Corsair

He pushed her ahead on the path. “Run!”

Geran took Selsha by the arm and led her out of the gate and down the road outside the old city walls. The hulks’ mandibles clacked eagerly as they lunged after their quarry. It was a very near thing for the first thirty yards or so, but then Hamil, Mirya, Geran, and Selsha began to pull away; the umber hulks had the size and power to flatten most of the undergrowth in their way or tear their way through hanging vines and creepers, but each time they did so, they lost a step or two on their smaller quarry. Geran was momentarily tempted to try to lead their pursuers off into the forest, but he discarded the idea at once. The last thing he wanted to do was split up now that they’d finally found everyone, and there was always the chance that the umber hulks and their small masters wouldn’t fall for the ruse. He plunged into the new trail behind Mirya and concentrated on speed. If they could outdistance the umber hulks, he doubted that the smaller creatures would be very eager to follow too closely.

After a couple of hundred yards, they struck an intersecting path. “Turn right!” Geran called to Hamil; if his reckoning was true, that should lead them back to the lakeshore and the Black Moon keep. They hurried in the new direction for a long time, until the path began to climb slowly upward again, ascending another hill. There they paused. Their pursuers were nowhere in sight, at least for the moment.

Hamil looked at Geran with a wry smile. “I suppose the little ones don’t fancy the idea of catching up to us without the big monsters to lend a hand,” he said.

“Mama!” Selsha threw herself into her mother’s arms. Mirya met her halfway, dropping to her knees to wrap her arms around her daughter and weeping with her face buried in Selsha’s hair. “I was so scared! The monsters chased me!”

“I know, my darling, I know,” Mirya said softly. “But you’re with me now, and I’ll keep you safe from them.”

The two Erstenwolds stayed that way for a long moment. Geran could hear the distant thrashing of the umber hulks in the forest behind them, but he smiled to see Mirya and her daughter together nonetheless. To the darkest Hell with Aesperus and his words of warning, he decided. He knew it couldn’t have been the wrong choice to rescue Mirya and Selsha from this terrible place. He’d gladly bear the cost of his decision later, whatever it proved to be.

Hamil glanced at the Erstenwolds, and he smiled too. But he looked back to Geran with a troubled expression. We should get moving, Geran, he said silently. We don’t know if there are more creatures around like the eye-monsters. The sooner we’re all out of this accursed forest, the happier I’ll be.

Agreed, Geran answered. And we need to get back to the keep. The fighting seemed well in hand when we left, but I’d like to be sure of it. He moved over to the Erstenwolds and cleared his throat. “We probably shouldn’t linger here,” he told them. “We can celebrate your rescue aboard Seadrake when we’re on our way back home.”

Selsha looked up at him and beamed. She let go of Mirya and threw herself into Geran’s arms, hugging him tightly. “Thank you for coming to save us, Geran,” she said. “Mama said you would, and you did! But I want to go home now.”

He looked over to Mirya. Her face colored a little, but she gave him a warm smile. He kneeled down to return Selsha’s hug and patted her back. “I’m glad I was able to help,” he told her. “But I’m ready to go home too. We’d better get started.”

They hurried along the path at the best speed Selsha could manage. The twists and turns soon left Geran with no very good sense of which way the path was taking them, but he thought the trail was meandering back toward the keep. Whenever he paused, he could hear the thrashing of the umber hulks as they battered their way through the moonlet’s forest along the trail behind them-but Geran and his companions were steadily gaining ground now. As long as they could keep moving, they’d be able to stay ahead of the monsters. The only question was whether this trail they were now on would eventually lead them back to the keep.

The path started to climb steeply, and Geran realized it was leading them to the hill top. Old black stone steps began to appear underfoot, marking out another ancient roadway-this one a staircase ascending the hill.

Hamil paused at the foot of the steps. “Keep going, or turn off the path and strike out for the keep?” he asked. “I don’t think this trail leads where we’d like to go.”

“I’ve no liking for the looks of the forest,” Mirya said. “I don’t want to leave the path until we’re certain that we have to.”

“Well, it would be inadvisable to go back.” Geran nodded in the direction they’d come. He could still hear the umber hulks behind them. “I think we should keep going for now. Maybe we’ll find another way down from the next hilltop.”

Maybe we’ll find more monster-haunted ruins, Hamil observed sourly. But he pressed on, leading the way as they scrambled up the old stone stairs and emerged in another clearing at the hilltop. This one was occupied with a large, round building whose dome had long since fallen in. To Geran’s eyes it had the look of an observatory, the sort of place where priests and sages might study the stars and cast horoscopes. He started to look for another way down from the hilltop, as did Hamil and Mirya.

“Geran?” Hamil called. He’d scrambled to a better vantage on the terrace surrounding the old observatory. “You’d better come here.”

The swordmage jumped up to where Hamil stood, and followed his gaze. He saw that they were closer to the keep than they’d been before; it wasn’t much more than a mile away. A great plume of smoke billowed up from the docks, where Kraken Queen was engulfed in leaping flames, but Seadrake was missing. “What in the world is going on down there?” he asked aloud. “They haven’t left us, have they?”

“Well, if they did, they didn’t get far,” Hamil replied. He pointed in the other direction. On the lower shoulder of the hill they stood on, perhaps five hundred yards away, Seadrake lay tangled in the treetops. Her deck was canted to one side, and a handful of men worked busily to free her from the branches. When Geran listened closely, he could hear the distant sound of axe blows and the ruffling of the wind in the ship’s sail.

“Can you make out who’s on deck?”

Hamil shook his head. “Not from this distance. My eyes are good, but not that good.”

“If Kraken Queen caught fire, Galehand might have cast off shorthanded to avoid burning too. He would’ve taken the ship aloft to open the distance.”

“Or Black Moon corsairs took the ship and wrecked her.” Hamil shook his head. “There’s no way to know from here.”

“The monsters from the keep aren’t far behind us,” Mirya said in a low voice. “We can’t stay here much longer.”

Geran looked at the caravel, caught in the treetop like an oversized kite. Either she was in friendly hands, in which case they’d have allies there and might be able to lend a hand with extricating Seadrake from her situation … or she was in unfriendly hands, in which case their only escape from Neshuldaar was about to sail off into the Sea of Night, leaving them here with no way home. They had to get down to the ship, and the sooner the better.

“We’ll make for Seadrake,” he said. Marking the ship’s position carefully in his mind’s eye, he chose a path that looked like it might lead them in the ship’s direction and set off once more into the moon’s sinister forest.

TWENTY-NINE

17 Marpenoth, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)

Geran followed the sound of the axe strokes as he slipped and scrambled over the jungle floor. The path down from the ancient observatory had brought them several hundred yards closer to where he guessed Seadrake was snagged, but it soon became clear that they would have to leave the trail to reach the ship. He chose a place where a small streambed crossed the trail, and he scrambled up the rocky creek, splashing through the cold, clear water. Overhead he could glimpse white canvas through the crimson leaves