Mishar’s head ached and pounded.

The world moved beneath him.

No, the skiff moved beneath his feet and the world moved beneath that.

He was propped up between two strong short men, his long arms draped across their backs. Before him was old Ismail, the man who had just dashed his head into the bamboo deck of the skiff—which they were leaving.

‘No,” he gurgled as his feet hit the loamy ground and Ismail reached out for his hand and took it, snarling, “Yes Puppy of the Sea. You are the grandson of my good Master and I will not have you lost to the Devil’s spawn. Come here boy.”

Domingo and Ibn steadied him as Ismail held Mishar’s throbbing head between his hands and whispered into his face, “We are a three-and-a-half man clan, and need a hetman. I am too old, Ibn too stupid, and as for the Christian, that’s just unthinkable.”

“Do I walk in a dream Ismail?”

“Can you think boy?”

“Do I think or do I dream?”

“I hope you can still think after the nightmare that is behind us. I apologize for braining you. But I swore to protect you, even from yourself, and I keep my oaths. I do also apologize for insulting your grandfather’s beard. He was always good to me. It was the heat of the moment. I need to know that your head is clear.”

Old Ismail stepped back and handed Mishar his Fez air rifle. “Young Master, can you use the optics to scan the fiord. I do not understand the turbulence. The tidal bore continues to rise and push upriver.”

“My gun.”

He caressed the powerful weapon between his hands as he felt himself being turned respectfully round on his wobbly legs, a taste of vomit in his mouth. Momentarily he stood between Ibn and Ismail with his rifle resting on Domingo’s broad shoulder as the ape of a man pointed and grunted at the remains of Clan Barge Lahab; broken in two, tentacles thrice the size of trees probing it’s decks, feeding the tender human morsels found therein into the hectare wide beak of polished pearl that opened half submerged in the midst of the wreckage.

What was worst was the tubular trunk that grew from somewhere beneath the beak and slurped up swimmers who spilled from the wreckage of their generation’s old home like a child drinking soup with a straw, only to regurgitate them into the massive beaked maw.

His mind was clearing.

Mishar cleared the viewport for his eye as Domingo had already cleaned the receiver, and pressed his eye socket snuggly against the port and traversed the weapon from the east shore of the Hudson Fiord to the west. The tide yet rose, unnaturally so—a cresting wave churning 800 meters down the fiord—and would soon wash their skiff from the bank below them. The water was also turbulent in what Shaykh Amal would call ‘localized’ as the turbulence did not roil, did not build in an oceanographic sense, but seemed somehow like countless large fish flopping in a half submerged net.

“Oh God save us!” he blurted.

The three men all removed their hands from him reflexively, as if he had the plague and looked into his eyes as if he were insane. Yet, just then, he did not doubt his sanity one bit.

Mishar made a show of confidence out of the way he hefted his weapon to port, and used his most level voice, though it quavered, “Merciful God has surely interceded through Ismail to save us and therefore the Clan. I believe the tidal bore is not tidal, but caused by the Great Leviathan. The surface turbulence is caused by—it has spawned and its spawn are furiously racing for this shore. We must make the wooded heights above or become a larval feast.”

They stood dumfounded and this moved him to action, “Ismail in the lead, Ibn to follow. Domingo and I will bring up the rear—move or die.”

They scrambled up the barren slope toward the wood line. The barren lower reaches of the slope were now intelligible as the result of regular spawning surges. Mishar was glad secretly that he was not mathematician enough to factor their chances of scaling the two hundred meter slope to the wood line before the wall of churning water covered the 800 yards it had left to travel.

Ismail made good time through judicious picking of his steps and the pacing of his stride practiced over generations. Ibn kept up with the old man through shear panic-driven urgency. Mishar only kept up on his empty feeling legs and with his heavy weapon because of the strong hand of Domingo pressing into his back and driving him forward.

Ismail led them in a short zigzag pattern, racing before the rising water which could be heard behind them churning against the slopes below, turning their immediate past into a very real demon-infested hell.

Fifty meters from the trees they heard, perhaps 100 meters down slope, a myriad of splashing, blowing, squishing and sucking sounds, that merged into a cacophonous slurping gurgle. Mishar fought the urge to turn and look even as Domingo pushed him so hard that his ascent was only slightly derived from his own strength.

Ismail had grabbed Ibn by the hand and was dragging him as the youth’s panic began to deaden his legs. The old salt’s voice could barely be heard beneath the furious gurgling, which was now infused with a rhythmic ‘suck-splat’ sound.

They all wanted to know what that ‘suck-splat’ was. Mishar, for his part, new that if it looked as bad as it sounded than he—if he turned to look—would surely become frozen in fear.

Domingo seemed to have become the embodiment of haste as his bare feet could be heard tearing the loamy debris that coated the hillside just beneath the tree line. Mishar fancied he could feel his slave’s infidel heart beat in the palm of the hand that dutifully propelled its master to safety.

Ismail was fairly dragging the younger whimpering Ibn with him snarling all the while, “Turn and look and you shall turn to a pillar of snot boy!”

25 meters from the tree line and the scent of sea bottom, redolent with the musk of the leviathan came to them in a nauseating wave. Mishar’s lungs were burning and his legs faltering. He tried to bark an order for the rest to run full out while he remained behind to fire into the teeth of whatever horror hounded them. He urinated instead, and as his knees began to fold beneath him he was heaved off his feet, thrown over a broad hairy back, and carried up the slope faster than he could have run himself. He yet managed to grasp his weapon as he bobbed upside down, his aching head bouncing over Domingo’s right shoulder affording him an unfortunate rearview.

As they passed Ismail and Ibn and neared to within a few paces of the trees, he did not now imagine for a moment that the slight cover of those hard-stalked plants would save them from what leaped frog-like from the churning waters as they seemed to eat the mountainside.

Immediately below them, invading a space about twenty meters deep, and extending all along the flooding bank in a like manner, was a plague of what at first seemed to be amphibious squid. Perhaps every meter played host to one of these toddler-sized monstrosities as it landed with a dozen tentacles splayed, hooked the bank with barbed suction pads, sucked in air through a trunk-like growth emerging from its gelatinous head, and then sprang forward by the use of a single reticulated appendage that sprouted from where the beak should be on such a creature beneath the translucently bulbous head. This appendage appeared to be constructed like the leg of a great frog. To his horror Mishar noticed that when the creatures leaped forward and he caught a glimpse of the base of the ‘foot’ that it was in fact a mouth, as if a suction hose had been designed with many beak like teeth with the body of a starfish as a nozzle.