She took a slow breath and felt Rill filtering the water. The air tasted slightly of minerals, like the hot springs in the Calderon Valley, but she had no particular difficulty. She willed herself forward and rushed through the water, banked in a half circle, and returned to the side of the Slive. It was somewhat daunting, how much water was around her. Isana had never been swimming in so much water that she could not feel either shoreline and the floor of the lake or river she was in. Here, in the sea, the water stretched out in every direction, for as far as her senses could reach, endless rolling blue all around her and endless, grave-cold blackness beneath her.
The water was disturbed behind and beneath her, and Isana darted to one side just as a smooth, sleek form more than ten feet long glided through the water she'd recently occupied. She saw a dark, glassy eye, and a mouth of jagged teeth. And then the shark was past her, and it vanished into the murky ocean in utterly silent grace.
Isana took a moment to deliberately extend her senses, so that she would have at least a little more warning should another shark attempt such a thing, and tried to slow down her wildly beating heart. Then she rose to the surface beside the ship.
Araris was halfway down the rope, leaning down, his expression drawn with worry. She met his eyes and tried to smile at him.
"Are you all right?" he murmured.
She lifted a finger to her lips as she nodded, and beckoned him. Araris turned and lowered himself hand over hand down the rest of the rope, the sinews in his back and shoulders rippling. He kept going once his feet hit the water and slid in slowly and quietly.
The rest of them came down the same way-except for Ehren, whose grip slipped halfway down the line. Isana was ready for it, and Rill was ready to receive him, a vaguely human shape rising from the waves to catch Ehren and lower him soundlessly into the water.
"All right," Tavi murmured. He treaded water beside Isana and seized one of the ropes on her harness. "Everyone grab hold. We need to hurry."
Isana turned toward the enemy ship as the Slive sailed on, and the others maneuvered through the water to catch hold of the trailing lines. It took them longer than she would have thought, and she felt the faint fluttering sensation of at least two more sharks circling fifty or sixty feet away.
"All right, let's go," Tavi murmured. She felt his hand touch her shoulder and squeeze once. His fear came pouring through his touch, but so did a sense of almost-eager elation. Great furies save her, the boy was enjoying himself.
"Deep breaths everyone," Isana said. She waited a beat, then she oriented on the receding form of the Mactis, reached out to Rill, and dived.
She noticed immediately how much more effort it took to move. A glance over her shoulder showed her that everyone was holding on with both hands, and stripped down to trousers, their bodies moved through the water as smoothly as they could. Even so, the additional weight and resistance to movement was considerable.
Isana ground her teeth. At this rate, it would take even longer than Demos's estimate to reach the Mactis, and the others didn't have her ability to breathe while underwater. Surfacing too near the enemy ship would be suicide, and if they stopped to discuss it, the Mactis might have sailed beyond her ability to catch up.
There was no help for it. She closed her eyes and redoubled her efforts, spreading more of her fury's attention into the water around her charges so that they cut through it more efficiently. Slowly, they began to pick up speed. The sensation of her bond with Rill became something tangible, a pressure on her temples, and she bent all her attention to her task.
She almost didn't notice it, but Rill's sudden warning made her bank sharply to avoid ramming something large and dark. She followed the contours of the object, pressing ahead. Its surface was odd, pebbly, and laced with barnacles and straggling, hair-fine bits of dark green seaweed. They passed along it for several seconds before it dawned on Isana that they were within arm's reach of a leviathan.
Her heart leapt into her throat, crashed back down into her belly, and began beating very quickly. The creature was huge. It literally stretched out of sight in every direction she looked. They were passing along what might have been a tail, she supposed, a long column of flesh and hide, ridged with bony, protruding plates down its center. Ahead of her, she saw a protuberance of some kind, then they passed over what might have been a flipper, broader than the Slive, its end impossible to see in the murky water.
Next she passed several rows of what looked like trenches, or perhaps ex-trabroad furrows in a field. Ribs. They were the creature's ribs. There was a dull, heavy throb in the water, pressing rhythmically against her, and Isana realized that she could actually feel the beating of the leviathan's gargantuan heart.
They continued on, passing another flipper, and then another column of flesh that must have been the leviathan's neck. The whole of the beast, then, must look something like an elongated turtle with no shell.
Its head came into sight. Its skull was very nearly as large as the enormous stone barn back on her steadholt, a structure that could house two hundred various animals, the farm's equipment, and stored food besides. It, too, was almost turtlelike, complete with a jagged-edged beak. Each eye was the size of a small cottage, great glassy black orbs that were almost entirely closed.
From its mouth hung bits of what Isana could only assume was some kind of pale flesh. Whale blubber, perhaps? Even as Isana watched, a chunk the size of an oxcart fell with deliberate grace from the leviathan's maw, and was promptly set upon by a veritable cloud of smaller fish, only to scatter from the path of a dozen sharks. Rill warned Isana of several more sharks nearby but out of sight in the murk, all of them arrowing toward the free meal. Isana's heart beat even faster, and she tried to increase their pace again, desperate to avoid tempting the hungry sharks with the others, literally dangling like bait on a line.
She glanced back behind her as one of the sharks began to edge a bit too near, and found Tavi staring at the leviathan in undisguised curiosity and glee. He saw her look back and glanced up at her. He pointed at the massive leviathan, and his grin widened still further, his smile so sharp and bright that she found herself mirroring it.
By contrast, Ehren, holding on behind Tavi, had his forehead pressed against the line with his eyes tightly shut. Isana could not help but feel that the young Cursor had a perfectly serviceable amount of common sense.
Tavi, after all, had a point. Certainly, the business was dangerous-but they would have been in danger regardless of what they did. And how many people in Alera could claim to have seen something so utterly awe-inspiring as this? Septimus would have had exactly the same look on his face...