almost enough to make him wonder.
“Think on this, then. Even if you could kill me, what would happen then?”
“Myth Nantar is supposedly full of sea-elves, mermen, and by your own account shalarins who don’t care a snake’s toenail about Umberlee anymore. Maybe I can talk one of them into helping me back to dry land.”
“After you’ve killed one of their own? How would your folk treat a stranger who’d done the same? Even if somebody did decide to help you, do you really believe it would do any good? You, the slayer of Umberlee’s servant, would still be at the bottom of the sea, where all creatures live only at her sufferance. Rest assured she would avenge me before you could escape.”
He hesitated. If it was a bluff, she was selling it well.
Maybe the sensible course was to play along at least until he was back on land. It was possible that with her powers, Tu’ala’keth could even help him locate the cult’s lair. Tymora knew, he hadn’t had any luck on his own.
He let his shoulders slump as if in resignation. “All right. You win. I’m at yourand your goddess’s service.”
For now. But, Lady, you will never see your goal.
CHAPTER 2
When they reached the shallows, Tu’ala’keth stroked the neck of her seahorse, and the animal obediently came to a halt. Anton stopped more awkwardly, nearly slipping from the back of his steed, and the creature tossed its ruddy, black-eyed head in annoyance.
The riders dismounted, Tu’ala’keth waved her hand in dismissal, and the seahorses swam away to roam and forage as they would so long as they didn’t stray too far from the island. She wanted them to hear and come if she called.
That accomplished, she and the human swam up the slope of the seabed. They soon reached a point where a person could set his feet down and wade with the upper part of his body out of the water, and Anton chose to do so.
She compelled herself to do likewise, meanwhile striving to conceal her trepidation. Such an emotion was weak and unworthy. She had come on Umberlee’s business, and the goddess would protect her.
Still it was one thing to be certain of her deity’s power and another to place her confidence in the contrivances of the Arcane Caste. If the talismans they’d provided failed to work properly, she was in for discomfort, even pain.
When she raised her upper body out of water the sun was even brighter, but with her goggles in place, she could see. The air passing through her gill slits felt strange, thin, but sustained her nonetheless. The latter benefit was due to the enchantment woven into her silverweave armor, a fine mesh tunic of worked coral.
Anton made a retching sound and, as she turned to look, finished coughing the water from his lungs. He straightened up, wiped his mouth and shaggy black whiskers, and asked, “Are you doing all right?”
“Of course.” She hefted her stone trident. “Onward.”
They sloshed toward the white-sand beach. Tu’ala’keth had done a bit of walking in her life, but not much, and it made her feel as clumsy as Anton had looked trying to manage the seahorse. She resolved to master the trick of it as quickly as possible.
She supposed she might have quite a bit to learn, for the landscape before her looked dauntingly unfamiliar. In its essence, Dragon Islea name of good omen, surelywas a mountain like any other, just one so tall its crest rose high above the surface of the sea. But it had no abundance of fish swarming about its stony crags, just a few gulls swooping and wheeling. The odd-looking vegetation was equally sparse.
Everything seemed muted, too, as if she’d gone partially deaf, and what she could hear was different. Absent was the ambient drone she’d known her entire life, a hum composed of the noises generated by the tides, currents, and countless marine organisms striving to survive. In its place was only the susurrus of the breaking waves and a bit of clamor rising from the town at the end of the strand, where humans and their ilk shouted to one another, scraped barnacles from a beached ship, or pounded pegs into the half-completed hull of a new one.
Bracketed by fortifications where land met water, the settlement was as peculiar as the rest of the scene. Naturally, Serdsian towns had no use for docks or boats floating at anchor, but something else struck her as even odder. All the doors were at ground level, and that was where everyone moved about. Some of the rough coquina structures were several stories high, but even so, it was plain that in a real sense, humans lived their lives in only two dimensions.
The cloth rectanglesfields of black emblazoned with skulls, crossed swords, and similar devicesflapping atop several of the most imposing structures added a final note of strangeness.
Anton shivered and gave her a grin. “It’s funny. When I was under water, I never really felt wet. Now that I’m in the air, I can feel I’m soaked.”
“What do we do next?” asked Tu’ala’keth.
“The sea turned my clothes to rags. I need new ones. Even more importantly, I need a barber. The cult identified a spy with long hair and a proper Turmian square-cut beard. Accordingly, I mean to turn into a clean- shaven fellow with close-cropped locks.
“So here’s the plan. At the end of the beach, there’s a path that runs up around the edge of the town. If we take it, we can reach the fellow we need without everybody in town gawking at us.”
“But surely some people will see us.”
“Oh, yes, the lookouts manning the battlements at the very least.”
“What if one of them is a cultist and knows your face?”
“It’s unlikely, but should it happen, life may get interesting very quickly. If the prospect frightens you, you can always turn around and jump back into the water.”
She scowled. “I would never shrink from anything Umberlee requires of me.”
“Of course not. Perish the thought.”
As they tramped up the beach, Tu’ala’keth kept a wary eye on her companion. She thought he might try to escape, but so far, he showed no signs of it. She wondered if he’d found the wisdom to embrace his destiny or if he was merely biding his time and reassured herself that it didn’t matter either way. Umberlee would make use of him regardless.
Despite the magic woven into Tu’ala’keth’s gear, the sun felt unpleasantly hot on her skin, and though she’d used it for years, her long trident suddenly seemed heavy. In time, she hit on the expedient of carrying it tilted over her shoulder, and that made it easier to manage… until the shaft started galling her skin.
The path climbed as the pirate haven of Immurk’s Hold itself ran upward from the harbor to higher ground. The slope made walking all the more difficult, and Tu’ala’keth’s calf muscles and the soles of her bare feet ached at the unaccustomed motion. Once she and Anton passed the fortress, she took her mind off her discomfort by peering down the streets and alleys that connected to her route. Her initial impression was that humans shared their habitations with an interesting miscellany of animals: plump, crested, strutting birds that seemed unable to truly fly no matter how frantically they flapped their wings; fat, oinking creatures rooting in muck; a smaller, shaggier, bleating animal with hooves and horns; and by far the most numerous, little brown creatures with short legs and long, hairless tails, digging and scurrying through heaps of refuse.
“Here we are,” said Anton. He led Tu’ala’keth down a quiet street so narrow the bright sun overhead left a welcome stripe of cool shade along one side. “I hope Rimardo is still in business.”
“Is this someone you trust?”
Anton grinned. “The Red Knight forbid! But the old miser knows how to cut hair and stick leeches on a festering wound, sells clothing pilfered from the dead, and despises everybody too profoundly to go out of his way to help anyone. In the Pirate Isles, that’s all you can expect of a barber.” He pushed aside the makeshift oilcloth curtain that hung in place of a door.
Rimardo’s shop proved to be a filthy one-room shack jammed full of bins, crates, and barrels. The proprietor himself, a scrawny, wrinkled, sour-faced runt of a man, sat the strapping Anton on a tall stool then had to step up on a box to reach his head. Though the spy had warned Tu’ala’keth that folk hereabouts were likely to stare at her,
