“I heard the captain talking,” the elfwoman noted. “He said that if we can make it to nightfall, we should be able to slip away from them—and your mother can rest, as long as there’s any breeze at all.”
“I hope so,” replied the princess, with a look at the sun. It was early evening, but the yellow orb was at least a couple of hours away from the horizon. And here, on the flat northern sea, she remembered that the daylight lasted for an hour or more after sunset. For a while, they stood in silence, unconsciously looking to the west—toward Evermeet, or least to where they imagined the elvenhome to be.
“Brigit …” Alicia looked down, wondering about the future, wanting to plan a known course to her father’s rescue, though of course this was impossible. “I’ve been wondering about Evermeet. What’s it like? Who rules there?”
“It is a wondrously beautiful place, dotted with clear lakes, covered with broad stretches of forest. It is also the largest, most populous nation of elves in all the Realms.” Brigit turned to Alicia to make her point. “In fact, while elven realms in the outer lands are usually ruled by matriarchs or lords, Evermeet is ruled by a queen, the only true monarch in elvendom.”
“Does she rule alone?”
“For the most part. She has many councilors, it is said, and a council of matrons acts as her advisers. I have heard that she is not afraid, however, to ignore their advice and make a decision on her own.”
“When we get there, what will you say? Do you think the elves of Evermeet will help us?” Alicia wondered. “Or are there too many who feel as Erashanoor, that we humans are the enemy?”
“There are others more … open-minded,” Brigit allowed, and then she laughed. “And there’s no telling what your mother will accomplish, if she has the chance to talk to the queen.”
“How can we be sure she’ll get that chance?”
Brigit smiled, her face sympathetic. “With the determination of humans like you and Hanrald to back her up, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it,” the elfwoman said.
“I wonder if we can persuade them to help us—for the elves’ own interests,” Alicia questioned.
“I’ve been thinking about what your mother said—in the Argen-Tellirynd,” replied the sister knight, almost as if she were musing to herself. “Doesn’t it seem possible—even likely—that the same forces are at work against both of our peoples? That the dark powers commanding the scrags are the same that unleashed the Elf-Eater and closed the Synnorian Gate?”
“It does! I’ve wondered about that myself—but we have no proof. Can you be sure?”
“Can we be sure that isn’t the case?” wondered Brigit. “And based on that premise, perhaps the only way to open the Fey-Alamtine is to defeat the forces that hold your father prisoner.”
Alicia was forced to smile at the elfwoman’s determination. “I wish you luck!”
“I believe that I can make the case,” Brigit replied. “But I’m not sure that I’ll find anyone impartial enough to listen—if we get there at all!”
“We’ll get there!” declared the princess, more vehemently than she had intended. Trying to conceal her concern from Brigit, she looked aft.
She saw her mother standing as if carved from stone, with the proud sail billowing overhead. Beyond, past the transom and far down the foam-flecked line of the longship’s wake, two black smudges lay against the horizon. These were the flat-ships of the sea creatures, and they remained well back.
Then her eyes were drawn back to the ship with a shock as Robyn groaned and staggered on the afterdeck. Immediately Tavish reached her side, holding Robyn’s elbows and gently lowering her to the deck. Keane knelt beside the queen in another instant as Alicia raced down the center of the hull.
“I’m all right!” Robyn insisted as her daughter got there. Robyn sat up and brushed away the hands supporting her. “You’d think I was an old woman!”
“Are you really okay?” inquired Alicia, kneeling before her mother. For a moment, Robyn’s eyes softened, and the younger woman saw a terrible exhaustion there.
“I … I just need to rest,” the queen assured her.
For the first time since her mother’s collapse, Alicia looked overhead. The once proud sail hung slack, undisturbed by any breath of wind, as if the real breeze had abandoned them at the same time as did the enchanted one.
“Swing out the oars! Clear those benches!” barked Brandon, and his crewmen scrambled to obey. He turned to Alicia, her own concern mirrored in his eyes. “We’ll try to keep ahead of them until nightfall. Then we’ll lose them in the dark and turn back to the west.”
“Will that work?” asked Alicia, hating the sound of the question. Her faith was wavering, but she didn’t want that fact to show.
“It’s all we’ve got,” replied Brandon with a shrug and a quizzical look at her.
Alicia rose from her knees and looked over the transom. Already, it seemed, the black dots had begun to grow.
* * * * *
In the darkest hours of the night, the longship Princess of Moonshae advanced across the black sea to the muffled strokes of oars, but no other sounds. For hours, the vessel slipped across the placid sea. The men labored at the oars. Even the Ffolk took turns wielding the heavy oaken poles, but they had no way of knowing whether or not the sea beasts on their great rafts were closing the distance.
Past midnight, the crew shuffled places once more. Those who had been resting took places on the rowing benches, while the exhausted sailors from the earlier shift tried to catch a little rest.
It was after this adjustment that the sailor, Luge, found himself at an oar, seated beside the gunwale of the longship. On each night of the voyage, he had performed his task faithfully, dropping one of the tiny bells over the side, plainly marking the longship’s course for the pursuing hordes of the Underdeep.
Yet tonight he found himself with a problem. For the first time, the crew remained active through the hours of darkness, and Luge had yet to perform his duty. Not understanding why, he grew more and more agitated as time passed. Now he tried to maintain the pace of his oar while slipping a hand into his tunic, fumbling at the concealed pocket.
“Careful, by Tempus!” snarled a fellow sailor as Luge’s oar collided with his neighbor’s.
“Sorry,” he grunted, turning to nod at the grumbling northman. At the same time, he placed his hand on the gunwale and allowed the tiny bell to drop into the water.
Immediately it began to ring.
* * * * *
The wind had abandoned them completely, Alicia told herself when she awakened to the pale blue light of predawn. An utterly still expanse of water surrounded them. It was too dark to see very far, but she had to wonder about the presence of the twin rafts.
Diffused light gave way to a banner of sunrise on the horizon, and details became apparent up to a mile away, and then two, except that there were no details, save for the eternal calm of the sea.
Then they could see three miles, and at the same time, they discovered the rafts. No one had to announce the observation; it was silently shared by every person on the ship. The two flat slabs came at them like huge, implacable sharks. They were close enough for the crew to hear the snapping of wide, fishlike jaws, and the slicing noise of the two massive rafts’ passage over the water.
Not a breath of wind stirred the flat, seemingly endless sea. The only waves were the twin plumes cast by the Princess of Moonshae. The vessel, despite the efforts of the straining oarsmen, seemed to labor only with great reluctance through the water. In the hush, the rhythmic cadence of the sea beasts’ paddling came to them, a dull pulsing that moved through the sea, sounding a beat of approaching doom.
“Stroke, you miserable lubbers!” shouted Brandon, but men could not increase their effort when it was already strained to the maximum. A martial chord suddenly rang through the air as Tavish again raised her harp, the need for stealth past. The playing of that enchanted weapon filled the weary sailors with strength, and once again
the longship moved with a feeling approaching speed.
Yet it was not enough. After a few minutes of watching, it became apparent that the monsters still closed the gap between them.
“How did those devils find us?” spat the Prince of Gnarhelm, glaring to the rear as if his anger alone could incinerate the bizarre rafts.
“Through the dark of the night, no less,” Alicia agreed. Subconsciously she looked for Keane. It seemed that now, with disaster so near at hand, the wizard was the only one who could offer them a chance of escape.
But he wasn’t even paying attention. The princess saw him in the prow, peering before them, studying the flat water in their path. The mage’s posture, his whole attitude, depicted raw tension. Abruptly he pulled a small vial of dust from a pouch of his robe and pinched a small portion of it between a finger and thumb. Then he let the dust fly, at the same time chanting the command words for a spell.
Alicia noticed that many of the crewmen were also watching the mage—as if they expect him to pull some kind of miraculous rabbit from his hat, she thought with annoyance. Then she realized with a flash of shame that she had been doing the same thing.
Abruptly all thoughts of salvation from that quarter were dashed when the mage stiffened, then whirled back to face Brandon and Knaff the Elder, who still manned the helm.
“Turn!” shrieked Keane, more agitated than Alicia had ever seen him. “That way—turn left!” He pointed, the tension in his body transferred in full to his voice. “Now, if you value your lives!”
Knaff hesitated a moment, looking to Brandon, but the captain didn’t question the mage’s warning. “Do it!” he bellowed, and the helmsman threw the rudder hard to port.
At her leisurely speed, the Princess of Moonshae didn’t heel or rock from the force of the turn. Instead, the longship meandered through a sweeping, gradual change of direction. To Alicia, it seemed as though they were mired in mud. She stared at Keane, at the calm sea beyond him, and wondered if he had lost his mind.
A danger of the turn became apparent when she looked backward. The two broad rafts seemed much closer, and now, with the longship sailing across their path instead of away from them, they seemed to advance with shocking speed.
Then she became aware of a sound or vibration—an ominous rumble so deep that Alicia felt rather than heard it. The others, too, sensed the disturbance. All talk ceased, and even the oarsmen cocked their ears at the water as they strained with redoubled efforts toward their task. Alicia saw, with a sickening sense of shock, that the faces of many of the veteran seamen had blanched with terror.
The Princess of Moonshae began to tremble with a vibration that could no longer be doubted. It seized the vessel as if in a giant fist, and the longship quivered helplessly in its grasp. Still Alicia couldn’t hear any audible noise, but the rumbling sensation reached into the pit of her stomach.
Then, finally, beginning like the roll of distant thunder, carried like an echo across a series of ridges, the sound came. Swiftly the rumbling gained force, and the hull of the ship shook so that it seemed as if the planks must soon be torn from the hull.
Tavish pounded her harp, tearing across the strings with her fingers, and the music rose up as if to challenge this unnatural disturbance. But it was no contest.
The only consolation came with a look to the rear. The two rafts of sea creatures were drifting as the monsters looked this way and that, obviously seeking the source of the same rumbling that afflicted the longship.
“At least we know they’re not causing it,” the princess remarked to Brigit, who once again stood beside her.
“They seem to be as worried as we are,” the elfwoman agreed. “Though I’m not sure that’s good news.”
The momentum of the rafts had carried them well forward, into the same area where Keane had first sounded the alarm. Now they came about, veering to port so as to continue to close with the Princess of Moonshae. Like the humans, however, the aquatic monsters remained preoccupied with the mysterious vibrations that seemed to disturb this whole area of the sea.
“Look! On the surface, there!” shouted Keane, pointing toward the waters at the rear.
“Under the water!” Brand corrected. “Something’s moving—fast!”
At first, they wondered if it might not be another of the flat rafts, for the appearance of bubbles and movement beneath the water was reminiscent of their arrival. In the stress of the moment, no one remembered that there had been no vibration preceding their surfacing. The current phenomenon also seemed to affect a larger area of water.
The rafts drove closer, propelled by the paddles once again, as the sahuagin and scrags who weren’t rowing stood up on their platforms and brandished weapons and fists toward the humans. A trap was about to close. One raft approached the Princess from dead astern, while the other closed from the port quarter.
And then the Princess of Moonshae pitched violently forward, her stern rising into the air, lifted by a powerful force from below. The longship shot ahead, sliding down a frothing wall of white water as if the ocean had been turned on edge. Spray flew upward, propelled by some massive undersea explosion, and a shower of water spilled into the rear of the suddenly careening longship.
The sea behind them continued to rise, swirling into the air, spewing a shower of brine to all sides but continuing to spin upward in a huge, towering column of seawater. A dark shape appeared in the liquid pillar. The raft directly behind the longship had been seized in the whirlpool and dragged upward with the force of the rising water.
“The Cyclones of Evermeet!” shouted Alicia.
Abruptly another of the great columns spewed upward from before them, and then a third and a fourth spouted from the surface. More and more of the vast, churning pillars of seawater spumed skyward, each more than a hundred paces across and apparently cylindrical all the way up the frothing surface. Water sprayed out from each, creating a drenching shower wherever the companions turned. Obviously the water thus lost was replaced, for the columns seemed to grow still larger as the awestruck witnesses watched.
Five hundred feet above them, the column of water spewed out the great raft. The flat vessel had swirled around and around the column, carried steadily upward until this point. For a few brief moments, the huge object seemed to float in the air, but then it plummeted seaward with steadily increasing speed. Hundreds of tiny forms spilled free, writhing in the air and clutching for some kind of support.
The raft struck the water flat on its hull, shooting spray for hundreds of feet to all sides and splintering into pieces from the force of the impact. Many of the raft’s passengers landed atop the suddenly immobile object, perishing instantly from the long, screaming fall.
The Princess of Moonshae careened to the side, once again driven by the wind, which had freshened dramatically at the same time as the cyclones had appeared. Now Knaff the Elder guided them away from the nearest waterspout, steering as far from it as possible while still bearing west.
Within moments, white water surrounded them. Needles of spray lashed skin and stung eyes, while the roaring of angry water rose to a thunderous crescendo. Knaff, high on the helmsman’s stand, tried to see what lay in their path, but he, too, was blinded by the torrent.
They might have reached the end of the world then, for with sudden abruptness the Princess of Moonshae plunged over the lip of an unseen drop, plummeting downward at breakneck speed.
* * * * *
“A Manta—destroyed!” Fury drove Coss-Axell-Sinioth to new heights of violence. His squid form lashed about in the depths of the Trackless Sea, the great tentacles crushing any scrags and sahuagin unfortunate enough to be caught by the stunning blows.
“But so are the humans!” hissed Krell-Bane, trembling before the avatar’s rage. “They must certainly be dead!” The giant sea troll, master of his race and ruling monarch of the Coral Kingdom, unwisely spat his own anger back at the giant squid. “They sailed full into the Cyclones of Evermeet, and it’s common know
ledge that no air-breather can survive that tempest!”
“Can you bring me their bodies?” demanded the giant squid.
Now the sea monarch trembled before the wrath of his master. Still, the scrag king was forced to shake his head in negative response.
“Where is the other Manta?” inquired the avatar, his tone dropping to a deep rumble of menace—like an undersea earthquake, thought Krell-Bane, distant but promising the imminent arrival of a crushing wave of pressure.
“It patrols outside the Cyclone belt, awaiting the humans,” explained the scrag, hoping the news would be well received. “If the ship should somehow escape—and I assure your Excellency that that is virtually impossible—then—”
“I thought you told me that it was impossible,” the great squid shape reminded the scrag.
“Yes. It is—for all practical purposes, of course. There’s no way—”
“Enough!” snapped Coss-Axell-Sinioth, finally growing tired of his minion’s groveling. “Send all the troops we can muster to form a line at the outer edge of the cyclone belt. If they emerge, they are to be tracked and observed—not attacked until I give the word. Is that understood?”
The sea beast bowed and nodded cravenly.
“Then begone!” commanded the great squid. “Return to me when you have news!”
The sea king darted away, quickly vanishing into the emerald depths. Coss-Axell-Sinioth watched him go, growling deep in his black heart. He itched for vengeance, but had no ready target for his hatred—nothing nearby, at any rate.
His thoughts drifted to the south, to the bright coral castles in the ocean shallows of Kyrasti and the air-filled prisons formed therein. Sinioth summoned the king of the sahuagin, who had waited safely out of the avatar’s range. The fishman was considerably relieved that it was the scrag who bore the onus of the attack’s failure.
“Come, my faithful one,” ordered the giant squid, and the hulking sahuagin, the largest living member of his race, obeyed. “It is time for you to return to the grotto. There you must tend to the prisoner.”
The Coral Kingdom Page 17
