*
The water closed over me, warm as broth. Unlike the others, I had kept my own knife strapped to my thigh. The steel ballast was welcome as I felt my body go weightless, legs first, then chest, then finally arms. I might have been stepping into a dream, some other world where all the rules I knew had ceased to apply.
The crocs didn’t budge as the five of us slid into the water. Chua said they were attracted to movement, and unlike Dem Lun, who had gone into the small lake screaming and flailing, we moved slowly, deliberately. I could see only their ancient eyes above the water—crocs could live for a hundred years or more—the raised scales of their backs and tails. It made sense, suddenly, that the Vuo Ton should choose these as the avatars of their gods.
“We go to the flanks,” Ruc said, nodding right and left. There is a fighter’s knack to putting aside everything but the fight. Now that we were in the water, he might have forgotten Dem Lun entirely.
“You go where you want,” Ela replied. “I’m floating.” With no more preamble, she rolled onto her back, and closed her eyes.
The three of us stared at her as she floated slowly toward the crocs.
“Is she insane?” Ruc asked.
“Yes,” Kossal replied grimly.
It certainly looked like madness. The priestess had her arms stretched out to both sides, hands idly feathering the water, as though she were lounging in some lord’s private pool, waiting for a servant to bring her a drink, or a towel. The sun blazed on her wet skin. She might have been afire. A contented smile played over her lips.
“What is she planning?” I asked.
“If I understood that woman’s brain,” Kossal said, “I would not be here now.”
Ruc studied her a moment longer, then nodded toward the crocs. “Whatever she’s doing, we want to be on the flanks when it happens. I’ll take the left, the two of you—”
“I will take the left,” Kossal said, stroking away before either of us could respond.
I looked at Ruc. “I guess that makes us a team.”
He held my gaze. “Seems like we were always better at fighting against each other.”
Off to my left, the crocs shifted, two of them tracking Kossal.
“They remind me of you,” I said quietly. The words just floated up, unsummoned, strangely euphoric. If I was going to my god, there were things I wanted Ruc to know. “Their stillness.”
He watched me a while, silent, then shook his head.
“You’re just as insane as the other two,” he growled, then nodded toward Ela. “Let’s go. She’s getting close.”
We swam almost as slowly as Ela floated, circling around the side of the smallest crocodile—small being a relative term when discussing a beast the size of a boat—trying to betray ourselves with as little motion as possible. The creature followed us with those slitted eyes all the same, rotating silently in the water, obeying some imperative bred into its flesh to keep those teeth between it and anything moving.
“Getting behind them seemed a lot easier before we got in the water,” I murmured.
“Never mind getting on their fucking backs.” Ruc nodded incrementally toward Ela. “I hope you told your friend anything you wanted to tell her, because she’s about to die.”
The priestess was barely an arm’s length from the nose of the center croc. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. I watched, fascinated, as she floated closer and closer. I waited for those jaws to open, then snap closed on her throat. The creature didn’t move, even when she bumped up against it.
“Too slow,” I said, shaking my head. “They track motion, and she’s given them nothing to track.”
“Unfortunately, we have to kill them,” Ruc said. “Not just float past.”
Ela rolled smoothly as a log, twisting in the water to press her naked flank against the crocodile’s hide. Slowly, slowly, she slid a hand over the creature’s back, the half-drunken embrace of a woman barely waking from sleep, searching for the lover at her side. She smiled without opening her eyes, slid a hand along the scales, and then, the movement so fast I saw only the spray followed by the fountain of blood, slammed her knife into the creature’s eye.
The lake exploded.
The wounded animal thrashed, snapped its jaws furiously at the air, then rolled, tail thrashing the water to a froth. The other two crocs twisted inward, drawn by Ela’s sudden attack or by the death spasms of the flailing beast. Kossal, quick as an eel, closed the distance in moments, sliding behind the closest crocodile, rolling up onto its back, clenching it between his knees like a rider on a panicked mount as he drew his knife.
I was swimming before I knew it, Ruc at my side, both of us closing on our own quarry from slightly different angles. He was near the head, the snapping jaws. I thought I had the easier approach until the tail whipped across the water, smashing me in the head, knocking me back a full body-length. When the haze cleared and I’d coughed the water out of my lungs, I found Ruc grappling with the thing, one arm caught in its jaws, the other wrapped around its neck, his face a rictus of determination.
Kossal was gone, and the croc he’d been riding, both of them transmuted into a mad boiling of the bloody water. Ela, too, had disappeared, though the croc she’d killed was still twitching, the knife standing proud from the eye. I was vaguely aware of the Vuo Ton chanting and taunting, of Chua shouting some sort of advice, but my world had narrowed to Ruc and the furious beast trying to devour him.
“Your knife,” I shouted. “Stab it!”
By the time the words were out of my mouth, however, I saw it wouldn’t work. The croc was thrashing viciously as a fly-maddened bull. Ruc had managed to hold on so far, but if he let go of the thing’s neck with his good hand, it would toss him around like a doll until his shoulder ripped right out of the socket.
“Get on its back,” Ruc growled. “Get behind—”
Before he could finish, the croc rolled, dragging him down into the muddy depths.