Chapter 41 #2
Mullins returned with a ring of keys and as soon as he noticed me knotting the ropes, he shoved one of the keys into the lock and opened the cell gate.
The ship slammed into another rock, throwing all three of us off our feet and piling us against the opposite wall.
The water began to rush in with more force, transforming the hold into a rainstorm.
Mullins picked up a plank of wood and hauled it toward the wall, slamming it against the leaks.
All the while, the goat was bleating loudly like a screaming child.
“Hold it!” Cathal said, pulling iron nails out of the pockets of his trousers and hammering them quickly into the wood.
It all happened quickly. I’d never seen two men work with so much haste and before long, the wall had been managed, but we were wading in ankle-deep water while the rest of the ship was in questionable condition.
“Galley!” someone shouted. Cathal quickly took his hammer and ran out into the passageway again. “Flooding in the galley!”
“These rocks are going to rip this ship apart,” Mullins said.
“He’ll get us through,” I said with unyielding faith.
We stumbled out of the cell, closing the gate behind us.
I tossed Lyla one last glance just as the jostling of the ship began to quell.
Mullins rushed topside while I stayed behind, listening to the movement of the ocean around us.
The Weaver moaned like a giant animal in agony as she leveled out on a calmer tide.
A smothering silence enveloped us. I still had a grip on the bars, bracing for another impact, but it never came.
Slowly, I began to approach the door again, my feet squelching in the water.
Just as I was about to step through, a resounding bang reverberated through the patched-up hull behind me.
I spun as if I would be able to see something through the wood.
Lyla and I locked eyes and a moment of understanding passed between us.
Understanding that it was no rock that had grazed the hull that time.
I dashed out of the hold, squeezing past men trying to move planks from one place to another, and climbed the steps to the deck to find us drifting through a narrow passage between tall, jagged cliffs.
A thin blanket of fog returned as if to make navigating the rocks more difficult, but at least the wind had begun to quiet down.
I peered over the edge of the ship into the undulating waves below, looking for movement, but I saw nothing.
Turning toward the sound of boots, I saw Vidar descending the steps with his cutlass drawn.
“They’re beneath us,” I warned.
“Aye, I would expect nothing less.”
“There was a leak in the hold.” He fixed his eyes on me, concerned. “It’s under control. For now. I can only hope your men can get the rest in hand.”
“They’re no strangers to foul weather. They’ll keep her afloat, but that’s not the worry I have.
” His gaze darted upward and I followed, staring at the main mast and the strange way the rocks arched sharply over us.
“If we lose the mast, we’re fucked, and this passage doesn’t look any more forgiving than the storm we endured to get here. ”
“What can we do?”
“We can pray. For now,” he sighed. “I think it’s obvious at this point that the water here will do with us what it wants. We’ve made it this far, though. If Theloch didn’t want us here, we’d be dead already.”
He started to walk away, shrugging off his coat the way he always did when he was getting ready to do strenuous work.
For the next hour or so, the crew worked tirelessly to repair damage and siphon water from below deck.
I kept my eyes on the mast, watching every cliff and rock pass us by, sometimes within inches of the sails like the rocky canyon was taunting us.
Eventually, Meridan reemerged from below, her clothes just as wet as everyone else’s.
She seemed a bit out of breath as if she’d been helping fix the damage.
She surveyed our surroundings and then looked at me as if to tell me she was alright.
Behind her, Cathal and Nazario hiked up the steps like they were climbing a steep mountain, both clearly fatigued.
Nazario headed toward Vidar, but Cathal stayed behind, hanging his hands on his hips as he caught his breath.
“Things are in order,” he said. “The ship’s holding, even if it’s barely.”
Aeris was next to emerge, but her wide, green eyes were perhaps the least at ease out of all of us. She quickly walked in my direction clutching the small, bronze blade Addison had gifted her as if she knew how to wield it.
“It’s not safe,” she said.
“We know.”
“No, I mean, it’s not safe. They’re everywhere.”
My brows pinched together. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I can feel them. Everywhere.”
As if in response to Aeris, the whole passage fell silent. The wind fled once more into the thin fog. The dark cliffs loomed over us like the shadows of giants. The Weaver creaked and whined as she drifted and as I peered up into the rocks, dread showered me like cold rain.
I turned on my heels and quickly made my way across the ship to Vidar.
As if he sensed my approach, he turned to face me, our eyes locking for a fleeting moment.
But then a sudden commotion shattered our connection, pulling our focus to the port side.
Vidar instinctively recoiled, barely evading a hurtling projectile that sliced through the swirling fog.
It embedded itself deep into the base of the mast between us, its long shaft quivering from the impact.
Vidar snarled, grabbing the spear and freeing it from the wood.
All eyes were on the cliffs surrounding us.
The men solidified their positions on the harpoons and anyone on the deck had their flintlocks at the ready.
I drew my cutlass from my belt, my eyes piercing the darkness to see rigid cliff faces, but nothing seemingly out of place.
“There!” someone shouted.
We all turned toward the scream and found a harpoon gun absent the man who was just on it. It took less than a heartbeat for the severity of the situation to sink in.
“All hands!” Vidar roared.
“All hands on deck!” Mullins echoed.
The chaos changed from trying to keep the ship afloat to defending her from the beasts lurking in the rocks.
Another spear whistled past me, clearing the deck completely.
As I turned to watch it pierce the opposite stone wall, a figure was leaping at me through the mist, its wide, toothy maw open for a bite.
“Xhoth!” Meridan announced.
I raised my cutlass, slicing through his belly before he hit the deck.
Entrails and ink-like blood spilled out before me as the body flopped toward the edge.
All around me, more were flooding onto the ship.
Unfolding to their full height, they looked like great, lanky demons, their soulless red eyes glistening under the starlight like glass.
The familiar sounds of shouting, metal clashing, and pistols firing echoed through the canyon.
The squirming xhoth at my feet reached for me, disregarding the way his insides were in a pile beside him.
I drove my foot down onto his wrist, pinning it, and jammed my cutlass through the soft tissue of his eye socket before moving on to the next.
The voices of the men were drowned out by my own determination and anger as I fought my way towards Vidar.
“Kroan,” a gnarled, deep voice spoke.
I spun to find one of the xhoth standing over me, wide mouth smiling. He flexed his jaw, snapping his teeth together loudly.
“We hungry,” he said. “You bring us food. We keep you for fun.”
I did not waste a word on the beast before I started swinging my blade.
The sons were slow and lumbering, but their skin was tough.
Every time I made contact with his flesh, I could feel that I wasn’t doing much damage.
And when he drew back his spear to lunge, I staggered back, pinning myself against the railing.
I was prepared to dodge, but before I had to, foul-smelling blood exploded from his head, spraying across my face.
The xhoth tripped forward, careening over the side of the ship.
Standing with a smoking rifle pressed to the pit of her shoulder was Aeris just before Nazario appeared to usher her below.
So, she did have other uses.
It didn’t take long for the men to clear the ship of hostiles. The attack was direct but swift. The twitching corpses of Akareth’s sons littered the deck and without wasting a second, the men were loading their guns and positioning themselves along the railing, aiming toward the rocks.
“Keep her steady, Nikolai!” Vidar shouted, reloading his pistol.
Silence settled over the ship like a cloud. I made my way to him, my clothes blackened with blood, and stood at his back, peering through the fog in search of movement.
“How many do you think are residing in these cliffs?” he asked.
“Can’t tell.”
As if in response to our conversation, a series of sharp clicks and guttural words that sounded less like speech and more like the tones of a strange instrument began to fill the canyon.
The men were looking about, trying to determine where the noises were coming from, but in truth, they were coming from everywhere.
The sides of the ship grated against the rocks and she continued to moan every time in complaint and then, like a blessing from Lune, the canyon opened up again.
The ship cleared the high peaks and entered mildly choppy water, but the threat had not left us.
I could still hear the commotion in the waves and the chatter between the rocks, but in open water, at least we could not be ambushed as easily.
I switched my cutlass to my other hand, wiping my bloodied palm on my shirt.
“This journey gets more interesting by the second,” Vidar commented.
“Strange choice of words.”
A couple of the men chuckled at that, but I wasn’t sure if they were amused or going mad. I was inclined to believe it was a little of both.
“Reload those harpoons, men,” Vidar ordered.
Those that were not on guns stood huddled near the center of the ship, waiting for another assault, but none came.
It didn’t seem right to me. Fighting them off felt too easy.
The canyon had been the perfect place to launch a real attack that would maim the ship and yet we defeated them with barely any casualties.
I turned my head, halfway glancing at Vidar.
“Aye,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“It was too easy,” I said.
“You think they want us to keep going?”
“I think they would have tried a lot harder if they didn’t. False confidence will get us killed.”
“In other words, let’s not get comfortable.”
“Cap’n,” David said.
I spotted him looking through the spyglass dead ahead.
Vidar left the formation to join him and snatched the spyglass, staring out into the night.
The expression on his face when he lowered it prompted me to go to him and see what it was he was looking at.
The moment I lifted the spyglass to my eye, a dark horizon came into view and on it, the silhouette of something even darker.
A towering collection of sharp, jutting peaks reaching toward the stars like they were trying to stab the sky, but these were not like the canyon cliffs. They were taller. More deliberate.
“If they’re not trying too hard to stop us,” Vidar said. “Odds are there’s something worse there waiting for us.”
I handed the spyglass back to him, glaring forward.
“And if there is?” I turned to look at him. “Would you rather turn around?”
I knew there was a tiny part of Vidar that wanted to say yes to that.
The part of him that didn’t like the idea of David dying in that place.
Or Mullins. Or me. Or any more of his men for that matter.
Men he was responsible for and despite the fact that they all knew the risks, the chance that we’d have to watch more of them die had not escaped our notice.
“No,” he finally answered. “We’re past that, love. There’s an end coming. Let’s make sure it’s not ours.”
Those words replayed over and over in my head as the Weaver drifted closer to the shadowed city in the fog.
By the time we could see it without the help of the spyglass, the air grew colder as if to remind us that we were entering the true nightmare.
We were in Theloch, a city no siren remembered building.
A place that had been the subject of stories since I could remember.
The place I was born, just like many before me.
When the peaks emerged from the fog, it was like watching the claws of a mammoth beast rearing from the water to feed and the closer we sailed, the more my eyes could detect.
Sculptures carved from the stone sat half-submerged.
The battered and rotting corpses of ships long destroyed on the jagged rocks sat impaled on obsidian spears.
The air was stagnant and old like that of a tomb that had sat closed off for too many years.
Death was everywhere and yet Theloch seemed alive, every slow churn of the water like a heartbeat.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones who have washed up here,” Vidar said, eyeing the shipwrecks in the distance.
“But we’re going the be the only ones to leave,” I added.
Ahead of us, the tallest tower stretched upward like a monolith, a centerpiece to the rigid archway that stood at the end of a long, flat bed of slick rock. Were the tide lower, I imagined it would look like a bridge, but the waves were slowly swallowing the whole place.
“Looks like the closest thing to a dock,” Vidar said.
Nikolai needed no instruction and began to navigate toward the cliffs.
Hearts were beating wildly around me. I could hear their frantic tones as if reality had finally set in for the crew.
We were in an ancient and dangerous place.
Even I was feeling the teeth of death’s dogs on my ankles, telling me we were someplace we weren’t supposed to be.