Into Eternity

Chapter Two - Wet

Chapter Two

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WetBuried amongst the debris was a shard of steel almost sword-like in length. I flexed the thing, which offered substantial resistance, so heaved with all my might to twist one end upon itself. The metal bit deep into my skin, but my force was fashioned from desperation and I was not to be denied. Once happy I'd made as good a hook as an unskilled man might, I then realised it useless without a hole to feed the rope through. That was less easily accomplished. I flickered around like a lighted match seeking to remain un-wetted as the waters poured in from every angle. The Marquis' name was never far from my cursing lips as I slipped and fell, only to watch a riveted unit shake free from the wall and collapse upon my prize. However, to my astonishment, the retrieved blade-c*m-hook had acquired a gash down one side that allowed at least in principle for the rope to gain some purchase along its flank. I wrapped the rope around said gash three times, then once more for good measure, fastened it beneath the hook and with a word of warning to Merryweather, who chose to ignore me, tossed the thing high into the air.

“Ouch!” I yelped, as it hit me on the head.

“Oh, bravo, genius, you nearly made it a quarter of the way that time.”

Although I wanted to rip out Merryweather's vocal cords, he was correct, I had miscalculated, and not by a bit. “You could always help,” I suggested.

“I could,” he said, flicking water from the chamber floor at my trousers.

“Try should.” However, he'd already turned away.

And so I started my beachcombing a second time searching for anything I might tie together to form an extension to my original grappling iron. I found nothing.

“Use the curtains,” came a Britannian voice.

“Why didn't you say that before,” I growled, as I sprinted across the deepening surface to tear two thirty-foot-high drapes from either side of the tunnelled entrance.

“I would have, but I found them in rather good taste and didn't wish them sullied.”

“I'll sully you in a minute!”

“Temper, temper. Anyway, I'm doing all the hard work.”

“Lifting Aura's head from the floor is not my definition of hard work.”

“She's heavy, and I'd rather you addressed her by her full name, not some abbreviated abhorrence.”

“Aura, Aura, Aura,” I rattled off, as I knotted the curtains together, and then attached them to the end of the rope. A sharp tug and the whole assembly knitted together. It was the best I could do; I was not a handy man.

“What a botch job,” Merryweather bemoaned. “A child could have done better. If only your father could see you now.”

That rankled, but I ignored him, took a step back and tossed the hook high into the air and out of the chamber: it held.

“I think I shall risk the water,” Merryweather stated. “It is no comment on your craftsmanship, but I have no desire to fall from so great a height. I shall sit here in the water and levitate into the atmosphere like an Arabian djinn in silent splendour.”

“Walter,” I said, lifting Aurora from his arms and tossing her over my shoulder, “I couldn't care less.”

The look on his face was priceless, almost worth a wet end. Almost. The dandy looked so perplexed that I thought I might laugh. But, as ever, Merryweather was quick to adjust his plans to the situation. He jumped to his feet in a spray of water, leapt over my head, and clambered up the rope.

“Wait for us, you Britannian git,” I called, as I struggled hand over hand after his fast-ascending form.

Merryweather climbed at such a pace that the rope jiggled and wiggled in my clutches and I thought the hook to come unsecured at any moment. However, fortune favoured us, as it did not. The greater problem was that I could not climb fast enough to outrun the ocean. The seawater poured through the cracked walls at such velocity that with every passing second the chamber stood in an ever-deepening flood. I looked back once and once was enough.

I battled on with the resigned expectation of soon becoming orca chow or worse. Aurora rocked back and forth across my shoulder like a see-saw; a perilous ascent made worse, as the bottom of the rope churned in the maelstrom of the chambered ocean.

“Merryweather, you coward!” I bellowed into the Arctic darkness. “b****y well help us!” Futile expletives, the Britannian was long gone. Aurora and mine's extraction would take considerably longer.

I took a deep, unnecessary breath, focused straight ahead, and almost let go of the rope; an eye observed me through those translucent walls. At first, I thought it a trick of what blue light remained. But it was not a thing of blue, a mere reflection in cobalt of some circular object, but an eye of jet black. A huge dark star, far bigger than that of any orca I'd witnessed, it hung in the midnight depths as though suspended in time. A gentle thing, quite unlike the cold calculations of an orca eye, which devised your demise in divisions of pain, it was the orb of a pacifist, a thinker, and it meant no harm. I knew it with a rare certainty, for I felt it in my heart. The creature blinked; an eyelid of barnacles slid over its giant orb to say hello before retracting away. And, for some unknown reason, I stopped.

Despite the crescendo from the tumultuous waters cascading and clattering around the great chamber of invention, a serene calm came over me. We linked that leviathan of the deep and I, two creatures as out of place as each other. We shared our grief for the past, the present, and the shortening future, and for a fleeting, fraction of existence, I felt a kindred soul. We were one, but not for long. No sooner had we bonded than our link was broken. The creature tore away in a flash of dread. And although it should have been impossible to tell from an eye what the creature behind the orb experienced, I knew it feared for its life. Something passed between us as it turned away from Hvit's almost-glass walls, enormous flukes propelling the creature into Arctic depths. The whale, for what else could it have been, was pursued; another experience we shared. No sooner had it turned tail than three obsidian hunters shot past in the liquid darkness. Another life had not long to live in our dying world, one I would have imagined already long extinct. A fourth streamlined predator did not transcend into those netherworld depths but paused mid-flight. The thing hovered where its larger compatriot had lingered and smiled a dagger-toothed grin. In a six-inch proliferation of teeth, it found humour in my expected demise.

There was a time when I would have panicked, the killer before me waiting for Hvit's walls to shatter, the water rising, ever rising, but I would not die in that damned place. I would not succumb to the fear of a submerged finale, nor perish in the jaws of a murderous fish like Grella and who knew how many countless Nordic others. I was Jean, an Eternal, and I would not allow the girl I carried to die whilst in my care.

So, I climbed. I hauled myself and my burden up, the freezing waters gaining by the second. The orca rose with us. The beast watched through that lens of a wall, observed its prey; that only fuelled my fires. In fact, any fear of the creature evaporated as it disappeared then returned after taking a gulp of required oxygen. It was an air breather, and I pitied its pathetic existence, always one breath away from death. I almost wished for those walls to shatter so I could dig my talons into its dirty, great eyes and rip them out. I'd take the beast with me to Hell if it was the last thing I did. Merryweather, too, if I got half a chance. The Britannian might even have returned to the top of my list if I'd had longer to stew on it, but, again, I had misrepresented him.

I had miscalculated on Walter's behalf. I had thought him fleeing when he ascended, but I was wrong. For as my toes felt the tumbling waters lick at them, I found myself hauled at great speed into the air. Up and up my burden and I shot. We traversed with such haste that I had all on just to retain my grip. I dug my talons deep into the rope and pinioned Aurora between my neck and shoulder. Walter pulled as though his life depended on it, never mind ours, such velocity did we attain. A glance down saw the ocean a distance below, a glance up, clear air drawing rapidly closer.

By the time Aurora and I flew out of the chamber roof and an extra twenty feet into the air, before plummeting to the ground in a shared heap, I was almost too shocked for words.

I lay on the compacted snow just glad to be alive, in a manner of speaking, my non-heart almost beating with relief. I scratched at the deep blanket of white as if for confirmation of non-liquidity and sighed with relief at its resistance.

In fact, so relieved was I, that when I stood to thank Walter for his eventual assistance, seeing him gasping into the snow some way off came as little surprise. The deep baritone of someone demanding of more respect than he caused a more substantial shock.

“Good evening, Jean. Thank you for saving my sister.”

“You're welcome, Prince Grella. You're very welcome indeed.”