In the middle of that rising stormcloud body, he saw a baleful sheen of eyes. The beak clapped. An arm coiled out at him. Upon it were suckers that could strip the ribs of a whale. Barely did he swerve aside from its snatching. It came back, loop after loop of it. He drove his knife in to the hilt. The blood which smoked forth when he withdrew the blade tasted like strong vinegar. The arm struck him and he rolled off end over end, in pain and his head awhirl.
Another arm and another closed in. He wondered dazedly who he was to fight a god. Somehow he unslung a harpoon. Before the crushing grip had him, he swam downward with all his speed. Maybe he could get a stab Into that mouth.
A shattering scream blasted him from his wits.
He came to a minute later. His brow ached, his ears tolled..
Around him the water had gone wild. Eyjan and Kennin were at his sides, upholding him. He glanced blurrily bottomward and saw a shrinking inkiness. The kraken hooted and threshed as it sank.
“Look, oh, look!” Kennin jubilated. He pointed with his own lanthom. Through blood, sepia, and seething, the wan ray picked out the kraken in his torment.
Brother and sister had towed their weapon above him. They had cut it free of its raft. The spear, with a ton of rock behind it, had pierced the body of the kraken.
“Are you hurtT’ Eyjan asked Tauno. Her voice wavered through the uproar. “My dear, my dear, can you get about?”
“I’d better be able to,” he mumbled. Shaking his head seemed to clear away some of the fog.
The kraken sank back into the city he had murdered. The spear wound, while grievous, had not ended his cold life, nor was the weight of the boulder more than he could lift. However, around’ him was the outsize net.
And now the merman’s children carne to grab the anchors on the rim of that net and make them fast in the ruins of A verom.
Desperate was their work, with the giant shape threshing, the giant arms flailing and clutching. Cast-up ooze and vomited ink blinded eyes, choked lungs, in stinking clouds; cables whipped, tangled, and snapped; walls broke under blows that sent Doomsday thunders through the water; the hootings beat on skulls and clawed at eardrums; the attackers were hit, cast bruisingly aside, scraped by barnacled skin until their own blood added iron taste to the acid of the kraken’s; they were a battered three who finally pegged him down.
But bind him they did. And they swarn to where his huge head throbbed and jerked, his beak snapped at the imprisoning strands, his arms squirmed like a snakepit under the mesh. Through the murk-mists they looked into those wide, conscious eyes. The kraken stopped his clamor. They heard only a rush of current, in and out of his gills. He glared unflinchingly at them.
“Brave have you been,” said Tauno, “a fellow dweller in the sea. Therefore know that you are not being killed for gain.”
He took the right eye, Kennin the left. They thrust their har-poons in to the shaft ends. When that did not halt the strugglings which followed, they used their second pair, and both of Eyjan’s. Kraken blood and kraken anguish drove them off.
After a while it was over. Some of their weapons must have worked into the brain and slashed it.
The siblings fled from A verorn to the sunlight. They sprang into air and saw the cog wallowing in billows that the fight in the deeps had raised. Tauno and Eyjan did not bother to unload their lungs, though air-breathing they would be lighter than the water. They kept afloat with gentle paddling, let the ocean soothe and croon to their aching bodies, and drank draught upon draught of being alive. It was young Kennin who shouted to those clustered white-faced at the bulwarks: “We did it! We slew the kraken! The treasure is ours!”
At that, Niels ran up the ratlines, crowing like a cock, and Ingeborg burst into tears. The other sailors gave a cheer that was oddly short; thereafter they kept attention mainly on Ranild. Through the waves leaped the dolphins, twoscore of them, to hear the tale.