by Ree Soesbee
“Did you see it?” a sailor roared at the edge of the deck. “Where did the beast go?”
“What hit us?” another shouted amid the clamor.
“A sea monster! It was fifty feet long,” the first answered. “With a maw the size of the Indomitable’s main anchor!” Before he could say more, a clear, sharp command cut through their yells.
“Stand your posts!” Chernock yelled sternly into the wind. The ship rolled farther to one side, the masts wavering uncertainly with the change of gravity. “Clear for action!”
The sailors rushed to obey, leaping to close the hatches as the ship’s bell clamored the general alarm. Something that sounded like a broadside battered the Indomitable’s bow, and there was a heady sound of creaking wood. The foremost of the three masts tipped to the side with the severity of the jolt, a thunderous crack heralding its demise. With a twist, the broad shaft of the mast swung to an awkward angle above the main deck. There it hung, tangled in the rigging of the mainsail and tethered to the shards of its broken stump by jib and spar ropes. Each time it slipped down a bit more, the weight of the mast pulled the galleon farther and farther to its side—and closer to the sea below.
“The Maw!” one of the sailors cried out. “Beast of the sea! They said it was just a legend!”
“Legend or no,” Chernock said through gritted teeth, “if it’s flesh and it bleeds, it can die. Man the cannon and fire at will!”
“Watch out for those mast spars!” Vost yelled. Cobiah saw that several long ropes had broken away from the wildly flapping sheets. They whipped about like shooting stars, and where they touched flesh, they cut through to the bone.
Cobiah lunged to his feet. He scrabbled toward the mast but froze as his hand reached the smooth facing of his belt. His knife was down among his bedding. If he was to be of any help cutting loose those lashing ropes, he’d have to grab it before he made his way into the rigging. Cursing, Cobiah reversed course and dove down the stairs past a cracked and battered hatch.
The crew’s berth was ravaged, and rocking hammocks had dumped sleeping sailors, bedding and all, onto the lopsided floor of the hold. Several shouted for help, while others dug to find them, lifting comrades to their feet as the boat fought to right itself. Cobiah made his way to his cubby as one of the men shouted, “Are we taking on water?”
An answer came from farther down, in the hold. “Cracked but holding, sir! Aye, we are!”
“Draw out the bilge pumps! Get them ready to draw water!” One of the older sailors quickly took control, ordering others down into the dim belly of the ship. The fury of the unknown sea creature’s assault hadn’t cracked the keel, but the ship was suffering. If the creature returned and they couldn’t fire the ship’s cannons, the Indomitable would be split open by the next blow to the ship’s hull.
Kneeling by the crew cubbies, Cobiah jerked bedding out, dumping everything on the floor in his haste to get to the knife. As his hand drew it out by the white hilt, his sister’s rag doll tumbled from his pillowcase onto the floor.
Cobiah stared at the rag doll. Was it a sign from the gods? Goddess Dwayna, protect our ship, Cobiah thought, sweeping up the doll. Biviane, if you’re an angel now, keep a weather eye out for me. He began to stuff the doll into his vest but realized quickly that it wouldn’t fit beside the captain’s astrolabe. Instead, he tied Polla to his belt with the scabbarded knife and dashed back onto the main deck.
The first mate, Chernock, stood near the rear of the ship. She drew a leather tawse from her belt and shouted orders that cut through the pandemonium. She called for the men to bring hoses and water, thumping stunned sailors with the heavy, knotted leather if she caught them standing still. Her expression was as hard and cold as ice.
Something to the rear of the ship was smoking, black wisps trickling out from beneath the quarterdeck. Cobiah grimaced; fire on a ship was more dangerous than sinking. Fire would eat you faster than the sea would swallow you, and if those flames reached the black cannon powder . . . they’d all be done for.
“Cobiah!” Sethus waved to catch his attention. The young sailor was standing by the tottering foremast, sawing desperately at a thick sheet of sail. “If we don’t cut this free, the canvas will take on water. The weight will tip us over!” He hacked at the ropes and tarpaulin with great sweeps of his long knife. “Grenth’s mercy, help me!”
There was so much going on all around him that for a moment, Cobiah froze. But in that moment, his anger rose, and he felt the same stubborn rush that had come over him when he was fighting Tosh on his first day aboard. Cobiah set his feet against the planks and ran forward through the sloshing water, hurling himself past lashing ropes and over slick boards with a lack of care that bordered on the suicidal. His friend needed him.
Everyone else was dealing with the fire in the rear or the bilges belowdecks. A few stood at the side of the ship, trying to pull their fellows back aboard before they vanished into the black waters of the Sea of Sorrows. Vost was below. The first mate was concentrating on the flames. Captain Whiting clung to the ship’s wheel on the forecastle, his face as pale as the sail that dragged, heavy and drawing water, against the side of the Indomitable. His lips moved, but the sound emanating was too soft to distinguish between prayers or orders. Whimpering and wide eyed, the captain tightened his arms about the many-spoked rudder wheel and did nothing at all.
The mast wavered and the ship shuddered again. “If we can cut the rigging free,” Sethus panted, “the mast will carry away the sail.” Spray and panicked sweat plastered brown hair to his forehead as he chopped wildly at billowing yards of loose canvas. “I’ll cut this part. Can you climb to the yardarm at the top of the mast and slice the cross ropes free?”
Nodding grimly, Cobiah slithered beneath the sail. He gripped the unsteady trunk of the mast and studied the damage. The trunk hadn’t come entirely free of its base, but it hung half-shattered, rippling with its weight. It was definitely unsafe to climb, but if he didn’t try, the sail fabric would take on water and the ship would capsize. Forget the fire and the bilges, even the awful sea creature that threatened them from below—if the ship rolled, the crew would die to a man in the icy sea.
Cobiah wrapped his hands with sharkskin and pressed the palms to the wooden beam. There was still tension on the mast from the thick ropes twined about its yard-arms, interlaced with the other masts of the great galleon. As he’d done a hundred times before, Cobiah shimmied up the trunk, grasping rope and netting and pushing his wrapped hands against the slick wet wood to get some faint purchase. The ship tossed beneath him like a horse testing its reins, and the thick smell of smoke clogged his nostrils.
He could hear the shouts below on the deck. Captain Whiting seemed to have found his voice at last—if not his sanity—and was yelling orders to fire into the waves. The heavy guns roared. Sparks flew, and to the starboard side of the galleon, a plume of white sea-foam sprayed up from the charge.
“Gun crew!” Cobiah heard the captain shriek. “Raise the level! Fire again! We’re consigned to bloody that beast by the king of Kryta himself, and by Balthazar’s dogs, we’ll do it even if it sinks us!” Some of the sailors struggled to obey the captain’s command on both decks, manning the upper carronades and the lower main guns. Others jumped to ready a new fuse, pushing the black rope into the cannon’s small touch hole. After powder and a heavy ball had been rolled down the barrel, one of the sailors brushed a handheld torch to the fuse, and within seconds, the mighty cannon thundered its massive bellow of deadly flame.
Now Cobiah could hear the picket fire of the smaller guns, carronade blasts pounding out a martial rhythm. He risked a bit of balance to glance down at the deck below. The fire in the rear cabin had been put out, but smoke still trailed up from the windows. Sailors clustered about the guns, heaving powder and shot into the glowing-hot mouths of long barrels. Sethus was nearly finished cutting the ropes to one side of the great mast. Unable to stop himself, Cobiah looked out to sea.
From his vantage near the top of the tilting foremast, he could see black water quilted with white foam. The sea stones that had frightened him with their nearness were now far to the side, well out of reach of the beleaguered Indomitable. No sign of the underwater beast. Breathing out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, Cobiah reached for the tethers that tangled the foremast with the forward jib sails and began to saw at them with his knife.
He’d cut through two of them when something in the water caught his eye. At first it was a purplish blur beneath the surface, a shadow within shadows, notable only by the speed and direction in which it flowed—counter to the ocean’s tide. The knife slowed in Cobiah’s hand. He watched the oily patch of color pass beneath the ship, trying to mark its true size and shape. Could the gunners see it? Grasping a rope, Cobiah leaned and shouted down to the deckhands, “Look aft, boys! The creature is—”
Just then the beast rose from the depths. Sharp teeth, each nearly the size of a man, broke through the glassy surface of the ocean, pouring water in flowing gouts down its massive throat. Cobiah could hardly believe the scale of the creature. Its maw was vast and cavernous, capable of engulfing half the ship’s stern in a single bite. Beady eyes flickered behind thick, coiled lips. From his high vantage, Cobiah could see fins the size of lifeboats propelling the monster forward and, far below, a tail that thrashed so hard it formed its own mighty current beneath the sea. One of the cannonballs had struck the monster in the cheek, rending a bloody hole in sensitive flesh, and the pain must have driven the monster to strike again. Cobiah barely had time to wrap his arms tightly about the mast before the monster slammed into the rear of the ship. Everything pitched forward, and he slipped precariously, his body twisting into the very rigging he’d been working to cut away.
The planks of the stern began to crack and complain as the Maw’s great teeth fastened upon it. Windows in the ornate rear cabin shattered as it bit down, and heavy shards of broken glass slashed the creature’s lips and gums. The pain only infuriated the creature further.
Its roar shook the sails, stinking of brine and rot. There was a horrible, crashing impact as the creature bit into the rear of the Indomitable, tugging the ship backward into the water. Teeth sank into thick wooden panels, and the vessel lurched in the water like a wounded animal. A splintering of boards was followed by a sickening yaw, and with a jolt, the entire mast began to slip toward the sea, carrying Cobiah along with it.
The trunk toppled, crashing through line and spar, and caught with a listing stagger in the netting between the two main masts. It spun about, wrapping Cobiah in rope and the canvas of the sea-damp sail hanging more than seventy feet above the deck. He choked back a scream and clung to the swaying lanyards. In his desperation to hold on, the long knife slipped from his hand. He lost sight of it as the blade vanished into the ocean’s dark waves.
Somewhere in the pandemonium below, Vost was howling orders. If they could only get it to release its grip before the Maw crushed the ship’s hull, the Indomitable might just survive the encounter. To push it off, they’d taken up the ship’s fishing harpoons, jabbing at the monster’s eyes with all their strength.
Tosh’s spear struck flesh, and the Maw roared again. As it did, its teeth slipped from the stern of the galleon, and the monster fell back into the sea. Slowly, it sank into the ocean, dark fins circling in massive watery drafts, the tail lashing up waves that swept the top deck. The ship shuddered with the effort of shaking off the beast, but she bobbed back to her full height once its weight dropped away. The hull wasn’t punctured. The Indomitable still held.
That didn’t help Cobiah. He stretched to grab the sail canvas as the deck swung sickeningly below him. The mast tilted from side to side as the wind and the violent rocking motion of the ship tossed the heavy timber back and forth in its stays. He wrapped the ropes around his fists, struggling to pull himself upright, but the effort was barely worth it. There was no way he was going to disentangle himself from the netting without a knife.
Along the southern horizon, a dark line swelled against the gray-green clouds. It rose up from the sea, first a thread, then a rope, then a hand’s breadth of thickness, and then, impossibly, reaching higher than the forecastle—higher, even, than the ship’s yardarms on her great masts, all while it was still too far away to ripple the sea around the Indomitable’s bow.
It was a massive wave, a tsunami. Cobiah had seen storm billows in Lion’s Arch. One year when he was a child, there had been a great storm in Lion’s Arch. When the sun went down, a little cluster of sturdy houses stood along the sandy strip near the docks. When it came up the next morning, after the storm had blown itself out, the sand was clear, clean, and empty. The houses, families and all, had simply ceased to exist. Later, sailors said those waves stood more than twelve feet high when they hit shore. Those storms were nothing compared to the wall of water filling the sky on the Indomitable’s starboard side. Because of his awkward vantage point high amid the topsails, Cobiah was the first to see the wave coming. It crested more than twice as high as the ship’s great mast, and it was still growing. Cobiah struggled to understand—there wasn’t even a storm on the horizon. Something must have happened past Malchor’s Fingers, deep in the heart of the ocean of Orr.
Desperately, Cobiah struggled to be free of the twisting ropes and tangled netting. He screamed for aid, but his voice was swallowed by the cheering on the deck below. The sailors had driven off the sea monster, and now they were celebrating. Tosh was lifted on the shoulders of the older sailors, thrusting the harpoon over his head in glee. Vost thumped his shoulder and yelled his name with pride.
They were cheering far too loudly to hear Cobiah. Only Sethus remained below the broken mast, chopping desperately at stays and ropes to separate the sinking canvas from the galleon’s rigging. He looked up at Cobiah, white faced. “Hold on, Cobiah! Don’t let go of the mast!” Seconds were passing, but they felt like hours. The sailors never even saw the wave until it was too late.
It rolled across the ocean’s surface as fast as flickering lightning, closing the distance in breaths. The wall of water was curved at the top, snarling with white foam, sweeping aside everything in its path. The ocean dropped beneath them as the tsunami pulled close, and the Indomitable groaned and settled in the water. Cheers turned into shouts of fear as the sailors finally saw the wave. Cobiah’s stomach whirled, sickened by the motion of the great galleon in the ragged swell of water. The tsunami bore the ship aloft in slow motion, pitching her inexorably forward. For one horrible breath of time, the Indomitable stood on her stern, nearly perpendicular to the ocean floor.
From his perspective at the top of the mast’s rigging, Cobiah felt the graceful rise and tilt, the sway of rope and the twist of the galleon in the current of the wave. It felt as though he were riding some kind of wind beast, lifted into the air on graceful, weightless wings.
The wave crested with maddening slowness. If there were screams on the deck below, they were muffled by the sound of rushing water, and Cobiah couldn’t hear them. If the sailors prayed to the Six Gods, their cries were lost in the crash of the crest against wood. Everything seemed overwhelmingly bright, and loud, and terrifying. Cobiah was pitched higher and higher still as the galleon rolled, until for just a moment, he saw over the peak of the massive wave. There, in the center of the darkest, deepest ocean in the world, at the very heart of the Sea of Sorrows, Cobiah saw something that should not have existed.
He saw land, where there was nothing but ocean.
Dark, tattered wings, as if something long dead was rising from the grave.
Ancient cathedrals of coral-crusted stone. Torn flesh and ice-white bone against a storm-laden sky. Corpses, crawling from the waterlogged earth like maggots; bodies by the thousands, roiling like waves themselves over sodden ground.
As Cobiah stared in shock, the wave fully crested. The Indomitable teetered in the curl of blizzard-white water, then pitched violently downward, rolling onto her back
with a horrible crashing yaw. Foam shattered timbers and masts beneath the massive weight of the wave. With a low, deathly groan, the mighty galleon rolled over beneath a thousand tons of sea.
The Indomitable was lost.
A sailor’s life’s filled with toil and strife
The sea’s both boon and bane, O
We’re Kryta bound on a northern tide
Through the lightning and the rain
We’ll sail through all these stormy nights
’Til we’re safe at home again, O.
—“Weather the Storm”
I can’t think. I should think of something. What? What was I doing? Something important. I need to think. How do I make my mind focus?
“Draw the bilge-rat up!”
A lurch rolled through Cobiah’s stomach, and he felt himself purge its contents. The effort didn’t stop the motion that rocked him back and forth, and he tightened his hands on the sheets wrapped about his body, unsure if he was clinging to them or struggling to push them away. Where was he? What had happened? Opening his eyes brought a painful flash of white-hot light. Cobiah whimpered in distress. Wherever he was, he wasn’t dead.
“Lookit ’im puke!” a too close voice roared. “This little mouse is still fighting to live!”
“Cut its throat, like any other gaping fish,” snarled another with a ringing laugh, “then throw it back into the sea.” There were shouts of agreement all around.
Hesitantly, Cobiah forced his eyes to focus, making himself ignore the pain that wracked every muscle and bone of his body. He lay on the deck of an unfamiliar ship, fouled in the knots of rigging still attached to a chunk of the Indomitable’s foremast. Someone was using a sharp knife to cut the ropes. With a groan, Cobiah tried to roll over but found himself too tightly tangled in the cords that held him to the thick spar of wood.
Memories twisted confusedly in Cobiah’s mind. Tosh, laughing and grabbing for the rag doll. The officers standing on the forecastle. The shine of a polished glow on brass arms. The billowing of white sails. Sethus grinning like a monkey as he swung from spar to spar. A dark land beyond the edge of the storm . . .
