A Sea of Blood and Magic

Chapter Thirteen

Late one night, the heaving of the ship woke me. Nik slept on undisturbed, one arm flung over my stomach, legs curved against my own. I gulped, the familiar ache blooming in my chest. I wanted Nikhil back. Except this was Nik, except she wasn't the same... I wanted to cry, but I'd done enough of that for a while. Extricating myself with care that probably wasn't necessary, since the vicious back-and-forth hadn't woken her, I stepped out into the narrow corridor and almost immediately had to grab a pipe for balance. The door at the end of the hallway seemed to be uphill, then downhill. I squinted, trying to make sense of it, a task that wasn't aided by the fact that the lightbulb overhead had burned out.

"That was a twenty degree roll," Higgs said, probably from up on the bridge.

"Wind's at sixty knots." Daiane's voice had gone taut with fear.

"The earth shaker's pissed," Ramirez muttered. "Reduce speed to ten knots. No, turn the engines off. I should never have had them on, this far out. We're just going to have to ride it out." A crack of thunder seemed to punctuate the statement.

I grinned with excitement. A major storm. Back home, we almost never got rain, let alone thunder. Pulling the door to our bedroom shut behind me, I made my way toward the door to the outside deck, handhold to handhold. The pitching almost sent me off my feet more than once, but I continued undeterred, drawn by an unreasoning impulse. As I walked down the hall, the next light down burned out with a tiny "pop." I froze, looking up, but then shook off the unreasoning chill and kept going. The next light followed its predecessors' example, and the next, all the way to the door.

"It's just a fuse. Or something," I told myself, reaching for the latch.

The instant I stepped outside, I gasped, clinging to the door frame. The ocean seemed to be beside me, instead of beneath me. A wave crashed over the side of the ship, soaking my bare feet. Only then did I realize the pain in their soles came from the steel—I'd left my enspelled tech, and its protection, in our quarters. It hurt all the sharper for having been absent for so long. I padded out onto the deck and then almost fell over the railing as the ship pitched and dipped again.

"Thirty degree roll," Higgs said, but I barely heard him through the noise of the wind.

Wrapping my arms around the bottom rail, I knelt and looked into the ocean, all black water and white foam beneath the furious sky.

And an ichthyocentaur looked back.

Frightened beyond anything I had ever felt before, I stopped breathing. He stared at me, long green hair whipping back and forth in the gale, only visible because of the luminous staff he held in one scaly hand.

His lips shaped three syllables. I couldn't decipher their meaning.

Thunder rumbled overhead, and the ship pitched to its port side, sending the ichthyocentaur out of sight. When we rolled back, I swallowed a scream as he rose out of the water, balancing on his fish-like tail, his delicate horse's forelegs pawing at the air.

He extended his free hand to me, palm up, as if expecting me to take it. And to my utter astonishment, I freed one arm from its anchor around the deck railing, reaching toward him.

The ichthyocentaur jerked his head up, staring past my shoulder, just as a high-pitched voice screamed over the wind, "Kharis! No!"

An arm-like extension of water punched out from the wave, knocking me back against the wall behind me. The sea-creature whirled and dove beneath the surface of the water at the same moment a pair of surprisingly strong hands grabbed my shoulders and hauled me, unresisting, back into the corridor.

Nik reached past me to slam the door closed, then shrieked, "What the hell were you thinking?"

The question seemed to break the thrall the teras had cast over my mind, or maybe it was just my own stupidity that had done it. My teeth clacked together with my shivering. "I-I-I d-don't know."