Her straining fingertips brushed the polished-smooth pistol butt, and fingernails tore as she scrambled to lift the heavy, slick weapon up to her palm. But she did it. She did it faster than cowardice and a heartbeat before unconsciousness could claim the laurel crown. With a hot lead prayer, she pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Like a runner tripping within steps of the finish line, she wondered what might have betrayed her—a faulty flint? a broken cockjaw?
Blackness triumphing, her hands began pulling at his forearm like she was some moron who’d never trained against such things. Her knees sagged. It was too late to do all the right things. She was too weak for the chin turn, too . . .
Her last thought swam through the gathering wet darkness like some unseen loathsome sea creature sliding against her bare toes on a midnight swim: There’d been no mechanical failure. Teia had failed.
She hadn’t cocked the pistol.
There was no way to try again. She was out of time and strength. There were no second chances here.
She slumped into the wages of that mortal sin: losing.
Chapter 26
Gavin knifed into the waves—tumbled, spun deeper. Black spots swam in his vision. He stabbed his hands forward and racked water back, back. It was several long strokes before he realized he was pulling himself deeper, like a disoriented eagle trying to swim, as if its pinions could beat the waves rather than the air.
He turned toward the greater light, and pulled for the sky.
His progress slowed. His chest convulsed. Vision darkened.
And then his hand pulled weakly on the air, and he bobbed to the surface. He gasped in a great breath, caught some wave with the air he inhaled, and coughed. He floundered, slapping at the water, gulping in air, trying to see.
The lagoon was calmer than the afternoon chop of the waves outside the reef. First he saw the remains of the ship, torn to pieces, part of the forecastle still perched on the reef it had been dropped on, the rest shearing away into a flotsam of broken wood and broken men and women.
Flung from the highest height, Gavin was the closest in toward land, but he saw others, their heads dotting the waves, yet alive. Some screamed with fear or injury, some clung to bits of crates or decking. Others danced to the sea’s cruel, silent song, bobbing without a word, drowning: for the drowning haven’t the breath to spare for screams.
Ceres hated anyone to interrupt her dancers, so in his terror, a drowning man would often force his rescuer under the waves himself, and Ceres would claim two victims rather than one. Fully half of the distance back to the ship from where he was now, Gavin saw Orholam, wet hair streaming over his face, hands plunging down and down, frenetic—dancing to that tune.
It took a strong and healthy swimmer to dare pull a man away from Ceres’s fatal song. Gavin felt neither. He looked at the shore calling him.
Then he saw the fins cutting through the water.
Then he felt the stinging on his back. He was still wearing the gun-sword, and in the fall, it had cut him. He was bleeding into the water; he had no idea how badly.
But he knew how blood called sharks.
Orholam bobbed up, up, up arrhythmically. He’d known he was going to die. Had accepted it as far as he could. Come to peace with it. You’re not that man, Gavin Guile.
Gavin kicked off toward the old man.
He cursed himself with every stroke. What the hell am I doing? I don’t even want to save him! I need to get my ass on that island so I can save Karris! I am more important than this old shit-brained—
A sailor clinging to a broken spar nearby screamed and kicked at the waves. Something slashed through the waters, and he screamed louder, lifting a bloody stump of a knee from the waves. He scrambled to climb fully onto his bit of spar, overbalanced, and fell into the water.
But Gavin was close now. He was committed. And—
Of course the old prophet went down before Gavin reached him.
Gavin dove and snatched at the disappearing form under the waves, caught something, and hauled him up by his beard.
The old man spit water into the air as they broke the surface. Alive.
Damn!
But if it had been bad luck to reach the old man as he was on the verge of losing consciousness, now it was good—he didn’t fight as Gavin pulled him into a weak grip with his left hand and kicked for shore.
By the time they made it to the shallows, all the screams had stopped, though in two places the sharks still churned the waves white in their frenzy.
Gavin stood, though his legs were wobbly and even the gentle sloshing of water that came up to his chest nearly knocked him down. “Stand. Come on,” he told Orholam.
Behind them, still halfway out to the wreckage, Gavin saw a swimmer coming in, cutting strong and fast past dead bodies floating in the waves and heedless of the sharks.
Orholam stood, wheezing and spitting, and Gavin began hauling him toward the shore.
The figure resolved into the form of Pansy, the first mate, her hair still stuck in those iron-hard glued points. She was such a fast swimmer, Gavin could only wonder where must she have fallen to have not made it to shore before them.
They made it to water that only came up to their thighs, and Orholam said, “Please, please, let me rest.” He leaned over, but Gavin pulled him on.
Coming up behind them, Pansy stood at last. She cleared the water from her eyes and heaved great, deep breaths. She leaned over, hands braced on her thighs, face barely clear of the waves.
In between breaths she said, “I don’t . . . I don’t think I want to be a sailor anymore.”
“Let me rest!” Orholam said, slapping at Gavin’s hand.
“I mean, not that I have any choice in the matter,” she said, turning to gaze at the wreckage. “Seeing how a trip home is pretty much—”
She cut off abruptly, and Gavin heard a sharp intake of breath.
He saw the shadow streaking through the shallow water a moment after she did. Pansy spun and tried to leap forward through the waves, half jumping out of the waves and half swimming, clawing at the water, but the shark hit her hard and she crashed sideways through the water.
This time, Gavin didn’t even think to save anyone else. He plunged toward the shore, wild with fear, lifting his feet free of the treacherous waters with strength he didn’t even know he had.
And then he collapsed onto the dry sand.
From his hands and knees, he saw a dark stain spreading in the water, then a glimpse of torn flesh as another shark appeared and ripped at what had been Pansy only moments ago.
Moments later, Orholam trudged up next to him and dropped heavily onto the sand.
Turning from the sight of the sharks at their feast, Gavin crawled to shade, curled into a ball, and closed his eyes.
Chapter 27
“Karris Shadowblinder.”
Nothing. Maybe it had been written the other way.
“Karris Atiriel,” Kip whispered, watching the cookfires flicker in the darkness far below. “Anselm Malleus. Eva Ultafa.”
With only Big Leo as bodyguard, Kip had climbed to the top of Greenwall. There, atop the massive living wall, on a magically grown walkway of well-nigh immortal branches and foliage that was evergreen, he surveyed those who had become his people, both inside the city of Dúnbheo and in a crescent on the shore of Loch Lána around it.
He was missing something, and his failure was going to get them all killed.