Eagles and Swans
Chapter 37: The Sea
It was not long before Helika turned into a cluster of tiny white specks in the valley between a mountain and a foothill; now the contours of Astra took shape, rising out of the land.
She saw things she'd only ever known through her textbook: Calmen Ihira sloping towards the coasts like a great heap of sugar, around that central peak a turbulence of foothills, knolls, and human structures. Then the New Town was blazing beneath her, then it was behind. The grey line of sea advanced on the east horizon, where the land was flat and the sky was darkest. A sparkle of brilliant gold marked the boundaries of Centrelight. The greedy inkiness had grown to claim a greater portion of the sky.
As Ruthenia passed the border of the coast, the panic reached a spike. Her breaths grew shallow, eyes searching the black ocean beyond the lights of the jagged coast. It was not hard to find the V formation of five bright decks upon the dark eastern waters—half a mile out, by her estimates—still in the view of the bay, but quickly leaving it.
With a curse, she felt a fiery rush of blood fill her head. She trembled and gritted her teeth, wriggled her fingers to warm them, clenched her hand harder around the joystick.
She pitched forward once more, so the nose of her machine dipped into Centrelight's glow. Shivers rippled through her as she stared beyond the lights. Shooting past the glowing jetties of the coastline, she heard the roar of the waves, the wind growing damp in her lungs.
The sea was below her. Fright and thrill swelled in her gut.
Ruthenia tugged the joystick back with a clatter of cogs, pitching the aircraft back into horizontal flight. She gulped in the ocean air and the smell of brine, but she could not stop shaking.
It was a matter of minutes before the night grew truly deep, crystal-cold in this tiny space. Nothing but ocean lay for miles on either side, and the dial indicated the engine was emptying; she had ten minutes of flight left.
Clenching her jaw with a narrowing of eyes, Ruthenia tugged the joystick right, listening as the elevators creaked and the plane yawed.
The bloody red lights had resolved into brilliant glass bulbs at the tops of warship superstructures. Paler lights glowed across the decks, and as she descended towards the central ship, they elongated into islands.
She hadn't thought any sound could overpower the chugging of her own engine, but all she could hear now was the roar of monstrous propellers churning up water at each stern. Their smokestacks spat lurid billows of smoke into the air, nebulous white in the glow of their deck lights.
The lead ship thundered several yards ahead of the rest, frothy wave crests forming a V-shaped wake behind it. It was thronged with camera crews, their machines set up all along the deck, xenon flashes bursting across the water every half-minute or so.
There was a wave of silence as she approached. The cameras stopped, and for a moment she feared she had been seen.
She soon realised it was much worse.
On the superstructure of each ship, a cannon turned to gaze into the waves. Then, from each barrel, something gleaming pierced through the darkness. Something narrow and supreme.
She'd learnt the lesson of lightning and thunder as a child, because her second name meant “to thunder”, and when she asked why she was named after thunder if lightning always came first, they told her it was because it was lightning that birthed thunder, just like how she'd come into this world beside the generator room of the laboratory.
As each metal shell slid into the water, and the impact sparked a chemical trigger deep inside, she learnt it again.
The vision registered before the sound. A swell of water bulged like a dark hill from the ocean surface, brushing the warships aside like a tablecloth rising, knocking the glasses away. She plugged her ears with her fingers.
The pain tore each ear like metal spikes—except there was nothing but a frenzied rippling of particles.
Ruthenia curled up, body vibrating in agonising resonance with the boom. Her eardrums screamed against the assault of the noise.
Even after it had faded, her ears rang, and her breath came in gasps.
“I will finish this,” Ruthenia growled through chattering teeth, and shrugged off her coat.
Out here, beyond the Astran coast, the air was empty, not one trace of Thread fluttering. With her left hand, she unscrewed the bottle, fighting to grip the slippery Thread inside.
She hooked and swirled, sweat breaking out on her brow. “Ihir, help me out for once!”
Several seconds later, she’d managed to tangle enough around her index finger to Weave it.
Now, all that was left was for her to take the leap.
Sucking in her breath, Ruthenia snatched and yanked the thrust lever at her right.
The machine began to throttle against the wind. The dashboard flickered. The flyer swung into its final trajectory, pitching towards the pylon atop the lead ship’s superstructure.
With a single sweep of her arm, she tugged all the Thread out of the jar. She pulled and flung, every inch of the thirty feet unspooling—those thirty feet of Thread Melkior Rae had handpicked for her once upon a time. And where she had never felt it before, she began to detect, amid the ethereal hollowness, the teeming energy of the strand fluttering from the tip of her finger.
Her heart pounded. While the machine whistled towards the pylon, she stood. And as it passed, she did two things: she killed the engine, and she tossed the trembling loop of Thread into the air, letting it catch on the pylon in a tangle.
Closing her eyes, clenching her jaw so hard it hurt, she swept her hand through the air, and felt her heart swell as it found purchase on the Threads.
Then she Wove.
The Swift swung, falling into a descending orbit around the pylon. She looped the Thread, under and over, and it liked to loop, tying a knot around the machine. Beneath her she heard voices clamouring and thickening at the base of the superstructure.
She Wove the flyer into a clumsy arc, the way she always did, barely managing to release it as it swung towards the bow, where cameramen and naval officers were scrambling out of her path.
She was careening through the air in what had in a split second become deadweight.
A bang jarred the entire body of the machine was followed by a screech that put her teeth on edge, setting the entire warship deck rocking.
She leveraged her body weight into slamming the wheel brake forward, and groaned with her stomach against the gear as her wheels skidded past four gun turrets, stopping ten feet from the very tip of the ship’s bow.
Springing from her seat, she lunged for the door latch and hurtled into the floodlights.
Something cold struck her arm, then another, and then a proper barrage of drops from the sky.
Everything in her screamed for her to run.
Rain splashed and pounded at her face, seeping into her eyes and threatening to blind her—beneath her too the rain was a threat, slippery beneath her shoes. She saw no one but Leon Alemer, at the edge of the bow, beside a uniformed captain, skin gleaming in lights, the Glaive glowing like a torch in the fog to its very pointy tip.
The captain turned just in time for his eyes to widen with horror. “Go!” he bellowed to Leon as she dodged through the broken lines of navy officers. “Dive!”
The hunter shouted a frantic “yes sir”, and in a flash, he had vanished through the gap in the railing, taking the light of the Glaive with him.
At the same moment, the first gunshot exploded. Lightning-strike. Ruthenia swung almost and slipped on the deck as the bullet flew wide, and the ocean devoured it like a benevolent beast.
Without another thought to the plan ahead, she sprang over the rails, and dove into the sea.
Ruthenia had never dived before, or quite known this sensation—air rushing over her face, sea-spray and rain exploding in a glorious tumult. She didn't know how to anticipate it—the approach of the black wall beneath her in the ship’s shadow.
Waves shattered beneath her shoulder and her body jarred, and she gasped before the black water engulfed her head.
Up above, she heard a frenzy of bellows upon the deck: “don't shoot! Who in Ihir's name is she?”
“Leon!” she screamed again, launching towards that other head in the water.
“Who are you?” Leon roared with eyes wide as the moon.
Then Ruthenia pounced. Leon yelped when her hands clamped down on his arm. “Stay away!” he shouted between pants, struggling to twist his arm out of hers. Buffeted by waves, her grip moved to the weapon in his fist.
“Can you really do this?” she asked. “Murder a goddess? Tear her apart from inside her?”
“You're crazy! You're a madwoman!” The diver gasped, water streaming from his hair. The rain pounded yet, drowning the bellows from above. “Leave me be, leave me be—they hired me for this—”
A gunshot boomed. His words were broken by a rasping cry.
Thick black rivulets were flooding out of his right shoulder and dissolving in the sea.
At once she yanked the Glaive out of the man’s grip, stomach churning from the scent of blood.
“Damn it! I told you not to shoot!” came a shout from above.
“She’s the escaped convict, sir—”
Leon moaned with pain and clenched his teeth; his left hand was on his right shoulder, his grip so deep in his skin that it seemed he was trying to rip his arm off.
“You got our diver, you understand? You shot a serviceman! Throw in the emergency ladders!”
“Sir!”
“What is it?”
“Lilin is surfacing! “
Ruthenia stiffened.
“Get out of my face, you bloody fool! Once Alemer's out, I want the second round dropped. The girl's not worth saving. Go!”
Immediately Ruthenia felt terror girdle her; she fought it with a yell, gulping all the air she could.
Then she clamped her eyes shut, fingers curling around the Glaive of Laveda. She pulled her lips tight, and plunged into the sea.
Water swallowed her hair, fought into the cracks of her goggles, pressed into her nose, flooded her mouth with the taste of salt. She kicked up a thrash of bubbles behind her, fighting through the cold blackness. Before her the shimmering Glaive slit the water as if it were silk, setting a halo of particles aglow.
She tunneled deeper, deeper, deeper. For these seconds she forgot how to do all else. She fought with all that her body could offer her, the whole sea pounding against her head.
Up overhead, something flashed, piercing clean through the surface.
A fish-like projectile with perfect fins dove through the murk in a trail of bubbles, plunging almost as deep as she.
Her blood roared as she watched it descend, and she was seized with an emotion too strong to be understood. It wasn't terror, and wasn't rage. It was something akin to regret.
Her heart pounded faster than it ever had before. The sea shone and burned like a ballroom chandelier.
*
She heard the ocean itself screaming as it sublimed into an infinity of frothing bubbles and steel.
Something slit through the back of her calf—just a graze, but the wound throbbed, and she knew she bled.
The second was not over.
*
Ruthenia shut her eyes in a torrent of burning seawater. The screaming went on around her, a light swelling from below, fading beyond her eyelids.
The world winked out.