Thy Father's Shadow (Book 4.5) (23 page)

The bubbling stopped, and silence reigned.
Where did it go?
Terian wondered but kept his question to himself.
It was just sitting there, and now it’s gone?

The boat bobbed from the water’s disturbance, and Terian could feel it gently swaying back and forth beneath his legs. He waited. Xem was frozen at the front of the ship, staring into the dark waters with a look of horror. Sareea stood directly across the aisle from him, her curved sword now drawn as well.

She caught his eye and nodded at him. He wondered at her meaning but had no time to decipher it before something bumped the boat.

It was a gentle bump, one that jarred Terian only slightly. His breath caught in his throat as he kept his balance.

The lapping of the waters at the hull grew more insistent—a steady, maddening sound as though the sea were trying to slowly consume the boat.

Another thump drove Terian to his knees. Angry screams of the wooden hull, tested for its strength, filled the air. A few cracks followed as timbers met their match, and a trickling noise of water streaming into the boat washed over them.

“Not good,” Verret said. “This boat is not going to make it back to shore like this—”

“I don’t think this boat was ever going to make it back to shore,” Terian said and turned his eyes toward Sareea again. Her gaze met his and she nodded again, just once. In agreement.

The boat rocked again with the full snapping of planks this time, and Terian was thrown against the side. Something broke through the bottom. Tall and dark, like a mast sticking out of the middle of the ship, it writhed.

Terian stared at it from where he lay. Water was pouring in from the hole it had made. He could feel it wetting his back, his hands. He started to force himself back to his feet but the ship was jarred again.

It’s a tentacle.

He realized it with a certain amount of shock. He’d seen the squids brought into the Reikonos market. Little things, most of them, no more than a few feet long for the biggest of them.

Except
…

There had been one. He’d heard about it, years ago, and had gone to Reikonos with some other members of Sanctuary to see it. Niamh had carried them there on the winds of a teleportation spell. It was the talk of all the land. A sea beast so large that it hung as tall as a titan across a beam planted at the docks. People were crowded around it in amazement, teleporting in from as far away as Oortrais, Pharesia and Fertiss.

A squid bigger than a giant.

Terian felt himself groan in pain and anticipation. The boat lurched as the tentacle moved. It slid down and withdrew, shaking the boat as it did. Water gushed in through the hole it had made at the bottom of the hull.

“This is all wrong!” Grinnd said. “That looks like a saltwater squid, but this is fresh water—”

“Save the analysis for after it kills me, please,” Verret said, his voice muffled. Terian looked back to see his face buried in the deck. Dahveed was the only one still on his feet.

“Should we go overboard?” Sareea asked, and he fixated on her. She was watching him.

“I don’t know,” Terian murmured.
It’s so big. How do we fight that?

“You’re the leader,” Sareea said to him, so softly that no one else could hear her. She was looking in his eyes, whispering, and she wore no shirt to cover her …

Terian felt his fear dissolve, replaced by a flash of lust, then a hard sense of reality crashing down on his gut drove even that out of him.
I’m failing. I can’t fail. If I fail, they die
. “Everybody out of the boat before it sinks!” he called. “We need to kill that thing, now!”

There was not even a pause before he heard the sound of bodies hitting water. Terian vaulted over the edge himself, though his feet had already been nearly up to the knees in the deepening water. “We’ll need to submerge—” he started, and felt air fill his lungs even though he was not taking a breath.

“You can now breathe underwater,” Bowe’s calm voice reached him. He glanced back and saw Bowe hovering above the sinking ship, the water a foot below his feet. His hands were moving in a frenzy, and at the end of each motion he indicated another member of the crew.
Casting Breath of the Aquatic spells.
Sovereign bless you, Bowe.

I should have ordered those as soon as this menace appeared.

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with,” Sareea said, and he watched her pearl-white hair disappear underwater. Her feet broke the surface for a second before dipping below with her.

“Let’s go,” Terian said, feeling far behind.
She’s leading right now. Leading me. I need to get moving, get my mind moving. I was an Elder of Sanctuary, for the gods’ sakes—and I’m being led by a newly graduated dark knight. What is wrong with me?

Terian dove without waiting to see if anyone else followed. The depths were dark, scarcely any light penetrating them. He felt a tickle in his vision and he could see.
Eagle Eye. Bowe, you are truly an indispensable man
.

He could see Sareea swimming beneath him. The dark, rocky bottom of the cave was visible now, covered over with some thin lair of algae.

Something was moving, something big.

He could Sareea swimming toward it.
She’s fearless, that one. Or crazy.

Or both.

He followed her, his strokes of middling effectiveness. Something passed him on the right, and he realized it was Grinnd. He was paced a moment later by Verret.

Terian swam faster, flailing his arms and legs while maintaining his grip on his axe.

Grinnd and Sareea reached the beast at the same time. Its tentacles swept upward around its center like spikes driven in a circle around it. It aligned itself to use the tentacles as a fence between it and its foes, and Terian knew with horrible certainty that this thing was a predator of the worst sort.

It’s ready for us.

A flash of something cut through the water leaving a hard trail behind it. It streaked over Terian’s head and snaked between an open space of tentacles to strike the beast in its oblong head. Terian watched the tail of the spell drift slowly downward, dissolving as it went, and he realized it was a burst of ice.

Whatever my father is paying Bowe, it’s not nearly enough.

The monster swayed with the strike of the ice, tentacles flailing in clear anger. One of them shot at Sareea, another at Grinnd. Terian felt bubbles escape his mouth as he drove his muscles to take him down.

Grinnd met the tentacle with the blade of one of his swords, and dark blood stained the water. It went cloudy and opaque, as though a well of ink had been dropped into the Great Sea. Terian watched the edge of the tentacle continue to flail, a four-foot section of it severed. It drifted out of sight as the beast pulled the rest of it back toward itself.

Sareea cleanly dodged the one flung at her. She managed no counter blow, spinning in the water to reach the inside of the squid’s defensive perimeter. She plunged her sword toward the bulbous head, but the tentacles moved as one and it shot upward as though it had been launched.

Sareea spiraled down like she had been caught in a whirlpool. Terian watched her legs spin until she seemed to catch her bearings and reorient. By then, he was almost upon a tentacle of his own.

He bore his axe in front of him. Verret was alongside him now, aiming for another tentacle, and Grinnd was only just behind them. Another streak of ice pelted the creature but from closer this time.

Ugly monster.
Terian swept his axe back to strike, feeling the resistance of the water as he pushed through. He struck the tentacle that came at him squarely in the middle.

And the axe hung in place.

The tentacle pulled back as though he’d burned it. It dragged him along with it holding the handle of the axe as though it were a rope that would pull him back to the clay beach. The strength of the beast was astounding, and Terian could feel the tug of the water’s resistance to his passage as though it were trying to rip him free of his weapon.

This is not going to be as easy as I’d hoped.

A flare of ice blasted the squid in the side of its head. It was a dome-shaped monstrosity, pointed and almost phallic. Terian ripped his axe free of the indentation he’d made in the creature and swept it into the beast’s head, trying to cut his way in. He made only a thin mark before the squid blasted upward again, knocking him asunder with the sweep of its tentacles.

Terian spun in the water, tossed and disoriented. Up and down became meaningless, concepts he felt he’d once learned but now had forgotten. His head spun with the rest of him and a sudden nausea crept in. His breakfast crept up his throat and he tasted the bile and nastiness of it through the water trying to force its way into his nasal passages.

This was the worst idea in the history of terrible ideas. Who fights a sea monster in the middle of the sea?

A moron, that’s who.

It lingered above him, hanging between him and the surface of the water. He could see it rippling, tentacles moving in time like a dress being spun at a ball.

Something swept by him in a flash. Terian’s head was still swimming while he was holding his position in the water. It took only a moment for him to realize that it was Verret.

Verret swam with long strokes, long sword in one hand and his legs carrying him upward in powerful scissoring motions. Terian could see the underside of the creature, where some aperture waited to spit hard water out and send it upward again.

He watched Verret’s approach almost helplessly, trying to marshal his own limbs to work to push him up as well. After a moment he managed, using his legs to propel him toward the surface.

Verret had a long lead, though, and Terian was moving slowly. Sareea and Grinnd passed him, and another blast of ice came from somewhere above, the trailing edge looking for all the world like someone had made a long pillar of frost with which to stab the creature.

Terian watched them move toward it, and he saw the bottom aperture of the creature open at Verret’s approach. Something bothered him about it, something tickled at the back of his mind.

It was not until he saw the teeth that he knew what he had feared.

The tentacles pushed upward in a solid motion, driving the creature down toward Verret, who was still swimming up to meet it. The dark elf did not have time to react to the beast’s motion, and it came straight for him.

It was a mouth that had opened, and Terian watched it shut again upon Verret’s torso. Teeth shredded through the man, ripping him solidly in half. His upper body disappeared, followed by his lower body in the next motions.

Blood darkened the waters around the mouth, a black cloud hanging beneath the sea monster.

But before it disappeared it the mist of the blood, Terian would have sworn its face was creased in a bizarre, twisted grin.

Chapter 32

He wanted to scream, wanted to yell, but the water would come flooding down his throat so he did not. He tightened his grip on the axe handle so that his knuckles cracked. He could feel the pressure of his grip and wished for his gauntlets so he could sink those taut, metal fingers into the skin of the creature.

I want to hear it scream. I want to hear it cry.

It shot through the cloud of Verret’s blood still hanging between it and the rest of them. It snaked toward Grinnd with three tentacles and each one of them met an end so vicious that Grinnd might have been hacking off his enemies’ heads for the fury with which he treated them. His motions, so normally relaxed and languid, looked merciless.

Grinnd flung himself at the head and buried his swords into it as another blast of ice, larger this time, spiked into the creature and drew blood. Sareea swept through the hole in its defense created by Grinnd and buried her blade several inches in its skull.

The sea monster shook but showed little response to all that was happening to it. The remaining tentacles still moved in a light, swirling dance.

Terian shot toward the head as the creature turned to place its mouth toward its attackers. He did not halt as it opened wide to devour him, and he swept the axe in and hit it squarely in the soft tissue above the teeth.

Three of the pointed things broke free and fell out of the mouth with a swirl of cloudy blood. The monster recoiled from him, dragging Grinnd and Sareea along with it as it tried to escape.

Terian felt a solid jet of water push against him, expelled by the thing’s mouth. He felt it and pushed back, swimming against the current it made. This time he did not spin, though he felt it try to push him away.

You won’t get rid of me that easily, you son of a bitch. I’ll see you hanging on the docks for what you did to Verret!

Grinnd attacked again with a mighty blow that opened a wide gash in the squid’s skin. It split open and Terian saw Sareea plunge her blade into the hole that Grinnd had made while the warrior sliced another on the top of the bulbous skull.

The monster jerked with its remaining tentacles. They flailed in the water loosely, like it had been struck by lightning. Terian paused, and watched, preparing to defend against whatever next blow it might strike.

Sareea’s sword split the skull vertically as she pulled it free. The blade glowed with blue, cold fire.
The most powerful spell a dark knight can wield—the Cold Flame of the Darkheart.
Her face was lit by the light of the blade and he could see a cruel satisfaction in the twist of her lips.

The squid jerked one last time and began to fall, loose tentacles hanging in the water like leaves drifting down from a tall tree.

Terian watched it fall wordlessly. He and the others—the survivors—kept watching until it vanished into the depths of a crevasse, swallowed up by the darkness that had borne it.

Chapter 33

Seventeen Years Earlier

“There is no greater triumph,” the voice of the instructor intoned, “than to follow the will of the Sovereign and defeat his enemies for him. In the time that Sovereign is gone, his tribunal is his voice in these lands, and to obey their command is to please the Sovereign himself greatly.”