I wanted to see what this shark could do in the water. I started swimming and discovered that I could move with effortless speed and agility. I dived down, feeling the pressure of the water grow more intense with my descent. Then, when the water was inky black all around me and it started to feel as if it was beginning to crush the shark’s body, I turned around and blasted up toward the surface at full speed, breaking the surface in a spectacular flying leap that took the zombie shark a good few yards up out of the water.
I asked pulled my spirit out of the undead shark even as it soared through the air. The creature caused a great splash as it hit the water’s surface
“Blimey!” one of the pirates yelled. “Would ya look at that!”
“You want to see something even better?” I asked, my spirit now firmly inside my own body.
“Aye, Captain!” they all shouted excitedly.
This time, I turned my focus to the dead whale. I injected its enormous heart with undead life force, and its half-eaten corpse twitched and jerked before it rolled over, much to the surprise of the sharks feeding on it. The sharks started attacking with a renewed frenzy, but their jaws and teeth, strong and razor-sharp as they were, did not slow my whale down. Controlling the aquatic mammal like a gargantuan puppet, I swatted at the raging sharks with the massive tail, as if they were nothing more than annoying mosquitoes. There was immense power in the whale’s boat-sized tail, and each blow that struck a shark killed it as quickly as a man’s hand would a fly.
I grabbed one shark in the whale’s gigantic jaws and crushed the thrashing creature as if it were nothing but a little minnow, and the pirates let out a cheer. Once I’d killed a few sharks, the survivors got the message and fled, and I resurrected the dead ones that were floating belly-up around my zombie whale.
“Look at that,” Percy exclaimed. “I never imagined I’d ever see a bloody zombie shark, let alone a bloody zombie whale! Three cheers for the God o’ Death, ya yellow-bellied thieves!”
The pirates all cheered vociferously and started pestering me with requests to kill and resurrect all sorts of other things.
“Sorry, boys, the show’s over for now,” I said. “Rami-Xayon, let’s get that breeze blowing again.”
The pirates dispersed, disappointed but still grinning and talking excitedly among themselves. Rami-Xayon called up her wind to propel our ships forward again. My new shoal of undead sea creatures tagged along in our wake. I figured they might come in handy sometime, especially if we ran into the Transcendent Sails or some other group of pirates. The whale could put holes in a few ships’ prows, I imagined, and my sharks would quickly pick off any marine troops who were unlucky enough to fall into the water.
As we sailed onward, I thought about what Percy had said about the kraken. A beast that could split warships in half and drag them under the waves would be a powerful weapon if we could somehow find one and kill it for me to resurrect. I figured most ship captains prayed that they would never run into a kraken at sea. I, however, desperately hoped to encounter one. Having an undead kraken at my disposal would make this ocean voyage a lot more interesting.
Of course, the kraken was a famously rare and elusive creature. Tremendously destructive and powerful when they rose from the depths, yes, but nobody could predict where or when that would be. While considering this, a notion struck me: if the sharks could detect the positions of other creatures in the upper part of the ocean, then surely the whale, which could dive far deeper than any shark, would be able to sense the presence of the kraken down in the depths...
I made a mental note to keep part of myself tethered to the zombie whale at all times, letting its senses feed into mine like the steady dripping of a leaky wine barrel. Any detection of the kraken’s presence would send a jolt into my consciousness, so if it ventured up from the depths anywhere near enough for my zombie to detect, I’d be ready.
While I was considering these possibilities, Rollar approached me with a smile.
“I’ve seen it quite a few times by now, Lord Vance, but whenever you raise something from the dead, it always astounds me. The way you controlled the zombie shark was quite impressive, as was the manner in which you raised the whale.”
I raised an eyebrow and kept my smile hidden. “Are you trying to butter me up, Rollar?”
“I’ve, uh, I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now, Lord Vance,” he said as he avoided eye contact and looked uncharacteristically uneasy.
“You want to become Fated, right?”
He looked up, and an eager grin broke across his face. “It would mean the world to me, Lord Vance. I’ll remain loyal to you until my final breath leaves my body whether you grant me this request or not, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, does it?”
“Rollar,” I said as I placed my hands on the big barbarian’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. “You’ve been an extremely loyal soldier and the most reliable second-in-command any leader could ask for. To be honest, if you’d made this request three days ago, when it seemed that the Fates were doing everything she could to fuck me over and keep me stuck in Prand,
