Bone Lord 4, стр. 40
“You’d better hope that part of the plan doesn’t involve hiding inside a dead whale,” Elyse said to Anna-Lucielle, wrinkling her nose and shuddering with disgust.
“It won’t,” I said.
“You haven’t explained just how it is you think I can use my Wind powers to conjure up a ship,” Rami-Xayon butted in.
“Oh, you’re not going to be conjuring one up,” I said to her. “You’re going to be bringing a wrecked ship temporarily up from the ocean bed. There are a few down there, some more intact than others. I’ll use my whale to track down the most intact-looking wreck, and then you create a powerful waterspout to pull the ship up from the ocean depths. Hold it there for long enough for the pirate crew to repair the hull so that the wreck will float, and voila! We have our dummy ship.”
“Arr,” Percy said enthusiastically, “if your Wind goddess can haul a wreck up from the depths, we can fix it! We’ve got barrels o’ tar with us, and plenty of spare wood and nails!”
“There’s one problem with your plan, Vance,” Rami-Xayon said carefully. “It would work perfectly, but I don’t think my Wind powers are strong enough yet to do that sort of thing.”
“I thought about that,” I said to her, “and you don’t need to worry about it. Remember, you’re not the only one who’s able to use some Wind magic. I can work a bit of Wind magic myself, and if we combine our powers, I think we can do it.”
A smile broke across Rami-Xayon’s beautiful face. “Of course, Vance, yes!” she exclaimed.
“Everyone else is going to have to man the ballistae,” I said. “I want you all to spend the next few hours practicing shooting them so you’re ready and accurate when it comes to firing them in anger. Use the harpoon spears with ropes attached for practice; that way, we don’t lose valuable ammunition. I’ve already assigned my strongest zombies to each ballista to work the cranks and load them. All you lot have to do is practice shooting them. Float some dinghies in the water and use them as targets; we have more than enough of those.”
After a general murmur of assent, my fighters divided themselves among the ballistae.
“All right,” I said to myself, nodding with satisfaction as I watched my party practice smashing dinghies into splinters with each potent, accurate shot of the Death-enchanted spears. “It’s time to go kraken hunting.”
Chapter Fourteen
To set the kraken trap, we needed to find and raise a suitable shipwreck from the seabed. I’d noticed a large stretch of ocean nearby where the bottom wasn’t too deep, and there were a couple of wrecks scattered across the area as well. I sent my whale down, examined the wrecks, and chose one that was perhaps a hundred years old and was mostly intact. There was some damage around the hull, which my pirates would be able to repair easily.
“Rami-Xayon, all set?” I asked.
She nodded, furrowing her brow with concentration and preparing to push her Wind powers to their limits.
“I can’t see under the water like you can, so you’ll have to help me with the location,” she said.
“Easy enough,” I said as I sent my whale down to the wreck. Once it had found the location, I ordered it to make straight for the surface. “Create your waterspout in the exact spot you see the whale breach and send it down as deep as it’ll go,” I said to Rami-Xayon. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
The whale breached around a hundred yards from our ship with a spectacular splash, almost managing to hurl its entire body out of the water before coming down in a bellyflop that sounded like a thunderclap.
“Here it comes!” Rami-Xayon said.
The air above the spot where the whale had breached started to shimmer, then a large and powerful tornado appeared. I had to send the whale racing away; the tornado was easily strong enough to lift the huge creature out of the water and hurl it into the clouds. Not because that would have killed the undead whale but because any wastage of the tornado’s strength could ruin the mission.
“Is the tornado as strong as it can possibly be?” I yelled over the deafening howl of the distant wind.
“I’m using all of my power!” Rami-Xayon yelled back. “And I can’t hold it long at this strength—hurry!”
“Send it down into the water!”
Beads of sweat were forming on Rami-Xayon’s forehead, and her whole body was trembling with the effort of maintaining the tornado’s power. She directed it into the water with her shaking hands. The moment it got within a few yards of the waves, it started sucking water up into its swirling vortex, becoming a waterspout.
Gritting her teeth harder and growling wordlessly with exertion, Rami-Xayon finally forced the tornado beneath the surface. It sent a madly whirling plume of frothing water up into the air, sucking everything in its path upward.
This was where Rami-Xayon needed my help. Pushing the tornado down into the water meant it encountered massive resistance, so I closed my eyes and began to manipulate sections of the air around the tornado, using the skills I’d developed with my Plague Storm magic. Once it was completely submerged, it became a lot easier, as the water around it started to form a whirlpool. Unlike other whirlpools one might encounter in the ocean, this one was sucking things up from the ocean and spitting them out.
Rami-Xayon and I pushed the whirlpool ever deeper, and the harder we pushed, the more momentum and power it gained. By the time it got to the depth of the shipwreck, it was easily powerful enough to rip the ship from the seabed and yank it up to the surface. The shipwreck was flung out of the ocean and hurled through the air, and it came down around 30 yards from the edge of the whirlpool in a massive