The shict stood her ground, bracing with her legs spread and feet firmly against the bow as she leaned back and held on tight. He slid into her stance as he collided with her, the rope slipping out of his hands briefly.
She let out a sharp cry as she was jerked forward, looking as though the thing would pull her over at any moment. He snatched up the rope again, feeling it gnaw angrily at his palms as he struggled to regain his grip.
“Hold on!” Kataria shrieked to be heard over the roar of waves beneath them and the bellowing of the Akaneed before them.
“I am!” he cried back, seizing the rope and holding it tightly.
“Hold on!” she screamed again.
“I said I was!”
“HOLD ON!”
“That’s not as helpful as you might think!”
“LEFT!”
It became clear she was talking to Gariath about the same time it became clear that they were about to die.
A great rock face, jagged and gray, came shooting out of the mist, seeming to have risen out of the very ocean just to stop them. It passed them with a breathless scream as Gariath snarled and jammed hard on the rudder, angling them out of the way and denying stony teeth a meal of more than a few splinters.
More came out of the endless gray on stony howls and wordless whispers as they sped past, until it came to resemble less a sea and more a forest, with granite trees rising up around them in great, reaching number. Kataria continued to cry out commands, Gariath continued to grunt and to strain against the rudder.
And in the shadows painted ashen against the mist, Lenk thought he could see things other than the stone faces. Great, man-shaped things that rose from the water and extended thick hands as if to ward off the mist. Thin, skeletal arms reaching out of the sea with tatters of flesh hanging from their knobby and broken fingers.
What are those? He squinted his eyes to see more clearly. Masts? Ship masts?
“Down!” Kataria shrieked as she fell to the deck.
Yes, he thought as a yardarm yawned out of the fog directly in front of him and struck him squarely against the chin, ship masts.
The rope tore itself from his grasp as his hands became concerned with the matter of checking to see how many pieces his jaw was in. One, fortunately, albeit one with a few splinters jutting from it.
“Up,” a voice urged him through gritted teeth. “Up!”
He looked to Kataria straining against the rope, barely holding on. He scrambled for it, but as he rose to his feet again, something stopped him from reasserting his grip.
“Let go,” the voice whispered inside his head. “Let her fly. Let her die as she let you die.”
“Lenk!” Kataria cried, pulling hard against the rope.
“Let her go. Turn upon the other traitor.”
“Lenk!”
“Kill.”
He began to miss the silence.
And yet the voice was soft. His muscles were burning, his head was warm. He felt no chill. The voice didn’t command. It had seen her betray him, heard him call out to her, watched her turn her back on him. In some part of him, free from the voice, he wanted to let go.
Such a flimsy thing, so weightless. It would be such a trifling matter to let go. And who could blame him?
The voice did not repeat itself. It didn’t have to.
The ship buckled under a sudden pull. She hauled herself backward. He felt her crash against him, felt her muscle press against his, felt her growl course from inside her to inside him.
He felt her warmth.
“I won’t let go,” she snarled, perhaps to him. “Not again.”
She didn’t.
Neither did he.
Not that he wasn’t sorely tempted to as another great rock came shrieking soundlessly out of the fog.
“Right,” Kataria screamed as the rock grew closer. “RIGHT!” She screamed as the ship drifted into its path. “GARIATH, YOU—”
In a wail of wood, her curse was lost. The rocky teeth bit deeply into the vessel, smashing timbers and sending shards screaming. They cowered, but did not let go, holding onto the rope only narrowly keeping them from flying off in the haze of splinters and dust.
When they cleared the rock, they had left the railing and most of the deck with it. Water began to rise up onto the deck as the boat shifted awkwardly with its new weight.
“What the hell was that, Gariath?” Lenk cried over his shoulder. “She said ‘right!’”
“I know,” the dragonman snarled, as he rose up and picked his way across the slippery deck. “I chose to go left.”
“Why?”
“I’ve just been choosing which way to go on my own.”
“Kataria’s been calling out—”
The dragonman stopped beside him and held a hand up, the rudder’s handle clutched firmly in it . . . the rest of it somewhere else. Lenk looked up, bulging eyes sweeping from the shattered rudder to the violent mess that had once been the vessel’s stern. When he looked back to Gariath, the dragonman almost looked insulted.
“Oh, like I’m not justified in ignoring her,” he snorted, tossing the useless hunk of wood overboard. His snort turned to a snarl as he reached out and seized the rope. “This was getting obnoxious, anyway.”
His strength was all that allowed them to hold on as the vessel, without rudder or hope, went sweeping wildly across the sea. Rocks flew past them, some avoided, most not, each one claiming a piece of their ship.
Yardarms and masts of dead ships cropped out of the water with increasing frequency. Statues of great robed figures rose up around them, hands outstretched before them. The mist began to thin, giving sight to something in the distance.
Vast.
Dark.
Jaga, he thought. It worked. He could hardly believe it. Kataria actually managed to—
He should have known better than to think that.
Where the crop of rock had come from, he had no idea. Unlike its massive and braggart brothers, this one rose shyly out of the water, extending just its jagged brow above the surface as if to see what was going on.
As it happened, that was more than enough to completely ruin everything.
The boat all but disintegrated beneath their feet, the rope torn from their hands as they came to a sudden and angry stop. Three voices cried for it, six hands scrambled, trying to seize it, trying to seize anything but air as they went tumbling haplessly through the air alongside planks and splinters to crash into the water.
What followed was a confusion of drowning voices, sputtering commands and flailing limbs all centered around a singular, urgent need.
“Out!” Lenk cried. “Out of the water!”
His vessel bobbing haplessly around him in pieces, his attentions became fixed on the distant outcropping of rock. It rose up from a base so jagged and insignificant, it might as well not be there. But he stood a better chance on land than he did flailing in the water.
As good a chance as one typically stood against a colossal sea serpent, anyway.
He kicked his way to the great pillar rising stoically out of the sea, scrambled around its base as he searched for a place to hoist himself up amidst the jagged rocks.
And yet, he found no jagged rocks, no insubstantial footing. Slick, sturdy stone greeted his wandering grasp, a small landing, more than enough for a man to stand comfortably upon, grew out of the rock’s face. It was smooth, too smooth to be natural. Someone had carved it.
He might have wondered who, if a clawed hand wrapping around his neck hadn’t instantly seized his attentions. Gariath didn’t seem to care, either, as he callously threw the young man out from the water and onto the landing. He hauled himself up afterward, spreading his wings and shaking his body, sending stinging droplets into Lenk’s eyes.
“Watch it,” Lenk muttered.
“If you said less stupid things, you’d have credibility to resent me when I called you stupid,” the dragonman replied crisply, folding his wings behind him.
“Would you call me stupid less?”
“No. But I might feel a little less good about it.”
Lenk opened his mouth to retort when his eyes suddenly went wide, sweeping over the sea.
“Where’s Kataria?”
The first answer came with an uncaring roll of Gariath’s broad shoulders.
The second, slightly more helpful answer came from the bubbles rising up beside the landing. A sopping mess of golden hair, frazzled feathers and sputtering gasps emerged moments later. With some difficulty, it made its way over to the landing and hooked an arm onto the stone. It looked up at them, the only thing visible through the mess of wet straw being an angry, canine-bared snarl.
“Help me, you idiots,” Kataria snapped. “I didn’t go back to get your stupid supplies so I could die for them.”
She seemed less than annoyed when Gariath took her by the arms and hauled her effortlessly from the water, callously dropping her and the stuff she carried to the landing. Steel rattled upon stone, a blade sliding away from her to rest at Lenk’s feet like a waiting puppy.
“You . . .” he whispered, reaching down to take it by the hilt with a slightly unnerving gentleness, “went back for my sword.”
“You’re useless without it,” she muttered. She rose up, kicked a sopping leather satchel toward him. “And these are useless without you.”