Hunted

Chapter 18

The first hundred yards or so was largely an effort on Oberon’s part to properly express how cold the water was.

He was pretty slow in the water and I wasn’t much faster; sea otters typically chase down sea urchins, which tend to have the top speed of a snail, so speed wasn’t at a premium. But Granuaile’s staff, sticking out horizontally from where we’d bound it, performed a valuable service: Oberon was able to drape his forelegs over it and keep his head above water and kick with his back legs. I did the same on the other side, and together we were able to make about ten miles per hour. Two hours wouldn’t be so bad, I figured, if no one messed with us, but that was far too much to hope for.

Avoiding the shipping was a challenge in itself; the Strait of Dover was one of the busiest waterways in the world, and we had to add on a bit of distance by swimming outside those lanes.

We saw nothing for the first few miles except the next choppy wave that wanted to slap us in the whiskers. The white cliffs of Dover eventually appeared in our night vision; they had some white magic about them in the magical spectrum. Someone had cast wards over them, though I could not tell what kind at that distance. When we swam past the halfway point without incident, I allowed myself to feel the faint stirrings of hope. And, directly afterward, I felt faint stirrings in the sea.

Something was moving beneath us. The strait was twenty to thirty fathoms deep, and something down there was displacing a substantial amount of water. Something of leviathan proportions. Rising.

My imagination filled with a tentacled horror reaching up from the dark to pull us down for dinner. Krakens, to me, are so much more terrifying than sharks, though I do not know why it should be so. More people are bitten by sharks than eaten by krakens every year, but seeing a shark would have been reassuring right then. A shark, somehow, was merely a predator doing its predator thing, where a kraken was an unholy monster that sent sailors (and Druids) shrieking from their bunks.

I’m aware that my fear and loathing of krakens is unjustified—after all, they bear me no more ill will than I bear to lunch meat. But fear and rationality are hardly good drinking buddies—I’m fairly certain one of them doesn’t even drink. When I’m on dry land, I can set aside my dread and even feel sorry for krakens because nobody loves them. It is a desolate feeling to crawl about the crust of the world unloved, and though most of us have never spent a single moment bereft of love, we can sense the emptiness of it and fear it, can sympathize with J. Alfred Prufrock and all such people unmoored from the shores of humanity. But my empathy for krakens dissolves in the water when we may be swimming in the same body of it.

Night vision, I discovered, does little good in the water past a couple dozen feet. If something decided to swim up from beneath us very fast, I would have almost no time to swim out of the way, assuming I could. And Oberon was about as agile in the water as a lily pad.

Magic sight was slightly better—the auras of living things have their own light and don’t give a damn how far away they are from the sun or moon. But the sea is full of living things, and as I peered into the deep I had quite a bit of filtering to do before I could see anything more than visual noise and get a sense of distance. If I was having trouble, I imagined Granuaile was bewildered. She could interpret what she saw very well but still had difficulty penetrating the nonessential bindings.

When I finally identified the threat, it was so close that I nearly shat kine. It wasn’t a kraken at all; it was a chorus of seven great serpents, spawn of Jörmungandr, swollen to monstrous size and rising below us to the left. Väinämöinen had told me of his encounter with one of them long ago; otherwise, I would not have recognized them. Sentient but shy creatures that preferred to dine on blue whales, they never would have pursued us without goading. They preferred the deep ocean and rose to the surface only in their youth to satisfy their curiosity. Poseidon and Neptune were whipping them doubly against their natures—to eat food they’d never seek out on their own, and in a portion of the sea they habitually avoided.

Frantically seizing on the threads of their consciousness one by one, I shouted the concept of Poison! to them as best as I could. One turned away. Then another. One that I hadn’t shouted at turned away, so Granuaile must have been doing something similar. Four were still rising fast and opening jaws that would gulp us down like goldfish. I got one more, and two others peeled off to erupt from the surface nearby. But for the final one—a gigantic yawning darkness rimmed in teeth—there was simply no time. I had a Hamlet moment as death approached: The famous Dane had marveled in the graveyard at how Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away, and I wondered at how I could live so long and survive so many wars to wind up as snake shit.

Something massive rammed into the serpent’s neck right below the head—it came in from the north and I never saw it coming, because I had been looking down. The collision caused the serpent to change course just enough to miss our tails. It still exploded through the surface along with the six other serpents, and the resulting turbulence tumbled us ass over teakettle deeper into the water. This wasn’t a problem for Granuaile or me, but it was a significant issue for Oberon, who’d had no warning at all of the attack.

I couldn’t answer him specifically, because I honestly didn’t know. The churning of the sea continued to pull me in directions I didn’t want to go, and I was helpless to fight against it. I couldn’t even see him. I caught a flash of Granuaile’s sleek shape twisting away from me—either above or below, I couldn’t tell which—and saw the shining trunks of serpents surrounding me like scaly towers. Everything else was dark and I couldn’t tell which way was up. The huge creature that had butted into the last serpent flickered in my vision—a shark, perhaps, but strangely limned in white magic. And then the serpents crashed back into the sea again and made it all worse. That told me where the surface was, at least.

Oberon’s clear panic was infectious, and I struggled to right myself. I didn’t know where he was and couldn’t think of how to help him even if I did.

I told him. It was his best hope, slim as it was. The serpents would be coming around for another pass; Poseidon and Neptune wouldn’t let them give up.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to wait for. I began to shout “Flee!” at the serpents, to try to clear them out, but all that accomplished was another short-term reprieve from becoming an hors d’oeuvre. The Olympians were urging the serpents to eat us as quickly as I could urge them to forget about it, and so for every time I convinced one to swim in a different direction, it would swing back around a few moments later as I switched my attention to another set of jaws. It wasn’t sustainable; my magic was draining rapidly out of my bear charm. Soon I would have no way to communicate to the creatures, and that would be the end.

I missed one diving from above, but Granuaile must have spotted it, for a serpent plunged right past me, its scales scraping my fur and its tidal gravity pulling me deeper with it, tumbling me in swirls of current and confusing my sense of direction once more. My lungs burned, reminding me that breathing air was not optional, but the surface was a mystery to me now.

Oberon’s plaintive tone was heartbreaking.

I managed to fight free of the serpent’s wake and searched for anything in the darkness that would tell me which way was up.