Grym Prophet (Song of the Aura, Book Three) Read Online Free PDF Page B

noticed the stare of the ponytailed wheelman being drawn in his direction. Elia’s hand was gone suddenly, as she twisted around to face the open water behind them. He followed her example and began to watch the undulating waves, one hand over his brow to shade his eyes from the sun.
     
    Elia had stretched her hand out now, and was moving it in leisurely S- shapes, like a swimming fish. For a moment nothing out of the ordinary happened, and Gribly’s gaze dropped to the foamy water below. Then, like an apparition, the water directly under the Treele girl’s hand, yards below, began to imitate her movement, defying gravity and the swell of the sea. It looked like a little blue-green river amid the white foam, sloshing and swimming almost directly perpendicular to the current left in the ship’s wake. Gribly smiled.
     
    “Nice trick,” he told her. She smiled back, and lifted her hand.
     
    “I’ve only started,” she said, and the water obeyed her command, rising up straight out of the waves, a wormy, jiggling mass of liquid that seemed to be pouring over and over itself in a never-ending cascade. No matter how quickly the water flowed, it never let a single drop fall back into the foam. As Elia brought her hand higher, the water followed, until she was almost pointing at the sky, and the seawater worm was wriggling and sloshing not more than two feet from her face.
     
    “I’m impressed,” Gribly said, wriggling his own way just a little closer to Elia and stealthily slipping an arm in hers.
     
    She threw the water-worm right at him.
     
    ~
     
    As the Suthway Cath plowed through the Inkwell faster than an eagle in flight, the dark bulk of the Grymclaw grew closer and closer. Soon it was a high wall of looming gray cliffs not far in the distance. Down in Captain Berne’s cabin, Elia talked to him earnestly about the possibilities that could help her survive in the dry expanse of the Grymclaw. Once Gribly had dried himself off, he joined them.
     
    “Why couldn’t you dry me with that trick of yours, that you used on Lauro and me back on the iceberg?” he asked, shaking his wet hair at Elia like a dog.
     
    “Oh… I didn’t think of it,” she answered, leaning away with a too-innocent smile.
     
    “All right, calm yerselves,” Berne interceded, tapping the edge of his map table with a heavy metal device used for navigation. “I’ve consulted what few charts o’ the Grymclaw are avail’ble with th’ Zain, an’ I think I may’ve come up with an answer to yer problem, mis’tress Elia.”
     
    “Oh?” she said, turning her attention to the yellowed papyrus sheets laid out in front of the captain. Soon the two nymphs were deep in a discussion about water and carrying capacity, distances and available water sources. Gribly tried as hard as he genuinely could to stay interested, but his attention soon wandered and he found himself looking around at the interior of Berne’s cabin.
     
    A large but mostly unadorned mattress-bed stood in one corner, a curious suit of armor in another. There was a carved hearth in the wall nearest to the navigation table, with several chairs pushed up against the wall on either side. Odd… He hadn’t thought to find anything like that on a ship. On each wall were various trophies and maps of past voyages, along with one strangely realistic painting above the hearth. When it seemed as if his absence wouldn’t be noticed, Gribly slipped away from the table to examine it. Elia and Berne soon drifted into the nymphtongue behind him.
     
    In the background of the painting was a ship much like the Suthway , beached on a sandy shore with green trees in the background. The foreground was a jagged cliff and series of small pools, where a ragged group of nymphs he assumed to be the ship’s crew were gathered, staring and pointing. The object of their attention was a strange, womanlike creature made of green-blue scales, rising from depths of the largest pool. What in Vast it