Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(104)
She tried her ankle. “Fuck.”
“Lean on me.”
“I’ll use the wall.” If she couldn’t quite walk, at least she could hop. “Slower than I’d like. Let’s move.”
“Down?” As if he hoped she would give up. Not tonight. Not with gods and goddesses and friends counting on her two thousand miles away. Not with so few hours remaining. Her watch lay heavy in her pocket.
“Down,” she said.
52
Silverclad Cat splashed through the ocean’s skin, plummeting toward a darkness that paled all color: moonlight shafts ended in the shadows below, embedded in the flesh of a beast too large and cold to care.
Cat sank. Bubbles clung to the Suit, and as she kicked they slipped free, tickled up her flanks to form a whirling trail. Justice’s song buzzed beneath her conscious thought. She was far from the community of cops. Seril’s light followed her, warm inside her mind, a caress she couldn’t call a mother’s—not her mother’s, anyway.
She did not have to breathe while wearing the Suit. Blood rushed in her ears, and the water’s pulse twinned her own.
She heard a splash as Raz dove into his element. The speed of his descent slicked back his hair. Naked from the waist up, he joined her as she fell. He swam with beautiful efficiency.
Westward rose the continental shelf, steeper than any cliff could be in air. When Cat was a kid, old Father Clemson at the Quarter parish who owed gambling debts to half his congregation told myths during weekend services. Cat would have beaten up any kid who suspected how much she loved those stories. She had no time for sermons, which were one more way folk told you to sit down and listen, but she liked the strange tales and weird poems, and one line returned to her thoughts as she looked down into the black: something about spirits brooding on the abyss.
She pointed down and shot Raz a questioning glance. He gave her the thumbs-up. Pointed down. Thumbs-up again.
Great.
She brooded on the abyss like a champ.
Water pressed her in an embrace tighter than the Suit’s used to be before Seril came back, and the Suit stiffened to match.
Cat’s heart beat faster. Raz kicked into the deep, somersaulted, and waved up at her with a smile.
Pressure at this depth could warp a body from within. The City Aquarium displayed the corpses of dead things divers dredged from the deeps, spiny and toothed, many-clawed, tentacular. Special care had to be taken, the exhibit’s brass placards read, in recovering such specimens, due to the pressure difference between ocean floor and surface. If she removed her Suit down here, she’d die.
Her eyes adjusted. No human eyes could have, there wasn’t enough light, but human limits did not bind the Suit. Raz’s white pants flashed when he kicked.
They passed few fish at this depth, and no vampires she could see. They’d almost reached the bottom. Sharp grim coral towers jutted from the murk below. White flakes of sea snow flitted between the peaks. Could Raz have been mistaken? He’d sounded so sure.
The coral towers moved.
Earthquake was her first thought, though there were no quakes in Alt Coulumb. The movement’s scale was too great for anything else. It could not be a living thing—nothing so large could live, on land.
But they weren’t on land anymore.
The towers swelled and reddened as they approached, sharp pitted texture filling out with roseate skin. Blue sparks crackled beneath a translucent surface. High-pitched cries filled the deep. Arms the length of Alt Coulumb’s coastline coiled, wreathed by clouds of dust. Currents tossed her as the thing beneath bloomed, the coral forest transformed into a city-sized mantle. The Suit fed liquid beauty through Cat’s vein, but chemical confidence was little help. As she grasped and failed and grasped again at the sheer inconceivable scale of the thing coming oh gods toward her, its displacement current pulled her down, tossing Raz head over heels— And what she’d taken for wrinkles on the creature’s skin were blade-sharp ridges— She caught Raz and pulled him close as the star kraken crashed into them.
Blade-flesh drew sparks as it scraped her Suit; she tumbled into a canyon-sized wrinkle, bounced off a rubbery wall, pushed herself away—Raz tugged her out of the groove before it snapped closed, mouthlike. She kicked off and down again, and realized they were not alone.
Nearly human creatures slipped through the water around her. She’d taken them for snow at first, decayed dead things fallen to the benthic plane. They swam, long limbed and webbed, skin every color she had seen, jaws distended with curved teeth. Darting about the kraken, they pierced its flesh with spears and carved broad wounds with knives. She saw a slick naked girl unhinge her jaw and sink fangs into punctured kraken flesh. Blue blood leaked from the seal her lips made. The girl swallowed convulsively, released the monster, and howled.
Not all the shapes were human, or humanlike: Cat saw sleek bottle-nosed bodies, fangs curving from their open beaks. Hundreds streaked through the night—tiny beside the kraken, but pale corruption spread where their spears bit, and their teeth, and the kraken shriveled as it rose.
The kraken hit her again. She sprawled on its mantle as a translucent sack of flesh inflated overhead. That bloodred mass held many eyes, their pupils figure eights within which Cat could have stood upright.
Then the mantle collapsed and they fell, propelled down by the kraken’s jet. Cat stared up into a beak that could crush mountains, ringed with lightning, and within that gnashing mouth a furnace. The speed of the kraken’s retreat slapped its arms and tentacles together, and Cat and Raz and all the hunters tumbled down, down— To land dust-clouded on a stony plain.