Corsair

crewmen on the deck, both by the door leading to the captain’s cabin, which hung open.

“They must have tried to barricade themselves inside,” Hamil said. “There may be survivors belowdecks.”

“We’ll check in a moment,” Geran said. Keeping a wary eye on the dark opening to the cabin, he climbed up the short ladder to the quarterdeck. A heavy canvas hood covered the binnacle Murkelmor had built for the compass. He used the blade of his sword to slice through the cords knotting the hood together and dragged the cover away.

The starry compass was still there.

Geran breathed a deep sigh of relief and peered closely at the dark sphere. In the dull gray daylight, it seemed little more than a smooth round ball of black glass-although the longer he looked at it, the more he saw of its hidden depths, in which tiny glittering pinpoints of light hovered like stars in the night sky.

“It’s here,” he said aloud.

“Good,” said Hamil. “Let’s get it and go. I don’t like this place.”

“Agreed,” Geran said. He produced a small sack from his belt. Together he and Hamil detached its silver collar from the wooden stand Murkelmor had built for it, wrapped it in a woolen blanket, and placed the orb carefully into the sack. Geran had no idea how breakable the thing was, but he certainly didn’t want to take the chance that it was, not when lives depended on it. With that done, they left the quarterdeck. A quick check belowdecks revealed another half-dozen crewmen dead in the midships bunkroom amid a scene of extreme violence; blood splattered the bulkheads, and furniture lay splintered or upended throughout the lower decks.

“Call me a coward, but I’m not sure I want to linger long enough to provide a decent burial for these fellows,” Hamil said. “What happened here?”

“Come on,” Grean replied. “Let’s go see if we can hurry things along and get back to Seadrake.”

They returned to the beach. Geran sent several of the soldiers to collect the bodies from the ship, slung the compass in a satchel over his shoulder, and then lent a hand with the unpleasant task of burying Moonshark’s dead-or the ones that were near at hand, anyway. By his count there were at least thirty or more still unaccounted for. If they were lucky, Murkelmor and the others had fled the city outright; if not, Geran guessed that most were dead somewhere in the ruins above the harbor.

Finally, after half an hour of grim work in the steady rain, the dead pirates were laid in the campsite’s trenchlike sawpit. Several of the Shieldsworn began to shovel damp sand and earth over the bodies. Geran looked around the beach, making sure they hadn’t missed anything or left anything behind. He certainly didn’t want to leave something else on Moonshark that he’d have to come back for later.

Something gave voice to a harsh, croaking cry from the heights overlooking the beach.

The Shieldsworn stopped where they were and looked up. Several archers laid arrows on their strings; other men hurriedly unslung their shields and fit their arms inside. “What was that?” Hamil muttered to himself.

Geran didn’t bother to guess. He watched the heights warily for a time. For a long moment nothing else happened. He was just about to relax his guard and tell the soldiers to finish up their work when several more cries of the same sort echoed back and forth through the steady pattering of the rain. A small stone, dislodged from somewhere above, fell down to the beach, bouncing from the bluff several times. The harsh voices called back and forth, snarling and rasping unintelligibly. He realized that the creatures above, whatever they were, were talking to each other. He glanced over at Sarth to see if the sorcerer had any idea what might be above them, but Sarth just shook his head.

“Let’s head for the boats,” Geran said to the people around him. “Slowly, now. Stay together, and keep your weapons in hand.”

They started back toward the longboats, marching across the wet gravel-and then the creatures attacked. With a sudden thunderstorm of wingbeats and earsplitting cries, scores of winged creatures leaped from their hiding places in the ruins above and swooped down at the men on the beach. They were grayish black in color, with oversized talons, lashing tails, and horned heads. Fangs jutted from their wide mouths. More of the creatures raced out over the bay, heading for Seadrake a half mile away.

“Gargoyles!” Hamil shouted. He raised his short bow and loosed an arrow at the nearest of the plunging monsters. His hard-driven arrow struck the creature near the center of its chest, yet it barely sank an inch into the gargoyle’s stony flesh. With a shrill cry of pain, the creature wrenched the arrow from its wound. More arrows sleeted up from those Shieldsworn who were holding bows, but few did much harm. Hamil swore then shouted, “Eyes or throat! Shoot for the eyes or throat!”

Sarth intoned words of arcane power and blasted a pair of the monsters out of the air with a crackling blue bolt of lightning. Then gargoyles dropped amid the shore party in a wave of rending claws and snapping fangs. Screams of terror and inhuman croaks of anger or pain rose from the fray. The monster’s talons were hard enough to rend steel mail, and sword cuts tended to bounce off their tough hides, but a hard-driven swordpoint could pierce their flesh. Even as Shieldsworn went down under bloody claws, gargoyles spitted on Hulburgan steel shrieked and flailed desperately.

“Cuillen mhariel!” Geran snarled, invoking the warding of his silversteel veil. Argent mists swirled around his body, deflecting the flurry of slashing talons reaching for him. Then he invoked another spell to set his sword aflame and hurled himself headlong into the fray. His sword blazed with arcane fury as he slashed and stabbed at the flapping monsters around him, leaving long, black-scorched gashes in gargoyle hides. “Stand your ground!” he called to the Shieldsworn. “Guard each other’s backs! We can fight them off!”

Just out of his reach, a gargoyle dropped down behind a soldier, clenched its talons in his shoulders, and then leaped back into the air, carrying the screaming, writhing man aloft. An archer shot through its wing and sent it crashing back to earth, only to be plucked off the ground himself by another of the monsters. Still other gargoyles clutched and dragged soldiers away, seeking to carry their victims aloft or pull them away from the melee. The creatures croaked and hissed with dark glee as they singled out their prey.

“Narva saizhal!” Sarth roared. He wheeled and flung a lethal blast of icy darts at gargoyles rushing him from behind. Geran leaped to cut down another of the monsters as it threw itself at the tiefling’s back. Despite their stonelike flesh, the gargoyles were susceptible to the sorcerer’s spells and Geran’s swordmagic. And, as Hamil had said, they were vulnerable to well-aimed blows; the swordmage caught a glimpse of a gargoyle plummeting to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, one of Hamil’s arrows standing a handspan deep in its eye.

For a moment, Geran believed they would repel the first assault without much loss-and then a thin ray of grayish light lanced down from overhead, striking a Shieldsworn soldier in the chest. The man groaned once, staggered back a step, and then toppled to the ground, eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. More rays stabbed into the knot of fighting soldiers, rays that burned, rays that corroded, rays that knocked men senseless and left them virtually defenseless against the gargoyle attacks. Geran looked up and saw a large, round-bodied creature floating thirty feet in the air behind the gargoyles. It had one great staring eye, fixed on the battle below, and a number of tendrils with smaller eyes flailing around it. From the lesser eyes the deadly magic rays lashed out, scouring Seadrake’s landing party even as they fought to fend off the swooping gargoyles.

“A beholder,” he groaned. The gargoyles were trouble enough, but beholders were terrible adversaries. Given a few moments, the monster could destroy the whole landing party single-handedly. He whirled to shout a warning to his soldiers. “Archers, pincushion that thing!”

Most of the Shieldsworn were busy fighting the gargoyles, but a couple still had their bows in hand. Bravely they fired at the multi-eyed monster. Sarth turned his attention to the beholder as well, hurling a blast of scorching emerald fire that clung to the thing and sizzled like acid. The beholder roared in anger and turned the full fury of its eye-rays against the tiefling. Sarth threw up a quick spell-shield but staggered under the magical assault.

Geran searched his mind for the arcane symbol of a spell he rarely used. He brought it to the tip of his tongue as he wove the point of his sword through mystic passes and unlocked its magic with a single word: “Haethellyn!” His blade took on a strange blue sheen, and he leaped in front of Sarth, parrying the beholder’s eye-rays with the sword. He deflected a crimson ray at a gargoyle nearby, who howled and burst into flame, and caught a pale yellow ray next. This one he sent back at the beholder; it struck the monster in its own middle eye with a shower of sparks.

The floating monster wailed and spun its eye away from the battle below. But one of its smaller eyes found Geran and blasted him with a coruscating blue beam before he could deflect it. The magical beam seized Geran like