Drifting the Obsidian Narrows

Sixty yards of frothing black water was not enough space to turn eight hundred feet of carved cedar.

The pale crest of armored bone rose like a jagged island from the wake, throwing a tidal wash against the dreadnought's stern. Donnchadh MacAoidh planted his heels into the notched fir deck, muscles straining against the five-man sweep oar as the subterranean current tried to wrench the timber from his grip. Along his forearms, the azure script of the Wild-Torrent Matrix hummed with a cold, vibrating pressure that matched the pulse in his jaw.

"Donnchadh!" Beathag's voice dropped from the prow rigging, sharp as snapped twine. "Narrows ahead! Chasm walls are pinching down to four hundred paces, and there's an obsidian tooth sitting dead center in the channel!"

"I see the damn tooth!" Donnchadh shouted back over the roar of the rapids.

He didn't ease his grip. The river did not offer second chances to a pilot running blind in the dark. Ahead, where the subterranean canyon narrowed into a jagged throat of black volcanic glass, the current bunched into high, glassy standing waves. In the middle of the chute stood a monolithic spire of obsidian, its leading edge sharp enough to split the canoe from stem to stern like dry firewood.

Behind them, the chasm beast surged. Its plated snout broke the foam again, four yellow eyes burning in the gloom, jaws lined with interlocking ivory slabs snapping closed on empty air just forty yards off the rudder.

"Bring her around, helmsman!" Muircheartach bellowed from the midship deck. The giant bear-brawler leaned over the port railing, laughing into the spray while slapping the thick oak gunwale. "Swing the tail sixty degrees left! If you put its snout within jumping range, I'll wrestle that overgrown river-slug into submission before it touches the cedar!"

"You'll drown us all, you wool-headed lunatic!" a muffled shriek rose through the deck grates between Donnchadh's feet. Fionnghal's pale face peered through the iron slats of the lower hold, soaked in river silt and clutching a heavy brass valve wrench. "The port bilge is taking on two inches a second! If you pitch this hull another ten degrees into a turn, the lower seams will burst and we'll be diving to the bottom before the monster even chews on us!"

"Secure those grates and flood the starboard ballast, Fionnghal!" Donnchadh roared, his eyes fixed on the approaching stone needle. "Keep the counterweight heavy on the right side! If we drop below forty knots, the Matrix goes dark, and we become firewood!"

Donnchadh checked the closing distance. Three hundred paces to the obsidian spire. Behind them, the monster had closed to thirty yards, riding the surge of the dreadnought's wake with terrifying acceleration. It was built for straight-line charges through deep water, heavy and relentless.

The dreadnought, however, was eight hundred feet of continuous kinetic momentum.

Donnchadh shifted his stance, locking his right boot against the heavy wooden fulcrum stop. The System's blue runes surged along the shaft of the steering sweep, illuminating the cedar grain in sharp relief.

He didn't pull away from the right-hand canyon wall. Instead, he steered straight toward the crushing basalt bank on the starboard side.

"What are you doing?" Beathag cried from her perch seventy feet above, her longbow already drawn with an obsidian-tipped shaft. "You're taking us into the wall!"

"Trust the wake!" Donnchadh yelled back.

He read the hydraulic rebound of the river. Where the black current slammed into the starboard wall, it formed a massive cushion of compressed backwash—a hydraulic ridge rising three feet above the main channel.

At fifty paces from the obsidian spire, Donnchadh threw his entire weight onto the sweep oar, kicking the retaining lever free with the heel of his boot.

The rudder blade bit sideways into the foaming torrent.

The eight-hundred-foot cedar canoe shuddered violently from stem to stern. The bow caught the rebound current off the starboard rock, while the heavy stern whipped outward across the black water in a sweeping lateral slide. Friction screamed along the keel. Sparks of pulverized stone and boiling spray erupted as the canoe's reinforced starboard flank skipped across the compressed hydro-cushion.

The dreadnought swung like the blade of a colossal scythe. The monolithic obsidian spire flashed past the port side with barely four inches of clearance, throwing up a razor spray that sliced a trailing coil of mooring rope into ribbons.

Behind them, the pursuing beast could not turn.

Locked into its straight-line charge at over fifty-five knots, the armored predator hit the dreadnought's violent sideways wake. The massive backwash threw the creature off balance, driving its plated skull directly into the obsidian tooth at full speed.

The impact sounded like a quarry collapse.

A deafening crack echoed through the subterranean chasm as the beast's armored brow shattered against the volcanic glass spire, severing the stone column at its base. The monster let out a guttural, waterlogged screech as hundreds of tons of collapsed stone and thrashing foam buried it in the churning eddy behind.

Donnchadh hauled the sweep back to center, panting as cold river mist washed over his face. His arms burned with deep lactic fire, but the dreadnought righted itself, slicing cleanly into the wide, dark channel beyond the narrows.

"That was almost competent, helmsman!" Beathag called down from the rigging. She lowered her bow, though her fingers never left the nock of her arrow. "You only missed splitting our skull by half a cubit."

"Half a cubit is plenty of daylight in a cave," Donnchadh muttered, wiping wet hair from his eyes.

"Did you see the size of that skull plate?" Muircheartach yelled, jogging toward the aft deck with a wide grin split across his bearded face. "If you'd given me three more seconds, I would have dropped an elbow across its nose!"

"You would have been crushed into eel paste, you maniac," Fionnghal wheezed, his head poking back through the deck grates. He wiped black slime across his forehead with a trembling sleeve. "The bilge stopped rising, but the port strakes took a terrible shuddering. We can't survive another turn like that."

"We go as fast as the water takes us," Donnchadh said, leaning hard against the sweep to steady the shuddering hull. "Look alive, everyone. The river isn't slowing down."

Before Muircheartach could answer, a series of sharp, wet thuds hammered against the port gunwale.

From the dark, jagged walls of the lower canyon they had just clipped, dozens of slick, pale shapes were dropping onto the ship's side. Webbed claws with obsidian talons dug into the cedar planks, their glistening, multi-jointed bodies hissing as they clambered over the railing.

Within seconds, forty amphibious cave-stalkers clung to the port side, their combined weight dragging the giant canoe into a sharp, dangerous list toward the black torrent.