by Mel Odom
He gestured and the golden orb in his eye flared. The world seemed to ripple at his side, like a pool disturbed by a tossed pebble. He stuck his arm into the ripples and it disappeared up to the elbow.
The pirates looked on in superstitious awe. Magic was known to them, of course, but not so familiar. Many of them, Laaqueel knew, had seen more this day than they would in their whole lives.
“Get this weapon if you want, Vurgrom,” Iakhovas said, “but I’ll want it when you do. You belong to me until such a time as I release you.”
Vurgrom held tight to the mast and said nothing.
Iakhovas held out a hand to Laaqueel. The malenti priestess was barely able to maintain her own stance as the ship pitched again and the canvas cracked overhead. Even during her spying days, she’d hated ships. She reached for Iakhovas and felt him take her hand. Her balance steadied at once and she stepped through the gate back into the captain’s quarters aboard Tarjana.
“I sense conflict within you, little malenti,” Iakhovas said flatly.
He moved behind the table again and resumed his seat. The king of the sahuagin studied her with his one good eye and the golden one, and the malenti priestess felt as though he could see her clearly with both.
“When we arrived here and you saw that things were as I promised regarding the imprisonment of the Serôsian sahuagin, your faith seemed to return to you, stronger than before. Now I feel that you are questioning yourself again.”
“Faith,” she replied, “lies in the ability to answer those questions.”
“You are my senior high priestess, and you serve the will of Sekolah. There should be no questions.”
“I am weak.” The admission was as much to herself as to him.
“I need you strong.”
“I will be,” she promised. “Have I ever failed you? I returned from the dead at your call.”
Not so many days ago in Coryselmal while searching for the talisman Iakhovas had used to sunder the Sharksbane Wall, Laaqueel was certain she’d died at the hands of a vodyanoi, or come as close to it as the living could without fully crossing over.
Iakhovas had been as close to panic as the malenti priestess had ever seen him. He’d worked to save her, using a black skull with ruby eyes he’d gotten from his artificial eye. Laaqueel still felt certain somehow that it hadn’t been Iakhovas’s efforts that turned her back from death. It had been another, someone with a soft, sweet, feminine voice.
Go back, the voice told her. You are yet undone.
Iakhovas raked her with his gaze. She felt the quill quiver tentatively inside her.
“Go then, little malenti,” he said, “and attend to your faith. Answer your questions as best as you are able, but in the end you’ll find that the truest belief you have is in me. You may have rescued me from the prison I was in, but I have made you more than you have ever imagined you would be.”
Stung by the dismissal and the knowledge of her own uncertainty, Laaqueel left the room and strode back out onto Tarjana’s main deck. She walked to the starboard railing and peered over into the sea. For a moment she wished she could just leap in and swim away to leave all the confusion behind her.
Farther along the railing, a group of sahuagin hauled on a length of heavy anchor chain hanging in the water. Bodies—some of them sahuagin of the inner and outer seas, others sea elves—were hooked to the chain. All of them were relatively fresh kills.
Three of the sahuagin group doing the hauling reached down and began plucking off bodies, harvesting them for meals. Razor-sharp talons sliced through flesh and brute strength snapped joints. Gobbets of flesh were torn free and passed around. Crabs and other sea creatures that had taken up brief residence within some of the corpses, and they became part of the meal.
One of the sahuagin warriors turned to face Laaqueel, regarding her with his black gaze. “Join, Most Favored One,” he said. “There is plenty for all.”
He held out a forearm, not a choice section, but not food to be turned away either.
“I am not hungry,” she declared.
The warrior looked at her with consternation. No true sahuagin passed up a meal. A warrior needed to consume huge quantities of flesh to give him the strength to make it through a day.
“I ate the fallen on my return,” Laaqueel said.
She knew the warrior probably wasn’t listening and didn’t care, but she made the excuse so that she might hear it herself. In truth, she was nearly starving. Since her arrival, days ago, in the Sea of Fallen Stars, she hadn’t eaten from either dead sahuagin or enemy. The thought repulsed her, made her stomach twist violently within her.
There was no reason that she could think of for that to be so, no malady that she’d heard of that so plagued her people. Sahuagin, even ill-born malenti, were born to eat.
She watched as the warriors who made up Tarjana’s crew ripped at the dead bodies and ate what they wanted. She sighed, trying not to think about what Iakhovas had told her, trying not to succumb to the doubts that filled her. Her faith was more fragile than ever, a hollow shell she wrapped around Iakhovas.
She leaped overboard, longing to find solace in the sea.
Black Champion sat at anchor in the harbor. Jherek stood on the ship’s deck and looked up at the Earthspur. The huge tower of rock and windswept land stabbed more than a mile above sea level in the center of the Dragonisle, the island where Immurk’s Hold was located. Even in the night, the mountain left a shadow across the black water.
Azla was below with the others, questioning Frennick. The pirate captain laid out torturer’s tools on a small table, the metal gleaming from the lantern light.
Jherek hadn’t been able to stay, nor did Azla permit it.
He struggled with his conscience, telling himself that Frennick deserved all that Azla could think to give him, but it was no use. Through it all, the young sailor remembered that it was his doing that placed Frennick in her hands.
“Young warrior.”
Turning, Jherek saw Glawinn approaching him, two steaming cups in his hands.
“I brought you some soup,” the paladin said. “I thought it might serve to warm you some.”
Jherek didn’t want the soup, didn’t want to pretend that everything was normal. A man he’d captured was being tortured down in the hold. He couldn’t help but listen for the screams he knew must come. Thankfully, the crash of the sea’s waves was too loud.
He accepted the cup anyway and said, “Thank you.”
“What an awful place this is,” Glawinn commented quietly.
“There are people in Immurk’s Hold who still maintain an innocence,” Jherek stated, thinking of the girl he’d rescued in the tavern.
“That was a brave and good thing you did back there, young warrior.”
“It was foolish,” Jherek grumbled, then shook his head. “Come morning, the girl will still be on the island.”
“You saved her from a bad night.”
“Delayed, is more correct, I think.” Jherek turned the cup in his hands, absorbing the heat. The soup smelled delicious, full of spices.
“You’ve got a headful of dark thoughts,” the paladin said.
“I look out there, and I wonder how different I am from those men,” Jherek said. “Did I ever tell you how I came to Velen from my father’s ship?”
IV
5 Flamerule, the Year of the Gauntlet
“I was twelve,” Jherek said. “My father spotted a merchant ship, heavily laden so she was sitting low in the water and dragging down the wind. That night he announced to the ship’s crew that we would claim it as a prize the next morning.”
Glawinn listened in silence.
“My father is a hard man,” Jherek said. “You know the stories they tell along the Sword Coast of Bloody Falkane, and you know that nearly all of them are true. He’s unforgiving and merciless, as able to cut down an unarmed man as he is to fight to the death. There is no right or wrong in his world, only what he is strong enough to take.�
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The rattling of the rigging on the lanyards sounded hollow, echoing the way Jherek felt. Glawinn waited silently.
As he spoke, Jherek felt the heat of unshed tears burning his eyes. Still, even though his voice was so tight it pained him to speak, he had to.
“I loved my father.”
“As a child should,” Glawinn said.
“I remember how he laughed. It was a huge, boisterous sound. Even though I didn’t understand much of what made him laugh, I laughed with him. As I grew older, I stopped laughing and learned to fear him. Then, one day, he saw that in me. My father told me that I had to learn to be hard, that the world was cold and would eat the weak. I believed him, and I believed I was weak.”
“That’s not true.”
Jherek didn’t bother to argue. “He had me taken from the small room off his cabin where he’d kept me all that time and put in with the men. They weren’t any more gentle than he’d been, though they were careful not to leave any marks that he could see.”
In the distance, another longboat drew up to a cog and lanterns moved along its length as the passengers prepared to board.
“For the next eight years, I lived in the shadows of my father’s rage. There was never a day I felt peace between us, nor anything even close to love.”
“To be the son Bloody Falkane wanted,” the paladin said, “you’d have to have been born heartless and with ice water in your veins. Where was your mother?”
“I never knew her.”
“Your father never spoke of her?”
“Not once,” the young sailor replied. “Nor did the ship’s crew.”
He stared up at the dark sky and refused to let the tears come. How much of it came from what he remembered, and how much because he knew Frennick was down in the hold, he couldn’t say.
“The night I chose to leave,” Jherek continued, “my father visited me in the hold. He brought a cutlass and placed it in my hand and told me I would take a place in the boarding party in the morning.”
“At twelve?”
“Aye. He told me I’d kill or be killed, and in the doing of that, I’d be dead or I’d take my first steps toward becoming his son.”
“Lathander’s mercy,” the paladin whispered.
“I stayed up most of the night,” Jherek continued. “I knew I couldn’t be part of that boarding party.”
“Because you knew it was the wrong thing to do.”
His throat hurting too much to speak right away, Jherek shook his head. “No. I only knew I was afraid,” he said hoarsely. “I was afraid I would be killed, but mostly I was afraid of what my father would do to me if I froze and could not move, could not make it onto that other ship. I was certain he would kill me himself. So I walked out onto the deck when no one was looking, threw the cutlass into the sea, and jumped in after it. Bunyip sailed on, leaving me in the ocean. I wanted to die, but I started to swim, not even knowing where I was heading. I don’t know how long I swam, but I know it was well into the next day before I washed up on Velen’s shores.”
They were silent for a time and Jherek struggled to ease his thoughts back into the dark places of his mind where he kept them.
“Why are you telling me this?” Glawinn asked.
“Because you seem to see something good in me,” Jherek said, “and I wanted you to know it was false. I ran from my father’s ship that night.”
“You didn’t want to kill innocent people,” Glawinn objected.
Anger stirred in the coldness that filled Jherek. “Am I any better now? I took a man prisoner tonight only so he could be tortured.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Isn’t it?” Jherek demanded. “I am my father’s son. When it came time to take Frennick, I took him and I brought him here.”
“No, young warrior, you judge yourself too harshly. You did only what you had to do. You are meant for more than being a pirate’s son, Jherek.”
“How can you believe that?”
“That’s the wrong question.” A small, sad smile twisted Glawinn’s lips. “After having heard everything I have from you, the question is how could I not believe that.”
“I just want out,” Jherek said tiredly. “I don’t want any more false hope, no more dreams, and I’m sick of the fear that has filled me all my life.”
“A way will be made,” Glawinn whispered. “You must believe.”
Jherek couldn’t, and he knew it. He looked out over the black water, taking in all the emptiness that made up the Sea of Fallen Stars.
“It’s done.”
Almost asleep, Jherek blinked and looked up at Azla as she strode across the deck.
More than an hour had passed since Azla had gone below with Frennick. The young sailor pushed himself up from his seated position against the prow railing.
“And Frennick?” Jherek asked.
“Relax,” Azla told him. “Frennick is alive and of one piece still.”
Images of how the man must have been tortured ran rampant through Jherek’s mind. The instruments the pirate captain had laid out with such familiarity looked vicious enough to come straight from Cyric’s darkest hells.
“Nor have I harmed him,” Azla went on, “so your precious honor and integrity yet remain whole.”
Jherek shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Glawinn asked that no harm come to Frennick when we returned to the ship,” Azla said.
“Glawinn didn’t tell me he’d asked that,” Jherek told her, confused.
“No, nor did he want you to know until it was over.”
Jherek grew angry but pushed it away. That lack of knowledge was something he intended to deal with the paladin about. He should have been told instead of spending time worrying over it.
“Pirates are a superstitious lot,” Azla commented. “Despite all his blustering and bravado, Frennick is not a brave man. My ship’s mage bewitched him, making him think we’d immersed his hand in a pot of acid till the flesh melted from his bones. Actually, it was a pot of water.”
Two of the ship’s crew marched Frennick up from the hold. The pirate captain swore venomously, calling down the spiteful rage of Umberlee on Azla, her ship, and her crew. When the crewmen threw him over the side, both the splash and Frennick’s curses echoed around the ship. Relief filled Jherek, but it didn’t take away the anger he felt toward Glawinn.
“Where is the disk?” the young sailor asked.
“Vurgrom has it.”
“Does Frennick know where Vurgrom is?”
Azla shook her head. “But he did know that Vurgrom used a diviner to learn what he could of the disk.”
Jherek’s heart sped up. “What did he learn?”
“Frennick wasn’t allowed in the room. Only the diviner and Vurgrom were there. However, Frennick gave us the location of the diviner. She lives off the northeastern harbor of the Dragonisle.”
“If we are not sailing there,” Jherek said, “I need to know so I can make other arrangements.”
Azla looked at him, her dark eyes flashing, and asked, “You would, wouldn’t you?”
“Aye, Captain. I’ve no choice.”
“You won’t have to walk,” she replied. “We’re going to weigh anchor in a short while.”
“Enter, young warrior.”
Jherek slipped the lock on the door and let himself into the room.
Glawinn sat on the lowest of the bunk beds, crouched over so his head wouldn’t bang against the upper berth as the ship gently pitched at anchor. An oil lantern hung from the ceiling over the small desk in the corner. The paladin was cleaning his armor, a task he tended to every day.
“You lied to me.”
“No.” Glawinn’s eyes narrowed and became hard. Steel filled his voice. “You never accuse another man of lying unless you know that for a fact. Especially not a man of honor.”
Shame burned Jherek’s cheeks and ears. “My apologies.” He tried to maintain his level gaze but had to drop it to the f
loor. “You didn’t tell me that they weren’t torturing Frennick.”
“No.”
“You let me believe they were.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You were comparing yourself to the wretches and scoundrels that populate that island like that was your destiny. Suddenly you were seeing yourself as no better than they are, doomed somehow to follow in your father’s footsteps.”
“They say the apple never falls far from the tree.”
“Then looking forward to a life as a pirate or a thief is something you deserve?”
“I never said that.”
“Yes you did. You were pulling penance for Frennick. You looked out over Immurk’s Hold and told me you couldn’t see the difference between yourself and those men. Can you now?”
“Aye,” Jherek said, his voice tight, “but I also see the difference between you and me.”
“Do you believe that difference to be so great, young warrior?” Glawinn stood. Without his armor, he looked like only a man. Lantern light gleamed against the dark black of his hair and short-cropped beard.
“You’re a paladin, chosen by a god to represent the covenants of his faith.”
“Was I anything before I became a warrior for Lathander? Or was it Lathander who made me the man I am today?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me what is in your heart, young warrior,” Glawinn said softly, his voice barely carrying across the small room. The waves slapping against the side of the ship outside the room underscored his words. “Tell me what you believe me to have been before I followed Lathander’s teachings.”
“You were a good man.”
After a moment, Glawinn nodded. “My father was a knight before me, and my mother a good woman who learned the art of cheese making from her father. I am their get, and I wear Lathander’s colors and fight the battles the Morninglord sets before me.”
Jherek stared into the paladin’s eyes, wondering for just a heartbeat if Glawinn was telling him this to make him feel worse.
“I was born one of twins,” Glawinn said. “I have a sister. She was never a gentle child, and never easy on my parents. When she was seventeen, she left our home in Daggerdale and joined the Zhentarim.”