“I don’t know how to end this!” she said, but fury, exhaustion, fear, all took hold and she wanted only to smash everything. She raised the idol high and smashed it into the ground. It thunked but didn’t shatter. It didn’t even appear to have a chip in it. Nothing seemed to change.
They both turned at the sound of a cry in the distance. “Aston?” Slater screamed.
She saw the bloodstone spear Jen still held, remembered its powerful effect against the beast. “Give me that,” she said, and Jen handed it over.
Slater took it in a two-handed grip and stabbed it into the idol. A blinding flash burned her eyes, and the statuette exploded. Her howl of shock and pain mingled with Jen’s as they were sent flying, shards of stone slicing into any exposed flesh. But with their cries, a deafening shriek filled the air, so loud Slater thought her ears would burst. The very ground shuddered and giant stalactites fell from high above, somewhere lost in mist, and splashed into the sea, or crashed and shattered onto the rocky ground all around them. As Slater and Jen grabbed hold of each other in an attempt to steady their stumbling on the heaving ground, a massive wave crashed into them. It lifted them high and fast. Slater had a moment to notice the cavern wall rushing toward her. Sharp pain blossomed in her head, a hollow thud rang in her ears, and everything went black.
46
Aston had watched with grim satisfaction as the dagger had slammed into the Overlord’s mouth and flash with darkness and green ichor. The creature bellowed, clearly hurt, and then Aston had seen through Digby’s eyes as the three mantics fell on the man. Everything became lost in a confusion of sights and sounds, he tasted O’Donnell’s flesh and blood even as the mantics tasted it, he felt the agony in the creature’s maw, he experienced Digby’s pain as he was torn apart. It all combined into a maelstrom of emotion that Aston was incapable of processing, that threatened to shut his mind off like a light switch, and some deep part of him welcomed that. Some part of him even desired it. Then through it all, he realized O’Donnell had dropped the icon. His connection dimmed, the thrumming, vibrating sensations lessened. The Overlord, lamenting its pain, began to sink back below the waves.
Aston opened his eyes, saw the scorched and damaged mouthpiece retract into a black and bony beak deep within the thick roots of the writhing tentacles. He allowed himself a smile, struggled to break free of the coils about him, but the Overlord would not let him go. Yet still it withdrew.
After all that, it’s going to drown me, Aston thought, incredulous. An incongruous, unlamented death. Unless Slater lived to remember him. Perhaps that would be enough.
He suppressed a gasp as the tentacle slipped beneath the surface and he was plunged into the icy water. Green luminescence flickered all around him and he was pulled deeper. He struggled, wished he still had the dagger to stab and slash at the limb that bound him, but he was useless in its grasp. He thought of Jo Slater and briefly, through the eyes of a mantic, caught sight of her and Jen Galicia, stumbling from the water onto the rocky shore. He saw her raise a spear, as the pressure built and his mind began to black out. At least she was still alive, he thought. And still fighting. About to stab something. He smiled. Fight on, Jo, he thought. Don’t ever quit.
A blinding flash seared his mind, pain arced through every nerve he had. A great, rumbling vibration rose up from the gargantuan beast as it sank below him and he was tumbled over in the churning, bubbling water. Turned over! His hands went to his body and he found it free of the restricting tentacle. The Overlord had released him, whether by design or by accident, maybe it had simply forgotten what it held. Regardless, he was free.
He swam upwards, following the rising bubbles, his lungs screaming for air, blackness encroaching on the edges of his vision. He broke the surface and gasped air in, coughed and spluttered, gasped again. But his clothes were heavy with water and dragged him back down. He fought once more to the surface, sucked in desperate air, then the waves closed over him once more.
He sensed the retreating presence of the Overlord as it sank back down to whatever stygian depths in which it dwelled, lonely, hungry, desolate. His heart ached for the thing. It had an intelligence that caused it pain. Like all cephalopods, it was smart, curious, playful, inquisitive. But it lived alone in the dark and it knew its fate, was driven mad by its isolation. There was nothing Aston could do for it. His struggling mind pictured it out in the open ocean. He imagined some underwater channel, like the one in Lake Kaarme that had allowed that prehistoric anachronism to travel between the lake and the open sea. Would people ever be able to somehow drill something similar to allow this leviathan to escape? Was such an enormous feat of engineering even possible? People would need to know about it first, at the very least. Or perhaps, with the idol destroyed, it would finally be called no longer, and starve. A slow and agonizing, but welcome death. And, as he sank back down again, Aston felt a sadness rise that he would never be able to tell anyone about it. Would Slater? Did she even know the half of it?
He gave up the struggle of trying to reach the surface, the muscles of his arms like jelly, unable any more to pull him through the sparkling sea. He reached out with his consciousness, trying to see through the eyes of anything still on the ocean shore. He found one mantic, realized the Overlord’s swift retreat back beneath the surface had caused a giant wave to smash the shore. Everything was dead up there, this one mantic the only thing he could connect with other than the sea life that swarmed everywhere underneath.
He shook his head. After all that, even Slater hadn’t managed to survive. This foolish endeavor had killed them all. Then the mantic’s gaze fell upon a sodden lump up against the cavern wall, dark hair stuck wet across the back of the jacket. Slater’s body, face down. Grief swallowed his heart.
And then she stirred. Joy pushed the grief aside and Aston watched Jo Slater raise her head and look groggily around herself, eyes cinched narrow in pain. But she lived! What he would give for just one more kiss with her.
He bumped into something hard. Looking down, as the blackness began to close his vision to pinpoints, he saw the curving white shell of the huge turtle. Its green eyes met his and he saw himself, slack-faced. “Take me to the surface!” he begged with his mind, imagining himself laying across its back as it swam to the shore. Some sensation of acquiescence came from the creature and it rose up beneath him. He was lifted swiftly through the water, his lungs burning again. And then the sea sluiced off him and he gasped in air. The majestic creature bore him slowly to the shore and tipped him into the shallows. With the last of his strength, he crawled to the water’s edge and rolled onto his back before passing out.
47
Aston was shivering so much, his teeth rattled together. At least, he thought, that means I’m still alive. Unless it finally is a cold day in Hell.
“Sam!” Someone was calling him from very far away, their voice muffled by distance. And another sound insisted on his hearing, a repetitive thump-thump.
He sucked in a deep breath, wincing at the pain it caused in his chest.
“Oh, Sam! You’re alive!” The voice wasn’t nearly as distant this time, much closer in fact. Somewhere right nearby. And the thumping sound was his own heart, his pulse a rapid pressure in his ears. Memories came flooding back, the giant cephalopod, the crazed attacks on shore, the dark flash of the bloodstone dagger hitting that terrible mouth, Slater’s spear shattering the idol. His mind stuttered and, though his eyes were still closed, he saw a glimpse of a body lying on the shore, two people crouched over it. The clothing was familiar. One crouching person had long dark hair, hanging in wet ropes about her face. Slater! She was alive. But his eyes weren’t open. He sensed the chittering mind of a mantic and his awareness flipped back to his own eyes as they opened and he saw Slater leaning over him, her face split in a smile. The mantic that had been watching him lying on the rock squatted nearby, lost and directionless. On his other side was Jen Galicia, also alive, though battered looking. Her eyes had dark rings around them, the skin of her face drawn tight.