Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) Read Online Free Page B

on the grass, mouth open to the blasts of sea air.
    H er gaze lifted with the colossal surge that scaled the fjord walls. But it hadn’t reached land yet. The monstrous wave was still out to sea and gaining height! She thought she saw someone fall out of a tree to her left. She crabbed backward up the slope. The urge to escape blanked every other thought from her mind.
    Father plucked her up and s queezed her against him as he made back for the house. She peered over his shoulder in horror as the giant wave piled above the highest peak. It blackened all twilight and moonlight from the bay. A thousand feet and more and still it rose, finally crashing over the shoulders of the fjord cliffs and wiping out unreachable forests at high altitude.
    It climbed higher yet as it approached shore, its spumy summit curling tonnes with the teetering promise of an avalanche. The black wall summoned all remaining water before it to feed a final towering surge of Biblical proportions. It dragged a fishing fleet from its berth before dashing the vessels to kindling. The wave leaned and toppled and collapsed—an incalculable explosion of breaking water—onto the village.
    The crash shook the ground, forced Meredith to slap her palms against her ears. Niflheim burst into a cloud of roaring white. Its watery shrapnel bombarded the hillside and the garden. Father set her down and shielded her from the onslaught. William rushed to her defence as well, and she cringed as the massive drops thudded onto their backs. Meanwhile, Professor Sorensen protected Sonja in the same manner. They all crouched together and waited, prayed, not daring to look up. Not until the deluge slackened.
    The w orst eventually passed as driving winds dispelled the drizzle away to the west, but the thunderous new tide hadn’t even begun to settle. It heaved and sloshed its way up ridges and hillsides, then collapsed back on itself with the added tonnage of accumulated debris—rocks, trees, houses, boats.
    Father had to shout to be heard. “ Are you hurt, love?” He grabbed Meredith’s shoulders and peered into her gaze.
    “ N-no. I’m...”
    He gave her a quick squeeze, then saw to Sonja. Meredith glanced all around her, trying to remember where she was, what part she ’d played in the end of the world. Then she spied the used-to-be valley below, where upturned hulls rocked and glistened in the moonlight on the wild undulating sea. Broken rooftops and loose forests swam about and collided in the frothy cauldron. Waves continued to break ashore where there was no shore—on low mountain passes, against wrecked barns and farmhouses, on the bare crowns of besieged hillocks.
    She shrank from her memory of the dark rising surge. Too big, too monstrous to comprehend. Her mind couldn’t think past the cold and the sure-to-be nightmare images and noises of the tidal wave. But why hadn’t it taken her? Sonja? Father? The last thought she’d had before the rain was of the sea swallowing the earth. But it had only swallowed the valley below.
    She gasped. Had the walls of the nearest cliff not guided the wave, it would have broken over her as well, over Sonja and Father and the entire Sorensen estate. Washed them away like sheaves of wheat, as it had the village and the fishing fleet below.
    God had spared them this night . He had wrought the rock cliffs into their specific shape for this purpose alone—to spare the McEwans. Of that she had no doubt.
    Death. So that was what it tasted like.
    Dark salt. An ant’s eye view of a mounting ocean.
     
    Men waded out to see the shocking flood. Women screamed and fainted on the lawn which was still awash up to shin-height. A few of them had to be saved from drowning. Sonja had no words to describe the enormity of what had just happened—indeed, what was still happening. The tidal surge had reached as far as she could see into the valley, and even now it lapped over half way up the hillside to their garden.
    As the event had