Thinking that it was finally succumbing to its wounds, Silus loosened his grip on the javelin and looked up to see how the Chadassa was responding to the imminent death of its mount.
But the creature didn't seem at all perturbed; instead it dug its heels sharply into the eel's temples and placed its remaining hand on the top of the creature's skull.
There was a flash of light and it felt as though a vice had suddenly closed on Silus's heart, as though he had been slammed into a brick wall at speed. One moment he was preparing himself to deliver the killing blow, the next he was falling, wracked with pain and paralysed. The water around him sparkled with electrical discharge and a dead Calma drifted down towards him, lazily turning, its eyes the white of cooked fish.
The eel coiled down from above and tore the creature in two, hungrily gulping down the innards that burst from its sundered flesh. But the Chadassa didn't give its mount long to feed and soon the eel was hurtling towards Silus once more.
He willed his limbs to move, he even attempted to reach into to the eel's mind and turn it on its rider, but all he could do was watch as death came to claim him.
He was about to close his eyes and offer up a final prayer to the ancestors, when a Calma ship closed around the eel.
The Chadassa was thrown from its saddle only to be cooked in an instant when a thin beam of emerald energy lanced from the ship. Riderless now, the eel coiled itself around the strange vessel and tried to close its jaws on the flesh-like hull, but the ship was clearly tougher than it looked. The eel worried at it in vain, rapidly becoming more and more enraged by its impervious prey. The ship withstood its futile scrabblings for just a moment longer, before suddenly flexing its limbs and pulling the eel apart.
As the sundered chunks of flesh fell slowly past, feeling began to return to Silus's extremities; but not quickly enough for him to get out of the path of the ship as it closed on him.
A thin, translucent tentacle unfurled from the centre of the craft to wrap itself around his waist. He knew that the Calma were on his side, but he couldn't help but feel afraid as he was pulled into the red, gaping maw that opened up at the vessel's core.
The mouth closed behind him and Silus was deposited into a small domed room that began to rapidly drain, leaving him on his knees, coughing up the seawater from his lungs. Once he was breathing normally again he managed to stand, though his legs shook with the strain and he had never felt so tired or so cold.
With a sound like lips moistly parting, a door dilated open above him and a hand reached through. Silus knew that hand and when he looked up, sure enough, there stood Katya. She helped him scrabble up into the ship's control room, where several Calma were busy piloting the vessel.
Silus and Katya didn't say anything as they embraced.
With his wife's arms around him, he realised just how long it had been since he had last held her. All the things he had taken for granted — the smell of her hair; the warmth of her skin — suddenly seemed as though he were experiencing them anew, and when she said his name he began to cry.
'I'm so sorry. So, so sorry,' he said. 'What did they do to you?'
'They took Zac away and then left me. After that there was nothing. Have you seen him Silus? Do you know where Zac is? He's safe, isn't he?' The look in Silus's eyes told Katya that he wasn't. 'No, please no. No, please Silus. Tell me that he's okay. Please.'
But no matter how much she pleaded with him, Silus couldn't tell her what she wanted to hear, so instead he continued to hold her, and when the grief overcame her and she sank to the floor, he went with her.
'Make them pay, Silus,' she said, 'promise me that you'll make them pay.'
As they sped away from the Chadassa citadel, Silus promised.
Kelos waited until the remaining Calma ships surrounded the Llothriall before he began to cast the spell. The parchment he took from the battered leather tube had the rainbow sheen of fish scale and, indeed, the sheet had been made from the hide of an extremely rare marine creature. It had cost Kelos a considerable amount to acquire and would crumble into dust once the spell was cast, but he considered that such circumstances as they now found themselves in more than justified its use.
Kelos lay the shimmering material flat on the table before taking out a small bottle of violet ink and a quill from a pocket in his robe.
'Kelos, what the fuck are you doing? This is no time to draw a picture,' Jacquinto said, as he peered over his shoulder, 'those bloody things are almost on us.'
'I am not drawing a picture. It may not look like it, but I am performing some extremely powerful magic. You should be impressed.'
Kelos began to draw a diagram onto the sheet, the ink of the chasm squid sinking into the page with the faintest of crackles as he moved the quill.
The Llothriall shook as something ploughed into its side and the bottle of ink went skittering across the table. Jacquinto caught it just before it hit the floor and Kelos exhaled heavily.
'Thank you, you may well just have saved all our lives.'
Kelos finished his illustration as the sound of the assault increased on all sides. Then, after blowing on the ink to ensure it was dry, he took the page and folded it into eight segments.
The Llothirall shuddered as the sea warped around it. Kelos closed his eyes as the geometry of the cabin ruptured, the scene before him breaking into a kaleidoscope of disparate fragments. He heard Jacquinto say something, but his voice seemed to be getting further and further away.
Kelos tied the threads of elemental power together, spoke the closing words of the spell and unfolded the sheet.
The noise of the Chadassa bombardment stopped suddenly and the quiet was only broken when Jacquinto dropped to his knees and vomited.
'What the hell did you do?' he said, after the last spasm had died away. 'It felt like being turned inside- out.'
'I simply brought our destination closer to us, thus facilitating a swift exit and avoiding the need for a lot of tedious sailing. We are now not far from the Calma's city. Look.'
But through the porthole, they saw not the glass domes of the city but a pall of thick black smoke boiling swiftly and steadily to the surface. Above, they could just make out the keels of a fleet of ships, from which fell a steady rain of dazzling white fire.
'I thought that you said the Llothriall was the only ship capable of sailing the Twilight seas,' Jacquinto said.
'It is.'
'Then who in the name of the seven hells are they, and why are they attacking the Calma?'
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Llothriall surfaced and, at a gesture from Kelos, the covering that had enclosed the deck dissolved, bright sunlight washing across the boards as it fell away. He chose to keep the masts down and the sails furled for now, not wanting to attract the attention of the fleet of eight ships that sat some thirty yards from starboard.
Whatever Kelos had been expecting to see on breaking the waves, it certainly hadn't been the symbol of the Final Faith, painted in red on the white of the ships' sails. For a moment he thought that the Faith had managed to repeat the success of the Llothriall, but then he saw that these vessels weren't suited to the Twilight seas at all. Already several were sporting rents in their hulls where the waves had battered their way in and, as he watched, one of the ships took a sudden nosedive. The men and women who fell from the deck were sucked under in her wake.
This, however, did not detract the remaining ships from their task.
Gun ports stood open along each vessel and through these were being pitched weighted barrels that burned with a blinding light. Even as they sank the flames were undiminished and Kelos wondered what kind of fire burned underwater. His awe at this peculiar sorcery, however, was broken by the realisation that if they didn't act soon the Calma city would be entirely destroyed. More importantly, Dunsany was somewhere down there. For all Kelos knew he could already be dead.
