Darkness Descending

Sea . . . sky . . . sea . . . sky. Still nothing but sea and sky, as far as he could see. He muttered in frustration. And then he spied something neither sky nor sea, but not something to delight him as a hunter. Instead, he cursed and ordered his leviathan to dive. He hoped the dragon gliding through the air far above had not spied him.

His rubber suit and sorcery kept the cold of the southern seas from slaying him by stealth. Another sorcery let him get air from the water around him, so that he could stay down as long as the leviathan could. No mage had ever successfully applied that latter spell to a leviathan, to let it stay submerged without ever needing to come up and breathe. Nor had any mage ever made a spell to let a man dive as deep as a leviathan could without the weight of the water above him crushing out his life.

He had the leviathan stay submerged as long as it could. When it finally had to rise to spout, he anxiously scanned the heavens. If that dragonflier had spotted him before he took cover below the surface of the sea, an egg might fall out of the sky at any moment, or the dragon might come skimming low over the waves to flame him off his leviathan. He hated dragons and dragonfliers not least because they could hurt him and he couldn’t hit back.

But, once more, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He breathed a sigh of relief at what had annoyed him only minutes before. He hated ley-line warships, too, but he hated them because they belonged to Algarve. Aye, they could hurt him. He could hurt them, too, though, if only he got the chance.

Patting the leviathan, Cornelu asked, “Now, which way did you swim when you went under?” The leviathan couldn’t answer--and, by his own silly logic, wouldn’t even have understood the question, being a Lagoan beast.

He pulled out the instrument he used to detect sorcerous energy. Both gold-leaf vanes hung limp, which meant the leviathan had swum away from the ley line. Cornelu turned the instrument in his hands. The vanes stayed limp. Cornelu cursed, loudly and foully. Why not? No one was around to hear him.

With a couple of taps, he ordered the beast to swim south. After what he judged to be about half a mile, he stopped the leviathan and examined the instrument again. If anything, the vanes hung closer together than they had before.

Cornelu grunted. He hadn’t found the ley line, but he’d found where it wasn’t. That gave him a better idea of where it was. He turned the leviathan back toward the north and swam past--he hoped he swam past--the point where he’d begun trying to reacquire it. Then he checked the instrument once more and nodded to himself. The vanes were separating.

Before long, he’d found the ley line again. He sent the leviathan southwest down it. These were Algarvian-controlled waters. Where were the warships with which the Algarvians controlled them?

Most patrols, by the nature of things--the ocean was vast, the targets upon it few and small and far between--ended in futility. Cornelu’s whole war up till now had been futile. He didn’t know how much more futility he could stand.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before he spotted a speck on the horizon. Hope flooded into him. If he could bring his leviatJhan back to Setubal after sinking an Algarvian ship, even the haughty Lagoans would have to give him his due.

Haughty wasn’t quite fair. The Lagoans thought they were better than anybody else, but they didn’t flaunt it the way, say, Valmierans did. For his part, Cornelu remained convinced one Sibian was worth three Lagoans any day. Nobody who talked through his nose the way King Vitor’s subjects did was altogether to be trusted.

Well, now Cornelu had the chance to prove that of which he was convinced. He urged the leviathan toward the ship--and the ship was coming toward him, too. He couldn’t have caught it from behind, not unless it was just lazing along.

He pulled a brass spyglass off his belt. A minor magic kept its lenses dry so he could peer through it right away. The ship seemed to leap toward him. He gasped. For a moment, he thought it was a floating fortress. Then he realized it was the next class down, a ley-line cruiser. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. “It will have to do,” he said.

Through the spyglass, he saw sailors on the deck of the cruiser. A jack of green, white, and red snapped in the breeze. Cornelu nodded. He wouldn’t be attacking a Lagoan ship by mistake. That would be biting the hand that fed him.

Those sailors would be on the lookout for leviathans. If they spied him, he would never get close enough to plant his egg against the cruiser’s flank. He fought the Algarvians, ironically, by keeping his mount at the surface. Mezentio’s men would be watching for the big plumes of vapor that rose when a leviathan came up from the depths. So long as his beast kept breathing steadily, it wouldn’t give itself away too soon.