Realms of War

The forest elf didn't even glance at the gore-drenched campsite. She held out her forearm, ready for his knife.

'This is necromancy,' Elaith warned her.

'Yes.'

'Some would consider such magic evil.'

Ferret's smile was both sad and terrible. 'I think we're both past such considerations. Do what needs to be done.'

And because it was his destiny, Elaith did precisely that.

CHANGING TIDES

Mel Odom

Flamerule, the Year of the Gauntlet (1369 DR)

1

'I still say ye're a fool to go out there in this storm, Rytagir! Better to stay on the ship where ye'll be safe whilst this maelstrom descends upon us! That shipwreck's been there fer hundreds of years! It'll be there awhile longer yet!'

'Duly noted, Captain,' Rytagir Volak replied as he gazed out at the heaving swells of the Sea of Fallen Stars. There was no denying the anticipation that filled him. It had been nearly a year getting that far. 'If that treasure ship would see fit to come up off the bottom of the sea and sail into port by itself, why, our lives would be even better, wouldn't they?'

Captain Zahban scowled. 'Ye don't even know if Peilam's Nose is down there,' he squalled back through the gale.

Rytagir held a hand up in the wind and spattering rain and said, 'I believe you're right. Better we should wait for a more hospitable day.'

The ship's captain was a broad, burly man in a modest shirt and coat. His pants and boots had seen better days. A heavy-bladed cutlass hung at his side. A queue held back his gray-streaked black hair. More gray stained his curly black beard. The years hadn't been overly kind to Zahban, but he had all his limbs. For a man who had sailed the Sea of Fallen Stars all his life and always against those that flew a pirate's flag, it was a considerable accomplishment.

'Now I wasn't sayin' that.' Zahban knotted his fingers in his beard. His broad hat shadowed his craggy face and the dark storm clouds overhead further obscured his features. 'Them books what ye found this location in, there's other scholars what could cipher that out, ain't there?'

'Any man that can read and cares enough to look, Captain,' Rytagir replied. He enjoyed toying with the captain's conflicted feelings of greed and worry for his charge.

The ship's crew, a loose but hungry-eyed gathering of seadogs that had faced years of the sea's cruel affections without any of her fortunes, listened anxiously.

'Well,' Zahban said, 'we can't be dilly-dallyin' about this treasure hunt none neither.' He paused, then finished, 'If there be treasure to be had down there at all.'

Rytagir grinned at the man. 'There's only one way to find out.' He peered over the ship's side. Azure Kestrel, a cog named much prettier than she was and so called because of her light blue sails, strained at her leash. So far the anchor held on the sea bottom.

According to the ship's quartermaster, the bottom was a hundred and ten feet below. Peilam's Nose sat somewhere in the general vicinity.

If you figured those charts and currents right, Rytagir reminded himself. Sea currents, especially two hundred and seventy-eight years of them, were hard to figure.

Rytagir was of medium height and wide-shouldered, arms and legs sleek with muscle and bronzed from years of swimming, diving, and salvaging in rivers and oceans. Good leather armor covered his body. He carried a long sword at his hip and a pair of knives in his knee-high boots. He wore his yellow-gold hair cut so short it wasn't long enough to lie down.

His eyes were the gray-green of the sea. A past lover had told him that his eyes were so much that color that it seemed as though part of the sea had seeped into him and claimed him forever.

Rytagir supposed that could have been true. Lovers never stayed long. They preferred men who could at least be distracted from their other passions more than a few hours or a day. Rytagir's whole life had been about his studies, and about the things he'd found. He'd learned everything his father, a ranger in Cormyr, could teach him of the wild. But it was the seas of Faerыn—not the forests, to his father's eternal dismay—that called out to him.

Quickly, Rytagir spoke a few arcane words, then drew a symbol in the air. Power quivered through him. He vaulted over the cog's side toward the sea breaking against the wooden hull.

The crew rushed over to peer down at him.

Instead of crashing through the waves, Rytagir stopped only a mere inch or two above the water, held there by the magic he had worked. He flexed his knees to absorb the shock and remained standing, though it was a near thing because the sea was so rough. The water-walking spell kept him on top of the ocean, but the waves still provided an uneven surface.

With a flourish—and he freely admitted that he often adored attention far too much than was good for him, which his father had never been happy about because he'd always been a modest man himself—Rytagir turned and bowed to the ship's crew.

They crouched along the starboard side of the ship in fearful dread. The storm had unnerved many of them. Normally the storms were over by summer, and any squall that blew up after that tended to be disastrous. There was already talk of this being a cursed wind. Bad waters and bad winds had taken ships to the bottom over the years.

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 res­cuing 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