The Coral Kingdom

by Douglas Niles

  “Father!” cried Alicia, scrambling down to the bow, holding on to benches and sailing lines to keep her balance on the steeply inclined surface. She barely caught herself at the figurehead, holding tightly to the stout timber as she leaned over the rail. Beside her, she saw the lanky form of her changestaff, also clinging precariously to the prow.

  Desperately the princess looked around, gathering a coil of rope and then searching for Tristan’s head, but the king once more vanished into the frothing turbulence.

  Then she saw two of the mermen and her father’s bearded face between theirs. Slowly they made their way toward the longship, circled protectively by the great killer whale.

  “Here!” Alicia shouted, throwing the line and securing the end around the trunk of her changestaff.

  Then the water bubbled around the trio, and Alicia screamed as one of the mermen rose from the brine, the tines of a scrag trident emerging from his chest. Blood turned the water pink as the brave creature perished.

  The lashing limb of a monstrous tentacle suddenly whipped through the water again, and Alicia saw the squid shoot up from the floor. Tristan shouted something, then vanished with shocking suddenness. The princess saw a flash of black and white skin, a tall dorsal fin, and then the powerful killer whale disappeared after the monster.

  “No!” cried Alicia, shaking her head in anguish. Then, before she stopped to think, she drew her sword and dove headlong into the water, aiming the blade like a harpoon at the place she had last seen the great squid.

  She felt slick, leathery skin before her and drove the blade into the monster’s body, feeling it lurch away from the force of the blow. Opening her eyes, Alicia saw nothing but bubbles, but then a hand came into view—a human hand! She reached out and grabbed it, kicking upward and raising her head above the surface in time to gulp one precious gasp of air.

  Something wrapped around her leg, and she chopped with her sword, still holding on to the hand. For a moment, she glimpsed Tristan’s face as the king broke from the water and drank in a breath, then father and daughter plunged below, caught in the nest of snakelike tendrils.

  Alicia saw the darting forms of mermen around them, the black and white skin of the great druid nearby, and she drove her keen blade again and again into the tough body that seemed to drag her and her father ever deeper into the flooded chamber.

  And then abruptly they broke free. She swam upward in a frenzy, feeling her father kicking beside her. Just when she thought they must certainly drown, their faces broke from the water only a few feet from the longship’s bow.

  “Here!” The frantic voice belonged to Keane, who threw a rope toward them. Alicia and Tristan seized the line and hung on for dear life. “Pull!” cried the mage as a dozen crewmen scrambled to help him.

  They strained against the weight of the pair in the water, but the footing in the steeply canted hull proved treacherous. The king and princess started to rise from the water, but then several crewmen slipped and they plunged back into the maelstrom.

  “Help!” cried Alicia, choking on spray and turbulence, knowing that her friends already were doing everything in their power to aid them.

  Yet one heard that call and answered. The gangly form of the changestaff had slowly pulled itself back into the hull, though several of its limbs still firmly grasped the figurehead. Now the tree extended a long knotty limb down toward the two Ffolk in the water. Alicia and Tristan grabbed at the branch, clinging tightly as the tree being slowly lifted them free of the water, toward the tenuous safety of the longship’s hull.

  Aided by the frantically straining Keane, in another moment the pair tumbled over the rail of the ship, collapsing in the bow as water continued to thunder downward around them.

  “Break her free, men!” shouted Brandon, chopping at one of the frames where the ship was braced into the broken window. Pry bars, axes, and hammers all crunched against the coral surface of the dome, chipping and bashing in a desperate effort to enlarge the entrance.

  “The pressure’s too great!” Keane shouted over the thunderous cascade. Brandon saw that the water pouring into the dome held them firmly in the gap.

  Spray splashed over Alicia and she whirled in surprise, seeing the sleek killer whale leaping from the water that now surged nearly onto the longship’s figurehead. The great mammal teetered on the gunwale for a moment, and then the High Queen of the Ffolk tumbled into the hull beside them. Once again in human form, Robyn knelt beside her husband, tears of relief glowing in her eyes.

  The pounding cascade slowed as finally the chamber beneath them was fully flooded. They saw no sign of the squid as the crew again pried against the frame jammed around the vessel’s bow. Abruptly the Princess of Moonshae lurched. A chunk of the dome wall fell away, releasing the longship but twisting her hull with brutal, unforgiving force. Planks splintered along the keel, and water exploded through the gap, quickly swirling around Alicia and Tristan as they tried to scramble to their feet.

  Slowly the longship began to float upward, toward the surface and the sun. Marquillor and his surviving comrades swam out the broken window, diving for the shelter of the coral ridge below. Water continued to flood the hull in a roaring cascade through a gap at least twelve feet long and more than a hand-span wide.

  Grimly Knaff took his position at the helm, and the Princess began to move forward, trailing a bubbling wake at the stern. Her bow rose slightly, but so much water sloshed in a large wave toward the stern that the helmsman had to quickly bring the ship back to level. Dank air stung their eyes and caused their lungs to strain for breath as the ship wallowed through the depths.

  “We’ve got to get Brigit and Hanrald!” Alicia shouted to Brandon, who stood near Knaff in the stern.

  “Where are they?” demanded the captain, peering through the turbulent seas. They could see no sign of the knightly pair.

  “Look!” Tavish called in alarm as a giant shadow moved through the broken window, emerging from the dome to follow them into the sea. The blunt body, the long tentacles—all were dolefully familiar.

  Yet even that fact paled against the significance of the ruptured bow. Water gushed around their knees, rising higher every second.

  It seemed clear to them all that the Princess of Moonshae was fatally breached.

  * * * * *

  Through Deirdre’s mirror, Talos observed the escape of the human prisoner, and vengeance against his servant’s failure crystalized into determination in his evil, immortal mind. His presence, always a shadow when the princess used the crystal, now formed into a conscious thought—knowledge that he projected into the young woman’s mind.

  “His name …” came the voice of Talos. Deirdre stiffened, frightened yet at the same time intensely thrilled. She felt the touch from beyond her world, beyond her existence, and she knew that a source of great power reached her.

  “His name is Coss-Axell-Sinioth.”

  The voice faded, but Deirdre’s attention had already fixed on a plan—a plan that she could at last put into action.

  Finally, now, she had her weapon.

  19

  To Sun and Sky

  Painfully Hanrald grasped at another step, and then one more, pulling himself up as he had for the last half hour—one stone stair at a time. The deep wound in his side wracked his body with waves of agony. He had no idea how much blood he had lost, but from the amount of the crimson liquid that continued to drift around him, he knew that he must be pretty thoroughly drained.

  But Brigit still wouldn’t leave him. He had tried again to persuade her, halfway up the agonizing climb, when he had been convinced that he couldn’t make it. Again she had insisted that she would wait until he was ready. Ultimately the only course left to the earl—the only way to save the elfwoman—was to make this climb.

  Meanwhile the sister knight defended them both, fighting below him on the stairway, backing up the steps, holding the scrags at bay if they tried to pursue too closely. Fortunately the great beasts usually hun
g well back, having learned several painful lessons about the Synnorian warrior’s skill with her keen elven steel.

  During the duration of his climb, Hanrald noticed steadily growing illumination above him, the promise of escape that had kept him moving, had brought him back from the edge of utter despair. The steps were very steep, and he knew that he had climbed more than a hundred, though he had forgotten to keep an exact count, a fact that he chided himself about as he neared the top.

  Finally Hanrald came around a spiral in the staircase that ended in an aperture above him—a rectangular gap that was the source of the pale green light, the illumination that had drawn him this far. Cautiously he raised his head through the hole, discovering that they had indeed reached the top of a tower. Aqua-colored seawater surrounded him, stretching to the far limits of the horizon. Above—and so terribly, impossibly far away—he could see the sun-dappled reflections of the surface.

  Without hesitation, the knight crawled onto the floor of the flat stone platform that capped the tower, finding a circle no more than twelve feet across, lofted more than a hundred feet above the floor of the sea. He saw that the tower stood proudly at the rim of the great undersea bowl. Below him, some distance away, he made out the multidomed structure of the huge palace.

  Among the towers and domes of that edifice, he observed many companies of scrags and sahuagin, mere dots in the water at this distance. Hanrald crouched flat on the exposed surface, thankful that, for the moment at least, none of the monsters seemed to notice the human’s presence. Instead, they swarmed about the palace, clearly focused on an enemy closer to hand.

  Brigit scrambled out of the opening beside him and looked back down the stairway. “The scrags are just down the stairs,” she warned. “They have no intention of letting us get away.”

  “Look!” cried Hanrald, spotting a heavy metal trapdoor lying open beside the entrance. With great effort, the two of them lifted the portal and dropped it over the opening, where they swiftly bolted the barrier shut.

  “Rest for a moment,” the sister knight said quietly, and for once, the man needed no coaxing. He slumped, all but unconscious, onto the flat coral surface.

  The elf stood up and studied their surroundings. Sunlight brightened the surface of the sea, reflecting from the waves like multiple facets of diamonds, still at least three hundred feet above her. Many spires like the one they now occupied rose around them, and she noticed numerous shell-covered, domed structures dotting the rolling surface of the great reef below.

  A swarm of creatures near the largest of these domes caught her attention, and she saw bubbles and turbulence in the water there. Then a familiar shape—the longship!—moving slowly, emerged from the turbulence. Even from this distance, a mile or more away, it seemed to Brigit that the Princess of Moonshae wallowed heavily in the water.

  Still, the elfwoman’s heart filled with renewed hope. She leaped to her feet, her silver breastplate gleaming in the bright water, and frantically began to wave.

  * * * * *

  “We’re sinking!” Brandon snarled from the stern, angrily watching seawater flood into the longship’s hull. It seemed to him a cruel irony: A powerful magical barrier protected the ship from tons of water weighing heavily above them, yet a simple gash in the planking seemed likely to doom them all to a watery grave. Already the vessel wallowed sluggishly, and in a few more minutes, she would inevitably become too heavy to rise through the sea.

  Alicia noticed, for the first time since they had broken free of the dome, that the lanky figure of her changestaff had crawled back into the bow of the longship. It perched, like a gigantic mantis, near the figurehead, as if it tried to crouch out of the way of the frantic voyagers in the hull.

  Her mind seized upon a desperate idea, and it was obvious no one else had another plan to suggest. “There!” the princess commanded, speaking to the creature of wood, the powerful servant of the goddess … and herself. Would it comprehend? The princess pointed to the gash in the ship’s hull, addressing the animated tree. “Can you seal that hole—stop the leak?”

  Slowly, deliberately, the creature extended a limb into the water gushing through the gap, and then another. Finally it reached into the hole with its remaining branches, gaining solid purchase on the outside of the hull. Then those sturdy limbs contracted, pulling the trunk of the tree into the long, narrow crack, compressing the flow of water until the spurting leak had slowed to no more than a thin trickle. The changestaff pressed itself even more tightly into the gap, blending into the planks of the hull, and in another moment, the leak stopped entirely.

  “By the gods!” Knaff grunted in gruff appreciation. “We might make it yet!”

  They had no time for congratulations, however. A quick look in any direction showed huge schools of swimming scrags and sahuagin, rapidly closing in to attack. Columns of sea trolls formed the vanguard of the onrushing force, while vast waves of sahuagin followed quickly in the wake of their larger cousins. The creatures might have been schools of minnows when viewed from a distance, but they rapidly closed the gap, quickly expanding to more menacing dimensions.

  It seemed the creatures of the sea had the Princess of Moonshae dead to rights. The longship wallowed in the depths of the sea, short of air and slowed by the unnatural environment. Everywhere the crew of Brandon’s vessel faced a teeming collection of hungry monsters of the sea, while the humans had difficulty even drawing enough breath to stop panting and gasping.

  The air in the magically enclosed longship continued to grow increasingly foul. The crew had been underwater for nearly a full day, and the strain showed on faces streaked with sweat, mouths hanging open, reflexively gasping for oxygen that was not to be had.

  And yet, under these conditions, the northmen and Ffolk prepared to fight their most desperate battle yet. Never before had they encountered nearly the number of beasts that now swarmed toward them. Above and below them, to port and starboard and astern—indeed, everywhere but directly in front of the ship—the gathering schools of warriors approached. The crew could clearly see that they faced far more attackers now than had gathered to block their initial approach to Kyrasti.

  Yet no one would even acknowledge the possibility of defeat.

  The voyagers universally rejected the thought that now, after their miraculous rescue of the High King, they might fail to reach the surface or see the shores of Moonshae again. Every man and woman aboard vowed quietly that he or she would see that sky, breathe the fresh air that hovered so close above them.

  Besides the warriors thronging through the water, the humans faced the reality of yet another grim threat. Brandon and Knaff, in the stern, saw clear evidence of the ominous form that slowly followed in their wake.

  The image of the giant squid grew ever larger, emerging from the darkness of Kyrasti to advance toward the still-sluggish longship. The Prince of Gnarhelm saw that the creature delayed beginning its attack, obviously waiting until the troops surrounding the vessel had a chance to initiate the assault.

  “Look there, to the west!” shouted Knaff the Elder, his voice booming through the hull of the longship. They followed his pointing figure past the bow to the one region where they had previously seen no threat, gradually discerning another mass of warriors advancing rapidly toward the Princess of Moonshae. These submarine troops swam through the water in long ranks, ranging across the full depth of the reef waters from surface to floor. Hundreds of fresh warriors surged toward them, still far away but closing the distance quickly, approaching from the only path of escape that had lain before them.

  “More of them?” groaned Alicia, following the loyal helmsman’s indication. The additional figures emerged from the haze of distance, swarming toward them as quickly as the palace guards.

  Alicia’s eye, however, was drawn to a flickering point of brightness in the direction of this new advancing force, yet not so far away. She looked more closely, positive she had seen the flash of silver or some other bright metal. Then she was
certain.

  “It’s Brigit!” the princess cried, gasping for enough breath to shout in the foul atmosphere of the hull. She pointed to the spot of radiance, barely making out the desperately waving arm. “There! We’ve got to get to her!”

  Slowly, with noticeable reluctance, the Princess of Moonshae pushed through the water, cutting a course toward the knight, but unable to avoid hundreds of savage enemies on all sides.

  * * * * *

  Luge huddled behind his shield, a wet and bloody sword in his hand. The terrors of this undersea journey continued to assail him, yet like any true man of Gnarhelm, he stood ready to follow his captain wherever Brandon led. He had slain sahuagin, sliced deep wounds into scrags, battled sharks and worse, all for the love of his prince.

  But now he felt something even more horrifying, darker and far more sinister than any of the mortal foes he had battled to this point. The evil centered in the giant squid that pursued them. The beast had terrified Luge when he had first witnessed it in the flooding dome, and even then somehow it had reminded him of a black-bearded man who had come to him in The Black Salmon Inn.

  In the terror of that recognition, he remembered things about the crew’s last night in Corwell, memories his mind had tried very hard to shut out. He saw the death of his friend Roloff, the terrified sailor strangled by the dark man, then cast casually into the harbor. Finally he knew a sense of obscene violation, and he recalled the magic the stranger had worked on him, twisting Luge’s mind to the evil fellow’s own dark will.

  Then, not knowing the cause of his compulsion, though it grew to irresistible proportions as the squid neared the Princess of Moonshae, Luge felt a different urge. He wanted to serve, to help this monster.