Corsair

TWENTY

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

Wet gravel grated under the longboat’s keel as it grounded on the strand a bowshot from where the silent Moonshark was drawn up. Geran vaulted over the side into knee-deep water and splashed ashore in the cold, steady rain, sword in hand. Weathered gray battlements and crumbling temples towered over the landing party, clinging to the edge of the steep bluff that marked the western side of Sulasspryn’s bay. The harbor proper lay several hundred yards to the east, where the remnants of a stone jetty sheltered the city’s old quays from the Moonsea storms. On this side of the harbor, a causeway ran out to the old customshouse across a thirty-yard-wide strand at the foot of the bluff. It was the only place in Sulasspryn’s bay flat enough for a ship the size of Moonshark to haul her prow out of the water-and it was well hidden from ships passing by at sea, not that many ever had reason to sail along this desolate coast.

“It seems your guess was right,” Sarth said to him. The tiefling pointed to the camp set up not far from the beached galley. Several fresh logs lay stacked there, partially stripped of their bark. The ship’s bow was braced atop two more logs set like rollers under the keel, and a simple framework of timbers held her in place. “Murkelmor must have decided he could not sail any farther without first mending the damage to the bow.”

“He would’ve been wiser to find a cove a few miles back, then,” Geran said. He reminded himself that few in Moonshark’s crew had any reason to be wary of Sulasspryn. None of them hailed from Hulburg or the lands nearby, after all. But he would have imagined that any grim old ruin of a city should have commanded some respect. Everyone knew that all sorts of curses, ghosts, and hungry monsters might lurk in any long-abandoned castle or city, even if few of the pirates were familiar with the specific perils of these ruins.

“There aren’t many trees along the coast, but there seems to be some good timber here,” Hamil pointed out. “Or perhaps Murkelmor was counting on the reputation of the place to ward off pursuit and chose to land here for that very reason.”

“We’ll ask Murkelmor when we see him,” said Geran, although he was beginning to doubt that they would. He had a hard time believing that the pirates of Moonshark would have been willing to strand themselves beneath Sulasspryn’s brooding ruins even for a few hours, let alone the days of work that would be needed to effect serious repairs. He waited for his armsmen to drag their longboats up onto the beach and then motioned for them to follow him. “Come on, fellows. Stay close, and keep your eyes and ears open. Assume it’s a trap until we know for certain that it’s not.”

They marched toward the pirate galley, boots crunching in the pebbles underfoot. As they neared, they saw that the pirate crew had set up a worksite on the beach to cut and shape new timbers for their ship. It looked as though they’d simply walked away from their work. Saws, axes, and other tools lay scattered around the site. The Shieldsworn and sellswords with Geran kept their thoughts to themselves, but Geran noticed that they redoubled their vigilance, watching the bluffs to their right and keeping a wary eye on the shadows of doorways and windows above.

Where are they? Hamil said silently to Geran. Did they flee into the ruins when Seadrake appeared in the bay? I can’t believe Murkelmor would let us have his ship without fighting for it.

“I don’t know,” Geran murmured in reply. He circled around the prow of the galley with caution, just in case his former shipmates were waiting in ambush behind the ship’s hull-and then he found the first of Moonshark’s crewmen. The body sprawled at the water’s edge, facedown in the small wavelets lapping alongside the black hull. His back was a gory mess, ripped open in great furrows; several small, pale crabs scuttled away from the corpse as Geran approached.

“I think that’s Khefen,” Hamil said in a low voice. He grimaced. “Poor bastard.”

Geran glanced around and then crouched by the body to study it closely. “Dead a couple of days, I think. The wounds show a lot of tearing. Claws or talons, not blades. If I had to guess, I’d say that some beast drove him to the ground from behind and ripped him to shreds. Kara could tell us more, if she were here.”

“Whatever it was killed him here and left him,” Hamil said. “Most animals would have dragged him off or eaten their fill.”

“There’s another over here, m’lord!” one of the Shieldsworn guards called. He stood by one of the large logs at the side of the worksite. A moment later another guardsman peering into the tangled scrub and brush at the foot of the bluff added, “And half a dozen here in the briars, m’lord!”

“None of this is our affair any longer,” Sarth said in a low voice. “We should retrieve the compass and go.”

“You’re right.” The longer they stayed, the more likely it was that whatever had fallen upon Moonshark’s crew would fall on Seadrake as well. And while Geran would have been happy to take away any surviving pirates who appeared and asked to leave, he didn’t feel obligated to search them out, not when the lives of Mirya and Selsha might be hanging by a thread on some far island in the sky. To the soldiers poking around the campsite, he called, “Gather up the bodies you can find without straying too far and bury them together in the sawpit. But keep your weapons close to hand!”

The corsairs had rigged a simple rope ladder with wooden rungs from the half galley’s deck to the beach. Geran caught hold of it and climbed to the main deck, followed by Hamil and Sarth. He saw two more dead 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 the grip of an invisible titan and flung him headlong down the beach. The swordmage tumbled through the air and crashed into the pebble-strewn beach with bone-jarring force. He felt his left wrist snap under him, and a jolt of hot, white pain ran up his arm. He rolled several times before he came to a stop, dizzy and disoriented. Slowly he pushed himself upright with his good hand and reached for his sword, lying on the ground nearby.

Suddenly something hit him across the back, hard. It drove him to the ground, stunning him again, only to drag him into the air a moment later. Wings beat like thunder around him, and talons clenched with iron strength around his shoulders. Only the potent defensive wardings ofhis swordmagic prevented them from sinking deep into his flesh. Through the pain, the thundering wingbeats, the dizzying swings and drops, Geran realized that a gargoyle had caught hold of him and was trying to fly off. Already the beach was a good twenty feet below him, and the monster that had him was beating upward with all its strength.

“Geran!” Hamil shouted. The halfling ran after him and paused to take careful aim with his bow. But another gargoyle spoiled the shot, knocking Hamil down as it crashed into him, wounded by one of the Shieldsworn. Sarth dueled the beholder with a blinding barrage of deadly spells and fierce blasts, holding the monster at bay.

Geran struggled in the gargoyle’s grasp. “Let go of me!” he snarled. He was a heavy burden for the monster; it sagged and dipped precipitously in midair as he tried to twist free.

The monster croaked in protest. “Mine!” it rasped. “Catch! Slay! Mine!”

He managed to tear free of one talon, which had only been caught in his leather jacket. The gargoyle almost dropped him; Geran glanced down beneath his wildly swinging feet and realized that a fall from his current height would be sure to break bones, if not kill him outright. In fact, if the gargoyle wanted to kill him, the easiest thing to do would be to let go of him. Despite the searing pain of the monster’s grip on his shoulder, Geran reached up with his right hand and seized one ankle in a powerful grip, determined to cling to the creature until the drop below them was something he might survive without crippling injury.

The gargoyle hissed and turned on him in midair, clawing and kicking at him. Talons scored his chest, raked his limbs, and came within an inch of eviscerating him, but his magic wardings held, blunting the attack. But one flailing kick of the gargoyle’s taloned foot snagged the satchel hanging around Geran’s neck and ripped through its strap. The leather pouch-with the starry compass inside-dropped to the ground below, vanishing into thick underbrush in the middle of a roofless house. Geran roared in fear and frustration, hanging on by one hand and waving his damaged left arm ineffectually to fend off the enraged monster.

Then he lost his grip at the same time the gargoyle’s talons tore loose from his jacket.

For one terrible moment he plunged backward toward the earth, flailing in midair. Then he plummeted through the thin branches of a small cedar tree growing alongside the wreckage of an old temple. Limbs pummeled him in a dozen savage blows, spinning him first one way and then another, cracking and thrashing as he fell. He hit the ground below hard enough that his sight went black and his breath whooshed from his mouth. The compass! he thought. I lost the compass!

Groaning, gasping for breath, he somehow groped his way to his feet and staggered out from under the cedar. He was standing near the front of what had once been a grand old stone building, its facade now little more than heaps of rubble spilling across a densely overgrown street. His back ached, and his knee throbbed painfully; he couldn’t put much weight on that leg. But he’d been fortunate-the gargoyle’s flight had brought them over the buildings at the top of the bluff, so that instead of falling a hundred feet or more to the beach, he’d only fallen twenty or thirty feet through the branches of a tree. “Fortunate, indeed,” he muttered. “If I’d been a little more fortunate, I wouldn’t have been dragged off in the first place.”

“Catch! Slay!” The gargoyle alighted atop a broken column a short distance from Geran, red rage burning in its eyes. Two more of its fellows circled overhead, apparently drawn by the struggle. The monster flexed its talons and hissed at Geran.

His sword was somewhere on the beach below. The compass was lost somewhere in the maze of ruins around him, if it hadn’t been shattered by the drop. He could barely stand. And he had at least one broken bone, perhaps more. Geran bared his teeth in a fierce snarl. His death was likely moments away, a fact that filled him with fury and frustration. If he fell here, Mirya and her daughter would likely never escape from whatever fate the masters of the Black Moon consigned them to. But he meant to die fighting and die on his feet, if that was all fate offered.

Holding the gargoyle’s gaze, he shaped a single arcane word with his will and whispered, “Cuilledyrr!”

The gargoyle sprang at him from its perch, claws outstretched. Geran stood his ground as long as he could before dodging aside. He managed to twist out of the way of the deadly claws, but his injured knee gave out under him, and he went down in the loose rubble and wiry grass of the street. The gargoyle gave one gloating hiss and threw itself back at him to finish him off. Then the shrill ring of steel on stone echoed through the air. Geran held out his right hand-and his sword of elven steel flew hilt- first into his open hand, summoned from the beach below by his word of calling. In one fluid motion Geran buried the swordpoint in the gargoyle’s black heart. The thing screeched horribly in his ears, and its body slammed him back to the ground again.

He struggled to free himself from the monster’s dead weight and looked up to see the gargoyles who’d been circling above swooping down on him. He didn’t have the strength to fight off another of the monsters, let alone two at once. Wildly he looked up and down the street, searching for some sort of shelter, some defensible position. All that he saw was the dark doorway of a dilapidated palace across the street. There was no way he could outrun the gargoyles to the doorway, but he had one last card to play. As the two monsters swooped down on him, Geran fixed his eyes on the darkness inside the stone archway and mustered the strength for his spell of teleportation. In the blink of an eye he was no longer on his hands and knees in the rain-soaked street outside, but instead kneeling in the clutter and debris inside the palace, looking back out at the place where he had been. The gargoyles screeched in frustration, fluttering and bounding from side to side in search of their missing prey.

Geran held still, hardly daring to breathe. If the monsters peered too closely at the doorway, they would surely see him … but the creatures moved down the street, passing out of his sight. He heard their wingbeats and their croaking voices moving away.

With a sigh of relief, he climbed to his feet. The interior of the palace was dark and cluttered; he could barely see anything inside. He hobbled a couple of steps away from the open doorway, just in case the gargoyles returned-and then his foot plunged through the floorboards. He hit the floor hard, and the whole thing gave way, sending him into the cellar below in a cascade of rubble and dust. For the second time in the last hundred heartbeats, Geran found himself falling. He hit the bottom, struck his head on something hard, and sank into dizzying darkness.