“I told you it would be so,” he heard the sea god say. Far off he saw a silver fish eluding through dark water. There were no sea stars. Overhead, Prydwen bounced wildly again, and he knew Loren had somehow blocked a second crashing of the monster’s tail. Not a third, he thought. He cannot block a third.

And in his mind a voice spoke: Then there must not be a third. Twiceborn, this is Gereint. Summon now, through me. I am rooted in the land.

Paul linked with the blind shaman he had never seen. Power surged within him, the godpulse of Mórnir beating fiercer than his own. Underwater in his mind, he stretched a hand downward through the ocean dark. He felt an explosion of his power, grounded on the Plain in Gereint. He felt it crest. Overhead, the vast tail was rising again. “Liranan!” Paul cried for the last time. On the deck of Prydwen they heard it like the voice of thunder.

And the sea god came.

Paul felt it as a rising of the sea. He heard the god cry out for joy at being allowed to act. He felt the bond with Gereint going, then; before he could speak again, or send any thought at all, the shaman’s mind was gone from his. How far, Paul thought. How far he came. And how far back he has to go.

Then he was on the ship again and seeing with his own eyes, tenuously in the moonlight, how the Soulmonger of Maugrim battled Liranan, god of the sea. And all the while the singing never stopped.

Loren had dropped the protective shield. Matt was lying on the deck. Coll, at the helm, fought to steer Prydwen through the troughs and ridges shaped by the titans on their starboard bow. Paul saw a man fly overboard as the ship bucked like a horse in the foaming sea.

The god was fighting in his own form, in his shining water robe, and he could fly up like a wave flew, he could make a whirlpool of the sea below, and he did both those things.

By means of a power Paul could scarcely grasp, a hole suddenly formed in the sea. Prydwen bounced and rocked, her timbers screaming, on the very lip of it. He saw the vortex whirling faster and faster, and as its wildness grew he saw that even the vast bulk of the Soulmonger was no proof against the weight of the roused sea.

The monster was going down. The battle would be in the deep, and Paul knew this was for their sake. He watched the god, luminous and shimmering, hang suspended on a high wave overhead as he shaped the sucking whirlpool to draw the other undersea.

The Soulmonger’s slimy scum-encrusted head came down. It was almost as large as the ship, Paul saw. He saw the huge lidless eyes up close, the man-sized teeth bared in fury.