Chương 182: Chapter 177. The Healing Rune

"THIS IS NOT A LEVIATHAN, ADOM!"

"YOU DON'T FUCKING SAY, SAM!" The kraken came down on them like a falling building. Adom moved on instinct, grabbing a fistful of Sam's collar and hurled them both sideways across the surface. A tentacle the width of a watchtower hammered into the spot where they'd been standing, and the sea didn't splash so much as detonate: a wall of black water blown forty feet into the air, the whole surface bucking under their boots hard enough to nearly tear the water-walking spell loose.

The dying whirlpool was breaking apart into a dozen smaller ones, the collapsing vortex flinging off spirals of water that rose and twisted up into the dark like waterspouts. The entire sea had become a heaving, churning thing — and the two of them were standing on top of it.

"Wait—" Adom got his feet under him, threw up a flat shimmering barrier against the next sweeping arm, and reached with the druid sense. He pushed it outward, toward the vast cold mind behind that lidless eye, feeling for anything he could take hold of. Easy. Easy. We didn't come here to fight! But alas, there was nothing to talk to. Where a beast's mind should have been, there was only a wall of blind hunger, and it wanted them gone. They were less than nothing to it. Insects on its water.

"It won't listen—" Adom started.

"Sam, there's nothing in there, it's just—" A bolt of fire shrieked past his ear and burst against the kraken's mantle. Adom turned, very slowly, to look at his friend." REALLY?"

"I PANICKED!" Sam already had another spell crackling between his shaking hands.

"IT'S ATTACKING US, ADOM, SO I ATTACKED IT BACK, THAT'S HOW IT—" The kraken suddenly screamed. The sound tore out of it from somewhere deep, a vast wrenching shriek that came up through the water as much as the air. Every arm it had reared up at once, a forest of them blotting out the stars. Then they all came down. Adom was already moving. He shoved Sam behind him, dropped his stance, and dragged both hands up through a fast spiral of mana.

The water beneath them went hard as stone in a wide disc — solid footing — and as the first arm dropped at them like a felled mast, he stepped into it instead of away, and brought his hand down in a flat sweeping cut. A blade of compressed force, edge-on, thin as a thought. It met the descending tentacle and passed clean through. The severed length crashed into the water beside them with a slap that sent both of them stumbling, trailing thick dark ropes of ichor, and the kraken's shriek climbed.

Adom didn't want to kill it. That was the maddening part. Even now, with the thing screaming and bleeding and trying to fold them down into the sea, some stubborn part of him kept pulling his strikes — aiming for the arms and not the eye, for stop and not for die. He skated backward across the hardened water, threw up a barrier to catch a blow that would have flattened a house, felt the impact ring all the way down to his shoulder, and answered with a lance of wind that knocked a groping arm wide.

"SAM! KEEP BACK—" Sam got the idea half a second late, flung out a hand, and a gout of fire took the next tentacle across its underside, suckers blistering and curling black. It bought them a breath. Not much more. Because there were nine of the things left, and two of them, and the sea would not stop moving — Then the water at the heart of the dying whirlpool bulged. Not down this time. Up.

A great dome of black sea swelled out of the vortex, as though something beneath it had decided to stand — rising, rising, water sheeting off its flanks, until the dome split open and Old Mazor came up out of the deep. He rose like a mountain heaving itself out of the sea, the whole ocean pouring off a body the length of a city block, scales gleaming black and ancient in the starlight. And the kraken looked, all at once, very small. It had just enough time to begin to turn when Mazor's jaws opened.

Like a cavern of a mouth unhinging wide enough to swallow half the sky, it ringed in rows of teeth each the size of a fishing boat, and then it closed over the kraken with the sound of a mountain-sized door slamming shut. The crunch went through the water, and through the air, and up through the soles of Adom's boots.

He saw it in pieces, frozen between one heartbeat and the next: the kraken's arms still thrashing, whipping uselessly against the leviathan's snout; the great pale eye blowing wide; that inhuman shriek cut suddenly, wetly short. Mazor's teeth came down through the meat of it, and the thing simply came apart. Dark fluid and ruined flesh burst out the sides of the leviathan's jaws. Severed tentacles spun off into the churning dark.

A length of arm thick as a temple column splashed down a stone's throw from where Adom stood, still curling and clutching at nothing at all. Then Mazor swallowed and the sea went still. For a moment, neither of them moved while the sea rocked gently beneath their feet, as if nothing had happened at all.

"... What the fuck," Sam said.

"Yeah."

"What the fuck, Adom."

"I heard you." Adom let out a breath that came out less steady than he'd have liked.

"... Fuuuck." He dragged a hand down his face. The maddening part — the genuinely funny part, now that the last of the thing was sliding down a leviathan's throat — was how hard he'd been trying not to kill it. But he'd had his reasons. Biggins had told him about krakens once. That for all they came up out of the dark looking like every nightmare ever dreamed, they were people, after a fashion. Sapient and ancient.

They kept whole societies down in the deep places, with courts and codes and laws of their own, rules older than any nation Adom could name. Killing one wasn't like killing a beast. It was the sort of thing that put a name on a list, somewhere lists were kept for a very long time. And krakens ruled the Deepmere, the great black sea north of Arkhos. A place Adom had always meant to see one day, when there was time for it. He'd rather not turn up there already marked as the man who'd murdered one of their own.

So he'd pulled every blow. Arms, not eyes. He'd even tried to talk to it. Mazor had simply opened his mouth. Just like Biggins, Adom thought. The truly old ones never seemed to agonize over much of anything. They saw the thing that wanted doing, they did it, and they had a cup of tea afterward. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Adom let the last of the fight drain out of him.

He steadied himself on the water, drew a slow breath, and reached out once more with the druid sense. Old Mazor. It's good to see you again. Your timing was… kind. For a moment, there was nothing. Then the great dark eye turned, slow as a moon, until it found him. A slow, deep voice resonated in Adom's head. Adom… Sylla. The leviathan was quiet a while after that. Do not grieve this one, he said at last.

Krakens do not wander so far from their own waters unless their people have cast them out, and they do not cast out for small things. Whatever this one had done, it was enough to be exiled for. His gaze settled on both Adom and Sam. He would have taken you apart and thought nothing of it.

"... Oh." Adom hadn't realized how much of that he'd been carrying.

"I see. Thank you." You are troubled, Mazor said.

"Ah… yes. Yes, a little. It's been a long day." Adom managed a small smile.

"Most of them are, lately." He turned and gestured to the young man frozen at his shoulder. To Sam, none of the exchange had happened at all. He'd just watched Adom go still and then he'd watched Adom point at him, and now an eye the size of a house was rolling slowly around to settle on him instead. Sam swallowed.

"H-hello. Sir." Adom watched his friend silently perish of the word sir.

"I mean — not sir. Just — hello. It's an honor. Sir. Sorry." Mazor considered him for a long, long moment. Why is he so weird? And Adom laughed out loud.

"What?" Sam's gaze darted between them.

"What did he say? Was it bad? It looked like it might've been bad."

"He says you're a weird one." Sam stared.

"... Huh?"

"Well, for what it's worth, he doesn't actually use words. It's more like impressions, intentions, and I'm the one putting them into language. So it could've been strange, really. Odd. Peculiar. Hard to say."

"... What's the difference?"

"There's a difference." Adom shrugged.

"Point is, if you didn't want to get called weird, maybe don't stand there looking like you're about to be eaten." Adom turned back to the leviathan. I came to ask your help, actually, he sent. I've run into a rune I can't crack. One of Law's. I was hoping you could point me the right way. A flicker of interest moved through the great eye. Show me. Adom reached into his inventory and drew out the book, thumbing it open to the heart-shaped rune. Mazor bent his attention to the page.

A mark smaller than one of his own teeth, in a book he could have swallowed without noticing — and still the great pupil found it, narrowed, and fixed. Adom doubted there was much, large or small, that escaped an eye like that. He took a while to look. I remember this one, Mazor said at last. Of all the marks I have seen set down, across all the years I have seen them set, this is among the few I remember the most. Adom's pulse jumped.

"Really?" Yes. A slow current of certainty. It is an enhancement rune.

"... Enhancement?" Adom looked down at the heart, the radiating lines. He'd been so certain.

"I thought — the heart, the context all around it — I was sure it was healing." It heals nothing on its own. It makes greater. No more than that, and no less. The great eye shifted, unhurried, back to Adom. It is made to be cut into living flesh. Bonded into the one who bears it. Once that is done, the bearer need only lay a hand on a thing whose effect can be raised, and raise it. One of those draughts your people drink, perhaps. The more power you pour in, the greater the working.

"Oh," Adom said quietly, looking down at the rune again, and this time it was different; because this time he had the one thing he'd lacked. Understanding of the rune's nature. And now, at last, the artifacts had something to work with. Now that he knew what the rune was for, [Revealer's Eyes] could finally do its work.

With the purpose clear in his mind, the details began to resolve one after another, every line settling into its function, every symbol into its place — things he'd stared straight past for months, plain now only because he finally had the knowledge to read them. And once that had built into a real grasp of the thing, [Riddler's Bane] drove it deeper still — past the gist, down into the true mechanics — as it was supposed to, once there was finally mastery enough to deepen. The whole structure opened.

He saw how the radiating lines carried the working outward; where the mana entered, how it pooled and scaled; what inscribed on flesh truly meant — why it had to be living, why bonded, what it would reach and what it wouldn't. A grin spread slowly across his face.

"... Adom?" Sam was watching his face.

"Adom. What is it? What's that look?" Adom didn't look up from the page.

"I think I've got it." Sam went very still.

"... You think, or you've got it?"

"I've got it." Adom looked up and met his eyes. Sam held the look a moment. Then his knees just went, the relief buckling him at the waist.

"Oh shi—" The water-walking spell was only on his legs. The rest of Sam was not. So he dropped straight through the surface and vanished with a tremendous splash, the sea closing over his head. He came up a second later soaked to the shoulders, hair plastered flat, glasses askew, coughing seawater, and laughing. Helplessly laughing while the whole long horrible day poured out of him in great wet gulps of it as he tread water beside Adom's boots.

"You okay down there?" Adom asked." No," Sam wheezed, grinning up at him.

"No, I'm great. I'm so great." Adom smiled, closed the book, then he looked up at the great dark eye. Thank you, Mazor. Truly. You may have just saved a life tonight. A low warmth moved through the water, and up through the soles of his boots; the leviathan's version of a smile, as near as Adom had ever been able to tell. Then I am glad of it, Mazor said. Go and use it well.

Adom passed the gist of it down to Sam, who was still in the water, treading it and blinking up at the two of them through wet lashes and a conversation he couldn't hear.

"Thank you," he called up, far too loudly.

"Thank you! I don't know how to even— ah!" Sam tried, from the water, to bow. It mostly just dunked his chin under and brought him up spluttering, and he kept going anyway, entirely sincere. He's weird, but he has a good heart, Mazor observed.

"He does," Adom agreed. With the rune understood, it was now time to go. Sam's mother wouldn't wait, and the sea between here and Arkhos was wide. But as Adom turned to leave, the rest of the day caught up with him at last Specifically, Biggin's revelation about Mephtilem being a demon. And that thought led to the other one. To the thing Mazor had wanted from him since the very first day they'd met. Law had made the old creature a promise, ages ago; that one day Adom would come, and that he would help set him free.

Adom hadn't understood it, at first. He'd pictured a chain. A cage. Something with edges, or that he could break. But it was nothing so simple. Mazor was the last leviathan alive. Not the last of an age or the last of a sea, but the last, entirely, of everything his kind had ever been. And they had not faded gently into the deep. They were exterminated. Hunted down and slaughtered by demons, every last one, across a war so far back that no human memory held even its echo, until only Mazor was left.

Ever since that day, there had been only one thing left in the old Leviathan. One single intention. There was a demon, as old as Mazor himself, who had been there at the slaughter and had made certain Mazor would be the last. His name was Vharoth. And until Vharoth was dead, Mazor would not, could not, let himself die. That was the freedom Law had promised.

The right, after all these long centuries, to finally lie down and follow his people into whatever lay past the dark of the deep, once the last of his enemies had gone ahead of him. Adom turned back to the great eye. Mazor. I think I've found one of them. He chose the words with care. Not yours, maybe; I don't know yet. But a demon. An old one, wearing a man's face. At the word demon, a cold light woke far down in the great eye, and did not entirely fade.

I'll be hunting him, one way or another, in the years ahead, Adom went on. And if he turns out to be the one you're owed, you'll be the first to know it. You have my word. The leviathan was quiet a long, long while. You are a strange little thing, Adom Sylla, he said at last, and it came almost gentle. Law chose well. The great eye began its slow descent toward the black water. Go. We will speak of debts another night.

The dome of his back slid under without a ripple, and then there was only the open sea, with the two of them standing on it, and a very long way to go before morning.

"Come on." Adom turned toward the distant smudge of the boat.

"We've got a potion to make."