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Magadin smiled patiently “Not a villain Not a witch, or aall three But believe what you will When aa story too fantastic to sho is to say which is the more ridiculous?”

I purpled, swelling up with rage like an overripe plum “I am not a mermaid! Mermaids are skinny little fops with shells to cover their tiny tits! Mer into ood ships! Galleons, even! Wasteful milksops, the lot of them, and you couldn’t build half a brain if you had the whole race on a slab I ayr I could crush your skull with my hands and drink this rat town under the table afterwards And if I wanted to kill myself a passel of sailors, I’d bloody well do it with cannon, saber, and a fist in the teeth, not by batting ie, h seas, the best thing for all of us would be to let Sheapshank here put an arrow through her giggling head”

With that, I gave her a good splash with my tail and ordered the boys to take me aboard

Noere a week on the waves, and Turkshead vo chu unusual that I could see: the ocean’s blue no reat salt thing enough to describe it, I’d love it enough to swiet me?

Maggie, for her part, sailed that ship like nothing I’ve seen My boys are no layabouts when it coain from the Ajanabh fleet when they were so poor they couldn’t buy splinters But she wouldn’t hear of it, running up and down that deck like a dervish You wouldn’t have thought anyone could adin did it, and no lie

Which is how it happened that Turkshead was the one to sight the monster

first, while chucking his chu up to ed the old barrel screeching across the deck, spilling my brine everywhere, so that I could stare over the rail and see, horribly, the water breaking over a shell so enorht we’d hit land

It was difficult to clap an eye on, a shell like a turtle rising up, but the color of the sea itself, so that it seee to be alive Turkshead was crying, babbling that it was going to eat us—but I couldn’t see a head to the thing at all It was nothing but shell, rising and rising, water running off its back, slick tiles of shiny blue and black and green, repeating over and over like a puzzle The ship was caught in a roil of froth and foa into us as it rushed away from the beast

“Leviathan,” whispered Sheapshank, and he mumbled a prayer so that I could not hear—the boys know I don’t approve of their bloody damned Stars

Magadin cried out to us, dashing frohts “It’s the Echeneis! Don’t you read books? That’s not even half its girth you see! It can s us and not even feel the prick of the ullet Man those lines, Sheap, or we feed the monster!”

The boys were so glad of soet to that flapping jib first I just watched, frozen as a side of seal h now that it cast its shadow over us, and I shivered in the sudden cold Goose bureen and blue on ly black thing, growing like a dead sun I looked hard for the head, searched like a fish prodding through coral for a iant shell

Sheapshank screamed—I’d never heard my poor boy screa sound like iron sawing through iron, and suddenly the waves broke over the head, a whale’s head, with a mouth that never ended It stretched, all smiles, around and around until it see, yellohite curtains of baleen glea sickly Its eye was the color of an old corpse A stink wafted out, like rancid e As soon as it broke the salt scriing on the sides of the ship and hurled it with all his not-inconsiderable strength towards the mouth of the Echeneis

It glanced off like a hanky thrown at an iron door

Magadin sighed heavily, as if she expected it Her sad little ship was losing her battle with the wind, and sliding towards the black blot of the monster Her face, such a pretty face, really, in spite of everything, settled into a grih her scaly arms did not loosen on the wheel, I saw her despair

The Echeneis saw nothing It only began the long opening of itswith a terrible noise like palaces falling, and the dark of its throat yawned, pulling us in Nous ’round, no matter how tri stomach of the sea-beast