Yet even that fact paled against the significance of the ruptured bow. Water gushed around their knees, rising higher every second.
It seemed clear to them all that the
Through Deirdre's mirror, Talos observed the escape of the human prisoner, and vengeance against his servant's failure crystallized into determination in his evil, immortal mind. His presence, always a shadow when the princess used the crystal, now formed into a conscious thought-knowledge that he projected into the young woman's mind.
'His name. .' came the voice of Talos. Deirdre stiffened, frightened yet at the same time intensely thrilled. She felt the touch from beyond her world, beyond her existence, and she knew that a source of great power reached her.
'His name is Coss-Axell-Sinioth.'
The voice faded, but Deirdre's attention had already fixed on a plan-a plan that she could at last put into action.
Finally, now, she had her weapon.
19
Painfully Hanrald grasped at another step, and then one more, pulling himself up as he had for the last half hour-one stone stair at a time. The deep wound in his side wracked his body with waves of agony. He had no idea how much blood he had lost, but from the amount of the crimson liquid that continued to drift around him, he knew that he must be pretty thoroughly drained.
But Brigit still wouldn't leave him. He had tried again to persuade her, halfway up the agonizing climb, when he had been convinced that he couldn't make it. Again she had insisted that she would wait until he was ready. Ultimately the only course left to the earl-the only way to save the elfwoman-was to make this climb.
Meanwhile the sister knight defended them both, fighting below him on the stairway, backing up the steps, holding the scrags at bay if they tried to pursue too closely. Fortunately the great beasts usually hung well back, having learned several painful lessons about the Synnorian warrior's skill with her keen elven steel.
During the duration of his climb, Hanrald noticed steadily growing illumination above him, the promise of escape that had kept him moving, had brought him back from the edge of utter despair. The steps were very steep, and he knew that he had climbed more than a hundred, though he had forgotten to keep an exact count, a fact that he chided himself about as he neared the top.
Finally Hanrald came around a spiral in the staircase that ended in an aperture above him-a rectangular gap that was the source of the pale green light, the illumination that had drawn him this far. Cautiously he raised his head through the hole, discovering that they had indeed reached the top of a tower. Aqua-colored seawater surrounded him, stretching to the far limits of the horizon. Above-and so terribly, impossibly far away-he could see the sun-dappled reflections of the surface.
Without hesitation, the knight crawled onto the floor of the flat stone platform that capped the tower, finding a circle no more than twelve feet across, lofted more than a hundred feet above the floor of the sea. He saw that the tower stood proudly at the rim of the great undersea bowl. Below him, some distance away, he made out the multidomed structure of the huge palace.
Among the towers and domes of that edifice, he observed many companies of scrags and sahuagin, mere dots in the water at this distance. Hanrald crouched flat on the exposed surface, thankful that, for the moment at least, none of the monsters seemed to notice the human's presence. Instead, they swarmed about the palace, clearly focused on an enemy closer to hand.
Brigit scrambled out of the opening beside him and looked back down the stairway. 'The scrags are just down the stairs,' she warned. 'They have no intention of letting us get away.'
'Look!' cried Hanrald, spotting a heavy metal trapdoor lying open beside the entrance. With great effort, the two of them lifted the portal and dropped it over the opening, where they swiftly bolted the barrier shut.
'Rest for a moment,' the sister knight said quietly, and for once, the man needed no coaxing. He slumped, all but unconscious, onto the flat coral surface.
The elf stood up and studied their surroundings. Sunlight brightened the surface of the sea, reflecting from the waves like multiple facets of diamonds, still at least three hundred feet above her. Many spires like the one they now occupied rose around them, and she noticed numerous shell-covered, domed structures dotting the rolling surface of the great reef below.
A swarm of creatures near the largest of these domes caught her attention, and she saw bubbles and turbulence in the water there. Then a familiar shape-the longship! — moving slowly, emerged from the turbulence. Even from this distance, a mile or more away, it seemed to Brigit that the
Still, the elfwoman's heart filled with renewed hope. She leaped to her feet, her silver breastplate gleaming in the bright water, and frantically began to wave.
'We're sinking!' Brandon snarled from the stern, angrily watching seawater flood into the longship's hull. It seemed to him a cruel irony: A powerful magical barrier protected the ship from tons of water weighing heavily above them, yet a simple gash in the planking seemed likely to doom them all to a watery grave. Already the vessel wallowed sluggishly, and in a few more minutes, she would inevitably become too heavy to rise through the sea.
Alicia noticed, for the first time since they had broken free of the dome, that the lanky figure of her changestaff had crawled back into the bow of the longship. It perched, like a gigantic mantis, near the figurehead, as if it tried to crouch out of the way of the frantic voyagers in the hull.
Her mind seized upon a desperate idea, and it was obvious no one else had another plan to suggest. 'There!' the princess commanded, speaking to the creature of wood, the powerful servant of the goddess. . and herself. Would it comprehend? The princess pointed to the gash in the ship's hull, addressing the animated tree. 'Can you seal that hole-stop the leak?'
Slowly, deliberately, the creature extended a limb into the water gushing through the gap, and then another. Finally it reached into the hole with its remaining branches, gaining solid purchase on the outside of the hull. Then those sturdy limbs contracted, pulling the trunk of the tree into the long, narrow crack, compressing the flow of water until the spurting leak had slowed to no more than a thin trickle. The changestaff pressed itself even more tightly into the gap, blending into the planks of the hull, and in another moment, the leak stopped entirely.
'By the gods!' Knaff grunted in gruff appreciation. 'We might make it yet!'
They had no time for congratulations, however. A quick look in any direction showed huge schools of swimming scrags and sahuagin, rapidly closing in to attack. Columns of sea trolls formed the vanguard of the onrushing force, while vast waves of sahuagin followed quickly in the wake of their larger cousins. The creatures might have been schools of minnows when viewed from a distance, but they rapidly closed the gap, quickly expanding to more menacing dimensions.
It seemed the creatures of the sea had the
The air in the magically enclosed longship continued to grow increasingly foul. The crew had been underwater for nearly a full day, and the strain showed on faces streaked with sweat, mouths hanging open, reflexively gasping for oxygen that was not to be had.
And yet, under these conditions, the northmen and Ffolk prepared to fight their most desperate battle yet. Never before had they encountered nearly the number of beasts that now swarmed toward them. Above and below
