'I have salve,' Eshono said, changing the subject. He retrieved a pot from beneath his hammock. 'I got it from one of the lubber temples. It's not as good as Auld Dessinha made, but it seals you up. This one's almost empty. Take what's left, if you wish.'
Eshono had lost so much meat to the shark that his wound would never quite heal. His over-taut skin seeped and cracked whenever he exerted himself. He went through pots of salve and had become a connoisseur of priests, healers, and potions.
Shemsen, who'd been slashed to the bone in several places, accepted the fist-sized pot. 'I'm going out.'
'So soon? Your body needs rest-'
'My mind needs it more. I'll be back when I'm back.' Shemsen took up his trident and kicked toward the open corner of the netting. He was halfway through before turning back to say, 'Thanks for the salve. You're a good man, Eshono. Don't follow me.'
'I wouldn't ever,' Eshono assured him, a look of boyish anxiety across his face. 'Be careful, Shemsen. We're so few now. Everyone's precious.'
Shemsen kicked free of the niche. His thoughts were heavy, and he sank down and down, until he passed the deepest of the niches. Here, a man needed a lantern to see past his own feet, unless his eyes weren't his only navigation senses. Of course, such a man who didn't rely on his eyes, even though he might look exactly like a sea elf, couldn't possibly be a sea elf.
Shemsen daubed a bit of Eshono's paste on the least of his gouges. A man who wasn't a sea elf couldn't tolerate Auld Dessinha's salves. But a lubber's salve-a pitchy salve that stung but didn't burn-wouldn't harm him if it didn't harm Eshono. Shemsen slathered his wounds and let the emptied jar sink to the harbor bottom. When the sting was gone, he swam away.
Ships cast shadows through the water. Shemsen hid in darkness until he reached the main channel. Stealth, even deception, was habit with his kind. No one, including Eshono, suspected him. Entering Waterdeep for the first time, he'd been touched by one of Faerun's mighty mages-all the refugees were before they were granted sanctuary. He'd raised his heartbeat, relaxed his skin, and expected to die, but the mage had passed him through.
And why not? In the water and above, most folk didn't believe his kind could exist. A sahuagin shaped like a sea elf? That was a cautionary tale for disobedient children. Among sahuagin, the elf-shaped malenti were tolerated, rarely, because sahuagin needed spies. Even among sahuagin the elf shape was accounted a curse rather than a blessing. Hatchlings were swum through the gardens where malenti quartered and trained.
Give glory to Sekolah that He provides all that His worshipers need to serve Him. Give thanks to Sekolah that He did not shape me malenti.
The word itself meant 'grotesque' and Sekolah in His wisdom, if not His mercy, understood that malenti torment should not endure for long. The elf-shape was lethal. By the measure of sun and tide, Shemsen was younger than Eshono, yet Eshono was counted a youth and Shemsen for a man nearing the end of his prime. In his bones, Shemsen felt older still.
Merfolk appeared overhead. Pilots, it was their job to guide the ships through the channel to open water. Shemsen dived to avoid the eddies as the rudder beat against the estuary current. Safe below the roiled water, he swam toward Deepwater Isle, and the underwater lighthouse that marked the rift called Umberlee's Cache.
With Fleetswake scarcely a tenday away, folk of all types were making preparations for the moment when Waterdeep made its annual gift to Umberlee, Goddess of the Sea. Twenty barges, maybe more, had been lashed and anchored into a ring above the lighthouse. Already they rode low in the water, laden with offerings from landlubbers and sailors, guilds and shops, wizards and priests.
It was no different below. Most of the sea folk passed their tokens up to the barges or tied them to the great funnel net being strung even now below the hulls. On Pleetswake Eve, when the offerings were cast into the water, every sea-dweller would swim to the net and make sure nothing drifted free. There was no worse omen than a gift meant for Umberlee not falling into Her Cache.
Lubbers arranged their pantheon in alliances and tried-for the sake of their fears-to bind Umberlee in a controllable place. Those who dwelt in the sea knew better. No sea-dweller worshiped the Queen of the
Oceans. She was the oceans personified, and She always triumphed.
Net weavers hailed Shemsen as he approached. Did he know where he was? Was he lost? Inebriated? Bent on self-destruction? He told them, in words gleaned from the rough edges of the harbor, to tend their own affairs. A few responded in kind. A sea elf-a woman he didn't know-hauled the funnel net aside, allowing him to swim through an as-yet-unsewn seam.
'Peace to you,' she called from above. 'Peace for your pain.'
The words were not a traditional sea elf greeting. Shemsen was impervious to those. By the time he'd left the sahuagin garden to steal a place in a sea elf village, he'd known all their traditions and despised them without exception. For almost a century he'd lived among them, his malaise and nausea relieved only when he slipped away to drop a cunningly knotted string where another sahuagin might find it. He wore his orders around his neck and the sea elves- the thrice-damned fools-admired his treachery so much they'd ask him to fashion similar ornaments for them.
Then, on a moonless night when the sea had been too quiet, miasma, like ink from all the cuttlefish that had ever swum, had descended on the village. It clung to gills and nostrils alike. Suffocation wasn't the worst part. The miasma had talons, or teeth, or knives- Shemsen never knew which. He never saw what slashed at him. He'd assumed it was some new boon the sahuagin priestesses had sought from Sekolah. Certainly, he'd survived because he was sahuagin, tougher than any sea elf and blessed with true senses beneath his malenti skin.
Shemsen had expected to find sahuagin beyond the miasma, but there were only sharks so wrought with blood frenzy that no malenti could hope to dominate them. It had taken Shemsen's remaining strength to resist their call as they tore through the sea elf survivors. He couldn't say, then or now, why he'd resisted, except that however much Shemsen had despised his neighbors, he hadn't wanted to be anyone's last living vision.
Exhausted from his private battle, he'd fallen to the sea floor in a stupor. When he'd opened his eyes again the miasma was gone and he was neither alone nor among sahuagin. A handful of villagers had survived. They were numb and aimless with grief. Shemsen had easily made himself their leader and led them west with the prevailing current, toward the sahuagin village he hadn't seen in decades. He anticipated the honor that would fall around his shoulders when he, a malenti, finished what the miasma and sharks had left undone.
Ten days later, they swam above deserted, ruined coral gardens. A year, at least, had passed since Shemsen's kin had swum through their ancient home and he, suddenly more alone than he'd imagined possible, did not tell his look-alike companions what had happened. True, there had been no entwined instructions waiting for him the previous spring, but that hadn't been unusual. In Shemsen's centuries of spying on the sea elves, he'd often gone four years, even five or six without contact. He'd never considered that something might be wrong.
He'd never know what happened to his kin. If there'd been survivors, none had thought to leave him a message. Shemsen didn't think there had been sur vivors. Knowing what had been there, he saw the scars of violence and destruction. Sahuagin did war against each other, for the glory of Sekolah, who decreed that only the best, the strongest and boldest, were meant to survive, but in none of the many tales Shemsen knew by heart did sahuagin abandon what they'd won or lay it to waste.
It had seemed possible that both villages, sahuagin and sea elf, had fallen to an unknown enemy, a shared enemy. A mortal mind did not want to imagine an enemy that was shared by sahuagin and sea elves.
Shemsen hadn't embraced the sea elves that day above the ruined sahuagin village. Neither compassion nor mourning were part of the sahuagin nature, which was Shemsen's nature, if not his shape. Still, a sahuagin alone was nothing and faced with a choice between nothing and sea elves, Shemsen chose the elves. He made them his own, his sacred cause, and led them north, to fabled Waterdeep. By the time they arrived, his loathing had been transformed into something that approached friendship.
So he rolled over in the water and called, 'And peace with you, for your pain,' to the woman before making himself heavy in the water.
Shemsen had heard that as recently as sixteen years ago, the Cache was a maelstrom that spewed or sucked, depending on the tide, and chewed up any ship unfortunate enough to blunder across it. Then the merfolk had arrived in Waterdeep. In the name of safety, their shamans had gotten rid of the maelstrom and poked a ship- sized hole in a goddess's bedchamber.
