Asunder: A Gathering of Chaos by Cameron Hopkin (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

when she hits the deck. All clear amidships! All hands to weapons!” Everyone scrambled to obey, and Gamarron tore his eyes away from the specter of approaching death. He cast about for something to fill his hands with, knowing it was futile. The gunners had abandoned the spore cannons – except for the man who had fallen in the vat. He remained with his head submerged, back arched over the lip of the vat, the spore tube’s seeking vines wound ‘round and through his corpse. Half of the sailors stood huddled near the wall of the forecastle and the other grouped in similar fashion just forward of the poop deck. Some bore coral knives and swords, others bone-tipped javelins. One evil-looking fellow with frilled gills protruding from his neck had a curved, lacquered wooden falchion whose edge was lined with glass. Glass! It had to have been worth five years’ wages for the man, and from the look of him, there was absolutely no chance he had come by it honestly. It was a wicked weapon. Glass would cut through nearly anything, and its sale was prohibited in every corner of the Mainland.

The captain hefted his massive stoneoak battle-axe, obviously of Weaver make, with its writhing vine that wrapped up and around his forearm. The masked boatswain stood aft with the sailors, a pike with a strangely pearlescent head in her hands. She caught his gaze and shook the weapon in the air. Whether she meant encouragement or admonishment, it reminded him that his hands were empty. Lacking any other options, he pilfered the coral sword from the belt of the drowned gunner, being careful not to touch the brackish water of the vat. He joined the group on the forward wall, hoping that Kest had had the sense to go to the cabin and stay there. He’d be of little use with his broken collarbone.

The sea serpent broke the surface only ten yards off the port beam, arching far up into the sky. It seemed impossible that she could rise so high – her head must have been fifty meters in the air. Her roar filled his ears, obliterating thought, and then slowly, oh so slowly, her body curved toward the ship and began to fall. The captain was screaming, motioning everyone back with both hands, but Gamarron heard nothing but that scream, could see nothing but the awful, beautiful glint of the sun on cream and scarlet scales. In a normal, masted vessel, she would have torn sails and fouled the rigging, but in the Seafarer ship there was nothing to impede her as she landed athwart the vessel, her body draped amidships, her snout clearing the far side of the railing.

The concussion of her impact knocked the bulk of them from their feet and sent a wash of seawater over them. Then came a mad scramble as everyone recovered their weapons and tried not to stab the crowded bodies around them. The captain was the first to charge, two hands on his axe, the third holding a short stabbing spear. He roared wordlessly, rushing forward with a powerful overhand swing right at the scaled body of the beast. The weighty axe bit through a scale as thick as his thumb and sheared off to the side without drawing blood.

Gamarron scrambled into the fray, focusing on the muscles of his shoulders and arms, stabilizing the angle of his hands, and finding just the right place to plant his feet. Delivering the maximum possible amount of force, he slipped the coral sword laterally between two overlapping scales and felt it bite home for a bare second before the fragile blade snapped at the base of the hilt. For the thousandth time in his life, he wished for some kind of weapon that wouldn’t easily break. He’d had the same thought in nearly every single battle he’d ever been in.

The serpent thrashed back and forth across the main deck, turning her head from side to side to bite at whatever she could reach, her body pushing up against the foredeck on one side and the wall of the poop deck on the other. The monk threw himself backward to outdistance the writhing undulations and fell to the deck. Once again men’s screams rang out as they were crushed under the leviathan’s body or fell prey to her pearly teeth. The railing was broken clean through on both sides of the ship, and Gamarron saw the second mate hurl himself overboard to escape that blood-red maw. At this rate they would all be dead in minutes, and that was only if she didn’t crush the ship like a twig in her massive coils. Their weapons were useless against her armor. He felt the lassitude of despair leach the strength from him. Why fight it? You wouldn’t have ever defeated the demon lord anyway. Best if you die without any of your people seeing your face or knowing what you’ve done.

He was prostrate on the deck, blue sky filling the upper half of his view and thrashing sea serpent the lower half, so he had the perfect vantage to see it happen: the boatswain had climbed onto the poop deck and vaulted across three meters of empty air to land atop the serpent’s head, the long white pike still in her fist. The beast hardly seemed to notice her, but she braced against its horns, compensating for the swaying underfoot. The mouth on her knee bit onto a nearby scale, giving her extra stability. The blonde sailor raised the weapon high, sunlight playing hypnotically off its tip, and plunged it directly through the top of the thing’s head right where the eyebrow ridges met.

It didn’t scream or buck or spasm – it simply reared up high with a thunderous hiss, crashed into the water, and was gone, the boatswain still astride her head. The crew’s surprise was absolute – no one spoke. Many of them likely hadn’t even seen what happened. But