by Mel Odom
“I’m all right,” she told him.
Black Champion continued to pitch and plunge across the uneven ocean, but the supernatural wind that had captured her guided her safely through the troughs. Startled shouts rang across her decks. The sailors cheered as they felt the ship come about under her own power despite the duress she was under.
Without warning, sails punched up into the sky, cresting the next roiling wave that was spurred on by the volcano. At the top of the mainmast, the skull and crossbones on a field of black crowned the pirate ship as it continued its pursuit. The cheers turned to dismay.
“I’ll take the wheel,” Sabyna said.
Jherek stepped back, breathing hard. He drew the cutlass from his sash and pulled the hook into his free hand. Pushed by a full complement of sails, the pirate ship closed quickly. Red-eyed pirates clamored for blood as they stood at the railing. They clanged their swords together and sang a sea chantey. Jherek only heard a few words, but he recognized it for what it was.
“They’re ensorcelled,” Sabyna yelled out to be heard.
Jherek nodded. No sane man would take the risks those dozen pirates had lined up for. The young sailor set himself, pushing the pain in his injured arm from his mind as well as he could.
In the next moment, catching the crest of the wave that overtook them, the pirates sprang from their ship. Propelled by magic, the men spanned the twenty feet separating them from Black Champion and landed on the caravel’s deck. Immediately, the pirates pushed themselves to their feet and rose to do battle.
“Go below!” Jherek yelled at Sabyna, knowing he couldn’t hold a dozen armed pirates back.
“If I let go this wheel, we’ll go down!” she shouted back at him.
Knowing it was true, Jherek felt torn. She stood in harm’s way, and yet he couldn’t protect her if she abandoned the wheel. He concentrated on the possessed pirates who moved at them with single-minded purpose. With the way the stern castle’s steering section was left so open, the pirates would surround them quickly. The red-eyed men already moved to flank them.
Jherek swung the cutlass, feeling the impact of blade meeting blade when the pirate automatically blocked. Before his opponent could withdraw his weapon, the young sailor reached out with the hook and caught the man in the shoulder.
The curved hook bit deeply into the man’s flesh, skidding for just a moment across the shoulder blade before sinking into his back. Under the spell that held him, the pirate didn’t make a sound, but tried to pull his weapon into Jherek’s exposed arm.
Shifting quickly, Jherek blocked the weakly aimed cut, then stepped to the pirate’s left and yanked on the grappling hook. Getting his weight into the motion, the young sailor pulled the pirate over his hip in a wrestling throw Malorrie had taught him.
Off-balance and at the mercy of the brutal hook, the pirate stumbled over Jherek’s hip and sailed into the next man behind him. With a crashing thrash of limbs, the two pirates tumbled over Black Champion’s stern railing and splashed into the dark sea below.
Pulled nearly off his feet by his own efforts, the hook lost to him because he hadn’t been able to free it from the pirate, Jherek caught himself on his free hand and pushed up. He blocked a cutlass blow that had been intended to take his head from his shoulders, then launched a kick that caught the pirate wielding it full in the chest.
Bone snapped and the pirate stumbled back, knocking down two others.
“Well met, young warrior,” Glawinn growled as he stepped in at Jherek’s side. The paladin’s blade gleamed despite the darkness of the sky. “Now let’s rid ourselves of these vermin.”
As the paladin and the young sailor engaged the pirates, Skeins blew past them in a violent flutter. In heartbeats, the raggamoffyn chose a victim and covered him, possessing him even in spite of whatever spell had already claimed him. The pirate lifted his blade against his brethren and attacked from the rear.
Jherek’s breath burned deep in his lungs, gusting out in uncontrolled bellows. His trip through the rigging had taken a lot from him already. He fought fiercely, stepping into the rhythm Glawinn set up. Or maybe the paladin stepped into the rhythm Jherek had established. The young sailor wasn’t certain. All the days they’d spent as sparring partners stood them in good stead now.
Ducking low beneath a wildly swung cutlass, Jherek saw Glawinn rip a backhand blow across a pirate’s throat. Blood dribbled down the man’s chest as he fell backward. Jherek surged up, holding tight to the hilt of the cutlass as he drove it into the chest of the pirate in front of him. Though the cutlass wasn’t normally a thrusting weapon, it split the man’s heart and killed him instantly.
Jherek shoved the corpse from his weapon, aware of Azla racing up the stern castle steps to join them. Her scimitar rang, a death song hammered out in steel. Jherek fought fiercely, defending Sabyna from the pirates who tried to take the fight in her direction. The footing became even more treacherous than the storm had made it, as blood spilled quickly across the brine-stained deck.
Despite his efforts and the fact that his life hung on the eyeblink of time between the slashing and parrying of the cutlass, Jherek played over the voice’s words.
Soon, my son.
There’d been no promise of how soon, and no indication again of whom the voice belonged to. The young sailor was only dimly aware of the fight ending. He’d known the odds were lessening, but he didn’t know the battle was over until Glawinn grabbed his arm.
“Easy, young warrior,” the paladin advised. “It’s over.”
Jherek struggled against the man for just a moment, then realized the caravel’s crew was even now beginning to throw the dead pirates overboard. The young sailor took a deep breath, feeling his heart hammering at his ribs and his body shake with exhaustion. Blood streamed down his face and from half a dozen other cuts across his body where his armor hadn’t protected him. He let the cutlass hang like an anchor at the end of his arm.
He glanced at Sabyna as Azla assigned a man to relieve her. The ship’s mage met Azla’s eyes briefly, then Sabyna turned and walked away.
Jherek wanted to go to her, but he knew it wasn’t right. Sabyna was capable of standing on her own, and if she wanted his company, she was capable of asking for that as well.
She didn’t.
Uncaring of the debris that occasionally struck the deck around him, he walked to the railing and watched the pirate ship that had trailed them break off pursuit as the supernatural wind continued pushing Black Champion away. In moments, it was tacking back toward Vurgrom’s other ship.
Jherek stared back at the spewing volcano in the distance, watching as more lava poured into the Alamber Sea. He didn’t understand the forces that had pulled him there. He reached out for the voice inside his head, opening himself up to it, wanting it to fulfill its promise.
Only emptiness rang inside his skull.
Jherek gazed down at the deck, watching Sabyna walk away. The ship’s mage had her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She never looked up at him. A heaviness he’d never felt lay on the young sailor’s heart. He couldn’t make sense out of anything, and in that moment, knowing how little control he had over anything that happened to him, he let go the faith he’d tried to cling to for so long.
Ilmater the Crying God, the god to whom the young sailor had given himself, shed no tears for Jherek Wolf’s-get. The young sailor’s heart turned cold and hard. No matter what happened, he promised himself silently, once he got the pearl disk from Vurgrom, he would be free.
* * * * *
Covered protectively in Iakhovas’s grasp, Laaqueel watched the fiery red of the volcano channel give way to the cool blue of the sea again. Huge boulders spun through the water, wreathed in flames that wouldn’t die, until they dropped out of sight.
Iakhovas gripped the wheel sternly, altering his course. “See, priestess. We are arrived hale and whole. If you have faith, all things become possible.”
“You have my thanks, Most Exalted One. If
not for you, I would have died.”
“You cannot die. I won’t let you. Our fates are strongly wound together—as long as you acknowledge them.”
Laaqueel stepped away from him, no longer feeling the pull of the currents sweeping Tarjana’s deck. She stood easily on her own. “Where are we?”
“In the Alamber Sea.”
The water around Tarjana roiled with boiling bubbles that raced for the surface. They were so thick, so tightly compacted together, that they created a misty curtain that limited visibility to no more than a few feet. Only the magic surrounding the mudship yet protected them.
Laaqueel looked behind, making sure the fliers trailing them had made it as well. Miraculously, the cone of protection that extended over Tarjana weaved back through the roiling water. She couldn’t see if all of the fliers were there, rowed from the belly of the volcano that had burst underwater, but she got the sense that most of them had.
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
“There is much to do now that we are here,” Iakhovas said. “First, we will find a place that will serve as our base of operations. If I’m to free the forgotten clan of We Who Eat from this place, I must find the tools to do it.”
“Do you know where these items you need are?”
“Yes. There is an ancient place that lies far from here. It’s called Coryselmal, a broken city that once housed the cursed sea elves. I shall reap from its corpse all that I need to destroy the Sharksbane Wall, then I shall recoup all that is mine.”
Laaqueel gazed at the water, knowing the titanic forces that warred in the ocean were somehow kept separate from them. She started her prayers to Sekolah, asking that their voyage be successful, and that it try the spirits of the sahuagin so the Shark God’s chosen might become even stronger.
It was better, she knew from her experience as a priestess, to pray for the things that were sure to happen. It helped to remind her that those trials weren’t unexpected or without reason.
She knew her people would pay in blood.
XXVIII
2 Flamerule, the Year of the Gauntlet
“Are you sure you want to do that, young warrior?”
Glawinn’s quiet words startled Jherek. He hadn’t known the paladin was there. Immediately, he felt guilty about what he was doing. He’d thought he was going to be alone long enough to do what he planned.
“Aye,” the young sailor replied, his voice thick with his own doubts and fears. “It’s what I have to do.” He peered at the long black sea stretching out to the east as Black Champion made her way west again.
Vurgrom and his pirates had lost sails during the volcanic eruption stemming from the Ship of the Gods, but they’d brought extra sails. After the turbulence had finally died down in the Alamber Sea, Vurgrom’s pirates had simply rehung their rigging with the new sails and continued on with their journey. The pirate captain had paused to throw a few taunts Azla’s way first. Azla had ignored him, but in stony fury. The half-elf obviously had a long-standing feud going with the pirate that wasn’t going to end until one or the other was dead. Evidently Black Champion’s captain and crew were too well respected for the pirates to think they could take them without loss.
In the hours since the eruption, Azla and her crew, with help from Jherek, Sabyna, and Glawinn, had worked to repair the sails. However, there was no replacing the lost mainmast, not at sea. Jherek had sewn and cut and spliced sailcloth until his hands ached, but he hadn’t complained. Neither had he talked with Sabyna. He’d also avoided Glawinn’s offer of lessons with the sword, working on the sails until it was well past dark.
“Why do you think you have to do this?” Glawinn asked in a soft voice.
Jherek listened to the man’s words but found no challenge in them, nothing he could take offense at and use to leverage an argument that would end the unwanted conversation. “Because I’m tired.”
“We’re all tired.”
“It’s not the work,” Jherek snapped, his voice almost breaking with the emotion that filled him. With all the rage inside him, he felt like demanding that someone understand what was going through his mind. “It’s the hope, Glawinn. I’m tired of all the hope.”
“A man can’t live without hope.”
“Well,” the young sailor challenged, “I’m going to have to see about that.”
Glawinn stepped closer, coming within Jherek’s peripheral vision. The young sailor didn’t turn to face him. “You have no thoughts of a future?”
“I have no future,” Jherek declared.
“You’re not dead.”
Jherek clung to the cold rage that had filled him since the voice saved the ship. “I was born dead, and I’ve died a little more each day, till I owe Cyric at least three or four other lives.” A chill touched him when he mentioned the god of death’s name. In all his life, he never had.
“You really believe that?”
Turning, Jherek glared at the paladin. “You don’t know anything about me.”
Glawinn crossed his arms over his chest and drew himself up to his full height. “Such wisdom in one so young, to be knowing all these things that you do.”
“You taunt me.” Jherek’s eyes blazed, but he restrained himself. Glawinn didn’t deserve his wrath and he knew it, but that emotion was so ready to be released.
“The opposite,” Glawinn disagreed. “I marvel at you.”
“This is my decision.”
“I’ve not tried to alter it.”
“You asked me if I was sure about doing this.”
Glawinn let out a slow breath. “I only thought that someone should. I’ve known something was bothering you. I waited, thinking you might come to me for help. Or talk to Sabyna about it.”
Jherek’s throat hurt when he tried to talk, and his eyes burned from the effort it took to keep his words from breaking. “I can’t talk to her about it.”
“Why?”
“Because it would hurt the friendship I have with her.”
“Is it so bad, young warrior?”
Jherek looked past the paladin, making sure none of the sailors were close by. Troge, the first mate, was making his rounds, checking his night crew and the lanterns that hung from Black Champion’s yardarms and masts to light her and to mark her for other ships in the water at night.
Closing his fist over the object in his hand, Jherek pulled up his left sleeve, baring the flaming skull tattoo masked in chains. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.
Glawinn only had to glance at it briefly. “It’s the mark of Bloody Falkane the pirate, also called the Salt Wolf.”
“Aye,” Jherek said bitterly, “and known widely abroad enough that even someone from the Dalelands has heard of him.”
“You’re not old enough to have been one of his crew.”
“No,” Jherek agreed. “My fate is worse than that. I’m his son.”
Glawinn didn’t let any surprise show. He said, “I never knew he had a son.”
“It wasn’t,” Jherek replied, “something he seemed especially proud of.” He rolled his sleeve back down. “And what do you think of me now, Sir Glawinn, when you think back on those nights you’ve spent training me with a sword? Did you ever think you might be training a pirate captain’s son who might someday hold that sword and all that skill at your throat?”
The paladin’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not something you’d ever do.”
Jherek shook his head. “How can you be so sure about that?”
“I know you.”
“You don’t know me. The tattoo proves that.”
“I know you,” Glawinn said, “I admit the tattoo is something of a surprise. Tell me about it.”
Standing there gripping the railing, his fist tight about all that he was about to abandon, Jherek did. He told the story of his life on Bunyip, and of what little he knew about his father. He spoke of the sea battles he’d seen, the deaths he’d watched, and the tortures he’d seen inflicted.
And he to
ld of the time when he was twelve and his father had first placed a cutlass in his hand and told him he was going to be part of a boarding crew. He’d escaped in the night and somehow made the long swim in to Cape Velen fourteen miles away.
“When I got to Velen I was starving,” Jherek said, “but I couldn’t even steal food. Instead, I lived on berries and eggs I found down by the beach. I hired myself out first working the docks to move cargo, then any job I could get in Velen. Eventually I got a job with a shipwright. I love working wood, and I’ve got a talent for it. That’s what got me the job of repairing Madame Iitaar’s roof.”
He told the paladin of Madame Iitaar, how she’d taken in an orphan boy who was sleeping in an extra room in the shipwright’s building during the months it took to repair her roof.
“Months?” Glawinn asked. “For a roof?”
“It started out as the roof but it moved on to other things. A new fence. A new porch, front and back. New tables and chairs. Madame Iitaar has a list of projects she always wants done. I’m a good woodworker.”
“You must be.”
“I lived in her house for years, and she wouldn’t have treated me any better if I’d been her own son.” As he said that, Jherek was surprised to find that he still believed that.
“Why did you end up in Baldur’s Gate?”
Jherek told him of Breezerunner and the Amnians, and how Madame Iitaar seemed certain that whatever destiny he had lay in Baldur’s Gate. “Even Malorrie thought so.”
“Malorrie’s the man who taught you your skill with the blade?”
“Actually, Malorrie’s a phantom,” Jherek replied. So he told of how Malorrie had been the first to really find him living on the beaches. He’d broken his leg a short time after arriving in Velen and it had been the phantom that’d taken care of him. He told of the nights they’d spent in the shipwright’s building learning all the combat skills the phantom knew.
“You don’t know who this Malorrie was when he was living?” Glawinn asked.
“I never asked. It’s like that between us. We just accept each other for the way we are. Without trying to change anything.” Jherek’s voice turned bitter. “You don’t get that out of many people.”
