Darkwell

by Douglas Niles

  She was called the stoutest vessel, with the ablest crew, among the four kingdoms of the Ffolk. The proof had come when they sailed into the late stages of an autumn gale that would have kept any other vessel of the Ffolk in port. Racing through the Sea of Moonshae around the northern tip of Gwynneth, the Defiant had coursed through the Strait of Oman. Now they sailed south toward Corwell itself.

  These northmen were obviously returning home—it was already later than the usual raiding season—but they would doubtless welcome one last prize before making port for the winter.

  “The standard of Norland,” grunted Dansforth. “That one, to starboard, would be the king’s own vessel.”

  “Grunnarch the Red. I have fought him before,” mused Tristan.

  “So the stories say. And bested him,” The captain looked at the king with just a hint of amusement in his gray eyes. Dansforth was not yet middle-aged, though his hair and beard had silvered until they matched his eyes. Yet he had an enigmatic manner of speaking that reminded Tristan of an old, but very smug, man.

  “Can we alter course?” asked Robyn quickly. “To there?” She pointed straight toward one of the advancing longships.

  “Why?” Dansforth was mildly incredulous. “They’re cutting too wide. They underestimate our speed, I think. With a little luck, we can dash between them.”

  “We won’t need luck if you can get close to one of those ships.” Robyn spoke quietly, but there was a hint of great power in her voice.

  “Do as she says,” said Tristan.

  “Very well,” Dansforth said with a shrug. He stepped to the steersman, standing at the huge wheel amidships, and ordered the change in course. Then he hurried back to the bow as the Defiant heeled over with the turn.

  The trio was joined by another pair. One was Tristan’s friend Daryth, the swarthy, handsome Calishite who had become the king’s chief adviser. Now he carried his gleaming scimitar lightly in his hand, awaiting battle with a half-smile across his dark brown face. The other was the halfling, Pawldo of Lowhill, a middle-aged adventurer whose wrinkled face and graying hair belied his vitality.

  “What are you trying to do?” demanded Pawldo incredulously. “Let’s make a run for it!” The diminutive con man had been a friend of the Prince of Corwell for even longer than Daryth, and he now took it upon himself to protect the young king from the influences of others of a similar moral caliber.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” grumbled Dansforth. “My men will stand by to repel boarders, but the crew of that one ship alone outnumbers us two to one!”

  Robyn did not turn to look at the captain. “They’ll not get near enough to throw a line.”

  Still skeptical, the captain turned to his crew while Daryth, Tristan, and Pawldo stood protectively around the druid. She closed her eyes in concentration and calmly caressed the smooth wood of her staff. The others held their swords ready. Tristan’s own blade gleamed in his hand. The legendary Sword of Cymrych Hugh was a symbol of the ancient glory of the Ffolk. The fact that Tristan had discovered the potent blade after it had been missing for centuries explained to a great extent why the lords of Callidyrr had been so willing to extend to him the kingship.

  The longships raced toward them with startling rapidity. One came head-on, closing rapidly. The other tried to veer in from downwind, battling the gusts to close with her intended victim. Soon they could make out ranks of axe-wielding northmen standing along the hulls, ready to leap into the Defiant. Others stood ready with lines and grapples, though the closing speed of the two vessels would make a grappling attempt risky at best.

  The nearest longship veered slightly from its path, a hundred yards away, seventy, forty, closing fast. Robyn held her staff over her head, spreading her hands as far apart as she could. She clenched her hands and strained, as if trying to bend the stout shaft, silently mouthing a prayer to her deity, the goddess Earthmother.

  An inhuman creaking assailed their ears as the longship suddenly lurched and twisted in the water. Nails flew through the air as the sleek hull bent tortuously. Boards snapped, the mast crumpled, and then came a harsh snap, like the breaking of a bone.

  Suddenly the longship buckled, her keel torn in two. Bow and stern rose into the air while the center of the hull filled with foaming brine. The sail billowed gently into the water, belying the violence of the ship’s demise, and forty men tumbled into the cold gray sea.

  Tristan understood what had happened, though the reality of it stunned him. Robyn’s power, the power of the earth, was keyed to all things wild, all creatures of nature. The oak trees that had formed the keel of the raider were such creatures of nature, and the druid had called upon those trees to change their shape, warping them into something different, something that would not support the frame of the longship.

  He heard a thump on the deck beside him and turned to see Robyn, pallid and motionless, lying on the deck. “What happened?” he cried, kneeling and cradling her head in his arms. Her eyes fluttered open, and a look of panic washed across her features.

  “I … I fainted! The casting made me weak! Why—how could it do that?” She groaned, but struggled to a sitting position. “I think I’m all right now.”

  The king sprang to his feet as the Defiant cut through the wreck, and Tristan could see the faces of the northmen who had been dumped so suddenly into the sea. He saw anger and hatred, but not fear. Even the display of ship-killing magic was not enough to quail the hearts of these fierce warriors.

  Suddenly he saw a northman’s eyes widen in terror. The man’s mouth opened to scream, but he disappeared under the water before a sound could emerge. Another, and another of the raiders vanished with a desperate thrashing. Now the remaining men began to scream loudly, in mind numbing panic. The gray sea turned green with the thrashing of scaly bodies, and red froth exploded from the torn shapes of sailors.

  Tristan saw the other longship heel toward them and then suddenly lurch off course. Her sides became a seething mass of green scales as reptilian creatures climbed from the water over the smooth planks, to fall upon the crew with sharp teeth and wicked, slashing claws.

  “Sahuagin!” gasped the king, recognizing the savage fishmen they had battled upon Callidyrr.

  And then it was the Defiant’s turn to slow in the water as the attackers grabbed her hull as well. Tristan saw a fishlike head, bristling with spines above a snarling nightmare of a face, and he stabbed instinctively. The creature fell back into the water, but two more took its place. Their humanlike hands, tipped with sharp claws and webbed between the fingers, grasped the hull as they pulled themselves upward. Tristan stared into their blank, emotionless eyes. He saw the bracelets of silver and gold, the cruel tridents, spears, and daggers tucked into metal belts. The monsters tumbled onto the deck all around him as Dansforth’s crew put up their weapons against this new assault.

  The humans took sword and axe and crossbow and faced attack from the Claws of the Deep. These creatures, the sahuagin, they knew to be cruel and implacable foes. Still the fishmen rose from the sea, striking at the two ships while their brethren dealt a bloody end to the northmen still bobbing among the wreckage of the third.

  The Darkwell grew even blacker with each killing. Hobarth sat and studied the pool, praying and meditating. He had seen a panther and an owl obliterated in the last day, joining the bear, eagle, and stag in giving their lifespark to Bhaal. Somehow, the god summoned these wretched creatures from the surrounding wasteland. Hobarth did not know why.

  The fat cleric studied well the word of his god, and slowly he began to sense Bhaal’s plan. At least, he began to understand his own substantial role in that plan.

  He looked to Genna Moonsinger, sitting upon one of the crosspieces that had fallen from the ruined druidic arches around the Moonwell. She stared listlessly off into space, as if awaiting a command. The fat cleric wondered at the druid’s docility.

  She looked like the same implacable enemy he had faced a short month ago. The statue ha
d become a being of flesh and blood when he pressed the Heart of Kazgoroth into it. She looked, sounded, and moved like the Great Druid of Gwynneth. Even the bear, Grunt, had been taken in.

  But now she was unquestioningly obedient to the commands of Bhaal, and thus Hobarth. For several days, this had been but a pleasant diversion for Hobarth. He had not been with a woman in months, and so he had taken advantage of her willingness to follow his orders. Though she displayed no revulsion, neither did she exhibit any other emotion. Hobarth had eventually realized that her lack of passion turned the whole experience into rather a bore.

  Then he commanded her to use her magic, wondering if that potent weapon had been lost upon her perversion to the will of Bhaal. The cleric was delighted when she called forth an inferno of fire from the ground itself, surrounding them with greedy flames. However, he noted a difference from her previous castings of the firewall. Now, as the flames licked across the ground, they left the earth tortured, blackened, and barren in their wake, whereas before the spell had made no mark whatsoever upon the land. This spell fascinated Hobarth particularly, for it was one that no cleric could perform. She had used it to telling effect when he had sent his army of undead against her, and now it was his to command!

  Yet, if her body and mind remained that of the Great Druid, her soul was unquestionably altered. The heart beating within her breast was no longer her own. It was the foul organ of a black beast of chaos, and this was the thing that held her now in its thrall.

  The difference was visible mainly in her eyes. Where once they had sparkled with vitality and wisdom, they now glowered darkly. At times, Hobarth imagined he saw a flash of red fire within them, not unlike the gaze of Kazgoroth itself. And her lack of emotion reminded him more of the zombies he had once commanded than of any human being he had known.

  Now, knowing the will of Bhaal, he approached her.

  “Druid!” he barked, and she looked dully at him. He realized that he had forgotten to order her to clothe herself after his latest indulgence. “Don your garments.”

  He waited as she pulled her tattered cloak about her, watching with interest. Though she was well along in years, her body had not succumbed to the flab of middle age. She was stout, but her flesh had a firmness that he found strangely attractive. Shrugging, he told himself that it was merely the lack of any younger woman that caused him to desire her.

  “Bhaal has spoken. You are to go to Caer Corwell. There you will perform a certain task he has planned for you. Upon its completion, you will return here.”

  As he told her the plan, as Bhaal had told it to him, he watched her for some sign of reaction. After all, he was asking her to betray the land and the people she had striven all her life to protect. Hers was not a mission of attack, but something far more insidious. Bhaal faced two powerful human enemies on the island of Gwynneth. These humans were closely allied to each other. The mission of Genna Moonsinger, simply, was to drive these two allies apart.

  “I understand.”

  “And you will obey?”

  “I shall obey.”

  Claws raked Robyn’s calf as she slipped on the blood-slick deck. She whirled toward the sahuagin that had seized her, cracking her staff sharply against its spiny head. The creature dropped like a stone, its skull crushed. Forked tongues flicking from between rows of razor-sharp teeth, others scrambled across the deck as the Defiant heeled sideways. Robyn lurched against the rail, still dizzy and unbalanced, but the faintness seemed to be fading.

  Tristan slashed at a fish-man. The Sword of Cymrych Hugh sliced through the air, and as easily through the flesh of its victim. The sahuagin leaped backward, clutching the stump of its arm. It opened its mouth wide, showing hundreds of teeth in the gaping maw, and then hissed its hatred.

  The king leaped forward, and the monster dived cleanly into the sea. Tristan stopped at the rail and stabbed another creature just as it tried to scramble over the gunwale into the boat. It fell back into the water, dead, and he looked about the deck. He saw Daryth behead one of the monsters as it lunged toward Robyn’s back, and Pawldo’s keen dagger disemboweled another as the nimble halfling ducked beneath the monster’s grasping claws.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the killing ended. The bodies of a score of sahuagin, and several sailors, lay in chaotic disorder across the deck. Red human blood, and the pinkish froth from sahuagin veins, mingled on the planks.

  But there was not a moving sahuagin to be seen. Captain Dansforth stood with a knot of his sailors amidships, while Daryth, Pawldo, and Robyn were near Tristan on the fore-deck. Tristan’s great moorhound, Canthus, stood beside the druid. The dog’s back was higher than her waist, and its shaggy brown muzzle was stained with sahuagin blood. More than once this day, he had saved the lives of his master and mistress.

  “They still fight,” said Robyn, pointing at the longship, where the battle still raged.

  Tristan smiled grimly at the sight. He could see the northman chief, Grunnarch the Red, poised before the mast of his graceful ship. His men stood with him in a circle, facing outward, while twice their number of sahuagin slashed toward the kill.

  “Make sail!” cried Captain Dansforth, sending his men to line and beam. He nodded at the king. “We can make a break for it before they finish ’em off!”

  The Defiant had placed her port side to the wind as she drifted during the melee. In another second, the sail came taut and the Defiant heeled sharply into the wind. As her nose passed the drifting longship, Tristan saw another northman dragged into the mass of sahuagin.

  “Come alongside!” he called, noting the shock in Dansforth’s eyes. “To the rescue!”

  “You’re—”

  The captain was about to call him mad, Tristan realized. The thought startled him, and he realized that his order must seem mad by most logical arguments. Why should they help the raiders who had, minutes earlier, been bent on their destruction?

  “Hurry! And send your bowmen forward, man!”

  Dansforth only hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he curtly gestured to four of his men who held heavy crossbows. “You heard the king! Move!”

  The Defiant crashed against the waves again, slicing a path that would take her just past the longship. The distance closed rapidly while the bowmen knelt at the rail and took aim.

  “Oh, good!” Tristan was startled by the shrill voice behind him. “C’mon, Yaz—we didn’t miss the whole battle!”

  “I’m scared—scared! W-W-We better get below!” answered another, equally shrill voice.

  The bright orange shape of a tiny dragon, its butterfly wings fluttering excitedly, suddenly appeared beside the king, popping from invisibility as faerie dragons are fond of doing. The little serpent darted past the king to perch on the rail. “Oh, boy! Northmen! C’mon, let’s get ’em!”

  “N-Newt, don’t! Stay back here with me—with me!” Without turning around, Tristan pictured the tiny sprite, Yazilliclick, cautiously peering from the hatch to the hold, his antennae no doubt quivering anxiously. The two faerie creatures had spent most of the voyage belowdecks, but now the chaos of the battle had aroused them.

  “Newt, why don’t you keep watch on the waters off the stern?” suggested the king. “See that they don’t sneak up on us from behind!” And incidentally, he added silently, stay out of the way.

  “Well, all right,” the faerie dragon agreed, with a suspicious look at Tristan.

  Quickly Newt buzzed away, and Yaz popped out of the hatch to follow him. The sprite was a small, humanlike creature, about two feet tall and distinguished by a small pair of gossamer wings and two antennae that sprouted from his forehead.

  The young king turned his attention back to the battle, to see that the longship was very close now. He could clearly make out several northmen in desperate combat with the monsters, while other sahuagin held back from the fight.

  “Shoot those farthest from the humans,” said Tristan. “Now!”

  The four bolts flew through the
air, each finding a target in the mass of scaly bodies. The red-haired northman in the center of the deck cried out a challenge, and his crewmen pressed the attack. The crossbowmen reloaded quickly, and loosed a second volley as the Defiant started to turn, barely a hundred feet from the raider now.

  These bolts, too, found home in the slick bodies of the fish-men. The spined heads of the sahuagin bristled as they turned to face the Defiant, hissing their rage and clashing their weapons.

  Daryth and Robyn joined Tristan at the gunwale. The king climbed up on the rail, bracing himself with a hanging rope. The Sword of Cymrych Hugh was like a feather in his hand—a thirsty, violent feather. He saw perhaps two dozen northmen still standing, though the numbers of the sahuagin had thinned as well. And the redbearded captain still led his men boldly, striking to both sides with his broad-bladed axe.

  The two ships drifted closer as Dansforth smoothly maneuvered his vessel through a sharp turn. Then the Defiant paused, parallel to the longship and barely twenty feet away.

  The rolling of the swell dropped the longship into a trough. Tristan looked down into the hull and saw a pile of bodies, white skin and green scales intermingled in death. At the same instant, he pushed away from the gunwale, swinging on the rope until he lost momentum. He hung poised over the longship for a moment, and then let go to land lightly among the bodies. He heard Daryth land easily behind him.

  On the deck of the Defiant, Robyn chanted a prayer to her goddess, then waved her staff in the direction of the sahuagin. Suddenly the outline of fish-men bodies glowed white, outlined in cool, magical fire. The reptiles hissed their rage, though several cowered back in fear. They slapped and struck at the flames without success, though the fire did not appear to cause them harm.

  The red-bearded northman bellowed a challenge of brute violence, cleaving a sahuagin to the waist with his axe. His comrades let loose a shout and attacked.