The Farthest Shore (Eden Series Book 3) (20 page)

He had started sweeping the sea in steadily widening arcs from the starting point of
Checkmate
, but there had been no sign of any other ships. Soon he knew they had lost
Checkmate
too, because while the steamship was heading due west, he had no idea where he was in relation to her. By the time evening fell, he knew his only remaining hope was to find
Wrack
, though he would have happily settled for a few square feet of solid ground on which to rest. Seawatch training kept him awake, but the night felt endless, and before dawn he was talking to the shark again to stay alert.

“No,” he said. “One ship, even two, but we’d be very unfortunate if it reached all three of them before us. We’ll find
Wrack
.”

The shark swam on through dawn. To Kovir’s dismay, clouds sailed before the sun like masses of shadow, which meant he was no longer able to gauge the passage of time. The prospect of a storm was even more unnerving, because it would take all his strength to stay on the shark’s back if she was tossed like a chunk of driftwood on waves dozens of feet high.

He finished the last of his food. The shark couldn’t hunt while she carried him, but she could live off the fat in her liver for a while. By the time she became hungry enough to dive in pursuit of prey, he’d have either died of thirst or fallen off in an exhausted stupor anyway.

He began to wonder if they were going in circles, endlessly patrolling the same part of the ocean. Fusing his mind with the shark’s didn’t help, because although her senses were sharper than her teeth, she didn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. At one point he slowed her to a crawl, slipped his mask on and put his face beneath the waves, but nothing was visible.
Welcome to the ocean
, as his mentor had once said to him. If he needed a place where he could make marks on unmoving objects to show where he had been, best to remain on land.

Then, as he pulled himself back astride the shark, he saw a ship in the distance. His heart leaped before he pushed his mask down and saw the Dagran flags.

“Well, that’s hardly unexpected, given where we are,” he said to the shark. “And I think we’ll intercept them anyway.”

Muscles tensed beneath his legs and her tail spatted the water hard. The lookout on the Dagran ship called a warning as he drew closer, and men crowded at the gunwales to stare. The ship was a trawler dragging nets in her wake, so he kept the shark at a safe distance and shouted up in a hoarse voice to ask if the crew had seen a Denalait ship.

To his surprise, they had. “
Wreck
,” a man called down. “No,
Wrack
, the one with a figurehead wearing a seaweed crown. Sighted her at three bells. Head northeast by east, and she should be just a few hours away.”

Most of Kovir’s weariness fell away from him. “Thank you,” he said with the courtesy Seawatch taught its recruits before they ever saw a training pool. “May I also buy supplies from you?” In the event they were wrong, and the shark didn’t find
Wrack
after all.

The Dagrans exchanged dubious looks. “With foreign money?”

Kovir drew his double-edged knife, short but honed razor sharp, and slashed open a cuff of his watersuit. An eagle fell out from the fold and he caught it before it could strike the water, then held it over his head so the Dagrans could see it clearly. No matter whose sigil was on the coin, gold was gold—and it was probably the most profit they would ever make.

Two of them hurried away for his supplies at once. He tossed the coin aboard, then directed the shark to the bowsprit where a boy had shimmied out to lower a cloth bag on a long string. The food didn’t taste like anything he was used to, but he was far too hungry to care. He tucked the remains of his meal carefully inside his watersuit and held the shark to the course the Dagrans had advised.

The clouds drifted away, much to his relief, and as the sun began to sink, he saw the tip of a mast on the horizon. The ship’s banner was a black circle on a white field, and he smiled.

“I’ll go aboard for a rest and then you can eat too.” He leaned low over the dorsal so he could press his palm flat against the shark’s hide. She wasn’t likely to feel it, not when her skin was an inch thick to protect her from the teeth of males as they fought to hold on during mating, but the contact always made him feel better. “I don’t know if you like Dagran food any better than I do, but—”

The shark dove beneath the waves.

Kovir’s legs slipped away from her body, and he thrashed his way back up to the surface. He hadn’t been prepared for that, and for a moment, he was blind as well as startled. Coughing, he blinked his vision clear and shoved his mask on. Then he took in a deep breath and went beneath again to see what she thought she was doing.

Perhaps ten feet away, the shark swam in tight circles, her normally graceful movements jerky and her back hunching. Her head shook from side to side. Kovir touched her mind, and a cold thrill ran through his body. He tasted her fear and fury in his mouth.

He intensified the contact at once, sinking from
touch
to
hold
, and he saw what she did. A cluster of writhing arms rose from the deep, changing in color from mottled brown to purple. Too fast for him to clamp down on her reflexes, she lunged at the nearest of the kraken’s limbs. Rows of serrated teeth closed on an arm, shearing through skin and muscle.

In the next moment Kovir regained control. The shark spun about her own axis, narrowly avoiding the maddened lash of other arms as she accelerated to get away.

The whip slewed in from one side, and it was so long it didn’t even seem connected to the mass of the kraken. The shark saw it from the corner of her eye. Before she could dart away, the thick coil curled around her body just behind the dorsal, and the plate-sized suckers lining the inside of the whip clamped against her skin. The coil tightened like a vise.

Bite it
, Kovir thought, watching through the shark’s eyes, tasting cool flesh and cyanic blood. The shark twisted, fighting the strength of the kraken’s grip, her jaws opening.

And the second whip slammed into her. If she had not turned, it would have wrapped around her tail, but it struck her head hard enough to daze her for the instant it needed to coil around her. A sucker was plastered flat against her left eye, and the slimy underside of the whip covered the gills just behind that eye as well.

Panic began to flicker through the shark’s taut body. Not only was she half-blind and completely snared, she couldn’t breathe through one side of her head. Kovir fought to keep her calm while he tried to think of a way out. Nothing came to mind. She struggled violently but the whips only constricted further, crushing her jaws shut until her upper and lower teeth meshed with each other. Her momentum in any direction came to a halt, and she began to suffocate.

Then the whips moved, dragging her towards the confluence of the kraken’s arms and the open mouth in their midst.

Kovir’s lock with the shark ran so deep that iron bands tightened around his own chest as if to hold in the growing fire of suffocation. Through her one eye, he saw the kraken’s beak gape open, and the whips dragged her closer. The shorter arms groped like a cluster of worms, reaching for her.

Her body went rigid. He held her motionless, refusing to waste the last of her strength until he knew what to do. Her tail was still free, but against the whips she would only exhaust herself, and the kraken expected her to struggle, to pull away—

That’s it.

Instead of drawing back, the shark thrashed her tail and plunged forward. Startled, the kraken’s whips tightened a moment later, but her burst of speed took her to the beak. She couldn’t use her jaws, but she didn’t need to. Her body half-curled. The side of her head, with the whip wrapped around it, slammed into the sharp edges of the beak.

A ripple drove through the kraken’s body and the injured whip loosened reflexively. The shark twisted just enough, and her jaws opened. When they closed, they did so in the other whip and she was free again.

This way
, Kovir thought, and the shark plunged towards him. Behind her the beak snapped shut and water rushed as the kraken gave pursuit. Kovir’s senses recoiled into his own mind. He unlocked the contact and saw through his own eyes as her fin streaked at him.

He flung out an arm. Despite her terror, the shark could breathe again and her training asserted itself. She swam straight beneath his arm, against his side, and he grabbed the edge of her dorsal to pull himself on to her back. At her speed, his leg was wrenched beneath his body before he freed it, but he barely felt the pain.

His own training settled back on him like a cold heavy dew, and he glanced over his shoulder, because enraged kraken or no enraged kraken, he had to warn
Wrack
. His pulse clanged so hard in his ears he could barely hear anything else, and he wondered why his physical reactions hadn’t come back under control. Then he realized the sound was the warning bell on
Wrack
.

A pale pennant rose to the top of the mainmast. The ship’s sails began to turn. For a moment he was both half-afraid and half-hopeful that the kraken would attack
Wrack
instead, but then the shark jerked in pain. He dropped back into her mind and felt a sharp throb in her tail where a claw had stabbed her.

Faster
. Except there was no safety in the sea for her unless she found either shallow water or small spaces the kraken could not enter. He would have given anything to be safely back home in the training pools at Whetstone. He wondered if they would ever see Whetstone again.

No, keep calm and think
. He could let her swim until she was exhausted, but what if the kraken’s endurance was greater? And if
Wrack
followed, he would have guided the ship as Seawatch operatives swore to do, but where in all of Eden would he have guided her to? His thoughts roiled worse than the water.

Sometimes
, he remembered his mentor saying,
it’s better not to think than to think too much
. Except how was he supposed
not
to think?

His gaze dropped to the shark’s snout, and he detached completely from her mind. If she noticed, she gave no indication, but when she was fleeing for her life the last thing she would be disturbed by was his absence.

“You have better senses than I do.” He spoke fast and intently. “Than anyone does. You remember
Checkmate
, don’t you? You remember the stink of her copper hull and her new wood and her coalsmoke. Don’t you? You remember the sound of her bell and her paddlewheel. All that’s guiding us now are your senses. There’s only one safe place in the Dagran ocean for us, and I need you to find your way back there.”

The words were meant for him rather than her, a hope of what might happen. Alone in an alien sea, she would flee for the nearest familiarity. That was
Checkmat
e. And since he wasn’t overlapping his consciousness on hers at all, she had to draw on her memories of the ship’s sound and smell. Her senses didn’t need any help from him in that regard.

Then there were the abilities which went even further than those—her attunement to the unseen patterns of energy in the earth, her dead-reckoning estimation of distance. Neither of which he could imagine easily when he was relaxed, let alone at such a time. But the less help he gave her, the more he’d force her to rely on her own devices, on instincts and traits honed over millions of years.

Keeping one hand on her fin and the other flat against her spine, he alternated between looking forward and glancing back. Nothing of the kraken was visible from above the waves. He thought of taking her lower, but that would slow her down. At least while part of his body was above the water, he provided less drag on her.

She could more than sense the kraken’s presence, though. Water turned to churning froth in her wake as she swam with desperate speed, hurtling through the waves. And miles behind them by then,
Wrack
turned fully and began to follow.

Alyster had never before realized what it meant to be lonely.

He’d shared quarters with others of his rank when he had been a midshipman, and after his promotion, he had served on his older brother’s ship. Being the captain was a much more solitary position, and he hadn’t done much to make it less so. He invited Reveka to supper, but it was an effort to keep up the one-sided conversation, and for once he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Thomal and the chief engineer were good company too, but both Kovir and Miri were conspicuous in their absence.

Nothing to be done about Miri, he told himself. Much as he cared about her, she was not only half-salt—something she couldn’t help—but she didn’t seem too intent on hiding it.
That
she had a choice about. And he had to make a choice too, between a rank that was so new it shone and a half-Turean woman. The reception to his speech had shown him one thing: he had to play all his cards right or he might never have a ship better than
Checkmate
.

For that matter, he might not have a ship at all. The Admiralty had the right to revoke his commission if his loyalty was in doubt, and while he knew he would never have placed the best interests of Denalay above any woman, he couldn’t expect the Admiralty to be certain of it. He had to be beyond suspicion. And if that meant giving up Miri… Well, there was a price to be paid for everything.

He just wished he had never met her, had never looked into her eyes or asked her to share his bed.

The next morning the Shiptrapper Coast was in sight, though neither Kovir nor his shark were. By noon, Alyster had spent an inordinate amount of time scanning the horizon with a spyglass. He also ordered a rowboat let down on their starboard side, sculling parallel to them but closer to the coast, since if there were reefs or hidden rocks, he would rather lose a boat than the ship’s keel.

He’d seen coastal cliffs in Denalay, but none like the ones in Dagre. They towered for two hundred feet or more, and were as jagged as if they had been hacked from the land with axes. Rocky fingers extended into a sea which hissed white about them. Worst of all, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the cliffs changed shape subtly when he wasn’t looking. Holes in the rocks stared like eye sockets.