Free Oshenerth by Alan Dean Foster Page B

had rapidly evolved into a give no quarter and ask none battle to the death. By now subsumed in frenzy, the sharks would not retreat until all were sated or the last of them were dead. The increasingly desperate mersons were given no such choice. To the credit of his training as a fighter, Chachel did not vomit once, until he saw Aunt Selemoel come drifting past him. Spinning slowly in the current, tumbling end over end, the upper half of her body was like some grotesque sculpture of a memory of a merson and not a representation of the actual individual herself. The lower half of her body was nowhere to be seen. Entrails trailing behind the severed torso like a jellyfish’s tendrils, the vacant-eyed half-body of his aunt was soon set upon and ripped apart by half a dozen blues. Gasping to clear his gills, Chachel found relief only when the lump of ragged flesh that had been his relative was no longer recognizable as the nightmare it had become.
    Then he heard someone, perhaps it was his father Horaleth, shout, “Beware—the Bite comes!” Chachel knew he should have turned his back to the open sea. But he could only stare outward.
    Facing the still-intact remnants of the spherical defensive formation of mersons and manyarms, the female great white, as big as a small whale and weighing as much as thirty mersons, had opened her mouth. Rolling her eyes back to black, what she spat was half shark and half magic. Inside the front of that gaping maw, as dark as the caves that riddled the reefs of Chachel’s home, were multiple rows of teeth in various stages of maturity. Triangular in shape, serrated on two sides, precise of point, and sharp as any knife blade, some were large enough to cover his open palm. In response to the thaumaturgic urging of the shark sorceress, two hundred such porcelain daggers now shot from her jaws.
    They shredded the merson globe.
    Those teeth that did not find flesh flashed by in ivory arcs of varying efficiency and degree as they sought to slash vein and bone, artery and nerves. Trying to avoid them was worse than being caught up in a school of a thousand territorial triggerfish all biting and snapping at once. A tooth as long as his thumb sliced across the top of Chachel’s left bicep, leaving a trail of blood to mark its passage. Despite his training, despite his resolve, he screamed. All around him, the defensive orb of mersons and spears was disintegrating, coming apart under the assault of hundreds of individually motivated triangular white razors. In shock from his injury, he saw one merson couple leave the school and make a break for the potential shelter of Splitrock. Should he follow, or should he stay and fight?
    His mother made the decision for him. He choked when he saw that she was bleeding from half a dozen wounds of her own. But she was gesturing forcefully, indicating that he should try to swim for the safety of the rocky spires. He nodded his understanding and turned to kick hard in the designated direction.
    Looking to him and not behind or beneath her, she did not see the approaching male white death. How something so massive and powerful could come right up to one in complete silence was one of the deadlier mysteries of the sea. Her lower limbs disappeared into its wide-open mouth. The great jaws did not close until they were halfway up her thighs. Then they snapped shut, and in one bite the shark neatly bit off both legs halfway to her hips.
    Rendered as immobile by the sight as if the blood in his veins had suddenly ceased flowing, a paralyzed Chachel could only stare. So transfixed was he that he did not even feel the pain of individual white teeth slashing at his own undefended limbs and torso. His non-reaction was all that saved him. Perceiving him as unfeeling and therefore probably dead, the cursed triangular teeth sped elsewhere in search of more responsive targets.
    Once the jaws of the great white locked tight, everything thereafter seemed to take place in slow