He laid her body down in the bottom of the boat. If the links had snagged on the shark’s teeth, he didn’t know what he would have done.

The shark sank back into the water as though it could no longer support its own weight. Darok felt just as exhausted, but the sight of Yerena made him forget that. Her eyes were closed, and she wasn’t breathing. Water ran from her nostrils and the corner of her mouth.

The weight of the iron wrapping her made the boat sink dangerously low, but Alyster was already ordering the men to row, to get them away from the galleys. Darok didn’t bother unwinding the chains around Yerena. He had to make her start breathing first.

As the boat backed water, he turned her over to drain her mouth and nose. There was enough water in the bottom of the boat already that her hair floated around her when she lay on her back. He cupped one hand beneath her chin and covered her mouth with his, breathing out deeply.
You’d better not be dead, Yerena, not after I went to that much trouble
.

He exhaled again and again, until he felt light-headed. When he finally raised his head to clear it, he couldn’t be certain whether she was breathing on her own or whether he had imagined her chest move.

Then she coughed, and it was the sweetest sound he had ever heard.

Her eyes opened as she kept coughing, spitting up water. Darok almost laughed aloud. He pulled her to a sitting position, chains clanking, and she closed a hand around his arm. She was still gasping too hard to speak, but the look in her eyes told him more than enough—and there were grins of relief from the men in the boat as well.

Though Alyster didn’t smile. He was at the other end of the boat, watching something that moved through the water towards them, and Darok turned his head to see a fin, smaller than that of Yerena’s shark, and a different shape. The galleys were moving to the west under full sail for some reason, but that left the sea clear for other predators.

He started to say
Hit it with an oar
, before he saw the gloved hand gripping the dorsal fin. As the shark veered sharply, the man let go of it and caught the side of the boat, holding on as he treaded water. He wore a grey watersuit and a glass mask, but when he pushed the mask down, his tattoo was visible, a black hammer surrounding his left eye. Yerena sat up straight.

“Yerena Fin Caller.” The man spoke as if they were meeting in a teahouse on Orchid Lane.

“Ko—” She coughed again, and her fingers tightened on Darok’s arm. “Kovir Sea Hammer,” she said, more steadily.

“Where the hell did you come from?” Darok said, more harshly than he had intended.

Kovir Sea Hammer, of course, looked much as Yerena had done when Darok had first spoken to her, direct and polite and indifferent. “I was assigned to guide two ships of the Guardian Fleet into the Iron Ocean to provide you with any help you might need.”

“Two ships…” Darok glanced at the horizon and saw them. Lagging behind the swift streamlined hammerhead, but now within sight, and he knew why the battlehorns had sounded on the Turean galleys. Their lookouts had spotted the ships first. Slowly they drew closer, flying their circle flags, decks crowded with sailors in Denalait uniforms, and the larger of the two ships sported twenty sails on which twenty hawks were painted in black, their wings spread.

Hawk Royal
.

It was over.