released. Tristan left the keys with the merman and returned to dispatch the monster with another thrust to its brain. By the time he finished, Marqillor had succeeded in working himself free of the final bracket.
'Thank you, friend,' said the merman, using his long tail and his hands to propel himself over to Tristan and the troll. He looked up at the human for a moment. 'You wait here,' he said, and then he slipped silently into the water and disappeared.
For a moment, Tristan was too shocked by the merman's disappearance to react, and by then it was too late. All he saw were the spreading rings on the surface of the pool.
And then once again, beside him, the sea troll began to stir.
The secret passages through the coral reefs would have been impossible to find, according to Brandon, without the guidance of the sea elf Palentor.
'The thing is, they look like shallows,' the Prince of Gnarhelm explained in amazement. 'And what looks like the passage as often as not is studded with those great spires of rock or coral. That's what caught us on the way in.'
The Prince of Gnarhelm had been garrulous and friendly since they had departed from Evermeet, as if on their last night together he and Alicia had settled all of their doubts. To the princess, however, the situation was exactly the reverse. The unease she had felt before was magnified tenfold now, into a raging chorus of tension and anxiety.
Her disquiet increased as she began to suspect how much her dalliance with Brandon had hurt Keane. The magic-user had spoken barely two sentences to her since they had boarded the ship, but she noticed him looking at her frequently, though he dropped his eyes quickly whenever she tried to meet his gaze. His unhappiness brought guilt into Alicia's emotional maelstrom, and finally she devoted herself to the voyage, spending a great deal of her time in the bow, watching the sea elves guide them through the narrow channels and gaps.
For two days, the
So far they seemed to have been successful. There had been sign of neither scrag nor sahuagin. Frequently a blanket of thin mist obscured the reaches of the sea, further securing their progress from detection.
Now Alicia couldn't wait to get on with their task, across the open sea and then. . down. None of them had talked about it very much, but they all felt some apprehension about the efficacy of the Helm of Zulae. Of course they believed it would work-otherwise the entire mission would have gone for nothing-but nevertheless, the unnatural method of travel couldn't help but disturb sailors used only to the sunswept expanse of the surface.
The horizontal rudder installed by Knaff trailed behind them, just above the water level so it wouldn't impede their progress on the surface. Yet a disturbing fact was forcibly reminded to each voyager when they saw the silver helmet gleaming in the middle of the hull. They would be voluntarily
Still, progress remained steady, and always the heavy bank of land lay to the west. Then on the second day out from the grotto, they began to notice that the land swept away, no longer running north to south but instead commencing a great curve away from them-the southern terminus of Evermeet. A low, rocky horizon loomed to the south-the Guardian Isle of Belintholme, according to the sea elf.
'Sail due south for two or three hours from here,' Palentor instructed the Prince of Gnarhelm, Brandon. 'That'll take you beyond the reefs. Then you can swing your course around to the east and a little south.'
'Aye-and thanks,' grunted the northman. Brandon had come to respect the sea elf mightily. Also, he fully understood the value of his guidance on this embarkation, for it had saved them from the pitched battle that would have inevitably ensued if they had sailed straight east.
'It-it has been my pleasure,' replied Palentor, with apparent sincerity. He and Trillhalla took a few moments to say good-bye to the others in the crew, and then the sea elves disappeared over the side into the mottled waters.
For a few moments, they watched the pair until they vanished. Then, favored by a strong westerly wind, with the sea before them calm and inviting, the
Darkness shrouded the longship, though a dim phosphorescence gleamed in the white water pushed aside by her racing bow. The sail stretched taut, pressed by a steady wind, and Brandon himself had the rudder as they charged through the night. It was a few hours after sunset on the first day of their return to the open sea. Belintholme had vanished astern sometime during the afternoon.
The Prince of Gnarhelm fixed his eyes upon the waters ahead, and the sleepy lookouts, too, kept their attention on the ocean surface surrounding the boat. None looked for trouble in the shadowed confines of the hull.
But that was where Luge stirred, once again kindled to the task that he did not understand-or even acknowledge, once the morning sun crested the horizon. Now the little northman crept to the gunwale, undetected by his comrades. His hand reached into the secret pouch, removing one of the tiny bells, as it had done every night of their outbound voyage from Gwynneth. In a quick motion, he cast the object over the side and crept back to his bench.
Below and behind the speeding longship, sinking steadily into the depths of the ocean, the tiny bell began to ring.
The vast undersea army hovered in its screen, stretching more than two hundred miles along Evermeet's coast. Creatures of the deep, the sahuagin and scrags kept their distance from the coastal shallows around that great island. The deadly defenses of the sea elves were well known to these aquatic raiders. Nevertheless, they formed a solid cordon along the drop-off, where the coastal shallows plummeted into ocean depth.
Coss-Axell-Sinioth slipped along the length of the great formation, unable to dispel a sense of unease, although he was pleased with the alertness, the barely contained killing frenzy, he saw among his minions. His huge squid body loomed great among the teeming scrags and sahuagin, and an escort of giant barracuda cleared the waters before the avatar wherever he went.
The remaining Manta Sinioth held in the center of the line, crewed by his most powerful sahuagin and several elite corps of sea trolls. Krell-Bane himself, the monstrous sea troll, captained the great raft. The army was poised and ready, prepared to strike any place along that vast front.
Of course, there was a possibility that the longship had been sunk, but it was a likelihood Coss-Axell-Sinioth did not believe. This belief had nothing to do with sensing the life-force of his enemies or anything like that. Instead, the feeling owed its persistence to Sinioth's sense of destiny: He couldn't believe the issue would be settled without a direct battle between the human foe and his own undersea minions.
The sound of the bell thrumming its basso resonance far to the south came as a rude shock to the avatar of evil. The humans were afloat-and more significantly, they had somehow slipped past his great army!
Immediately Sinioth mustered his minions, sending them in a great swarm following in the wake of the elusive and speeding longship. The avatar pictured the rage of Talos should his quarry escape them, and he drove his creatures with brutal lashes of his tentacles.
Then, a day later, another bell followed, and a third on the night after that. The three bells formed a perfectly straight line, and Sinioth had no difficulty drawing that line to its inevitable destination: the underwater city of Kyrasti, the heart of the Coral Kingdom.
Grimly Coss-Axell-Sinioth left the army of the deep under the command of Krell-Bane. The sea troll king pursued the
The giant squid, meanwhile, sped southeastward at speeds that far exceeded those that even the Manta could travel. Sinioth would go to Kyrasti, there to prepare for the approaching threat.
