The Poisoned Crown (40 page)

“It looks like it.”

“Then blow the horn!”

Nathan lurched to his feet, grabbed the shell trumpet. The ground vibrated; standing was difficult even for someone who was used to it. The Goddess’s words boomed around the cavern like the thunder of great waves—“I will kill them all—the lungbreathers, the humans, the creatures that walk and crawl—I will drown the cities, sink the ships— the ocean will reclaim the earth—” She obviously no longer knew who she was or what world she was in. Nathan found the hole to blow through—it was in the side of the shell, not at the very top—and set it to his lips. His mind—as the human mind can—thought a dozen thoughts in a fraction of a second. What was he really doing?—blowing for the end of the world? Didn’t the Archangel Gabriel have a bugle to blow for the last trumpet—or was it Heimdall on Bifröst Bridge, announcing Ragnarök? And there was Queen Susan’s horn in the Chronicles of Narnia, that would summon help if you were in danger—the horn of another Susan, in Alan Garner’s books, the horn you blew when all else was lost. The horn of last resort. Which horn was this? No more time to speculate. Just blow it and see …

The mouthpiece tasted stale and unpleasant, with a far-off tang of seafood several years past its sell-by date. He thought:
If I get through this, I’ll probably die of botulism.

He blew.

Nathan had never blown a horn in his life. There was a noise like air whistling in a tube, barely audible against the reverberation of Ne-fanu’s curses.

“Blow!” Denaero urged.

He tried again, putting all his strength into it—the shell emitted a sort of squeak, but that was all.

“Give it to me! I’ve done it before—hunting with barracuda—but not—not in air—”

He saw there was blood on her lip where it had desiccated and split—her face was drawn—her hands unsteady. He knew she was an amphibean, but she had been too long out of water; she would never find breath enough for the horn.

“You can’t—”

But she squirmed and crawled toward him, bruising her legs on the rock floor, snatching the shell trumpet from his grasp. She put it to her bleeding mouth, closed her eyes.

Nefanu looked down.

“Nooooo
—”

The horn call wasn’t loud, but somehow it overpowered all other sound, a low soft note that swelled and swelled until the air, the walls, the ground beneath them all thrummed with it. It was like the sea surge against the Rock of Ages, like the wind blowing down the long, long tunnel to eternity. Like the song of the whales echoing through the endless halls of the deep. Long after Denaero had run out of breath and dropped the horn the note went on, carrying into the caves beneath and the seas above, till that whole world throbbed. It was the sound not of endings but beginnings, a bugle call to wake the dead and summon souls from hell… Nefanu covered her ears; her lips gaped in a scream that no one heard. And then, when the horn music finally died away, there was another sound.

Water.

It came through the widening cracks, a drip, a seep, a trickle, a gurgle. It spread across the cave floor in wavelets, shallow but very swift, covering the ground faster than a rising tide. Denaero dipped her hands
in it—her face—rolled in it, trying to moisten every inch of her. The Goddess, grown as high as the roof, cursed in every language of the sea, pressing her palms against the cracks, seeking to close them with power or brute force, but nature was stronger than magic, and the water streamed in. Trickles became cascades, cascades became torrents.

Nathan thought,
Now would be the moment to wake up
—but he knew he couldn’t, the moment had gone for good, and somehow, in taking control of his thought, he had severed his link with the Grandir. This time, there was nobody to help him but himself…

The water was already three feet deep and Denaero had
changed
, flexing her tail with relief. Her skin was starting to plump out again, though the blotches would remain for some while.

She said: “Can you go home?”

“No—”

“Hang on to the Crown—I’ll hold you—I won’t let go, whatever happens. If the water doesn’t come in too fast we might make it to the surface …”

“Leave me. You can save yourself—” He’d always thought it idiotic when people said things like that in films. It sounded idiotic now.

Denaero ignored the objection, unlashing the leatherwrack strap that supported her knife. “Here—this’ll help.” The water was rising faster—faster—in a minute Nathan would be out of his depth. Denaero looped the weed under his arms, around his torso, through the Crown, binding them together—he felt her breasts squeezed against his back.

He told himself he wasn’t noticing, and then it occurred to him that he was probably going to die, so he might as well notice and enjoy it.

But there was no time now—he was swept off his feet in the growing surge, carried across the cave, buffeted this way and that. Even Denaero could do little except try to steady them and lift Nathan’s head above water whenever possible.
Don’t panic
, he thought.
Panic kills. Breathe when you can
… He was weakened by the long swim—the trek across the cavern—lack of food—lack of drink. They were getting nearer and nearer to the roof, most of which was still holding. The cracks were all at the western end where the walls must be thinnest;
Nathan, who had a good sense of direction, was almost sure it was the west. Nefanu, speaking now in the tongue of magic, sealed one rent, only for another to open wider.

“We must go—that way!” Denaero gasped, pushing against the current. “We need—out—”

The new rent yawned farther, farther—there was the head-splitting, mind-crunching noise of great rocks shifting and grinding, as if some ancient door in the fabric of the planet itself was slowly opening. The sea should have come through in a boiling tumult that would sweep them all to destruction—but there was something else in the gap, blocking it out, restricting the flow to a mere gush. Nathan and the mermaid were lifted up on the crest of the wash, plunged down again into a sudden valley of water. Briefly, they glimpsed a darkness filling the gap—a darkness solid as a wall, blacker than the blackest deeps of the sea. And in the darkness, eyes—not in pairs but singly, hundreds, maybe thousands, all different. Werefolk eyes, reptile eyes,
human
eyes…

My God
, thought Nathan.
What did we summon?

There was a smell—a stench—as if all the fish in the sea had been piled on a beach to rot. Nathan gagged, filling his mouth with water.

He heard Denaero say something that might have been
Leviathan
, but the sea swallowed her cry.

They never saw it clearly. That one glimpse—Nefanu’s scream, searing air and water alike—a gulping, squelching, gurgling noise as if a giant quicksand had reared up, consumed a city, and was now smacking its muddy lips. Even as the thing retreated the backwash bore them toward it—Denaero, threshing her tail like a fury, propelled them into its wake like a flier heading for the epicenter of a hurricane. Nathan took his last breath even as they dived and the ocean poured over them …

A
LIFETIME
later, they broke the surface. Nathan coughed and retched a little and, against all the odds, found he was still alive. They had emerged from so near the cavern roof, he realized, they must have been
above the levels of killing pressure. He had a dim recollection of the sea swirl rushing past, and the opening looming up in the cavern wall, and torn rock on either side, and the black solid mass beyond. He couldn’t tell if it had scales or skin, only that it seemed somehow
rubbery
—he had a horror of rubberiness ever after—and the smell of it, the rotting fishy stink, tainting the water. It was too vast to see any shape. There had been an eye, flat and round like the eye of a haddock, but lidded … An eye so near he could have touched it. And then only the sea.

Denaero said: “Has it gone? I think it’s gone … I knew it would shield us, when the sea came in. It was so big … I knew, if we could get close enough …”

Nathan couldn’t talk.

“It was the Leviathan, wasn’t it? It ate
her
… It
ate
her.”

Something zoomed past underwater, grazing Nathan’s calf. He managed a grunt of pain.

“What’s that?” Denaero said.

Deflected by Nathan’s leg, the javelin came to the surface some way off.

They were in the middle of a war.

bove the sea, nothing looked different. Nathan’s first thought was that his plan had failed: in spite of Nefanu’s death and the leakage into the caverns, it would take too long for them to fill and the level of the ocean to fall. After all, it covered the whole planet, so a huge volume of water would have to move before it sank even a foot. From what the Goddess had said, the final drop would be considerable, but Nathan remembered learning in a geology lesson that when the Mediterranean was sealed off and dried out it took a year to refill, and he could imagine the labyrinth of caves might take at least that long. I
should have thought of that
, he berated himself.
I’ve changed their world for nothing. They’re still killing each other
…

Most of the battle was clearly happening underwater, but the surface of the sea churned from the tumult below—the waves still heaved from the backwash of the Leviathan’s rising—bodies floated here and there, both selkie and merman. The shadow of the birds stretched across the reef from sky to sky, blotting out the sun. They screamed and swooped and dived, mobbing any merfolk who emerged above water—the noise of them was like the screech of a hundred saws sawing at a hundred metal bars. If Nathan and Denaero had been any
closer, it would have been unbearable. Nathan realized how conspicuous they were with their heads bobbing about like marker buoys. “Undo the strap!” he said to Denaero, but she was already working on it. Even as he spoke, a group of gannets detached themselves from the flock and began streaking toward them.

“Ezroc!” he cried, hoping the albatross was within earshot.
“Ezroc!”

And then he was there, plunging down from some hover point far above, fending off the assault with a squawk of warning. “Leave them! Leave them to me!” Denaero had unfastened the leatherwrack that bound them together, and as Ezroc settled on the water Nathan hung on to his neck.

“We have to stop this,” he gasped. “Nefanu’s dead—”

“What?”

“Didn’t you hear the horn?” said Denaero.

“We heard
something
—there was this enormous surge, like the beginning of a tidal wave—the armies got mixed up—then it subsided and the fighting started again …”

“We raised the Leviathan,” Denaero said, not without pride. “It
ate
the Goddess. It just swallowed her up—”

“The
Leviathan?”
The bird’s head swiveled, trying to look in every direction at once. “Where? Where?”

“It’s gone,” Denaero assured him. “It ate
her
and vanished.”

“What did it look like?”

“I don’t know. It was too big to see …”

“Get on my back,” Ezroc said to Nathan, pulling himself together. “We’ll find Nokosha.” And to Denaero: “You get hold of your father. I saw him over
that
way …”

“He thinks I’m dead!”

“Give him a nice surprise!”

Nathan climbed onto the albatross, the Crown once more looped around his arm, feeling weak from long effort, clumsy with exhaustion. He needed an adrenaline rush, but so far his body hadn’t responded to the order. Denaero, revived by extended immersion, had evidently recovered her strength: she shouted something and dived.

Ezroc took off, calling to the birds in their own languages—in
Gannet, and Skua, and Common Gull. Gradually, the flock ceased their attack and rose into the air, spreading out in a giant V-formation behind him, a cloud of wings that swept across the ocean like a great wind, whipping the waves to spume. They no longer screamed but cried the death of Nefanu in all the tongues of the sea. For Nathan, the adrenaline kicked in at last—he forgot he was tired, he forgot he was thirsty—now he was king of the sky, riding at the head of his own storm.