invention and perhaps himself. Kerrick tried to see through the flowage, hoping to catch a glimpse of the gnome or Divid, the other gully dwarf, but there was only the foaming, churning sea. Once again he felt Moreen’s hand on his shoulder, and he groaned at this proof that she was still within the steel hull. He couldn’t let her die, especially not here, within sight of her home.
Resolutely he started to climb, allowing her to aid him, employing all of his strength in a battle against water pouring down. They were near the hatch now, but his broken leg was a dead weight, and the force of the current was too strong. The cold sea surrounded him, but he could feel no trace of the chiefwoman overhead-he could only hope she had escaped.
A sailor throughout his eight decades of life, the elf had faced nautical emergencies on many occasions and always had survived. He believed he could do the same here. A rational corner of his mind told him that he just needed to hold onto the ladder until water filled the sub then swim out through the hatch without having to battle the crushing pressure of the inward flow. The chances for the gnome and the other gully dwarf deep in the hull, sadly, were not very good-the water had them trapped far below, and he doubted they would make it out.
There was nothing he could do for them. Instead, he clutched the ladder and held his breath, feeling the current ease after another minute until it ceased altogether. He exerted himself no more than necessary, conserving the air in his lungs. When he released the ladder, the natural buoyancy of his body actually lifted him up, bore him out through the open circle of the hatch. He looked upward, toward the brightness that was not so terribly far away, and started to swim.
Again he felt the stabbing pain in his leg, agony that would not let him kick. A glimmer of panic took root in his mind. He strained with his hands, tried to kick with his good leg, but he rose very, very slowly.
Another hand took his. He knew that Moreen had dived under the surface, and the sensation gave him a strange sense of peace. She pulled, and he rode along with her. When they broke through the surface and he drew a breath, he saw a boat-a sailboat-and he knew that he and she had somehow survived the long journey home. Either that or death was a wonderful dream.
In another moment he felt strong hands pulling his arms, then the familiar feel of a deck under his body as he collapsed onto wooden planks. He saw people, including a familiar round face beneath a shock of black hair-Mouse, but what was he doing here? — and finally succumbed to a sensation of peace, warmth, and silence.
Moreen Bayguard lay on the deck, too exhausted even to cough. That weariness was almost her undoing, as her breath gurgled in watery lungs and a pleasant darkness began to close across the vision of her one good eye. Her eye patch, the flap she wore over the ruined socket, had been washed away by the sea, and salt burned in the scarred flesh of her face.
Someone wrapped strong arms around her and squeezed with crushing force. The reaction was instantaneous: She spewed a gout of brine across the pine planks then drew a ragged, gulping breath. Again she coughed and again, and slowly the darkness pulled back. Weakly she rolled upon her side, looking up to see a young man’s face, the brown skin furrowed into lines of dire concern.
“Mouse?” she said weakly. “I’m dreaming.”
“It’s me,” said her tribemate, one of Moreen’s most capable aides-and her lifelong friend. “Don’t try to talk. Just breathe.”
“What about Kerrick?” she tried to ask, ignoring his advice and paying for it with another bout of choking and gagging.
“Bruni’s working on him. He’s breathing. The little fellow seems to be okay, too.”
The chiefwoman turned her head and saw the elf, prostrate upon the deck nearby. with the unmistakeably large shape of Bruni leaning over him, wiping his brow with a towel. The heights of Brackenrock rose just beyond, as the sailboat stood in the water just outside the entrance to the harbor. Just beyond she recognized Slyce, or at least the gully dwarf’s hindquarters, as the stubby castaway was bending over to look through a hatch, his head and upper torso sticking down through the hole in the deck.
Questions churned in her mind. What boat was this? How had it come to be here, just outside the entrance to her homeport?
Again ignoring the young man’s advice, she tried to push herself into a sitting position. The sailboat had to be Mouse’s, she realized-his home-built craft, dubbed
She saw two burly men, unmistakably Highlanders, watching her suspiciously from the foredeck. One of these was huge, nearly as large as Bruni, displaying a gold tooth as he glowered and clenched his jaw. The second was an older man with hair and beard of gray. His expression was unreadable.
“Who are they?” Moreen asked Mouse, as he helped her to a bench in the sailboat’s cockpit.
“The big one is Barq One-Tooth, the other Thedric Drake. They’re Highlander chieftains, and I picked them up on the east shore to bring them to Brackenrock.”
“What do they want?”
“They want to know what happened to Strongwind Whalebone. That is, they want their king back,” the young Arktos sailor said grimly.
“Strongwind …” Moreen declared weakly, despairing anew at the bitter memory. “He was captured by the ogre king … he created a diversion, allowed Kerrick and I to get into the castle.”
“The ogres have him now? They’ve taken him to their stronghold?” replied Mouse, his expression bleak.
Moreen nodded, then gestured to the two thanes.
“Tell them-” she began to say, then paused as another interval of coughing seized her. Even as she had started to speak, she hadn’t known what she was going to say.
“Tell them that I am going to get him back as soon as I can get ashore and make a plan.”
Kerrick looked around and quickly realized that he was lying in one of the nicer suites in the upper reaches of Brackenrock’s keep. He could see the midnight sun through the south-facing window, low and pale over the distant peaks of the Glacier Range, the rugged mountains beyond the Tusker Escarpment. His first thought was that he was dreaming, but when he shifted in the soft bed he felt a twinge in his right leg and remembered everything: the voyage back to this fortress, the desperate escape from the sinking boat, and the miraculous appearance of a sailboat on the surface of the sea.
The next thing he saw was Mouse, seated on a chair beside the bed, studying him worriedly.
“How’s the leg?” asked the Arktos sailor.
The elf blinked in surprise, stretching the limb that had been badly broken when he lost consciousness. “Not bad at all,” he replied. “Have I been out for weeks, or did Dinekki have something to do with that?”
“Her healing spells are the best in all the Icereach,” Mouse said with a smile. “She said you’d be jogging around by tomorrow. No, you haven’t been out long-we brought you, Moreen, and that little fellow ashore just a few hours ago.”
“Captain Pneumo was lost, and Divid, too,” sighed the elf, feeling a weary sadness. “Still, if you hadn’t been sailing past when you were, I don’t think any of us would have made it to shore.”
Exhausted, Kerrick leaned back and closed his eyes.
“I still can’t believe it!” the young Arktos man said, shaking his head in amazement. “I thought I was the only boat on the sea, and then people start popping up on both sides of me. To find out it was you and the Lady … and that little fellow. What kind of a person is he, anyway?”
“A gully dwarf,” Kerrick said with a grimace. “Not the most appealing folks of Krynn, but he was a loyal crewman, and … and he lost his best friend.”
“He didn’t seem too broken up about it. He was pilfering fish from the market down at the waterfront within a minute or two after landing. Moreen had to talk Old Cutscale out of throwing him into the harbor. Now he’s drunk, I think-he found his way into the cook’s beer barrel.”
“Yes, that’s Slyce,” the elf agreed. “I’m glad he had the sense to climb up when the boat started to sink.”
“You,” Mouse continued, “how … why were you coming back underwater? What about
The very word, the name of his beloved sailboat, nearly broke Kerrick’s heart. He looked at his friend, very
