Who can she mean? Parry wondered, queasily; he wavered, grabbing his wound and pumping yet more magic into it to push the lead forth and speed its healing, weeping bloody tears with the effort. At the same time, however, the question answered itself—Mister Dolomance came threshing into the back of the crowd, summoned by Clione’s cry like a dog to his whistle, and made wholesale bloody work of two more men before getting his teeth stuck into a third, slowing his slaughterhouse passage to a stand-still.
Up on the fo’c’sle, Parry glimpsed the bo’sun waving his arms like some carnival mountebank, trying to shout his damage-bent brethren down; when this had no effect, he seized the next one rushing to offer violence and fetched him a buffet that almost pitched him over the side. So perhaps Parry had, indeed, underestimated him—annoying to think Rusk might have been right on that score, or any—
—but that hardly mattered right now, not with Clione hissing beside him, teeth bared, and the shark-were finally pulling his head free with a wet red crack. Not with one more fool (a master’s mate, he thought) pointing his blade at her whil
e snarling, in Parry’s direction: “You’re leakin’ power, man-witch. So call yer beast off, an’ quick-smart, or I’ll slit this wet bitch’s throat!”
Parry felt his eyes narrow, blood-clogged lids slow and sticky. “You will not touch her,” he heard himself grind out, barely recognizing his own voice. “She is mine.”
The closest on scoffed. “Don’t think ye’ll lose yer whole crew over some skirt, Cap’n.”
“Then don’t think, I pray—you’re none of you good at it, since you’ve failed to grasp that every man here stays aboard only at my sufferance. I can run this ship myself, if needs be.”
“Aye, ye talk a good game! But we’re many, you one. What can ye do, if we attack all at once?”
Parry smiled, grim as a blade. “This.”
For: his stores were running dry, true enough—but there was yet something else to call upon, in worst circumstances; a force he only seldom felt stir against his presence, stroking itself on him and purring, like some great spectral cat. It lurked all ‘round him in the very wood and weight of the ship itself, Rusk’s Bitch turned his Salina, and if Parry did not pretend to understand it (being no sailor, as Rusk had pointed out on so many different occasions), he nevertheless knew it ever faithful to his touch, eager to do his bidding and willing to lend him its connivance in all sorts of mischief, no matter the cost to others . . . or itself.
I will have to hurt you now, he told it, soundlessly, this invisible daimon, and I am sorry for it, truly. I wish there was some other way.
I understand, something seemed to reply, meanwhile—but no, not so clearly. More consent as a twinge, at the very edge of consciousness, as he reached out with the next-to-last of everything in him and scooped a great chunk from the ship’s own side, planks spraying everywhere. The hull cracked, deck tipping to slide the bulk of the troublemakers brine-wards, below the water-line, which Parry proceeded to suture over their screaming heads with a solid blue-green seal like ice or glass, two feet at least in depth. They hammered at it, desperate, but got no relief; he saw their lungs empty out, bubbles rising, and smiled through his bloody flux, straining to not cough up his guts.
Give me a moment, he thought. Only a moment . . . I can recoup. Can move the ship’s parts back in place, fit nails to holes, trust in motion to keep us from taking on too much water . . .
(Dolomance had made short work of those remaining, all but the bo’sun, who’d wisely gone aloft, taking refuge in the rigging. Those stubby fin-hands Parry had fashioned were not made for climbing, so the man was safe enough, for now. Parry would have to calm the creature’s blood-lust to make sure that stayed true, later on—)
Oh God, it hurt. It hurt so magnificently, all over. But ‘twas almost worth it to see Clione gaze on him with worship, for all he could now clearly see the lines of gills fluttering open along her neck, neat-frilled as Mechlin lace.
And now ye’ve gutted your own ship, Rusk’s ghost observed, from where the cabin had once stood, as though it were some great insight.
How fortunate I am, to have you to note such things for me! Parry snapped back, using a blue-green thread-net to fold the planks—haphazardly yet finally, all the same—back over the bulk of his thrashing, swearing, blood-maddened crew’s heads.
“There,” he said. “We are done, now. It is resolved.”
“I knew you would save us, Jerusalem. Ah, but yet . . . ”
“But yet?”
Turning to her, seeing her shake her head, fine eyes already growing bleached and transparent-lidded. The tentacle-sway of her naked body, dorsal-raised spine barely concealed by hair. The Dolomance, snuffling to his knees, keen to lay that terrible head at her similarly-webbed feet.
“I cannot stay,” she said, sadly. “My air is almost gone—I know it. Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Down. Down. Oh, my magician . . . only come below, and we will rule together; you will be king of a dark place, beyond all their reaches. Dark, and deep, and shining.”
(Her sea-coloured eyes, her weed-thick hair, her skin green-tinting. Oh, how he longed to change along with her, to rip his own skin off and take his chances with whatever he found beneath—or didn’t.)
“The land does not love you, Jerusalem Parry; it never has, and never will. But I do.”
“Clione . . . madam. We . . . barely know each other.”
“Call it what it is, then. Call it magic.”
Rusk at his shoulder one more time, a buzzing bloody gnat: No, my Jerusha, no. She’s not for you, nor you for her. Do not try to make yourself over in her image, I pray, lest you lose your grip on life entirely—
Reaching out a hand to stop him and failing to take hold, miserably; how it made Parry crow to watch the bastard’s grip slip straight through, his living flesh a mere ghost’s ghost. And think, crazily—