Japheth replied, his voice growing surer, 'I saw only kuo-toa converging, no kraken small or great.'
'Well… maybe we ain't all dead!' exclaimed Thoster. A small grin chased away worry lines with deeper grooves. 'Fish-men I can handle. No offense, Nogah.' The captain turned to face the stairs, his blade whirring and clicking like a hungry insect.
Unless the kraken has come in the meantime, thought the warlock. Better be sure.
Japheth projected an arcane summons into the space hidden within his cloak, to his hidden fortress, shadow-drenched Darroch Castle. The call roused those he sought from their lightless roosts. Crying and chirping their eagerness in registers higher than men could hear, they emerged as a dark swarm from Japheth's billowing cloak.
Seren and Nogah both exclaimed in tones surprisingly similar for such disparate family trees. Thoster, familiar with the warlock's many abilities, grinned wider.
The cloud of flapping black motes arced straight into the wall of mist, immediately lost to sight.
But bats did not rely on eyes alone, and now, neither did Japheth. Nay, he was the bat swarm. Closing his eyes on the tower interior, he opened his perceptions to the audibly sculpted, texture-defined world the bats inhabited.
His fingers, grown long and composed only of sound, caressed the tower as its rounded sides fell away behind. The wet, uncertain boundary of the sea lapped up from below. Bipeds with large, noise-muffling eyes and hard scales scampered from the water's edges up the beach of sound-scattering sand, to join their brethren already snorting and giggling at the tower's base.
Japheth directed the darting swarm out over the water. His touch-sight stretched down to pat the sea's inconstant surface. The water was impenetrable, but its fluid, ever-changing nature betrayed the shapes of what lay beneath. Mostly, that was bulging swells of water that rolled endlessly to the shore, there to break and froth on the sand. But the swarm also discerned schools of fish as small mounds sliding along the surface, the edges of a half- formed coral reef, and what might even be a drowned shipwreck.
Nowhere could he perceive what he most feared to discover: great, sinuous bulges in the water hinting at tentacles hundreds or more feet in length, or a great bulblike central body with a brain more ancient than the founding of Impiltur. Japheth had seen pictures of kraken in the Candlekeep stacks.
He found no evidence of such a shape, but something else was fast approaching.
A handful of ballista-like shapes arrowed through the water. They left V-shaped wakes behind each one's single high fin that pierced the boundary into air. Sharks, and big ones. Worryisomely, the contours of reflected sound revealed each bore a rider, but the swirling seawater foiled him from teasing out real shape from fancy.
The swarm veered closer, darting down to intersect the line of the onrushing fins.
Japheth saw a warty arm rise from the water and point. He had just a heartbeat to study it, to recognize that its oozing, sound-absorbing flesh wasn't the scaled arm of a kuo-toa, before pain cut his connection to the swarm.
He opened his eyes, his mouth dry.
'What?' said Captain Thoster.
'Kuo-toa, maybe twenty. Well, maybe they're not exactly kuo-toa; they looked warped somehow. And, I think… a covey of water witches.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Green Siren on the Sea of Fallen Stars
The slushy, damp patter of kuo-toa feet on the stairs knifed terror through Anusha. She instinctively tried to get away-
The girl woke in her flesh body as if from a nightmare, breathing hard and struggling to sit up.
Pain smote her forehead. Dazed, she fell back, blinking in darkness broken only by a ruler-straight thread of light that ran from near her left temple down past her left foot. It was the seam of the travel chest's lid, in which her body slept away her dream travels. Not for the first time, she imagined it was like this inside a sarcophagus. Unlike most sarcophagus residents, though, she could leave whenever she wanted.
She slid open the custom-installed bolt that unlatched the lid from inside. With only a little effort, she pushed away the covering. Brightness brought tears to her eyes. Even though the light from the cabin's porthole was dimmed by mist, she had to squint.
The roiling fog beyond the porthole was the same mist she'd seen rushing across the water to blockade Hegruth Island. The same mist that cloaked the scaled, fishy kuo-toa as they converged on the tower.
Her cheeks warmed. They couldn't have hurt her, or probably even seen her. Yet she had done the equivalent of scream and run. Had Japheth seen her depart in fear? She hoped not. He probably had.
'Am I such an infant, to flee at the first hint of danger?' she wondered aloud. 'You can do better.'
A gurgle of hunger diverted her self-rebuke.
With one hand, she grabbed a piece of unwrapped hardtack from the clutter on the adjoining cot. Her other hand sought the wineskin Japheth had also provided. She bit and chewed the stale, unsalted biscuit-like texture, moistening it with the watered-down wine. She had incorrectly supposed that spending most of her time lying still and dreaming would cut her appetite by half or more. Instead, the yawning chasm in her stomach told her she must eat, if she was going to launch yet another dream walk. The activity seemed to suck far more out of her than a natural dream. Already her clothing was becoming loose and baggy. If she didn't increase her food intake, she would waste away to a dream in truth.
Anusha choked down the last of the biscuit, took another pull on the skin, and then pulled the lid closed as she reclined back into the travel chest.
After several rafts of empty moments floated past, she recognized the hard truth her body already knew.
She wasn't the least bit sleepy.
'Oh, please!' she whispered fiercely, frustration making her voice shrill.
She spent a few more moments attempting to control her breathing and calm her thoughts. It simply wasn't working. Her heart still pounded with the memory of kuo-toa on the tower stairs.
Her hand moved almost of its own accord, feeling through the things she kept with her in the chest. She found the cold silver vial Japheth had provided two days earlier. The 'elixir of somnolence,' he'd called it.
A drug, she knew it to be in truth. One she was on the cusp of taking, despite her disdain for Japheth's habit.
'No time for prissiness,' she remonstrated. She twisted off the lid and brought the cold vial to her lips. The taste of blackberries bloomed across her tongue, and her lips tingled as if she'd bitten into a mint leaf. Recalling Japheth's words about counting down from ten, Anusha quickly re-stoppered the vial.
She didn't feel any different. Had he given her colored water? Perhaps the warlock- everything blurred away.
She stood outside the travel chest, intangible as a hallucination.
Japheth's potion wasn't colored water that was certain.
Anusha rushed from the cabin, slap through the door without pausing. The guard dog, Lucky, still standing vigil in the narrow hallway, yipped and wagged his tail. She took a moment to pat his head, saying, 'I'll bring you a treat later, I promise!'
She emerged from below the stern deck onto the main deck. The crew stood in disorderly groups, weapons in hand, glancing nervously into the impenetrable vapor that pressed in on all sides. The high masts poked up into a ceiling of white, fluffy film. It was as if the entire ship was cocooned in a great down pillow.
Now what? Could she swim in her condition? Walk along» the bottom? Her dream form didn't need to breathe. She sup-1 posed she could pass through water as easily as solid walls.,|
A crewman at the starboard railing suddenly gasped f out a surprised oath. He pointed over the deck. He yelled, 'Something's coming out of the soup!'
Anusha and several pirates joined the man at the Tailing.
A woman emerged from the fog. She balanced on some sort of low raft, narrow and long, adorned with a
