Then a huge shadow burst into view, leaping from the dock–side onto the deck of the airship in a single bound, an impossible distance. It landed in a skid, its crooked limbs scrambling to find purchase on the smooth, damp wooden planking. Ahren Elessedil and Gar Hatch, startled, turned to look at it, both of them frozen in surprise. Pen caught the sudden flash of a blade, wicked and bright, but he couldn't make himself move, either. It was Khyber who leapt up, screaming in challenge to save them all. Hands outstretched, she summoned elemental magic in the form of a wind that picked up the dark form while it was still trying to regain its balance and threw it back over the side of the vessel into the cold lake waters.
Pen and Tagwen rushed to the side of the airship and peered down. The dark figure was gone.
On the dockside, the shouts were coming closer. Torchlight flickered through the mist. «Cast off,' Ahren Elessedil snapped at Gar Hatch, «or I'll put you and your crew over the side and do it myself!»
The Rover Captain hesitated for just an instant, as if perhaps he would test this threat, then wheeled about, ordering his men to release the lines. The ropes fell away, and the airship began to drift from the dock. Pen continued to scan the waters into which the dark thing had fallen, not convinced it had given up, not persuaded it wasn't going to come at him again.
«Safety lines!» Gar Hatch snapped.
The Skatelow began to rise and the lake to drop away. Pen exhaled sharply. Still nothing. He glanced at Tagwen. The Dwarf's rugged features reflected his fear. His eyes shifted to find the boy's and he shook his head.
«Safety lines!» Hatch repeated angrily. «Young Pen! If you can spare the time, would you bring Cinnaminson into the pilot box before you secure yourself?»
Pen waved his response. He took a final look over the side before heading for the hatchway. The lake had disappeared beneath a sea of shifting mist.
Then they were flying into the night, a solitary island in the deepening gloom, leaving Anatcherae and its horrors behind.
TWENTY–THREE
Darkness had fallen, stealing away the last of the daylight. Heavy fog closed on the airship, enfolding it in a swirling gray haze. There was no difference now between up or down or even sideways to those who sailed aboard the Skatelow. Everything looked the same. The day had been dreary to begin with, washed of color and empty of sunshine, but the night was worse. The clouds were so thickly massed overhead that there was not even the smallest hint of stars or moon. Below, the waters of the Lazareen had vanished as if drained from an unplugged basin. The lights of Anatcherae had vanished minutes after their departure. The world had disappeared.
Pen brought Cinnaminson to her father. She squeezed Pen's hand as he led her along the corridor from her cabin and up the stairway to the deck, but neither of them spoke. There was too much to say and no time to say it. In the pilot box, she moved obediently to her father's side, saying as she did so, «I'm here, Papa.» Pen was dismissed, told to go below, and he moved away. But he lingered at the hatchway with Khyber and Ahren, staring out into the impenetrable fog, into the depthless night. If Cinnaminson wasn't able to navigate blind, he was thinking, they would be in trouble. There wasn't even the smallest landmark on which they could fix, no sky to read, no point of reference to track. There was nothing out there at all.
«She's her father's compass, isn't she?» Ahren asked him quietly. «His eyes in the darkness?»
He nodded, looking at the Druid in surprise. «How did you know?»
«It was nosed about at the docks in Syioned. Some say she's his good–luck charm. Some say she can see in darkness, even though she's blind in daylight. None of them have it right. I saw the way she moved the first few days we were aboard. She can sense the position of things in her mind, their location, their look and feel.»
«She said she sees the stars in her mind, even in mist and rain like this. That's how she navigates.»
«A gift,' Ahren Elessedil murmured. «But her father thinks it belongs to him because she is his child.»
Pen nodded. «He thinks she belongs to him.»
They could hear her speaking softly to her father, giving him instructions, a heading to take, a course to follow. His hands moved smoothly over the controls in response, turning the airship slightly to starboard, bringing up her bow as he did so, easing ahead through the gloom. In a less stressful situation, he might have noticed them watching and immediately ordered them below, worried that they would discover his secret. He might have refused to proceed while they remained on deck. But that night he was so preoccupied that he didn't even know they were there.
The mist thickened the farther away from land they flew, swirling like witch's brew around the airship, alive with strange shadows and unexpected movement. There was no wind, and yet the haze roiled as if there were. Pen felt uneasy at the phenomenon, not understanding how it could occur. He glanced again at Ahren Elessedil, but the Druid was staring straight ahead, his concentration focused on something else.
He was listening.
Pen listened, as well, but he couldn't hear a thing beyond the creaking of the ship's rigging. He looked to Khyber, but she shook her head to indicate that she didn't hear anything, either.
Then Pen froze. There was something after all. At first, he wasn't sure what it was. It sounded a little like breathing, deep and low, like a sleeping man exhaling, only not that, either. He furrowed his brow in concentration, trying to place it. It must be the wind, he thought. The wind, sweeping over the hull or through the rigging or along the decks. But he knew it wasn't.
The sound grew louder, crept closer, as if a sleeping giant had woken and was coming over for a look. Pen glanced quickly at Ahren, but the Druid's gaze was intense and fixed, directed outward into the mist, searching.
«Uncle?» Khyber whispered, and there was an unmistakable hint of fear in her voice.
He nodded without looking at her. «It is the lake,' he said. «It is alive.»
Pen had no idea what that meant, but he didn't like the sound of it. Lakes weren't alive in the sense that they could breathe, so why did it sound as if this one was? He tried to pick up a rhythm to the sound, but it was unsteady and sporadic, harsh and labored. The ship sailed into the teeth of it, sliding smoothly through the fog, down the giant's throat and into its belly. Pen could see it in his mind. He tried to change the picture to something less threatening, but could not.
Then abruptly, ethereal forms appeared, incomplete and hazy, riding the windless mist. They brought the sound with them, carried it in their shadowy, insubstantial bodies, bits and pieces echoing all about them as they moved. Pen shrank back as several approached, sliding over the railing and across the airship's rain–slick deck. Cinnaminson gasped and her father swore angrily, swatting ineffectually at the wraith forms.
«The dead come to visit us,' Ahren Elessedil said quietly. «This is the Lazareen, the prison of the dead who have not found their way to the netherworld and still wander the Four Lands.»
«What do they want?» Khyber whispered.
Ahren shook his head. «I don't know.»
The shades were all around the Skatelow, sweeping through her rigging like birds. The breathing grew louder, filling their ears, a windstorm of trouble building to something terrible. Slowly, steadily, vibrations began to shake the airship, causing the rigging to hum and the spars to rattle. Pen felt them all the way down to his bones. Seconds later, its pitch shifted to a frightening howl, a wail that engulfed them in an avalanche of sound. Pen went to his knees, racked with pain. The wail tightened like a vise around his head, crushing his ineffectual defenses. In the pilot box, in a futile effort to keep the sound at bay, Cinnaminson doubled over, her hands clapped over her ears. Gar Hatch was howling in fury, fighting to remain in control of the airship but losing the battle.
«Do something!» Khyber screamed at everyone and no one in particular, her eyes squeezed shut, her face twisted.
Like the legendary Sirens, the shades were driving the humans aboard the Skatelow mad. Their voices would paralyze the sailors, strip them of their sanity, and leave them catatonic. Already, Pen could feel himself losing control, his efforts at protecting his hearing and his mind failing. If he had the wishsong, he thought, he might have a way to fight back. But he had no defense against this, no magic to combat it. Nor did any of them,
