lightning strikes. The beast meanwhile had wrapped four massive tentacles about the Banshee, squeezing like some colossal vise. The timbers along the ship’s bulwarks cracked and buckled under the awful pressure. The deck rolled as if the earth were quaking, men tumbled back down the stairs or over the rails. Other mutinous wulfguard leapt over their falling comrades, desperate to put a blade to Mia and the Ladies at peace.
Tric stood atop the port stairwell, bringing one of his gravebone swords down in an overhand swing that split one man’s skull clean in two, the blade plowing all the way down into the fellow’s rib cage. Mia stood atop the other stairwell, plunging her sword through a sailor’s chest and kicking him backward, sending the men behind him sprawling. The deck rocked again, a massive wave crashing over their bow. The Banshee listed dangerously, her broken masts trailing heavy in the water, adding to the weight of the leviathan beneath, all set to drag them below. As she dispatched another mutineer with a savage thrust, Mia’s mind was racing, heart pounding in her chest. Fighting off her crew, she wasn’t fighting off the beast, and the ship was being torn apart around them. The water was full of drakes. The waves like towers. If Banshee died, so did they all.
Enemies beneath. Around. Below.
Story of my life …
“… MIA, BEWARE…!”
Sigursson was charging up the stairs with his blade drawn, teeth bared. Mia caught his thrust on her longsword, turned it aside. With a gesture, she wrapped her first mate up in his own shadow, ribbons of darkness seizing hold of his arms, legs, throat, holding the Vaanian pinned and thrashing in midair.
“I warned you what would happen if you defied me, Ulfr!” she shouted.
Sigursson could only gargle, veins bulging in his neck as the shadows squeezed. Mia raised her hand, lifting him farther off the deck, fingers curling closed. Thunder shook the heavens, pressing down on her skin.
“Now you get to see what makes the rest of them so afraid!”
Mia opened her hand and Ulfr was ripped apart, pieces of him flung in every direction, blood falling like rain. The Banshee shook again in the leviathan’s grip, the crunch of splintering timbers loud as the storm as the ship split across her middle. Tric staggered across the deck toward Mia, drenched in seawater and blood. Mia caught him in her arms, her shadows holding them steady as the aft rose out of the water.
“… MIA, WE CANNOT STAY HERE…!” Eclipse roared.
“I’M WILLING TO ENTERTAIN SUGGESTIONS!” the boy bellowed.
Mia could see the Banshee was doomed, crumbling all around her, waves rushing in over her sides, masts and spine broken. One way or another, they were going into that ocean. And even if the seas weren’t crashing about them like hammers and filled with monsters from the deep, it was still an impossible distance to swim …
“THE ONLY WEAPON IN THIS WAR IS FAITH.”
Lightning flashed, that same rapid strobe turning the gloom brighter than the sunslight. The shadows were etched around her in perfect black with each strike, writhing at Mia’s feet, carved deep and dark in the great valleys between the waves, miles and miles of them between her and land. But she could feel the dark above her. The dark inside her. Thinking of a line from that old Ashkahi poem,
No shadow without light …
and finally shouting to Tric, “Hold on to me!”
The boy obeyed, wrapping his arm tight about her waist. Banshee shuddered beneath them, the ocean rushing up to meet them as the leviathan dragged the ship and her murderous crew down to their dooms.
“Eclipse, you move where I point you, aye?”
“… AS IT PLEASE YOU…”
“Go!”
Mia pointed across the iron-gray sea. The gnashing swell, the colossal waves full of teeth. The daemon disappeared from beside her, and holding tight to Tric, Mia
Stepped
out across the
water into the shadows
between two towering waves. She felt a moment of weightlessness, the sensation of falling, the Dweymeri boy in her arms and nothing but death beneath them both. But before they could plunge into the depths she was
believe.
They fell into the sodden sand. Shallow waters rising up about her thighs. A red sliver of storm-wracked Ashkahi beach was stretched out before her. The familiar, moldering facades of Last Hope in front of her. Black clouds arrayed above her. Snarling waves rising behind her. The rain was on her skin and her hair was in her eyes and the chill was in her bones. Tric