Seven Princes (47 page)

Now the
Cloud
and
Sharkstooth
raced ahead. A sound like the moaning of the earth itself bubbled up from the deeps, and a massive serpentine head rose above the prow. The sea-beast’s skull was triangular, finned with bat-like flaps of translucent membrane, and vast enough to swallow a whale. Its great black orbs
were focused on the forecastle of
Dairon’s Spear
with a hideous intelligence. A deluge of sea-murk spewed from between its great fangs, which were white as ivory. Men screamed and called upon the Gods for help as the demonic head rose higher above the decks.

A fresh round of shrieks came now as the leviathan’s spiked tail rose from the sea and curled about the ship’s middle. It slid through a crowd of men with the speed of a hurricane, spearing bodies before it dove back into the water on the other side. Again it rose, and again, as more and more of its tremendous coils came rushing from the sea, encircling the galleon like rope about a toy ship. It smashed the yardarms to kindling, tore through the sails and rigging like paper. Two of the three masts broke beneath the beast’s scaly mass, splintering and thundering. Its bulk was thicker than an Uduru was tall, and its scales were black emeralds gleaming with the muck of the deep sea beds. Tiny coral colonies grew along its fishy spine. It squeezed the great ship the way a constrictor squeezes a rat before swallowing it whole.

Men died beneath toppling masts, or were crushed by the scaled hide of the monster. Some even died from fear looking upon the monolithic devil. It was like a Serpent from the tales of old, but legless and of far greater weight and mass. Long enough to wrap itself several times about
Dairon’s Spear
.

In the prow, watching the devastation of the ship’s middle, Vireon held the rail with one hand and with the other unsheathed his great Uduru blade. Alua and D’zan hugged the rail with both arms. They could do nothing but hold on for their lives as the ship broke in two, prow and stern rising toward the sky in opposite directions.

The hull burst, spilling terrified horses and men into the ocean. Some who clung to the decks sank spears into the scaled gargantuan, but it did not seem to notice. What it
did
notice, peering
and scanning with those great black eyes, slitted nostrils flaring, was D’zan. Its breath was a wind reeking of rotted sea matter. A crimson tongue darted out like a tentacle, thick as Vireon’s waist. It slapped D’zan, who screamed and clung helplessly to the railing; the forked tongue wound about his body as the leviathan’s coils had wound about the galleon. D’zan cried out, but his words were lost.

“Hold on!” Vireon yelled to Alua.

With one hand steady on the railing, he raised the sword in his other hand and sliced through the tongue as it lifted D’zan into the air. The Yaskathan Prince fell toward the swirling chaos below. There was no midship now, only the wreck of the triangular prow and square-shaped stern floating and sinking, heavy with clinging men.

The Serpent’s head, squirting black ichor from its severed tongue, rushed past Vireon and Alua on the rail, racing toward D’zan as he fell into the floating wreckage and the deep water. Vireon did not think; he seized an advantage. The beast had ignored him in its quest to devour D’zan. His legs launched him away from the rail, out past the flaring neck-fins. For a moment, he flew downward like a hawk, falling through the air near to the Serpent’s rushing neck. Then he slid along the scales of its skull on his backside, toward the jutting ridge of its forehead. A half-second before he reached the slimy snout, he took his sword in both fists and drove it home with all his strength.

The skull-bone cracked and split beneath him. The sword sank into something at once spongy and sinewy. He hung on to the embedded blade, riding the pierced skull like a great bull into the littered sea. Now the blue depths rose about him on all sides. He saw men swimming for the surface, D’zan among them. Floating barrels and casks rose quicker than men, while soldiers sank with pieces of mast stuck in their bellies, others tangled in the
mutilated rigging and sails. Horses sank into the black depths, or twisted and writhed toward the air above.

Vireon twisted his blade inside the creature’s brain, driving it deeper and ripping the skull wider. The beast thrashed, sending men and wreckage flying from its coils. Its great head came bursting out of the water, black blood gushing, and Vireon came with it. Men on the two undamaged ships stared, hundreds of eyes looking right at him for a moment – a bit of frozen time – then the head slammed back into the sea, carrying Vireon down again. He hung on, holding his breath, digging deeper into colossal flesh. Once more the Serpent’s head came up, spewing a final roar of torment, vomiting black fluid from its snapping jaws.

The third time it went under, Vireon pulled free his sword and broke away from the skull. The orb eyes were glazed and mindless now. The bulk of its coils spread throughout the undersea, twitching and floating slowly toward the surface. He swam into a cloud of the black ichor and could see no more. But he was sure the leviathan was dead.

He burst from the water, gasping foul air into his lungs, wiping the gore from his eyes. He floated among the winding coils that stretched at least a half-league across the waves. The debris of what had once been a mighty ship drifted all about him. Horses swam past, making terrible sounds. Men wailed too, the wounded clinging to flotsam, casks, chunks of mast, each other.

“Alua!” he called. His head swiveled to survey the remains of the
Spear
. “Alua!”

She burst from the water not far away, swimming quick as an eel toward him. She wrapped slim arms about his neck and checked him for wounds. He assured her he was fine.

The massive Serpent head finally bobbed up to the surface. Its slitted eyes were gray and lifeless. Everyone on the two surviving
ships, and those who clung to life in the water, could see now that he had killed it.

“Vireon!” came the cry from the
Sharkstooth
. Then the mass of soldiers on the
Cloud
took up that cry. “Vireon! Vireon!” As they lowered nets and ropes, scooping survivors out of the brine, the crews and warriors of the two ships yelled Vireon’s name.

He looked about for D’zan and saw the boy climbing up a rope on the side of the
Cloud
’s hull. But what of the scholar Lyrilan? He was in a central cabin when the beast came; most likely he had gone down with most of the ship’s crew.

But no… There he was, clinging to a barrel, his face pale and desperate. As a rope ladder fell into Vireon’s hands from the
Cloud
’s railing, he yelled up at Tyro, who was scanning the wreckage.

“Your brother!” called Vireon. He pointed to hapless Lyrilan floating among the wreckage. Other men drifted around him, and a few horses.

Tyro yelled to Lyrilan, and the scholar waved his arm. His hand was red, bloodied, but he seemed intact. As Vireon followed Alua up the rope ladder and stepped onto the
Cloud
’s deck, he saw D’zan among the cheering sailors, bellowing as loudly as anyone.

“Vireon! Vireon! Vireon!” they cried.

He took Alua in his arms and the men patted his back, greeting him with smiles and handshakes. Some touched his shoulder or elbow, so they could later say they had done so.

“Save them,” Vireon panted. He looked over the rail at the corpse of the monster and the spreading wreckage of the flagship. “Save as many as you can. The horses too…”

Both ships pulled men from the ocean first, and by then most of the surviving horses had tired and drowned. The few who were reached in time had to be coaxed into nets, and they were lifted aboard by a crew of ten men. Vireon lifted nine such horses by
himself, one at a time, each one drawing a fresh round of cheers. He waved away the acclaim. Now was no time for such things. Fearing that the dead Serpent might rise up and menace them again, like the dead Khyreins had in Murala, the crews poured buckets of pitch onto the floating carcass. Alua then set it alight with a white flame dropped like a flower petal from her fingertips. The smell of the beast’s cremation was a gut-wrenching foulness, yet the reek was reassuring. Better the smoke of its burning flesh than the wrath of its second life.

Lastly, they hauled aboard the floating barrels of fresh water and any unbroken crates of provisions and horse grains. Of the two hundred and twenty men aboard
Dairon’s Spear
, only eighty-five survived, plus the three Princes and Alua. Of the two hundred horses, only twenty-three were saved. Most of the rations and water were recovered, but the two ships were desperately crowded now. By men, if not horses.

During the last hours of the salvage, done in the calm light of a half-moon, D’zan and Lyrilan came to the railing of the
Cloud
and stood near Vireon.

D’zan took his arm and met his eyes, a mixture of seawater and tears staining his cheeks. “Thank you, Vireon,” he said. “I can never repay what you’ve done for me this day. You knew that thing had come for
me
, yet you—”

“I did what had to be done,” said Vireon. He patted the boy’s shoulder. “Repay me with your allegiance when you take back your stolen throne.”

“I will,” said D’zan, and Vireon knew he meant it.

Lyrilan stared over the middle rail at the spars and shards of wreckage, spread now far and wide across the sea. White flames danced along the coils of the Serpent’s corpse, devouring its flesh even below the waterline. The ships had begun moving away from the blazing carcass.

Lyrilan sighed and stared at the black waters. “My book,” he whispered. “My quills… my ink… all gone.”

The scholar mourned the loss of these things more than all those who had died. Vireon would never understand such men. The face of Lyrilan was pale and drained of hope. A red bandage wrapped his right hand.

D’zan seemed to understand the scholar’s mood better. He clapped Lyrilan on the back, and his hand lingered there.

“These are only things,” he told the scholar. “You are alive, Lyrilan. Think of those who are not.”

Lyrilan nodded, pulling back a mass of oily curls from his face. “Yes,” he said. He looked at Vireon. His eyes glittered with moonlight. “There is only one thing to do.”

“What is that?” asked Vireon.

“Start over,” said the scholar.

Vireon looked at D’zan, who shrugged.

“The Mumbazans make a fine parchment,” said Lyrilan, turning toward his new cabin. “There must be a single chapter all about today. ‘Vireon and the Sea Monster’…” His voice trailed away as he lost himself among the men filling the crowded deck.

“Is the Prince all right?” Vireon asked D’zan.

“He will be,” said D’zan. “As will we all, once we get off this damned ocean.” The Yaskathan walked away, his head hanging low. More men had died for him today. More would die in the days to come. The bloody mantle of war would not hang easy on his young shoulders.

Vireon watched the smoking remains of the leviathan fade into the night as the ships drew southward.

“What was it?” Alua asked, stroking his chest with her cool fingers.

“Something from the deep,” he said. “Some ancient cousin of the Serpents my ancestors killed. But a thing of water, not fire.”

“I felt its thoughts,” she told him, looking into his eyes. “They were the thoughts of a
man
, not a beast.”

“What did these man-thoughts say?” asked Vireon.

“
The Heir, find the Heir
, it thought.
Swallow the Heir, chew his bones
. And when it saw D’zan, it
knew
he was the one.”

The tyrant
, thought Vireon.
Not the Sea Queen, but the Usurper of Yaskatha
. The northern ships sailed into the reach of Elhathym’s power. He had commanded this devil of the Old World. Made it rise from the depths and kill all those men in the hope of killing just one. He would never stop until D’zan’s threat to his rule was removed.

Elhathym and all his walking dead, ancient devils, and terrible sorcery.

So be it. Elhathym must die
.

Before or after the Kinslayer, it made no difference.

Fangodrel, Elhathym, Ianthe… There was much killing to do.

Vireon had left winter sleeping in the frozen north.

This was the hot, southern Season of Blood.

It flared now in his chest like the flame from Alua’s palm.

T
hey rose from Udurum as twin hawks, he crested in black feathers and she in white. Soaring above the continent of clouds, they reached Uurz at sunset. Drawing as little attention to themselves as possible, they lodged in separate rooms at a modest inn called the Raven’s Perch. From her window Sharadza watched the towers of Dairon’s Palace fade from gold to dark silver as night fell across the city. The songs of minstrels floated from roof gardens as she lay upon the soft bed, her mind racing with thoughts of Vireon, Fangodrel, and her cousin Andoses. Nightmares came, distorted visions of the horrors she had seen in Iardu’s spilled wine. She woke to the sound of bellowing merchants and rolling thunder outside her window. She and Iardu breakfasted on dates and honeyed bread; he drank wine while she sipped water drawn from the Sacred River. In a dark alley they became hawks again and flew into the Stormlands sky, leaving Uurz to bask in its sudden showers, ephemeral rainbows, and ripe orchards.