Bone Lord 4, стр. 41

Rami-Xayon was about ready to pass out at this stage, and she only just managed to stop herself from crumpling to the floor after she released the tornado.

Before the wreck could sink again, I sent my whale racing to it so that it could both prop it up and to lift it high enough above the surface for all the water to drain out. Soon, the pirates had rowed their way to the ship, and within the hour, they’d patched up the hole. This was enough to make the old wreck seaworthy again, after a hundred years of collecting barnacles and seaweed on the ocean floor.

Now that the dummy ship was ready, it was time to start the hunt.

As the afternoon faded into dusk, I sent my mind into the undead whale again. We had more or less an hour before the sun would set. I felt I’d have more chance of provoking the kraken into an attack if the light was dimmer rather than in the peak brightness of day. For a creature so accustomed to the blackest depths of the ocean, even the half-light of dusk would be blinding.

So, I dived down with the whale, the pressure of the water building around me once more. While the sharks’ senses detected movements in the water directly, the whale could emit low, rumbling sounds that traveled in all directions through the water. When they echoed off distant objects, I could tell how far the objects were and roughly what shape and size they were. It took some getting used to, but I understood it quickly enough.

Eventually, my whale calls located the presence of something truly massive lurking down in the blackest crevasses of the ocean. No light from the outside world filtered down, and everything existed in a permanent state of darkness. There was something sexy about the whole thing.

I swam toward the huge object, feeling the crushing pressure around me growing ever more intense. I was a mile below the surface, possibly deeper, and it started to feel like I was reaching the limits of the whale’s diving depth.

I rumbled out another call, hoping that the giant creature would respond, perhaps taking this foolish whale who had ventured so deep for an easy meal. There was no response though. I pushed deeper and sensed that the whale’s body was being slowly squished to bursting point. I couldn’t go too much deeper without destroying my undead whale.

“Come on, kraken; here I am. Come get me,” I said.

I sent one last whale call down into the black depths, and then stopped, hovering in the water. A few yards deeper, and my Death magic would no longer be able to hold the whale’s body together; the pressure would pop it like a rotten grape in an angry toddler’s fist.

There was still no response from the massive entity in the depths. Maybe it had eaten its fill already; maybe it wasn’t interested in the whale. But for whatever reason, it didn’t react.

I wasn’t about to leave without getting the beast to rise from the deep. If this resulted in my undead whale exploding, then so be it. Gritting my teeth, I rumbled out one final whale call, then started to inch deeper, yard by yard.

Then, just as I reached the point at which the skin on the whale’s nose end was at breaking point, I saw them: two tiny round lights, glowing bright blue, far below me. They grew steadily larger.

“Yes!” I roared up on deck, opening my eyes and jumping up to punch my fist into the air.

“What’s going on, Vance?” Elyse asked.

“Man your battle stations, everyone!” I yelled. “The kraken’s on its way!”

I closed my eyes and blasted my mind back into the whale’s body. I was using it as bait, but I didn’t want to lose it to the kraken unnecessarily. I needed to make the upcoming chase perfect, to give the kraken enough hope that it would be able to catch the whale.

The five warships were arranged in a pentangular formation, with the dummy ship in the center. As long as we could get the kraken to attack the dummy ship, we could pour ballista fire into it from all sides.

“Get ready,” I said to Anna-Lucielle, who was next to me. “You need to channel every ounce of your Charm magic through the Beast Helm the moment you sense the kraken’s presence.”

“I’m ready, Vance,” she said.

I sent my mind back into the whale, and I finally saw the kraken in all its monstrous glory. It was like an octopus and a squid had mated, and their baby had not stopped growing for a thousand years. The kraken had more tentacles than either of those two creatures, though—too many to count, in fact, and each was easily as thick as the trunk of an old oak tree, and a hundred yards long at least.

The creature’s skin was different, too. While squids and octopuses had soft, jelly-like flesh, the exterior of the kraken’s body looked spiky and rough, almost armored, in a sense. A number of bony horns riddled its gargantuan head, and a parrot-like beak gaped wide open, ravenous and vicious. Inside the beak was another set of jaws, these lined with sharp, serrated teeth. And then there were the beast’s glowing, bright-blue eyes, rushing toward my whale like two malevolent comets in a black, watery night.

Pumping my whale’s tail madly, I surged upward with the kraken in hot pursuit, gaining slowly but surely on me. With the position of the whale’s eyes on its body, I could see both ahead of and behind me, and there was no question that the kraken was gaining ground.

I pushed the whale harder, injecting fresh Death energy into its undead body. It couldn’t get tired, but it did have its physical limits, and as I pushed it beyond them, chunks of blubber and flesh were torn off its frantically beating tail. Despite my accelerated pace, the kraken continued to gain on me, reaching