The raider’s eels stopped fighting the moment that he raised his hands and called to them.
They pulled back from the needlefish and lay still in the brown water, waiting. Mav told Two to let them go. Two didn’t like it, but he did it.
The man climbed out of the mud and stood on the broken island, as far from the turtle as he could get. From a distance, he had looked frightening, but up close, he only looked tired. His coat was torn at the shoulder, and there was mud in his beard.
"Don’t touch my stone," he said. His voice was rough. "I’m sworn to Marek Tidecaller. If you take it, I die."
"I know," Mav said.
"Then tell me what you want."
Mav looked at him for a while before he answered. He thought of Five, lying across the mouth of the lowest tunnel.
"Your eels came into my dens," he said. "At the hour when the young were alone. One of mine stood in front of them until the last young fish was past her, and they killed her there."
The man’s face didn’t change. "It was the trial," he said. "It was the law."
"So is this."
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then the man looked at the empty mud of the river mouth, where his eels had lived. His eyes came back to Mav, and for the first time, there was fear in them.
"Someone sold you my World," he said slowly. "Stormveil."
Mav didn’t answer. But he didn’t tell the man that he was wrong.
-----
A dozen needlefish had died in the fight with the eels. Their friends carried them in their mouths, so that they could go home too.
Mav stood at the edge of his dome for a last look at the delta. The rain had stopped. The island was split in two, and the turtle stood over it like a hill, with its small eyes half closed.
Two came to hang beside him.
’Is it enough now?’ Mav asked.
Two didn’t answer at once. "For Five, yes," he said at last. "Not for the next one."
Mav let go of his Manifestation.
The dome faded. In the same moment, everything in it went home to his sea: the needlefish with their dead, the stalkers, Six, Log. The turtle went too, because the Genesis saw it as his now. One moment it was standing on the island. The next moment, there was only a great dent in the mud where it had been.
The raider stared at the empty place. He didn’t say anything.
Mav swam up to his arch alone.
-----
The way home was harder than the hunt.
He had to go back through the arch to the Nexus, cross the whole plaza in the dark and open his own World on the other side. It wasn’t far, and on any other night, it would have taken him a few minutes.
But that night, it took much longer, because the lock was slipping with every step.
He felt it like a rope running through his hands. Somewhere far away, at the bottom of his sea, a huge, old, angry mind was waking up in a place that it had never seen. It pulled against the seaweed in its neck, slowly and steadily, the way that it had dragged Log through the mud. Each time it pulled, the lock gave a little. Each time, Mav put his will against it and pulled back. He knew that if he let go for even a moment, he would lose it for good.
He walked across the plaza with his teeth closed tight. People looked at him as they passed. He must have looked like someone who was very sick, or very drunk.
When he finally came out over his own sea, he didn’t even stop to look at the city. He went straight down.
-----
The turtle had landed outside the city, on the floor of the sea, right on top of Sela’s outer wall.
The wall hadn’t survived. A long piece of it lay in broken blocks under the turtle’s belly, and the rest was cracked from end to end. All around, the young fish had fled into the dens. Seven floated over the turtle’s head in the dark water, pale and very still. She hadn’t attacked it, but her light was ready. Eighteen’s spined fish had formed a line between the turtle and the gate.
Sela was standing on the next piece of wall with her hands behind her back.
"It’s on my wall," she said.
’I know.’
"Move it."
Mav tried. He reached into the turtle’s mind and told it to walk forward, off the wall, but the lock slipped so badly that he almost lost it. For half a minute, the turtle didn’t move at all, as if it had grown into the rock. Then, very slowly, it took one step, then another, and it lay down again on the bare rock beyond the wall.
Sela looked at the broken blocks for a moment, furious. Then she called her builders.
-----
He looked at his new host properly for the first time that night, sitting on its shell in the dark.
[Siege Turtle. Rank D+.]
[Skill: Anchor]
[Nothing can move the user from where it stands for 30 seconds. Recharge: five minutes.]
[Skill: Quake]
[The user strikes the ground with one foot. The ground shakes for 20 meters around. Recharge: two minutes.]
That explained the half minute when he couldn’t roll it over. It also explained why the island had cracked in half. Mav sat there, looking at the words, and he felt the shell under him rise and fall with the turtle’s slow breathing. He tried to imagine what it would be like when the lock finally held, and he couldn’t help smiling.
Most of his hosts had the names of trees and plants: Oak, Ivy and Elm, Birch, Moss and Fern. This one deserved the biggest tree that he knew.
’Cedar,’ he decided.
The turtle didn’t care what it was called. It pulled against the lock again, and Mav pulled back.
-----
Mav didn’t sleep that night, or the next day.
He couldn’t. Whenever he started to drift off, the lock slipped, and he woke at once. So he stayed on the roof of his cabin with his eyes open and his will on the turtle, hour after hour. He let go of every skill that he had borrowed, because he needed all of himself to hold it. Even Telekinesis felt heavy.
The others came to see it one after another.
Nell sent her bats to circle over the place at the surface, as if they could see it from there. Brann asked how big it was, and when Mav told him, he didn’t believe it. Ivo sent his otters out to look and asked whether it was going to eat them. Mav said no, but he wasn’t completely sure.
Ronald came through the arch in the afternoon with a sack of goat, as he did every day now. Mav met him at the surface and told him about the turtle. Ronald floated on his back with the sack on his chest and listened without a word.
"You went to get eels," he said.
"I got eels."
"You came back with a hill."
"I came back with eels and a hill."
Ronald looked at him for a moment. His mouth moved, and Mav thought that he was going to laugh. He felt a sudden hope. Then Ronald pushed the sack into his arms and swam back to the arch without another word.
-----
Tamsin understood what the turtle was for before anyone else did. Of course she did.
"Can it carry the wolves?" she asked.
They were sitting at the edge of the pool in the second air hall in the evening, Tamsin wrapped in a blanket and Mav in the water. Outside, Cedar lay on the rock beyond the broken wall like a small green island at the bottom of the sea.
"All of them," Mav said. "Birch too. All of them at once, I think."
He had been thinking about it all day, through the pain in his head. His wolves had never been happy in his sea. Neither had Birch. They lived in the air halls and on the island, and they could only fight where there was ground. But Cedar could carry ground with him. He could walk along the bottom of the sea with Birch and the wolves on his back, and he could rise under an enemy wherever Mav wanted.
"When the lock holds," Mav said. "Tomorrow, I think. Maybe the next day."
Tamsin looked at him. "You look terrible," she said.
"I know."
She stayed with him until it was dark, but then she had to go back to her silk on the island. Mav went back to the roof of his cabin with his will on the lock. He was so tired that his eyes hurt.
Some time after midnight, he felt Nell’s bats turn.
All of them at once, far out over the sea, toward the trench.
He sat up slowly. He felt the lock slip as he did, and he caught it.
Over the trench, an arch was opening.