Bone Lord 4, стр. 42

“Come on, come on,” I growled as I pushed the whale harder, the gap between it and the kraken growing dangerously small.

The first of the tentacles slapped onto the side of the whale’s tail. The suckers of the tentacle dug into the blubber and held fast, and I felt a tremendous pull hauling me backward. I fought against it, pushing upward, but my momentum had been drastically reduced, and my passage onward would be halted completely if the beast got a few more tentacles wrapped around me. If this had been a live whale struggling against the kraken , it wouldn’t have been struggling at all; one tentacle, and it would have been dragged back like a chick being pawed into a lion’s maw.

“Anna-Lucielle, can you sense the kraken yet?” I asked, my eyes still closed.

“Almost, but not quite,” she answered. “There’s an echo of something big down there, but nothing I can connect to yet.”

Another of the kraken’s tentacles curled around the whale’s beating tail and slowed its momentum further. I was pushing upward with all my might, thrashing the whale’s powerful tail as vigorously as I could, but I was barely able to inch forward now.

“Almost there, Vance, almost there,” Anna-Lucielle said.

Two more tentacles locked onto the whale, and its upward movement was halted. Now the kraken was slowly pulling the struggling whale toward it.

“I’m here,” Rami-Xayon said from beside me. I opened my eyes so I could see her on the deck, and she had both hands raised as she summoned another tornado. With gritted teeth and an exhausted cry, she slammed the tornado into the water. The roaring winds threw up water, but they also carried my whale to the surface. Two tentacles were still wrapped around my undead sea creature, but they had been severed from the kraken’s body and dangled limply.

Rami-Xayon collapsed with a sigh and crumpled to the deck. The tornado vanished, and the whirlpool it had created was subsumed under a flood of water, but not before I saw the kraken’s eyes, glowing brighter with rage as its prey escaped.

Before the water had a chance to settle, the kraken propelled itself upward. The tentacled monstrosity lashed out with its appendages, but it paused suddenly, as though frozen in time.

“I’ve got it, Vance!” Anna-Lucielle exclaimed through gritted teeth. “The Beast Helm is working together with my Charm spells. But it won’t hold forever.”

“Firing positions, everyone!” I yelled.

“I can’t control it completely,” Anna-Lucielle said. “So I’m directing it toward the dummy ship. The monster has a mighty will, but I’m trying to overcome it.”

The kraken unfroze and went beneath the surface again. A giant black shadow was all that was visible from the ship as the mighty sea giant surged toward the dummy ship.

I sent my whale out of the way and positioned myself in front of a ballista, my hand wrapped around the trigger. The water beneath the dummy ship started bubbling furiously, then the ship itself started rocking.

“Here it comes!” I roared.

The first of the enormous tentacles rocketed up out of the water, and others soon followed, shooting skyward like a group of sea serpents trying to take flight. It was like watching gigantic trees growing from acorns to hundred-year-old titans in the space of a second. The tentacles writhed and lashed and grasped, wrapping themselves around the ship’s masts and rigging and deck. In the frothy water below the doomed ship, I saw the glowing blue disc of one of the kraken’s eyes, far bigger than the largest wagon wheel I’d ever seen.

“Turn the monster into a fucking pincushion!” I roared. “Let those Death spears fly!”

As part of the body of the beast came into view, we all discharged our ballistae. The huge spears, gleaming black with their Death power enchantments, zipped through the air and slammed into the titanic body of the kraken. The projectiles blew wagon-sized holes into the creature, and bright blue blood spurted in torrents.

The kraken let out a scream that was both fury and pain, and the sound and force of it was almost enough to knock us all off our feet. I didn’t think it was possible for anything to make a sound that loud, and when the horrific scream ceased, all I could hear was a high-pitched whine ringing in my ears.

“Reload!” I yelled, not knowing whether anyone could hear me after almost having our eardrums blown out.

The zombies didn’t need to hear me, though. They received my signal and groaned with effort as they worked the ballistae’s enormous cranks. Other zombies picked up more black ballista spears and slotted them into the rails of the weapons when the strings were locked.

“The kraken is fighting against my command, Vance!” Anna-Lucielle cried. “It’s slipping out of my control; its anger is too powerful!”

“Don’t worry; we’ve got the motherfucker.” I took aim at the creature’s writhing body.

The kraken let out another ear-destroying shriek. With a swift contraction of its tentacles, it shattered the dummy ship into splinters. It was an awesome sight to behold: one second, the object was a fully intact ship; the next it was nothing but an exploding cloud of splinters, seaweed, and barnacles. The kraken was pissed, and its eyes turned to focus on me. Somehow, the monster knew that I was the one in charge here, and as such, it was determined to end me.

“Bring it on, bitch,” I snarled as the kraken’s tower of lashing tentacles turned in my direction.

They raced toward me like a wall of humongous serpents, but I kept my cool and took careful aim at the creature’s most vulnerable target: not its eyes, which I wanted to keep intact, but its mouth.

My other party members started shooting spears into the kraken’s tentacles and body, ripping up huge holes in explosions of blue gore. The monster’s fury was implacable, and its determination to kill me would not be stopped by anything except death, something I was only too happy