The map on the table had been scratched into so many times, that the parchment had torn and the scarred table was visible beneath.
The boat lurched. Whisky toppled and spread across the map, running the ink that Louka had just inscribed. He smashed his fist into the beam of the hull, looking up, booming his voice preternaturally loud, like the sound of a horn in the mists: “Keep the blasted thing still!”
His hearing had never been so good as his Genitor’s, but he still heard Dom’s recalcitrant, “Sure, I’ll just settle the storm for you, shall I?”
Louka couldn’t help but smirk at that. He swiped his hand across the map. It was ruined now. But it didn’t matter.
When he closed his eyes, he could feel them, the shadows.
“You can’t be sure,” Halvdir said.
His thick, berry beard was an eyesore, Louka thought. Every time that he looked at it, he wanted to tug on it, pull it to him, maybe. Maybe later. Not now. They were close.
“You said to follow the storms,” Louka reproached the mortal man.
Halvdir looked at him with the severity of every Varangian he’d ever known. There weren’t that many. It was an impassive, fearless look. Reproach meant nothing to this man. Nor did retribution. Nor did the storm raging through the seas and throwing the boat from side to side, nor the fact that he was, mortal, and would die in the water if it came to it.
“I did,” Halvdir said in quiet acknowledgement.
Louka nodded. “And we have,” he said, flitting his eyes to the map. Some of it was still visible. The shade of Raphael couldn’t have gone far. And it would be angry, no doubt of that.
“You’re looking for a needle in a stack of needles,” the Varangian rebounded.
Louka looked up at him, eyeing him with anger and frustration, and a strange, bubbling excitement that blistered across his skin like fire. “You didn’t have to come,” he said.
“Your Genitor would kill me if he knew I’d let you go alone.”
“Would have,” Louka whispered.
It still hurt.
It would always hurt.
“Besides,” Louka said, looking at the mortal again. “You said yourself; the shadow is never really gone, is it?”
“It isn’t,” he said, slow, as if he wanted to interject more.
But Louka cut him off, “Which means that if I follow the… the feel of him, he’ll be out there… out here, in the waters, somewhere.”
“You’re chasing a shade,” Hvaldir said.
“I know that!”
“Yes, but do you understand it?”
Louka looked up at him.
Hvaldir was visibly lamenting the loss of his whisky, and he poured another from the decanter, catching himself on the edge of the map table as the boat rocked with sickening intent. He downed the drink, wincing. It was obvious to Louka that he was fighting a war against the sickness in him at the motion of the sea under his feet. The Varangians liked solidity. Rock, earth. And the water was anything but. The irony of Viking ships and raiding parties made Louka’s unbridled, misplaced laughter bubble up.
Louka relished in the waves. It meant the storm was stronger.
Raphael: he knew he was here. He knew he’d come for him.
Louka: He knew, this couldn’t be the end.
Hvaldir shook his head. Another swig, and he sighed. “Death is the end,” he said as if mirroring Louka’s thoughts and answering them.
“Never,” Louka growled, looking at the map for something to do that was not looking into the steady, pitying eyes of the other man.
“The shadow doesn’t make the man,” Hvaldir said.
“How would you know?” Louka snapped. It was the anger in him, the pride, that Raphael had reprimanded for years. But it was who he was, and couldn’t be loved, beaten, sulked, out of him. It was, who he was. And he was not going to let this silly little human man make a mockery of his certainties.
Raphael, was, here…
Hvaldir pointed to the porthole and hissed, and it sounded like the water bubbling, and the waves fighting for dominance. “His shadow may very well be somewhere out there,” he said. “But what comes back, will need a body. And it will be more hunger than compassion!”
Louka shrugged. “Whatever the cost,” he said.
Hvaldir made a derisive sound, and walked up the rickety stairs, to the storm outside, like he was making a point of displaying his courage to the Gens below deck.
Louka watched him go and moved to look out of the porthole of the ship, staring into the frothing black water filled with shadows. Each of them angry, hungry. But all he had to do was wait, didn’t he? One of them would come to him. Raphael’s shadow. Raphael himself. He’d know his death was unjust; he’d want vengeance, he’d feel the need for it as badly as Louka felt-
The boat lurched, and Louka’s face smashed into the wooden hull, splintering it. There was a yell from the deck. The wood made a scream like dying forests, and water began to gush into the hull. Louka lifted his fingers to his head. The shadow had chosen now to start healing a wound here, or there. Blood tipped his fingers. He sniffed at it, licked at it. He heard Dom yell, and Hvaldir bark an order to her, and the scattering of some of the mortal men they’d brought with them as well, and he smiled as the dark water raced inside.
“Hello, my love,” he whispered.
Chaos had erupted.
The ship was sinking. He heard them screaming it. He heard Dom raise her voice as a panicked deckhand started a hysterical babbling that was a higher pitch than the wind. He heard the sound of flesh hitting flesh, a fight breaking out, then a scream. Hvaldir’s voice above it all, booming, trying to keep the calm through loud fury, and he looked into the water. It was invading, seeking him out, it wrapped around its legs, it lifted, it licked at him, like tendrils, tentacles. They’d hit something. Or the strike of his thick, weighty form had been too much, or the water had just demanded the ship’s destruction, but, water filled it, and they were sinking, fast.
Dom and Hvaldir’s voices were far away now.
The water rose up to his neck; he floated a moment. He made no move for the stairs. He let the chamber flood; he let himself go down with it. He opened his eyes in the black liquid, and he could see. The map, lifting from the desk and was swept by a current, or something. Bubbles and foam erupted from where the crack had formed in the hull, where the water had flooded.
A large, black shape was moving.
He closed his eyes and listened. The sea moaned and with it, came the rush of water, at his side, and something heavy, brushed by him.
Heavy.
He didn’t know that. Not in the tactile sense. But he felt the weight of it. He opened his eyes, and the water was black, but a grey flank swam past him. It was gone, then it appeared again, and its shape was…
It was the length of the hull, but it moved inside it, thrashing, breaking the precious little they’d taken on the voyage. It smashed the desk with it’s slanted, muscular tail. It writhed, and its head struck the stairs, shattering them.
It turned on Louka, only one big, liquid black eye, like the dark of night, like the ink of the cosmos, looked at him. It opened its jaws wide, and rows upon rows of sharp teeth seemed to grin. Louka mouthed something, and the thing was gone. He spun in the water. He didn’t need to breathe. He pushed towards the gaping hole in the boat. He swam out with powerful strokes.
The water embraced him like an old friend. A lover. A father.
Had this been a sign? From his Raphael?
The dark shape cast across his vision again. He reached his hand to it, and its eyelids blinked, a grey film almost covering them. It opened its mouth wide to reveal those teeth, and lips, or what passed for lips, pulled back and away from its jaws.
It gave a mighty flick of its tail, and it rushed him.
