The Jewel of Turmish (28 page)

“What’s the meaning of this?”

Borran Kiosk looked up from the frightened quartermaster to the old man standing on the upper deck. He wore dark robes and had a fierce gray beard that still held smudged traces of red. The sun and harsh elements of the sea had browned and wrinkled his face. Shaggy hair wafted in the breeze.

“We have paid for passage,” Allis said.

Durgel helped Vonnis to his feet. The quartermaster continued to gasp and hack as he struggled to get his wind back.

“What does that have to do with your treatment of Vonnis?” the old man asked.

Borran Kiosk felt the old man’s magic. Tendrils of the unseen force pried and lifted at the spell of illusion the mohrg had woven over his own fleshless features.

“He was rude,” Allis said.

“He did not lay hands upon you,” the old man said.

Borran Kiosk felt the unseen tendrils wither and die as his own spell rendered them useless.

T would have killed him for that,” the mohrg said. T punished him for his rudeness.”

“Punishment such as that is better left to his captain,” the old man said.

“You come close to rudeness yourself,” Borran Kiosk warned.

The old man’s lips closed tight and his dark eyes glittered.

“Have a care how you carry yourself, good sir,” the man said. “I’m Hildemon, ship’s mage aboard Mistress Talia, and I’ll brook no threat from any man.”

“You’ve got the gold I’ve paid for passage,” Borran Kiosk said. “If you want a little extra gold for my rashness in dealing with your man, so be it. Name your price.”

After all, whatever gold he paid would be reclaimed when he overtook the ship.

“They wanted onto the ship early,” Durgel said. “An’ ever’body knows ain’t nothin’ to do aboard. It’s gonna be hours before we haul anchor and set sail, even with all the crew working.”

Hildemon’s face wrinkled and he asked, “Why would you want to come aboard so early?”

“I’ve done everything in port that I care to,” Borran Kiosk said. “I stayed up all night, and I wanted to see this ship, perhaps even place a few investments of my own after I see what cargo you’re carrying.” That would be excuse enough for him to learn the run of the ship.

The old mage was silent for a time.

Borran Kiosk knew that Mistress Talia was a ship

down on her luck. Remnants of the Taker’s War still existed throughout the Sea of Fallen Stars, and the waters were rife with pirates. Mistress Talia had battled a ship on her last journey, and the scars of that fight still showed on her deck and sections of missing railing. The gold Allis had paid for passage had been welcomed with no questions asked.

“Quartermaster Vonnis!” the old ship’s mage called out. “Aye?” Vonnis croaked through his bruised throat. “We’ve got a cabin for these people?”

§

“Hold, you foul beast!”

Druz Talimsir glanced quickly to her left, thinking that the voice had come out of thin air. She brought her sword up, ready to defend herself.

An elf dressed in hide armor, with a helm of deer horns and falcon feathers, seemed to step out of the tree beside her. His black hair was knotted through the deer horns and ran down his back, leaving his smooth, unblemished face in full view. A dark green cloak hung from his shoulders. Like all elves, he didn’t show any indication of age. His dark emerald eyes flashed with angry fire.

His presence filled the marsh.

“Beware this thing,” Haarn said, still dangling upside down. “A skeleton called it up from the earth.”

The shambler turned. Though it had no eyes, it seemed to sense the elfin some manner. The elf was smaller than Haarn, smaller even than Druz, and more slender. Still, when he started toward the shambler, Druz moved to follow him into battle. The elf threw up a hand without glancing in her direction.

“You can’t face that thing by yourself,” Druz protested.

“Stay,” the elf said. He closed on the shambler, stepping gracefully through the uneven terrain masked by the water.

The shambler loosened its squeeze on Haarn and

pulled its feet out of the ground. It tinned, and as if toying with the new arrival, the shambler dangled its captured prize in front of the elf.

The elf spoke, but Druz couldn’t understand the language, though she got the impression it was an old tongue.

As the elf s words died away, he raised his right arm. A blazing blade formed entirely of twisting red and yellow flames nearly four feet long sprouted from his hand. The flames danced and shivered, and Druz expected the elf to yank his hand back in pain. Instead, the elf lashed out with the fire sword.

The move caught the shambler unprepared and the flame blade cut through the shambler’s vinelike arm. Haarn dropped from the shambler’s grip like a fresh-harvested fruit.

For the first time, Druz saw the shambler hesitate before attacking. She thought the thing might have recognized something even more fearsome than itself.

The elf stood there with his blazing sword and the wind blowing through his hair. He spoke again as the shambler attacked with its other arm. Moving only enough to avoid the whipping lengths of the vinelike appendages, the elf lashed out with the flame sword again. Smoke puffed from the amputated end of the shambler’s arm as the first half of it dropped, sizzling, into the mud.

Nearby, working in spite of the pain that still racked him, Haarn stripped the dead length of the shambler’s arm from him. He tried to get to his feet, but his legs kept going out from under him.

Stepping back, opening his arms wide, the elf shouted to the heavens, his face upturned. Dark clouds formed above the shambler. Sparks flitted like fireflies inside the clouds. The shambler started forward then, like an avalanche of mud. Before it had taken three steps, the swirling dark clouds above it unleashed a column of white-hot flames that descended on the shambler.

Holding her empty hand up to shield her face from the heat, Druz peered through her fingers. Almost between heartbeats, the shambler dried out, hardened, then flaked

to pieces. When the column of fire died away, a pile of gray ash—all that remained of the shambler—spread out over the water.

Druz sucked in a breath, only then aware that she’d been holding it. Wicked and acrid, the stench of the dying creature filled her nose.

“The skeleton,” Haarn said.

“What skeleton?” the elf asked.

“I was trailing a skeleton.”

Haarn pushed himself up from the ground with some difficulty, but Druz was still amazed at the druid’s resilience.

“Who is the woman?” the elf asked.

Seizing his scimitar from the muddy ground, Haarn glanced at Druz, then quickly looked away. He looked self-conscious.

“She’s …” he said. “She’s a… friend.”

Despite the tension of the moment and the unexplained appearance of the elf, Druz almost smiled in disbelief. She couldn’t understand Haarn’s deference to the strange elf. Since she’d known him she’d never seen him defer to anyone, but with the elf he acted like a student facing a harsh taskmaster.

“She shouldn’t be here,” the elf said. “She has the stink of city upon her.”

Druz’s ears burned in embarrassment and anger, but it was hard to be rancorous with someone who had just saved her life.

“I know,” Haarn agreed. “Other business brought us together, business that I had no say in.”

“You always have a say in the things you do, Haarn,” the elf said. “I’ve always taught you that.”

Blood tracked Haarn’s face. He squatted and checked on Broadfoot then glanced over his shoulder as he tended the bear.

“If I could have gotten rid of her,” he said, “I would have.”

He rummaged on the ground and found a hunk of green and white moss. Praying over it, he closed his hands,

hiding the moss from view, then opened them again to reveal that the moss had become more vibrant and healthy. Working quickly, he packed the moss into the bear’s wounds.

“I didn’t give him a choice,” Druz said, giving in to the anger that overrode her fear.

The elf shot her a look and said, Tf he’d chosen to leave you, woman, you wouldn’t be here.”

The elf squatted and ran his fingers through the gray-white ash. He felt the consistency, smelled it, then put a pinch of the ash on his tongue. His face turned lemony tight and he spat the ash out.

“Dead things,” muttered the elf.

Finished with the bear, Haarn pushed himself erect again and said, “The skeleton remains free.”

“Which way?” the elf asked.

He stood with easy grace and Haarn pointed.

“How did you come to follow it?”

“The business I had with the woman put me close to where it dug up itself from the ground,” Haarn said.

The elf frowned at the pile of gray-white powder and asked, “The skeleton had the power to create this shambler?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve fought skeletons before?”

“Of course I have,” Haarn said. T faced my first skeletons with you.”

“So you did. Have you ever seen one then or since that can handle magic like this?”

Haarn shook his head and started forward in the direction the skeleton had taken. Broadfoot lifted his big head and whined a little. The bear put his front paws out and tried to rise but couldn’t get up the strength.

“There’s a jewel in its chest,” Haarn said as he pushed himself into a jog, slogging through the water. The elf followed.

“What kind of jewel?”

“I don’t know,” Haarn admitted. T didn’t get a good look at it, but I know it created that false shambler.” “That creature was very strong,” the elf said. “If it had

been any more powerful, I might not have been able to destroy it.”

Staggering forward, Druz felt her body screaming as she took up their rapid pace. They plunged seemingly without effort through the uneven land and brush that constantly threw Druz’s own gait off and slapped at her eyes. She didn’t know what reserves Haarn must have been drawing from after the frantic pace they’d been traveling at since morning and the beating he’d taken from the shambler.

Just as black spots started swimming in Druz’s vision and her breathing was beginning to burn the back of her throat, she saw the druids—the elf was surely another druid—slip through the wall of brush and scraggly trees. The land sloped down and water that had been lazy and stagnant on the marsh gathered speed as it tumbled down the long, steep descent ahead.

Gazing at the broken ground, shading her eyes with one hand, Druz saw where several streams had formed and bled off into a small river that roiled between two irregular banks. Nearly a quarter-mile away, the skeleton kept up its steady pace. It pumped its arms, running hard and throwing out clods of mud from its skeletal feet.

“There,” Haarn said, pointing.

The elf glanced at him and asked, “Can you shift?”

“Not now,” Haarn said.

Nodding, the elf lifted his arms.

“The skeleton is very powerful,” Haarn warned.

He turned and jogged along the edge of the steep dropoff, looking down.

“So am I,” the elf said.

He held his hands straight up, and as she watched, Druz saw the elf shrink and sprout feathers at the same time. In seconds, he was a great horned owl, almost identical to the one she’d seen Haarn turn into.

The owl took to the skies, leaning forward and falling over the edge. Spreading his wings, the great bird caught the wind and leveled off in a steep glide that took him straight toward the skeleton.

Haarn found a less steep section of the incline and

started down. Druz followed him, nearly falling half a dozen times in the first three steps.

“You know this elf?” she asked, watching the owl bear down on bis quarry.

“Ettrian,” Haarn said.

He released bis hold on the incline and slid twenty feet down. A cascade of falling mud and rock followed after him, breaking like a wave over his head and shoulders.

Druz sheathed her long sword and removed the scabbard and belt from her waist. She gripped the weapon in both hands as she stepped off the incline and slid after Haarn. The passage was rough and bruising, but she caught herself at the end of it, not surprised that the druid was already in motion. As they slid down the next section, Druz saw the great horned owl fold his wings and drop.

When Ettrian reached the ground, he stood on human legs again.

“He …” Druz hesitated. “He walked out of a tree.”

Haarn slid again, making his way to the level land. “I haven’t yet learned that spell,” he replied.

Ettrian reached into his cloak and drew out a quarterstaff as he faced the skeleton. Druz had heard of magical cloaks with pockets like bags of holding, though she’d never seen one before.

She gathered herself at the end of the final slide, drew her long sword from its scabbard, and kept the scabbard in her left hand. She ran, pushing herself to match Haarn’s pace.

Seeing the elf druid square off against the skeleton, Druz worried that they might arrive too late to aid Ettrian against the skeleton. She pushed herself harder, feeling muddy clumps in her hair bang against her head and shoulders, feeling the burn through her fatigued muscles, hearing the rasp of her own breath as she tried in vain to fill her lungs again. If they arrived in time, what was there to say that the skeleton wouldn’t summon yet another shambler to act as its guardian?

The skeleton lashed out at Ettrian. Using the quarterstaff, the druid knocked the blows aside and returned a

few of his own, succeeding in driving the skeleton back. A familiar, somber look played on the druid’s face, and Druz recognized it as a look Haarn often wore.

Whirling, Ettrian dodged a blow meant to take off his head, took a quick step to the side, then rammed the quarterstaff between the skeleton’s ribs and twisted violently. Bone snapped off, and the sound reached Druz’s ears over the slapping noise of Haarn’s feet and hers meeting the muddy ground.

When Ettrian stepped away, tearing free several of the skeleton’s ribs, Druz saw the crimson flash of the ruby falling from the thing’s rib cage. The elf increased the level and speed of his attacks, aiming his quarterstaff at the skeleton’s head.

Druz didn’t know if smashing the skeleton’s skull would stop it.