“No!” she screamed. She wrenched herself around, marched to the mast, and hammered the flat of the sword against the wood. “Bad dog! Bad dog!”
In response to its punishment, evidently, the blade turned pitch black. When she finished beating it, the pirate glared at the weapon. Anton surmised that she and the sword were speaking mind to mind.
After a minute, she turned back around. “Once more,” she said.
From that point forward, the greatsword refrained from trying to kill him, even when sparring at full speed. At the end, eyes shining, face exultant, Shandri set the weapon aside and gripped his forearms. It was almost a hug, the implication of an embrace from a woman who wasn’t certain he’d welcome the familiarity.
She needn’t have held back. He was now sure they’d be lovers by the end of the evening. But with that certainty came a sudden, unexpected spasm of self-disgust.
Maybe it was because, in a vague way, her lack of self-worth reminded him of the boy he’d been, hating himself when the other novices prattled of mystical communion with Torm and he had nothing to say, when they started conjuring wisps of light or healing sores and scratches with a glowing touch while he tried repeatedly and failed. Or maybe it was because he’d seduced too many trusting women over the years. Whatever the reason, he didn’t want to use and ultimately betray Shandri in the same way.
But it was his work, and if the means were shabby, the ends were important, or so he had always striven to believe. He smiled back at her and brushed a lock of sweaty bronze hair away from her eye.
A slender, gleaming shadow in the moonlight, coral tunic glinting, Tu’ala’keth picked at her plate of raw, spiced shrimp and perch. Born in a world without fire, she had no taste for cooked food and preferred a seat without a back so as to avoid compressing the sweeping fin running down her spine. Vurgrom had learned these details and dozens of others over the course of the past few days, yet in the ways that mattered most, she remained a mystery. Maybe that was why she fascinated him.
It wasn’t an entirely comfortable fascination. He wasn’t used to lying sleepless, imagining the pleasures a wench had withheld in actuality. He’d always taken what he wanted when he wanted it.
But Tu’ala’keth was different: a shalarin waveservant, the partner he needed to topple Teldar at last. He had to treat to her with circumspection.
Or so it had seemed at first. But she’d made it plain she was judging him, assessing his fitness to champion her savage, relentless goddess, and in the middle of a tossing, feverish night, it had finally dawned on him just what sort of test it might actually be.
Still, when her long, dark fingers reached for a certain dark green morsel, he almost stopped her. Because what if his understanding was deficient? He took a drink of brandy to drown his doubts, and as he swallowed, she did, too. Now it was too late for second thoughts.
“Did you like that?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, black eyes reflecting the teardrop glow of the candle in the center of the table. “We pickle seaweed in As’arem, also. Tell me more of the smugglers on Kelthann. Do they dispose of all the plundered goods our faction seizes?”
Vurgrom snorted. “Don’t you ever get bored, talking about raiding and the like? It’s a beautiful night.” Perched on a balcony at the top of the house, they had a fine view of bright Selûne and her tears shining in a cloudless sky, the wavering yellow lights of Immurk’s Hold running down to the harbor, the dark, heaving vastness of the sea, and the waves crumbling to pearly froth near the shore. Far out on the water, a ship’s lanterns glowed at the bow and stern. “Too beautiful for my list of gripes about greedy, thieving, gutless go-betweens.” He covered her cool, silken hand with his own, and experienced the usual pang of excitement.
She must feel it, too, for her flesh quivered. But her voice remained steady and cool: “I wish to know about your dealings so I can give you whatever help you require.”
“If you and Umberlee deem me worthy,” he said dryly.
“Yes.”
“Maybe you should tell me again what the goddess expects, so I’ll know what to do to measure up.”
She eyed him quizzically, but he was sure she’d accede to his request. She never tired of talking about Umberlee. Even he, who doted on her—much as he’d struggled against such a needy, mawkish emotion—grew weary of it sometimes.
Sure enough, she rose, and clasping his hand, drew him to the balustrade. “Behold the sea,” she said.
“All right.”
“On the—” She hesitated then frowned.
He had to suppress a smirk of anticipation. “Are you all right?”
“Perhaps your cook has not yet learned how to prepare food that agrees with me. My stomach … never mind. I am well. On the surface of the waves and beneath them, every moment, a thousand thousand predators kill and devour their victims. Most people understand this, even if they rarely bother to think about it.”
“I follow you.”
“Now recognize … recognize—” she paused to massage the round mark on her forehead—“recognize all those separate deaths as aspects of a higher unity. Comprehend that the sea itself, acting through its creatures, is the killer. Per … perceive it for what it is, a gigantic set of eternally gnashing, tearing jaws.”
“Umberlee’s jaws,” he said.
“Yes, and to find favor in her sight, you must embody the same qualities. You must be fearless and ruthless. You must take—” She swayed and grabbed the balustrade to keep from falling. “Something is wrong with me.”
Vurgrom let the leer stretch across his face. No need to hold it in anymore. “I drugged you, dear one. It will wear off by morning.”
Or at least it would if she were human. The apothecary couldn’t guarantee it would affect a shalarin in precisely the same way. But Vurgrom had decided it was worth the risk to bring an end to his frustrations. As it would, one way or another.
To his surprise, Tu’ala’keth still had the strength to tear her hand from his and stumble a couple of paces backward. Of course, she had nowhere to run in the confined space of the balcony. “You … are a blasphemer.”
“How do you figure?” Vurgrom replied. “Weren’t you just now telling me the Bitch Queen wants me to be bold and merciless and take what I want? All right, then, I’m taking you. That’s the test, isn’t it, to see if I dare. Well, watch me.”
Tottering, she gripped the skeletal hand dangling on her breast and gasped the opening words of an incantation.
He lunged and punched her in the jaw, snapping her head to the side and spoiling the cadence of the spell. He wrested the sacred pendant out of her fingers then yanked it from around her neck.
“No magic,” he told her and hit her again. Her legs buckled, and her arms flopped to her sides. He grabbed her before she could collapse and hauled her to the table. He swept the dirty dishes crashing to the floor to make a space then thrust her down.
The coral tunic—silverweave, she called it—should have come off easily. She wasn’t fighting anymore, and the armor was split all the way down the back to accommodate her fin. But it clung to her somehow, perhaps by virtue of an enchantment.
The more he struggled with it, the angrier he became, while desire burned hotter and hotter inside him. For an instant, he felt like a stranger to himself, as if his urgency was unnatural, or some sort of malady, but he pushed the reflection aside. If his need was a sickness, then satisfaction would provide the cure.
Finally, with a soft clinking, the silverweave pulled apart. In his frantic yanking and fumbling, he’d evidently released some sort of hidden catch. He didn’t know how or where, but neither did he care. He only had eyes for Tu’ala’keth’s narrow torso with its subtly inhuman contours and gill slits on the collar bones and ribs. In that moment, it seemed both the strangest and most desirable thing he’d ever seen, and he stretched out a trembling hand to caress it. As if his excitement had kindled a comparable ardor in her, she shuddered violently.
Tu’ala’keth and Anton stood arguing in the narrow side street. He offered his objections to her scheme, and she refuted them. Yet when he finished, she felt obscurely disappointed.
“You didn’t,” she said, “make the one point that might almost have deterred me.” She’d thought that by now, he understood her well enough to think of it.
“What point is that?” he asked.
“I intend to cloud Vurgrom’s mind, not my own, and to beguile him properly, I must allow him to touch me from time to time. It will be repulsive and unnatural for me.”
“Can you bear it?” Anton asked. “Act as if you enjoy it?”
“Yes.” Within limits, she thought. “As I told Shandri Clayhill, I will be a hunter stalking her prey, and that is a sacred act.”
“Good,” said Anton, except that he wasn’t Anton anymore. Somehow, between one heartbeat and next, he’d swelled into hulking, blubbery, leering Vurgrom. The pirate chieftain flung his arms wide, pulled her into a crushing embrace, and planted his lips on hers.
His mouth stank—and tasted—of wine and gluttony. Viler still were the mustache and whiskers, the bristling hairs jabbing into her skin. She suffered it while she silently counted to three then squirmed be free of him.
He lumbered after her, and the chase was like a dance, flickering from one day and location to the next. On the verandah, in the solar, in his suite and aboard the small sailboat he kept as a toy, she lured him in and pushed him back again.
“It’s a matter of balance,” she told him, “of pitting one emotion against another. As long as you fear to offend me as much as you yearn for my touch, you won’t demand too much, and I can tolerate you.”
“Can you tolerate this?” He was Kassur now, complete with eye patch, and he thrust out his hands at her. Yellow flame leaped from his fingertips, inspiring a jolt of terror that shocked her from her delirium.
Unfortunately, reality was equally nightmarish. Confused, for the first moment she understood only that the “balance” she intended to keep her safe had somehow tilted precipitously. She was on her back with Vurgrom leaning over her, mauling her. His ruddy face with its broken capillaries was contorted with passion, and it was plain he meant to use her as brutally as he’d treat a slave.
When she tried to clench her fists and pummel him, her limbs flailed uselessly, and she felt a burning throughout her frame. For a moment, she imagined the fire from her delirium had somehow accompanied her into the waking world to sear her in truth. Then, however, she realized the feeling wasn’t really heat but rather a kind of starved frenzy—the panic of a body no longer able to breathe.
Vurgrom had divested her of her silverweave. Most likely he didn’t understand she needed it to survive out of water, for she naturally hadn’t told him of her vulnerability. Now if she couldn’t recover the coral mesh quickly, that sensible reticence would be the death of her.
“Armor,” she croaked. “Dying.”
He slapped her and resumed his pawing, as if he had no more comprehension than a beast. Perhaps he didn’t. Maybe that was what her magic had made of him.
It was certain only magic could save her now. She struggled to compose her thoughts for conjuring. It was difficult when her body hurt so badly, Vurgrom’s caresses were so loathsome, and she could feel life itself withering inside her. She reached out to Umberlee, and the goddess granted her a wave of frigid anger, sweeping through her mind to scour weaker, useless emotions away.
Tu’ala’keth wheezed the opening words of the invocation. Straining to control her spastic hand, she attempted a mystic pass. Vurgrom realized what was happening and reached for her throat to silence her.
She flailed her other arm across her body, blocking the human’s clutching hands. It gave her time to complete the spell. Despite the fumbling execution, power seethed through the air. Vurgrom shrieked, scrambled off her, and floundered backward, fetching up against the door that led to his apartments. Shaking and whimpering, he gawked at her.
The magically induced terror would only last a few heartbeats. She had that much time to save herself from asphyxiation. She heaved herself up off the tabletop, tried to catch her balance, but her legs gave way beneath her. She collapsed to her knees, banging the left one hard, a sharp stab of pain to punctuate the ongoing, all-encompassing excruciation.
She cast about for the silverweave, and failed to discern it or much of anything else. Even when its dazzling sun forsook the sky, the world above the waves had always been bright by her standards, but now darkness seethed and swam through the air, obscuring everything. A fresh cramp in her guts suggested the cause might be the poison Vurgrom had fed her.
Still the armor had to be here, didn’t it? Well, no, actually, it didn’t. Not if, wild with passion, Vurgrom had flung it off the balcony.
But if that were true, she was as good as dead, and Umberlee’s cause, as good as lost, and so she refused to believe it. Instead, she crawled, praying that, her near blindness notwithstanding, she’d spot the tunic when she dragged herself close enough.
She didn’t. But eventually, when she set her hand down, something clinked beneath her palm, and she felt the familiar mesh of sculpted coral. She scooped up the silverweave and examined it by touch as much as sight, searching for the sleeves. She located one and fumbled an arm in, and Vurgrom bellowed, a roar of rage, not panic. His footsteps shook the balcony as he charged.
Until she had the silverweave on properly, she couldn’t fully benefit from its enchantments. She was like a beached fish with the edge of the surf washing and receding over its body. Her gills worked one moment and not the next. It wasn’t enough to quell her spasms or restore her depleted strength, but she had no time for anything more.
She groped about—she still could only barely see—found the heavy golden goblet from which he’d swilled his brandy lying within reach, and grabbed it. As he bent over her kneeling body and poised his thumbs to gouge her eyes, she rammed the cup into his groin.
It was a puny blow, but it caught him where he was sensitive. His mouth fell open, and he groaned. She bashed him in the knee, and he fell beside her, which enabled her to pummel him about the head.
He howled and tried to shield himself with his arms. She rolled away beyond his reach and back onto her knees then hastily drew the silverweave on as it was meant to be worn.
At last she could breathe as easily as if she were under water. It didn’t end her spasms or restore more than a frail shadow of her former strength—no hope of that with the drug still ripping at her guts—but it helped.
Vurgrom scrambled to his feet and charged. “Trip!” she gasped. He caught one foot behind the other and fell headlong, bashing his face against the floor. She reared over him and pounded his skull with the goblet, which bonged and crumpled under the force of the blows. Blood streamed from his split scalp to stain his coppery hair a darker hue, and he stopped moving.
Tu’ala’keth yearned to keep hitting him until she was certain he’d never stir again, but that would preclude him serving Umberlee’s purpose. Besides, she was nearly as avid to end her own distress.
She set the cup aside and retrieved the drowned man’s hand from the floor of the balcony where Vurgrom had tossed it. She cast restorative charms on herself and, clasping the hand, she purged the poison from her system. The clenching pains in her belly eased, and the veils of darkness shrouding the world dropped away.
Next, she prayed for enhanced vitality. The magic flowed through her in a cool tide, easing her aches and replenishing her strength. She then found one of the sharp knives she and Vurgrom had used to slice their food, crouched over him, and chanted a healing prayer.
It was only a minor one. She didn’t want him fit enough for further fighting. He moaned, and his bloodshot eyes fluttered open. She set the knife against the throbbing artery at the side of his neck.
“Struggle or cry out,” she said, “and I will kill you.”
“Bitch,” he said, his voice low. “If you were a proper woman
and not some ugly fish, the drug would have kept you helpless.”
“I perceive,” she said, “you have shaken off the glamour I cast upon you. No matter. Your attempt at molestation has taken us beyond such tricks. Now I will ask questions. You will answer truthfully or die.”
He stared at her. “ ‘Questions?’ You bewitched me just to get some sort of information?”
“Yes.”
He snorted. “All right. I’ll tell you anything. But you have to swear by your goddess to let me live if I give you what you want.”
Tu’ala’keth scowled. “Very well. I swear it on the wrath of Umberlee. Now what do you know of the Cult of the Dragon?”
He peered at her quizzically. “Just what everyone knows. They’re wizards and lunatics who like wyrms. What kind of fool question is that?”
Anton had warned her Vurgrom might know nothing helpful. Was it possible the spy was correct?
No. It wasn’t. Umberlee had surely brought her to this moment for a reason.
“You have no dealings with the cult?” she persisted.
“No! Never.”
“Then who among the pirates does?”
“As far as I know, no one.”
“Where in these islands is the cult’s stronghold?”
“I don’t know that they have one. If they did, they’d keep it a secret, wouldn’t they?”
She pressed the knife against his neck, reminding him of its proximity. “Thus far, Captain, you have given me no help. You must do better, or my oath will not constrain me from cutting your throat.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know!”
“Let us try again. Somewhere in the Pirate Isles, a group of recluses has established a community. They do not raid as the rest of you do, and their purpose is a mystery. They would prefer to go unremarked, but you have discerned their presence because you strive to know all that occurs hereabouts. Point me to them.”
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