“What do you mean?” Tylar asked, climbing after him.
Rogger didn’t answer as he led the way to the starboard rail. Tylar craned around. The wavecrasher’s crew scrambled in the rigging, working sail lines. The black-skinned captain of the Grim Wash stood by the great wheel, flanked by a pair of steersmen at the lesser wheels. All their faces were etched in stern lines.
“Haul your arses, ya blooding bastards!” the chief mate screamed across the middeck, rousing the sailors to a quicker pace.
“What’s happening?” Tylar asked.
“See for yourself.” Rogger pointed an arm out toward the empty seas behind the ship.
Tylar shaded his eyes against the achingly blue sky. Clouds scudded in vague smudges. Sunlight glared off the rolling seas. The waters of the Meerashe Deep lay empty. “I don’t understand what-”
Then he saw it. Words died as horror iced through him.
A wide wake surged toward them, a V-shaped churn of white water, cutting through the blue swells like a sword through a sow’s belly. It was still a full reach away, but it was rapidly closing the distance. A massive pale form hummocked up momentarily, breaching between the arms of the wake, corpse bright against the blue seas. Its surface flailed with fleshy appendages and tentacles. Then it was gone again, rolling below, leaving only the wake of its passage as it flowed below the surface.
“A miiodon,” Tylar gasped out at the impossibility.
“Jelly shark,” Rogger agreed, using the more common name.
“But they don’t hunt these cold waters.” From all Tylar had been taught, miiodons lived only in the equatorial seas, below even the Summering Isles. “What’s one doing all the way up here?”
“Maybe you’d best jump in and ask ’im,” Rogger said, tugging at his beard.
Tylar felt the deck buck slightly as the wavecrasher’s speed increased. New sails snapped into the steady breeze. He watched the crew’s frantic efforts, their eyes tight with fear. Their only hope lay in outrunning the beast. The Grim Wash was not outfitted with the Chilldaldrii ice harpoons necessary to defend against such an attack. The beast would tear the ship apart, snatching free what bits of flesh it could glean with its poisoned tentacles.
“She’s diving deep!” a cry called from the crow’s nest atop the center mast.
“Below!” shouted Captain Grayl, a black-skinned Eighth-lander whose shipping-guild tattoos were bright crimson on the nape of his bulging neck. The crew obeyed their captain without hesitation, sliding down ropes and leaping to the deck. Hatches crashed open as the evacuation commenced.
The captain waved off his two steersmen. “I’ll man the wheel. Try to keep her in the wind as long as possible.”
Rogger tugged Tylar toward the open hatch, but Tylar shook free of the old thief’s grip and marched toward Captain Grayl.
“What are you doing?” Rogger asked, heeling after Tylar.
The captain noted them. “Get below!” he shouted.
“You’ll need someone to guard your back,” Tylar said, sliding free the sword he had stolen from Darjon ser Hightower.
Grayl eyed the sword, then grunted. “It’s your hide.”
Rogger stepped to Tylar’s other side and nodded to the sword. “That’ll do you little good against a jelly shark. But what about that smoky beastie of yours? Mayhap it could defend the boat.”
Tylar had already guessed that this was the reason Rogger had called him out on deck. He fingered the loose shirt that covered the black palm print centered on his chest. He sensed the savage beast lurking behind the stain. Since their escape, he had not dared attempt to call forth the black daemon… the dred ghawl.
Still he balked. On every level of his being, he feared what dwelled inside him. He remembered the crush of his fist under the torturer’s hammer, the pain as his body broke apart, crippling once again. But that was not the worst. He also sensed the bloodlust, savagery, and raw hostility in the daemon, along with a foreignness to this world that felt deeply wrong, an affront to the very existence of wind and stone, blood and flesh. And while connected by the dark umbilicus that tied palm print to beast, Tylar had felt himself drawn into that wrongness.
He was loath to feel it again… even if it meant his own death.
Past the ship’s stern, the waters remained empty. Tylar was not deluded enough to believe the miiodon had fled. It had simply dived deep, tight on the trail of its quarry, preparing to launch its dramatic attack.
At the great wheel, the captain grumbled, “I’d give my left stone right now for an ice harpoon.”
Rogger shook his head. “You’d have a hard time making that deal. One stone doesn’t sell as well as it used to. You’d probably have to give them a matched pair.”
“Aye, I’d if I still had the other,” the captain bantered grimly, one eye on the seas behind them, one on the sail. “My first wife still has it in a glass jar on her mantel.”
“That’s why I always stick to sell-wenches,” Rogger said. “While they may lighten one’s pocket, they take little else.” The thief kept his stare fixed on Tylar, awaiting his decision.
Tylar took a deep breath. It wasn’t only his life in danger. Belowdecks hid an entire ship’s crew, with families in ports scattered across the Nine Lands.
“How…?” Tylar had to clear his throat. “How do I loose the daemon? I don’t have a hammer handy.”
Rogger kept his voice low. “I wager it takes only a single broken bone to unlock the cage that holds the beast. Like a snapped finger. It’ll break free on its own from there.”
Tylar watched the seas. Break free on its own…
“Here it comes!” the captain shouted.
Beyond the ship’s stern, a flurry of bubbles preceded the miiodon, boiling up from below as if a deep-sea volcano had opened on the ocean floor. Then it appeared, shooting straight out of the depths.
The miiodon’s roiling tentacles had fused, narrowing its form to a sleek arrow almost half the size of the Grim Wash itself. As its bulk cleared the waters, the mass of tentacles unbraided from its streamlined form and billowed out around it. Tylar had witnessed fire-sky displays exploding above nighttime festivals. This was the same-only instead of fire and lights erupting, here exploded a horror of flesh and poison.
A plume of water showered the deck as the creature sailed over the stern masts. A trailing tentacle, its footpad, struck the mast’s sailcloth. Poison burned through, allowing it to reach the mast’s wooden pole. It latched on and used this toehold to bring its bulk crashing into the middecks.
The sudden weight drove the boat deep into the waves. Seawater sloshed across all decks. Screams rose from below, echoing up through the planks. The center mast cracked with a thunderclap and went toppling sideways, a tangle of sailcloth and ropes.
Tylar fought to hold himself upright by gripping one of the lesser wheels. The captain hugged the central great wheel and kept the ship from swamping completely. It was a skilled effort. The Grim Wash bobbed back up, lolling back and forth.
But the boat could not escape its new passenger.
The miiodon lay spilled across the middle of the ship, filling the space between the stern and forecastle. It was a forest of snaking tentacles around a central mound of pale, watery flesh. A pair of black globular eyes, as large as pumpkins, gazed from deep within the translucent mass, protectively buried in the center.
Tylar felt those eyes gazing toward the trio of men. Tentacles wormed in their direction. Easy meat.
“Below!” Grayl bellowed. He waved them toward the hatch in the stern castle.
As they retreated, Rogger tossed an oil lantern at the nearest tentacle. Fire splashed across its skin.
The captain shoved the thief toward the hatch. “Fool, you’ll burn my ship to the waterline before you even warm its hide. Ice is all that can harm a jelly shark.”
Rogger glanced at Tylar, his meaning clear. Act now, or see the ship sunk.
Tylar stopped a few paces from the door. “Get the captain below,” he whispered through clenched teeth.
Rogger nodded and hurried to the hatch with Grayl.
Tylar turned his back on the pair.
Tentacles squirmed over the stern deck’s rail and roiled toward him. He smelled the bitter tang of their poison in the salty air. Channels of oily yellow venom flowed beneath translucent skin. A mere touch would melt flesh to the bone, creating a liquid feast for the tinier, sucking tendrils that fringed each tentacle.
“Skags,” he swore and sheathed his sword. He needed both hands free.
