by James Wyatt
“You were fighting in the war?” Captain Avaen asked Dania.
“I enlisted as soon as I was old enough, which was as good a way as any to get out of my father’s house.”
The captain looked surprised. “Yours is a noble family, is it not?”
“Oh yes, the line of ir’Vran goes back to the first nobles of Breland. And my father could easily have kept me from combat duty, if I hadn’t volunteered for it.” Dania was still staring at the polished wood of the tabletop, not looking at the captain.
“So Lord Kor put the four of us on a ship to Xen’drik,” Janik said, trying to steer the conversation away from Dania’s painful memories of the war. “And we trudged through the jungle to a tiny ruin full of baboons, remember?”
“Rabid baboons,” Mathas said, chuckling.
“Corrupted baboons,” Dania said. “That was no disease—there was an evil in that place that made them that way.”
“And that big one nearly ripped my arms off,” Janik said. He turned to Auftane and the captain. “It was holding me right up to its face, my feet dangling above the ground, and tugging on me like a rag doll, screeching like a banshee. Then all of a sudden it got this quizzical look on its big baboon face and started to look behind it, and then it just fell over dead. Dania had neatly cut right through its spine.”
“And did you find what you were looking for?” the captain asked.
“No, but neither did Krael, who was in charge of the Emerald Claw expedition. Eventually we came back to Breland with some good information about the Emerald Claw’s intentions there, and that convinced the king that we were worth what he was paying us.”
“And what were they doing?” Auftane said.
“Mathas, you can explain it better than I can,” Janik demurred.
“They were building some kind of magical device around a manifest zone they had discovered,” the elf began.
“A manifest zone?” the captain asked.
“A place where the boundaries between the planes are thin. In that particular location, the plane of Shavarath, called the Battleground, was somehow close at hand. They were building a device in the hope of bringing some of that plane’s warring inhabitants into our plane to fight on their behalf.”
“It could have been quite devastating,” Dania added, “if they had been successful. Imagine an army of demons marching at Karrnath’s command.”
“Or a swarm of blades flying through the air, unhindered by any defense their opponents could muster,” Mathas said.
“So we snuck in and destroyed their precious device,” Janik said.
“I’m surprised Breland didn’t want it for itself,” the captain said. “Even the best of nations, when at war, can lose sight of the proper perspective on such things—the devastation it could cause.”
“Well,” Janik hesitated, then admitted, “we actually had orders to secure it for Breland, if possible.”
“That turned out not to be possible,” Dania added with a grin.
“In fact,” Mathas added, “it’s not quite fair to say we destroyed it, is it?”
“No, it was that army of archons that destroyed it,” Janik said. “But we helped get it sucked into the Battleground.”
“Right,” Mathas said. “Through our efforts, the boundary between our world and Shavarath disappeared entirely—just for a moment, and in that particular place. The device the Emerald Claw was building passed through the boundary—”
“Taking us with it,” Dania interjected.
“Taking us with it, yes, and it was quickly destroyed by a raiding force of celestial beings.”
Captain Avaen looked somewhat skeptical. “But you escaped,” he said.
“We did,” Janik said. “And Krael did, worse luck. But the Emerald Claw mastermind behind the whole project—what was his name?”
“General Malestra,” Mathas said.
“Right, Malestra emphatically did not escape.” Janik smirked.
“Nor did most of his lackeys,” Dania said grimly.
“How did you get back to this plane?” Auftane asked, his eyes wide with wonder.
“The planar boundary was ruptured when the device passed through,” Mathas explained. “It started to repair itself almost immediately, but we were able to jump through it again, in the opposite direction, before it closed entirely.”
“And Krael?”
“He and a couple of his men made it through ahead of us,” Janik said. “He stuck around on this side of the portal just long enough to swear vengeance on us, and then ran off.”
“And ever since then, it’s always the same with Krael,” Dania said. “He tries to sabotage our work, and we get in his way as much as possible without lowering ourselves to his kind of dirty tricks.”
“Hmm,” Janik grunted. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe we should break into his apartment to steal his books.”
“Count me out,” said Dania.
“I suppose that wouldn’t fit well in your new lifestyle, would it?” Janik said, the merest trace of mockery in his voice.
Dania’s temper flared. “No, and it wouldn’t fit your old way of doing things, either,” she said, her voice rising only slightly. “You used to have some ethics.”
Mathas and the captain looked anywhere but at the other people at the table, while Auftane watched Janik and Dania with morbid fascination.
“Well, look where it got me,” Janik responded hotly. “You can only turn away from evil for so long before it stabs you in the back.”
“That’s why you’ve got to confront it, face to face,” Dania said.
“Like we did with Maija?”
“Janik, that caught us all off guard,” Dania said. “We never knew she held such evil in her heart.”
“Which proves my point. If we couldn’t see the evil in Maija—if I couldn’t see it—then how can we see it anywhere else in order to confront it? Maybe it’s better to strike first, ethics be damned.”
“So you’d betray me, or Mathas, or Auftane here, rather than risk one of us turning on you? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No! Churning chaos, Dania, you’re twisting my words. I meant that maybe we shouldn’t think Krael’s tactics are beneath us. They seem to be working all right for him.”
“Wait until you see Krael, Janik. I think you’ll agree that his tactics, as you say, aren’t working well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maija turned on him, too,” Dania said, her voice suddenly quiet. “I don’t know if Mathas told you, but I saw them both when I was in Karrnath.”
“Together?”
“Yes, they were still working together,” Dania said. “They were both working with a shifter vampire, looking for the Tablet of Shummarak.”
“The Tablet of Shummarak? Sea of Fire,” Janik muttered.
“Janik,” Dania said. “Krael is a vampire.”
“A va—” Janik’s mouth hung open for a moment. Mathas and Avaen returned their full attention to the conversation, and Auftane’s eyes grew still wider.
Janik gasped. “Is Maija—?”
“As far as I know, she’s still alive. At least she was when I saw her. We destroyed the shifter vampire, and then Krael and Maija disappeared. We couldn’t find them again. But Janik, I don’t have much hope that she can ever be redeemed. She had such a strong aura of evil around her.”
“Was it an aura she didn’t have at Mel-Aqat?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t until I was in Karrnath that I started noticing things like that. Since seeing that, I’ve learned to focus it more—it was part of my training as a paladin. But at the time, it was just a powerful sense, almost like I could smell it on her.”
“So her smell told you she was beyond redemption?” Janik’s voice rose again. “Her smell told you I should give up hope?” He leaned across the table. “I’m not going to forget about her, damn it—I’m not going to give up on her, no matter what your nose or your special paladin sense tells you!”
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Mathas’s calm voice interrupted him. “Janik,” the elf said.
“What?”
“What’s the Tablet of Shummarak?”
“And that!” Janik said, pointing a finger at Dania. “When were you planning on telling me about that? If I’d known about that while we were still in Sharn, I could have looked into it, but now—” He broke off.
“Janik, I—” Dania began.
“Ah, never mind.” Janik stood, scraping his chair away from the table. “I need to look at my notebooks. I’ll be in my cabin.”
Janik sat on his bunk, notebooks piled around him. Each lay open, some holding scraps of parchment or quills or ribbons to mark pages he had referred to. He was still angry with Dania, and he told himself he was justified in feeling that way. But even if he had known about the Tablet of Shummarak earlier, he would only have grieved the theft of the Darriens Codex that much more keenly. Darriens had quoted snippets of the Tablet’s text in his commentary on the elven writings, but the Tablet had been lost for centuries and no copies of the complete text were known to exist. Because of Darriens’s work and his connection to the Church of the Silver Flame, the Tablet was best known within the Church, and carried religious significance for the order. In fact, the Church’s use of the Tablet was one of the key points in the argument he had read connecting the Church to the ancient Serpent Cults of Xen’drik.
Janik remembered that the Tablet made reference to the couatls that had imprisoned the great demons within the earth. But he couldn’t remember whether any connection had been established between the Tablet and the Place of Imprisonment mentioned in the Serpentes Codex, which he believed was Mel-Aqat. His notebooks were no help.
Perhaps it was sheer coincidence that Krael and Maija had been seeking the Tablet, but Janik doubted it. It seemed far more likely that Krael suspected a connection to Mel-Aqat, or perhaps had established one. Maybe he had found the Tablet. Maybe that’s why he was going to Mel-Aqat. And maybe that was why he was so desperate to get Janik out of the way.
Hours had passed since Janik had left the dinner table, and the ship was silent except for soft creakings as it coursed through the open sea. Auftane had not come to bed, but Janik supposed he was sleeping on deck—it was a clear, warm night.
The quiet of the night was shattered by the artificer’s cry.
“Attack! We’re under attack!”
SHARGON’S TEETH
CHAPTER 7
Janik grabbed his sheathed sword from the floor as he leaped to his feet. He pulled the sword free and rushed to the cabin door, kicked it open, and sprang up the stairs to the deck. Auftane held his huge mace in one hand and a scroll in the other, dodging the tridents of three sahuagin as he tried to read the scroll. Janik ran to the artificer and plunged his sword into the back of one of the sea devils, which crumpled to the deck with a gurgling yelp.
Janik’s arrival gave Auftane the opportunity he needed to cast the spell on his scroll. A ring of whirling silver blades appeared around him, cutting into the flesh of both sahuagin. They cried out but did not fall. Janik glanced around the deck.
Auftane had raised an effective alarm. The three sahuagin that had surrounded him must have been the first to reach the deck, though plenty more were crawling over the bulwarks now. Sailors appeared on deck in clusters, rushing to cut at the fishlike creatures as they tried to climb aboard. Near the bow, Captain Avaen and his first mate stood back to back, surrounded by a group of five sahuagin. Dania was charging up the steps from her cabin, and Mathas touched her to imbue a spell just before she jumped up to the deck.
The two sahuagin near Auftane backed away from the whirling blades and sought another target, and Janik proved to be the closest. They maneuvered around the ring of blades and came at Janik from opposite sides, their tridents lowered. Janik ducked their onslaught, then somersaulted past one of them and shoved it hard toward its ally. It met the leveled trident of the other sahuagin and slumped to the deck.
Janik had hoped the two sahuagin would impale each other, and he cursed his poor aim. But Auftane quickly stepped up to the remaining sea devil, and it died in the ring of whirling blades before he could even swing his mace. Janik raised his sword in a quick salute to the artificer, then ran toward the bow to help the beleaguered captain.
Two sea devils threatened Janik as he ran. He drove his sword into the chest of one, then heaved its corpse toward the other. As the sahuagin stumbled, Janik ran on, noting with a backward glance that Dania had moved to engage it. The attackers surged over the sides of the ship in an apparently unending stream, and though he and his friends had little trouble cutting them down, the sailors were not faring as well. Janik jumped over the bodies of two fallen sailors on his way to the bow, and he saw that more were falling under the sahuagin assault.
By the time Janik reached them, the captain and his mate had felled two of the creatures surrounding them, but three more arrived just as Janik did. Despite the newcomers, Janik’s arrival tilted the balance dramatically. The sahuagin fell quickly when their attention was divided between the sailors inside their ring of tridents and Janik’s darting blade outside it. Moving swiftly around the ragged circle of sea devils, Janik guided his sword to vital spots, never needing more than one blow to finish an opponent. He killed four and reached the fifth just as the first mate’s cutlass hacked through its neck.
“Thank you, Janik!” the captain called. The first mate, a pretty woman with almond-shaped eyes, gave him a grim smile before running to help a group of sailors nearby.
Janik surveyed the deck again, looking for where his help was most needed. Auftane had fallen back to the cabins, where he and his ring of blades were providing an effective shield for Mathas, who propelled fiery rays and bolts of acid at nearby foes. Dania was on the starboard side amid a thicket of sailors and sea devils, her sword rising and falling in a deadly rhythm. An aura surrounded her that Janik had never seen before, almost a shimmer of radiance—but Janik supposed that was the spell Mathas had cast on her, some kind of protective ward. Avaen was making his way toward Dania and the sailors, while the first mate had joined another trio of sailors on the port side, who looked a little overwhelmed.
Janik hurried to help the sailors, trapping one sea devil between his own blade and the first mate’s, quickly bringing it down. His arrival—and the quick deaths of three more sahuagin at the end of his blade—shook the sea devils’ morale and they started edging toward the bulwarks. Out of nowhere, a sahuagin hurtled across the deck from the starboard side, crashing into Janik. The sharp points of his trident only grazed Janik’s shoulder, but its body slammed hard into him, forcing him against the bulwark rail.
Janik hung there for what felt like many heartbeats. The sahuagin was wedged on top of him, its weight pushing him toward the open air and the churning sea below. It got one foot onto the rail and used the leverage to push him up higher. Over its shoulder, Janik saw the first mate’s blade come down onto its back, and it threw its head backward in pain. In the same instant, the rail beneath him splintered and he plummeted into the water, holding fast to the lifeless body of the sea devil.
The cold water swallowed him.
Well, Janik thought, this is a problem.
Lyrandar Dayspring was still moving, quickly sliding past him and disappearing in the dark. Blood was flowing freely from his shoulder, though it wasn’t a deep wound—and blood in the water where there were already sea devils could mean only one thing: sharks. Two things stood in his favor—his short sword was still in his hand, and the attack had come so quickly that he hadn’t had time to put his boots on.
He couldn’t think of any others.
Janik tore off his shirt, which had threatened to drag him down. Free of its clutches, he fought his way to the surface and filled his lungs with air, spitting out the water that had filled his throat. Away from the lanterns on the ship’s deck, the sea was darker, but the Ring of Siberys stretched its arc high across the sky to paint the night in soft g
olden light. He saw the ship as a silhouette against the glowing sky, her torches like dancing stars as she slowed and turned her port side to him. He knew they probably wouldn’t come back to him—they couldn’t risk running the ship over him. As soon as they cleared the sahuagin from the deck, he was sure they’d send a launch back to look for him.
That might be too late. A half-dozen yards away, Janik saw the unmistakable shape of a shark’s fin cutting through the water toward him. Bracing himself against the sting of salt water in his eyes, he took a deep breath and plunged his head underwater, quickly looking around him. So far, it looked like only one shark had arrived, and not a very big one at that.
It was upon him. At the last moment, Janik threw his body backward in the water, anticipating that the shark would aim for his wounded shoulder. The shark glided over him. Janik drove his sword upward, but without leverage in the water, he could only manage a glancing blow on the shark’s belly. It was enough to draw blood—and enough to drive the shark into a frenzy.
It circled back toward him quickly, its mouth open wide. Choosing his mark, Janik thrust his sword into the roof of its mouth. It was a good blow—Janik was pretty sure he hit the brain. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the shark from closing its mouth around his forearm and raking his flesh with rows of teeth. It didn’t have the strength to hold on—or to bite through the bone—and Janik wrested his arm and his sword free. The blood—his and the shark’s—was blackening the water, and it was only a matter of time before more sharks came, probably accompanied by their sea devil masters.
Janik clumsily slid his sword into his belt and started to swim. He doubted he could reach the ship, but perhaps he could meet the launch before the sharks got him.
After several hard strokes, Janik looked behind him and saw the water churning with sharks in the place where he had killed the first one. Feeding on the dead, he supposed. He swam harder toward the hulking shadow of Dayspring, still far away. The salt water stung in the wounds on his shoulder and arm, and he knew he was leaving a trail in the water that the sharks could follow to food. But he could do nothing about that.
