Chapter 40: Beastmaw
Veliah worked against the ropes. The hemp was good quality, the knots tight. She twisted her hands in opposite directions and felt the outer loop give a quarter inch.
The world above her exploded.
The first cannonball hit the water twenty feet off the port side and threw a column of ocean upward that came down across the deck in a sheet, soaking everything and everyone on it. The second hit something solid on a neighbouring vessel. The third hit the shoreline to the east, which was nowhere near anything it had been aimed at.
Then the shadow crossed their ship.
It came fast and low, the wind of its passage hitting before the shape was fully visible, a pressure that bent the rigging and snapped the smaller lines. Barjuchne's fire came with her, extended in a long, continuous exhale that she laid across the water along her flight path, and the ocean beneath superheated in a narrow corridor of boiling white, steam rising in enormous billowing walls that swallowed three vessels to the port side whole. The screaming from within the steam clouds lasted briefly.
The naga captain moved across the deck. Her lower body found purchase on the slick wood without effort, each scale gripping the deck the way human boots couldn't, keeping her centred and mobile while her crew stumbled and fell around her.
"Turn her about!" she shouted. "Get the guns around! Shoot it down, you dogs!"
The cannons fired. The shots scattered across the sky in spread patterns that tracked the dragon's last position and found only empty air because Barjuchne was already somewhere else, her speed making the gap between munitions and target insurmountable by conventional gunnery.
Boots thudded across wet deck boards. Swain appeared at the captain's shoulder, his face carrying the specific expression of someone delivering bad news.
"Captain. It's too fast!"
The ship lurched.
The wave came from the dragon's latest pass overhead, the displaced air and water combining into a swell that hit the hull at the wrong angle. The deck tilted sharply. Everything loose on it became a projectile. Sailors grabbed for anything fixed and found mixed results. Swain's feet left the deck entirely, his body swinging outward over the rail.
The captain's coils moved before her arms did.
She caught him with two loops of her lower body, pulling the young pirate back inward without breaking her stance, her upper body continuing to scan the battle with complete composure. She looked down at him, dangling in her grip.
"Why do I pay you more than the others, Swain?" she asked.
"Kindness of your heart?" he said. She glared. He blinked water out of his eyes. Thought. "C-captain. Grapes!"
The sharp grin appeared. She set him on his feet. "That's why," she said. "Grapeshot!" she barked, lifting her voice.
High on the broken mast, a sailor who had been listening gave a sharp salute and yanked a signal flag up the remaining line. The flag snapped in the wind.
Across the water, on the other ships of the fleet, signal mirrors caught it and relayed it outward in a rippling chain. The change in orders moved through the fleet. Below decks on each vessel, gunners broke open different stores. The heavy iron balls went aside. The fabric sacks came out, each one dense with small packed shot.
The sacks went in.
The cannons rolled back out.
Barjuchne landed on the largest ship in the fleet, the mast cracking and the vessel nearly capsizing from the momentum of the landing.
The hull groaned. The deck compressed under her weight with a sound like the whole vessel exhaling at once. The waterline rose along the sides as she settled. The wyvern opened her jaws and poured fire across the water in a sweeping arc that caught two smaller vessels simultaneously, the flames spreading across their decks in rushing orange sheets as men scattered away beneath her, screaming.
Sailors went into the water. But the boiling sea gave them no comfort.
A moment later, Barjuchne gathered herself and launched again.
The ship beneath her cracked as she left it, the keel giving way under the sudden release of her mass and the force of her departure. It split in a slow, spreading break from bow to stern and began taking on water.
She hit the air hard and opened her wings for altitude.
The volley hit her at the top of the launch.
It came from three ships simultaneously, coordinated by a flag signal, the guns firing in a sequence that gave the spread a layered quality, the first blast followed by the second, followed by the third, the pellets of each mixing in the air into a continuous cloud of fast-moving metal that occupied the space she was trying to move through.
The impacts registered across her back and wings in rapid, overlapping points of pressure.
Her scales took most of it without a problem. The small pellets, even if fired with force, did nothing to her armoured body. But her wings were not scales. Between the structural spines, the membrane was thin, built for flexibility and air capture rather than protection. The grapeshot found the membranes, punching through in small, ragged tears that did not bleed much but changed everything about the way the wings moved through air.
She faltered.
The left wing caught badly on the next stroke, the torn sections failing to hold the pressure she needed from them. She compensated with her right, which threw her angle off, and then the right caught a second scattered volley from a reloaded gun and the compensation became impossible.
Barjuchne roared.
She tried again. Her wings beat, found partial purchase, and tried to climb. She gained ten feet and lost fifteen.
"Captain!" A sailor's voice cut across the battle noise.
The naga looked. On the ship nearest to her, the elven girl had shed the last of her ropes and was moving through the deck crowd with her head down and her elbows working. Two sailors reached for her. She went between them.
The naga launched herself off a coil and swept both arms shut in a closing arc.
Veliah went through the gap.
The elf didn't slow. She hit the rail, cleared it, and was over the side and into the water before the captain's arms finished their arc.
The naga stood at the rail and stared at the water for a moment. Then she turned. "We don't need her." She looked back toward the battle. "Fire! Take it down!"
The dragon, unable to climb and unable to flee, took the next volley across her chest.
Multiple guns. Multiple ships. The fleet's coordinated fire had committed its full remaining capacity to the single target.
Smoke and fire rose from the impact points across the wyvern's torso. The sound she made was not quite a roar. It was something lower.
Her wings stopped moving.
She hit the remains of the split ship on the way down, what was left of it barely slowing her, and went through the surface.
The ocean accepted her without ceremony.
Barjuchne sank.
Her wings trailed behind her, useless in the water like the rest of her, the torn membranes streaming. Her tail moved in slow, disconnected efforts that produced nothing useful. The damage across her frame was serious. Worse, the cold bite of the ocean's water was doing something to her that the cold of the blizzard had begun but not quite finished, finding the same vulnerabilities in her draconic physiology.
The surface above her became a distant, rippling plane of light that moved further away with each passing second.
Barjuchne thought about the hoard room. About the warmth of the gold beneath the quilt. About the egg in the brooding chamber. She thought about her princesses. She thought about Veliah, specifically, in the way she always thought about Veliah when the thinking was involuntary. The particular way the elven girl tucked her hair back before she said something.
Something grabbed her, uselessly, perhaps. But it did.
Small hands, both of them, closing around one of the sinking wyvern's horns. Barjuchne turned her eyes in the water.
Veliah was there.
The elf had gone in off the ship's rail and come down through the water in the direction the dragon had fallen, and she had found her in the dark below the surface. She was pulling on the dragon. Both hands on Barjuchne's horn, her legs uselessly kicking, her entire body straining upward.
The dragon was several tonnes in weight. The elf was not.
The math was clear and did not change under the influence of effort.
But Veliah pulled anyway. She pulled with everything her body had, her face set, her hair drifting in slow clouds around her in the dark water. She pulled until her body began running its own separate accounting, the oxygen debt of someone who had been underwater too long reaching its due date. The shuddering started in her chest. She fought it. Her grip didn't loosen.
The shuddering reached her throat.
Veliah's exhale came in a single, involuntary release that took what she had been holding and gave it to the ocean. The bubbles drifted upward, past her face, toward the surface that was too far away.
Her hair drifted.
Her hands did not let go.
Barjuchne's eye opened.
"And a yo-ho-ho and the east wind blows -!" sang the crew in the midst of their shanty.
The rum had been opened.
It was the good rum. Bottles passed between hands still blackened with powder and blood. Songs emerged from several directions at once, not agreeing on tempo or verse but united in general celebratory intent.
"Captain! We got it!" The call came from the platform crew, whose job it was to manage the heavy winching mechanism that spanned the gap between the two largest remaining vessels. Below the platform, the massive chain disappeared into the water in a taut, straining line.
Cranks turned. Teams of men on each ship worked in coordinated rhythm, hauling against the weight below with steady, grinding effort.
The surface broke.
Fished from the depths, a head appeared. Dark-scaled, eyes closed, enormous.
The crew cheered, all across the remnants of the circling armada.
— But then a second head broke the surface beside the first.
The cheering wavered. Someone lowered a bottle.
A third head.
The ocean moved. The ships connected by the platform lurched sideways, their hulls grinding against each other. Men on the winching crews stumbled. The chain went slack, then taut, then slack again as whatever was below changed its relationship to it.
A fourth head.
A fifth.
The captain stood at the rail. The bottle in her hand had stopped moving.
“The hell…?” she muttered.
A sixth head. A seventh. An eighth.
The ocean between the ships erupted.
The ninth head came up last, and for a moment all nine hung in the air above the water in a spread of serpentine necks that caught the afternoon light and threw it back in nine directions. Each head was slightly different from the others. Each pair of eyes, as they opened, was a different colour.
Each one fixed on a different vessel.
Nine mouths opened simultaneously.
The glow inside them was different in each. Fire in one, white-hot and rolling. Ice in another, pale and crystalline. Lightning, blue-white and splitting. Wind that was visible as a distortion. Holy light, prismatic and warm. Dark light, the inverse of light, consuming the air around it.
"HYDRA!" screamed a voice from somewhere in the fleet. Old. Experienced. The voice of someone who had heard the word in old tavern stories from far away and dark places.
The ocean turned into a collage.
The naga captain stood at the rail of her ship and watched everything go white.