Realms of War

Rytagir walked precisely one hundred thirty-two strides north, northeast of Azure Kestrel's position. He'd gotten the cog's precise position from the stars the night before. The sea harbored her secrets well, and the seeker who went there had to know where to look to find them. Then he ended the spell and sank like a stone beneath the waves.

2

The cold sea leached the warmth from Rytagir's body as he sank. He felt the pressure growing as he slid unimpeded toward the bottom a hundred and ten feet below. Fish swam around him, but there were no sharks. Small fish swimming freely in the area was a good sign because it meant there were no large predators around.

He reached under his leather breastplate and took out the small silk bag that rested on a necklace. A pearl, a simple white ball no larger than the nail of his little finger, mounted on a plain white gold chain rested inside. He took the necklace out and slipped it over his head.

When the necklace was in place, the pearl gleamed with spun moonlight for just a moment, and Rytagir opened his mouth and breathed. Instead of the sea, he breathed in air magically extracted from the sea. He no longer dropped toward the ocean bottom either. He hung suspended, free to make any move he wanted to.

The pearl was a gift from a sirine he'd met while exploring the Dragon Reach near Ravens Bluff in Impiltur. Most sirines tended to be destructive and often led sailors onto rocks and reefs while teasing them with their nearly naked, beautiful bodies and heartbreaking songs.

This one had been different. She'd been scared and helpless against the slavers that had taken her captive. Then, as now, Rytagir had been searching for a legendary ship taken to the bottom.

That time, he hadn't found his prize. However, he had managed to rescue the sirine from her captors. As a gift for res shy;cuing his daughter, her father had given Rytagir the enchanted pearl to aid in his diving.

For a time, he'd dwelt among them. In the end, as always, he'd had to leave to find the next mystery, the next nearly forgotten thing. It was his life and he was sure it would be until the day he died.

A horrible death, probably, he reminded himself as he hung weightless in the sea.

Even those bad thoughts didn't weigh him down. The pearl's magic also allowed him to move however he wished in the water with no regard to depth or natural buoyancy. Without the spell, his leather armor would have dragged him to his doom if he couldn't shed himself of it in time, though the armor was enchanted as well. The armor's enchantment protected the leather from the damaging effects of seawater and also allowed him to free it from his body at a word-which was something he was loath to do because it was a very expensive and hard to replace garment.

He fanned his arms and legs as though swimming. When he'd pointed himself downward, he swam down into the darkness of the sea.

Peilam's Nose lay mired in sand on the ocean bottom on her port side. She was a large cargo ship that had sailed from the Old Empires to the Dragonmere to trade with Cormyr. Her home port had been Skuld, along the Mulhorandi coastline.

According to the texts Rytagir had read-a ship's log, a merchant's journal, and two reports dictated to the Skuld merchantmen's guild because some of the cargo aboard the lost ship had belonged to the king and an accounting had had to be made-Peilam's Nose had been attacked by a sahuagin raiding party.

The ship's mage and a contingent of guardsmen aboard hadn't stood a chance against the sea devils. The sailors were slain to a man, and the ship's mage gutted and flown from a cross timber of the main mast. Most of the crew had been eaten by the sahuagin.

After that, Peilam's Nose had been scuttled and sent to the bottom more than eight hundred miles away. It had taken Rytagir almost a month to plot her probable course once she'd gone under.

One of the old bardic songs that had fallen out of favor in the Inner Sea also contained a germ of truth about the attack. Rytagir's interest had first been caught by that song while in the Tattered Sails Tavern in Milvarune in Thesk almost a year earlier. He had been there researching some of the villages that had been left in ruins by the Tuigan Horde.

From that germ of the tale carried in the bard's sad, liking voice, Rytagir had spent a tenday researching Peilam's Nose. And what her cargo manifest might have included.

When an explorer-which was how Rytagir thought of himself-didn't have a vessel and he needed one to recover lost artifacts from a shipwreck, he learned to find the details that would encourage others to invest in his knowledge and experience. In this case, he'd put together a probable manifest of the ship's cargo to tempt Captain Zahban into becoming his partner and lending his ship to the effort.

Rytagir stopped his descent only a few feet above the shipwreck. Despite the magic woven into the pearl, his vision wasn't able to penetrate much of the gloom at that depth.

He swam slowly and surveyed Peilam's Nose from the broken keel to the distinctive prow that named her. She'd been christened for the man who'd built her, a dwarf woodworker who'd forsaken the forge for a lathe in a lumberyard.

Even half-buried, the prow showed the fierce profile of a dwarf. His blunt nose projected well ahead of the rest of his features. The eye that Rytagir could see looked undaunted. Peilam's beard showed in the scalloped trim that flowed back over the prow until it gradually faded into the hull on both sides.

The ship was unmistakably the one Rytagir had come for. He reached into the waterproof shoulder pack he'd brought with him and extracted the journal he'd dedicated to compiling all information about Peilam's Nose.

Protected by the pearl's magic, Rytagir hung cross-legged in the sea and quickly sketched the ship as it lay on the sea bottom. The salvage was going to be easier than he'd expected.

More times than not, the hull-especially on a scuttled vessel-shattered and emptied her guts across the sea floor. The trail of lost cargo could last for miles.

So immersed was Rytagir in the task of recording the image for the papers or book he would write on the ship that he didn't notice he was no longer alone on the ocean floor. At least, not until he noticed the shadow that slid over his.

3

Almost casually, Rytagir closed the journal and slipped it back into the shoulder bag. His hand closed over the plain hilt of his long sword and yanked the blade free. He spun around to face the observer and raised the sword between them.

With the shadow being human-shaped, his first impression was that he was being spied upon by a sahuagin. But he knew the chances of that were small.

Sahuagin had brought an end to Peilam's Nose, but the murderous sea devils no longer freely traveled the currents of the Inner Sea. The aquatic predators had been sealed within the Alamber Sea behind the massive Sharksbane Wall. The defensive structure was a hundred miles long, sixty feet tall, and a hundred feet thick. Legend had it that sea elves and other creatures manned the wall to prevent the sahuagin from invading the Sea of Fallen Stars.

But his observer wasn't a sahuagin. It was a sea elf. A beautiful sea elf. Her clothing consisted of clam shells that covered her pert breasts, a triangle of silverweave armor that barely concealed her modesty, and silverweave legging armor. Her pale blue skin had white patches that were natural camouflage many sea creatures shared.

As with other denizens of the deep, she was darker on her back-her dorsal side-than her front. The