The Reaver

by Richard Lee Byers

  Meanwhile, the capacious sleeves and voluminous folds of his robe billowing like the wings of a huge red bat, Kymas sprang from the main deck onto the quarterdeck. The crewmen who’d been adjusting the stern rudder recoiled.

  So did Umara. But when Kymas plunged down on top of her, she vanished.

  A heartbeat later, a second Umara appeared in front of the drooping awning and the entrance to the vampire’s cabin. She too had her hand outstretched, and with a crackle, a twist of lightning leaped from it to burn into Kymas’s back. The vampire shuddered.

  Anton grinned. By combining illusion and invisibility, Umara had kept the other Red Wizard from attacking her for a critical moment. Better, she’d maneuvered him to a place where she could smite him with a powerful destructive spell without risking further damage to their already leaking, floundering ship.

  But neat as the trick was, it didn’t end the fight. When the spear of lightning winked out of existence, Kymas spun around toward Umara, snarled words in the innately repellent conjuring language Anton had heard him use before, and slapped at the air.

  Seething into view, already in motion as it emerged from nothingness, a disembodied hand as long as a man was tall and seemingly made of shadow slapped at Umara. She jerked backward and avoided the blow but nearly pitched herself overboard in the process.

  Her murky attacker instantly reversed direction for a backhand swipe. Meanwhile, an orb of gray-black crystal appeared in Kymas’s fingers, and he brandished it over his head as he started another incantation. Distorted faces appeared, stretched, and split into new visages inside the dark but gleaming sphere.

  Flanking the entrance to the cabin and the strip of sagging sailcloth that shaded it, two companionways ran up to the quarterdeck. Umara was in front of the one to starboard, so Kymas was looking in that direction. Hoping to avoid notice, Anton sprinted for the larboard steps.

  But to his disappointment, though not his surprise, the undead wizard pivoted in his direction, shouted a word of power, and stamped his foot. The cry became a roar loud enough to jab pain into Anton’s ears and jolt through the larboard half of the quarterdeck and the steps the pirate ascended.

  Staggered, he felt the risers breaking apart under his feet. In another moment, they’d give way, and he’d fall, perhaps over the side. He made one more bounding, ascending stride, leaped, and landed teetering on the very edge of the ragged hole his foe had just torn in the planking above his cabin.

  Anton windmilled his arms and the blades in his hands, caught his balance, stepped to safety, and then, as he came on guard, shot Kymas a grin. “That was foolish,” he said. “Now it’s going to rain in on all your things.”

  “It truly is sad,” the vampire replied, “that you didn’t know your place.” The crystal orb vanished, he held out his hand, and a red staff flew up out of the hole in the deck and slapped into his palm. Taking it in his other hand as well, he shifted into a trained staff fighter’s middle guard and shuffled forward.

  When facing a staff fighter, Anton liked to cut at his adversary’s fingers. Taking care not to look into the vampire’s eyes, he advanced and feinted low. As he’d hoped, the staff snapped down to block, and then he made the true attack, a slash at Kymas’s right hand.

  An instant before the saber would have sheared flesh and bone, Kymas’s extremity burst into mist. Striking right through the gray vapor, the blade rebounded from the staff. Spinning his weapon one-handed, the Red Wizard caught the saber in a bind and nearly tore it from Anton’s grasp before he could twirl it free.

  At once, Kymas snapped the staff at Anton’s head. Anton parried with the cutlass, and though he knew by a telltale glimmer deep in the steel and the light, somehow eager feel of the weapon that it too was enchanted, the impact still jolted his arm to the shoulder. Plainly, the vampire had extraordinary strength and skill to match; otherwise, he couldn’t have wielded a staff to such vicious effect with two hands, let alone one.

  That was unfortunate. So were most aspects of this situation, including Anton’s physical condition. He’d promised Umara he could fight if need be, and in fact, at the moment, energized by combat, he felt more or less like himself. But it was likely he wasn’t moving as quickly or surely as he would in better circumstances, and likelier still that he’d tire soon.

  Still, he thought, I’m not pulling an oar or breathing zombie stink, so why am I complaining?

  He tried to hook the staff with the cutlass and yank it aside to clear the way for a saber cut to the chest. Both hands solid and gripping his weapon again, Kymas stepped back just far enough for the cutlass to fall short, then clubbed at Anton’s forearm with a stroke that would surely have shattered bone if the pirate hadn’t evaded in his turn.

  They traded attacks for the next several heartbeats, neither quite managing to penetrate the other’s defense. Anton was too busy fighting, avoiding Kymas’s gaze, and trying not to step in the hole to spare a glance to see how Umara was faring. He could only hope she was still alive. Or rather, he hoped she’d destroyed the shadow hand and was about to strike Kymas with another spell.

  The vampire whispered words that made wood creak, crack, and crunch all around him although that was apparently incidental to the incantation’s actual purpose. Hoping to at least spoil the casting, Anton rushed in and cut to the head. Kymas parried and nearly knocked the saber out of his hand.

  As Anton fumbled to recover a firm hold on the hilt, Kymas hissed the final word of his spell. Likewise hissing, only louder, a scaly length of flesh burst out of the wizard’s abdomen and through the scarlet folds of his robes. Eyeless, it spread its fanged jaws wide and struck at the man in front of it.

  Caught by surprise, Anton just managed a thrust with the cutlass. The short blade stabbed into the pallid roof of the tentacle snake’s mouth.

  The thing’s jaws snapped shut anyway, and only the cutlass’s curved brass guard kept its fangs out of Anton’s hand. The violent action in defiance of the weapon drove the blade deeper, and the bloody point popped out of the snake-thing’s dorsal surface.

  Surely, Anton thought, that had hurt it badly, and if Tymora favored him at all, hurt the undead mage who’d grown it out of his belly, too. But apparently Lady Luck wasn’t smiling in his direction. The tentacle ripped itself free of the impalement, nearly yanking the cutlass from his grasp in the process, and then both it and Kymas attacked as fiercely as before.

  Swaying back and forth and up and down, alternately trying to bite Anton or loop around an ankle or wrist, the tentacle serpent added a new complication to a duel that hadn’t been going notably well as it was. Step by step, Kymas pushed him back, and the cramped confines of the broken quarterdeck wouldn’t permit him to back very far. Another retreat or two would drop him over the side.

  Having evidently rid herself of the shadow hand, Umara crept up the remaining companionway, which put her at Kymas’s back. Her lips moved as she whispered something too faint for Anton to hear. She whipped her hands through diagonal clawing motions.

  Kymas jerked and stumbled. Though Anton couldn’t see the wound from his vantage point, he surmised that Umara’s spell had produced an invisible something that was tearing at the vampire from behind.

  Anton sprang forward to take advantage of Kymas’s incapacity. But, unaffected by its creator’s distress, the tentacle snake whipped itself into the way and struck. Anton knocked the gnashing jaws to the side and swung the saber at the writhing arm behind them. The stroke sliced off the eyeless head, and both it and the member to which it had been attached melted away.

  The demise of the tentacle serpent constituted progress of a sort, but by the time Anton followed up with a flank cut, Kymas had recovered from the shock of the unexpected assault from behind. Once again wielding the staff one-handed, the Red Wizard parried, and at the same moment, the dark orb reappeared in his off hand. Snarling a word of command, he threw it down on the deck.

  The globe shattered, and a dozen misty, elongated figures rose from the
shards. Moaning, half the phantoms flew at Umara. The rest swarmed on the unseen thing she’d evoked to rip at Kymas; they evidently perceived it without difficulty.

  They kept it away from their master, too, and, freed of the danger it posed, he drove Anton backward again until the pirate had the jagged hole in the planking on his left and the sea just a step or two behind him.

  Anton hitched to the right, and Kymas whirled the staff in a murderous horizontal arc. He’d been waiting for the Turmishan to dodge in that direction, for after all, where else was there to go?

  But the blow didn’t connect. After that initial feinting shift, Anton actually leaped left, over the hole. At last he could see his adversary’s back—bare, burned, and shredded thanks to Umara’s lightning and her invisible minion—and he slashed it as he fell.

  He couldn’t focus on making that clumsy stroke count and land gracefully, too, so he crashed down on a miscellany of hard objects. The impact knocked the wind out of him, but he made himself flop over onto his back.

  Rain stung his upturned face. At some point during the fight, it had started coming down harder, and he’d been too preoccupied to notice. Squinting against it, he peered upward and rather to his surprise saw only cloud beyond the splintered hole, not Kymas jumping after him or throwing a spell at him. That last saber cut must have finally slowed the undead wizard down.

  But it surely hadn’t destroyed him, and left to his own devices, he’d quickly shed his wounds and be as strong as ever. Anton sucked in a breath, jumped up, and scrambled out of the cabin and up the surviving companionway.

  On what remained of the quarterdeck, Umara was alive and armored in crimson light. Unfortunately, she was also still busy contending with the apparitions from the broken orb.

  Kymas was likewise still on his feet, but it was no longer just his fangs that looked bestial. His ears were pointed, and his eyes, red. He’d dropped the staff to seize the rudder man—the poor wretch must have been cowering up here the whole time—in clawed hands, yank him close, and bite his throat out.

  Yet despite his newly demonic appearance, Kymas retained the ability to speak. He proved it by bellowing, “Kill the pirate! Umara, too!”

  “Yes, lord!” called Captain Sepandem from somewhere to the fore. “Get them, men!”

  That was an unfortunate development, but Kymas was still the primary threat. Anton rushed him.

  His mouth and chin smeared with gore, Kymas dropped the dying crewman, hissed a word of power, and thrust out his hand. A bolt of ragged darkness flared from his claws. Anton twisted, and the power missed him by a hair.

  But as he dodged, he inadvertently met the vampire’s crimson gaze. His thoughts dissolved into confusion. Uncertain why he was running, he broke stride. Kymas lunged at him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and opened his gory mouth wide.

  Perhaps it was the suddenness of Kymas’s action, or the threat implicit in it, that jolted Anton out of his daze. The Red Wizard was too close for him to easily use the saber, but he managed to jam the cutlass between their bodies and rip his assailant’s belly open.

  Kymas shoved Anton away and staggered backward. His body steamed as it started melting into mist. So he could slip away and hide.

  “No,” Anton gasped. He darted forward and swung the saber. Kymas’s head flew from his shoulders and tumbled into the sea. His body rotted even as it fell.

  Anton turned, but nothing else required his immediate attention. With a shouted word and a clap of her hands, Umara destroyed the last of the phantoms. It unraveled into nothingness in a way that reminded him of his mother pulling apart an unsatisfactory bit of knitting. And while some of the marines and sailors had armed themselves, they were no longer advancing on the quarterdeck.

  Panting, Anton grinned at Umara. “What was that you said about no fighting?”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe just enough to make it interesting.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE GALLEY LISTED TO PORT A BOWSHOT OFFSHORE WHERE IT HAD run aground. Men and zombies waded from the ship to the beach with bundles slung on their backs.

  Sheltering beneath the branches of an oak that did a fair job of keeping off the rain, Umara watched the unloading alongside Anton and Ehmed. A short distance away, Stedd stood out in the open with his face upturned. Dawn had come and gone, and as usual, the sun was hidden behind the clouds, but it didn’t matter. After his captivity in the bowels of the ship, the boy was hungry for the open sky.

  But if Stedd was elated in a quiet, mystical sort of way, Ehmed’s expression was glummer than usual. Presumably, the death of his vessel was to blame.

  “You were as good as your word,” Umara told him. “You got us ashore.”

  The captain sighed. “Yes, Lady Sir.”

  “I also appreciate it that none of your men quite managed to intervene in my fight with Kymas before the whole thing was over.”

  For a moment, Ehmed’s lips quirked upward. “Well, you know sailors, Lady Sir. Useless and undependable. Lord Kymas told me so on more than one occasion, when he wasn’t driving the rowers of the upper tier like they were slaves.” He turned his head in Stedd’s direction. “I didn’t take any pleasure in seeing a child treated the way we treated that one. But no guard nor any sort of restraints? He could run off.”

  Umara took a breath. “He won’t because he’s no longer our prisoner. The notion that he ought to be was at the heart of Kymas’s treachery. Our purpose now is to take Stedd to Sapra. By so doing, we’ll cement an alliance that will serve Thay well in days to come.”

  Ehmed frowned as though he would have liked to ask the questions her unexpected assertions evoked. But after a moment’s hesitation, all he said was, “Yes, Lady Sir. I’d better go check what’s come off the ship and what still needs to.”

  As the captain strode toward the waterline, Anton murmured, “Eventually, you’ll have to tell him that none of you can go home.”

  Umara shook her head. “I told you, I’m a loyal Thayan. I have no intention of spending the rest of my life in exile. Besides, Stedd says I’m supposed to go back.”

  “Stedd says a lot of things. But I haven’t heard him explain how to justify your failure to carry out your orders.”

  Orders handed down from Szass Tam himself. Umara imagined standing before that legendary terror and felt a pang of dread.

  “I’ll figure out something,” she said.

  “If they understood the actual situation, Ehmed and the others might not care to gamble their lives on your glibness.”

  Anxiety gave way to irritation. Scowling, she said, “I’m not Kymas. I have a reasonable amount of concern for my underlings, and I hope that if worst comes to worst, my superiors will only punish me. But I’m entitled to the crew’s service by virtue of who and what I am, even if they come to grief because of it.”

  Anton smiled. “Spoken like a true Red Wizard.”

  Still vexed, although she wasn’t entirely certain why, she said, “Anyway, who are you to say these things to me? When did you ever hesitate to lie or put other folk in harm’s way to accomplish your ends?”

  The Turmishan’s eyes—eyes a rich, shining brown like polished agate—blinked, and then he burst out laughing. “Well, now that you mention it, never once in all my years of plundering. What in the name of the deepest hell has gotten into me?”

  Stedd, she thought, and perhaps their time aboard Falrinn’s sailboat, an interlude when neither of them had needed to fight, scheme, or tell too many lies, had exercised some small influence as well.

  “I’m more concerned about whether your newfound regard for honesty will last,” she said aloud. “If I knew, perhaps I’d know how far to trust you.”

  He grinned. “What a cold thing to say to the comrade who helped you kill angels and a vampire. How many folk share a bond like that?”

  That tugged a smile out of her. “Nonetheless. You know I truly mean to help Stedd. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have rebelled against Kymas. But it was different for you. Y
ou had to stand with me to be free.”

  “And now you wonder if I’m still looking for a way to re-kidnap Stedd and turn a profit on him.”

  “Can you convince me you’re not?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that I could carry the boy off from the midst of you and your followers, that he and I could survive alone on this desolate shore, and then I could find someone besides the church of Umberlee willing to buy him. Maybe a different band of Thayans. But truly, I’m bored just thinking about it. How many times have you and I and other scoundrels like us pursued the poor brat, taken him prisoner, and then lost him again to bad luck or a rival? I’d rather play a new game.”

  “Escorting him to Sapra?”

  Anton hesitated. “I don’t go to Turmish. But I’ll tag along as far as the border.”

  She wondered why he shunned the land of his birth. She assumed his fellow Turmishans had put a price on his head, but so had the rulers of Teziir and Westgate, and that hadn’t kept him out of their territories.

  She drew breath to ask him about it. Then, down on the beach, somebody shouted, “Ship ho!”

  Umara looked out to sea. Beyond the galley and farther to the northeast, tiny with distance, she could make out square-rigged sails bobbing up and down as the vessel beneath them cut through the waves.

  “Curse it,” Anton said. “That’s the Octopus.”

  Umara didn’t know how he could identify the ship from so far away, but that was scarcely the important question. “Is it a pirate ship?”

  “Yes, and her master was always one to truckle to Evendur Highcastle even before the stinking piece of offal came back from the bottom of the sea. I guarantee you he’s hunting Stedd the same as we were.”

  “Is it possible he knows Stedd’s with us?”

  “Given Evendur’s magic, how can you rule it out? Even if he doesn’t know, he might think a wreck and a bunch of castaways are too easy a prize to pass up.”