He didn’t like how quiet it was. Aboard the raft, the boys were as lively as posts, standing mutely, their heads listing awkwardly on their necks. The creatures massing beneath him in their hundreds couldn’t be heard, though Jaime could sense their undulating movements even through his clinging clothes, the black polyps smothering the rock in all directions.
Sandover reappeared, smiling too broadly. Holding a glittering blade to Cary’s throat, his other hand knotted in Cary’s thick hair, he drove him on hands and knees towards the edge of the raft.
“Do you know what a hydra is, Mr. Skye?” he crowed.
“A myth.”
“If so, then the tale has more than a little truth to it.”
“That thing down there is not a damned hydra!”
“Yet for every one of those arms you cut away, another grows,” Sandover replied. “And the part you cut away will seed itself anew if given chance. It is unkillable. Like myself. And unlike him.” His face blank with terror, Cary tensed as Sandover pressed the blade against his skin.
“Leave him alone!”
“You don’t give the orders, piece du merde,” Sandover hissed. “You will do as I tell you or watch him die. Now take a rock or a stick or your own stubborn head and throw it at that bomb until it ignites.”
“You’re a madman!”
“And yet it is you who has spent half his life in the asylum.”
“Because of a lie. You let him alone or I shan’t do what you want. I’ll let that monster have me, tear me to bits, so you can go back to your master and tell him you failed. You can join him in hell!”
He was losing control, the sky darkening above them, the waves rising. Or was that his weapon, as the wind snatched Sandover’s obscene hat from his head. Vain to the last, he let go of Cary to grab for it, stopping short of falling off the raft as the hat went sailing across the water. A short lived victory as something huge and heavy struck the water behind Jaime, drenching him. As Cary shouted a warning he turned to see a writhing red tentacle burst from the water. It whipped through the air and slammed down on the surface, sending another wave over Jaime’s head and making the raft dip and bob.
“The bomb!” Cary yelled as the others went reeling across the pitching deck. “That thing’ll set it off any second.” The next moment the creature’s foot-thick limb caught Jaime around the middle, sending him flying, the landing knocking the breath from his lungs.
Who needed breath? Not a waterman, and rather than fight the choppy waves he wriggled out of his heavy jacket and let it fall into the inky depths. He had landed far from the island, beyond the protective shelf of bedrock that held up the island. The black spawn had spread down the face of the underwater cliff, more of the squirming, writhing beasts emerging from the crevice where the mother made its home.
It was moving, its shapeless grey-pink body rising up the shadowy crevice, its arms with their hideous seeking mouths churning the water in search of something to latch onto. Higher it climbed, closer and closer to the spiny egg of the bomb, which sat on a ledge several feet below the edge of the gap, balanced precariously on some unseen outcropping of rock. At any second now it might ignite, by the creature’s flailing limbs or one of its swarming spawn.
Why had he and Cary not formed a plan? Stolen a canoe, left the others to their fate. The boys fault for taking money from a madman, but even as he thought this he knew that if he did nothing to prevent it their deaths would haunt him until his own.
Angling away from the break in the underwater cliff, he struck out towards the raft. The hideous spawn were massing beneath it, centred on the pair of ropes which tethered it to the stone anchors. Without warning the raft began to pitch back and forth, foaming the water and scattering the jellies with the backwash.
Jaime kicked to the surface to see Cary and Sandover locked in battle, the contrary winds of their magic swirling about in a twisting storm of invisible light. The boys lay where they’d fallen, knocked down by the raft’s wild motion or by magic. The next events happened nearly on top of one another, the time stretching like taffy. A blaze of radiant energy swept the deck of the raft, flinging Sandover backwards as if he’d been shot from a cannon. The next second the bomb ignited, sending a vast plume of water rocketing into the sky, followed an instant later by a great churning wave that swept over Jaime and send him tumbling head over heels far out into the lake.
His ears ringing, he righted himself. Or so he thought, but every direction he swam seemed colder and deeper. A bright pink figure went slashing sideways through the water. Sandover, his limbs wheeling, the silver cape and silvery hair fanning out around him as he sank.
Orienting himself again, Jaime struck out towards the sinking figure. Sandover was a wretch, a foul-brained lackey of that demonic duke, but Jaime was not so callous as to let anyone drown before his eyes. Or was it that he wanted Sandover to live a long, unpleasant life in whatever the mages used as a jail?
The pale cliff of rock emerged from the murky water as he neared Sandover, who was struggling with his heavy cloak. Sensing him, the mage looked up with an expression of perfectly human terror, but even as Jaime reached for him a clutch of the black spawn propelled themselves off the cliff face and wrapped themselves around Sandover. A garbled shriek bubbled from his gaping mouth as the weight of the creatures bore him down into the depths.
More of the beasts were flinging themselves at Jaime, their tentacles whipping about, their hideous beaks snapping. He looked down at fluttering motion beneath him. Borne by the cycling current as it struck the rocky shelf beneath the island and flowed back towards the lake, the monsters were rising, reaching for him, blind and ravenous.
No!
In the past he had asked, clearly if not always patiently, for the water to obey him. In this urgent moment his instinctive terror was enough, and he was suddenly hurtling through the water, driven by a great percussive wave that blew the black spawn backwards against the face of the rocks and sent Jaime hurtling into oblivion.