Sorcerer Rising (A Virgil McDane Novel) (37 page)

“I want to apologize,” Dorne said.

“Be specific, Wizard,” I replied with a grin.

He ignored it. “You were right to go in after Sam. I should have been the one to make that decision.”

“You were right in the end though,” I said, the jerky losing its flavor. “It wasn’t the closest I’ve come to death in the past month, but it wasn’t a walk through the park either.” I watched James order his men around. “James isn’t handling it well. He wasn’t made for this world.”

“Few are,” Dorne replied. “Nevertheless, it was the right thing to do. I let Diana convince me my responsibilities lay elsewhere. Smart or not, it was the wrong thing to do.”

“Happens to the best of us,” I replied. I hesitated, unsure how he’d react to my next comment. “So what’s the deal with her anyway?”

He cocked an eyebrow, giving me a sideways glance. “You think I would know?”

I gave him a knowing look and he laughed.

“I have a great deal of respect for her,” he said. “She is intelligent and driven. She would have been a natural for any House had she the ability.”

“So
, strictly professional, huh?” I asked.

He shrugged
, and I laughed again.

After that, we made our way back to our respective cabins.
Mine was deeper in the ship than his, and we parted ways there.

Another deck down, I was surprised to see light coming from the radio room. The operators had given up on regular night shifts. We were too far out and
the magic between here and there was too great for even the crystals to cut through.

Even stranger, the light wasn’t the ordinary dull yellow of a bulb but an undulating purple.

Sharp clicks played back from the room. Morse? I cursed myself. I knew Hebrew and Latin, several variants of Fay tongue, Aetherial languages, some draconic words, and a whole smattering of forgotten, discarded, and forbidden words and phrases. But not Morse.

Al,
I thought quietly.

Why are you whispering in your own head?
he asked.

He had a point.
Habit. I need you to listen to this, see if you can get it down. You don’t know Morse do you?

Nope,
he replied.
Never felt the need. I can read up on it though if you can get me the radio operator’s book. If I can decipher troll tongue, I can figure out Morse code.

I listened as the clicks continued, cursing the vantage point that kept me from seeing who was sending the message.

After several minutes, the clicking ceased. The light switched off and the hall was thrown into darkness, the door opening. I ducked back into the shadows and waited for the figure to pass.

I couldn’t make out much. He was tall and thin and for a moment I didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t any of the crew, taller than James and Conrad and certainly not Lambros. Then he scanned the hall, and I caught the growing green light of his lenses.

The next day, the away team headed south, hoping we would have better luck in that direction.

The sights were much the same in that direction. We camped at a lake, a wide basin of black water, filled with more briny liquid. If this had been some type of eruption or seismic shift, there was no telling what it had brought up from the depths. The pool reeked of salt and sulfur, giving off a greenish miasma.

I went on from the group, following the sound of air. I crested a ridge and gaped.

“Oh, wow,” I said to myself.

A huge sinkhole, deep and black, took up much of the horizon. It was perfectly round, several hundred feet across and deeper than hell. A strong ocean breeze wafted up from the hole, tossing me back and filling the air with an even harsher brine smell. I caught myself as the breeze shifted, drawing back into the hole.

I kicked a loose stone over the edge and waited. And waited. Then waited some more. When I didn’t hear anything, I stepped away, trying to shake off the sense of vertigo.

Someone hollered behind me “You gotta see this!” one of James’s men yelled, waving his hands over his head.

“I think mine’s better,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

I made my way back to the group, following their gaze. A huge pink mass had floated up to the lake surface. It was hundreds of feet long, easily sixty feet tall, and its scent made for the perfect accompaniment to everything else we had seen.

“That is amazing,” Dorne said.

“Sure is. What the hell is it?”

Dorne shrugged. “No idea. I just know I have never seen anything that big. I’m on an island that appeared out of nowhere, seeing plants no man has ever seen, creatures no man has ever even heard of.”

“It must have gotten stuck as this rose up from the sea bottom,” I said.

“That will be us if we can’t get the ship free,” Dorne said.

Then the mass shifted, one great yellow eye opening slowly, square pupil fixing on myself and the rest of the group.

Damnation.

For a moment we all froze, watching as the mass unwound. Dozens of thick tentacles unfurled from the thing, spreading throughout the lake. It rose up even higher and a great, wickedly barbed beak opened and shut with a loud clicking sound.

“Get down!” Dorne hissed to the men. He himself grabbed me by the shoulder and dived behind a boulder.

“That’s a kraken!” I said. “We need to get the hell out of here, not stop for tea!”

He shook his head, peeking over the boulder. “It may not even notice us, or care even if it does. These things eat fish that outweigh us times three. It might not consider us prey.”

I peeked over, the thing had unfurled itself completely, its long tentacles stretching out the entire width of the lake. It was slowly but surely making its way to the shore now,
large yellow eyes transfixed on something.

Suddenly, the water exploded, twin tentacles lancing from the surface in a spray of water than doused us all. They clamped together around one of the men, and snatched him down into the water.

“Then again, maybe not,” he said.

We exploded into motion. Dorne yelled for the men to run while sweeping his staff ahead of him. I drew Abigail, running to keep up. I wasn’t certain she would help very much against an animal the size of our ship, but there wasn’t too much else I could think to offer.

Dorne was trying to bring something to bear, I could sense it through the ground, but couldn’t tell what he was trying to do.

I turned around, loading in
my blue shell. It was the only one I had, but if ever there was a moment to use it, it was here.

“Dorne,” I hollered, taking aim. He was waving his arms around like a fool, banging that two by four of a staff against the ground. “What are you doing?”

“I’m working!” he shouted. “It’s taking longer than usual. Distract it!”

Distract it? Great.

I fired the blue shell.

Winter’s Kiss; gunpowder, mercury, a bit of the north wind, liquid nitrogen, and cold, brittle iron.

A white beam of light lanced from the end of the barrel, striking the pink, fatty flesh of the creature. Ice formed over the skin, one of its tentacles stiffening like glass. The ice spread over half its body, knocking it off balance and slowing it.

Dorne was working something, I could feel it rising up from the ground, but it was slow. Damnable earth magic, always took too long to the party.

“Dorne, you better hurry up,” I shouted. “I can only jump through that hoop once.” I sorted through my shells. No red, no black, no blue, no green. Just regular shells. There was a silver one, I never figured out what it did, and Abigail didn’t know.

The
kraken was thrashing around, the ice spreading to a few of its other tentacles. It slammed another into the earth, ripping a canyon into its surface.

The creature wrapped all of its tentacles around it
s frozen counterparts, and squeezed. There was a loud shattering sound, and its limb exploded, sending a shower of sharp, frozen squid across the ground. I dove for cover, barely avoiding a slab the size of a car.

I thanked my lucky stars as it dug a ditch in the stone where I had been. It would have been terribly embarrassing to have to tell St
. Christopher I had been decapitated by calamari.

I sensed as Dorne brought his magic to bear, though I didn’t turn to see what he was doing. I peeked around the rock. He was carving a rune into the ground, slowly etching it with his fingers, even as the kraken thrashed around behind him.

I aimed Abigail at the creature and fired both barrels. It bought the Wizard enough time to finish whatever the hell he was doing. He grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to my feet.

“We need to go!” he shouted.

I made a face. “You think? I was thinking of sticking around for seafood!”

He looked back at the rune. “No! We need to go!”

The kraken was coming up on us quick, all furious thrashing, silent as death and twice as appalling. It undulated over the stone, silent but relentless even missing several of its tentacles. There was no roar, no grunting or chirping, none of the usual sounds one might hear from an ordinary predator. This was a creature that existed in a largely soundless world and it followed us just as silently.

We kept running, dodging tentacles as we went. One man was crushed beneath a redwood sized limb, his life snuffed out in an instant.

And the thing was gaining on us.

Dorne spun around and brought his staff to bear. I stopped, going back to him. “What are you doing?” I asked.  I grabbed his shoulder. “We need to keep going!”

He shook his head, waiting, his staff grinding down into the ground. “I have this.”

Then the creature passed over the rune. Dorne raised his staff up into the air and slammed
it down again. The rune lit up the color of hot, molten steel, a corona of fiery silver light. It rose up from the ground filling the sky with its light.

“Look away, Virgil!” Dorne shouted. The run
e almost drowned him out.

I closed my eyes. There was a terrible, violent shuddering under my feet and the rune flashed again, brighter this time. For a moment, I could see Dorne’s outline through my eyelids, then the shockwave hit and knocked me off my feet.

I waited for it to pass, ignoring the pebbles and gravel raining down around me, hoping nothing bigger flattened me. When my eyes opened, the scene was chaos. The rune had exploded underneath the creature, creating a molten crack in the earth.

The kraken itself was
perfectly still, petrified to stone.

“Wow,” I said, patting Dorne on the shoulder. “Didn’t know you had it in you, Conrad.”

He slumped to one knee, holding himself up with his staff. He was sweating and breathing hard, but in-between breaths he managed to say, “It wasn’t supposed to do that.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Wizard, happens with me all the time these days.”

“It wasn’t supposed to explode,” he said. “It was supposed to petrify. It was a curse, not…not that.”

Then the earth shook violently, harder than before. The stone rippled, the dune like waves flattening and rising again.

A chill ran down my spine. Before I could even think about what had caused it, there was a bright green flash of light on the horizon. It lit up the sky, blotting out the sun. As quickly as it appeared, it was gone.

“Was that you?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe. My magic reacted with something.”

I watched as the ground quivered, the stone rippling. For the first time, I looked at the odd plant life that grew all over the surface. I thought back to the giant sinkhole.

Then I listened.

I grabbed Dorne, dragging him to his feet. “We need to go, as fast as possible.”

“Calm yourself,” he said, shaking off my arm. “I am looking forward to taking my time.”

“Listen,” I said.

He frowned, but stopped talking, his head cocked to the side. I watched his face as he put the pieces together, following the same trail I had, until he paled.

We could hear the ocean.

A mile or so of running brought us back to the ship. We shuffled up the ladder and I took my place at the rail, looking over.

The ocean, missing since dawn, was making its reappearance.

“What did you do?” James asked. “Did you honestly sink the island?”

“I…I did not
mean to,” Dorne said.

“You didn’t,” I said. “I don’t think so anyway.”

The ocean was rushing in on us. We braced ourselves as the tide slammed against the ship’s hull. Within moments we had broken loose of the island and floated up. The men cheered and James clapped Dorne on the back.

“Good job, Wizard,” he laughed. “Though, I feel like there was a better way to break us loose than to sink the whole damn island.”

I laughed. “He definitely deserves your praise, but I don’t think he sunk the island.”