Chapter 40 The Cost
Chapter forty
The Cost
Bash
Among sailors it is said that the sea keeps the dead, but the living pay the tithe. Loss is a current without mercy, dragging even the strongest hearts toward darker waters.
— The Mysterious Deep: A Comprehensive Understanding
She was alive.
Impossibly, beautifully alive.
Dilly kneeled before us as Rose fought to catch her breath, clutching a large bioluminescent shell to her.
“You did it!” Dilly practically shrieked.
Rose snorted.
“Yeah, and it almost killed me. Do you want it?” she asked.
Everything about Dilly, from her posture to the light shining in her eyes, said that she had never wanted anything more than to hold that shell, but she shook her head.
“Only you should touch it,” she said.
Something crept out of the shell slowly, as if unsure of itself. I don’t know what I expected from an ancient artifact, but a crab that appeared half-traumatized and half-angered was not it.
It reached out and snipped its claw at Rose’s soaked-through shirt.
Unsurprised, Rose laughed.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re pissed at me,” she said. “This is Sebastian Jr. He’s very grumpy, just like you.”
Dilly blurted out in a roar of laughter that seemed out of place as my broken ship attempted to speed out of these waters at Val and Oscar’s orders.
A roar that would haunt my dreams sounded in front of us, and I stilled.
“It won’t stop,” Rose said. “We either kill it or die.”
“Morwenna said–” Dilly began.
“Do not quote what you do not understand.” Morwenna snapped. “You have what you did not have before. If you want to kill it, then all you need to do is ask.”
“Except every time she listens, she will want to listen more, and my guess is the reason we are still alive is that she’s already listened once,” Dilly said with more bite than she usually had.
“It’s fine,” Rose said. “I’d rather go insane than watch you all die.”
“Rosamund,” I chastised.
Ignoring me, she lifted the hole of the shell to her eyes where the creature watched her with unveiled contempt.
“See, that’s who you were named after. Two peas in a pod.”
Maybe it was because I was holding my wife, who was alive and well, or maybe I was losing my mind, but I didn’t fight the current of humor running through me. Leave it to Rose to befriend an ancient creature.
All at once, our smooth sailing ended, and we crashed into something that should not have been there. Rose tucked the shell into her arms just as we tumbled forward into whatever it was.
“Leviathan!” Val yelled.
Fuck.
The Wraith lurched sideways, wood screaming protest as something impossibly huge ground along our hull.
My shoulder slammed into the rail. Rose yelped, twisting to keep the shell pinned against her chest. Dilly went down hard.
Morwenna staggered, caught herself on a coil of rope, and hissed a word that made the air taste like copper.
“Hold fast!” I roared. “Lines, now!”
The deck erupted into motion. Sailors who’d been stunned into silence scrambled for rigging and braces, bare feet slapping wet wood. Somewhere below, something cracked with a sound that didn’t belong on a ship that wanted to live.
Rose pushed herself up, hair plastered to her face, eyes wild. Her knuckles were white around the glowing shell.
“Bash—”
“I’ve got you,” I said, already shoving her behind me as the sea bulged unnaturally to starboard. The Wraith bucked, protesting, and then the water itself rose as if pulled by invisible hands.
The Leviathan surfaced.
It wasn’t like the smaller monsters we’d seen, not the kelpies or the water wraiths or even the dragon Emille swore he saw in Madeira after too much rum.
This was a cathedral of flesh and scale and scar tissue, a mountain that moved with purpose.
Its hide was dark as the abyss, broken by jagged streaks of pale bioluminescence that pulsed in time with some terrible, patient heartbeat.
Its head alone was larger than the Wraith. One golden eye rolled toward us, vertical pupil narrowing, curious and furious all at once.
“Saints,” someone breathed.
“Cannons!” Val’s voice cut through the shock. “Bring her teeth to bear! Emille, you touch my powder wrong, I swear I’ll haunt you!”
“Aye, aye!” came the ragged replies.
Oscar appeared at my left, sword at his hip, face drawn and pale. Somewhere behind him, Inu climbed over the rail in one smooth movement, soaked from whatever she and Koinu had done to get Rose back to me. Her dark hair was slicked to her cheekbones, her expression carved from stone.
She looked straight at Rose. For a heartbeat, something like relief cracked through her usual guarded gaze.
“You’re alive,” she said.
Rose, panting, nodded. “I’m hard to get rid of.”
Inu’s mouth twitched. “We will test that later.”
Another impact cut off any reply. The Leviathan’s bulk slammed into us, sending half the crew sprawling. I caught Rose around the waist as she lurched. The shell between us vibrated so hard it was like holding thunder.
“It knows,” she whispered. “It knows I have it.”
“Then let’s show it we aren’t easy prey,” I snarled.
Morwenna stepped forward, water dripping from her gown, eyes black as the sky above us. “You have a choice to make, daughter of the sea,” she said to Rose, ignoring me entirely. “You can run and be hunted to the ends of the world, or you can turn and face it.”
“You said—” Dilly started, voice trembling.
“I said much, little scholar.” Morwenna’s lips curled. “None of it promised mercy.”
The shell shuddered. Rose flinched, but her grip didn’t loosen.
“You were right,” Rose said hoarsely. “It wants us. It wants this. It won’t stop.”
“Then ask,” Morwenna said softly. “Ask how the Atlanteans thought to kill what cannot die.”
I grabbed Rose’s arm. “No. Not if it means losing you.”
“Bash—”
“Look at me.” I forced her to meet my eyes. The roar of the sea, the screaming of the crew, the groan of wood—it all went distant for a breath. “I almost lost you once today. I’m not handing you over to whatever madness lives in that thing.”
Her eyes were so dark they were almost black. There was fear there, and grief, and something else that I’d learned to recognize long before I ever called her my wife—stubborn, reckless love.
“If I don’t,” she said quietly, “you lose all of us.”
The words landed like a cannonball to the chest.
Behind us, Val shouted orders, voice raw. “Oscar, bring her nose around! Keep us off its flank, you hear me? I don’t fancy being wrapped like a gift!”
“Aye!” Oscar bellowed back, already sprinting toward the helm. Inu followed, sword drawn, a silent shadow at his back.
Another wave slammed over the deck, icy cold. For a heartbeat, the Wraith pitched so sharply I thought we’d capsize. Somewhere below, a scream cut through the chaos.
“The hull’s taking water!” someone yelled. “She’s taking water fast!”
Of course she was. The Wraith had survived more than most ships deserved to, but even she had limits.
Rose lifted the shell. Sebastian Jr. clung to the edge, glaring at her like this was somehow all her fault.
“You’re not going to like this,” she murmured to him. “But I need you to be brave with me, all right?”
The crab snapped a claw at her nose.
“That’s a yes,” she decided, and lifted the shell to her ear.
“Rose—” I started.
She closed her eyes.
The air shifted.
The glow from the shell intensified, throwing strange, pale light across her face,
across the deck, across my arms, holding her upright. For a heartbeat, everything went quiet. No roaring Leviathan, no shouting crew, no creak of rigging. Just the low, thrumming hum of something ancient waking up.
Rose’s body went rigid.
“Rose?” My voice came out rough.
Her lips moved, but the words that spilled out weren’t hers. There wasn’t any language I knew. They were deeper, older syllables that rolled like waves across stone, consonants that hissed like escaping steam, vowels that tasted like iron and salt and the weight of years.
Morwenna’s eyes widened.
“Fool girl,” she whispered, but there was something like awe in it.
The Leviathan dipped beneath the water. For a heartbeat, the sea looked… empty. Too empty.
“She’s calling it,” Dilly breathed.
“For Saints’ sake, why?” Oscar shouted over the sudden wind.
“Because that’s how you kill a god,” Morwenna said. “You make it listen.”
The shell blazed. Rose’s eyes flew open—and for a horrifying moment, they glowed with the same cold light.
“Rose.” My voice shook. “Come back to me, love.”
She sucked in a breath like she was drowning. The foreign words stopped.
“It remembers,” she gasped. “Oh, Saints, Bash, it remembers everything.”
“What does it say?”
“A lot of very unhelpful things about hubris and thresholds, but—” She broke off, staring past me. “There.”
The sea rose.
The Leviathan burst from the depths like an answer to a summons, water cascading from its body in sheets. It reared higher than before, exposing more of its enormous length. As it turned out, I saw it—the thing Rose was staring at.
Along its left side, just beneath the curve of its jaw, a jagged patch of scar tissue glowed brighter than the rest. The bioluminescence there was wrong—too bright, too sharp, as if barely healed.
“The Atlanteans tried,” Rose said, voice shaking. “They wounded it once. They couldn’t kill it, but they… they left a mark. A fault line.”
My mind raced. “We aim for that.”
“It’s not that simple.” Her fingers tightened around the shell. Sebastian Jr. dug his claws in stubbornly. “The shell says it’s not flesh. Not entirely. That place is where they bound it. Where the old magic was anchored. If we strike there while it’s listening—”
“Listening?”
“To me.” She swallowed. “To this.” She lifted the shell slightly. “We can unmake the binding. Kill the thing wearing it.”
“And if we miss?” I asked.
She met my eyes. “Then it eats us instead of chasing us to the ends of the world. Better for everyone else, don’t you think?”