the second ruined one of the great insectile eyes of the hulk. The creature screeched in agony, its great claws flailing in the air. Geran immediately attacked the creature’s flank. He stabbed it at the meeting of its leg and torso, and his point sank through the soft chitin of the joint. Dark ichor splattered the deck, and the monster’s leg buckled underneath it, but it responded with a furious rake of one great claw that he barely ducked under.
“Geran!” Sergen snarled. He whipped his rapier from the sheath. “You two, keep working on getting us free,” he snapped at his crew. “The rest of you, to arms! I want Geran Hulmaster dead!” Then Sergen threw himself to the deck as one of Hamil’s arrows sped right through the place where he’d been standing.
Geran backpedaled from another of the enraged umber hulk’s blows and saw a big, mailed armsman closing in behind him. The fellow’s head was shaven, and his face was tattooed with arcane sigils. Leaving the umber hulk to flounder to its feet, Geran wheeled and leaped to meet his new foe. This fellow was a swordsman of some skill, and he parried Geran’s high slash competently before returning a similar stroke. For several heartbeats they dueled fiercely, steel ringing shrilly as blade met blade. Geran gave back a step and suddenly turned his blade to throw his opponent’s edge into the mainmast nearby. The weapon caught for an instant, and Geran leaned close to throw his right elbow into the man’s face. It was nothing that his old teacher, Daried Selsherryn, would have approved of, but it worked; the big man reeled away, blinded by the pain of a flattened nose. Geran would have finished him then, but Sergen rushed him from his other side. The exiled lord attacked with a series of lightning-swift jabs and lunges, using his natural speed and light blade to good advantage.
Again Geran had to give ground, until he found an opportunity to snarl the words of a sword spell. With a cry of
“You seem a little overmatched, Geran,” Sergen taunted him. “You would have been wiser to let me go, I think!”
There are too many of them, he realized. As soon as I corner one, the others will have me. He risked a quick glance toward Hamil and saw his small companion fighting against a pair of pirates with his daggers in hand. A brilliant flash of lightning, followed by a great thunderclap, echoed through the treetops as Sarth blasted a small knot of crossbow-armed Black Moons near the ship’s foremast. The ship lurched to one side as one of the branches trapping the bowsprit shattered under the impact of the sorcerer’s spell.
“I think the odds are improving,” Geran replied. All he had to do was avoid getting killed by the umber hulk and keep Sergen and his bodyguard busy a little longer, and Sarth’s magic would eventually sweep the deck clean of pirates.
“Geran!” Mirya scrambled over the rail back by the quarterdeck and then turned to help Selsha make the jump. “The spider-creatures found us! They’re coming up after us!”
Sergen gave a single bark of laughter. “Ha! I see you’ve met the neogi, then. So much for improving the odds, Cousin!”
“By all the screaming Hells,” Geran snarled. He scrambled back from another blow of the umber hulk’s fist, trying to keep the mainmast between the monster and himself. The tattooed swordsman edged closer, and on the opposite side Sergen glided in with a grin of anticipation. He couldn’t afford any more foes, not at the moment. He risked a quick glance forward and saw that the two pirates were still working on cutting the ship free. Another large limb cracked and dropped away, falling to the forest floor far below, and the ship’s deck suddenly canted in the other direction. She’s working loose! he realized.
He looked back to the quarterdeck. “Hamil! Take the wheel and get us away from here!” he shouted.
Hamil nodded. He drove back one of his pirates with a furious frenzy and then turned on the other one and rolled up under the man’s guard to bury a knife in his belly. Before the fellow could even sink to the deck, the halfling dashed across the quarterdeck and seized the wheel. Hamil glanced once at the sails and then turned the wheel to the right and willed the ship’s bow to rise.
Instantly the deck rolled hard in the opposite direction as the ship leaped skyward. Geran lost his footing and slid to the opposite gunwale, catching himself there. Mirya locked one arm around the sternrail and hugged Selsha tight with the other. The second of Hamil’s pirates was not so lucky and was hurled off his feet when the ship rolled. He toppled over the side with a terrified wail. Sergen and his tattooed swordsman fetched up against the rail, but the two pirates who’d been at the bow working to cut the ship free now tumbled aft, rolling along the deck as the bow shot skyward. The umber hulk seized the mainmast in one claw, and reached out with its other arm to seize Geran. Its talons came up inches short of Geran’s leg, raking the tough old oak of the deck like soft sand as Geran kicked himself out of the way.
“Kerth! Kill the halfling!” Sergen shouted. The tattooed armsman steadied himself against the rail and then climbed back toward the quarterdeck.
The halfling glanced back at Mirya. “Take the wheel! Hold her steady!” he cried. Mirya hurried over to seize the ship’s helm, while Hamil retrieved his daggers and moved to meet the swordsman Kerth in the narrow space at the top of the quarterdeck ladder. But at that moment several arachnid legs appeared over the sternrail, and one of the neogi clambered over the side. It hissed at Mirya and her daughter, and Selsha screamed. The girl backed away from the spiderlike creature, which scuttled after her.
Geran struggled to get to his feet and go to her aid, but the umber hulk released its grip on the mainmast and lunged for him. This time its iron-hard talons ripped across his torso. Only his magical wardings saved his life, but even so the claws tore flesh and bruised bone. He was knocked spinning across the deck by the creature’s incredible strength. It pounced on him with surprising speed for a monster so large. He threw his sword up to fend it off, and then he made the fatal mistake: he looked into its eyes.
Instantly, his thoughts seemed to splinter into vertigo and nonsense. He staggered back, unable to remember where he was or what he was doing. The roaring of wind, the crackle of the tattered sails, the dizzying rush of the forest-covered hillsides spinning away under the rail, and the brilliant stars reeling by in a sky of pure black-all these things crowded in on his senses in a fearsome jumble. Clumsily he threw his sword point out, hoping to fend off the monster looming over him, but the umber hulk batted aside the blade and pounded him into the deck. He groaned and tried to crawl away, but it seized him around the waist and dragged him to its huge mandibles. Its scythelike mouthparts clacked together and scissorred eagerly, anticipating the taste of his flesh.
“Geran!” Mirya shrieked.
He struggled to make sense of what he was seeing, and closed his eyes to shut out all of the things he didn’t understand. His thoughts cleared a little, and he seized with all of his willpower at the fragile promise of calm, even as the hulk’s talons ground into his waist, and the mandibles slipped against his magical scales. The pain jolted him into clarity. In pure desperation he stabbed blindly straight ahead with his sword and caught the monster in its mouth. It roared and let go of him; Geran hit the deck and fell, still helpless from its maddening gaze.
The creature raised both of its huge arms over its head, ready to crush Geran where he writhed. But then a searing jet of fire blasted the umber hulk. Sarth appeared thirty feet from the ship’s rail, hovering in midair as he scoured the creature with his sorcerer’s fire. “Desist, creature!” he shouted between the words of battle spells.
The umber hulk reeled away with a screech of pain, and abruptly Geran’s mind cleared again. The huge monster floundered across the deck, retreating from Sarth’s fire, and fetched up against the opposite rail. Geran picked himself up and charged the monster while it flailed under the sorcerer’s flame. He reversed his grip on his backsword, capped his left hand over the pommel, and then drove the blade up under the hulk’s jaws with all of his strength. The thing shuddered and then toppled over the rail, almost taking his sword with it. He wrenched it out of the carcass as it went over the side, and had to catch himself hastily on the rail. Then Sergen’s sword point sank into the back of his left shoulder, missing his heart only because the umber hulk had dragged him around as it fell. Geran cried out as the sharp steel grated on bone before he twisted away.
The swordmage clenched his teeth together and pushed the hot agony in his shoulder from his mind. He
