Rising Tide (2 page)

She had no choice but to believe.

Hours later, Laaqueel stopped the group for the night, camping in the lee of a sunken Calishite sohar. The three-masted merchant ship showed signs of the battle that had sent it to the ocean floor. Blackened timbers thrust up from the dark mud, canting hard to starboard. Wisps of ivory-colored sailcloth still clung to the rigging of the two surviving masts.

Judging from the condition of the wreck and the way the skeletons were picked clean to the bone, the malenti guessed that the ship had been underwater for little more than ten years. Barnacles clung to the broken timbers and sea anemones clustered in small groups. Schools of fish hid inside the broken hold, taking cover from predators.

True dark filled the ocean when the sun sank around the curve of the world. The inky blackness restricted even Laaqueel’s sensitive vision until she could see only a few feet in front of her. She sat with her back to the broken ship, her arms wrapped around her knees in a posture the true sahuagin could never manage. In the elf communities she’d infiltrated over the years, she’d learned that such body language in the surface cultures signaled a wish to be alone.

Saanaa and Viiklee maintained their own counsel, sitting apart from her. They’d not spoken to her since she’d slain Thuur.

Finally it was Saanaa, the youngest, who crossed the distance first. Only a few yellow spots showed in her tail. “Favored one,” she said, “forgive our uncertainty.”

“There is no forgiveness for weakness,” Laaqueel told her coldly. “Uncertainty can be viewed as weakness.”

Saanaa’s gills flared in anger. “Make no mistake about my strength, favored one. Just as Thuur died for her convictions, I stand ready to follow you wherever you lead.”

“Good.” As sahuagin, she knew she didn’t have to worry about the other two surviving priestesses joining together to kill her. Their culture provided for one-on-one fighting among the community, and no challenges could be made to one who was wounded.

“Neither of us have heard how you came to find the record of the one you seek.”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” Laaqueel said. “It’s enough that Senior Priestess Ghaataag saw fit to send you with me. You should have taken that as a compliment.”

“I do, but I wish to know more for myself, that I may be stronger,” Saanaa said. She crouched, folding her arms in on herself, fitting her fins in tight against her body.

Laaqueel thought briefly of ignoring the other priestess. Though Saanaa’s argument had merit, the malenti still had that privilege. The months had worn on Laaqueel, too, though it didn’t touch her resolve. After being raised as a malenti, trained to be a spy, and moving among the hated sea elves and surface dwellers the few times she was able to mask her true nature, she welcomed the hunt she was on. No matter how long it took her, where she had to go, or what she had to do to accomplish it, she’d never felt more like a sahuagin than during this quest.

“I found a record regarding Sekolah,” she said, talking only because she wanted to hear it aloud again, to strengthen her own resolve, “that was older than anything I’d ever seen before.”

“A sahuagin book?”

Laaqueel shook her head and brushed her hair back. It was an all too elven gesture she hated picking up, but the long hair often drifted into her face. If she’d had her way, she’d have hacked the hair from her head, but it was a necessary part of her permanent disguise.

“No,” she answered. “I found it during a stay with the sea elves almost five years ago.”

The sahuagin books were created of strung bits of stone and shell on knotted thongs, each tied to a ring of bone or sinew. The way the shells, knots, and stones hung together represented sounds in the sahuagin tongue. Just shaking the sahuagin book created a series of sounds that gave the title. That was why many referred to them as “singing bundles.”

“An elven book, favored one?” Saanaa asked.

“It was written by a human.”

“About the sahuagin?” Disbelief sounded in the younger priestess’s voice.

“Yes.”

“It had to have been filled with lies.”

“Incredibly,” Laaqueel said, listening to her own words to further her resolve, “it held many truths.”

“The sahuagin who gave our history to whomever wrote this book must have been enspelled.” Saanaa shuddered. All sahuagin had an innate fear of anything magical.

Laaqueel shared that legacy. Even her time among the sea elves, who had no magic of their own either, hadn’t prepared her to see the things she’d seen in her roving. Humans bent the very elements to their will and threw fireballs through the air when they wished. She’d seen it done. Power granted by Sekolah, however, was never in question. The Great Shark wielded magic and gave it to his most favored and most faithful of priestesses.

“I think so too,” the malenti stated. “There was much in there about our communities as they were thousands of years ago.” Actually, the community life described in the book hadn’t changed much even now, though the places that were described were no longer on any sahuagin maps Laaqueel had ever seen. “I found among the myths of Sekolah a story that captured my eye and my heart.”

“It was not about Sekolah?” Viiklee asked. She sat watching, her black eyes gleaming with interest. She had crept much closer to share in the tale.

“No. The book was written by a man named Ronassic of Sigil. He’d already documented other ocean life and marine cultures. He carried forth a treatise concerning the origins of the malenti as being a bridge between the sahuagin race and the cursed sea elves. He held that one evolved from the other, suggesting that sahuagin were created from the time the first sea elves took to the oceans. I find that heretical. I believe that the malenti are Sekolah’s chosen sacrifices, the claws to lay bare the throats of the enemies of the sahuagin.”

Neither of the other priestesses saw fit to disagree.

“In his book,” Laaqueel went on, “he gets a great number of things wrong, but in the creation myths concerning the Great Shark and how the sahuagin were given to the seas, he mentioned another being of power.”

“Daganisoraan?” Saanaa asked.

“No,” Laaqueel answered, pitching her voice low to fully hold the attention of her audience. Daganisoraan was a common figure in sahuagin tales, featured as both hero and villain depending on the myth. “This was before even Daganisoraan’s time, and though I searched the book, the only name I ever found given to him was One Who Swims With Sekolah.”

“Maybe,” Viiklee said, “One Who Swims With Sekolah was the first sahuagin.”

“No.” Laaqueel shook her head. “He was someone … something … very powerful.”

“Why haven’t we heard more about him?” Saanaa asked.

“I don’t know. Perhaps he was there in the beginning but gone before Sekolah saw fit to put the first sahuagin into the oceans. Only the thinnest of whispers managed to survive concerning him.”

“What happened to him?”

Laaqueel took the small whalebone container from between her breasts. The container was hollowed out, carved in the shape of a shark. She unstoppered it and poured out six red and black stones into her palm. The red was so true, so inviolate, that it was visible even at this depth and in the gathering darkness. All of stones had holes drilled through them. “I don’t know. The book mentioned that he was locked away from the rest of the world to be taught a lesson.”

“By Sekolah?” Viiklee demanded.

“No. By another of the gods or goddesses that walked this plane of existence during that time. One Who Swims With Sekolah was imprisoned. He’s never been seen since.”

“Yet this book mentioned him?” Saanaa asked. “No sahuagin records remember him?”

“Our records,” Laaqueel reminded, “don’t tell of him. I have read them all and consulted with the other priestesses regarding this matter. None remember One Who Swims With Sekolah, but we don’t have access to all sahuagin records.”

“What makes you think you can find this being?” Viiklee asked.

Laaqueel ran a forefinger through the six red and black stones in her palm, revealing the runes inscribed on them. “I’ve given the last five years of my life to the search for the truth in this matter. Only a few months ago, I discovered these in a loremaster’s keep at Baldur’s Gate.”

“Where the humans live.” Viiklee spat a curse, roiling the water around her angular face.

“Yes. Magic surrounds these stones.”

Saanaa and Viiklee drew back, making protective wards against the hated magic. “You should have destroyed them,” Saanaa hissed. “To even carry them around with you is sacrilege.” The sahuagin coiled restlessly, edging away.

“There is nothing foul about these stones,” Laaqueel said, turning them in her palm. She deftly plucked a short length of worked sinew from her trident hilt and with practiced ease threaded it through the stones, making sure they were in the proper order and tying the correct number of knots between them as she’d learned.

“The runes mean nothing, a false trail laid for the surface dwellers,” she continued. “Someone tried to discover the secret of the stones and assigned names to the runes, and some have even used magic to try to read them. Humans and elves don’t understand the nature of the sahuagin written language, and none who tried ever learned the truth of the stones.”

Finished, she held the ring of knots and stones out, then shook them. They clattered against each other.

The message, to a sahuagin’s internal ear and lateral lines, was clear: “Seek out One Who Swims With Sekolah.”

“You see?” Laaqueel asked. “Above water where a sahuagin’s hearing doesn’t operate properly even should one be there, the song of the stones wouldn’t be clear. If the book I found hadn’t mentioned the existence of the stones, I wouldn’t have known. Even then, tracking down the stones was not an easy matter. They were part of a collection assembled by a historian from Skuld, a human city in the land of Mulhorand.”

“I’ve never heard of this place, honored one,” Saanaa stated.

Laaqueel knew she had them gripped by the story. If anything, the sahuagin definitely knew the value of a story. There were many concepts new to them, and the stones-with their curse of magic-lay before them.

“Mulhorand is believed to be the oldest continually inhabited human country,” she said. “It’s located in the ocean the surface dwellers call the Sea of Fallen Stars.”

“I know of our home sea, the Claarteeros Sea, the one the humans call the Trackless Sea and the Sea of Swords,” Viiklee stated. “I know of the Veemeeros Sea, which they’ve named the Shining Sea, but I have never heard of the sea you speak of.”

“It’s an inland sea.” Laaqueel watched their eyes widen. As young priestesses, their view of the world was kept deliberately small to encourage strength in their beliefs. Trained as a malenti spy to go into the cities of elves, Laaqueel had been taught early about the geography of the world even beyond what the humans termed the Sword Coast. She remembered how she’d felt when she’d first been told of the Sea of Fallen Stars. The idea of a landlocked sea was frightening.

“How can such a thing be?” Saanaa asked.

Laaqueel turned her hands outward, exposing the webbing between her fingers to show even they were empty. It was a purely sahuagin gesture, not the spasmodic shrug she’d learned of the humans and elves.

“It must be Sekolah’s will,” Viiklee stated.

“Perhaps.”

“Are there sahuagin there?” Saanaa asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve heard stories, but nothing I was able to confirm. The sea elves living along the Sword Coast take very little interest in anything outside their own villages and trading needs. The humans I’ve had chance to meet were more interested in filling their pockets with gold and silver than in answering questions I might advance, and I was trained not to draw too much attention to myself.”

“Living in such a fashion must have been hard,” Saanaa said.

“I hated it,” Laaqueel admitted. “Elven and human ways are not meant for sahuagin. They are too soft, too greedy. I welcome the day that we are able to push them from the sea and from the coastal lands and take back our world in the waters.” She paused. “Still, Sekolah gave each sahuagin the currents of his or her life …”

“… and it is up to each to swim with them,” the other two priestesses finished the familiar phrase.

“As we swim with this one now,” Laaqueel added.

“Did the book you read mention that Sekolah was within this Sea of Falling Stars?” Viiklee asked.

“As far as I know,” the malenti answered, “Sekolah was never there, nor was One Who Swims With Sekolah.”

“How did the stones get there?” Saanaa asked.

Laaqueel shook them again, causing them to repeat their message. “It’s a mystery, one of many I hope to find answers for.”

“How do you know One Who Swims With Sekolah is here?” Viiklee asked. “Why aren’t we looking for him in the Sea of Falling Stars?”

“Because the book mentioned that One Who Swims With Sekolah’s final resting place was in the Veemeeros Sea. It wasn’t called that in the book, but from the description of the land with terrible giant reptiles nearby, it could only be this place.”

“If only the sea weren’t so large,” Saanaa sighed.

Uncoiling, filled instantly with anger, Laaqueel backhanded the younger priestess. An explosion of bubbles erupted from her gills. “Sacrilege! The sea is our life!”

Saanaa cried out in pain, covering her face. “I didn’t mean it!” she cried. “Forgive me, favored one. I meant only that our task would be easier-“

“Sekolah never meant for sahuagin life to be easy,” Laaqueel snapped, “else he would never have given the sahuagin so many enemies.” She was going to add more, a sermon already on her tongue.

Before she could begin, the stones pulled gently from her hand, drifting into a current. Laaqueel watched them, feeling the old fear of magic twisting her stomach into knots around her last meal. Her abilities as priestess, she knew, rivaled those of some mages, but those abilities were given by the Great Shark, awarded to those whose prayers were truest, loudest, and strongest.

Viiklee and Saanaa drew back quickly, raising a murky cloud from the mud floor. They raised their tridents in defense.