Fire Heart (The Titans: Book One) (43 page)

Soon the army had no more need of torches, and the flames were extinguished. The ground, Will noticed, became steadily softer, and soon the dirt gave way to sand. The vegetation thinned out and became less varied as well, and it was not long before the palm trees took over completely. And there was something different about the air, too. Will sniffed, confused—it smelled salty, briny. It was a scent he had never experienced before, and it intrigued him.

Soon the light of day shone clearly through the sparse canopy, and alien creatures flitted and jumped about, screeching and singing at the army that marched below them. Will had never been to such a colorful place, and he delighted in the myriad palette of organisms laid out before him. There were birds with great bills that were colored like the rainbow, and lizards that clambered sluggishly among the leaves and branches, blending in with the foliage to become nearly invisible to the unwary eye.

The air was cooler, too; it was still very warm, but the constant breeze rolling in from ahead of them was far milder than anything the Southlands had to offer. And there was that smell again—what was that? And that sound, too—like cannon fire so distant that Will could only just hear its aftershocks.

The treeline broke abruptly as though halted by an invisible barrier, and Will could only stare in amazement.

They had entered a dream world, one which could not possibly exist. It didn't make sense—where the vegetation ended, the white sand took over and spread out in a field for leagues to either side, with the line of palm trees following suit. But what Will absolutely, positively could not get his mind around was the water that began a short distance away, where the sand ended just as abruptly as the trees had. The water seethed and roiled like a living thing, throwing its weight up the shore in an unending and futile attempt to leave itself behind in a white froth. It boomed and crashed as it slammed into the sand, and hissed as it trailed back, coiling in on itself for another attempt at freedom.

And the size—spirits above, the
size!
Will had never in his life seen anything so vast—even the rolling dunes of the Kahara desert had sparse, rocky mountains in the distance, but this great field of water simply had no end. It went off forever into the distance, a great blanket of white-capped waves the color of Borbos' eyes that disappeared beneath the gently curving arc of the horizon. Will gaped, spellbound by its majesty.

“Gefan's balls,” Katryna whispered beside him, and then she was laughing, her face as gleeful as a child's. “Are you seeing this?” she cried. “Castor, Will—tell me I'm not going mad. What
is
that thing?”

Will smiled softly at yet another memory, and resisted with difficulty the urge to look around for Clare. “It's the sea,” he said softly. “Clare told me about it. It goes on forever, until the world ends.”

“Not quite,” said a thickly-accented voice behind them, and Will turned to see Borbos, a look on his
face that was very much akin to theirs. “But it does go on for a very long time.”

“I...I've never seen anything so beautiful,” Castor finally managed to say, breaking his silence. “Lord Borbos, this is...”

“Incredible?” the Titan finished with a soft smile. “And please, Lord Commander, it be just Borbos to you.”

“Dismount!” Feothon called ahead, breaking the spell and drawing Will back into the present, where he had responsibilities far more important than ogling the scenery. He joined suit as every rider stepped off their horse, and his boots thudded softly into the sand—yet another feeling that, while not entirely alien, was strange to someone who had grown up on the hard-packed earth of the Southlands.

As he held his steed's reigns and stroked its neck, he wondered briefly where the animals would go. “The forest will provide for our mounts until we return,” Feothon called, answering his unspoken question, and the Titan ran his hand lightly along his stallion's flank. The horse seemed to know what he meant, for it turned without hesitation and entered the palm forest once again, the dense foliage swallowing it up instantly. Soon a herd's worth of horses was following the stallion's lead, and only humans were left on the hot sand.

Will looked around, telling himself unconvincingly that he was not looking for Clare. “She's over there,” Katryna said softly, interpreting his action for what it really was, and pointed to his left. Clare was standing a short distance away with Hook—something that surprised Will, considering the two had never really been formally introduced. But there they stood, neither of them talking—the absence of a tongue was something of a hindrance to formal conversation—with Hook carefully examining the melted-wax scar on her hand. Will always found it strange that Hook was, in fact, a talented healer. The man could sew a sword wound back together almost as fast as he could create one, and his knowledge of herbs and medicines never ceased to surprise Will.

Seeing him there, though, holding Clare's hand gently in his own, sent a pulse of jealousy through his veins. He stamped it out a moment later, silently berating himself for such a ridiculous reaction.

Should I go over there?
Will wondered.
Will she even want to talk to me?

He decided against it. She did not seem upset, and he didn't feel like changing that by saying something stupid. Instead he turned to Borbos, who by that time had started marching toward the shore with his buccaneers in tow. Caleeta, the woman Will had met only fleetingly before, marched resolutely beside him with a similarly dark expression.

“Borbos,” Will called, and the Titan turned to him.

“Aye, lad?”

Will gestured expansively at the vast sea before them. “Where exactly is your city, again?”

Borbos pointed toward the west, out over the churning waves. “You cannot see it yet, but it be there.”

Will nodded slowly. “Right...and, ah, not to sound conceited or anything but...how are we going to get there?”

Borbos smiled softly, his tanned skin crinkling around the corners of his mouth, and turned around without a word. By then nearly everyone else had gathered into a single massive group, and though there was some scattered conversation most of them seemed to be waiting on Borbos as well.

Borbos walked out to the edge of the shore where the water lapped softly at his boots, and as soon as he touched it his entire bearing seemed to change; his body slackened, relaxed, and he seemed suddenly at ease—Will even heard him breathe a contented sigh. The Titan tilted his head back and took his tricorn hat off, letting the sun hit him in the face. “A good day for sailing,” he murmured, his voice barely audible above the waves—which, Will noticed with a start, were rapidly increasing in magnitude.

The water around Borbos' feet was suddenly much deeper; it boiled around his calves in little pools of bubbles that swirled and churned as the tide swept in and pulled away, growing in volume with each subsequent push.

And then Will saw, far out in the distance, what appeared to be the beginnings of a pair of unbelievably massive whirlpools. The sea seemed to sink in on itself as though its bottom had simply
fallen away, and then the water between the swirling vortexes began to bulge. Borbos was waist-deep in the sea now, though he had not moved, and Will watched with complete fascination as a massive wave crashed atop the Titan—and failed to move him even a finger's breadth.

There was a deep, low groan then, one that reverberated across the waves and up through the sandy shore, shaking Will to his very bones and making the ground tremble beneath his feet. “What the—?” he whispered, and suddenly the ground was bucking and jerking. He threw his arms out to the sides to keep his balance, and everyone around him, he saw, was engaged in a similar dance. Everyone, that was, except for Borbos.

The groan came again, louder this time, and now it was accompanied by a dull explosion—the sound of countless gallons of water being thrown into the air, and then crashing down again with a rippling, thundering roar. The ground shook again, and a great blast of misty air rushed toward the shore, buffeting Will and whipping his hair back across his scalp. He blinked to clear the water out of his eyes, and then froze, gaping stupidly.

There was...
something
in the sea—something so huge that it dwarfed anything Will had ever seen before. His mind refused to accept the idea of a living creature so vast, and yet there it sat before him, plain as day, and only its chitinous, mottled hump of a back broke through the surface. Somehow, Will knew that what he was seeing was only the tip of something much larger; the rest of the creature must still have been concealed beneath the waves.

His first sensation was one of complete shock. This, however, was followed shortly by a strong burst of fear, and he stumbled back so quickly that he tripped in the sand and fell on his backside with a soft thump. He was faintly aware of a chorus of similar reactions all around him. Only the Titans and their most trusted warriors stood unafraid and unaffected by the enormous creature, and Borbos even began to wade farther out into the sea.

Then the water began to tremble and bulge once again, this time in a long, thick line that led from the creature all the way to the shore. It ultimately culminated in a frothing vortex a mere few paces from where Borbos stood calmly in the surf, unaffected as always by the battering force of the sea.

It was a leg, or a giant claw—Will could not be sure which with the  water streaming off of its armored, barnacled surface, but he was certain that it was one of the two. It rose ponderously from the waves, its surface covered in long streamers of kelp and little crabs that scuttled madly for cover. Fish flopped along its length, gasping briefly for water before flipping themselves clumsily back into the sea.

By then the leg—it was a leg, Will realized as its narrow, pointed tip broke through the surface and settled with a dull thud into the sand at Borbos' feet—had almost completely left the sea behind, and it ceased its heavy, grating movements and went still. The creature gave another long, deep groan, and Borbos reached out with a smile to pat its armored carapace.

“We are ready to leave, Feothon,” he called, and Will blinked in amazement. Was that the City in the Waves? A city made entirely from one giant sea creature?

The tide
swept back into the sea
, revealing the leg in its entirety; it was strange, like the leg of a crayfish but wider, and with what Will though
t
was mottled grey skin on its underside that was just barely visible above the sloshing waves. The entire length of the giant, segmented limb rested just above the water's surface now, like a living bridge that led all the way to the creature itself, which continued to float—or perhaps stand, Will thought as he struggled to wrap his mind around the sheer size of the thing—out in the deeper water. Gulls had begun to circle overhead, and their rowdy cries rang through the air as they darted down to snatch those tiny organisms unfortunate enough to still be trapped along the surface of the larger beast's body.

Borbos stepped nimbly up onto the edge of the claw. Its shape had a purpose, Will realized—its surface was wide and flat, perfect for walking on, and it was crusted with barnacles and what Will recognized from Clare's stories as the failed beginnings of coral. Both provided traction for sea-slicked boots. Borbos had no trouble making the short climb to the crest of the leg-bridge, where he turned around and motioned for the rest of the army to follow. “Come along,” he called. “Our time be wearing
thin.” He started off across the creature's shell, his boots thumping lightly on its carapace.

The first to follow were his warriors, who Will guessed had already become accustomed to such an experience. The other Titans and their bodyguards trailed after them, and they were accompanied at the end by Feothon's army. Soon, only Will and his Dragon Guard were left standing on the white sand. He licked his lips nervously and walked up to the claw, which swayed gently with the waves. The sunlight shimmered off of its damp surface, and a purple starfish crawled sluggishly around its base. Will shook his head as he was hit once again by the absurdity of what his life had become.
Right. First yaru, then I catch on fire, and now I get to climb up on the largest...thing...in the whole of Pallamar.
He reached out tentatively and, after a moment's hesitation, placed the palm of his hand lightly on the thing's slick surface.

The reaction was instantaneous: the creature shuddered beneath his touch, making waves in the deeper water around the leg-bridge, and then it trumpeted. The call was much higher than its usual groans, and it was so loud that the gulls overhead screamed in surprise and wheeled away to fly off into the horizon. Will snatched his hand back and stumbled away, his breath catching with fear. Had he hurt it? Perhaps the power inside of him had somehow made it angry. Fire was, after all, water's mortal enemy. Wasn't it?

“I think it likes you,” said a soft voice over his left shoulder, and he turned to see Clare, her gold-flecked eyes either unable or unwilling to meet his own and a look of guilt written across her face. He flicked his gaze away, suddenly nervous, and swallowed. His mouth was quite dry.

“You, ah...you think so?” he asked, his voice catching unintentionally.

“It sounded like it. Maybe...um, maybe you should try touching it again.” Will's thoughts were wholly preoccupied with things other than touching the sea monster at the moment, but he obediently reached out and placed his hand on the thing's shell again. As before, it shuddered beneath his touch, though this time it did not make a sound. And then, in a move that made Will's eyes widen, the claw drew itself out of the sand and reached forward, as though it were leaning into his hand. The very tip of the claw lightly touched his thigh, and he was reminded of a cat rubbing up against his leg. The gesture was so unbelievably gentle that it took his breath away.