The Wrath of the Lizard Lord (3 page)

Revived by the cool air, Oginski crawled on all fours across the rough rock towards the moored submarine. A rattle of metal warned Dakkar that the guards were uncomfortably close. He glanced back to see a gun barrel poking through the crevice, then another and another.

As he sprinted to the submarine, Dakkar bent down and dragged Oginski to his feet. Together they slipped and slithered up the ladder to the top of the tower.

The sea cavern exploded in a blaze of gunfire and musket balls buzzed around his ears. A bullet nicked the rim of Dakkar’s ear and smacked into Oginski’s shoulder. Blood speckled Dakkar’s face and stung his eyes.

‘Oginski!’ Dakkar yelled, and pushed his mentor into the hatch at the top, rolling in after him.

With a cry, Dakkar tumbled headlong into the stuffy closeness of the
Nautilus
’s tower and landed with a thump on top of Oginski. Peering through the porthole in the tower, Dakkar could see the guards squirming to get through the crevice. Fortunately, in their eagerness to capture Dakkar and Oginski, three of them had tried to get through at once, becoming wedged.

Clambering up the interior ladder, Dakkar slammed the hatch shut and then hurried back down to Oginski. He lay groaning, blood staining his shoulder.

‘Are you badly hurt?’ Dakkar asked, kneeling beside Oginski.

‘No time,’ Oginski groaned. ‘Get the
Nautilus
.
.
. away.’

Oginski was right. The men would disentangle themselves and clamber on to the sub at any moment.

Dakkar rushed over to the controls and the captain’s seat that sat at the base of the tower. He grabbed the craft’s wheel and turned the disc in the centre. Behind him the engine began to hum. This was the Voltalith coming to life, a fragment of the Eye of Neptune, a supercharged electric rock that powered the craft. Dakkar had been forced to retrieve it from the ocean bed by the last Count Cryptos.

Something cracked above Dakkar’s head. A musket ball lodged itself in the planks of the tower. Dakkar prayed that it hadn’t broken the watertight seal. He slammed the craft’s drive lever into
Backwater
and slowly the
Nautilus
began to reverse away from the rocky shore of the cave and into the sea pool. Dakkar knew that the cave exit, and the open sea, lay behind him. He began to turn the craft round, when something heavy thudded on to the back of the submersible. Then another weight followed, and another.

Now someone was clambering along the craft’s deck and trying to get inside the tower. Dakkar pushed the lever to
Full Ahead
. For a second the craft eased sluggishly towards the cave exit, but its speed gathered and Dakkar was rewarded with the sound of someone slipping over and falling heavily on to the rear deck.

Daylight shone across the
Nautilus
’s front deck.

‘We’ve reached open sea, Oginski,’ Dakkar said, preparing to submerge and shake off his unwelcome passengers.

As he reached for the submerging handle, a rather damp and dishevelled guard landed with a thump in front of the tower’s window. His musket was trained directly at Dakkar’s face and he yelled something that Dakkar couldn’t hear. The man’s meaning, however, was crystal clear. If Dakkar didn’t stop, the guard would fire, drowning Dakkar in a storm of glass and shot.

Chapter Four

Too Many Sharks

For a moment, Dakkar sat motionless in the captain’s chair. The thick glass of the porthole muffled the guard’s shouts but Dakkar didn’t need to hear him to know what he wanted.

The powder in his gun is very likely wet
, Dakkar thought, raising his hands to indicate that he wasn’t going to try anything,
but is that a gamble I’m willing to take?

The sound of more feet scrabbling above his head told Dakkar that guards had clambered back on to the tower of the
Nautilus
. His heart thumped.
I can’t let them get the sub
, he thought.

Suddenly Dakkar heard faint yells from above and the guard on the front deck glanced back and forth, scanning the water for something. A scream replaced the shouts and the
Nautilus
rolled, tipping Dakkar from his seat. Dakkar caught a glimpse of the guard at the window as he slid from the deck of the
Nautilus
.

‘What was that?’ Oginski groaned, dragging himself into the captain’s place. He looked terrible, his pale skin accentuating the bruise that bloomed on his forehead. Blood stained the shoulder of his white shirt, and his breath rattled as he sat slumped in the seat.

‘I don’t know,’ Dakkar said, peering out of the window. The guard had vanished from the front deck and the hammering at the tower hatch had ceased.

‘We should submerge,’ Oginski said as he turned the brass ballast wheel handle to fill the sub’s hollow hull with water. Dakkar hurried to help him but Oginski shook him off, wincing with each turn.

Slowly, the water rose above the portholes of the
Nautilus
and Dakkar caught his breath. They sank through a mist of red blood. Whatever had rolled the submarine had ditched the other guards into the open sea. Dakkar could see three of them lashing at the water as their heavy uniforms weighed them down. They floated a few feet below the surface.

‘Oginski, we must save them!’ Dakkar said, pressing his face against the glass. A shadow fell across the porthole, making Dakkar pull back. Something huge had passed above them.

‘What is it?’ Oginski asked, leaning heavily on the wheel and peering into the murky waters.

‘I’m not sure,’ Dakkar whispered. ‘A fish but it was big! Or maybe even a whale.’

The men outside had seen it too and were thrashing about in the water even more desperately.

The
Nautilus
pitched again as something grazed along her hull. Dakkar gasped as the nose and then the fin and then the tail of an enormous shark glided past the porthole towards the men.

‘That’s no ordinary shark,’ Dakkar gasped. ‘It’s massive! It must be at least fifty feet long.’

‘Too big for
.
.
. a white shark
.
.
.’ Oginski said, gritting his teeth. The stain on his shirt had spread. ‘We must leave.’

‘But those men
.
.
.’ Dakkar began.

As he glanced back, he saw the shark open its enormous jaws. Two men could have stood, one on the other’s shoulders, and still not spanned the creature’s mouth. It swept a poor guard up in one bite, leaving a faint, crimson trail.

Dakkar craned his neck to see the other two men and his eyes widened. Another shark, as big as the first, cruised lazily through the smoky haze of blood that filled the water. Dakkar screwed his eyes shut for a moment.
There was nothing we could do to save them
, he thought, but a pang of regret still nagged at him. He opened his eyes again. The shark had angled slightly and was now heading straight for the
Nautilus
.

‘It’s coming this way,’ Dakkar yelled as the huge jaw opened and the fish hurtled towards them. ‘Keep our course!’

Dakkar hurried from the tower down to the front of the
Nautilus
. He scrabbled at the boxes that lay in the front of the submarine and pulled out what looked like a long spear with flights at one end and a ball at the other. A Sea Arrow, an explosive missile invented by Fulton. Dakkar slipped it into the chamber in the wall of the craft and then pulled back the handle, loading the spring that fired the bomb.

‘Oginski, should I fire?’ he shouted.

No reply came back.

Cursing, Dakkar bit his lip. There was no time to lose; the shark would hit the
Nautilus
at any moment. He stabbed the firing button with his thumb and was rewarded with a comic
boing
sound as the missile flew from the sub.

Scrambling back to the tower, Dakkar just saw the arrow disappear into the creature’s gullet. Its red maw closed on the arrow and then the sea boiled with the explosion. A blood-red fog filled the water and chunks of shark thumped heavily against the
Nautilus
as she rolled and bucked, throwing Dakkar around the tower room like a drunkard in a storm. Oginski slid from his seat and, too weak to hold on, rolled at Dakkar’s feet.

Dakkar scrabbled over Oginski into the seat as the
Nautilus
plummeted down into the darkness of the sea, spiralling like a bird diving for a fish. Her planks groaned as Dakkar wrestled with the wheel.

Something banged against the rear of the craft and the world spun around as the
Nautilus
whirled nose over tail. Dakkar clung to the wheel, and Oginski’s limp body thumped against the walls, floor and ceiling as each took the place of the other. Maps, spanners, rope and anything that wasn’t tied down flew around the cabin, bouncing off Dakkar’s head. Then, in the distance, he saw the ominous outline of a shark growing ever larger.

With a yell, Dakkar wrenched the ballast wheel and blew the ballast tanks, sending water bubbling around them. His head pounded as the
Nautilus
rose upward, righting herself as she went. The shark tracked the sub­marine’s path with ease. Its red mouth, lined with dagger teeth, widened as it scraped past the sub’s hull, sending her juddering to port.

‘See how you like this,’ Dakkar hissed. He reached up to the wall and turned a crank handle rapidly clockwise, panting as he did so. ‘Eighteen, nineteen, twenty
.
.
.’

The shark circled back round and Dakkar realised that it was trying to get behind the sub to bite into the rudders of the
Nautilus. If that happens, we’ll be set adrift, helpless
, he thought, wheeling the craft round to face the oncoming creature once more.

The
Nautilus
shook again and Dakkar shuddered at the sight of the raw gums, serrated teeth and the cold, black button eyes of the shark. He pushed the red button next to the crank handle.

Thousands of volts of electricity pulsed blue around the sub and Dakkar watched as the shark thrashed and writhed in the storm he’d created. The charge died and, still twitching, the shark drifted to the depths below. Dakkar pressed his head against the glass and watched it vanish into the darkness.

‘Oginski!’ Dakkar yelled, spinning round and dropping down to the prone figure of his mentor on the floor.

Blood pooled from the count’s shoulder and he looked paler than before, if that were possible. Dakkar lifted Oginski’s shoulders up but his head lolled back. He’d stopped breathing. Dakkar shook Oginski but the big man appeared lifeless. He patted Oginski’s face, struggling to remember what he’d been taught about resuscitating those who had stopped breathing. Oginski had taught him a lot as they sat by the sea after their swimming sessions back home in Cornwall. In fact, Dakkar recalled one day when Oginski had timed how long Dakkar could stay underwater – Dakkar had nearly drowned. Remembering what Oginski had done then, Dakkar pulled his mentor’s arms up above his head and brought them down again rapidly.

Again, he pumped Oginski’s arms. Nothing.

He pressed an ear to Oginski’s chest, not noticing the blood that smeared his own cheek.
No heartbeat!

Dakkar felt numb. Oginski was dead.

Chapter Five

Life or Death?

Dakkar stared at the lifeless form of his mentor. Tears stung his eyes and he stifled a sob.
How can he be dead?
Dakkar thought.
It can’t happen
.

‘I won’t let it happen,’ Dakkar snarled, grabbing Oginski’s body and dragging it down to the lower cabin of the
Nautilus
.

The man weighed heavy in Dakkar’s arms and exhaustion made Dakkar weak. He winced every time Oginski’s head accidentally bumped against the walls of the sub or on a step. As he struggled, he remembered an experiment Oginski had once shown him. An experiment first carried out by an Italian called Galvani. He had made a frog’s leg twitch with life by passing an electric current through it.

‘Galvani believed that animals’ muscles have electri­city coursing through them,’ Oginski had said. ‘He may be right. I have conducted many experiments on animal tissue. I even set a pig’s heart beating for the briefest amount of time. If it’s true then, with a strong enough charge, could we not start a dead man’s heart?’

‘Oginski, that is monstrous,’ Dakkar had objected. ‘One must respect the dead. Experiment with human bodies? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Don’t worry, my prince.’ Oginski had laughed. ‘I’m not about to go skulking around graveyards at night, looking for fresh corpses. It’s just a theory
.
.
.’

Dakkar banged his head on the doorway to the engine room at the rear of the
Nautilus
, snapping himself back to the present. The engine room hummed with power and Dakkar’s hair lifted from his scalp as he entered. A blue light filled this chamber even though the Voltalith lay housed in a round flat case in the centre of the engine. Under Oginski’s tuition, Dakkar was beginning to understand the function of each of these machine parts, but at the moment it looked like a confusing bird’s nest of wire, cogs and levers all ticking and buzzing with energy. Two thick tubes coiled from the case that held the Voltalith. This was how Oginski harnessed the power of the electric rock somehow; it flowed through copper wire wrapped in thick Indian rubber.