The Shared Breath in the Deep

Would a forty-foot wels catfish swallow a dugout whole or smash it to kindling first? Rozsa Iron-Tooth hit the rushing mud with both heels, the sting of her torn shoulder forgotten the instant the pale slate-gray crest carved through the foam fifty paces downstream. She wanted twenty coastal warriors alive and her cedar hulls wedged into the cypress roots before the monster's wake rolled the camp into the deep channel, and she wanted Menyhért on his feet beside her bow timbers before the beast caught their scent.

The bayou answered with a rising roar.

"Out of the shelter!" Rozsa shoved Menyhért through the sealskin flap into the rain. "Get to the center thwart!"

Down on the mud-shelf, the river had risen another foot. Yellow foam spun against the cypress trunks. Csente stood waist-deep in the boiling brown current, bracing his thick back against the lead canoe while four paddlers fought to snub the stern line around a root elbow.

"The bottom is crawling!" Csente bellowed over the wind. "The mud-banks are sliding into the trough!"

The water ten paces beyond the dugouts bulged upward in a slick dome. Silt boiled black from the bed. A dorsal spine, thick as a split log, breached the surface. The leviathan did not rise to breathe. It drove forward along the scent trail of blood washing from the lost supply rafts.

"Hold the lines!" Rozsa sprinted into the surf.

The surge hit her thighs like a thrown boulder. Silt dragged at her knees, but she caught the gunwale of the lead war-canoe. Her hand went to the heavy shell-headed harpoon wedged into the forward thwarts. If the snout struck the hull, the hollow cedar would split down the centerline.

A pale whisker, thick as a spear haft, surfaced beside the hull. It whipped across the gunwale with a wet smack, shattering two forward paddles.

The canoe lurched sideways.

"Rozsa!" Csente lunged, his fingers clawing for her belt.

A massive wall of displaced water lifted the dugout five feet into the air. The painter snapped. Rozsa reached for the harpoon shaft, but the violent heave threw her footing out from under her. The hull rolled hard to port. Her hip slammed into the cedar thwart, and then the river closed over her head in a freezing shock of black silt.

The current did not carry her downstream; it dragged her straight down.

A drowning vortex churned beneath the overturned canoe, hollowed out by the beast's sweeping tail. Water rammed into her nostrils and burned her throat. Rozsa kicked hard against the drag, but her soaked otter tunic and the heavy stone sinkers bound to her weapon harness pulled like anchor stones. Darkness swallowed the storm light. Cold pressure clamped around her ears, pounding against her skull.

Survival was a matter of shedding dead weight before the river ate the rest. Her lungs burned for air, but panic was a luxury for people who had never watched their brothers die in the shallows.

Rozsa drew her flint skinning knife with her right hand. She slashed the shoulder thongs of her heavy otter mantle, letting the sodden pelt tear away into the churning vortex. With three rapid, deliberate cuts, she severed the cords holding her spare basalt club and stone ballast weights. Her body grew lighter in the black silt.

She kicked toward where she thought the surface lay, but the river was a spinning funnel of cold clay and rotting leaves. Her chest locked. Her lungs seized, burning with acid fire as her mouth threatened to open against the flood.

A pair of hands gripped her ribs from below.

The touch was sudden, hard, and sure. Arms wrapped around her torso, locking her against a lean, sinewy chest. Long hair drifted across her neck like river grass.

Menyhért pulled her upward through the pitch. His legs kicked in long, steady strokes, navigating the subterranean boil with the effortless balance of an otter. He spun her in his grip until her back pressed against his chest, then hauled her around until their faces met in the murk.

His left hand cupped her jaw. His thumb pressed into the hollow beneath her ear, tilting her head back.

Then his mouth locked over hers.

Rozsa stiffened, her fingers clawing into his bare shoulders. But Menyhért did not hesitate. His lips sealed tight over hers, his jaw clamping hard against her cheek as he forced a steady, unbroken stream of warm air between her teeth.

The air hit her starved lungs like liquid fire, driving back the dark spots behind her eyes. Her fingers dug deep into the corded muscle of his back, holding him against her as her body drank the breath from his throat. For five frantic heartbeats the bayou vanished, reduced to the violent heat of his mouth against hers and the beat of two chests pressed flush in thirty feet of drowning water.

A low vibration shivered through the current.

The water pressure around them dropped sharply. Menyhért broke the seal of their mouths, pulling his head back just enough to breathe into the hollow of his neck. With his free right hand, he brought a small, curved crane-bone ocarina to his lips.

He pressed the mouth-hole flat against his throat and hummed through the bone, using his vocal cords to resonate the hollow marrow tube directly into the surrounding water.

A deep, subterranean drone vibrated through Rozsa's breastbone.

The pitch was impossibly low, a heavy rhythmic rumble that mimicked the purr of a hundred-foot matriarch catfish resting in deep river mud. The acoustic pulse traveled through the water like a physical blow.

Ten paces away in the brown gloom, the titanic bulk of the bull-catfish drifted past. Its scarred, pale belly gleamed like rotten birch bark. A round, milky eye—blinded by decades in the river silt—rolled past three feet from Rozsa's boots. The enormous pectoral fins flared wide, catching the acoustic frequency.

The whiskers quivered. The titan mouth clamped shut. With a single, languid sweep of its immense tail that threw them three yards sideways, the beast turned its snout away from the boats and sank peacefully into the deep abyss.

Menyhért kicked hard, his arm tight around Rozsa's waist.

They broke the surface together into the cold rain, gasping in desperate, ragged drafts.

"Over here!" Csente's roar cut through the storm.

Three warriors waded into the shallows, catching Rozsa by the arms and dragging her onto the firm mud of the hummock. Menyhért scrambled up behind her on hands and knees, water streaming from his tangled black hair and bare chest.

Rozsa rolled onto her hands and knees in the peat, vomiting brackish water and yellow foam into the sedge. Her left shoulder throbbed with venomous heat, the bog-moss packing washed away by the plunge. Cold wind bit into her bare skin through her torn tunic, but the air in her chest was sweet and real.

Beside her, Menyhért collapsed onto his back in the mud. He coughed twice, spat a clump of duckweed into the grass, and wiped his nose with the back of his forearm.

"Next time you decide to bathe in your armor, Warlady," Menyhért rasped, his voice raw and gravelly, "warn a man. Tasting drowned saltwater reaver is worse than sour sturgeon bile."

Rozsa pushed herself upright on trembling arms. She looked down at him.

His chest heaved in the rain. The loosened rawhide cords from the night before still hung around his wrists, soaked and frayed, but trailing loosely across the peat. His bone ocarina hung from a simple sinew thong around his bare neck, intact.

Csente hurried up the bank, his basalt club raised, his dark eyes fixed on Menyhért. "He called the beast to drown the boats, Rozsa. I saw him dive into the surge right behind you."

"Shut your mouth, Csente," Rozsa said. Her voice was steady, quiet, and cold as winter rain.

Csente froze, lowering the club an inch.

Rozsa reached down to her hip. Her fingers closed around the hilt of her stingray dagger. She drew the white barb into the gray light of the storm, stepped over Menyhért's legs, and knelt in the mud between his thighs.

Menyhért did not flinch. He raised his crossed wrists into the space between their chests, his dark eyes meeting her unblinking amber stare with that insolent, fearless challenge.

Rozsa did not touch his throat.

She slipped the sharp, serrated spine beneath the wet rawhide cords binding his wrists. With a single upward stroke, she severed the thongs clean through. The wet leather fell into the mud, washed away by the streaming rainwater.

Menyhért lowered his hands, spreading his fingers slowly in the cold air. The skin of his wrists was scarred and pale, but free.

Rozsa sheathed her blade and leaned down until her lips brushed the hollow of his ear.

"You steer the fleet from the forward thwart," she whispered, her voice rough with cold and something far more dangerous than the storm. "And if you try to slip beneath the current again, I will drag you back by your hair."

Menyhért let his head sink into the mud, a slow, wicked smile curving his lips in the rain.

The war-fleet had its pilot, and she had unbound a creature deadlier than the deep.