construction, the ship could never be carried overland.
Fharaud kept to the fo’c’sle, shaped with intent like the guard tower of a keep, battlements and all, for the half an hour or so it took the ship to reach the safety of open water. Sanject climbed the stairs, returning from a final round preparing the crew to enter the portal, and stepped to Fharaud’s side, facing forward. In his hands, the pilot held a wand of clear crystal tipped on each end with shining platinum With a word he could use it to open the portal.
“The vessel is ready, Master,” the pilot said. “Are you?”
Fharaud saw the hint of scorn the pilot let show in his eyes but ignored it. He cleared his throat, nodded, and said, “Proceed.”
The pilot held the wand up over his head and spoke a word that Fharaud thought sounded like it must have hurt his tongue to pronounce.
The portal opened in front of them faster and closer to the end of the bowsprit than Fharaud had expected, and he took a few steps back despite himself. The wind blew in all directions at once, disrupted by the sudden hole in the air in front of them. The ring of purple mage-light that outlined the enormous circle fought with the dull overcast of the day to give everyone and everything a sickly, unnatural, bluish cast. The sound of the wind in the sails, the creak of the ship so new it still had years of settling ahead of it, and the shouts of the sailors behind them made Fharaud’s ears ring.
As it was, he almost didn’t hear Sanject ask, “You never told me, sir, what is her name?”
Fharaud looked at the man, shook his head, and turned back to the portal just as the ship started to cross that preternatural threshold.
“Sir?” the pilot shouted. “The vessel’s name?”
Fharaud looked up, watched the circle of violet light pass directly over his head, and called to the pilot, “Everwind. Her name is Everwind.”
Then they started to fall.
The rumble and clatter of the passage through the portal grew to a deafening cacophony of sailors’ screams and something else like thunder or a wind so powerful its sound was like the disintegration of an entire city. The deck bucked hard, throwing Fharaud off his feet to sprawl onto his back on the hard deck planks. He saw a sailor fly past right over him, arms pinwheeling and his face a mask of mortal terror. It was the first time in Fharaud’s life that he’d ever seen the face of a man who knew he was going to die.
“No,” Fharaud managed to utter through lungs that were constricting in his chest, then the ship pitched violently forward.
Something drew his eyes to the aft of the vessel and Fharaud watched the brilliant purple glow of the portal edge dwindling. At first he thought the ship was pulling fast away from it. An instant later, though, he knew the truth: the portal was closing.
“Wait!” he shouted and reached out with both hands hoping to find something, anything, to hold on to.
His right hand found a rope and he tried to pull himself up to a sitting position, aided by another sudden forward lurch of the ship. He squeezed the rope for all he was worth, and he sat up right next to the rail on the forward, starboard side of the ship.
A huge explosion of grinding wood and shattering glass burst behind him, sending shards and splinters onto his head and back. The portal closed around the back of the ship, shearing off the aft tenth of her and the realization of where that left them flashed through Fharaud’s panic-stricken mind. They would never hold water with the aft end off. Everwind would go down and go down fast.
Down.
That word took on new meaning as Fharaud whipped his head forward when the ship pitched again, even more violently.
The bow turned down and Fharaud slid forward on the deck, but only so far, as he managed to keep his grip on the rigging. He found himself looking down, straight down, at the surface of a wine dark sea a hundred feet below them.
He couldn’t have explained how he’d judged the height, but something primal in him mixed with a naval architect’s background in the tangible weights and measures gave him that figure: one hundred feet.
The ship rode a torrent of the Lake of Steam’s sulfurous water down that whole hundred feet. Sailors screamed as they were torn from the deck by the twisting, lurching, chaotic fall made all the worse for the enormous sail that took on some of the air, slowed them then released it and turned them sharplyutterly useless and out of control, it couldn’t save them from the impact.
Fharaud closed his eyes and held his breath but couldn’t hold it long enough. He let the breath out but kept his eyes closed. More screams, the crack of wood, the whip of rope torn loose from fittings, the cries of a dying vessel filled his ears.
When they hit the water Fharaud tried to scream, but every bit of air he had in him was driven out by an impact so violent and sudden that his teeth cracked in his head, one bone after another snapped like so many dried twigs, and his life became a mad maelstrom of pain, screaming, suffocating, and defeat. Everwind exploded around him and he was in the water before fickle Tymora blessed him with unconsciousness.
18
16 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
With the aid of half a dozen unseen servants, Marek Rymiit played midwife to a hundred hatchling firedrakes.
Hour after blood-and slime-soaked hour they came, one egg after another opening with a wet crack to reveal the writhing, already snarling form of the mutant dragon inside it. The babies were hatched with teeth and were born hungry. Marek ran out of piglets only three hours into the day. He’d brought a hundred of them, one for each egg he expected to hatch that day, but he was surprised to find that even the newborn firedrakes could eat more — j than one piglet. In fact, the black lizard-beasts, their fine scales shining in the torchlight like black patent leather,! could take one piglet in three bites. {
“Betterget more pigs, my friend,” the great black wyrm Insithryllax chided around a rumbling laugh, “before they turn on you.”
“Well,” Marek replied, panting, dragging another newborn firedrake out of the remains of its broken egg, “perhaps I’ll get lucky and they’ll turn on their parents first.”
The black dragon laughed again and said, “Trust me, Marek, that wouldn’t be lucky for anyone here.”
To emphasize his point, Insithryllax let a drop of his caustic spittle fall to the floor at his feet. The acid ate through a thick piece of broken egg shell, then the flagstone floor and the rock underneath, in less time than it took for Marek to blink once.
Though he would have enjoyed a bout of banter with the dragon, Marek went back to his work. A great deal of effort had been put into accelerating his breeding program, and the black firedrakes needed time to mature, and time for training, before they could be delivered. He had no time, and no firedrakes, to lose.
The older generations of black firedrakes packed along the walls of the great underground chamber and looked on while their little brothers and sisters were born. Marek did his best to ignore the hungry looks in their eyes. One of the reasons he’d begun to breed so many at a time, augmenting the black dragon’s potency and the egg-laying capabilities of the firedrake females with spells, was that he knew he’d lose a few in the first tenday or so. The firedrakes would eat one or two, then the older blacks would take as many as a dozen of the runts. Blood would fill the room long after the last egg hatched.
Having run out of food for the newborns, Marek knew he had only one recourse and that was to accelerate that natural process as well.
The black firedrake he pulled out of its egg was heavy, and it looked at the Red Wizard with a dangerous gleam in its eye, so Marek knew that one would live. He cast about him, eggs pressing in on all sides, and scooped up a handful of the slimy yellow tissue that wrapped the growing reptiles inside their shells. He pressed the handful of slime into the newborn’s mouth and it took the protein in hungrily. As Marek searched the floor around him for a
