“Fare you lucky,” said Eyjan. The three embraced in the dark. Tauno departed. Down he swam and down. He had not thought his world could grow blacker, bleaker, stiller, but it did. Again and yet again he worked muscles in chest and belly to help inside pressure become the same as outside. Nevertheless it was as if the weight of every foot he sank were loaded on him.
At last he felt-as a man at night may feel a wall in front of him-that he neared bottom. And he caught an odor. . . a taste ... a sense... of rank flesh; and through the water pulsed the slow in—and-out of the kraken’s gills.
He uncovered the lanthorn. Its beam was pale and did not straggle far; but it served his Faerie eyes. Awe crawled along his backbone.
Below him reached acres of ruin. A verorn had been large, and built throughout of stone. Most had toppled to formless masses in the silt. But here stood a tower, like a last snag tooth in a dead man’s jaw; there a temple only partly fallen, gracious colonnades around a god who sat behind his altar and stared blind into eternity; yonder the mighty wreck of a castle, its battlements patrolled by spookily glowing fish; that way the harbor, marked off by mounds that were buried piers and city walls, still crowded with galleons; this way a house, roof gone to show the skeleton of a man forever trying to shield the skeletons of a woman and child; and everywhere, everywhere burst-open vaults and warehouses, the upward twinkle of gold and gems on the seabed!
And sprawled at the middle was the kraken. Eight of his darkly gleaming arms reached into the comers of the eight-sided plaza that bore his mosaic image. His remaining two arms, the longest, twice the length of Herning, were curled around a pillar at the north side which bore on top the triskeled disc of that god he had conquered. His terrible finned head sagged loosely over them; Tauno could just glimpse the hook beak and a swart lidless eye.
The halfling snapped back the shutter and started to rise in lightlessness. A throbbing went through the ocean, into his bones. It was as if the world shook. He cast a beam downward. The kraken was stirring. He had awakened him. Tauno clenched his teeth. Wildly he dug hands and feet into that frigid thick water; he ignored the pain of pressure too hastily lifted; yet icily with merfolk senses he noted which way he moved. It rumbled below him. The kraken had stretched and gaped, a portico had been knocked to pieces.
At the verge of daylight, Tauno halted. He hung afloat and blinked with his lanthom. A vast shadowiness swelled beneath.
Now, till Kennin and Eyjan got here, he must stay alive-yes. hold the monster in play so it would not go elsewhere.
In the middle of that rising stormcloud body, he saw a baleful sheen of eyes. The beak clapped. An arm coiled out at him. Upon it were suckers that could strip the ribs of a whale. Barely did he swerve aside from its snatching. It came back, loop after loop of it. He drove his knife in to the hilt. The blood which smoked forth when he withdrew the blade tasted like strong vinegar. The arm struck him and he rolled off end over end, in pain and his head awhirl.
Another arm and another closed in. He wondered dazedly who he was to fight a god. Somehow he unslung a harpoon. Before the crushing grip had him, he swam downward with all his speed. Maybe he could get a stab Into that mouth.
A shattering scream blasted him from his wits.
He came to a minute later. His brow ached, his ears tolled.. Around him the water had gone wild. Eyjan and Kennin were at his sides, upholding him. He glanced blurrily bottomward and saw a shrinking inkiness. The kraken hooted and threshed as it sank. “Look, oh, look!” Kennin jubilated. He pointed with his own lanthom. Through blood, sepia, and seething, the wan ray picked out the kraken in his torment.
Brother and sister had towed their weapon above him. They had cut it free of its raft. The spear, with a ton of rock behind it, had pierced the body of the kraken.
“Are you hurt?” Eyjan asked Tauno. Her voice wavered through the uproar. “My dear, my dear, can you get about?”
“I’d better be able to,” he mumbled. Shaking his head seemed to clear away some of the fog.
The kraken sank back into the city he had murdered. The spear wound, while grievous, had not ended his cold life, nor was the weight of the boulder more than he could lift. However, around’ him was the outsize net.
And now the merman’s children carne to grab the anchors on the rim of that net and make them fast in the ruins of A verom.
Desperate was their work, with the giant shape threshing, the giant arms flailing and clutching. Cast-up ooze and vomited ink blinded eyes, choked lungs, in stinking clouds; cables whipped, tangled, and snapped; walls broke under blows that sent Doomsday thunders through the water; the hootings beat on skulls and clawed at eardrums; the attackers were hit, cast bruisingly aside, scraped by barnacled skin until their own blood added iron taste to the acid of the kraken’s; they were a battered three who finally pegged him down.
But bind him they did. And they swarn to where his huge head throbbed and jerked, his beak snapped at the imprisoning strands, his arms squirmed like a snakepit under the mesh. Through the murk-mists they looked into those wide, conscious eyes. The kraken stopped his clamor. They heard only a rush of current, in and out of his gills. He glared unflinchingly at them.
“Brave have you been,” said Tauno, “a fellow dweller in the sea. Therefore know that you are not being killed for gain.”
He took the right eye, Kennin the left. They thrust their harpoons in to the shaft ends. When that did not halt the strugglings which followed, they used their second pair, and both of Eyjan’s. Kraken blood and kraken anguish drove them off.
After a while it was over. Some of their weapons must have worked into the brain and slashed it. The siblings fled from A verorn to the sunlight. They sprang into air and saw the cog wallowing in billows that the fight in the deeps had raised. Tauno and Eyjan did not bother to unload their lungs, though air-breathing they would be lighter than the water. They kept afloat with gentle paddling, let the ocean soothe and croon to their aching bodies, and drank draught upon draught of being alive. It was young Kennin who shouted to those clustered white-faced at the bulwarks: “We did it! We slew the kraken! The treasure is ours!”
At that, Niels ran up the ratlines, crowing like a cock, and Ingeborg burst into tears. The other sailors gave a cheer that was oddly short; thereafter they kept attention mainly on Ranild. Through the waves leaped the dolphins, twoscore of them, to hear the tale.
Work remained. When the swimmers signed that they had rested enough, Ranild cast them a long weighted line with a sack and a hook at the end. They took it back under.
Already the ghost-fish he had been too slow to catch were nibbling on the kraken. “Let’s do our task and be away from here as fast as we can,” said Tauno. His companions agreed. They liked not poking around a tomb.
Yet for Margrete who had been Yria they did. Over and over they filled the bag with coin, plate, rings, crowns, ingots; over and over they hung on the hook a golden chest or horn or candelabrum or god. A signal would not travel well along this length of rope; the crew simply hauled it in about every half hour. Tauno discovered he had better attach his lanthorn, for, although the sea above had quieted, Berning did drift around and the line never descended to the same place. Between times the merman’s children searched for new objects, or took a little ease, or fed themselves off the cheese and stockfish Ingeborg had laid in the sack.
Until Tauno said wearily: “We were told several hundred pounds would be ample, and I swear we’ve lifted a ton. A greedy man is an unlucky man. Shall we begone?”