by Mel Odom
Droust peered cautiously into the passageway. “We don’t know where this leads.”
“Away from here.” Shang-Li shoved past the other man and took out his own glowstone. “For now, that’s enough.” He closed the door and locked it. The Nine Golden Swords warriors would struggle to find the secret of the door as well. Hopefully by the time that they did, Shang-Li would be lost to them within the passageways. He held the glow-stone up and went forward as fast as he felt he could across the debris-strewn floor.
Only a short distance farther on, the passageway forked. Shang-Li examined each of the new paths but saw no markings that indicated where they might lead. He chose the one on the right just so they could keep moving. Thirty feet later, as near as he could figure, he turned another corner and found a set of stairs leading down.
“Should we turn around?” Droust stood at Shang-Li’s back and peered down.
“No.”
“What do you think is down there?”
“Haven’t you ever prowled through a castle or manor house?”
Droust shook his head. “I think that would have been frowned upon.”
“Probably. The thing is, all passageways eventually lead to the kitchen or from the kitchen.”
“We don’t want to go to the kitchen.”
“Actually, the kitchen would be good. Kitchens lead to wine cellars with their own entrances from the outside, as well as sewers.”
“You’re assuming the lower part of this building still exists.”
Shang-Li started forward again, conscious of time slipping past him. “We have to assume it does. Otherwise we’re going to be backtracking.”
A short time later, Shang-Li stared in disbelief at the utter destruction that had been left of the kitchen. Tumbled down stone blocks filled the area and rendered it impassible.
“Back.” Shang-Li slid by Droust and went back the way they’d come. “We still have the other fork to explore.”
Long minutes later, Shang-Li followed the other passageway up steep steps that twisted in a lazy spiral. Unfortunately the new path didn’t have any side doors that allowed them to exit. And the passageway kept going up. Occasionally they heard the loud voices of the Nine Golden Swords warriors on the other side of the wall, but they were gradually leaving those behind.
“This isn’t good.”
Shang-Li paused while every nerve in his body screamed at him to be moving. His father was out there—in danger. And Shang-Li had delivered Thava and Iados into the greatest foe they’d ever faced.
“Why?” Shang-Li held the glowstone so it shined into Droust’s face.
“The upper part of the citadel is off limits to everyone.” Droust sucked in air because they’d been moving quickly. “This is where Caelynna works her strongest spells.”
“She wouldn’t trap herself.” Shang-Li turned and went on. “There has to be a way out.” His legs burned from the sustained effort and the fatigue that had been built up over the last several days. He pushed away the pain and tiredness and tapped reserves he’d been trained to access in the monastery.
Then the passageway leveled off. Lifting the glowstone, Shang-Li studied the hallway and found the latch for a doorway a stone’s throw ahead. He glanced at Droust.
“Do you know where we are?”
“No. But this has to be in the upper portions of the citadel, as I said.”
Shang-Li pressed his ear to the door and listened intently, but heard nothing. Then he dropped to a prone position on his chest and smelled at the juncture of the door and the wall. Only the smell of rot and the sea filled his nostrils. Cautiously, he drew his fighting sticks, hid his glowstone and made sure Droust did the same, then disengaged the lock and opened the door.
On the other side, the room was silent and still. Rubble covered the floor and cracks parted the ceiling in places, though none of them were large enough for them to crawl through. The door on the other side of the room stood ajar, but a streamer of harsh blue light cut through the darkness and power hummed around Shang-Li.
“It’s Caelynna.” Droust plucked at Shang-Li’s sleeve. “She’s beginning the ritual.
Shang-Li’s heart sped up a little and he wondered if he was already too late to help his father and friends and the rest of the ship’s crew. Despite the fear clinging to him even more heavily than Droust, he crept across the room and peered out.
The top floor of the citadel was made in the round. Other doors, broken or missing, framed five other room off the main room, which was circular. The design gave the citadel’s master a common area for his guests to meet. A brick firepit sat in the middle of the circular room. Two doorways led from the common room.
The Blue Lady floated in the water above the firepit. Her hands stayed busy as she sang or spoke in languorous syllables that Shang-Li didn’t recognize. They sounded like the elven tongues he knew, but these words were decidedly different. Despite the soft sibilance of her voice, the words came out harsh and sharp, as if filled with razor-sharp thorns.
Sharks swam around her in lazy circles, weaving a protective net.
Shang-Li had never killed anyone from behind, never ambushed anyone with lethal results, but as he stood there, he was sorely tempted. If he could have struck without alerting the sharks and getting intercepted, he felt certain he would have.
Shang-Li looked back at Droust, wanting to make certain the main remained stable. Evidently the Blue Lady wasn’t too concerned over their escape. Why would she be? She planned on killing everyone.
The Blue Lady stopped speaking and an azure tear formed in the water and glowed. Unconsciously, the Blue Lady raised her hands in defense. For just a moment, fear eroded the confidence on her face.
A male eladrin’s face, handsome and eerie and cruel, formed in the azure tear as it grew larger. He spoke in a harsh voice that filled the large room with thunder. Shang-Li recognized the name Droust had referred to her by: Caelynna.
The Blue Lady interrupted the man’s guttural venting with her own. She laughed at him and mocked some of the words he used.
Angrily, the eladrin thrust his head and one arm through the azure tear as it grew large enough to allow him. Lightning suddenly filled the room. One of the bolts smacked into the wall near Shang-Li’s head and he was blown backward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Blind and deafened for a moment, Shang-Li held onto his fighting sticks and rolled to his feet. He’d been trained to fight blind, and he already knew where he was in the room and how large the room was. He even remembered where most of the debris was. Crossing his arms over himself, he waited for the first of his foes to arrive.
When someone grabbed his forearm, Shang-Li almost lashed out. Then he recognized the weak grip as Droust’s, not a Nine Golden Swords warrior seizing him or the razor-slash mouth of a shark. He blinked his eyes and made out shapes through the shadows of the room.
“Are you all right?” Droust leaned his head close to Shang-Li’s as he whispered.
Shang-Li nodded and tried to slow his beating heart. He stared at the door, expecting discovery at any moment. When it didn’t come, he returned to the doorway and peered out.
The sharks floated in the water, their flesh torn and bloody, all of them dead weight now. The Blue Lady stood in the midst of swirling currents that lashed her hair around. She held out a hand to the azure tear and squeezed it down to nothing. Then she whirled on her heel and marched from the room.
Cautiously, certain that at any moment he and Droust would be discovered, Shang-Li hid. Then he thought of his father and the others and knew that he couldn’t balk. Hiding in that room wasn’t an option.
He stepped out into the circular room and chose the door opposite the one the Blue Lady had departed through. He shoved one of the floating shark corpses from his path. Then blue incandescence dawned again over the fireplace.
Turning with his fighting sticks in his hand, Shang-Li watched as the azure tear formed again. He grabbed Droust and got the scribe m
oving toward the other door, following at his heels.
“Hold,” a voice ordered in Common. “If you would save your lives, listen to me.” In the azure tear, looking smaller and pained, the eladrin male stared at Shang-Li. “We have a common enemy.”
Shang-Li halted. After seeing what the eladrin had done to the sharks, it was doubtful he would reach the doorway without suffering the same fate. “What do you want?”
“I am Fergraff, a prince of the Shining Valley,” the eladrin said. Only his face showed in the azure tear now. “I have a boon to ask, but I think it’s one that you would willingly take up.”
Hesitating, Shang-Li knew that every moment he wasted put him that much later to reaching his father.
“You can’t escape Caelynna’s wrath, Shang-Li.” Fergraff spoke with conviction. “She’s grown powerful there in that place, and it’s our fault. When we banished her from the Feywild, we didn’t know she would master the elements of that sea as she has. We expected her to be imprisoned, not becoming an even stronger menace to us.”
But you didn’t care if she became a threat in our world, did you? Shang-Li thought. Not until she became a threat to yours again. The question was on the tip of his tongue but he held it there.
“Caelynna calls to us, taunting with her plans.” Fergraff’s image shimmered a little, as if the connection to the Feywild wasn’t secure. “We know what she’s pursuing.”
Shang-Li kept himself from reaching for Liou Chang’s books in his bag.
“Even if she isn’t able to glean the secrets from the books she has in her possession,” Fergraff said, “Caelynna will keep searching for a way to come back here.”
“I don’t have time for this.” Shang-Li shifted. “My friends, my father, are in danger. I have to go.”
A look of irritation flitted across the eladrin’s cruel face. They didn’t like the other races to begin with, and getting talked to with such casual irreverence had to go down hard.
“You must stop Caelynna before she can perform the ritual. But you’re not strong enough to do it on your own.”
“Then help us,” Shan-Li said.
“We can’t. If we step through the gate into your world, the spells we have holding Caelynna in the sea will be broken. She’ll be able to come back here with all her increased power intact. We won’t be able to stand against her.”
Shang-Li grew angrier as he realized the eladrin didn’t intend to take an active part in confronting the Blue Lady. He didn’t know if they were afraid of her or afraid of the realm she’d created.
“If you’re not going to help, we’re done here.” Shang-Li turned to go.
“Wait! We can help. We just can’t join you there. We must preserve the our powers as much as we can in the event we are forced to face her here.”
“Moral support isn’t going to do much good.” Shang-Li put venom into his words as he thought of his father and the others.
“We can give you a weapon to fight her. One that will be powerful enough to damage her. And we can get you back to your ship.” The eladrin’s face hardened. “Whether you live or die after that is up to you.”
“What weapon?”
“A very special one, and one that you will feel at home with.” Fergraff shoved a hand through the azure tear. In his hand, he held two fighting sticks.
“I already have those.”
“Not like these.” Fergraff shook the fighting sticks and blades flicked open to stand at ninety-degree angles to the sticks. “And together, they are more.” He flicked the blades closed again and shoved the two ends of the fighting sticks together. When he removed his hands, they’d joined and lengthened, becoming a staff a few inches longer than Shang-Li was tall. Then the eladrin shook the staff again and the blades shot out the ends of the staff. “You can use this?”
Amazed and impressed at the sheer beauty and chilling threat of the weapon, Shang-Li accepted the staff. The wood tingled and felt alive in his hands. “I can use this. But how—” Even as he wondered how he could separate the staff into two parts, it separated and became two fighting sticks the right size. He flicked the blades out, then in, then joined the staff and made the blades flick at the ends again.
“It is our gift to you,” Fergraff said. “Use it in good health, and we hope that you are successful.”
Shang-Li separated the weapon into two fighting sticks again and slid them up his sleeves in place of his original fighting sticks, which he shoved in the back of his belt.
“Thank you for the gift.” Shang-Li bowed slightly, but he never took his eyes from the eladrin’s cruelly beautiful face. The dead sharks floating through the room provided a grim reminder of the Feywild’s power. “Now about my return to the ship.”
Fergraff tossed a black pearl into the room that descended slowly and burst into an oval a foot from the floor and just out of Shang-Li’s reach. “That way will take you to your ship.”
Shang-Li hesitated.
“You can trust me or not,” the eladrin said in a cold voice. “But what good would it do for me to give you a weapon against Caelynna and not allow the use of it?”
“Thank you.” Shang-Li stepped toward the spreading oval and felt the pull of it at once.
“You must hurry once you are there. Caelynna will not tarry.”
Just before he entered the black pearl oval, Shang-Li glanced back at Bayel Droust. The scribe hesitated and looked helpless.
“I’ve got the books,” Shang-Li said. “If they are not recovered—and I promise that I will see them destroyed before I allow them to fall into the hands of the Blue Lady—you know she will blame you for this. There won’t be any reason for her to keep you alive.”
“I know.” Gathering himself, Droust followed Shang-Li into the blackness.
Once he entered the spell, Shang-Li’s senses whirled and he felt lost. Fear ran rampant within him, and he knew that was part of the dark magic touching him as it worked on him. Droust keened and moaned, and Shang-Li couldn’t find it within himself to fault the man.
Then, as quickly as it began, the spell ended. Shang-Li spewed out into the water above Swallow. His senses reeled so much that he at first didn’t recognize the ship. Then he spotted Thava standing at the ship’s prow gazing up at him. An instant later, Droust vomited forth into the sea as well. The scribe whirled end over end as he flailed awkwardly.
Turning in the water, Shang-Li tried to spot the Blue Lady and her horde above the forest but saw nothing. Shambles and the tentacled things moved within the trees and brush, but they kept their distance from Swallow.
The ship shifted and rocked on the undersea currents. Ropes tied to stakes driven into the sea bed and some of the nearby trees held her down. Shang-Li hoped Amree had been able to make enough air to allow them to surface. He swam toward Droust, grabbed the man by his shirt, and pulled him down toward Swallow.
Thava met Shang-Li as he dropped to Swallow’s forward deck. “How did you get up there? The last I saw you, you were sleeping. You’ve done so much lately that we let you sleep.”
“That wasn’t me. The Blue Lady took me and left an illusion behind. Get the others. We have to go. She’s on her way here now with an army.” Shang-Li ran to the prow and called the sailors in from their work on the hull. No more time could be afforded patching it.
He looked down at Red Orchid.
Red Orchid stretched herself on the prow and met his gaze. “We could have used more time, Shang-Li, but I am ready.”
“Mielikki willing.” Shang-Li quickly posted lookouts, then went below to find his father and Amree.
“We need more time.” Amree looked as though she was about to fall over as she stood within the air bubble she’d created inside Swallow’s hold.
“If I could make that happen for you, I would have. But all the Blue Lady was waiting on was the moon.” Shang-Li glanced at his father. “We brought Liou Chang’s books back with us.” He held out the bag that contained the books.
His father too
k the books and nodded. “You’ve done well.”
“Only if we live to tell of it.”
“No.” Kwan Yung shook his head. “Keeping the books from the Blue Lady was success enough. I would like to return them to the monastery—”
“But if that doesn’t look possible, we have to destroy them.”
His father nodded and pain showed in his hazel eyes. “Of course, but I would rather concentrate on our escape.”
“So would I.” Shang-Li glanced around and saw Thava and Iados gearing up for contact.
“She’s coming!” someone yelled. “The Blue Lady is coming!”
Shang-Li dived through the bottom of the opening at the bottom of the hold and through the tear in the hull. The tear was much smaller, but it hadn’t been closed yet. They needed it for ease of access to get into the hold.
He shook the fighting sticks into his waiting hands and felt the power of them thrilling against his flesh as if they sensed the coming battle as well. His body flooded with blood and he cleared his head to ready himself mentally.
Over the top of the trees, the Blue Lady and her horde of creatures and Nine Golden Swords warriors swam toward Swallow. She rode the giant squid, which pulsed like a heart as it stayed at the forefront of the approaching danger.
“I see you have new toys.” Iados stood at Shang-Li’s side and nodded at the fighting sticks.
“Gifts.” Shang-Li brandished them and black lightning seemed to shimmer through the wood. “They’re supposed to be dangerous to the Blue Lady.”
“Gods willing.” Iados took a fresh grip on his blade.
“Remember the plan.” Shang-Li flicked the blades out of his fighting sticks. “We fight them off only as far as we can breathe. Then we have no choice but to crawl within the ship.”
Iados nodded grimly. “That’s one detail I won’t forget.”
Captain Chiang stood in the sterncastle above. “Cut loose forward.”
Red Orchid picked up the command. “Cut loose forward.”