Mel Odom - Rising Tide

Ignoring the comment, Jherek gazed up at the darkening clouds. The storm seemed more threatening than ever. The shadows had chased the green from the Sea of Swords, turning even the water dark. Off in the distance, pale flickering lightning knifed through the sky.

"You reading again?" Hagagne asked, picking up the book.

"Aye."

"Never found a knack for reading meself," the crewman said, "but I like being read to well enough. What's this book about?"

"A liege's man," Jherek said. "He joined the king's army to fight against the goblin hordes threatening the kingdom, only to find that he's falling in love with his liege's lady."

"Does she know?"

Jherek nodded. "The lady's marriage was an arranged one. She doesn't love her liege. She loves the warrior."

"Perhaps when you have time, you'd read this one to me." Hagagne picked up the thick volume. "I'd predict a short, unhappy ending, but I tell by the heft of this book that's not the case."

"No." Jherek loved the intricacies of the plot, loved the way the liege's man was at war with his own feelings and the rules he'd laid down for himself. He still didn't know how the story would end. "Aye, I’ll read it to you if you'd like."

Hagagne clapped him on the back. "Now there's a good lad. I shall look forward to it."

Jherek replaced the volume in his kit, brought to him earlier by a crewman the captain had sent up. His eye wandered back to the cog's wake to study the fishing lines. He and Hagagne watched in silence for a few moments, then watched Yeill's line suddenly draw taut.

A cheer rose from the throats of the Amnians, showing the effects of the wine they'd been drinking. It died away when the shark's dorsal fin broke the water.

The triangle of cartilaginous flesh looked impossibly large. The brute's gray mottled head broke water next, the fishing line trapped in its snarl of teeth.

The cheers turned to a panicked chorus of fear.

Jherek rose to his feet, yelling down from the crow's nest. "Cut the line! Cut the line!"

The line was stout, unbreakable. Butterfly had a large crew and she had to feed them. The Sea of Swords held big fish, and the captain wanted none of them to get away once they were hooked. The enchantment on the lines he'd paid for kept them from breaking, though they could be cut. Still, two men had been pulled from Butterfly's deck before.

Captain Finaren himself moved first, shoving his way through the ring of Amnian wealthy. He drew his cutlass and pulled it back to swing.

Timbers groaned and screeched as Yeill's fishing chair yanked free of the deck and tore through the railing. She was gone in an instant, pulled under by the big shark she'd hooked.

Jherek stood in the crow's nest and drew his seaman's knife from his leg sheath. The knife blade was a foot long, thick and heavy, with a saw-toothed back for cutting through bone. The small handle barely filled his fist.

"Sea devils!" someone shouted.

Glancing to his left, Jherek saw a sahuagin manta surface on Butterfly's port side. The oblong barge used by the sahuagin to travel above or below water was much smaller than most of its kind that the young sailor had heard described. Like all of its kind that he'd heard about, the manta had been cobbled together from ships wrecked at sea or scavenged from shorelines. The boards were stained green with undersea scud from being submerged for so long, but fitted neatly into a wedge shape that made it very maneuverable. It rode low in the water, but the finned shapes of the sahuagin could be seen hunkered down on the benches. They paddled furiously, moving in response to a measured cadence, totally focused on their prey.

Jherek had heard stories about mantas that crewed as many as six hundred sahuagin, but firsthand stories were few and far between. Most men who saw them perished in the sea devils' attack. From his initial estimate, he guessed that there were forty or fifty sahuagin aboard, easily twice the number of crew aboard Butterfly.

Captain Finaren bawled out orders at once, calling his crew into action.

Jherek looked at the water where Yeill had gone under. He couldn't see her.

"Lad," Hagagne called from the ship's rigging, already moving down to the deck himself. He stopped when he realized what Jherek was about to attempt. "Leave her. She's probably already in that shark's belly by now and not worth your life even if she isn't."

"I can't."

Hagagne reached back for the young sailor, but Jherek avoided the other man's grasp. Without another word, he dived from the crow's nest, plummeting toward the dark water.

9 Mirtul, the Year of the Gauntlet

Jherek hit the ocean cleanly, holding his hands before him to break the surface tension and lessen the chance of injury from impact. Still, the force of hitting the water nearly drove the breath from his lungs. The cold bit into him with jagged, angry teeth. The sahuagin manta was ahead and on the port side of Finaren's Butterfly so he knew he wouldn't immediately be seen by the sea devils aboard their barge.

He also knew that the shark that had taken Yeill's hook hadn't bitten by chance. The sahuagin ran with the sharks. He didn't doubt the danger that more sharks would be around as he attempted to save the Amnian woman.

The darkened sky above the ocean cut down on the visibility beneath the water as well. Pale colored sand covered the rolling ocean floor, and brain coral stood up in bunches, like tumors. A coral reef that housed dozens of multicolored fish hiding from the sharks ran in an irregular line to his right. As always, being below the ocean line filled Jherek with a sense of ease. Everything moved more slowly here, and it seemed more open to him than even the sky. He could feel the water, feel the pressure of it against his body, feel the current that mixed warm and cold water in layers. He felt at home there.

Jherek swam hard, the knife still clenched in his fist. The pressure on his ears told him he'd gone down thirty feet or more. He searched the water and spotted Yeill still in the fishing chair less than fifty feet from his position, sinking slowly. He turned toward her and swam hard.

Two sharks glided in sinuous circles around her, close but not closing in. One of them still had the fishing line in its mouth. Beyond the sharks, three sahuagin clutching spears kept watch. They spotted him and did nothing but spread out, assuming he was fool enough to swim to his own death.

Jherek looked at them, matching all the stories he'd heard with the sight of the monsters before him. The sahuagin were huge in build, their bodies massive with muscle across the shoulders. Their legs with the extra joint looked grotesque. Broad faces with flaring fins sticking out into the water on either side of its head held dozens of narrow teeth, the black lips curled back to expose them in a threatening grimace. Their bite, Jherek had been told, could rip gobbets of flesh from a man, and the sea devils literally feasted on their victims, often before they died. Their tails whipped back and forth to help them maintain their position. The webbing between their long fingers and toes made their hands and feet look impossibly large.

Fear filled Jherek as he closed on the circling sharks, yet he was drawn to the act of attempting to save the young woman's life as surely as a compass needle was drawn north. He couldn't leave the young woman to her fate. Despite the water around him, his mouth was dry. He estimated that Yeill was less than twenty feet below the ocean's surface.

One of the sharks pulled away from the other and sped at Jherek, mouth gaping to reveal its teeth.

Without hesitation, Jherek dodged, kicking out hard and twisting in the water like a porpoise. All his life the water had been his element, and even though he moved well in a ship's rigging and on the ground, it was nothing like the way he moved in the water. He'd won every swimming meet he'd ever entered at Velen as a boy, and he'd dived deeper and better than anyone in the town, including seasoned sailors.