Rachel ducked under the ledge but continued to watch her father, sure in her heart that he was as doomed as the former mer-leader. But Edmund seemed to dodge the ixchitl’s darts as if he had been fighting them all his life. She saw him cut one that came at him and swarm up the retracting organ that dangled from the belly of the beast. When he reached the ixchitl he drove the knife into its anus and cut upward, gutting it from bottom to top. As the ixchitl thrashed in its death agonies the general shoved his arm into the slit and grasped something in the interior, dragging the ixchitl’s body around to block another cloud of descending darts; he had created a giant shield out of the ixchitl’s body.
The shield was unwieldy in the extreme but Edmund had not planned for simple defense. His free hand darted out and grasped the retracting cord attached to Bruce and let it raise him, and his shield, up to the ixchitl that was preparing to feast on the mer-leader. The ixchitl apparently divined his intent because it began to flap wildly, but because of the drag of the dead ray that Edmund grasped couldn’t pull at any speed. It apparently had no conscious control of the retracting harpoon cord. Edmund was inexorably drawn up to the belly of the beast. He gutted it with another of those powerfully driven thrusts then cut the cord loose, leaving Bruce free to drift to the bottom.
More of the rays were gathering around him, though, and all the mer that were left had darted for safety. He managed to kill another of the beasts, who could seemingly only fire their darts straight down, but the crowd around him was eventually going to get a dart past his defenses. It seemed only a matter of time before the beleaguered general would be killed when a shadow passed over the square and Nebka dropped out of the sky into the midst of the rays, Bast hitting the water beside her like an avenging angel.
The dragon turned its head like a snake and caught one of the rays on the wing. The wyvern’s broad, crocodilian head shook like a shark and ripped most of the wing off, leaving the mortally wounded ray to writhe in a death spiral to the reef below.
But the dragon was nothing compared to Bast. The elf moved with an unnatural grace and blinding speed, like some knife-wielding demon. She disdained the gutting technique of Edmund, instead whispering in from above and slicing along the back of the rays, cutting the muscles to their great wings, her knife slicing through their tough skin as if it were paper. She had taken out two of the rays before the rest of the dragons appeared, swimming over the reef edge like great birds of prey and descending upon the suddenly outgunned ixchitl.
The rays, at the appearance of the dragons, turned for deeper water and put on a burst of speed until the last one vanished over the reef edge, chased by the wyverns as Joanna coasted to a stop over the square.
“Commander Gramlich,” the general said, tossing aside his ersatz shield, “get the dragons back; those damned rays can overwhelm them if they get their act together. And the orcas are going to be around somewhere. Daneh!” he bellowed as he drifted down to the twitching body of the mer-leader.
Rachel darted out of her shelter and to the side of the mer-leader who lay on the sand by the coral head at the center of the square. The mer-leader was still alive, twitching in the grip of the neurotoxin but Rachel could think of nothing to do for him. Suddenly, her mother was beside her.
“It’s a paralyzing toxin,” Daneh said. “Probably voluntary muscles only, which means he can’t breathe. If we can get water over his gills he’ll survive. But I have no clue how to do that.”
“Get him to the surface,” Edmund said. “Mouth to mouth.”
“We can’t get the water clear,” Daneh said, desperately. “There’s not enough air in our lungs to blow him out.”
“He’s trying to say something,” Elayna said, dropping to the sand by her grandfather and grasping his hand. “Just clicks. But…” she leaned forward, holding up his head and cradling it to her. “Grandfather?”
“Cave,” Bruce said. “Cave…” and then his eyes rolled back in his head.
“The birthing cavern,” Edmund said, coldly, turning to look towards the land. “I’d wondered where the damned orcas were.”
After Daneh had told about the birthing cavern, Herzer had taken the trouble to walk the crest of the island until he found the light-source of the cave. It was near the summit of the island, above the spring that had made the ancient lighthouse possible in its day. Now he winged Chauncey to a hard landing and sprang off the wyvern, slapping it on the flank.
“Go follow the other dragons, Chaunce,” he yelled, pounding up the slope to the cracks in the rock.
When he got there he could hear the screams from below and his heart dropped, but he got down on his belly and peered into the fissure in the rock.
His eyes were blinded by the bright light on the surface but after a moment he could see the tableau below. A small orca was swimming back and forth in front of the main ledge, where most of the mer-women and their children were huddled, as far back as they could crawl. From time to time it turned and got up speed, finally lifting its body out on the ledge and writhing back and forth, trying to snap up one of the mer. Finally, it writhed back and forth and dropped down from the ledge, circling back through the water for another run.
The crack was narrow and the drop was at least fifteen meters. Not a problem if he was falling in water, assuming it was deep enough, but Herzer was well aware that he was not Bast; if he fell into the water the orca would be on him before he could react and Herzer would just be a part of the food chain. He turned and lowered himself into the fissure and then rammed his good fist into the rock, dangling over the drop below.
The orca came back for another run and got out of the water, just about reaching the tail of one of the mer-women. He snapped and writhed, but try as he might he couldn’t, quite, reach the twitching tail. Finally, he started to hump himself backwards and was just about in the water when he was hit by a tremendous blow from above.
Herzer was half stunned by the impact and knew that he was going to feel it for days afterwards. He had hit the orca just forward of the dorsal fin with both feet, but they had both immediately slid out from under him on the slick skin of the beast and he had impacted on his hip and side, flipping sideways on the right side of the orca, entering the water with a tremendous splash.
The impact, however, had stunned the orca as well and Herzer was the first to gain some semblance of consciousness. He kicked himself back from the depths to which he had sunk and, taking a leaf from Bast’s training, slid his prosthetic into the blowhole of the orca and grasped the flexible flesh on the side of it. Then he squeezed.
The sonar blast that the orca released was like nothing that Herzer had ever heard, the shriek of a dying child the size of a whale was the closest he could imagine. It thrashed its way to the surface and blasted out air, flailing its tail and spinning around the cavern until it impacted nose first on one of the unyielding rock walls.
“Quit this!” Herzer shouted. He put his knife by the eye of the beast and it quieted.
“Leb go ob my ho!” the orca said as distinctly as it could. Its surface method of communication was its blowhole, which Herzer still gripped, although less firmly.
“The hell I will,” Herzer said. “I’ve got a cutting edge on this thing. I can cut right through the muscle. You won’t be able to submerge for weeks until it heals. You’ll starve to death first.”
“Baberd,” the orca said. “Pleab?”
“No,” Herzer replied. He suddenly realized that the orca, by its dorsal fin, size and, hell, demeanor, was no more than a teen, probably a young one. “Where are the rest of the orcas?”