Chapter 73: Naval Battle for Humanity (5)
The water closed over me and the world went out.
The sound first. All that roaring, those tens of thousands of voices, those feet hammering the stone, all of it vanished at once and was replaced by a dull humming and by the beat of my own blood in my ears.
Then the light. It came down through the surface above me in slanting columns, and it lit up exactly what I didn’t want to see.
Bodies.
They hung between the surface and the bottom, everywhere, ours and theirs, some of them still locked together. There were bodies in every direction. Below them, further down, the floor of the basin was covered in sand, and the sand was drinking the blood that came down through the water in thick slow threads.
I kicked up with my one leg and broke the surface.
The noise came back all at once, enormous, and I took my breath.
They were jumping.
All around me the men were letting go of the hulls. They were following me. They dropped into the water from both sides of the basin, alone or in clusters, and the ones opposite were diving too, and for a moment there were more men in the water than there had been standing all day.
There were thirteen of us.
Thirteen crossing toward that flat stone in the middle.
And they were waiting.
I saw the first one come from my left, and there was no time for anything.
It came out of nowhere, at a speed I’d never seen from that close, and its trident went into my stomach.
It didn’t hurt straight away.
It was an impact, a punch across the belt that emptied my lungs, and the water around me went red before I’d understood what had just happened.
I looked down.
The three points were in. Not through, in, buried in the flesh above the hip, and the inward-facing barbs were holding them there.
It pulled to get them back.
And then the pain arrived.
It arrived in one piece, a white burn that folded me in half and climbed all the way into my jaw, and I screamed, and all my air went up to the surface in a cluster of bubbles.
So I did the only thing that came to me. I took the shaft in both hands and pulled it toward me, as hard as I could, in the direction it was already going.
It went through me like a second wound.
It hadn’t expected that.
It came with the shaft, and I put my own trident through its throat at point-blank range.
Its blood went out into the water in a thick cloud and everything around our two bodies turned black. It let go of its weapon and dropped toward the bottom, twisting.
And its trident stayed in my stomach.
I put a hand on it, closed my fist around the shaft, and pulled.
It didn’t move a millimeter, and the pain went up so high that my vision filled with black spots. The barbs had set. It was built never to come back out, I’d known that since picking one up on the deck, and I understood it differently now.
Better not touch it for the moment.
I went up. I broke the surface, took in as much as I could, and simply filling my lungs dragged at my stomach. I went back under with one trident in me and another in my hands.
That was when the real rule of this fight became clear.
There was no air.
Everything we knew how to do, everything that had kept us alive on that deck, the lines, the orders, the shouting, the relays, none of it existed anymore. You don’t talk underwater. You don’t shout. You don’t warn the man beside you that something is coming up behind him.
And you have to go up.
That was the real trap, and they’d understood it before we had.
I watched a man fight properly, very well in fact, holding two of them off by turning on the spot with his trident. Then his lungs gave out and he went for the surface.
They let him go up.
They let him reach the air, and at the precise instant his mouth opened to breathe, they took him by the ankles and pulled him down.
He came back down swallowing water and he never fought again.
Twelve.
They wait for us to breathe.
I changed the way I swam.
I never went up straight again. I took air at an angle, in different places, going back under immediately, and twice I saw something pass through the spot where I would have surfaced.
And I kept going toward the stone.
It was straight ahead, under that murky water, that flat dark mass that didn’t move.
But every time I looked, it had barely got any closer.
We were advancing at an agonizing crawl, and they circled us at speeds my eyes couldn’t follow. They came from everywhere and from nowhere. Every time one went past it was already too late to react.
I took a point in the shoulder and never even saw where it came from.
I can’t track them.
I’ll never see them coming, they’re faster than my head is.
So stop looking at them.
I closed my eyes.
One second, no more, in the middle of a fight, in water full of blood. I closed my eyes and looked for something else.
And I felt it.
The water was moving.
Not the current in the basin. Something else. A pressure on my skin, on my left side, on my cheek, a mass of water pushed ahead of something coming in fast. It reached me before the thing did.
I shifted and the trident went through empty water at the height of my ribs.
I opened my eyes again, my heart hammering.
Again.
Do it again.
I stopped looking for the shapes and started feeling the water.
Every time one of them launched itself, it pushed a wave in front of it, and that wave reached my skin before the point did. It wasn’t Worldflow. There was no color, no weave, none of those currents I’ve read through the world for months. The System was cut, the mana didn’t exist anymore, and still I knew where they were.
I could feel them.
One came from behind and the water told me so across my back. I pivoted — and the shaft in my stomach turned with me and moved inside the wound, and I felt something give in there. I took it on my raised trident anyway, and it ran itself through on its own momentum.
Another from below. I folded my right leg and pushed off its skull to get clear, and I struck downward, and I hit.
I can see them.
Or feel them?
The basin was turning red.
It rose from everywhere, clouds of blood drifting slowly toward the surface and hanging there between the light and the floor, and the light stopped coming through them. We were crossing stretches where you could see absolutely nothing and where you only moved by feel.
And some of that red was coming out of me. I could see it leaving my stomach in steady threads, around the wood, every time I moved.
And up there, through the surface, there were those warped shapes, thousands of figures standing all around the basin. The sound of the crowd came down into the water, altered, muffled, a continuous rumble that wasn’t a voice anymore and that never stopped.
They must have been able to see all of it from the stands. The water would be clear from up there, no doubt, with lovely red flowers opening in it every time one of us died.
A man swam past me heading for the stone.
He looked at me. I recognized him, he’d held a net with me earlier. He made a sign with his hand, two fingers pointed at the stone, and I nodded.
Two of them caught him in a pincer as he set off again.
He saw one. Not the other.
I swam toward him as fast as this body would go, and I wasn’t fast enough, and I never would be in that water.
They opened him across the middle and were gone before I got there.
He went down toward the bottom turning slowly on himself, arms spread, and his eyes were still open.
Eleven.
I went up for air at an angle, my throat burning, and I saw the stone.
It was closer.
There was already somebody on top of it. A man standing, streaming water, a trident in his hand, shouting something down at the water and waving his arm in wide sweeps.
He was calling the others.
He’d got out and he was staying at the edge to call, in full daylight, with the whole arena watching him.
I went back under and swam.
My arms were doing all the work now. My right leg only pushed on every third stroke, and with every kick the shaft shifted in my stomach, and the cold climbing into my fingers wasn’t the water’s.
What came next I didn’t live through in order.
There was black, red, bodies, hands, points going past my face. There was a creature that took me by the ankle of my dead leg and pulled me toward the bottom, and I doubled over to hit it, and the wound opened a little wider around the wood and tore a scream out of me that went off in bubbles.
There were two men who killed one together, one holding it, the other striking, without a word between them, without being able to say a word.
There was a shark that passed between us with no rider and took no interest in anybody.
There was a moment when I thought I was going up and I was going down.
And there was Blackbeard.
I found him in the middle of a red cloud, grappling with one of those things, and that old man was fighting like an old man, badly, slowly, simply trying to keep it away from his stomach with a trident he didn’t know how to use.
I took it from behind.
I drove my weapon up under its arm and pushed until it came out the other side, and the thing’s blood covered us both.
He turned around. Our eyes met through that water.
His went down to my stomach, to the shaft coming out of it, and I saw exactly what he thought about it.
He couldn’t say anything to me and I couldn’t say anything to him.
So he raised a hand and pointed at the stone, and I nodded, and we set off together.
We were attacked twice on the way and twice I felt it before I saw it.
The stone grew in front of us, and I finally saw its base, a dark mass planted in the sand of the floor, real rock, unmoving, indifferent to everything happening around it.
My hands touched the face of it.
I climbed the stone, my head came out of the water, and the noise of the colosseum landed on me like a wall.
Hands took my wrists and hauled.
I came out, the water let go of me, and my body weighed everything it weighed all at once. The shaft scraped the rock on the way over and I nearly passed out. I went down onto my knees and stayed there, doubled up, coughing water, one hand closed around the wood to stop it moving.
Blackbeard came out behind me and collapsed onto his side.
We all looked up at the water.
We waited.
Nobody surfaced.
We stayed like that a long time, staring at that red surface, watching for a head, a hand, anything, and there was nothing but slow water lapping at the rock and dark stains diluting into it.
So I counted us.
Seven.
Seven men on a back of stone in the middle of a basin of blood, in a packed colosseum.
None of us said a word. There was nothing to say and nobody had the breath to say it.
One man was crying without making a sound, hands on his knees. Another had an arm opened from shoulder to elbow and was holding it shut with his own hand. Blackbeard was bringing up water off to one side.
Then somebody stood up.
And without anybody needing to say it, we all stood up.
I got up last, using the shaft as a support, which was the stupidest and most painful thing I did all day.
We spread out, we placed ourselves, and we ended up back to back, in a circle, each of us facing outward, each of us covering two other men, with what was left of our weapons pointed at the water all around.
We had something under our feet.
We could breathe.
I felt Blackbeard’s shoulder against mine and I gripped my trident in both hands, and under the surface, all around the stone, the shapes began circling again.
And the stands were howling.