Icelin slowly turned her body until she was facing Sull, who lay a few feet in front of the servant. The lady again mimicked the gesture.
“There,” Icelin said. “As long as I picture her standing here, she’ll remain. The folk of Mistshore should be wary enough of sea wraiths to stay away from this apparition until the Watch arrives.”
Still, her gaze lingered on Sull. She took a step toward him, but Ruen laid a gloved hand on her arm.
“If we’re going, we need to go now,” he said.
“You’re right. I just—”
“I know,” Ruen said. “You’ll see him again.”
She looked at him. “Do you truly think that?”
He shrugged. “You were right. If I didn’t think I could beat the odds, I’d never play the game.”
They looked at each other for a breath. Then Icelin smiled. “So let’s play.”
CHAPTER 18
Ruen’s raft was in good condition, considering it had gone through a sea wraith attack. Ruen and Bellaril worked the oars while Icelin sank into her thoughts. She kept a part of her mind fixed on the apparition watching over Sull, but she knew she would lose the spell soon. The battle ahead would require her complete concentration.
The Watch would be there by now. They would save Sull. Icelin could not consider any other outcome.
She took inventory of what magic she had left. She had never used so much in so short a time. Some of the spells left she hadn’t meditated on in years. They were at the very edges of her consciousness. Her teacher had insisted that she be able to protect herself, but she’d put the harrowing magic as far from her active mind as she could.
Now, mentally, she entered the tower room. The sunlight spilling in the windows had become stygian night. When she entered the room, flames sprang from tallow candles, long unused in their brass candelabras. Black shadows stretched to caress the bookshelves. It was only her fear made manifest, but she was still unsettled at the changes.
Icelin walked to a place at the base of the shelves. A black tome floated down from a high shelf to meet her outstretched hand. Arcane writing was burned into the silver spine. The book opened in her hand, and she read.
The spells were powerful, but she was more concerned with the backlash. She’d been caught completely off guard and made helpless when she’d incapacitated Trik. All the offense she could muster wouldn’t be worth anything if she were incapacitated herself.
Icelin blinked, and the tower disappeared. She stared out at an endless stretch of dark water. Ruen didn’t have his ring. With his body unfortified, he’d be significantly weakened by any blow that managed to land on him. But she trusted his speed. If they couldn’t catch him, they couldn’t hurt him.
That left Bellaril. She would anchor all of them, and she would make Cerest’s men answer for her master. It worried Icelin that she would be walking into a potential den of spellplague, but she knew the dwarf woman would not be dissuaded.
“What will you do when this is all over?” she asked.
Bellaril looked up from her rowing. “Go back to the Cradle,” she said, as if it was a foregone conclusion. “No one to run it, the champion should step in. I don’t think he’s going to be doing it,” she said, nodding at Ruen.
“The title’s yours,” Ruen said. “I have no interest in the Cradle.”
“Don’t know what you’re missing,” Bellaril said.
“What do you love so much about the fighting?” Icelin asked.
Bellaril shrugged. “I like the crowd, like it when they cheer for me. It’s what everyone wants.”
“She likes to be seen,” Ruen said.
“Isn’t that what I’m saying?” The dwarf woman looked irritated. “What of it?”
“Bells grew up in a family with eight brothers,” Ruen said.
“Eight? Isn’t that quite… prolific, for a dwarven family?” Icelin said.
“Not so much these days,” Bellaril said. “I’m thinking our sire wanted a small army, not a family, so he got all of us on my mother. As far as he was concerned, I would grow my cheek fuzz and be indistinguishable from my brothers. Nine soldiers, nine sons. That’s what he wanted. He cut my hair himself, when I refused to do it. My brothers held me down.”
“Gods,” Icelin said. “Your own family?”
“Blood doesn’t mean much. The next time he came for me, I bruised him good before he could get the shears on me. After that, I almost took out his eye. Each time I hurt him a little more, until he stopped coming for me.”
“That’s when you came to Waterdeep?”
“Not at first. I wandered a little, busied my hands at different jobs before I ended up in Mistshore. But the Cradle.” Bellaril shook her head. “They’d never seen a dwarf woman pretty as me who could fight as hard as the boys they bet their coin on.”
Icelin smiled at Bellaril’s pleased expression. “No one ever tried to make you grow a beard?”
“And they know better than to touch my hair,” Bellaril said.
In the distance, Icelin could see the behemoth outline of Ferryman’s Waltz. Wraiths circled in an endless dance in the water, occasionally swirling up to curl their bodies sinuously around the broken masts of the inverted ship.
The leviathan’s bones twined seamlessly with the rotting greatship. There was no flesh left to suggest what the creature might have looked like in its original form, but the thought of it driving the massive ship straight into the air was boggling. The leviathan’s remains kept the Ferryman from plunging into the deep by sheer force of an old will, a need beyond death to remain locked in battle.
Bellaril looked unimpressed by the sight. “How you thinking of getting past them?” she asked, nodding at the wraiths.
Icelin closed her eyes. She hummed the familiar ballad to brace herself against the magic. The lost boy, trying to find his way home. She didn’t look at Ruen to see his reaction to the song. She couldn’t let herself be distracted.
“Find a path into the wreckage,” Icelin instructed them. She reached into her pouch for foci, careful this time to make sure they were the correct objects. “When the wraiths scatter, make for it with all possible speed.”
Bellaril snorted. “They’re not just going to let us glide in—”
“Quiet,” Ruen said. “Let her work.”
Help me, Nelzun, Icelin thought. The raft drifted closer. One by one, the wraiths slowed their restless circling. They sensed a change in the chaotic usualness of their domain and turned their attention to the small raft and its three distinctly human occupants.
Icelin finished the spell and threw her arms into the air. She released a handful of coin-sized stones, three in each hand. They soared high and burst into orange flame. She pictured them in her mind, the wild, soaring orbs, pulsing with arcane energy.
To the wraiths, arcane energy released from a body steeped in spellplague was like a bone cast in the path of starving dogs. Their bodies glowed in concert with the flames. They streaked after the orbs in clusters of three and four, leaving a clear path between the only three living souls on the water and a cavernous hole snugged between the wrecked Ferryman and the leviathan’s bones.
The raft drifted up to a slash of sail draped across the upper half of the opening. Ruen pushed it aside with his oar. He maneuvered the raft between hull and rib and they floated on, into the Waltz.
Cerest listened to Trik’s report in fascination. “You’re certain it’s only the three of them?” he said. Trik looked uncomfortable. Cerest narrowed his eyes. “I’m sorry for the loss of Borion, but if you’re lying, it won’t go badly for just me. We’ve lost Cearcor and Rondel.”
Trik’s eyes bugged out and he half-swayed on his feet. “How?”
“Arowall’s guards,” Cerest said. “They caught them just after we split up. I underestimated their loyalty. But don’t worry, Feston is safe. He’s gone to get three more of your fellows to aid us.”
“Six of us,” Trik murmured. “Six of us against three of them.�
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“More than passable odds, if Icelin is willing to cooperate.”
Trik shook his head. He looked at Cerest in a way that made the elf’s skin prickle with anger—disgust swimming in pity. But Trik wasn’t looking at the elf’s scars.
“You go find her on your own,” he said. “Take the others if you want. Hells, they’ll all fight ‘til they’re dead, if there’s coin in it.”
He turned away, the torchlight burning his profile orange.
“Don’t you want revenge?” Cerest asked him. “They killed your friend.”
“And I killed hers, or near enough,” Trik said. “I’m out of it.”
Cerest watched the man walk away. It didn’t affect him the way it had when the Locks had left him. He felt nothing now, not in light of what Trik had told him about Icelin.
He’d finally worn her down. She was coming to him, and she was coming angry. He would have to fight to bring her to heel, but he wasn’t worried about that. He would have the upper hand, because he had the truth Icelin wanted.
All he had to do was make her give up everything to get it.
Ruen’s lantern flickered and went out. Icelin started to cast a light spell when she felt Ruen’s hand on her arm.
She knew it was him by the cool touch of leather.
“Save your strength,” he said. “I’ll get the lantern going. Bells, keep rowing.”
The dwarf grunted acknowledgment. Ruen moved away in the darkness. Icelin could only assume he was feeling his way.
She tried to get a sense of the interior of the Waltz by the moonlight filtering through the gaps in the rigging, but the sheer bulk of the vessel and bones prevented much detail from being discernible. The structures had massed together in one hive shape, eclipsing all the individual parts.
The raft bumped against something solid about the same time Ruen got the lantern lit. Icelin thought it was debris floating in the water. It took her a breath to realize that it was a boot, propped against the front of the raft. The boot’s owner floated six inches above the water.
Icelin looked up into the most frightening collage of a human face she had ever beheld. Naked above the waist, the man’s torso and shoulders were disproportionately wide. Veins and bone bulges stood out from his pale skin. Thin patches of hair grew like scrub grass all over his head. His bottom lip folded over on itself in one corner, giving him a perpetual sneer and allowing a stream of drool to escape from his mouth in a needle-thin waterfall. This type of deformity, the godscurse, Icelin had seen before. But the gods weren’t done with their jest at this poor soul’s expense.
From the man’s neck sprouted a quartet of bulbous gray tentacles. He had them draped across his shoulders like a mane that ended at his belt. The tentacles were moving, seemingly independent of any conscious mental direction on their owner’s part.
With his boot on the raft, the man brought forward a long polearm, its tip reaching well above his head. He swung the point down level with her chest. His arm muscles tensed. Icelin thought he was going to drive the weapon through her breast, but instead, he let out a keening whistle that threatened to shatter her eardrums.
Icelin folded into herself, clutching her head against the high-pitched whistle. When it was over, she noticed Bellaril and Ruen had adopted similar protective positions.
“We mean no harm here,” Icelin said shakily. “We came here for refuge—”
A howling cry echoed from somewhere deep in the inverted Ferryman, cutting off Icelin’s words. It rose in intensity, so that it mimicked the man’s whistle perfectly. The sound rang out again, nearer, and with it came clicks and rapid pounding on wood.
“Get the oars up!” Ruen shouted. Bellaril was already hauling hers out of the water.
Ruen ran past Icelin and swung his oar. He batted the man’s polearm away from her chest and reversed the swing for a swipe at the man’s legs.
The deformed man backed off, blocking Ruen’s swing with his polearm, but he made no further move to fight back. He smiled, and the expression was horrid, his lips curling like worms around uneven rows of teeth.
Ruen plunged the oar into the water, trying to push them away from the Ferryman.
“Beware!” Icelin cried, pointing to the ship. Pinpoints of light were visible from a gap in the hull. There came another howl, and a breath later, two enormous bodies leaped through the opening. In size and movement they resembled stags, but their faces were a cross between canine and badger. They launched into the air using massive haunches, one and then the other landing on the small raft.
The stink of rotting flesh and gamey fur swelled in Icelin’s nostrils. Their craft was not big enough to contain the beasts. Icelin fell to her knees to avoid being slammed off the raft by the weight of the furry bodies.
The beast farthest from her whipped its head around, catching Bellaril by the leg. She fell on her backside. The beast shook her like a playtime doll, and for the first time Icelin heard the dwarf woman scream. Terror widened her eyes, but she fought back, and folded her body up to get at the beast’s head.
It lifted her by her leg and swung her, tossing its head and snarling. On the second backswing Bellaril grabbed her belt dagger and planted it beneath the beast’s eyes. She missed its burning orb by half an inch.
The beast keened and snapped its head down. The knife came out of its flesh. It bit the blade in half, nearly severing Bellaril’s fingers too. The dwarf woman dropped the ruined weapon. Her skull smacked the raft, and she went senseless.
“No!” Icelin cried. She tried to crawl between the second beast’s legs. Ruen had his arms around its head. His muscles strained as he attempted to keep the beast’s teeth from his neck.
“Get up,” Ruen hollered when he saw her weaving between the beast’s legs. “They’re leucrotta. They’ll trample you!”
Icelin lunged forward, but the second leucrotta had already seen her. It dropped Bellaril in favor of a moving target. Curling sideways, it lunged. Its massive weight hit Icelin from the side and bore her to the ground.
She hit the planks hard. The leucrotta’s rancid breath was all over her. Bone-ridged jaws snapped inches from her face.
Icelin pushed against the leucrotta’s throat. Her hands slipped off the oily fur and down its chest. She had the brief impression of a wild heartbeat and stone-hard muscles. She would never throw the beast off. Her only advantage was the size of the raft. The craft bobbed wildly between the leviathan’s bones and the bow of the Ferryman. The leucrotta were positioned half on these shores and half on the raft.
Icelin couldn’t see Ruen now, but she could hear his punches vibrating along the other leucrotta’s body. It squealed in pain, and Icelin heard a splash when its back legs skittered off the raft.
She kicked up, into her own foe’s belly. It hacked a foul breath and became meaner. Nine feet of muscle and bone settled on top of her. Icelin couldn’t breathe. She flopped back and tried to pull her chest free, but the leucrotta latched onto her wrist and began to shake the appendage in its teeth.
Fire exploded up Icelin’s arm. She cried out as the flesh was stripped from her wrist, exposing white bone. The pain was mythic. She felt the blood dribble down her arm and almost passed out. She tried to rip her arm out of the leucrotta’s mouth, but that only made the pain worse.
Haltingly, she chanted a spell. Her concentration was in shreds, her attention too caught up in her trapped arm. She imagined how the magic would go wild, but she didn’t care. Any pain was better than watching the leucrotta tear her hand off. It was playing with her, enjoying her pain before it ate her alive. She shrieked the arcane words and braced herself for the backlash.
Metal spikes burst bloodlessly from her skin. They were two inches long and curled at the tips. She felt them puncture the roof of the leucrotta’s mouth. Willingly she gave the beast her hand, driving the spikes deep.
With a high-pitched wail, the leucrotta released her. The beast pulled its weight off her chest, but more of the spikes were growing
from Icelin’s skin. She felt each one as a tiny pinprick. They stuck and tore the leucrotta’s skin until both woman and monster were drenched in blood. The beast ripped free and retreated, whimpering pathetically. It limped to the edge of the raft and licked its wounds.
Icelin could see the wicked intelligence in its eyes as it re-evaluated her. She stretched out her wrecked arm, daring the creature to come at her and taste more spikes.
It watched her with those frightening eyes like the burning edges of coins, but it came no closer. That’s right, Icelin thought. I’m not as weak as I look.
She sat up and looked around, careful to keep one eye on the injured leucrotta. Ruen lay on his back; his beast had worked its way onto his chest, but it couldn’t keep him still. He punched the leucrotta in the side of its wedge-shaped head over and over. His fists moved in a blur, delivering quick, alternating punches down either side of the beast’s flank. Distracted by the constant stream of hurts, it couldn’t bite his fists or sever fingers. He would wear it down eventually, but not before he exhausted himself.
Not far away, Bellaril lay in a wrecked heap. Icelin saw she’d taken a bite to the neck before the beast had grabbed her. Her leg flopped in a blood pool. The stench of copper and oily fur was dizzying.
Icelin crawled to the dwarf’s side. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the leucrotta’s deformed master pacing the air among the leviathan’s ribs. He was agitated, his tentacles writhing over his chest. He propped the polearm on his shoulder, but he didn’t throw it.
He won’t risk hitting the beasts, Icelin thought. She tore her sleeve, wrapping it three times around the deep gash in Bellaril’s leg. The spikes made it take twice as long, but she didn’t want to end the spell yet.
When she was done, she tore her other sleeve and wrapped her own wrist as tightly as she could. Blood immediately soaked through the makeshift bandage. She felt light-headed. She prayed she could kill the injured leucrotta before she passed out.
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