by Roland Green
"Seek the boat," Wilthur said, though not in words that it would have been lawful for any human to hear. "Seek the boat, and let it be as before. But wait until the shallows-dwellers are close enough to seem the cause of what befalls the boat."
The eye blinked. The intelligence of the eye's owner allowed it to be stubborn as well, and it insisted on understanding Wilthur's commands before deciding whether to obey them. By the time the eye closed in obedience, he wondered if the boat might have wandered beyond the range within which his Creation could sense and pursue it.
If he had to guide it by magic, anyone listening for his spells would hear far too clearly for his peace of mind.
Wilthur the Brown fretted to no purpose.
His Creation's senses were quite adequate to finding Torvik's boat, for all that it was moving along at a good pace, cutting across the tide rather than battling it head-on.
Torvik's first thought at the splash ahead was that they were approaching a reef.
So was his second thought, as a part of the darkness turned solid and jagged, like part of a reef thrust above the water. It was when the solid darkness moved, then opened to become a gigantic claw, that he realized they had found their quarry. Or, more likely, it had found them.
Something wrapped itself around the tiller, nearly jerking the solid bar of wood out of his hands. Then the tiller jerked again, slamming hard against Torvik's chest. He heard ribs creaking, and was sure his spine had suffered grave hurt as his back crashed against the gunwale of the boat.
Then the boat tilted, as one sucker-studded tentacle heaved the tiller completely out of its socket and brandished it in the air. A man rose to retrieve it. Another tried to pull him down. A third drew his sword.
Torvik shouted at all of them to get down, but it was too late. The boat had tilted beyond its balance point even before a second length of rank, sucker-studded flesh slapped over the gunwale with a hideous sound, like a man drowning in boiling glue.
It caught the man with the sword, who slashed at it. Purplish fluid oozed, the arm twitched but did not loosen its grip, and in the next moment the man was gone, over the side. He had time for one despairing shriek before he was pulled under.
Then the boat itself went over. Torvik had just decided to leap overboard and dive after the man, who could hardly save himself unaided, when he found himself in the water regardless. He was trying to count the heads bobbing in the water beside the boat's upturned bottom, when what might have been a band of iron gripped his left foot.
His father's sword was long and supple; it could thrust as well as slash. He thrust down, and the iron band's pressure eased.
Then a second took his other foot, and a third looped about his sword arm and squeezed. He had sworn many years ago to die rather than let the sword fall into an enemy's hands, but it fell out of his hand now because his fingers could no longer grip anything.
Fury and shame left no room for fear in Torvik Jemarsson, as the Creation's tentacles drew him under the water.
Chapter 9
Mirraleen had encountered Wilthur's Creation before, and so had the band with her. She had not seen it when it was killing, however, nor from so close.
The Red Walker knew that she must go even closer still, to try to snatch some of the human sailors from the claws, tentacles, and beak of the monster. She had not been able to do this for the minotaurs, or later with the folk of a human ship so small that she'd left no survivors. Those failures both shamed her, even considering how little she liked minotaurs. They were too quick with their harpoons, as much as the worst sort of human.
But failure tonight could do worse than shame her. If a single man survived from the boat and told of sea otters present when his mates died, surely someone would blame the otters. Then the sea otters of Suivinari would face a great hunt, which might destroy them, perhaps sweep up any shallows-dwellers who answered Mirraleen's summons, and surely distract human attention at the worst possible moment.
She did not know who would gain the most from the Istaran fleet sailing so far wide of its true course, Wilthur or the minotaurs. She hoped it would be the minotaurs, who had limits and knew it.
Wilthur was also bound by nature and the gods, but thought otherwise. Seeking to go beyond these boundaries, he could wreak far more havoc than a hundred shiploads of those who called themselves the Destined Race.
Mirraleen tossed her flippers, driving herself through the shallow water. After her the rest of the band splashed into the water. From offshore those already feeding at sea responded with the quick barks that meant they were coming in ready obedience. A moment later, Mirraleen knew that she was not as much in command of herself as she had thought.
She replied to the sea otters with the clicks and whistles her magic allowed her to use, the tongue of the dolphins. She had learned the language centuries ago, to deal with dolphins seeking to make a meal of a sea otter, as they sometimes did. It also had its uses in speaking to the rare Dargonesti sea-brother who had been in his dolphin shape so long that his spirit was more dolphin than elven, and his attention best gained with the dolphin tongue.
Mirraleen rose, inhaled the night air, and barked quick commands in the proper language for leading sea otters. Their replies gave reassurance. They would move against Wilthur's Creation from two directions, rescuing the humans first and fighting only if they must, to complete the rescue.
Mirraleen angled downward, into the deeper water beyond the reef. She went that deep only to feed or to avoid the Creation. Not only did it seldom pass beyond the reef, but its senses could not reach out past the reef to find those who swam in deep water.
The Red Walker had pondered more than a trifle on this mystery. Had she known more of magic, she might have set herself the task of solving it. But her powers did not allow her more than intelligent guesses. Also, she shared the temperament of those with whom she swam. Sea otters were shrewd and practical. They did not often allow themselves to be troubled by mysteries that did not directly threaten their survival.
A patch of warmer water ahead told Mirraleen that she was coming up on Fountain Grotto. A little farther on lay an underwater tunnel through the reef. Through it, she and her companions could return to the shallows, striking with next to no warning.
From mind to mind, Mirraleen sent her war cry. From mind to mind, it echoed back to her, as a hundred sleek forms surged through the dark water.
Torvik was an experienced sailor and a survivor of fights far more serious than tavern brawls. He was also the son of a father and mother who had not endured and prospered by losing their wits in the face of surprise.
After the first moment of rage and shame, his thoughts arrayed themselves for battle. He let himself be carried downward into the darkness without further struggles. His captor might eat only live prey, think him carrion, and release him.
Failing that, it might send some of its tentacles questing in search of further prey. Lightly held, he might break free. If he broke free while this deep, he might find himself underneath his attacker. There were few living things, whether creations of the True Gods or of twisted magic, whose bellies were not a vulnerable spot.
He had no sword (a loss that now only heated his rage), but he had two arms and two daggers. Anything that believed him helpless would regret that belief.
One tentacle loosened its grip and darted away, toward the surface as far as Torvik could judge. The other two still gripped him, however, and now he was deeper than he had reckoned on. He felt the pressure of water as well as the clutching tentacles.
How deep did this monster lair?
The pressure grew still further, and Torvik sensed invisible bands of something stronger than even magic-driven flesh tightening on his chest. He had breathed deeply before he went under and could hold his breath longer than most, but before long even his endurance would reach its end. Then so would his life, going out in a brief spate of silver bubbles that would never even reach the surface from this depth.
Something struck his leg. Then the tentacle holding his right arm jerked free. Able to use steel with both hands, Torvik wasted no time in drawing his handiest dagger. He thrust it hard into the tough flesh of the tentacle holding his left arm.
The second tentacle recoiled so violently that Torvik's deep-slashing dagger nearly went with it. As he clutched it, he felt the burning in his chest that meant the end of his breath. He had no time left to hunt his attacker or rescue any of his men. Not with his life measured by the remaining air in his lungs, which might not even be enough to take him to the surface.
This time it was more of a gentle bump than a hard blow. Torvik felt himself being lifted by two furry… somethings, one under each arm. A third, then a fourth, positioned itself between his legs, adding to the lift.
He was rising now, faster than he could have done by his unaided swimming. He was still holding the dagger, and his air-starved brain turned over wild thoughts of stabbing out at the beings lifting him.
Dolphins? Even wild dolphins with no elven selves or ties to the Dargonesti had been known to rescue swimmers in distress, or attack sharks and octopi. But dolphins had smooth, sleek hides. He had felt fur under his arms, and now felt it below as well.
Seals. No, sea otters.
It took all the wits he had left to make that distinction. It was beyond Torvik to carry his thoughts one last step farther, to realize how the sea otters must have come to his rescue, or to hope that the sleek swimmers would rescue his crew as well.
The bubbles of his last outward breath sparkled on the water. Before he could draw the inward breath that would have filled his lungs with water, his head broke the surface.
He did not know it. He did not feel the sea otters under each arm or holding him up. Nor did he sense the one who swam up and took position under his chin, lifting his head out of the water.
His lungs drew in air, however, not water, with a noise like a sick whale. He would have heard similar noises from the water around him, had his senses been awake. Torvik heard none of the signs that others among the boat's crew yet lived. He also had no awareness of his swimming bearers guiding him away from the rest of his men, toward a beach at the end of a tiny, almost landlocked cove.
He was as one dead through the brief journey to the beach, dead to the pushing of whiskered muzzles and the heaving of agile flippers. He remained dead to the pricks and stabs of sharp rocks, and to the splashes as his rescuers slipped back into the water, their night's work only just begun.
He did not even sense a sea otter muzzle push above the water and suddenly change shape; nose, mouth, and eyes alike. Fur shrank away from the face, to instead flow from above as long auburn tresses.
But the owner of those tresses sensed that Torvik's life was safe, that he had passed from senselessness to sleep, and that she could now safely leave him. She left to the gods the question of her returning, although she knew what she wanted, in both heart and mind.
It had been arranged for small vessels with signal lamps to form a chain from within sight of Red Elf to the rest of the fleet. The disappearance of Torvik's boat was known aboard Wavebiter and the other principal ships of the fleet within an hour.
Gildas Aurhinius brought the news himself.
"This will kill my lady," the Istaran said, his first words after the bare facts that the lamps had already carried.
Haimya sat up in her bunk, snatching a sheet to cover herself. "You insult your wife and our old friend by those words," she said. "Take them back."
Pirvan looked from his wife to Aurhinius. Haimya seemed in deadly earnest, and Aurhinius more than a trifle taken aback by that earnestness.
"I know now why they call this the Bad News Watch," Pirvan said. "Even if the news is no worse than what comes in daylight, one has less strength to bear it."
Aurhinius sat down on Pirvan's sea chest and put his head in his hands. "I will beg my lady's pardon when I see her again," he said, "and I beg Lady Haimya's now. I—I have lost one who was no son by blood but might have been a son in spirit. How well would you have borne losing Sir Darin in the first year after he became a knight?"
Pirvan and Haimya exchanged glances. "Eskaia will hear nothing of your first words from me," she said, and her husband nodded. "As Pirvan said, bad news weighs heavier in the depths of the night."
Whether or not she had intended those words as a dismissal, Aurhinius took them as such. He bowed himself out, and Pirvan blew the lamp higher and took the Istaran's place on the chest. He did not, however, put his head in his hands.
"Are you thinking of Gerik?" Haimya asked.
"How not?" he answered. "We have it better than Eskaia. The land does not commonly swallow the dead of its wars, as the sea swallows those who do battle on the waves."
"That comes from The Lay of Vinos Solamnus," Haimya said. Her smile sagged at one corner of her mouth, but it was undeniably a smile. "You need more inspiration than such news, to be so eloquent at this hour of the night."
"Then inspire me."
"Perhaps I can."
She let the sheet fall. It pooled around her waist. Pirvan was admiring the play of the lamplight on his wife, when someone knocked.
The sheet rose to its former position. Pirvan opened the door on Aurhinius, who said, "More ill news. The minotaurs have sent a flyboat to our scouting line. They wish a parley. I agreed to be one of those going, suggested you, Haimya, Sirbones, and Darin for others, and wish your answer. Or rather, the council wishes your answer."
Pirvan wanted to suggest what the minotaurs could do with their parley and the council with its sudden need for delegates to it. However, that reply lacked a knight's dignity, if it was not actually unlawful.
Furthermore, minotaurs being the first to propose a parley was uncommon. It suggested shrewd leadership in their fleet, even if all their delegates intended to do was pound the table and bellow demands and threats.
Also, the human fleet's council was plainly not marching entirely to the beat of the kingpriest's drum, if they wanted any of the folk just named in their delegation. Surely there would be others, more in sympathy with the kingpriest—and still more if Pirvan and any of the others refused to go.
"I accept," Pirvan said, "likewise Haimya, subject to the approval of Sir Niebar. I must have that, by law. He should also be asked to join us, as commander over the embarked knights."
"Sir Niebar might command all the hosts of Ansalon, but he knows less of minotaurs than you do," Aurhinius said.
"I forged an alliance with one minotaur," Pirvan said. He knew he sounded tired and out of temper. He was. "One minotaur, moreover, very unlike most of his kind."
"That is still one more minotaur than most of us have dealt with," Aurhinius said. "But certainly I can ask Niebar."
"Sir Niebar," Pirvan said, but he was talking to a closed door, and Haimya had not only dropped the sheet again but climbed out of her bunk to embrace him. The embrace had just become mutual when knocking came again.
Pirvan opened the door just enough to see Aurhinius again.
"Yes?" He sounded as welcoming as a jailor hearing news of an uprising among his charges.
"Torvik's men are good, loyal stuff," Aurhinius said. "A new signal from Red Elf: she is staying to search the area, and has one survivor aboard already."
"As you said, good stuff," Pirvan said. "Or perhaps just with enough sense to tell ale from wine. I would not care to be known along the waterfronts of Ansalon as a man who abandoned the son of Jemar the Fair."
Pirvan took a firm grip on both the doorknob and his temper. "Now, my friend, a word of warning. The next person who knocks on this door before dawn, for anything short of the end of the world or the sinking of Wavebiter, will be bound, gagged, and hung up by his heels from the deck beams. Please send out the word.
"I can hardly be expected to bargain with minotaurs without sleep."
"Ah, but will you sleep more if not interrupted, or less?" Aurhinius said. With surprising speed for one of his ag
e and bulk, he darted back before Pirvan could slam the door on his hand or thrust steel through the crack.
Haimya, meanwhile, fought so hard not to shriek with laughter that she finally had to lean on her husband to keep from falling.
"I—I suppose I said a word too many," Pirvan muttered into her hair.
"More than a few," Pirvan grinned and tightened his embrace. "Perhaps I lacked inspiration."
"Then pray let me provide it."
The first of Torvik's senses to awaken was his sense of smell. He smelled the scent of a tide-swept beach, overlain like silk by the perfume of tropical flowers, and also by overripe seaweed and other jetsam.
His ears came to reinforce his nose. Either he was on the beach of a landlocked harbor, or the sea was as calm as a pond. He barely heard the faintest gurgle and splash of water on the sand—fifty paces away, as far as he could judge.
He was not in the place where he had landed, he thought. He had a dim memory of gravel with as many teeth as a baby shark biting into his all-but-senseless body. Now he was on sand as fine as dust, with what felt like rushes in a bundle under his feet, to raise them above the level of his head.
Torvik was trying to pick out the scent of the rushes from the other scents on the breeze, when a new scent floated by. It had salt in it, and other smells of the sea, and also living flesh, sweet breath—he could almost say the smell of a woman.
Which was so unlikely here and now that Torvik decided to open his eyes, to see what was giving him the illusion of a woman's presence.
He opened his eyes, and found himself staring straight up into other eyes—two of them, vast and green, surmounted by thick eyebrows too brown to be called red and too red to be called brown. Above the eyes flowed hair the same color as the brows. Below was a face that lacked perfect beauty—the cheekbones were too high, the lips a trifle weathered, and the chin definitely sharp. The lips lacked nothing, however, including a gentle curve given them by a smile.
