The Coral Kingdom

darkness, and Luge had yet to perform his duty. Not understanding why, he grew more and more agitated as time passed. Now he tried to maintain the pace of his oar while slipping a hand into his tunic, fumbling at the concealed pocket.

'Careful, by Tempus!' snarled a fellow sailor as Luge's oar collided with his neighbor's.

'Sorry,' he grunted, turning to nod at the grumbling northman. At the same time, he placed his hand on the gunwale and allowed the tiny bell to drop into the water.

Immediately it began to ring.

The wind had abandoned them completely, Alicia told herself when she awakened to the pale blue light of predawn. An utterly still expanse of water surrounded them. It was too dark to see very far, but she had to wonder about the presence of the twin rafts.

Diffused light gave way to a banner of sunrise on the horizon, and details became apparent up to a mile away, and then two, except that there were no details, save for the eternal calm of the sea.

Then they could see three miles, and at the same time, they discovered the rafts. No one had to announce the observation; it was silently shared by every person on the ship. The two flat slabs came at them like huge, implacable sharks. They were close enough for the crew to hear the snapping of wide, fishlike jaws, and the slicing noise of the two massive rafts' passage over the water.

Not a breath of wind stirred the flat, seemingly endless sea. The only waves were the twin plumes cast by the Princess of Moonshae. The vessel, despite the efforts of the straining oarsmen, seemed to labor only with great reluctance through the water. In the hush, the rhythmic cadence of the sea beasts' paddling came to them, a dull pulsing that moved through the sea, sounding a beat of approaching doom.

'Stroke, you miserable lubbers!' shouted Brandon, but men could not increase their effort when it was already strained to the maximum. A martial chord suddenly rang through the air as Tavish again raised her harp, the need for stealth past. The playing of that enchanted weapon filled the weary sailors with strength, and once again the longship moved with a feeling approaching speed.

Yet it was not enough. After a few minutes of watching, it became apparent that the monsters still closed the gap between them.

'How did those devils find us?' spat the Prince of Gnarhelm, glaring to the rear as if his anger alone could incinerate the bizarre rafts.

'Through the dark of the night, no less,' Alicia agreed. Subconsciously she looked for Keane. It seemed that now, with disaster so near at hand, the wizard was the only one who could offer them a chance of escape.

But he wasn't even paying attention. The princess saw him in the prow, peering before them, studying the flat water in their path. The mage's posture, his whole attitude, depicted raw tension. Abruptly he pulled a small vial of dust from a pouch of his robe and pinched a small portion of it between a finger and thumb. Then he let the dust fly, at the same time chanting the command words for a spell.

Alicia noticed that many of the crewmen were also watching the mage-as if they expect him to pull some kind of miraculous rabbit from his hat, she thought with annoyance. Then she realized with a flash of shame that she had been doing the same thing.

Abruptly all thoughts of salvation from that quarter were dashed when the mage stiffened, then whirled back to face Brandon and Knaff the Elder, who still manned the helm.

'Turn!' shrieked Keane, more agitated than Alicia had ever seen him. 'That way-turn left!' He pointed, the tension in his body transferred in full to his voice. 'Now, if you value your lives!'

Knaff hesitated a moment, looking to Brandon, but the captain didn't question the mage's warning. 'Do it!' he bellowed, and the helmsman threw the rudder hard to port.

At her leisurely speed, the Princess of Moonshae didn't heel or rock from the force of the turn. Instead, the longship meandered through a sweeping, gradual change of direction. To Alicia, it seemed as though they were mired in mud. She stared at Keane, at the calm sea beyond him, and wondered if he had lost his mind.

A danger of the turn became apparent when she looked backward. The two broad rafts seemed much closer, and now, with the longship sailing across their path instead of away from them, they seemed to advance with shocking speed.

Then she became aware of a sound or vibration-an ominous rumble so deep that Alicia felt rather than heard it. The others, too, sensed the disturbance. All talk ceased, and even the oarsmen cocked their ears at the water as they strained with redoubled efforts toward their task. Alicia saw, with a sickening sense of shock, that the faces of many of the veteran seamen had blanched with terror.

The Princess of Moonshae began to tremble with a vibration that could no longer be doubted. It seized the vessel as if in a giant fist, and the longship quivered helplessly in its grasp. Still Alicia couldn't hear any audible noise, but the rumbling sensation reached into the pit of her stomach.

Then, finally, beginning like the roll of distant thunder, carried like an echo across a series of ridges, the sound came. Swiftly the rumbling gained force, and the hull of the ship shook so that it seemed as if the planks must soon be torn from the hull.

Tavish pounded her harp, tearing across the strings with her fingers, and the music rose up as if to challenge this unnatural disturbance. But it was no contest.

The only consolation came with a look to the rear. The two rafts of sea creatures were drifting as the monsters looked this way and that, obviously seeking the source of the same rumbling that afflicted the longship.

'At least we know they're not causing it,' the princess remarked to Brigit, who once again stood beside her.

'They seem to be as worried as we are,' the elfwoman agreed. 'Though I'm not sure that's good news.'

The momentum of the rafts had carried them well forward, into the same area where Keane had first sounded the alarm. Now they came about, veering to port so as to continue to close with the Princess of Moonshae. Like the humans, however, the aquatic monsters remained preoccupied with the mysterious vibrations that seemed to disturb this whole area of the sea.

'Look! On the surface, there!' shouted Keane, pointing toward the waters at the rear.

'Under the water!' Brand corrected. 'Something's moving-fast!'

At first, they wondered if it might not be another of the flat rafts, for the appearance of bubbles and movement beneath the water was reminiscent of their arrival. In the stress of the moment, no one remembered that there had been no vibration preceding their surfacing. The current phenomenon also seemed to affect a larger area of water.

The rafts drove closer, propelled by the paddles once again, as the sahuagin and scrags who weren't rowing stood up on their platforms and brandished weapons and fists toward the humans. A trap was about to close. One raft approached the Princess from dead astern, while the other closed from the port quarter.

And then the Princess of Moonshae pitched violently forward, her stern rising into the air, lifted by a powerful force from below. The longship shot ahead, sliding down a frothing wall of white water as if the ocean had been turned on edge. Spray flew upward, propelled by some massive undersea explosion, and a shower of water spilled into the rear of the suddenly careening longship.

The sea behind them continued to rise, swirling into the air, spewing a shower of brine to all side's but continuing to spin upward in a huge, towering column of seawater. A dark shape appeared in the liquid pillar. The raft directly behind the long-ship had been seized in the whirlpool and dragged upward with the force of the rising water.

'The Cyclones of Evermeet!' shouted Alicia.

Abruptly another of the great columns spewed upward from before them, and then a third and a fourth spouted from the surface. More and more of the vast, churning pillars of seawater spumed skyward, each more than a hundred paces across and apparently cylindrical all the way up the frothing surface. Water sprayed out from each, creating a drenching shower wherever the companions turned. Obviously the water thus lost was replaced, for the columns seemed to grow still larger as the awestruck witnesses watched.

Five hundred feet above them, the column of water spewed out the great raft. The flat vessel had swirled