Out only another hundred paces, the other sea demons had doubled back. Even if the whale took out both of the first two of them, if Gunner didn’t get the ship through the gap in the first attempt, those others were going to demolish them.
Sailors on deck were praying, muttering, waiting with their hands on lines for their orders. Orholam had now stripped off all his clothes as if preparing for a swim. He saluted Gavin with a flagon of brandy and drank a deep draught. Crazy old bastard.
On the sterncastle, the first mate’s forehead glistened with sweat, stance wide, knuckles tight on the wheel. She had all the look of a grizzled veteran who was terrified despite being a grizzled veteran.
Gavin looked up. The gap yawned before them, but there was no way they could make the turn.
“Reef the main now!” Gunner shouted. “First mate, now! Starboard oars, stop! Port oars, double-time, now, now! Second mate, on my—mark! Mark! Now!”
In quick succession, the first mate spun the wheel hard in toward the reef; the mainsail went half; and the starboard oars stopped, dragging water, creating a pivot point while the port oars kept pulling. A rattling chain drew Gavin’s eyes to the rear.
The second mate had dropped the starboard anchor.
In the shallow water, it hit bottom and caught immediately. It was as if the ship had hit a wall, first jerking almost to a stop, timbers groaning, seams straining, men thrown from their feet, but then with too much forward momentum to stop, it slewed hard to starboard.
As the deck rolled, spraying a fan of water out, the crow’s nest whipsawed back and forth. Gavin crashed into the railing, his feet actually rising off the wood for one terrifying moment before the motion ceased and then started the other way, with Gavin dropping into the nest and then crouching down as low as he could, bracing the railing against his shoulder to keep from being thrown overboard.
“Anchor free! Anchor free!” Gunner was shouting. “All oars full! First mate!”
“Yessir!” she shouted, already making corrections.
Some mechanism snapped loudly under the forces on the anchor—but the chain spun away and the deck surged up and forward.
“Sails full!” Gunner shouted, though they weren’t ten paces from the reef—and they weren’t aligned with the gap.
Unbelievably, they’d actually cut the corner too tightly.
They were going to hit the reef. But then Gavin saw that the boat was still drifting sideways, its momentum in the waves carrying it toward alignment with the gap.
They were barely going to clip the near edge of the reef.
But that’d be enough. It would tear off the prow easily. Even if it didn’t, the crash would stop them dead in the waves as the sea demons arrived.
“Starboard guns . . .” Gunner shouted. “Now!”
The starboard guns all fired simultaneously, the hull shivering from the combined shock of the blasts, nudging the ship half a pace farther to port.
The sails filled with a snap as the ship rolled back on an even keel. Gunner was shouting to oarsmen, trying to get the starboard oars to lift from the water before they snapped off, trying to get them to push off of the reef as if they were polemen. He was demanding the port oars start pulling, but slowly so as not to drive them starboard. He had to repeat an order to the first mate, because he was already shouting his next at a gun crew and cranking The Compelling Argument himself.
Orholam’s beard, they were going to make it!
Then Gavin’s eyes rose to the sea to starboard—which had been behind them before they’d turned. Like a war-blind green recruit distracted by what was happening in front of and to each side of the ship, he’d not looked behind the ship in several minutes.
“Pull!” Gunner was shouting. “Damn your eyes, pull!”
Just behind the ship, the twin streaking lines of boiling waters of the sea demons and the black behemoth collided. Hot water sprayed over the decks as the huge beasts breached, and then as they crashed back into the sea, landing partially on the black whale, driving its great head into the coral, but then the sight of them was lost. A great trough from their bodies falling into the waters so near behind them slowed the ship as if it were suddenly going uphill—then sent a huge following wave into the stern, shoving the ship hard, straight toward the gap.
At first Gunner’s orders couldn’t be heard in the screams and the crash of water—but the ship rolled back on an even keel and the wind gusted and the sails snapped full, and the mast strained but held and it looked like they might pull through the gap safely.
“Pull!” Gunner shouted again.
Gavin’s warning was lost in all the other shouts and sounds.
The oars port and starboard dropped simultaneously and pulled.
The ship nosed into the gap. Faces lit with hope. A few more moments—
Only Gavin had seen their doom. He shifted his feet to the very rail of the crow’s nest as he cried out again, but nothing could save them.
Unseen until now, an eighth sea demon had appeared. Every sea demon was massive, but this one was twice the size of any of the others, so monstrously thick its body couldn’t even fit beneath the waves here, a battering ram shearing through mud and coral and water alike, its body pumping like a bellows. But to Gavin’s eyes it wasn’t red, but burning white-hot, steam boiling from it.
The convulsing, gulping mouth of this greatest of the sea demons was the long-pursuing mouth of hell itself.
At the last moment it closed its great cruciform jaw to bring its head like a bony war hammer up and against the stern on the starboard side.
The collision lifted and crumpled the ship against the reef. Gavin saw the coral punch in the portside hull, tearing forecastle from deck as wanton boys fighting over an old book might tear off a cover.
The flexing mast, first bent from the shock of the collision with the sea demon and then loosed with the shock of the collision with the reef, catapulted Gavin skyward. His three-fingered hand hadn’t a prayer of holding him. He twisted out into the air hopelessly, as sea and sky spun fast beneath him.
And then darkness opened its maw and swallowed him.
Chapter 25
Teia was being paranoid. She was sure of it.
Pretty sure.
The best thing about the near-total invisibility that the shimmercloak granted her wasn’t the invisibility, not today. It was the ‘ near-total’ part. Total invisibility might allow her to relax. Instead, using the cloak here took everything Teia had: constant drafting to maintain the paryl cloud necessary to defeat any errant sub-red who would otherwise see a warm ghost passing by, will to activate the cloak, skill to follow how the cloak split the light hitting it at each moment, bending it around her form. Most Shadows—the Order’s shimmercloak-using assassins—wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t, maybe.
Teia had to keep moving, and that meant she had to pay attention to any places where sources of paryl light weren’t available. Those were rare, but given that being stuck with no paryl meant discovery, and discovery meant death, it was still important to look out for. Using the cloak while dodging all the churning humanity that shot through the Lily’s Stem and into the turning flower that was the Chromeria itself took all her vigilance, all her dexterity, all her athleticism at moments that couldn’t be predicted. That was the gift: not thinking.