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 st it='0em' eem 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 callea! him. Hod. 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 recoveredwerns. Of, 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.
