Chaosbound (21 page)

Rain could hardly imagine how they would handle the ship with just four adults and a child. This looked to be a grueling journey.

“There is still time to go back home,” Myrrima said, “if that is what you truly want.”

Rain didn't have any good choice here. Whether she stayed or went, she'd lose something she valued more than life itself.

She sat for a moment, twisting the ring on her finger. It was an old thing, passed down from her grandmother. The band was broad, of cheap silver, and the large stone in it was blood-red jasper. It was the only heirloom that she had from the family.

She shook her head. “You should have seen the looks they gave me when I left. I've never felt such hatred. And if I stay, it would just grow, until my aunt Della drove me out once and for all. It's better that I leave.”

The whole crew fell silent. Aaath Ulber sat on the captain's deck, manning the rudder. He had not slept in well over a day, and finally he began to snore wonderfully loud.

And in half an hour the wind came, rushing down the hills from the deserts of Landesfallen, fanning out above the cool water. It was not much of a breeze, but it filled the sails fitfully, so that they luffed for a
moment; then the new wood of the timbers creaked as the ship began to ease forward.

Rain worried. They hadn't had time to take on much in the way of supplies, and she didn't know where the company might be able to take on more. If she understood correctly, islands that had once supported passing ships might well be underwater.

But Rain had more immediate concerns. The river channel was still filled with debris, and in the starlight whole trees could lie hidden beneath the ale-dark waters. So Draken and Rain each lit a little lantern, and she sat on the prow, her feet dangling near the waves, and helped guide the vessel.

Her efforts did little good, for often now they would scrape or bump against hidden obstacles.

Aaath Ulber came awake, and sat on the captain's deck. He expertly steered the ship, pulling down on the shaft so that the rudder lifted and did not catch on hidden trees. He seemed to relish the touch of the rudder, the water gliding beneath him.

With a thoughtful expression Aaath Ulber made slowly for the sea.

Myrrima voiced the concern that Mayor Threngell would try to stop them, but Aaath Ulber said, “There's little that they can do. Their little rafts can't form much of a blockade. Even if a couple of them do get close enough so that they try to board, I'll just throw them back in the water.”

They rode the waves for nearly thirty-six miles, until they rounded a wide bend. Here, two monolithic hills of stone created a narrow passage less than a quarter of a mile wide—the perfect spot for an ambush.

Ahead, guttering torches lit the water, a string of them billowing smoke. Men upon rafts held the strait.

At the sight of the ship, they gave a warning shout and stood upon their rafts, waving cudgels—knotty limbs pulled from the water.

“They don't know who they're dealing with!” Aaath Ulber growled, and he set course straight ahead—aiming to plow through the midst of them. But the channel ahead was filled with debris—dead trees and bits of houses, all thrust up from the water so thick that it looked like rugged ground, broken by rocks and ruin.

“Father,” Draken cried, “they've blockaded the river!”

Rain recognized what had happened. The townsmen had tied logs together and strung them across the narrow strait, forming a dam. And as the tide had retreated, the dam had collected tons of debris.

“Turn the ship!” Myrrima shouted, but it was too late. The ship rammed the debris, scraping against tree trunks and the roof of a house, then ground to a halt as completely as if it had struck a beach.

They sat there.

“Those clever little schemers,” Aaath Ulber muttered. “I thought they'd wear themselves out trying to catch us, but they came up with a better plan.”

“Prepare to be boarded!” Mayor Threngell called. “Lower your sails!”

Rain saw him, two hundred yards off, on the far side of the debris; he had a torch in one hand. He stood at the edge of his boat and peered about nervously, trying to figure out how to make his way across the flotsam.

Aaath Ulber chuckled at the man's predicament. The mayor and his men didn't have proper weapons, and crossing the logjam looked all but impossible.

Aaath Ulber got up from his seat, strode to the prow, and pulled his old war hammer from its sheath on his back. “Leave them to me,” he said, urging Rain and the others to retreat a pace so that he would have room to swing his weapon.

Rain heard Myrrima begin to pray under her breath, calling upon Water. Need drove her, and compassion.

She spoke to the Power that she served, whispering, “If indeed you want me to go to war, then I beg of you, open a path before us.”

Peace filled Rain like an ocean, and suddenly Myrrima stood, as if she had made up her mind what to do.

She went to the prow of the boat and raised her hands, summoning water into her service. Draken stood at her back, holding his lantern aloft, and Aaath Ulber stood at her right.

“Come the tempest, come the tide!” she shouted.

Nearby, the water began to swirl beside the boat, as if a huge hole had
opened up in the ground and was draining the ocean away. Debris swirled in the vortex. It began to whirl faster and faster, and the sound of roaring water filled Rain's ears, as if a mountain river thundered through rocks.

“Whoa!” Draken shouted; Sage cried, “Mother?”

It was obvious that neither child had ever seen Myrrima make such a display of power before.

The ship creaked and wobbled, and waves began to build, lifting the flotsam so that it swelled and bucked.

Then suddenly water spouted up from the vortex, twisting and rising into the air.

Myrrima reached out and grasped the column of water, taking it into her hand, so that a plume of water twisted a dozen feet in the air, whirling from her palm, as if it were a staff.

She pointed her watery staff toward the logjam in front of the ship and shouted, “Come the tide!”

Suddenly a rushing filled the air, and all around her the water began streaming seaward. Water from the sound leapt up and flowed over logs and bracken as if a river had suddenly flooded.

Mayor Threngell saw what Myrrima was doing; his eyes went wide. “Run!” he shouted to his men. “They've got a water wizard!”

In the logjam, debris strained toward the open sea, and strange groaning sounds and rumblings erupted. The enormous pressure of the rushing tide suddenly snapped ropes that held the dam in place.

The ship lurched forward, logs and debris rumbling against its hull as it began to break clear.

The great raft of debris went rushing seaward, and now the townsmen on their various watercrafts began to scream and do their best to push themselves away from logs that rumbled toward them.

Myrrima stood with her watery staff still swirling in her hand. She threw the whirling staff back into the surging tide. It danced upon the surface a moment, like a waterspout, and the water at its base began to swirl faster and faster.

“Bring up the dead!” Myrrima called to the waves. The whirlpool churned and foamed, became a waterspout rising into the air; from the
foam a body surged, a dead man large and pale, his eyes already plucked out by fish. The water made a moaning noise as it rose, as if the dead declared their pain.

Then a young girl surged into the waterspout, and in an instant dozens of other corpses bobbed into the air as if eager to be free of their watery grave, and all of them spun about in the plume, rising fifty feet in the air, as the moaning in the waters continued to build.

There had recently been a village here, a thriving hamlet. It had had tidy streets and quaint shops. A man in town had made stained-glass windows for a living, and every shop and house along the street was provided with a window to advertise his wares. Rain had envied the folks who'd lived here.

Their corpses rose, faces blue from the depths, hideous and terrifying, whirling as they swirled up the waterspout and then went flying through the air like fat dolphins.

The mayor and his men groaned in wordless terror and sought to escape, paddling away in a hurry, as horrid corpses began to splash around their boat in a gruesome hail.

Suddenly the ship burst through the last of the flotsam, groaning and scraping as it ran over a submerged log.

The Borenson family broke free of the narrows and headed out into the open sea.

11

Beware the sound of whispers as you breach a wyrmling stronghold. As a lich lord sloughs its physical shell, it loses its vocal cords. Thus it can never speak above a whisper
.

—Aaath Ulber

An hour before dawn, heavy fog from the sea besieged the watchtower at the wyrmling fortress so that its single black stone pinnacle floated above an ocean of clouds. Crows circled the tower, cawing, troubled by the movement below.

All around the tower, the clouds were lit a sullen red from beneath. Hundreds of bonfires ringed the tower so that the fog glowed like dying embers.

From the fires below voices rose up, human voices cruel and cold, singing songs of war:

“Behold! Thy fate is in my hands,
I'll hear no coward's plea.
I come from cold and distant lands,
To bring sure death to thee!”

Though the black basalt walls of the great tower looked smooth and unscalable from a distance, it was assailable—for a small man with clever fingers and a few endowments of grace and brawn.

So the runelords came, nine of them, eeling up through the fog, as swift as lizards, barefoot and unarmored, garbed only in sealskin, their long
blond locks braided and dyed in blood. They bore sharp daggers in their teeth and carried ropes coiled over their backs.

With three or four endowments of metabolism each, they seemed to race up the nearly vertical slope.

Few were such runelords among the warriors of Internook. These were old men, cunning warlords who had lived in wealthier days. Most of them had little left in the way of endowments, for the majority of their Dedicates had died over the past decade. But they came nonetheless, for they were bold men, and fierce, and endowments of attributes alone do not a warrior make.

The first runelord neared the top of the tower, reached back with one hand, hurled a grappling hook over the lip of a merlon, and scrambled up.

A wyrmling guard saw the hook and rushed to cut the rope. But he had never faced a warrior with endowments and was therefore unprepared for what he met.

The small man raced up the rope so swiftly that when he hit the battlement, he seemed nearly to have been hurled into the air by some invisible force.

The wyrmling grunted in surprise, then swung his battle-ax down, trying to slice the man in two and cut the rope in a single blow. But the little warrior sidestepped the attack, swung up with a short half-sword, and plunged it deep into the wyrmling's throat, slicing through his esophagus and severing his spinal cord.