Queen of the Depths (19 page)

She reached out with her mind, meshed her thoughts with the simpler, nonverbal ones of the seahorses, and visualized what she wanted them to do. Obedient as ever, they swam astern of the sailboat, ascended to the surface, and splashed about, raising a commotion to hold Anton’s attention.

Tu’ala’keth glided to the bow and pulled herself up. Her wounded leg gave her a twinge, but she still managed to clamber quietly aboard.

The fog veiled everything. The mast and sail were blurred and ghostly. Anton appeared as the vaguest shadow at the far end of the boat. But she’d pinpointed his location, and that was enough.

She stooped and picked up her trident, still lying where she’d left it in her haste to escape. She reversed it to use the heavy stone shaft as a cudgel then crept toward the stern. She picked her way around the sail and continued.

She aimed the butt of the trident at his head, and at the last possible moment, he sensed her presence. He jerked around, lifted a fold of his cape to guard himself, and discharged his crossbow, one-handed, in a single flurry of motion.

Her thrust glanced off the enchanted garment as if it were a sturdy turtle-shell shield. Fortunately, haste, or the soaking his weapon had received, spoiled his attack as well. The bolt flew wild.

He raised the crossbow to use it as a bludgeon, but she was quicker. She smashed the blunt end of the trident into his solar plexus, where, at this moment,

the cape didn’t cover. That froze him in place, and she bashed him over the head. He collapsed. She kept beating him until he stopped moving.

|_ike the rest of the Pirate Isles, Tan was in its essence a huge rock sticking up out of the sea, with some greenery on the lower slopes but little on the heights. But unlike Dragon Isle, it was volcanic, its flanks sculpted by ancient lava flows.

As Vurgrom had warned, Tu’ala’keth could see no sign of habitation beyond a few abandoned-looking cottages and shanties, and the beached, decaying husks of a couple of fishing boats. Yet the cove where the empty village rotted appeared to be the only safe or convenient place to land. Should she put in there?

No, she decided, definitely not. If the cultists were as jealous of their privacy as their reputation indicated, they might well have set a trap. It would be awkward if she had to fight

her way clear, perhaps hurting or killing someone, before she even had a chance to explain her purpose.

She rummaged through her sea bag, found the pellet that would enable Anton to breathe underwater, and crouched down beside him. His face bruised, cut, and bloody from the thrashing she’d given him, he lay bound and gagged—and thus unable to conjure—in the bottom of the boat.

She pulled the cloth from his mouth and showed him the spherule. “Eat this,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Tu’ala’keth, don’t do this.”

“Refuse if you wish,” she said, “but you are going beneath the waves either way. I may still have a use for you, but I no longer need you, and it would please me to watch you drown.”

Glaring, he opened his mouth, and she gave him the pellet. After he chewed and swallowed, she replaced the gag.

She had no further use for the sailboat, so didn’t bother lowering the sail, dropping anchor, or otherwise securing it. Let the sea have it for a toy, to toss about and finally sink or shatter. She bound Anton and her other possessions to the seahorses, who disliked it but suffered it at her behest. Then they swam for shore.

As when approaching Dragon Isle, she and her unwilling companion parted company with the mounts in the shallows and waded onward. They had to clamber over a jumble of rocks, with waves crashing to spray all around them and an undertow dragging them backward, to exit the water. She’d loaded Anton with the baggage. Denied the use of his hands, he couldn’t manage by himself. She grabbed his forearm and heaved him up, then waited for him to retch the water from his lungs. With the gag in place, it mostly came out his nose.

“I intend,” she said, “to circle around and approach

the village from higher up the slope. You will move quietly, or I will kill you.”

He jerked his chin at one of the sea bags she’d tied to him then gave her a sardonic look. She understood: His bonds and burdens were scarcely conducive to stealth.

“You must do the best you can.” She jerked the length of rope she’d knotted around his neck. “Onward.”

Once they climbed above the settlement, it was easy enough to discern that which had been imperceptible from the water. A cog, entirely seaworthy by the look of it, though the crew had taken down the two masts to facilitate concealment, listed on one side behind a screen of brush. Voices muttered from one of the dilapidated shacks.

Brandishing her skeletal pendant, Tu’ala’keth whispered a prayer to augment her force of personality. Then, gripping her trident in one hand and Anton’s leash in the other, she stepped out into the open. “Men of the Cult of the Dragon,” she called, “come forth!”

But the startled creatures who emerged from the shanties weren’t “men,” but rather, to all appearances, hybrids of human and wyrm. They walked on two legs and carried spears but stood half again as tall as a man—or shalarin. Their hides were scaly, and batlike wings sprouted from their shoulder blades. Tails lashed behind them, and they had the faces of lizards, framed by jagged bony ruffs and manes of coarse black hair.

Before their falling out, Anton had told Tu’ala’keth of such brutes. They were called dragonkin and sometimes served the cult. She’d already been sure—well, nearly—that the wyrm worshipers had established themselves on Tan, but it was nonetheless gratifying to behold incontrovertible proof.

But the reptiles gave her scant time to savor the moment. They glowered at her and Anton for a second,

and one hissed and hefted his lance for throwing.

“Stop!” she cried, and the magic locked his limbs in position. Before he could recover, or any of the others could decide to attack, she advanced on them, glaring. She wanted them to think her fearless, and to assume she had good reason to be. She wanted them to imagine her powerful enough to strike them all dead in an instant.

“Do you not see my amulet?” she demanded. “I am a waveservant, a priestess of Umberlee, who holds you all in the palm of her hand so long as you dwell in the midst of the sea. Now, who else wants to strike at me?”

None of them did, apparently.

“Good,” she said. “Which of you is in charge?”

The largest of the dragonkin snapped its leathery wings and sprang forward. Its hide was ocher with brownish spots and bands, and in addition to its spear, it wore a scimitar—a symbol of rank, perhaps. Its flesh had a dry, musky smell. She sensed it was leery of her but, even so, averse to appearing meek in front of its underlings.

“How you get here?” it growled.

“We swam.”

“Why?”

“I must see the master of this place. To deliver a message from the Queen of the Depths.”

The dragonkin grunted. “Not supposed to take strangers up mountain. Supposed to kill.”

“You cannot thwart the will of the greatest of all goddesses, but you are welcome to try. If I have to walk over your corpses to reach my destination, so be it.”

“Uh, no. We go up. No fish-woman come here before. Maybe Eshcaz or wearer of purple will want to see. Or maybe Eshcaz want to eat.” The creature waved its clawed hand at the trail snaking up the mountainside.

The cult enclave was larger than Anton had imagined it could be. He started to realize it during the hike up the mountain. In certain hollows, where no one out at sea could spot them, slaves toiled, tending crops, and dragonkin lashed them with whips and bastinadoes when they faltered. Perhaps some of the thralls had dwelled in the empty village on the beach before the wyrm worshipers staked their claim to Tan. Others must be captives purchased from the pirates of Mirg Isle. All were gaunt and haggard from hunger, ill treatment, and despair.

The actual stronghold was equally grim, and even more impressive. Anton had suspected a honeycomb of caverns inside the cone of the volcano but hadn’t dreamed they’d prove so extensive, so well populated, or so a-bustle with activity. Goldsmiths labored over glittering gems and precious metals, crafting intricate medallions too large for a human to wear. Sweating alchemists squinted into fiery kilns or supervised heated liquids as they bubbled, steamed, and streamed through twisting, forking mazes of glass pipe. Black-robed priests of Velsharoon, god of liches and necromancy, chanted before a sarcophagus—or an altar carved in the shape of one—in a chapel reeking of carrion. Wizards declaimed their own spells, invoking spirits Anton could glimpse at the periphery of his vision, but which vanished when he looked at them directly. Seers tossed bones and examined the patterns or stared into churning mirrors. The discharge of so much magic in a single place made the eyes water and the stomach squirm.

A smell somewhat like the body odor of their dragonkin escort—the reek of actual wyrms, Anton assumed—lingered everywhere, and he spotted at least three of the colossal creatures, prowling restlessly

through gloomy passageways or napping in unused galleries. As most dragons were powerful spellcasters, he assumed it was pride that kept them from pitching in to help with the arcane chores their worshipers had undertaken on their behalf.

He’d never seen a dragon before, not even from a distance, and the immense creatures were as frightening as he’d heard. But his predicament had already been about as dire as could be. Dragons only worsened it in a notional sort of way. Perhaps that was why he managed to cling to his composure until he and Tu’ala’keth reached what was evidently the end of their journey.

The dragonkin led them to a huge chamber near the apex of the volcano, where gaps in the walls admitted shafts of sunlight from the summer sky outside. Another breach in the rock, this one a chasm in the granite floor, quite possibly plunged all the way down to a reservoir of still-smoldering magma. Yet plenty of space remained for more slaves to pursue the prodigious, backbreaking task of chiseling a huge, complex geometric design and array of glyphs.

All this Anton observed in a moment, before movement at the far end of the cavern, atop a ledge midway up the wall, arrested his attention. He’d already noticed a shape hunkered there in the gloom, but had interpreted it as a protruding swell of rock. For surely it was too immense to be alive.

Alas, no. A gigantic wedge-shaped head, studded with horns on the beak and chin and larger ones sweeping backward from the brow, shot forward at the end of a serpentine neck. The striking motion carried it into a patch of sunlight, revealing the deep, glossy vermilion of the scales. The titan opened its jaws and roared. The echoing bellow shook the cave, brought bits of stone showering from the ceiling, and suffused the air with a stink of smoke and sulfur.

Everyone cowered, slaves and dragonkin overseers alike. Anton recoiled, somehow tangled his leg with one of the sea bags, and fell hard enough to evoke a jab of pain from his cuts and bruises. But he barely noticed the discomfort. He was too afraid.

Reds were the most terrible of all malevolent wyrms, and he hadn’t realized any dragon could grow so huge. It looked ancient—and thus, powerful—as the volcano in which it made its lair.

He waited, petrified, for the red to annihilate him and everyone else, for at the moment he took it for death incarnate. Accordingly, it never occurred to him that it would do anything but kill.

But evidently the roar had served to take the edge off its ire for a little while, anyway, for it didn’t follow up with a burst of sorcery or a flare of fiery breath. It simply swiveled its head to glare down at the man beside it. Compactly built, clean shaven, and white haired, clad in a dark—likely purple—robe, the cultist looked tiny as a beetle next to the object of his adoration.

“Why are they not finished?” the dragon snarled.

“It’s exacting work,” the cultist replied in a prim, well-educated baritone voice—the voice of a tutor or clerk. Some trick of the acoustics in the chamber enabled Anton to make out his softer tones even from dozens of yards away. “They have to cut the symbols precisely.”

“Sammaster promised that by now, I would already be a dracolich!”

“The First-Speaker said many things then wandered off and left me to perform the actual work. I’m doing the best I can. It’s partly a question of manpower. We need more slaves.” He hesitated. “Your hoard is greater than the wealth of many a prince. If you could spare just a small fraction, purely to help us bring about the consummation you desire—”

“You dare,” the wyrm thundered, the noise so loud it made Anton feel as if someone had slammed him in the head with a club, “ask for my treasure? You dare?”

The cultist abased himself. “I’m a donkey. I beg forgiveness.”

“Know this,” said the red. “Should you fail me, you won’t die easily, not even if frenzy has me in its claws. I swear it by the thousand fangs of Tiamat.”

Anton realized his terror had ebbed to a degree. He’d stopped shaking, and his heart was slowing.

Maybe the example of the snowy-headed cultist, who was able to stand up to the colossal wyrm to a point, anyway, had shamed him. Maybe he’d found some encouragement in the fact that the madmen had yet to create a single dracolich, for surely the impatient red was first in line. Or perhaps it was simply his manhood reasserting itself. But in any case, he resolved that whatever happened next, he’d meet it with a fortitude worthy of even a paladin of Torm.

As he struggled to his feet—no easy task with his hands tied behind him and the sea bags weighing him down—he looked over at Tu’ala’keth then sighed in grudging admiration. To all appearances, she was the one person who hadn’t flinched from the red’s display of temper. Her features composed behind the goggles, she still stood straight and tall.

Of course, like the cultists, she was crazy in her fashion. In certain circumstances, it was evidently an advantage.

She turned to their escort. “You will present me to the wyrm,” she said.

The dragonkin stared at her. “To Eshcaz?” it asked, plainly astonished that anyone would seek to approach the red when he was in such a vile humor.