“Wa-wa-why not?” Fukkelot asked.

“Because,” Gavin said, giving his best devil-may-care grin. He always gave that grin when he was terrified. “I ain’t a good enough swimmer to carry it with me.”

He tossed the rifle to Fukkelot while the sailor cursed in appreciation and Gunner cursed in frustration and Gavin’s own throat swelled with trepidation.

It was stupid, but it was simple: stay and let what would happen happen, or risk crocodiles and sharks and sewage. Sewage shouldn’t be so bad during flood season, right? Or did that make it worse? Gavin stood on the gunwale, balancing without even touching the lines. He turned to the prophet, who was still watching him with burning eyes from across the deck.

“Orholam,” Gavin said, “do I have your full attention?”

“Always.”

“Good.” He cracked his neck right and left. “Because fuck you.”

He dove into the water.

Chapter 43

The water was warm and buoyant. That was Gavin’s first warning. Now that he was in it, swimming a stroke that one of the Guile house slaves had taught him long ago in a different life, he remembered that the confluence of the Great River and the Cerulean Sea caused odd currents and warm spots throughout the Great Delta—and that the sharks didn’t like the freshwater coming from the river. On the other hand, the crocodiles didn’t like the saltwater. Crocodiles were much more likely closer in to shore. So Gavin would be giving both kinds of predators a chance at him.

And yet. There was something of that old blue peace here in the sea. Better, of course, to float on a narrow blue luxin skimmer. Better to feel the sun like a caress on the skin, the water a cool counterpoint. Better by far to be able to see the blue. He felt the briefest pang of loss, and then pure, unadulterated rage washed over him.

Limbs cutting smoothly through the waters, he suddenly wished that a shark would come. He wanted to fight. No, he wanted to kill. He wanted the terror of almost dying and the mastery of killing, of triumph.

Insanity.

He headed straight in, not pausing to look behind. He shed the encumbrance of his shredded tunic and trousers to give himself every chance at speed. He saw a river galley ahead and swam for it. He was a faster swimmer than he remembered. Perhaps the leaner muscles of rowing were better suited to the task than the bulk he’d developed from shooting a skimmer from a dead stop in the water to flying across the waves. That was a freedom he would never feel again.

The river galley started moving when he was still two hundred paces out. Its inertia should give him a chance. He kicked.

No damn sharks. Please no damn sharks.

Water was streaming through his beard, causing a drag he’d never felt in his clean-shaven past.

Let them be blind to me, just for a little longer.

But the galley began moving, and within moments, it was no longer perpendicular to him. He cut the angle, but ended up only even with the riverboat, and then behind it.

And then it pulled away, and left him exhausted.

But he’d come to some sort of channel. He saw buoys to either side. He treaded water for a minute. When he looked back, the Bitter Cob was in the distance. But the oars were out, and it was turning toward him.

Oh, hells.

But another river galley was sweeping through the channel, from farther out. It would pass fifty paces south of him—so he swam back toward the Bitter Cob. In another minute, he saw he’d miscalculated, or the river galley was turning, because it was headed straight for him. It was going to hit him.

He started to swim off to the side, when he saw a fin and a dark shadow, that way. He turned, heart in his throat, and saw another to the other side.

It was too late to move either way now. The galley was on top of him, sending out little sprays to each side of the bow as it cut the water.

Gavin took the deepest breath he could, and flipped around, his feet pointing toward the hull, and dove backward. The hull slapped against his feet even as he sank, but he absorbed the shock and pushed off it, using the hull’s force to propel himself deeper into the water.

He arched his back as he sank, hoping he’d made it deep enough not to be crushed by the rest of the hull or ripped to shreds against barnacles. He flipped over, opening his eyes, ears full of water, pressure on his chest. The monstrous shadow was passing above him. It was impossible to tell exactly how far away the hull was.

There was good news, if you could call it such. There were no barnacles on the hull. Of course, it must be a riverboat. Easier to keep clean and moving fast.

It meant he could surface, and if he misjudged, it wouldn’t be his death by scraping and infection. Though if he shed blood in this water, the sharks were close.

He kicked, and felt his hand brush something rough and muscular. He barely saw the shape as the shark’s shadow disappeared into the murk. He lost a bit of air. One chance at this.

A bank of oars went down on one side, agitating the water. A sharp turn. It slowed the boat at just the right moment. Lungs afire, Gavin swam hard for the surface, nearly cracking his skull against the last edge of the hull as it passed above him.

He shot out of the water and clawed for anything, blinded by the spray of water.

His fingers caught in something, but his left hand pulled free immediately. He held on by his right hand alone, body dangling and then pulled through the waves. He almost lost his grip before he was able to slap his left hand up into the net as well.

He blinked and coughed, trying to get his bearings. His legs were still dragging in the water and his hands were holding on to a thick net, the individual ropes cutting into his fingers as he tried to support his entire body’s weight on their narrow cords.

The net wasn’t empty. There was a tiger shark in it. Alive. One of Gavin’s hands was right by a pectoral fin. The other was stuffed nearly into its gaping, gasping mouth. Gavin’s weight was holding his hand away from those rows of razory teeth, but one thrash—

The shark thrashed.

Gavin dropped his hand and his body spun. With the motion of the boat dragging his body through the water, he couldn’t stop his momentum. The other hand got twisted painfully into the net. He almost cried out.

Then, being dragged backward, he almost cried out again at what he saw. Four fins in the water—no, six. All following the boat. Being dragged like this, he was the bait. And the boat wasn’t traveling nearly as fast as the sharks could swim.

He saw blood course down his extended arm. It wasn’t his. The shark in the net above him had been harpooned. With Gavin at the net’s lowest point, he became the path for the blood to course into the water. He was no expert on sharks, but he had seen them in frenzy—and it all started with blood.

“Blood’s drawin’ ’em, Kleos. See if you can get another before we get to the freshwater!” a voice called out above Gavin on the deck.

He heard the heavy breathing of a fat man on the deck above him, audible even above the hiss of the waves, and he could just see the tip of a harpoon bobbing in and out of sight.

Gavin almost called out to the man. But he knew how he looked. He looked like an escaped slave. Most mariners would claim him as the bounty of the sea, and immediately put him back on an oar. Without papers to prove he wasn’t a slave, there would be nothing he could do except try to convince them to ransom him—to whom? Would Karris hear about his plight before his father would? Would the men believe that the Prism himself had come to their boat, or would they dismiss it as the ravings of a madman?