Dream Storm Sea (26 page)

A redness grew in her vision, spreading through the water in waves of light.
My diamond?
She reached out to it, grasped nothing.

Darkness folded around her. Her perception shortened to flashes. Three bubbles spinning around each other. A worm with red suckers was going alone out to sea. A hand closing on her arm. The flash of abalone shell.

Hiresha vomited water and gasped air.

She opened her eyes, found herself sprawled over the railing of
The Roost
. Tethiel pulled her, and Emesea pushed her in.

The warrior jumped aboard after her. “Did you kill it? The kraken? The poor beauty.”

“I don’t—” Hiresha spit and spluttered. “Don’t know.”

Emesea said, “She left an arm behind. You butchered it.”

Tethiel scratched away the hair from the enchantress’s eyes. Half of him lit red from lightning bolts. “The kraken is either dead or fled.”

“Is the storm near?” Hiresha heard rain, then thunder. She tried to sit up.

“Yes, a typhoon.” Emesea pushed the enchantress down.

Hiresha had seen it.
The deadly shoal. The multitude of hungry mouths.

“Tell them, if you can,” Emesea stood over the enchantress.

“What should we tell?” Tethiel asked. He was pushed beside Hiresha at the bottom of the boat.

“That this dragon stood a thousand to one.”

The warrior squared her shoulders with the sound of incoming rain. Sunrise tinted the feathers above her in the sail. The daylight peeled away the opal sheen from her armor. Light dispelled illusion, leaving it the color of bloody mud.

Climbing from a whirlpool was not difficult. It was impossible.

Enchantress Hiresha would have preferred to live her life in ignorance of that fact. Clinging to a wet thread above a caldera filled with distilled essence tempest, she had to confront certain realities. Or unrealities, she hoped.

The rope curved with the flow of water, so Hiresha could not pull herself up and out, only around. With the current pressing against her, she made the most headway skimming on the surface with kicks. That effort gained her nothing. She slid further down the funnel with the rope because the barge was now caught in the sea vortex.

Grooves slanted down the whirlpool like roads cut into a valley wall. The boat spun sideways along one of these tracks of water. The rope had dragged it in.

Hiresha may have lost her acuity, but even she could see that it was hopeless. She clung to the rope and closed her eyes, willing an end to this travesty. Her efforts to save Emesea had also failed. Hiresha had thrown a length of rope to the spot where the warrior had disappeared in the seething magic. No one had grabbed a hold of it.

“Hiresha!”

Surprise forced her eyes open, and she saw Tethiel swimming to her. A grid of white scars crossed his chest. He wrapped her arm around his neck and started struggling to paddle his way straight up the liquid slope.

But you can’t swim,
she wanted to say.

His hands scooped a frenzy of water. A memory skipped through her mind about a dream storm curing his fingers. A desperation of heat wafted from him, and they did not sink further in the whirlpool. With her help they may have even gained ground.

A dragon sliced past. The entity of opalescent scales and azure frills paid them as little attention as any of the fish caught in the current. One peach-colored specimen rolled fin over fin, and a school with black-and-white stripes looked lost.

The barge slid into view. Hiresha could not believe they would reach it, but Tethiel drove them against good reason. She grasped the mussels on the side of
Pharaoh’s Wisdom
. Tethiel pushed her aboard, and Hiresha hauled him in after her. She did not feel relieved, only baffled.

“Have to cut the rope.” He picked up a dropped obsidian axe. He took one step then collapsed.

Hiresha wondered if the exertion had killed him. She had always measured the Feaster’s strength of will greater than his strength of arm.
Well, another reason that this is the less likely facet of my dream inversion.

He still had a pulse. The relief she felt was all too real, and she hated to disappoint Tethiel, even a falsehood of him. She picked up the axe.

“The rope’s enchanted.” Gold wire glinted up at her. “I can’t break it.”

One of his eyes flickered open. “The railing, my heart. You must live.”

The enchantress hacked through the seaweed-encrusted railing of the barge. The rope whipped away. The boat maintained its pitched course down the whirlpool. Hiresha glanced at the sails but knew it was too late to change their heading. The skewing boat slid Tethiel against her, and they both gazed to the base of the funnel. They would crash into the emerald maelstrom.

He gripped her hand. She did not want to look at him. Involving herself any more in this falsehood would only worsen the pain. A sensation of drowning caused her to choke, and she glimpsed a woman in red dying. She was floundering in water obscured by kraken blood.

My true self!
With a jolt of clarity Hiresha heard the red-dressed enchantress hoping the other facet was real. Hiresha clenched the sodden folds of her blue dress. She felt as if a gem-carving chisel was hammered between her ribs, a coldness of metal in her chest. She wrapped her arms around Tethiel and held on.

They both gasped when tentacles wrapped around the boat. Iris-hued eyespots moved over a hide of tangerine. Skyheart was trying to tell her something, but the only pattern she caught was “dragons.”

The kraken hefted the barge out of the whirlpool, and Hiresha felt cloud-soaring relief. Sobbing, she reached out and touched Skyheart’s arm. A ring of pigment moved beneath her fingers, and the marvel of it all caught her breath. When the boat sat level on the sea, she wobbled to her feet.

“Skyheart, my friend fell into the wild magic. Could you—Skyheart!”

The kraken’s suckers slurped away from the boat, and Skyheart dipped underwater, her colors smearing out of view. Only then did Hiresha realize she had shouted. She had lost the diamond dust she needed to speak with the kraken.

“She can’t hear me.” Hiresha’s voice sounded dead.

“Words…” Tethiel wheezed. “…are perfect playthings but useless for communicating.”

The whirlpool shrank then disappeared into flatness. A wave flowed outward against the barge. Sky skates soared into the underside of the thunderstorm then dove out again. Deep below them, the sea mount fumed green. It looked every part a magical volcano.

Hiresha assumed that Skyheart must have told the dragons to bathe in the power. The enchantress imagined the serpentine creatures drinking in magic, the storm above darkening and growing into a cloud more massive and powerful than a kingdom. She thought it peculiar that something might yet go as planned.

Her hand jerked to her lips. “The flood! I have to warn Oasis City, and I can’t fly.”

“Can’t you?” Tethiel touched the gems implanted in her cheeks and her brow. “Where has your spark gone?”

The diamonds in her face might as well have been gravel. Their enchantments had died. She tried to reach out to her dream power. She only felt sleepy. Pacing across the deck grew too wearisome, and she slumped against the mast. Her hair blew in black fans across her vision.

Her locks fell slack when the wind softened. The thunderstorm broke apart into white clouds. The feeling of wrongness in Hiresha climbed to an even more shrill pitch. A lone sea serpent raced away toward the horizon.

“Where did the other dragon go?” Hiresha glanced to the seamount. Its summit no longer glowed. “What—”

Tethiel pulled the enchantress behind the barge’s canopy. She was about to demand an explanation when the boat quivered. Redness splattered across deck boards.

A dragon’s head rolled over the barge. Its eyes were milky. Its neck frill folded and wrinkled like so much loose skin. Strands of muscle and sinew dangled from the stump; this was no clean cut. The head looked like it had been ripped off the dragon.
Why would Skyheart do that?
Hiresha could not believe it.

The boat tipped. Hiresha's primal terror felt like an insect digging its legs and pincers into her brain.

A creature crouched on the railing. Her eyes were the green of fireflies in a dark wood. Her hair was a black current in the deep sea. Her face resembled Emesea’s.
But, no.
A cliff of pitted stone could look more human, that crag like a nose, that cleft a mouth, that overhang a brow.

The being had a smear of lapis lazuli across her chest. Its color matched that of Emesea’s tattoo. The being wiped it off and flicked the blue slime onto the dragon’s blood. When she spoke, her voice sounded of tigers roaring, boulders grinding, monsoons gusting, and thunder echoing.

“The dragons wronged me.”

Those eyes of green sunbursts now gazed on Hiresha. The enchantress’s knees gave out. Only Tethiel held her upright.

“You wronged me,” the creature said. Something crossed over her face that almost looked like human confusion. “How? What could you have done to me?”

Tethiel squeezed Hiresha’s arm and shifted his chin side to side. Even without his warning, Hiresha was not about to remind this being why she should be angry. The enchantress understood that wild magic had changed Emesea into something feral. Even as Hiresha feared the being, she pitied her.
It was Emesea who saved me from this.

Emesea’s lips drew back from her crooked teeth. The expression was anything but a smile. “You think to look at me?”

She stormed over the boat toward Hiresha. Boards cracked. Poles splintered, and the canopy of mangrove branches flew away. The enchantress had only time to think she should jump overboard when Emesea was lifted off her feet.

The air around her had a fishhook sticking out of it. Skyheart had grabbed the being.

Emesea slashed and clawed with a fury.

Gouts of blue blood came from the sky. Tentacles appeared, crimson with violet eyespots. The kraken held Emesea, but it looked as easy as holding a tornado of jagged rocks. She ripped off one of Skyheart’s arms, and the limb continued to flop and coil on its own between the waves.

Hiresha gaped in shock. Tethiel pulled at her, saying something about sailing the barge away.

“No, I have to help Skyheart.” Hiresha had one foot on the rail before she remembered her powerlessness. Once again she tried to reach for her dream magic but only felt emptiness. “Swim away, Skyheart. Throw her off and escape.”

Whether the fight between the kraken and the warrior was long or short the enchantress could not say. To her it seemed an age. She wanted to cower from the sight, to deny it, but out of respect for the beautiful friend that had saved her life, Hiresha watched to the end.

Hiresha had never witnessed a friend being devoured, and she did not care for it.

Emesea did not scream, never more than grunted in pain. She shouted small triumphs. “Quick as spit but not fast enough.” The warrior even belted out encouragement to the swarm. “Call that a bite? I’ve had fiercer kisses, you mosquito!”

The Fanged Typhoon flew with a crackle of fin beats. They shadowed the boat from the sunrise. Most passed over Hiresha’s head, but a few fish gusted into the base of the boat. They zipped back and forth like hornets with crescent tails. Hiresha covered her face and Tethiel’s with the oilskin sack, but she cringed and jerked in pain whenever teeth pierced her clothes.

She beat back the few chomping at her. Above, Emesea was leaping over the boat, her arms whistling with obsidian. Fish dropped into the bilge, severed or dazed. Others in the deadly shoal chomped on their dying brethren, flipping out of the boat with them.
To save them? Or to cannibalize?

The air cleared. The swarm had swept past, leaving the bilge water red.

Hiresha peeked. The storm towered above them, a black monstrosity shivering with magic and lightning bolts.

She could not bear to look at Emesea. Somehow the warrior was still on her feet, if leaning against the mast and breathing wetly.

The enchantress asked the illusionist, “Can you make us taste terrible?”

“You mean like fish?”

The sound of rain circled around to strike again.

“They’re even gnawing the mast,” Tethiel said. “Tasting rotting meat would only encourage them to eat faster.”

The enchantress did not care to imagine that. “I don’t think we could swim—”

The tearing sound of droplets drowned her out. The Typhoon’s darkness returned. Hiresha swatted at a pain in her thigh. Two more fish latched onto her hand. She gasped.

Emesea no longer shouted. She staggered about the boat.

Hiresha tried to clear her mind. She cast about for her dream power, but she felt only the slime of the kraken’s venom in her nose and skin. The enchantress clawed at herself, scraping against the side of the boat to get the antimagic off. She hacked coughs. She had already vomited.
Some of the glowing gel may remain in my lungs.