by Филип Этанс
Aliisza held her breath watching the drow fight off the uridezu. The rat-demons weren't necessarily the most impressive foes, but all things considered the dark elves made a fine show of it. Pharaun was especially alluring, hanging in midair over the water, so wet and intense. It made Aliisza all tingly.
The invisible alu-fiend drifted in the air over the regal female drow, who had been paralyzed by the bite of the uridezu she'd dispatched in a messy and uncreative way.
Another of the rat-demons swayed before the paralyzed priestess, its fangs bared and dripping with toxic spittle. It giggled in a shrill, excited way as it inched ever closer to the helpless drow female.
A low rumble drew Aliisza's attention to the draegloth. The half-demon growled in the face of another rat-demon then slashed the thing across the midsection with the razor claws of one hand. The demon bounced back on its heels only barely far enough to avoid having its guts opened onto the deck. A hiss exploded from the uridezu's quivering lips, and its tail lashed around at the draegloth. The half-drow, half-demon behemoth avoided the appendage with surprising agility.
The captain of the ship of chaos rattled his chain but remained bound to the deck. Aliisza sensed the presence of an invisible wall separating the captain from the rest of them. It was as if the air had turned solid there. She could see the magic shimmering in her Weave-sensitive eyesight.
Aliisza didn't particularly care what became of the uridezu captain or the uncouth, unappealing draegloth, but she couldn't stand the thought of the attractive, impressive drow priestess being eaten alive while paralyzed by a creature as lowly as an uridezu. The alu-fiend began to drain the life-force from that particular rat-creature while still hanging invisible in the air.
The uridezu looked around. It could feel that something bad was happening to it. Maybe it felt cold, or weak, dizzy, sick. Aliisza was killing it, and it had to know it was dying. The rat-demon drew its arms around itself, and Aliisza sensed that it was on its way back to the Abyss—but something kept it there on the ship. Aliisza could see that magic too, binding it to the very air around them. Only Pharaun could have been responsible for that.
The fact that the dark elf wizard had that power made Aliisza uneasy.
She wondered where the invisible wall had come from when she heard a horrid ripping sound and had to dodge an arc of dark-red blood. The draegloth ripped the arm off the uridezu that was stupid enough to stand up to him. Aliisza didn't like the smell of the rat-demon's blood … at least not as much as the draegloth seemed to.
The half-demon picked up the uridezu's arm and lifted it behind him until it bounced off the invisible wall. That startled the draegloth—no, not startled, annoyed him. Aliisza realized someone was trying to separate the uridezu captain and the draegloth.
That had to be Pharaun's handiwork. As the draegloth beat the rat-demon to death with its own arm, Aliisza sorted out why the wizard might be trying to protect the captain.
She whispered a quick spell and rose higher into the air so that no one but Pharaun would be able to hear her. She had to stop draining the life-force from the last survivor of the demonic boarding party, but the draegloth had already begun stalking toward it.
"Pharaun," she whispered over the intervening yards, her voice coming to the drow wizard as a whisper in his ear.
She saw the mage react and continued, "Yes, it's me. You're protecting the captain from your own draegloth?"
"What of it?" the wizard asked, his voice sounding as a whisper in her ear too.
"You don't need him," she said.
"Yes, I do," replied the mage. "It's a ship of chaos, Aliisza, and I'm a drow who isn't much for boats. I've never piloted one of these things before. Probably no drow in history ever has."
"It's not that hard," she explained. "The ship is alive. You simply will it to go where you want."
"It's that easy?" Pharaun asked, skeptical.
Aliisza watched the draegloth shred the weakened uridezu with a flurry of claws and fangs and said, "After a fashion, yes."
Barely missing a beat, the half-demon turned on the invisible wall and went at it with claw and fang, wild and feral. The sight made Aliisza's heart race.
The uridezu captain was cowering behind the wall. He didn't bother trying to pretend he didn't know what the draegloth was going to do to him if he got through the invisible barrier.
"Let the draegloth have him, darling," Aliisza said as her spell began to fade. "We can pilot the ship together."
Pharaun opened a dimensional rift and stepped through. In an instant he was standing on the deck of the ship of chaos next to the paralyzed priestess and directly under the hovering, unseen alu-fiend. She began to sink toward him.
"Jeggred," the drow wizard said to the draegloth, "stop it. Stop it, now. We need him."
The wizard turned to the high priestess, who stood, her hand dripping with uridezu gore. The snakes at the end of her whip hissed at Pharaun, warning him away.
"Mistress," he said to her, "tell him to stop it."
"She's paralyzed," Aliisza whispered in his ear, close enough then to do it without a spell.
Pharaun didn't flinch but smiled and said, "He won't listen to me."
"I told you it's all right, Pharaun," whispered the alu-fiend, "we don't need him."
"We?" he asked.
Aliisza blushed, though Pharaun still couldn't see her.
"If Raashub can pilot this vessel," she asked, "why can't we? Could it be that hard?"
Pharaun drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.
"He's only going to keep defying me anyway, isn't he?" Pharaun asked.
"Who are you. ." Quenthel said, her joints jerking as she recovered from the uridezu's paralyzing bite, ". . talking to?"
"Wouldn't you, in his place?" Aliisza whispered, ignoring the high priestess.
Pharaun turned to her and looked her in the eyes, though she was sure he wasn't able to see her. He winked at her then turned back to the priestess.
"Jeggred means to kill the captain," he said.
"Let him," the priestess replied as she scanned the deck apparently looking for something with which to clean the blood off her.
"Well," Aliisza whispered into the wizard's ear, "it's her idea now, isn't it?"
Pharaun waved a hand and dropped the wall.
The draegloth leaped onto the uridezu captain. They both went over the rail. The chain that bound the uridezu to the deck—and to the material plane—snapped as if it were made of mushroom stem. There was a huge, echoing splash that sent lake water rolling onto the deck to mingle with the spilled demon blood.
Aliisza hovered over them as Pharaun and Quenthel ran to the rail and looked over into the black water. Bubbles peppered the surface, and there were ripples that made it obvious that some violence was occurring below the surface.
Then the bubbles stopped. The ripples played themselves out, and there was nothing.
"Go after them," the priestess said to Pharaun.
Aliisza caught herself before she laughed out loud.
Pharaun raised an eyebrow, looked at the priestess, and said, "I'm afraid I had to cancel the spell that allowed me to breathe underwater."
The priestess turned on him angrily, but any further discussion was stopped by the sound of another splash. Something arced out of the water and thumped onto the deck. The uridezu captain's head rolled to the other side of the ship and came to rest looking blankly up at nothing.
"Well," Quenthel breathed, glancing at Pharaun, "never mind."
The draegloth climbed slowly onto the deck behind the two dark elves. The half-demon shook himself hard, spraying water all over Pharaun and Quenthel. The two dark elves turned to regard the draegloth.
"That," the half-demon rumbled, "was almost worth the wait."
Chapter Thirteen
Danifae wanted them to meet her in a ruined temple on the edge of a swamp, on the east bank of which a wide river emptied into a sea. Halisstra spent the first night's w
alk explaining to Ryld what most of those words meant. By sunrise the first day, they had made the coast. The sight of the seemingly endless expanse of cold gray water took Halisstra's breath away. Like most of the rest of the World Above, it had made Ryld uncomfortable, even nervous. Halisstra was confident that he'd eventually get used to it, even grow to like it. He had to.
They followed the western shore of what the surface dwellers called the Dragon Reach for two long nights' march, using Ryld's keen senses, Halisstra's bae'qeshel,and Eilistraeen magic to avoid fellow travelers and unexpected dangers. In the hours before sunrise of the third day they stood at the bank of the wide Lis river delta, the Dragon Reach spreading out in angry, windswept white and gray to their right. To their left—north—was the river and intermittent woods and rolling, snowy hills. The weather was dark and bitterly cold, and Halisstra had to use spells to keep them from losing fingers and toes.
"We have to cross that?" Ryld asked, though he knew the answer.
They were concealed in a copse of sparse, leafless trees. The river delta crawled with boats of all sizes. Halisstra had never seen such vessels. Most bobbed on the angry waves, lanterns on their decks swaying in the chill wind. The drow caught the occasional glimpse of an armed human pacing the decks, wary of what, Halisstra couldn't imagine.
"It's an abandoned temple," Halisstra told him again. "An old temple to the filthy orc god Gruumsh. Danifae said it sits at the western edge of a vast swamp … a flooded place where water covers the vegetation, and many dangerous things hunt. The swamp is on the other side of the river."
Ryld nodded and continued to study the water as the sun's glow began to kiss the horizon.
"Would you know how to work one of those boats?" Halisstra asked.
The weapons master shook his head.
"Then we'll need help getting across," said the priestess. "It's too far and too cold to swim, and we'll attract too much attention using spells. If we keep our piwafwis up and over our heads, a less observant ferryman might not mark us as dark elves."
Ryld let out a sigh that told her he doubted that was possible but that he would try anyway.
They set out along the river's edge, working their way slowly northward in the pre-dawn gloom. Ryld stopped her occasionally to look around or study a boat that was either sitting on or adrift close to the riverbank. He never bothered to explain why he rejected first one then another and another, and Halisstra didn't ask.
Finally, they came upon a wide, square-keeled boat with a single long oar attached to a tall pole. The vessel had been pulled up on the riverbank, and a few feet away there was the indistinct lump of some humanoid creature asleep on the coarse sand. He'd built a fire before he drifted off to unconsciousness, and it sat next to him, the last of the embers quickly fading.
Ryld moved to within a few inches of the ferryman without making a sound. The weapons master slowly, silently drew his short sword and held it in a loose, easy grip. He crouched next to the humanoid, and the sleeper let out an odd sort of sustained, rumbling cough. Ryld half stood, looked at Halisstra, and shrugged. Halisstra returned the gesture. She had no idea what the sound could signify except that maybe the man—if it was a man—was choking.
Ryld rolled him over with a purposely harsh, violent push. The sleeper had the gruff grayish-yellow features of an orc, but not entirely. His eyes bulged, and he took a deep breath, his heavy brow wrinkled in anger. Ryld dropped the blade of his short sword to the boatman's neck, and the angry man stopped very suddenly. Halisstra stepped in. When she looked more closely at him, she saw that the ferryman was a half-orc. That was good luck for them. Half-orcs tended to be as despised on the World Above as they were in the Underdark, so he would be easier to manipulate into keeping their presence secret.
"Silence," Ryld whispered in the guttural trade tongue of the surface races.
The half-orc glanced once at Halisstra, then met Ryld's eyes and made a show of relaxing. He said nothing.
"We require a boat," the weapons master said quietly. "You will take us east across the river, and you will tell no one of it."
The half-orc looked at him, considering it.
Ryld nicked the man's neck with his short sword, barely enough to draw a half-inch sliver of blood.
"I wasn't asking," the weapons master added, and the half-orc nodded.
Within minutes they were on the boat. The horizon in front of them turned from black to a deep indigo. Halisstra had begun to grow accustomed to the sun, but Ryld still hated it, so they had been traveling at night. In order to make their arranged rendezvous with Danifae, they might have to continue through the morning, but Halisstra knew Ryld wouldn't complain.
"I think the ferryman expects us to pay him when we get to the other side," Ryld said in Low Drow, glancing at the half-orc who was pretending not to be staring at them. "Or do they breed half-orcs as slaves here too?"
At first Halisstra thought he was joking. It was hard to see his eyes with the cowl of his piwafwi pulled over his head. Halisstra wore her own hood the same way, but by the time they got to the midpoint in the wide river delta, the priestess realized that no one on any of the other boats was bothering to look at them and night-blind humans wouldn't be able to see them in the dark—not from a distance anyway. She slipped the hood off her head, eliciting an irritated scowl from Ryld, who kept his own cowl up.
"Why don't you ask him?" Halisstra said, nodding at the boatman.
Ryld shook his head.
"Danifae is going to kill you," he said, his voice flat.
"Is she?"
"I would," the weapons master replied. "She was your battle-captive for a long time, and now she isn't. Of course she will seek revenge for her years of bondage."
"Maybe," Halisstra had to admit, "but I don't think so."
"We don't get your kind around here much," the boatman blurted suddenly in heavily accented Low Drow.
The sound of the half-human, half-orc thing speaking the language of the dark elves made Halisstra's skin crawl. Ryld drew his short sword.
The boatman put up a hand, shaking, and said, "I mean no disrespect or anything. I was just saying. ."
"You've seen drow before?" Halisstra asked then flashed a quick sentence in sign language: An extra hundred gold pieces if you forget all about us.
The half-orc had no reaction to the signed question. He didn't even seem to notice that she'd been trying to communicate.
"Sure," the boatman replied, "I've seen a drow or two. Not recently, but. ."
Halisstra shrugged off the boatman's answer and signed to Ryld, I think he wanted us to know he understood us, so we wouldn't say something that would make us want to kill him for hearing it.
That drew a smile from Ryld.
You can put your sword away, she added.
The weapons master sheathed his blade and said, "If he understands the sign, he should say so now or I will kill him."
The half-orc waved a hand and said, "No, no, sir. I swear to you. I didn't even know what you were doing. I just paddle, yes? Paddle? You don't even have to pay me."
"Pay you?" Ryld asked.
The half-orc looked away.
He heard us mention the temple, Ryld signed. It goes without saying that he can't be trusted.
Who can? Halisstra answered.
Not Danifae, the weapons master signed.
Eilistraee will guide us, she replied. Danifae has no goddess to guide her.
Ryld nodded, though he made his continued skepticism plain.
They rode the rest of the way in silence, and soon they were at the other side of the river. Halisstra stepped off the boat, wading in inches deep water to the rocky riverbank. She looked back for Ryld, who was stepping toward the half-orc. The weapons master reached behind the ferryman, unsheathed Splitter, took off the half-orc's head, and resheathed his weapon in precisely the space of one of Halisstra's heartbeats. The head splashed into the water, and the weapons master kicked the body in after it.
Ryl
d turned to wade ashore, and Halisstra looked away into the blue-gray light of the dawn. She could hear his footsteps in the water then on the rocks behind her, but she didn't want to look at his face just then.
Danifae materialized on the deck of the ship of chaos and was instantly struck by how much had changed. Valas appeared next to her, and she watched his expression change from his normal stoic, blank pragmatism to an uneasy curiosity—he'd noticed it too.
Pharaun and Quenthel both looked bad and smelled bad. The ship itself looked different. The deck, which had been a dull white expanse of stark bone, was covered in spots with pink tissue and crossed with gently throbbing arteries. Sinew and what might have been ligaments stretched between gaps in the bone. The ship felt alive.
Pharaun and Jeggred both looked up at them when they appeared, but only Pharaun stood. The draegloth looked to one side, and Danifae followed his gaze to Quenthel. Jeggred's eyes burned when he looked at the high priestess, who sat on the deck with her back to the others, one hand absently caressing one of the vipers that made up her whip.
"Welcome back to the Underdark's dull wet arse," the Master of Sorcere said. He only glanced at Danifae but approached Valas with his hand out. "You have what we need?"
The Bregan D'aerthe scout nodded and handed the wizard one of the magical sacks that held their supplies.
Danifae kept her attention on Jeggred, who made eye contact with her finally and nodded. The former battle-captive gave the draegloth a smile and a slight bow—then she noticed that the bound uridezu was missing.
"What happened here?" she asked Pharaun.
The wizard began to laugh, and at first it seemed as if he would be laughing for a long time. When no one joined him, he calmed himself and took a deep breath.
"Mistress?" Danifae called to Quenthel.
Nothing.
Jeggred stared at the high priestess's back, saying nothing as well.
"Are we …?" the scout asked Pharaun.
"Oh, yes," the wizard replied, "we'll be setting sail as planned. It turns out that we didn't need the captain's services after all. Jeggred was kind enough to retire his commission for us. I will be piloting the ship to the Abyss and back,"