Captain's Fury ca-4

by Jim Butcher

  Isana took a moment to deliberately extend her senses, so that she would have at least a little more warning should another shark attempt such a thing, and tried to slow down her wildly beating heart. Then she rose to the surface beside the ship.

  Araris was halfway down the rope, leaning down, his expression drawn with worry. She met his eyes and tried to smile at him.

  "Are you all right?" he murmured.

  She lifted a finger to her lips as she nodded, and beckoned him. Araris turned and lowered himself hand over hand down the rest of the rope, the sinews in his back and shoulders rippling. He kept going once his feet hit the water and slid in slowly and quietly.

  The rest of them came down the same way-except for Ehren, whose grip slipped halfway down the line. Isana was ready for it, and Rill was ready to receive him, a vaguely human shape rising from the waves to catch Ehren and lower him soundlessly into the water.

  "All right," Tavi murmured. He treaded water beside Isana and seized one of the ropes on her harness. "Everyone grab hold. We need to hurry."

  Isana turned toward the enemy ship as the Slive sailed on, and the others maneuvered through the water to catch hold of the trailing lines. It took them longer than she would have thought, and she felt the faint fluttering sensation of at least two more sharks circling fifty or sixty feet away.

  "All right, let's go," Tavi murmured. She felt his hand touch her shoulder and squeeze once. His fear came pouring through his touch, but so did a sense of almost-eager elation. Great furies save her, the boy was enjoying himself.

  "Deep breaths everyone," Isana said. She waited a beat, then she oriented on the receding form of the Mactis, reached out to Rill, and dived.

  She noticed immediately how much more effort it took to move. A glance over her shoulder showed her that everyone was holding on with both hands, and stripped down to trousers, their bodies moved through the water as smoothly as they could. Even so, the additional weight and resistance to movement was considerable.

  Isana ground her teeth. At this rate, it would take even longer than Demos's estimate to reach the Mactis, and the others didn't have her ability to breathe while underwater. Surfacing too near the enemy ship would be suicide, and if they stopped to discuss it, the Mactis might have sailed beyond her ability to catch up.

  There was no help for it. She closed her eyes and redoubled her efforts, spreading more of her fury's attention into the water around her charges so that they cut through it more efficiently. Slowly, they began to pick up speed. The sensation of her bond with Rill became something tangible, a pressure on her temples, and she bent all her attention to her task.

  She almost didn't notice it, but Rill's sudden warning made her bank sharply to avoid ramming something large and dark. She followed the contours of the object, pressing ahead. Its surface was odd, pebbly, and laced with barnacles and straggling, hair-fine bits of dark green seaweed. They passed along it for several seconds before it dawned on Isana that they were within arm's reach of a leviathan.

  Her heart leapt into her throat, crashed back down into her belly, and began beating very quickly. The creature was huge. It literally stretched out of sight in every direction she looked. They were passing along what might have been a tail, she supposed, a long column of flesh and hide, ridged with bony, protruding plates down its center. Ahead of her, she saw a protuberance of some kind, then they passed over what might have been a flipper, broader than the Slive, its end impossible to see in the murky water.

  Next she passed several rows of what looked like trenches, or perhaps ex-trabroad furrows in a field. Ribs. They were the creature's ribs. There was a dull, heavy throb in the water, pressing rhythmically against her, and Isana realized that she could actually feel the beating of the leviathan's gargantuan heart.

  They continued on, passing another flipper, and then another column of flesh that must have been the leviathan's neck. The whole of the beast, then, must look something like an elongated turtle with no shell.

  Its head came into sight. Its skull was very nearly as large as the enormous stone barn back on her steadholt, a structure that could house two hundred various animals, the farm's equipment, and stored food besides. It, too, was almost turtlelike, complete with a jagged-edged beak. Each eye was the size of a small cottage, great glassy black orbs that were almost entirely closed.

  From its mouth hung bits of what Isana could only assume was some kind of pale flesh. Whale blubber, perhaps? Even as Isana watched, a chunk the size of an oxcart fell with deliberate grace from the leviathan's maw, and was promptly set upon by a veritable cloud of smaller fish, only to scatter from the path of a dozen sharks. Rill warned Isana of several more sharks nearby but out of sight in the murk, all of them arrowing toward the free meal. Isana's heart beat even faster, and she tried to increase their pace again, desperate to avoid tempting the hungry sharks with the others, literally dangling like bait on a line.

  She glanced back behind her as one of the sharks began to edge a bit too near, and found Tavi staring at the leviathan in undisguised curiosity and glee. He saw her look back and glanced up at her. He pointed at the massive leviathan, and his grin widened still further, his smile so sharp and bright that she found herself mirroring it.

  By contrast, Ehren, holding on behind Tavi, had his forehead pressed against the line with his eyes tightly shut. Isana could not help but feel that the young Cursor had a perfectly serviceable amount of common sense.

  Tavi, after all, had a point. Certainly, the business was dangerous-but they would have been in danger regardless of what they did. And how many people in Alera could claim to have seen something so utterly awe-inspiring as this? Septimus would have had exactly the same look on his face…

  Which, Isana realized, was important. It said something about him, as a man. His father had always counseled him to caution, to calculation, to committing all of his attention and focus to the task of ruling the Realm. In one of the letters to his son that Isana had read, Gaius had called rule a practical matter of survival. Survival, to the First Lord, was all but indistinguishable from duty.

  Septimus had quietly, gently disputed the point with his father, but until now, Isana had never truly understood the simple truth of what he meant.

  Survival was not the same thing as living.

  Septimus had gone into battle beside his men, despite the inexcusable risk to his person. He had traveled the Realm in disguise, experiencing life outside of Alera Imperia. It was, in fact, upon one of those incognito jaunts that Isana had met him, when a furious cook had turned upon her little sister after she'd broken a plate, and Isana had smacked the woman hard on the cheek and pushed her away from Alia. Isana stood facing the angry cook until the woman muttered something and stormed away. Then, Isana had helped Alia to her feet, and the two of them had walked away with at least a little dignity.

  A man she had never seen before came to her with a simple offer of work, and Isana had gladly taken it. Anywhere would have been an improvement over that scullery.

  She'd had no idea, at the time, that she and Alia had just become the maids to the senior officers of the Legion, Septimus's singulares, and to the Princeps himself.

  It was after that that they had begun to talk to one another. To fall in love- and to wed for love, and not for political gain.

  Survival was not enough. One had to live.

  Septimus had never articulated it: He had simply lived it.

  Septimus had been fiercely determined to live. So much so that he had died for it.

  Living was a dangerous past-time, and often quite painful-but there was also such joy in living, such beauty, things that one would otherwise never see, never experience, never know. The risk of pain and loss was a part of living. It made everything else mean more; beauty was more pure, more bright, pleasure more full and complete, laughter deeper, more satisfying-and contentment more perfect, more peaceful.

  She had, in a sense, betrayed Septimus in how she had treated Tavi after his f
ather's death. She had been focused completely on protecting the boy-on forcing mere survival upon him. How much more would Tavi have seen, and done, and learned, if she had chosen differently? How much different would her own life have been? In reducing Tavi's existence to a matter of survival, she had sheltered him from some pains, but exposed him to others, and robbed him of what he might have had-and in doing so, had robbed herself as well.

  The past was gone. Nothing could change what had already been. Looking back at it, letting its wounds fester, indulging in regret was just a different, slower way to die. The living moved forward.

  Living.

  Isana felt the wild beating of her heart and realized that it did not race entirely and purely with fear. There was also a sense of elation there, of joy. She felt more alive, there in that danger-filled murk, than she had felt in all the years since Septimus had died.

  She would have to be a fool actually to enjoy this.

  She would have to be a liar to say that it didn't have its appeal, as well.

  The pressure on her temples increased sharply, and then suddenly faded. Isana was never sure precisely what happened, but they were suddenly streaking through the sea, more swiftly than any shark, and Rill's presence swelled. Isana's senses expanded, exploded, becoming so intense that for a moment she thought that the whole of the ocean had suddenly turned as crystal-clear as a Calderon spring.

  She felt the heavy, drowsy presence of the leviathans (twenty-three of them, to be precise) and the endless, mindless swirling of the sharks (three hundred, give or take a dozen). She guided them past another leviathan's tail, noting the brightly colored crustaceans crawling among the barnacles and scales, found the Mactis beyond them, and shot forward, beneath the enemy vessel. They rose on the far side, and Isana made sure that they surfaced in total silence.

  The others labored to keep their breaths quiet, but they nonetheless gasped for air after the long trip underwater. Isana kept pace with the Mactis, just outside of the watercrafting that concealed the presence of the ship from the sleeping leviathans. The witchmen of the Mactis, Isana noted, maintained a far more slender watercrafting than the witchmen of the Slive. Their work was no less complex, but there was much less of an allowance for the turbulence of the sea-probably because their ship was so much larger than the Slive, displacing much more water, and they had a considerably more difficult task in hiding it.

  "Ehren," Tavi whispered hoarsely. "Make us a hole."

  Ehren swallowed, and kicked over to the ship. He released Isana's line and immediately sank one of his knives into the hull. He hung on, dragged through the water by the ship, put his free hand on the hull, and closed his eyes.

  Isana extended her senses toward the ship, and again felt surprised at the sheer clarity of what her crafting revealed. It was almost like when she performed a healing, sensing the pains and damage of a patient's body. She could feel the water all around the ship, in contact with the hull-including a number of places where the patient, gentle force of water had found flaws in the hull, and begun to slowly, steadily seep inward.

  She waited for a moment, but when Ehren shook his head in frustration and slid his hand to the next board, she angled her course in closer. "Lower, and about a foot toward the bow," she said quietly. "There's a leak there. They've patched it with tar and sailcloth, but the planks have begun to weaken."

  Ehren gave her a quick, surprised look. Then he moved his hand to the spot she'd suggested, and his eyes widened. He closed them and his fingers stiffened, forming something like a claw. He shoved down, forcefully, and his fingers sank half an inch into the wood. He made a satisfied, growling sound and repeated the motion several more times, until his hand had sunk to the base of his fingers into the ship's hull. Then he took a deep breath, made a twisting motion of his arm, and pulled.

  There was a soggy-sounding crack, and the plank peeled away from its companions in the hull and snapped. Ehren tossed a two-foot length of board away, grasped the plank just below the new opening, and after another moment of concentration, snapped a second length of board away.

  Isana felt intense attention directed at her, and she turned to find Tavi watching her, his green eyes narrowed. He leaned closer to her, and murmured, "What happened?"

  She stared back at him for a moment, then shook her head. "I'm not sure."

  "Are you all right?"

  "I'm…" She shook her head. "It's all one fury. All of it. The whole sea. If you can commune with any of it, you can speak to all of it. There's so much of it there, and I can't-" She broke off suddenly as Tavi's hand covered her mouth.

  "Shhhh," he said quietly. "You were raising your voice. Are you sure you're all right?"

  Isana closed her mouth and nodded firmly. "But hurry. We need to hurry. The sun is going down. I can feel them beginning to stir. We don't want to be in the water when they wake."

  There was another crack, and Ehren pulled himself up to the hole he'd created and thrust his head in. He leaned back a moment later, his nose wrinkling, and reported, "Bilge. Give me a moment to get through the other side." Then the little Cursor vanished into the hole. He reappeared shortly, and nodded at Tavi, then held out his hand.

  Isana felt the elation in her son at the intense experience of the adventure suddenly fade, and she felt it replaced with regret and steely determination. He kicked through the water, seized the knife Ehren had left in the hull as a handhold, and with the Cursor's help clambered inside. He had to go through the hole one arm at a time, his shoulders had grown so broad, and Isana was again struck by how very large the boy had grown.

  Kitai went next, though the Marat girl hardly seemed to need Ehren's out-stretched hand to help her in. From Kitai, Isana could sense only what she almost always felt in her-a kind of detached, feline amusement at the world around her, and an intense involvement in her senses and environment. Finally, Araris went, though he paused to glance back at Isana. She felt his worry for her very clearly.

  "Oh for goodness' sake," Isana whispered, flipping a hand at him. "Go. I'll be safer than you'll be."

  Araris frowned at her, hesitating.

  Isana felt the direction of his thoughts, the sudden, irrational heat of them, and she felt her face heat up. "I like the way you look all wet as well," she told him. "But now is not the time."

  His eyes widened, and Araris gave her a sudden, very boyish grin and a wink. Then he, too, swarmed up the side of the ship and through the hole in the hull.

  Isana bit her lower lip and waited, pacing the ship. Her sharpened senses continued to flood her with their newfound clarity and depth, and it made what would otherwise have been a very simple process-remaining steady beside the ship-difficult to focus upon. The motion of the waves, the mindless and purposeful movement of the sharks, the swirling of the smaller fish feasting on what fell from the mouths of the sleeping leviathans, all blended together into something beautiful, almost hypnotic, like a vast dance being performed for no one but her. The sea around her stretched out, boundless and powerful, merciless and bountiful, and she could feel it all, to such a degree that for a few seconds, she lost the feeling in her own limbs, their nerves and muscles vanishing among all the endless motion of the living sea.

  Fear and sudden agony hit her like a slap on the cheek. She had drifted ahead of the Mactis, and she hurried to return to her place. There was another stab of confusion and pain from somewhere in the ship-great furies, she couldn't have felt that from here, not with such perfect clarity. She couldn't even see whoever had been hurt.

  Panic native to her own heart clutched at her. Had something happened to one of her own? The bond between loved ones and, especially family, had long been well established as a factor that enhanced a watercrafter's already-acute empathic senses, and if Tavi or Araris had been injured it might account for-

  The ship suddenly shuddered in the water. It wasn't a large motion-just a gentle bob, out of rhythm with the waves around it, as the watercrafting around the Mactis s hull abruptly faile
d.

  The next wave crashed against the bow of the ship with a roar like a miniature thunderstorm, and a great cloud of salt spray flew up from the impact.

  Isana felt a sudden surge of emotion from the Mactis. Disbelief gave way to panic and terror, and every single facet of emotion was blindingly intense. They slashed at her like razors, and she could hardly keep herself moving through the water. On the ship, men began shouting. Boots hammered on wooden decks. The nearest of the shouts weren't twenty feet away, up on the ship's deck above her.

  Isana fought to contain her agonized senses, to draw away from them, and as she did, she felt her pace suddenly slow, her progress through the water becoming noticeably more difficult. She gritted her teeth and left herself open to the painful flares of emotion and held pace beside the ship, though her teeth had begun to chatter in sheer, nervous reaction to the fear.

  Another minute went by, and no one appeared at the hole in the ship's hull. There were more, harsh shouts from inside the ship, and the ring of steel on steel. Then there was a hissing sound and a low howl of tortured wood, toward the bow, where the witchmen were usually stationed. It repeated itself twice, and then Araris's bare foot kicked a triangular section of wooden hull away from the ship, its edges as clean-cut and smooth as if done with the finest saw. The severed planks fell into the sea. The singulare looked out from the hole, spotted Isana, and waved a hand at her.

  Isana surged forward through the waves, just as Tavi appeared in the newly cut opening and tumbled into the sea gracelessly, as if he'd been pushed through. Isana darted through the water and pressed one of the lines into his hand, then caught up to the ship again, just as Ehren leapt out and hit the ocean heels first. Kitai came next, diving through the hole, her arms extended, to enter the sea in a graceful dive.

  Isana rounded them up, made sure each of them had a solid hold on the line. It was getting increasingly difficult to concentrate, and Isana suddenly realized why.

  The leviathans had woken.

  The very water of the sea itself had all but begun to boil with a slow and monstrous anger.