Page 70 of The Shadow of Polaris

At the bottom of an empty pint, seasoned sailors with drunken voices and bloodshot eyes told tales of the monsters that lurked just beneath the surface. Swinging their glasses around a dusty old tavern, they told tales of scarcely escaping certain death in the form of titanic, tentacled beasts. I’d laugh along at their foolish tales, dismissing their words with skepticism. Frya, swatting them with the tip of her dishrag, brushed aside the stories of old. The fairy tales of monsters far more ancient than the gods. If only she were here to see the uncertainty in my eyes.

Two dark cliffs loomed over our fleet. Maybe their legends were true.

The jagged rocks were barren and lifeless. Salt composites from millennia of violent storms and spray killed all life that once dared to emerge between the cracks of their sediment.

As we sailed in line through the tight passage, the skies above grumbled and darkened. The Narrows knew of our intentions and forbade us to pass. I clung to the railing of the aft deck, holding my breath as the oarsman barked orders at his men and delicately steered us between the piercing structures jutting from beneath the black, murky water.

The ridge lines pressed closer and closer together until it forced our fleet to sail one ship after another, the beam of our hulls just barely squeezing through.

I turned to face the warship behind us, focusing in on Aryx standing rigid on the command deck. He fixed his eyes on me. The white of his knuckles were clenched into fists. He nodded and whispered an order to the grey, leathery oarsman beside him. Only the sound of oars skimming across the surface echoed between the cliff sides as we pushed on.

Just as the golden cat eye painted on our bow crept through the cliffs into the open horizon, a deep rumbling erupted from the water, shaking the halyards and lines from their coils across the mast.

I turned back to Aryx. His eyes burned holes into me from across the length of his ship. Swallowing hard, I said a prayer to my mother and faced the impending attack.

She has awakened. With a frantic flap of his wings, Rah took flight, soaring high above us.

“Who?” I called, my hands trembling against the cool metal railing.

She is called Scylla, the Guardian of the Narrows.

Chapter 38

Fragments of sediment and rock broke loose, plunking into the surrounding depths. Arcturas paced beside me, her fur pin straight against her back.

“Pickup pace!” my oarsman barked, swinging his tiller across the deck, narrowly avoiding a falling boulder. The floorboards groaned under the abrupt change in direction and my pulse skyrocketed. I heard the crack of splintering wood behind us. I didn’t dare look back.

Our fleet raced through the treacherous passage, leaving behind a sunken hull, the screams of her men on the ocean breeze.

An ear-piercing shriek halted our rowers mid stroke. The air thickened. A beast, larger than the cliff itself, breached the surface in front of us. Twelve clawed feet rose from the depths, sending showers of seawater across our bow. It wedged itself between the twin cliffs of the strait, crushing sediment between each spiked toe. The beast roared to life. She blocked our exit to safe waters with scaled, monstrous limbs.

“Reverse!” oarsmen of the ships behind us called. The frantic lapping of oars against water pushed through the violently rising tide.

Scylla shrieked. Her six serpentine heads reared and bucked at the warships. Rows of shark-like teeth nipped at the panic-stricken sailors heaving on halyards to stow their white flax sails.

“Xenophron, Balakros! Prepare your archers! Stow those sails! Faster!” I commanded across ships.

They jumped to action, booming orders and knocking their arrows.

“On my word. Hold. Hold. Fire!” I called, releasing a flurry of black-tipped arrows into the sky. They whizzed over the air like a flock of birds ready to unleash on their prey.

The points of the arrowheads bounced off Scylla’s armor-like skin. She howled with rage, swiping her heads across the deck. Soldiers knocked into her scaly necks, launching into the air and wailing as they plunged beneath the rapid, dark surface.

“Hold. Hold. Fire!” I called again. Arrows arced into the sky. Most merely bounced off of her skin, but one sank into the gelatinous flesh of her middle eye. Scylla roared, lashing her wounded head against the bow, sending splinters of pine decking into the air.

“Elpis!” Aryx’s voice boomed across the strait, “Arrows won’t work! We need the rams!” He plunged his sword into Scylla’s thick, armored head, now slithering across his warship, slicing through the iron scales and severing the dragon skull straight through the tendons.

“The ram’s not long enough! We’d have to send our ship beneath her feet. She’d surely sink it! It’s a suicide mission!” I called.

Another head lurched for the oarsmen, sending me sliding across the deck. Her fangs sank deep into his chest, bones crunching and breaking through skin. With a final gasp, his bloodied body fell limp against his oar, causing our ship to spiral out of control. I leaned against the deck boards as the hull swung around, tilting until the left rail was flush with the waterline.

The ship groaned beneath us. Sailors who hadn’t clung to the mast slid into the depths, flailing and screaming for help. Arcturas clawed at the wooden surface, her nails splintered the wood as she, too, slid toward the water. Rowers leapt from their posts, swimming for the safety of the other retreating ships. Scylla plucked bodies from the water using her taloned feet and flung them across the cliffs until only mangled, unrecognizable carcasses remained distending in the raging waters.

I had to do something, or we risked capsizing. Digging into the raised decking, I pulled myself up to the dead oarsman and pushed his lifeless body off the oar. Muscles straining against me, I reeled the oar back to centerline and the keel, creaking in protest, slowly evened out.

There was no time to take a breath, however, because as I regained control of the ship, three of Scylla’s heads swung for me. She knocked five of my men off their feet, leaving them unconscious. Unsheathing my dagger, I dove beneath her, jerking the blade into her chin. The sharp edge of my blade shredded the squishy flesh along the length of her under-neck, washing me in her steaming blood as I slid across the deck. The wooden floor boards splintered the tender flesh of my elbow and my body screeched to a halt.

Scylla’s neck, now split in half, fell on the ship with a loud thud and the creature bellowed in agony. That was two of six heads defeated. The other four continued to wreak havoc on our fleet as bodies soared through the air, spattering blood across the twin cliffs until the rock stained red.

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