The Coral Kingdom

by Douglas Niles

  A great crack sounded at the same time as the longship’s bow flew upward into the air. The blinded turtle hadn’t struck the ship squarely, but several more planks splintered, and the craft rocked dangerously as it slid backward off the dragon’s rising shell. Water spilled into the hull through several narrow, long gaps.

  “By the Abyss, still it finds us!” hissed Brigit, her hand tightening around her sword.

  “By sound!” Keane’s eyes suddenly flashed, and he looked for Brandon. The turtle, meanwhile, vanished into the depths. In a few seconds, the magic-user explained his plan—and Brandon nodded grimly.

  “Be silent!” ordered the Prince of Gnarhelm in a low voice that nevertheless carried throughout the hull. “Everyone remain perfectly quiet!”

  As always, the crew obeyed even as the order was issued. Quickly the Princess of Moonshae grew still, drifting like a ghost ship with upraised oars and silent, staring crewmen.

  Keane stalked to the starboard rail and murmured the words to a spell. Something splashed beside the longship and Alicia flinched unconsciously, expecting the return of the dragon turtle. Instead, she saw the effect of Keane’s spell.

  The mage had created an invisible wall of force, shaped like a square about twelve feet on a side and pressed flat against the surface of the water. Concentrating diligently, Keane shifted it first to the left and then to the right, so that water splashed around and over it. Then, still staring intently at the evidence of magic, the mage directed the force away from the Princess of Moonshae.

  Splashing and swirling steadily, the effect of the spell moved farther from the longship, at right angles to her gentle course. After a few moments, they saw it: The water heaved beneath the wall of force, rising to reveal the great dome of the dragon turtle’s shell. The blind creature thrashed about, seeking the thing it had heard, but Keane had already slid the invisible craft off to the side. It continued to churn its way through the water, and once again the monster heard it. The dragon turtle dove again, and they could imagine it following the noisy effect of the spell.

  “Look!” Brigit’s voice, a taut whisper, came to Alicia’s ears alone. She turned and gasped silently. The shore of Evermeet loomed so close now that they could see individual trees and the gracefully sculpted outlines of tall, brightly painted buildings. Hues of blue, green, and amber mingled together on the small structures, creating a village that looked rather like a giant flower blossom.

  Once more the dragon turtle broke the surface, more than two miles distant now and moving away fast. Safe from that threat, at least for the time being, Brandon directed their attention to a safe approach to shore.

  “Soundings—constant,” he ordered several crewmen, who took a weighted line to the bow and began to measure the depth of the water.

  “Plenty deep!” came the reassuring reply.

  “Lookouts—all along the hull,” cried the captain next. “Be alert for anything! Sounding?”

  “Still deep!”

  Leaking from a dozen holes, listing to her battered starboard side, sail puffing from a few listless gusts of wind, the Princess of Moonshae crept toward Evermeet. Alicia stood beside the elven woman and shared her sense of awe. It seemed impossible that they were here, barely a mile away from the verdant shore.

  “Still deep,” came the announcement from the bow, followed by a strangled gasp. “Wait … I see something. What the—stop! Shallows—coral!”

  Brandon whirled, ready to order his men to the oars. Before he could open his mouth, they all felt a wood-splintering crunch. At the same time, the longship stopped moving completely.

  “Coral reef came from nowhere, Captain!” stammered the shocked sailor who had been performing the soundings. “The water was hundreds of feet deep, and then there it was, like a giant spike stuck as a barrier!”

  “It may very well be just that,” Brigit noted grimly. “How badly are we stuck?”

  “With luck, the tide’ll float us off,” replied Brandon, with a worried look at the water that had started to trickle in through several new cracks.

  “That’s the least of our problems,” announced Keane, with a meaningful gesture over the side. A quick look showed Alicia what he meant.

  The water around the longship teemed with swimming figures—greenish and mottled blue creatures with elven features but webbed hands and feet. Each of the figures held a bow, with an arrow nocked and pointed at the longship.

  With a sinking sensation in her heart, the princess looked around. The coastal guards had them completely surrounded. A quick count showed her there were many hundreds of them.

  * * * * *

  Deirdre returned to the mirror but again met with frustration. When she sought her sister or mother, she saw instead only a gray fog. It had been this way since they had passed the Cyclones of Evermeet. Whatever the nature of the arcane barriers protecting the island, Deirdre deduced that they extended into the realm of the arcane.

  Nor did her continuing efforts to discover the location of her father yield any results other than a fruitless search of the limitless depths of the Trackless Sea.

  More and more she had found her thoughts moving away from her family, away from any and all the people of her realm. Instead, her mind chased relentlessly after the one she could not find, the one she knew again walked the surface of the Realms.

  Sooner or later, she vowed, her mirror would again locate the being she had known as Malawar, and when it did, her vengeance against him would be complete.

  * * * * *

  For a long, pregnant moment, the creatures in the water made no sound. Sunlight glinted from hundreds of arrowheads, a warlike and ironic contrast to the beautiful coral shallows, the mottled blue and green water reflecting the sunlight in dazzling hues.

  The aquatic archers held their weapons horizontally so that both ends of their bows remained out of the water. The archers could shower the longship’s hull with their lethal rain at a moment’s notice.

  “Be careful!” Brigit hissed. “They’ve been taught all their lives that humans are their mortal enemies. Don’t let anyone do anything to give them cause to shoot!”

  The princess studied the creatures in the water, realizing that they tended to be very fair-looking beings, with the pointed ears and narrow, shapely skulls of elves. The skin on their faces and arms, the only parts she could see above the water, varied in color from soft green to deep blue, even shifting through many hues on a single individual. The webbed hands and feet, however, couldn’t help reminding the princess of a sahuagin.

  “What are they?” she asked softly, realizing that Brigit stood beside her.

  “The Aquis-Dulcio … sea elves,” said the sister knight, her voice heavy with awe. “I’ve heard about them. All of us know of our cousins of the deep, but never have I seen one!”

  Just then one of the sea elves rose, treading water with his feet. He opened his mouth, and a series of lyrical sounds came forth. To Alicia, it sounded like a pleasant song in which the singer made up nonsense sounds instead of words.

  Brigit, however, stiffened and then listened with rapt attention. She responded once in the same language, and then the aquatic elf continued speaking. Despite the musical nature of the speech, the speaker’s gestures and expressions convinced the princess he was delivering a harangue. His webbed hands clenched into fists, and he planted them firmly on his hips. Brandon, Robyn, and Keane observed the communication, gathering around the sister knight by the time the sea elf ceased speaking.

  “What does he say?” asked the captain impatiently.

  “They demand that we leave. They promise to kill us if we don’t depart immediately.”

  Alicia’s heart sank. “But don’t they understand?” she objected.

  “They understand that this is a human ship, and they insist that humans are not allowed here.”

  “Did you tell them why we’re here?” asked Robyn.

  “I told them who I am. The Sisters of Synnoria are known throughout elvendo
m, and being their captain gives me some status. I started to explain about the Synnorian Gate, but he cut me off and told me that it didn’t matter—we had to leave.” She didn’t repeat the names he had called her, the filthy epithets—traitor and worse—for bringing the eternal enemies of elvendom to this sacred place.

  “Does he see that we’re stuck on an Abyss-cursed lump of coral?” snarled Brandon, stepping to the rail to glower at the male, who still held himself half out of the water. The northman started to raise his fist, but then apparently thought better of the gesture. With an inarticulate mutter, he turned back to the discussion.

  Brigit leaned over the rail again and sang something back to the elf in the water. The sea elf scowled and came back in a minor, threatening key. The sister knight shrugged and turned back to the humans.

  “I told him that we’re stranded, that we can’t get off of here. He … was insulting, but at least he didn’t insist that we leave.”

  Hanrald listened intently, standing at the gunwale and flushing as he stared at the elf. He sensed that Brigit had been treated very rudely. “He’s a pompous little wart, that one. I’d like to have the chance to teach him a few manners!”

  Abruptly Alicia grew impatient and stepped to the gunwale. “We come in peace, and we seek an audience with your queen and her council of sages.” She spoke in Common, trying to keep her voice light, her face friendly. “We offer no threat!”

  She found herself the target of more arrows than she could count, all poised on the brink of launching. If any one of them slips, she thought, I’m dead.

  Then Brigit stepped to her side. Again she spoke in that lyrical tongue, and the male replied. Now, however, several other males and a female joined him. All of them were covered by multicolored skin, fading through every shade of blue, green, and aqua in an effect that was really quite beautiful.

  The female sea elf, who also rose from the water to sing, addressed Brigit and then the male. She was marvelously beautiful, with silvery hair that hung to the waterline in tight curls, concealing her breasts—but not the fact that she, like the male, seemed to be naked. Then she dove, her webbed feet popping out of the water just briefly. Alicia quickly lost sight of the perfectly camouflaged form as the sea elf disappeared into the dappled waters of the coral shallows.

  “That’s a little better,” Brigit told them, still wary. “This one gave me her name—Trillhalla. She called the other one Palentor. She says that we’re fortunate in where we’ve made landfall. The queen is in the Summer Palace, and that’s not far from here. Also the names of Tristan and Robyn Kendrick are not unknown to her. Nor,” she added quietly, “is Brigit Cu-’Lyrran. Anyway, she’ll send word of our arrival. She warns that we have to stay here until she returns.”

  “That’ll be easy enough,” Brandon growled, with a belligerent look at the male who had been the first to speak.

  Alicia, meanwhile, looked at the sky. The sun had passed into the region of late afternoon, and the magnificent forests of Evermeet, gleaming in a rainbow of colors, glowed beneath it. The water was placid, except for the graceful disturbance caused by the array of elven archers. As she looked, it seemed to her that their numbers continued to swell.

  Natural enough, she thought, if humans are unknown here. They’ve probably never seen a longship before either.

  With that not exactly comforting thought, she settled down on the deck with the rest of the crew to await the return of Trillhalla.

  * * * * *

  “Have you failed me, worm?”

  The question posed by Talos was an awkward one for the avatar Sinioth. He answered as deftly as he could.

  “We have trailed the humans to their destination. They are far removed from the prisoner, and we have two thousand warriors screening the seas against their escape. Should they try to sail, we shall annihilate them!”

  “Very well,” rumbled the Destructor. “Even the mirror brings no image of them. I shall be patient—for now.”

  “Thank you, most merciful master!” pledged the avatar, thrashing his squid body through the depths in an ecstasy of groveling.

  “But should you fail me in the end,” continued Talos, “it will be more than the pathetic humans who face annihilation!”

  13

  A Queen of Evermeet

  A snarl prowled across Brandon’s face as he climbed aboard the stricken Princess of Moonshae. He and Knaff had completed their inspection of the hull, scrambling about on the coral outcrop that now, at low tide, held the longship completely out of the water. The Corwellian bowmen and Keane had stood an alert guard, though they all knew that their presence was for show only. The sea around them was a vast expanse of bobbing heads and torsos. Tavish, in a quick count, concluded that more than a thousand sea elves had congregated by now.

  “As I thought, she’s splintered in a lot of places where she’s not holed clean through.” The captain’s tone was sad, almost brokenhearted, but also fiercely proud. “No other ship would have survived!”

  “Can you patch the hull?” asked Robyn.

  “Maybe. Give me two weeks, plenty of tar and timber, a forge, and a bigger drydock than you could find in the Moonshaes, and I might be able to make her seaworthy again. But she’ll never be the same Princess.”

  The northman captain didn’t try to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He looked at Alicia, his expression despairing, and the princess wanted to take him in her arms and soothe his pain. She remembered, with a tinge of resentment, that the northman would find such a reaction humiliating in the extreme.

  “Look! Isn’t that Trillhalla?” asked Alicia. “I hope she’s bearing good news!”

  They recognized the female sea elf, the only one thus far who had offered them the slightest willingness to listen, not to mention help. She was identifiable not from her features, but by the formed escort of warriors screening her approach. No less than a full score of large males swam before her, breaking the water like dolphins so that they could continually observe the humans.

  Finally the formation broke apart in the shallow water before the reef where the Princess of Moonshae sat in her coral-bound trap. The dappled face of Trillhalla broke the surface, framed by her silver curls and growing rings of water as she raised her torso into the air. Palentor rose beside her, his face fixed in its familiar scowl.

  “You, Brigit Cu’Lyrran,” began the female sea elf in heavily accented Common, “are commanded to bring two of the humans and appear before Queen Amlaruil in the Summer Palace.” Palentor turned to object, his face blanching with shock, but his reaction was halted by a sharp gesture from Trillhalla.

  The female sea elf remained still, half out of the water, and it was several moments before the visitors realized that she had concluded her speech.

  “I thank the queen—and yourself—for this gracious command,” replied Brigit. The sister knight turned and, without hesitation, named Robyn and Alicia as her companions.

  Meanwhile, a long, graceful canoe appeared, emerging unobserved from a concealed gap in the verdant shoreline. It was already halfway to the stricken longship before any of the companions noticed it. Then it was Knaff the Elder who, in obvious chagrin at its undiscovered approach, pointed out the craft.

  The canoe was half the size of a small longship, propelled swiftly by a dozen paddlers on each side. A single long outrigger extended to the craft’s starboard side. It had neither mast nor sail but was decorated in multicolored, flowered patterns along the hull, with garlands of real blossoms gathered in many places along the gunwale. The thing moved very quickly. Alicia thought it the equal in speed of a longship under full sail.

  The craft slid easily into a tiny inlet of the coral reef—no more than six or eight inches of water—and came to a rest just a few feet from the longship. The three visitors climbed easily over the side, took two steps across the exposed coral, and were helped into the canoe by silent, muscular elves. These were not sea elves, but Alicia saw that their skin had a bluer cast than did the
Llewyrr. Also, many of these elves of Evermeet had dark hair, a virtually unknown phenomenon among the elves of the Moonshaes.

  They took seats in the bow of the slender boat on plush, cushioned benches surrounded by bouquets of brilliant flowers. The canoe moved smoothly but with surprising speed as it drew away from the longship and glided toward the tree-lined shore. Trillhalla swam beside them.

  “The queen was surprisingly calm about your arrival,” the sea elf announced, speaking in particular to Robyn. “Though the rest of the palace has been thrown into quite a stir. She, too, has heard of the High King and Queen of Moonshae. Synnoria is an important place to us in Evermeet, and the reign of you and your former husband has made that valley more secure than it has been in many years.”

  “Let’s hope she wants it to go on for a few more,” Alicia observed wryly. By then, however, the wonders of Evermeet drove the desire for further conversation away.

  The trees, they saw as they neared the shore, sprouted a leafy mixture of blue, green, and silver foliage, all three colors combining when the breeze ruffled the branches into a glittering array of beauty. Colors seemed to shift and flow along the forest, which consisted of far greater trees than Alicia had ever seen or imagined. Even the saplings were the size of Corwellian oaks! The great mature specimens rested on trunks as large around as a good-sized cottage, towering hundreds of feet into the air.

  Before Alicia noticed, Trillhalla, with a flick of her webbed feet, propelled herself from the water into the canoe beside the visitors. The sea elf seemed to have no regard for her nudity as she lay on the seat and let the sun dry the seawater from her skin.

  Alicia didn’t see the entrance into the forest before them, but suddenly the canoe slipped into a narrow channel. Despite the overhanging canopy of verdure, sunlight reflected from the silvery leaves and the clear water, making the hidden passage a bright, airy place. Here Trillhalla sat up and removed a plain white tunic from beneath her bench. Throwing the garment over her shoulders and pushing her arms through the sleeves, she tossed her silver-curled locks free. She looked, Alicia thought with amazement, as glamorous as any lady of an elegant court.