The Farthest Shore (Eden Series Book 3) (29 page)

The cutlass slashed down. Reveka threw herself aside and scrambled into a corner of the room, raising an arm over her face. Miri shook off her shock and grabbed the nearest thing she saw, the metal pan Reveka had used to call for help earlier—before she had been able to speak.

She flung the pan as hard as she could. The exertion seemed to tear the gash in her belly wider, but the pan hit Graley’s arm, and his strike missed Reveka. Snarling, he whirled around to face Miri.

She hurled a fistful of sand in his face.

Graley’s free hand flew to his eyes. Reveka bolted up, slid clear past him and grabbed the handle of the sand bucket. Miri threw herself flat on the floor to get clear as Reveka, teeth set with the effort, whirled the bucket around and let it fly. The reaction sent her off-balance, lurching against the nearest wall, but the bucket crashed into Graley’s chest.

The heavy bone breastplate cracked with the impact, and Miri didn’t think that was the only bone which had broken. He staggered back and crumpled slowly.

There was no sound in the surgery except for rapid, hoarse breathing—whose, Miri couldn’t have said. A hand was extended down to her, and she looked up at Reveka’s set face.

She was speechless again, not asking
Are you all right?
or anything similar. Miri found herself thinking of a magical creature in a story, permitted to speak once in the tongues of men but silenced forever after, and told herself not to be ridiculous.

“Can you—can you still talk?” she whispered.

“I always could.” Reveka pulled her up. “Go lock the door.”

Ralcilos froze. He wanted to kill the man who stood before him—despite the rising cloud of steam, he was close enough to see the Denalait captain—but Cuyven’s shrieks echoed off the walls, and every instinct told him to get out before he was blinded too. The place was a tangle of devices and instruments he didn’t understand but which the Denalaits could use against his people.

The kraken
. He grasped at the lifeline. The kraken could sink the ship.

He was out of the engine room at once. When he reached the deck, the air no longer smelled of blood and smoke and metal burned to red heat, and it cleared his head, but more screams came up from below. His crew. But they had been dead from the moment they had left the Iron Ocean. The only thing left to do was bury them all and build a cairn of Denalait corpses over their resting place. Kaig stood to one side of the stern, beside the anchor that had been raised, a lantern in one hand and an axe in the other. Ralcilos hurried to him.

He smelled the kraken, but beneath the usual pungency was a faint unpleasant sweetness that might have been flesh starting to rot. When Kaig held the lantern out over the taffrail, Ralcilos saw the ends of the arms spreading languidly through the water just below them. The rest of the kraken, beyond the circle of light, might be at the surface too. He guessed it no longer had the strength to return to the Iron Ocean, but that didn’t matter either.

Time to finish everything. And he could imagine what would happen when the ship tilted just low enough for the ocean to rush in. Instants before water ruined the machinery and stopped the engine, it would sizzle on the burning-hot components and fill the engine room with enough steam to cook all the Denalaits.

“Take the ship down!” he shouted at the kraken.

There was a trundling creak. Ralcilos knew it was the hatch cover beginning to turn, but who was doing that? The only way the girl could reach it was to break every nerve-strand holding her to the control chamber.

Then the hatch opened. Even in the darkness and before the figure spoke, Ralcilos knew it wasn’t the girl.

“She remembers now,” he said, as if continuing a conversation he and Ralcilos had begun a little while ago. “She was very young. So the Seawatch agent who found her agreed her family could keep her for another year, but that was enough time for a spy to pass the news, and you couldn’t pass up—”

Ralcilos grabbed Kaig’s axe, yanking it free of his hand. The kraken was too large to kill with such a weapon and the Denalait was a shadow in the night, but the winch wrapping the anchor chain was close enough. He spun around and smashed the axe’s blade into it.

The blow was hard enough to strike sparks. Wood crunched and cogs flew skittering across the deck. The oiled anchor chain spun.

“What are you—” Kaig’s eyes went wide. “Nuemy, get away! Go!”

Just as Ralcilos had expected, she heard the fear in Kaig’s voice and did the opposite. The kraken lurched up against the hull, arms rising to grab the rail. The ship began to slope and the anchor swayed as the lashings which held it away from the hull were strained to their limits. Ralcilos swatted one tentacle away with the edge of his axe, ignoring the splatter that followed, and brought the axe down across the lashings with all his strength.

Rope snapped. The chain slid free, whirring loose so hard that it whipped the deck, and the anchor dropped. Tons of metal descended on the kraken. All its limbs flailed up wildly and were drawn down as if the ocean had sucked them back into itself. The trailing end of the chain vanished over the gunwale.

“You killed her!” Kaig screamed at him.

If she was one of them, she deserved it
. He wanted to kill Kaig too, but there was no more time and he had no intention of being taken alive by the Denalaits because he’d been fool enough to waste time fighting traitors. Instead he ran to the side of the ship, to the single boat.

He vaulted over the gunwale, and it was the work of only a moment to cut the boat free. He dropped with it, biting his tongue with the impact when the boat hit the water, but he was beyond pain at that point. All he could think of was getting away.

Dropping his axe, he caught up the oars and rowed steadily. The water in the bottom of the boat soaked his shoes, but at least the night was far too dark for anyone to see him. He kept rowing, knowing only that he had to put enough distance between himself and the ship.

And after that? He could never go back home now, but he still had matters to settle with everyone on
Checkmate
. First he had to head for the coast, though if a Dagran ship found him that would work too, since he still wore a Dagran uniform…

The water had saturated the cuffs of his trousers. Puzzled, Ralcilos let go of an oar and reached down. He’d thought the water had splashed into the boat when it had dropped, but his hand went in past his wrist—and the water was continuing to rise.

The plug. Shipping the oars hastily, he went to his knees and felt his way along the bottom of the boat until he found the source of the leak. Where was the plug? He searched with growing panic and found nothing.
Never mind, stopper it somehow
. The water was halfway up the sides of the boat.

By the time he managed to seal the leak with scraps of his clothing and belt, the boat rode lower. No time to stop and empty it, but as long as it wasn’t sinking, he could row. He took up the oars again.

Something moving fast and solidly struck the hull. The boat rolled, and before Ralcilos could throw himself to counterbalance it, he was in the water. He struggled to the surface, coughing, as the boat went keel-up beside him.

All of its contents would have spilled by then, but the only thing he wanted was to be out of the water before whatever had hit the boat collided with him too. He grabbed at the boat, clawing at the slippery hull, and a hard thump turned his left foot numb. A prickling sensation, like a wave of gooseflesh, rolled up his leg.

Terror gave him the strength he needed, and he clambered on top of the boat, which rocked under him. Drawing his legs up to keep them out of the water, he closed his fingers over his foot. Half the shoe had been cut away with what felt like the sharpest of shears, and liquid too warm to be seawater trickled through his fist.

I didn’t want to die alone
, he thought, just as the clouds parted and he saw that he wouldn’t. In the moonlight the fin that flashed into view for less than a heartbeat gleamed metallic blue. Then it was mirrored by a second fin and a third, as they began to circle the boat.

“Nuemy, get away! Go!”

The hatch was open, so Nuemy heard Kaig’s voice—distant, like all sounds from above, but she knew him so well that the fear in it clanged loud as a bell. Ralcilos. Her heart stuttered. Ralcilos knew Kaig cared about her and that she loved him, so he would hurt Kaig to punish her.

On top of using her as a shipkiller, he was trying to take away the one person in the world who mattered to her. The panic vanished. She wasn’t going to let him harm anyone else.

Joined so closely to her, the kraken sensed her fury, and she gave it its head.
Nautilex
tilted upward as the huge body rose from the water, arms clutching at the steamship. Kovir scrambled into the hatchway and Nuemy fell into the kraken’s senses. She abandoned her usual caution, allowing the kraken to feel all the emotion she would have suppressed. A sharp pain drove through one of her arms—its arms—as Ralcilos struck out with an axe, but she had more limbs that reached for him, grasping, moving to cut off his escape.

She couldn’t see what happened next, but she heard the swift metallic slide of chain links over each other, whirring through the air. Then a great crushing weight slammed down.

The pain was blinding. Her mouth opened, though if she screamed she couldn’t hear the sound. The kraken’s arms convulsed, but she had one glimpse of the anchor before the sea closed over her eyes, and she knew that in its weakened, injured state, the kraken would never be able to move something so heavy. Water gushed up over its mantle and down into the open submersible.

Kovir was in the hatchway, though. Nuemy was only peripherally aware of him, but as she detached from the kraken, she heard the hatch cover slide into position. He shoved the locks shut and leaped back down into the submersible.

Water sloshed over the floor and Nuemy drew her legs closer to her. She couldn’t remember if the door between the control chamber and the rest of the submersible was waterproof, and she didn’t care. The kraken was her first priority. Now that she knew she wasn’t going to drown in the next minute, she tentatively brushed her mind against its senses again.

The anchor had crushed its arms and done too much damage for it to recover, yet that was all that had been hurt—its arms, so it wasn’t even dying quickly. She imagined lying there with her limbs broken, in agony, unable to move and yet capable of existing until she died of thirst or the sharks closed in. No, she wouldn’t put it through anything more.

“Nuemy!” Water splashed around Kovir’s ankles as he made his way into the control chamber. “We have to get out.”

She nodded. “Help me up.”

He stripped off a glove with his teeth, caught her arm and pulled. Stars exploded in her vision. She hadn’t realized until then how closely she’d been enveloped in the kraken’s flesh, joined to its nerves. Now the delicate fibers snapped as Kovir hauled her up, and she swayed, fighting to stay on her feet. Her muscles felt limp and empty, like thrown-away fruit peels.

“Pull the levers,” she managed to say. “The ones in the wall behind me. Right, then left.”

He released her at once and crouched. Thank both the gods he was there, because she knew she would not have been strong enough to do that herself. His arms tightened, flexing, and the first lever clanged up. All around them, beneath the air-exchange surface, metallic plates slid into place and cut off every pore in
Nautilex
.

Kovir hurried to the second lever. She touched the kraken’s mind for the last time, telling it silently that that should never have happened, and she would have to hurt it one last time. But once that was over, it would finally be at rest, and in the last moments of its life, she would give it back its home.

As Kovir knelt and wrapped his hands around the second lever, she fused completely with the kraken’s consciousness, taking it down with her thousands of fathoms into the abyss, the bone-deep cold and the calm lightless reaches of the ocean. In her mind’s eye, she saw the seabed, thick-furred with mud, and the skeleton of a great whale picked clean just beneath as the kraken swam onward into the night.

Kovir slammed the lever up.

A muffled
whump
detonated at the end of the submersible. The connection between Nuemy and the kraken burst apart like a bubble. The submersible jolted violently as it was torn free of the kraken’s body. It slid away, out of control now and half-turning as either the kraken’s last movements or an ocean current buffeted it. Nuemy was thrown against the wall as the submersible finally came to rest.

Soaked to the skin, she shook her head in disorientation. Her legs gave way, and she landed on the thick, oozing gill-surfaces of the wall—no traction there even if she wanted to crawl. Water was leaking through the hull in a dozen places.

“Kovir!”

A few feet away, he struggled up. Blood trickled from a cut in his head, but he moved across to her, and when he pulled her up, she clung to him. The water came to her knees and was rising.

“We have to swim.” She tried to speak normally, but she couldn’t keep the dread from her voice as she glanced up at the hatch. Not only did she have no idea how deep they were, once they opened the hatch, they would have to swim out against the inward rush. The water had reached her waist.

“I’ll go first—” Kovir began.

A hard thump-thump sounded against the hatch, the sound of someone striking it with a rock, and despite everything that had happened, Nuemy’s heart leaped. A signal, Kaig’s signal. No one else would have risked their life to save her.

They reached the hatchway together. The cover was being turned from above now, but if Kaig had managed to swim down to them, they couldn’t be too deep. Kovir’s hands closed around her waist, and he lifted her up into the hatch. She grabbed the rungs—her arms, which hadn’t been sunk into the kraken’s flesh for months, were a little stronger than her legs—and dragged herself up halfway.

That was all she could go before her arms felt about to give way, and her legs were so little help she might as well have left them behind in the control chamber. Below her, the water came to Kovir’s neck.