Ninsday, 25th of Frostember, 1788

  The Nautilus climbed through the Black Trench. Laila surveyed her companions all strapped into harnessed chairs. What had been a precaution before had become a requirement.

  Even Augustine had been hastily wheeled out of the locker, much to her own distaste, and bolted with manacles into a chair.

  She had a lot of thoughts about her son’s interest in this… man. Say nothing. The moment you object, he digs in.

  The Nautilus spun in the dreadful current, throwing the submersible sideways. Laila lurched as she felt the harnesses pull taut. Then the harnesses went slack and her weight left her.

  The bridge heaved around her, metal straining to a cacophony of awful noises.

  From Augustine’s direction came a sound that took her a moment to identify.

  He was laughing. Unguarded, undisguised, he had remembered, in the middle of a submarine being flung through an abyssal current, that he was alive. Or had been, once. She had catalogued the polished social version at Seraphina’s court. This was older.

  The Bore seized them again. The ship rolled. Laila’s harness bit into her shoulders and Augustine made a noise of pure delight.

  Of course, she thought. Of course he does.

  Then Navarro stood up.

  He had made his decision already. He crossed the bucking deck, reached the helm console, and took it in both hands. The ship shuddered under him. He held it. The engine note shifted, climbing, and the Bore pushed back, and Navarro held it anyway, and slowly, a decade of these waters in his grip, the Nautilus steadied.

  The Bore gave one last convulsive heave.

  Then they were through.

  The noise fell away. The projection showed open water: the Trench walls receding, the abyss spreading wide beneath them, the long dark of the climb ahead. She had been holding her jaw tight. She released it.

  Navarro returned to his seat without comment and began checking his instruments. The ship had nearly come apart. He had a checklist for that.

  “Exhilarating,” Augustine offered, into the silence.

  Navarro unstrapped himself and crossed to stand over Augustine and leveraged what bulk he had with intimidating presence.

  “You were part of Lampetia’s party,” he said.

  “I was.”

  “Then what, precisely, was she after? I was given to understand the target was the egg.”

  Augustine met his gaze with perfect equanimity. “It was. She wanted something with concentrated divine essence. I was told no more than that.”

  “And yet she ignored the dragon egg entirely.” His voice was even. “Which was already gone by the time she reached the nest. And took the other thing.”

  “Yes.” A pause. “I confess that was not the outcome I anticipated.”

  Navarro turned to Lambert. “You called it the blood pearl. In the projection — she was holding up what looked like the kraken’s own egg before she disappeared.” He paused. “Am I mad, or is that what we’re talking about?”

  Lambert’s hands were still. “We’re not certain. We only have pieces of it. If it is the blood pearl — as best as we understand it — it’s something Lampetia made. Or had made.”

  “But what is it?”

  “A vessel of divine essence. Filled with the blood of Malothar.”

  Three of the crew made a small, sharp gesture with their hands. Vera turned away briefly. Even Mira’s expression moved.

  Navarro did not move at all. “Malothar,” he said.

  “The priest in Fairhaven told us the legend: the White Lady fashioned a pearl from the blood she shed into the sea and gave it to the deep. We believed it was scripture. A metaphor for the tide.” Lambert looked at the projection, at the empty nest below. “Lampetia had it sitting in the kraken’s nest for a decade. Letting it steep. Letting whatever was in it sink into the creature guarding it.”

  “What can she do with it?” Navarro said.

  “The scroll described how divine essence could be used to transform something — invest a new nature into it.” Lambert glanced at Wylan. “The dragon egg was a vessel for that. A container of concentrated divine power pressed against something living.”

  “Seems like the blood pearl is the same,” Wylan said.

  “Don’t be silly.” Augustine’s voice was conversational. “You can’t use the blood pearl for ascension. It’s the wrong kind of divine essence. Even I know that.”

  The room turned to him.

  “Then what is it for?” Navarro said. “She didn’t come to the bottom of the ocean for a romantic trinket.”

  Augustine smiled and said nothing.

  “Everyone be quiet for a moment,” Lambert said.

  “The only thing I can hear,” Isabella said, “is the engine.”

  The projection showed the edge of the Trench, the ocean floor falling away into deep void. The thin lights of the submarine were taken by the dark.

  Lambert unstrapped himself and strode to the front of the bridge.

  “Look out there.” He pointed at the projection.

  “I can’t see anything,” Laila said. “Is it Lampetia?”

  “Sweet mercy.” Navarro was already at his console. “It’s gone.”

  “Will someone please start making sense,” Laila said.

  “The Bore.” Navarro’s hands moved across the instruments. “The undertow. It’s stopped.”

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Would have been nice a few minutes ago.”

  “You don’t understand.” He looked up. “The Bore — the ebb and flow of the undertow — it was caused by the kraken breathing. As it slept.”

  A beat.

  “It’s awake?” Laila said. “Then we’d best get out of here.”

  “All hands.” Navarro’s voice carried across the bridge without effort. “Battle stations. Get this vessel moving.”

  The bridge became very busy very quickly.

  Harnesses unbuckled and bodies moved in purposeful scramble. They had drilled for this. Drilling and doing, it turned out, were not the same thing. Pip was already at her station. Mira crossed the bridge at a run. Laila gripped her seat and watched people more suited to nautical emergencies apply themselves around her.

  “The ascent overloaded the primary engine.” Vera’s voice was flat, clearly course correcting. “She’s stalling.”

  “Out of the way, darling.” Divina materialised at Vera’s shoulder with a toolkit that had not been there a moment ago.

  Laila let go of her seat.

  She moved to the forward hatch, unlatched it, and opened it just enough. The cold came in immediately. She reached into her coat and found the last vial of scarlet oil, barely a measure left, the glass nearly empty, and tipped it into the water. The colour spread and was taken by the current almost before it had fully left the vial. She closed the hatch.

  She walked back to her seat, sat, and folded her hands in her lap. She closed her eyes and let her thoughts follow the scarlet threads dissipating in the dark water below.

  There was something down there.

  She had expected the void, the absence of the kraken’s mind, the negative space where the tidal patience had been. What she found was not absence. It was presence, deep and large and ancient, and it was rising. Fast.

  Not hungry, she corrected herself. Thirsting. There was a difference, and it mattered. Hunger was animal. What moved beneath them was thirsting, craving, and what it craved had a specific warmth to it. The warmth of living blood.

  “Captain.” She kept her voice even. “You need to take us away from here. Now.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “Madame.” Navarro did not look up from his console. “Please let me work.”

  The projection changed.

  At the edge of the Trench, where the seafloor fell away into void, something entered the light. It did not move quickly. It did not need to. The currents shifted ahead of it, not pushed aside but redirected, the water rerouting itself around something that did not yield. The wrongness arrived before the creature did.

  “What is that,” Pip said.

  The first tentacle came up over the lip of the Trench and came down.

  It fell to the seafloor on the port side with a weight that registered in the deck beneath their feet, and then the second came down starboard, then another to port, further forward. They came down one by one, deliberate, not attacking but placing. The projection mapped the scale of it and then ran out of frame. What surrounded them on both sides was not tentacles. It was architecture.

  The ship was bracketed.

  “The bioluminescence.” Wylan’s voice had not caught up with the fear yet. “The pattern is wrong. It’s not organic. Something is wearing this.”

  The lights along the tentacle surface pulsed in sequences that had nothing to do with any living creature. Imposed. The body of the kraken performing a display it had not chosen.

  Then the eye.

  It came up from the dark slowly, as though surfacing from very far below. Red. Large enough that the projection could not contain it. It moved with a fixed, absolute certainty, and when it found the ship, it stopped.

  It was not searching.

  Through the scarlet threads still trailing in the water below, Laila felt the moment it found them. The thirsting, which had been vast and general, a direction rather than a destination, sharpened. Narrowed. Fixed.

  There, it said, in a language that had no words.

  “I’ve got her.” Divina’s voice from across the bridge. The engine note changed, climbing, catching. “Go, go—”

  “Full ascent.” Navarro’s hands were already moving. “All ahead, now—”

  The sound came through the hull from everywhere at once. Not a crack. Not an impact. A pressure, slow and exploratory, the sensation of something vast closing its hand around the ship to see what it had found.

  The Nautilus groaned.

  Laila opened her eyes. “I don’t think the current stopped because it woke up,” she said. “I think it stopped breathing altogether.”

  Wylan looked at the projection. At the tentacles placed on either side of the hull like columns. At the eye. “Did she turn a kraken into a vampire?” he said. “Like — like a vampire squid, or something?”

  From his bolted chair, Augustine let out a whoop. “Wow.” He sounded genuinely delighted. “She really made a monster this time.”

  The lights of the Nautilus swung as the kraken tightened its hold, the beams cutting through the dark water and finding the creature’s body in sections: the impossible scale of it, the wrongness of the bioluminescence, the tentacles thick as the hull itself. And then, near the eye, where the body curved into an arch, the lights found a figure in white.

  She stood perfectly still. She had been waiting, and she had not minded the wait.

  Augustine went quiet.

  It was a specific quality of quiet. He had been laughing a moment ago. Now he sat with his head slightly tilted, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere past the projection, as though listening to something the rest of the bridge could not hear. His expression had gone neutral, stealing his natural manner away.

  “She says,” he began, and his voice had lost its music, “it seems you have managed to find Aeloria’s egg. She finds it charming that it should have been hidden here all along.” A pause, his head tilting further. “She’ll be taking it. Master R?zvan has need of it.”

  Nobody on the bridge moved.

  “She’ll also be taking the boy.” Augustine’s eyes moved to Wylan. “He was awfully naughty, running away. Those were her words.”

  Wylan’s eyes went to Augustine first. Then the hatch.

  The lights held Lampetia in their beam. She did not look at them. She was watching the eye beneath her, one hand resting on the arch of the kraken’s body, and her expression, at this distance and through this water, was not readable. But she was not in a hurry.

  The gill compound tasted exactly as bad the second time, with the additional complication of the iron reagent fighting it for space on the way down.

  ? Alchemy did not object to improvisation of the body or mind. It simply charged interest the next day.

  The water welcomed him back with complete indifference.

  The kraken did not. It filled the water around the hull. The space had reorganised itself around it. Wylan had built the Nautilus. He knew its dimensions precisely. The tentacle holding it was wider than the corridor he slept in.

  He took stock of what he had: himself, a bracer of vials, and the iron reagent now arguing with the gill compound somewhere in his bloodstream. Behind him, Mira and Grimshaw dropped through the barrier and flanked him. He tried not to focus on the shape of Grimshaw’s other form moving through the dark water beside him. In light of the kraken, Grimshaw barely registered.

  Okay. Okay. Friendly tentacles. Friendly tentacles.

  He swam up to the hull and wedged himself against it and the tentacle, then pushed.

  The tentacle did not move. He pushed harder. The tentacle still did not move, but he achieved a mild dent in the hull, which at least proved something was happening.

  He tried to swear. A gasp of invective burst away from him in the deep and was taken by the current, unheard and unappreciated.

  Then the Nautilus answered.

  Its own tentacles deployed from the hull’s underside, steel and articulated, the full weight of the ship behind them, and locked onto the kraken’s grip above his hands.

  Together they pulled. The kraken held.

  Wylan pulled two vials from his bracer, smashed them together, and pressed the compound against the tentacle’s surface.

  The kraken tightened its grip.

  Something in the hull changed pitch. A building hum, low and purposeful, running through the metal under his hands. He knew that sound.

  He kicked off the hull’s edge hard.

  The charge fired a half-second later, visible in the water, arcing across the Nautilus’s skin and jumping into the tentacle, spreading along its surface in a flat white light.

  He hung in the water at a safe distance and watched.

  The kraken did not react. The current ran through it and was absorbed and was gone, and the tentacle held exactly as it had before.

  Through the hull, through the water, through the metal’s faint reverberations: nothing. No second attempt. Wylan could imagine Vera’s expression with considerable precision.

  Then the engines caught.

  The Nautilus shuddered, the vibration changing pitch as full power arrived, the sound of Divina’s work paying off in one sustained mechanical note. The ship drove upward. Wylan felt it in his chest, in the water displaced around him.

  The tentacle held.

  The kraken had more purchase than the engines had power. The ascent stalled. All of that force and nowhere to go, the Nautilus straining against something that had been holding still since before any of them were born and saw no reason to stop now.

  Wylan went back to the tentacle.

  He worked through the remaining vials on his bracer methodically. The first produced a reaction he couldn’t read. The second produced nothing at all. The third made the tentacle tighten, which he filed alongside the first compound under findings that did not help. By the time the last vial was gone he was simply a man in the dark with his hands pressed against something that did not notice him.

  Then Grimshaw hit it.

  Full mass, full speed. The shark form hit the tentacle with everything it had. The grip shifted. A real shift, not a centimetre but something measurable, the tentacle’s hold breaking fractionally from the hull’s seam. For a moment Wylan thought it would be enough.

  The second tentacle came down.

  It came down exactly as the first had, finding the hull above them and closing. Grimshaw pulled back hard to avoid being caught between them. The window closed. Two tentacles now where there had been one, the grip doubled, the Nautilus held more completely than before.

  Wylan hung in the water and looked out into the dark beyond the ship’s lights.

  Two figures moving with purpose through the black water, not drifting, in no hurry.

  Wylan unclipped the lantern from his belt.

  He held it out toward the tentacle and the light hit the kraken’s skin, and the skin reacted. Not much. A scorch, a darkening along the surface where the beam touched, the flesh drawing back from it by a fraction. The creature still remembered sunlight.

  He pressed closer. Held the lantern against the tentacle directly, both hands, the light pouring into it.

  The scorch marks spread slowly. The kraken was vast and the lantern was small and the mathematics of this were not in his favour, but it was doing something, and doing something was all he had left.

  Callion and Lampetia had come to collect.

  They moved through the water toward him without slowing, without deviation. Wylan kept the lantern pressed to the tentacle and did not look away from them and hoped, without anything left to hope with, that the light would be enough.

  Lambert stood at the helm and watched.

  The projection showed him everything. Wylan outside, both hands on the lantern, the scorch marks spreading too slowly across too much. Grimshaw holding position. Mira pulling back. Two figures cutting through the dark water toward the ship, already decided.

  Behind him, Vera said something to Navarro in a low voice. Navarro answered without looking up. The engines were running, Divina had seen to that, but the Nautilus wasn’t moving, held in place by something that had been here since before the ship existed and would be here long after.

  Isabella had moved for the hatch twenty minutes ago. Laila had put herself in the way without a word, and Isabella had sat back down, and the look on her face was still there.

  Lambert’s hand found his holy symbol.

  He had tried once already. The invocation had answered with a flicker and gone out. They were too far down, too far from the light, and the signal thinned with every fathom. He knew the difference between a god who wasn't listening and a god whose voice couldn't carry this deep.

  He watched Wylan hold the lantern against the tentacle. He watched Lampetia and Callion moving through the dark. The shape of the situation was clear.

  They were not getting out of this by force.

  He closed his eyes. His thumb found the face of the holy symbol, the familiar edge of it, and pressed.

  No invocation left. No doctrine for this. Just help us, Invictus.

  He prayed.

  “I know I am far from your light.” His voice was very quiet. The bridge did not stop moving around him. “I know I have walked strange paths. But you must know my faith in you has never wavered — even though I’ve embraced others.”

  Daylight bloomed in the depths of the ocean.

  It came from the edge of his vision, a pulse of light off the port side. Warm and gold, the light had no business being this far from the sky. It bloomed outward through the dark water, finding the Trench walls, finding the kraken’s body, finding everything.

  Lambert turned toward it and could not look directly at it.

  The kraken recoiled. Not gradually. A single convulsive movement, the tentacles releasing the hull as the light hit them, the vast body drawing back from it. A sound came through the hull that was not mechanical, not the ship’s engines, not anything Lambert had a category for. The scorch marks on the tentacles were visible even from here, brands burned into flesh that should not have been able to feel pain.

  The light held for one more moment.

  Then it faded, and the dark came back, and the water was just water again.

  The silence broke when Navarro’s hand came down on the collision alarm, a single long blast that rang through every compartment of the ship, and his voice followed immediately.

  “All hands, back inside. Now. Move.”

  The Nautilus climbed.

  Wylan was through the hatch. Grimshaw behind him, then Mira, the barrier sealing with its low hiss and the sound of the deep locked out. Navarro had the engines at full ascent before the hatch finished closing. The Trench walls rose in the projection as they rose through them, the dark peeling back in layers.

  Laila did not look forward.

  Through the scarlet threads still trailing in the water below, thin now, almost gone, the oil long since dispersed, she felt the kraken’s hunger stir. Distant. Inexorable. The creature gathering itself back from the light’s edge, the wound and the wanting knitting together. It did not know how to stop.

  She looked at the projection.

  As the Nautilus climbed, the kraken receded. Its vast form dimmed in the projection by degrees, the charred brands fading into the dark, the eye’s red light shrinking, the whole immensity of it swallowed back into the Trench as though it had never fully left.

  And on the crest of its body, where the great curve of it rose highest, stood a figure in white.

  She was not looking at the ship. She stood with one hand at her side and her face turned slightly away. The Nautilus’s departure was a detail she had already accounted for. The kraken moved beneath her and she moved with it, at rest on its surface.

  She stood upon it. The kraken was her throne.