Dream Storm Sea (27 page)

The Fanged Typhoon blew past. Only then could Hiresha see that a thing in abalone armor had fallen. A fright of teeth without lips. A yellowish arch of a cheek bone. The enchantress wrenched her gaze away from Emesea, the red memory stinging the back of her eyes.

The pain of losing a friend made her vomit again. Just as potent as the sting in her throat was a sense of strangeness.
This isn’t right. Emesea wasn’t the one to die.
She felt that in another place and another time, Emesea still lived. She thought if she strained she could almost remember.

The carnage so overwhelmed Hiresha that it seemed close enough to touch. She flinched every time a tentacle was cut. The coppery blood filled her senses. Only after the struggling died out did Hiresha see it was far away. Tethiel must have caught a wind with the sails.

In the distance, the being that once was Emesea stood on an island of crumpled flesh. The head of the kraken sagged and flattened as the warrior strode over it.

Hiresha’s eyes stung. Her chest hurt from the spasm of sobs. She flinched when Emesea’s voice boomed.

“Oasis City held me in darkness. It bound my hands. It starved me. I will drown its towers. I’ll grind its stones to sand.”

The warrior leaped off the carcass. She dove, and when she struck the seafloor it sounded as a tremor. The sea moved. A trough opened, a mound of water behind it.
The beginnings of a great wave,
the enchantress saw.
Emesea will carry a flood across a desert and through city gates.

Hiresha had no doubt this being could destroy Oasis City. It was beyond belief, but the enchantress believed it down to the worms of pain in her stomach.

She kneaded the length of her blue sari slung over her shoulder. The enchantress had seen Emesea savage a kraken and run off with a tsunami. She wanted to believe it too unlikely to be truth. She feared it too improbable to be a dream.

The enchantress had promised that her escape would only bring good to the Lands of Loam. Because of her, Emesea had transformed into a walking cataclysm. If a morsel of a chance existed that this was not a dream, Hiresha knew she had to stop it.

“Turn this boat around.” She rushed to the rigging. “To the seamount.”

“The wind is blowing west.” Tethiel sprawled against a railing, exhausted. “We should ride it to land.”

“I need my diamonds. I have to—”

“We can escape this, my heart.” Tethiel’s brows inched together in concern. “This is our chance to leave the sea.”

“Spellsword Fos might be waiting for me in Oasis City. Janny, too, and thousands of other souls.” Hiresha beat her fists against the rigging. “And Emesea will level the city.”

“I have children there.” Tethiel grasped her wrists. His hands shook, but his voice held calm. “I’ll send them a dream. They may have time to find your friends and flee the city.”

“That’s hardly sufficient.”

Even when she calmed herself enough to untie the ropes and adjust the sails, she saw it was as Tethiel said. The wind defied her. If she wished to reach the seamount, she would have to swim. How she might retrieve her diamonds then reach Emesea in time to stop her, the enchantress could not guess.

More than anything, she wished to know. She wanted to speak the keystone words that revealed if she dreamed. That would end the dream inversion, if it had not ended already.
What a relief if this catastrophe never happened.
The enchantress also understood the danger of that gamble. The blue dress could be reality. She would need to begin a new inversion to avert disaster, and that might take half a day, if it was even possible.

“Oasis City will be underwater in hours.” She thumped her hands against the railing.

I was wrong.
She saw that now.
Wrong to believe this a dream, to think I knew which facet was correct.

Hiresha decided the dream inversion had not ended. She had only strained it with her disbelief.
I have to think that. It’s my only chance. And if I’m still in the inversion, I should have power.

She focused on Lightening herself, to fly. The enchantress leaped.

Her knee skinned against the railing, and she flopped overboard.

In one world, Emesea lived. In the other, she had died. To Hiresha it felt like holding a diamond in her fist without knowing if it was perfectly carved or broken to shards. Each second of ignorance chafed. Nothing came more naturally than the desire to open her hand, to know the absolute truth.

“But my hand must stay shut.”
The power of the dream inversion depends on it.

“What was that?” Tethiel’s jaw pressed against her shoulder, the two crammed together in the hull of
The Roost
.

The sound of rain grew to a nearing deluge. The boat bobbed downward to reveal the sun as a molten orb of shimmering heat.

Hiresha wrung the collar of her dress. “My perspective was wrong.”

Revelation came to her in a shattering gust. Hiresha had agonized over the similarities in her two worlds and stumbled over the discrepancies. She should have delighted in them both.
They’re proof of my dream inversion.

Tethiel shook her shoulder. “The Murderfish, she’s—”

The boat was hurled. Tethiel and Hiresha tumbled through the air. He caught her hand. She looked down, saw a sea painted maroon with the sunrise. The Fanged Typhoon seethed from the water, a mass of silver fins ebbing and flowing, splitting apart and welding back together.

Hiresha could not see the Murderfish, but she knew it was there.
In one world the kraken died. In this one, it lives. I mustn’t distress myself with guessing which facet is truth. I must embrace that each might be.

Her mind crackled with lucid energy. She could count each ripple in the sea. They spread from tentacles that themselves were patterned in a camouflage of furrowed water. The kraken unfolded itself from the background in her eyes. It had almost reached her, its suckers the hue of fire.

She stopped herself midair with a Lightening spell. The kraken’s arm missed, and she leaped off the back of it with Tethiel.

The two spun upward. The storm whirled around them as a blackness alive with crimson thunderbolts. Updrafts of wild magic within the cloud burst out the top like volcanoes. She could taste the lightning, a sharp newness. The sun appeared level with the Feaster and the enchantress, and the new day had turned the sea into liquid rubies.

Tethiel wrapped both hands around her. “This is a moment worth a lifetime.”

Hiresha wanted to tell him so much.
No need to worry. I’ll fix everything.
And,
This is a terrible world we live in, but you’re the one constant of undependability that makes life bearable.

She decided on the practical. “Hold on, and hide my attacks with your magic.”

They rode a warm storm gale downward. Holding Tethiel close, she felt a giddy swooping sensation in her core. Hiresha reached out, sensed her red diamond amid a sinking clump of compressed fish. She summoned her gem toward her. Deeper, she felt the enchanted spearhead. She had dropped it. Her connection remained, and she beckoned it to rise from the seafloor.

The deadly shoal spewed from the waves to engulf them.

The diamond flicked into her hand. This time when she threw it, it seemed to disappear into thin air. Tethiel had thrown a cloak of magic over her deadly jewel.

The center of the Fanged Typhoon flashed red. The shoal crumpled inward, crushed by Attraction forces.

The surviving fish buzzed forward in clumps then flapped away to regroup. The diminished cloud swam around the boulder of their dead comrades, and then they dove. Razor tails fled into the deep.

The enchantress thought she should celebrate the defeat of the Fanged Typhoon. It had killed Emesea, and Hiresha had taken revenge. Yet the enchantress felt no joy in it.
Blood for blood hardly seems a fair trade.
Besides, she had no time. The enchantress had heard the kraken breach behind her.

Seven tentacles spread through the air, skin like sails between them. Where the eighth arm had been was a stump of visible white in an otherwise impressive mimicry of sky and sea. Three arms reached like tongs toward Hiresha and Tethiel. Flapping suckers could seize and rip apart.
The Murderfish must’ve thought to take advantage of a defenseless enchantress without a gem in her grasp.

Hiresha made a snatching motion with her hand. She caught the enchanted spearhead. Its speed trailed a line of droplets. The silver-encrusted point was cocked over her shoulder, Lightened, and ready to be hurled at the speed of thunder.

The enchantress aimed her throw. She knew the anatomy of the kraken now, and she lined the arrowhead up with both the brain beneath its eyes and the central heart at the back of its head.

The Murderfish must have realized its peril. Its skin blanched in fright. It paled to the crystalline whiteness of a woman left frozen in the snow. Terrified, the kraken had never looked so human.

Weariness of fighting felt like lead weighing down Hiresha’s arm.
I’ve seen this unique creature die before. Did I kill it?
She could not believe so. Grief stung her tongue like vinegar.

As one, she lowered her bronze spike, and the kraken withdrew its arms into coils of suckers. The Murderfish’s siphon bulged with a jet of air that carried the kraken away. Hiresha rode the same salty current in the opposite direction.

Tethiel rearranged his hands on her hips. “Was that a truce?”

“A reprieve.”

The kraken had harmed her friends and many others. It had also died, and one mortal punishment seemed sufficient to Hiresha for both facets.

She touched the center of her brows then pointed to Emesea’s remains in the sea. Dead fish pooled around the drifting vest of abalone armor. “We have all of us seen enough blood. And I don’t care to honor Emesea’s death with more of the same.”

“Death is a fit end for nothing,” he said.

The kraken gazed up at her, its image swaying back and forth beneath the waves. Its arms splayed in and out, treading water. The motion reminded Hiresha of something the kraken had done while she had worn a blue dress. A sense of deep knowingness filled the enchantress.
All this time I’ve struggled in red, and the solution was always in my other facet.

Hiresha tucked the spearhead in her dress then caught her red diamond. She Attracted rings of water from the sea. They converged and flowed over each other. From the kraken’s vantage, they just might be seen as patterns of eyespots.

“Its name is Skyheart,” she said to Tethiel. “After saving us from the rogue fish, the kraken tried to communicate. I never replied.”

“And you know how to speak krakenese?”

“I learned, in what we’ll call a dream. Now I’m telling it that each of us is the only one who can speak across the divide of land and sea. What a shame if we killed each other.”

Tethiel chuckled at the circles of water that danced around each other. “It’s a beautiful language.”

“And a colorful one. I only wish I could paint a better meaning.”

“What colors do you desire?”

“Canary yellow, and rings of violet.”

Those hues appeared for a heartbeat. The sunlight washed them away.

The kraken’s head compressed, and it puffed its way closer. Colors spread from the tips of its tentacles, the same hues that Tethiel had summoned. Its eyespots began to move with meaning.

Hiresha scanned the patterns. She felt at peace, as if she drifted in the soothing waters amid a kelp forest.

Tethiel squeezed her with his lovely crooked fingers. He asked, “What’s the message, Ambassador to Krakens?”

She laughed. “It means I don’t know as much as I dreamed.”

The patterns made no sense together, and three of the arms showed designs Hiresha had never seen before. She realized the language she had taken such care to learn in the other facet was not the one she needed while wearing red.
The kraken’s name might not even be Skyheart.