Captain's Fury (33 page)

"We find some way to change the rules," Tavi said. He rose for a quick peek at the other ship, then glanced quickly at the sea ahead of them. He started to drop down again, when he froze, staring.

Ahead of the ship, the relatively calm seas were washing against slate grey rocks that rose seven or eight feet up out of the waters. There were perhaps two dozen of them, any one of them large enough to smash open the
Slive's
hull like the lid of an ale keg should the ship collide with them.

"Captain!" Tavi bellowed. "Rocks ahead! Captain Demos, rocks ahead!"

Some of the crew took up the call, relaying it back along the length of the ship. Seconds later, Demos hurried down the deck, crouching low the way Tavi had done it, though the ship's captain moved far more swiftly and confidently than Tavi had.

"The bow!" Tavi called. "Get up here and…" Tavi broke off as Demos's calloused hand clamped suddenly over his mouth.

"Quiet," said the captain, his voice and face unreadable. He let out a pair of sharp, single whistles, and the sounds of sailors talking and calling out to one another abruptly stopped.

Tavi pushed Demos's hand away, staring at him, and lowered his voice. "Why?"

"Because those aren't rocks," Demos said calmly. "They're leviathans."

Chapter 26

"Oh dear," Isana breathed. Demos, like Tavi, was capable of concealing his emotions—or perhaps he simply didn't feel them with any particular intensity. Either way, Isana had been able to discern very little about the man's state of mind at any point during their voyage.

Right now, Demos was radiating a cold, carefully restrained fear.

He stared ahead for a few seconds more, then waved his arm in some kind of signal. The timbers of the
Slive
creaked, and the ship changed course slightly.

"Will we get by them?" Isana heard Tavi ask.

"We might, if we're quiet. This time of the day, they come up to the warm waters at the surface to bask. Provided people don't start shouting"—he gave Tavi a deliberate look—"and that we don't actually bump into one of them and wake him up, the witchmen should let us tiptoe past."

Tavi narrowed his eyes, his brow furrowing. "What if we didn't have the witchmen?"

Demos shrugged. "We'd wish we did. Briefly."

Tavi nodded, his eyes flicking around. Isana watched as a sudden, wolfish grin appeared on his face, accompanied by a surge of excitement.

Kitai, who had been facing away from Tavi, peeking at the enemy vessel and the leviathans in turn, suddenly turned around, and Isana was startled by her expression—a grin that matched Tavi's as perfectly as the green of her eyes.

Her son glanced aside at the
Mactis
, his eyes narrowed. "Change the rules."

Demos finished securing the straps of a heavy canvas harness around Isana's waist. "Too tight?" he asked.

"I have no idea," Isana replied.

Demos grunted. "As long as you can breathe, it should be fine." He held up a line knotted to a metal clip. He showed it to her, then slapped the clip against a metal ring on the harness and gave it a firm tug. "In these waters, you can only see about ten feet. Remember that the
Mactis
is moving forward, so you aren't just moving toward her. You've got to aim ahead of her on an angle."

Isana nodded. "I'll be able to find the ship. I'm not worried about that." She leaned out around the corner of the cabin and peeked at the enemy ship, now less than two hundred yards away.

He attached a second line to another ring. "Make sure you're at least ten feet down when you do," Demos warned her. "If that archer sees you coming, you'll get to experience bow-fishing from the soggy end. Go beneath the ship to the far side before you come up. Believe me, they'll have all their attention focused on us."

"Why does it seem like you've been involved in this sort of thing before, Captain?"

"While it has never actually happened, of course, I have made a number of plans in the event that I should ever work with a customer who wished his cargo to be loaded or off-loaded without troubling a customs inspector or harbormaster." He tested the knots on the lines. "It is in that spirit of preparedness that I had these made for my witchmen. Though I admit, they usually tow crates, not people."

The cabin door opened, and Tavi, Kitai, Araris, and Ehren came hurrying around the corner. Araris's sword was in his hand, and as he came, it flashed in the lowering sun and shattered yet another arrow. The enemy archer had not slackened her pace, and her shafts only became more accurate as the distance closed. A dozen sailors now lay wounded or dead.

"Except for the
leviathans!"
Ehren sputtered.

"Quiet!" hissed several people.

"Actually, your real worry is the sharks," Demos murmured, his tone practical. "There are always dozens of sharks around leviathans, and we're about to start passing through them."

Ehren's face turned white.

"Come on, Ehren," Kitai said. She stripped out of her tunic and kicked off her shoes without a trace of self-consciousness. "Be a man."

Ehren blinked, and spots of color appeared on his cheeks as he turned his head away and coughed. "Oh, bloody crows." He glowered at Tavi, and demanded, "Why do I keep on following you into this kind of thing?"

"You must enjoy it," Tavi said.

"I must be an idiot," Ehren responded. But he, along with Tavi and Araris, also began stripping down. "Let me get this straight. We hold on to the ropes. The Steadholder drags us over there underwater. I open up a hole in the hull, and we eliminate their witchmen. Then we run back here and sail away while the leviathans eat them."

"Yes," Tavi said.

"How long are we going to be under?" Araris asked quietly.

"I've never done this before," Isana said. "If I was alone, it might take me half a minute to move the distance. Perhaps a little more."

"Double it," Demos said, glancing away from Kitai. "At least." He lowered a rope carefully over the side. "Are you not going to strip down, lady? That dress is going to drag quite a bit in the water."

Isana arched an eyebrow at him. "I assure you, Captain, it won't slow me."

"Ah," he said, nodding. "Try not to splash when you go in."

Isana went to the rail and looked down at the sea beneath them. She had never actually gone swimming in it, much less engaged in watercrafting using salt water as a medium. She had heard that there were almost no practical differences in working with freshwater or salt water.
Almost
hardly seemed a comforting word, given that her watercraft was the only thing standing between them and a number of extremely violent, unpleasant forms of death.

For a moment, Isana felt her hands start shaking. What in the world was she thinking? She was no Knight, nor soldier, nor mercenary, to go hurling herself into the deadly sea for the express purpose of murdering two men whom she had never met, nor who had ever done her harm. She was a Steadholder, used to running a farm—and half the time she'd had that position, she had been traveling around the Realm for one reason or another. What could possibly make her think that she was capable of doing something like this?

Isana caught herself before all the anxiety and rising apprehension around her overwhelmed her thoughts. She took a deep breath, called to Rill, and lowered herself into the sea, parting the water beneath her so that she entered with hardly a ripple, much less a splash.

She stayed under for a moment, using the bond with her fury to reach out around her in the water. The sea was warmer than she expected, and there was a greater sense of buoyancy than in the cold streams and lakes of her home. She closed her eyes for a moment, focusing on the water around her, and immediately felt the presence of the furies laboring for the
Slive's
witchmen. It was crafting of considerable complexity and effort—allowing the ship to cut smoothly through the waters while simultaneously smoothing those waters only a few feet from the hulls. Isana had no idea if she herself could have managed it, and certainly she couldn't have done it for any length of time. The witchmen kept it up on a continual basis. It was a specialist's form of crafting, then, something that took time to practice and master.

It was probably why the witchmen remained so isolated from the rest of the ship—down in the depths of the hold, as close to the water and as far from the distracting emotions of their crewmates as possible.

She took a slow breath and felt Rill filtering the water. The air tasted slightly of minerals, like the hot springs in the Calderon Valley, but she had no particular difficulty. She willed herself forward and rushed through the water, banked in a half circle, and returned to the side of the
Slive
. It was somewhat daunting, how much water was around her. Isana had never been swimming in so much water that she could not feel either shoreline and the floor of the lake or river she was in. Here, in the sea, the water stretched out in every direction, for as far as her senses could reach, endless rolling blue all around her and endless, grave-cold blackness beneath her.

The water was disturbed behind and beneath her, and Isana darted to one side just as a smooth, sleek form more than ten feet long glided through the water she'd recently occupied. She saw a dark, glassy eye, and a mouth of jagged teeth. And then the shark was past her, and it vanished into the murky ocean in utterly silent grace.

Isana took a moment to deliberately extend her senses, so that she would have at least a little more warning should another shark attempt such a thing, and tried to slow down her wildly beating heart. Then she rose to the surface beside the ship.

Araris was halfway down the rope, leaning down, his expression drawn with worry. She met his eyes and tried to smile at him.

"Are you all right?" he murmured.

She lifted a finger to her lips as she nodded, and beckoned him. Araris turned and lowered himself hand over hand down the rest of the rope, the sinews in his back and shoulders rippling. He kept going once his feet hit the water and slid in slowly and quietly.

The rest of them came down the same way—except for Ehren, whose grip slipped halfway down the line. Isana was ready for it, and Rill was ready to receive him, a vaguely human shape rising from the waves to catch Ehren and lower him soundlessly into the water.

"All right," Tavi murmured. He treaded water beside Isana and seized one of the ropes on her harness. "Everyone grab hold. We need to hurry."

Isana turned toward the enemy ship as the
Slive
sailed on, and the others maneuvered through the water to catch hold of the trailing lines. It took them longer than she would have thought, and she felt the faint fluttering sensation of at least two more sharks circling fifty or sixty feet away.

"All right, let's go," Tavi murmured. She felt his hand touch her shoulder and squeeze once. His fear came pouring through his touch, but so did a sense of almost-eager elation. Great furies save her, the boy was
enjoying
himself.

"Deep breaths everyone," Isana said. She waited a beat, then she oriented on the receding form of the
Mactis
, reached out to Rill, and dived.

She noticed immediately how much more effort it took to move. A glance over her shoulder showed her that everyone was holding on with both hands, and stripped down to trousers, their bodies moved through the water as smoothly as they could. Even so, the additional weight and resistance to movement was considerable.

Isana ground her teeth. At this rate, it would take even longer than Demos's estimate to reach the
Mactis
, and the others didn't have her ability to breathe while underwater. Surfacing too near the enemy ship would be suicide, and if they stopped to discuss it, the
Mactis
might have sailed beyond her ability to catch up.

There was no help for it. She closed her eyes and redoubled her efforts, spreading more of her fury's attention into the water around her charges so that they cut through it more efficiently. Slowly, they began to pick up speed. The sensation of her bond with Rill became something tangible, a pressure on her temples, and she bent all her attention to her task.

She almost didn't notice it, but Rill's sudden warning made her bank sharply to avoid ramming something large and dark. She followed the contours of the object, pressing ahead. Its surface was odd, pebbly, and laced with barnacles and straggling, hair-fine bits of dark green seaweed. They passed along it for several seconds before it dawned on Isana that they were within arm's reach of a leviathan.

Her heart leapt into her throat, crashed back down into her belly, and began beating very quickly. The creature was huge. It literally stretched out of sight in every direction she looked. They were passing along what might have been a tail, she supposed, a long column of flesh and hide, ridged with bony, protruding plates down its center. Ahead of her, she saw a protuberance of some kind, then they passed over what might have been a flipper, broader than the
Slive
, its end impossible to see in the murky water.

Next she passed several rows of what looked like trenches, or perhaps extrabroad furrows in a field. Ribs. They were the creature's ribs. There was a dull, heavy throb in the water, pressing rhythmically against her, and Isana realized that she could actually
feel
the beating of the leviathan's gargantuan heart.