The Cerulean Storm

TWELVE THE SHOALS

The chain of shoals stretched across the entire horizon. In the dusk light, they appeared to be true islands, covered with tangles of water-loving ferns and vine-draped trees. From every copse trilled the warbles of strange birds, underscored at regular intervals by the chilling roar of some colossal reptile. Most of the flats even had a beach of sorts: a broad expanse of crusty, sunbaked mud that ringed the fertile groves in the center.

In the past two weeks, however, the dhow had passed enough shoals for Neeva to know the truth. The inviting isles ahead were little more than a chain of muddy swales, created by water seeping up from springs buried deep beneath the dust. The ground beneath the trees was a thin, sticky sludge only slightly less treacherous than the powdery loess filling the Sea of Silt.

“There’s no way the Balicans took their schooners through that,” growled Neeva. She leaned over the gunnel and peered into the shadowy labyrinth of channels between the shoals. “We’ve lost their course.”

“We haven’t,” Caelum called back. The dwarf kneeled in the bow, his eye fixed on an arrow of crimson flame gliding through the silt just ahead of the prow. “Our sun-guide still points straight ahead. Judging by how brightly it glows, I’d even say we’re catching up to the fleet.”

The dwarf cast the spell several times a day, alternately using it to track the Balicans and Rkard. So far, the arrow always pointed in the same direction, though it always glowed much more brightly when Caelum directed it at the fleet.

Neeva looked across the boat to Rikus. “What do you think? Could the Balican schooners squeeze through those channels?”

The mul shrugged. “There’s enough space between the trees,” he said. “But the shipfloaters would have to lift their hulls high enough to clear the mud crusts at the shoal edges. It wouldn’t be easy.”

“Or the sorcerer-kings might know of a hidden passage,” said Sadira. The sorceress sat in the stern, using her magic to fly the dhow. “If not, their magic is certainly powerful enough to see them through.”

When Neeva did not respond, Sadira added, “We’ll catch up to Borys and your son.”

“How?” Neeva snapped. “We don’t know the way through there. It could take days to find a passage.”

“We don’t have to go through the shoals,” suggested Rikus. “We could fly over them.”

“No!” Caelum objected. “The Balican fleet is too near. Their lookouts might see us.”

Sadira glanced over her shoulder at the setting sun. “Besides, it’ll be dark soon,” she said. “My powers will fade before we travel far.”

Neeva cursed. “We’ve got to do something,” she said. “The last time Caelum’s sun-guide pointed at Rkard, it was so faint we could hardly see it.”

Rikus stepped over Tithian, who was sleeping in the bilge, and took Neeva by the shoulders. “You’re right, Neeva,” the mul said. “We don’t know how far away the Dragon and your son are, but we’re doing everything we can to catch them.”

“What if that’s not enough, Rikus?” she demanded. “We’ve already seen that the Dragon’s magic is just as powerful as Sadira’s. And if he knows we have the Dark Lens, he’s probably trying to hide Rkard from us.”

“Maybe,” the mul allowed, his black eyes holding hers steady. “But you know we won’t stop searching.”

“Like Borys hasn’t stopped searching for the Dark Lens?” she asked. “My son won’t live a thousand years. He might even be dead now.”

“Yes, he could be dead,” Rikus allowed. “But should we do anything different because of it?”

Neeva shook her head, folding herself into the mul’s arms. “Damn you,” she whispered. “You always were too honest with me.”

She had only been there an instant when she felt her husband’s hands prying her away. “Are you cruel or just stupid, Rikus?” the dwarf demanded, interposing himself between her and the mul. “The last thing she needs to hear right now is that Rkard might be dead.”

Rikus scowled, more confused than angry. “How do you know he’s not?”

“That’s not the point,” Caelum fumed.

“Then what is?” demanded Neeva. “Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe anything else?”

“Of course not,” the dwarf said. “But don’t you see what he’s doing?”

“What?” demanded Neeva.

“Now that Sadira’s spurned him, he wants you back,” said Caelum, his red eyes burning with anger. “And he’s preying on your emotions.”

“I was only trying to calm her down!” Rikus shook his head in disbelief.

Caelum stepped toward him. “I know what you were doing!” The dwarf turned his palm toward the sun. “And if you try it again-”

Neeva slapped her husband’s arm down. “That blow to your head must have shaken your brains loose.” She jerked him away from the mul. “Apologize to Rikus.”

“He’s the one who should apologize,” Caelum said. “He’s already come between us, whether you admit it or not. You think I haven’t noticed how distant you’ve been?”

Neeva released her husband’s arm. “This has nothing to do with Rikus, except that I keep thinking Rkard should have been with him instead of you,” she said. Her throat suddenly felt as dry as silt. “I can’t help blaming you for what’s happened to our son. It’s unfair, but I just can’t get over the fact that Borys took Rkard from you. I’m sorry.”

Caelum’s face paled from bronze to ivory. Even his eyes seemed to fade from red to pink. “Don’t apologize. I feel the same way,” he said. “I’ve gone over the fight a hundred times, and I still don’t know how I could have stopped Borys. I just wish he had finished the job and killed me.”

“The fault is more mine than yours,” said Sadira. “When I used my magic to move you and Rkard to the well, I played right into Borys’s plans.”

The dwarf shook his head. “You moved both of us so I’d be there to protect him if anything went wrong,” Caelum replied. “But I couldn’t. What good is a man who can’t defend his own son?”

Neeva felt sorry for her husband but could not bring herself to offer him consolation. The simple fact was that she could not answer his question. What good was a man who couldn’t protect his own son?

Caelum turned toward the bow then paused and faced Rikus. “Please accept my apologies, my friend,” he said. “What I said to you was terrible.”

The color rose to the mul’s cheeks. “Think nothing of it.” He tried to shrug in a good-natured manner but succeeded only in looking uncomfortable. “We’ve all been touchy for the past few days. Tithian must be using some mind trick to make us argue.”

As if he really believed what he had suggested, the mul planted a sharp kick in the sleeping king’s ribs.

Rkard woke, gagging on the rotten stench of sulfur fumes and faintly aware that the Dragon still held him. They had stopped flying. Borys stood on a broken hillock of basalt overlooking a vast valley of dust and fire. Before them lay a plain of loose cinders and black stone laced with yellow channels of molten rock. Scattered geysers spewed ash and fire high into the sky while cascades of lava poured from the steaming fissures of distant cliffs. A cloud of red ash boiled overhead, and the air tasted as hot as flame.

“Where are we?” Rkard croaked. “Inside the sun?”

“No, Rkard,” answered a familiar voice. “Borys has carried you into the heart of the Sea of Silt-his personal lands.”

Jo’orsh appeared at the Dragon’s side. As always, the banshee arrived instantaneously, as if he had emerged from the vacant air itself.

“Jo’orsh!” Rkard cried. He twisted around to face his friend, fighting against the Dragon’s incredibly tight grip. “You found me!”

“I never lost you,” replied the banshee. “Why haven’t you killed the Dragon yet?”

Feeling guilty that he had not, Rkard tried to pull his arms free. He was too weak. The Dragon had not allowed him any water in almost a whole day, and it had been three times that long since the boy had eaten. Still, the young mul did not think his thirst or hunger made much difference. Borys’s grip was as powerful as that of a giant.

Rkard lowered his gaze. “Borys is too strong,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to kill him.”

“That is for you to decide,” said Jo’orsh. “After all, it is your destiny.”

“His destiny?” scoffed Borys. He snorted in amusement, shooting wisps of red-glowing sand from his nostrils. “There is no such thing as destiny-except what a being chooses for himself.”

“And Rkard has chosen to slay you,” said Jo’orsh.

Rkard frowned. As he remembered it, he had been given no choice in the matter. The banshees had told him that he would kill the Dragon.

“Then perhaps I should kill the child now,” hissed the Dragon. “Before he makes good on his threat.”

Borys’s grip tightened, and Rkard heard a crack deep inside himself. A sharp pain shot through his flank, then he could not breathe.

Jo’orsh’s orange eyes grew cool and narrow. “Release the boy!”

“Give me the Dark Lens,” came the reply.

“If you wish,” replied the banshee.

Borys’s grip relaxed, and Rkard could breathe again. The effort filled his lungs with fire, confirming that his captor had broken a rib. Taking advantage of the Dragon’s preoccupation with the banshee, the young mul pulled his hand free and raised it toward the boiling sky. As he summoned the energy to heal himself, a spout of glowing red ash shot down to lick at his palm. The Dragon paid no more attention to the whirling jet than he had when Rkard had assailed him earlier with kicks and bites.

Borys kept his beady eyes fixed on Jo’orsh’s gnarled form. “After a thousand years, you’re going to give me the Dark Lens?”

“Let me have the boy,” Jo’orsh answered.

Borys held Rkard out.

Jo’orsh advanced to within a few paces of the Dragon. He glanced down at a patch of broken basalt in front of him, then stopped. From between the cracked stones shone the orange glow of a submerged lava channel, dappled here and there with flecks of green fire.

“Don’t come any closer, Jo’orsh,” Rkard said. He was almost ready to cast his healing spell, for his hand now glowed fiery red and smoked from the fingertips. “If you let Borys have the Dark Lens, what happens to me doesn’t matter.”

“Silence, child!” ordered Borys. His grip tightened around Rkard’s injured ribs.

The burning embers beneath Jo’orsh’s brow flared yellow, shooting a pair of fiery bolts straight into Borys’s beady eyes. In the same instant, he leaped the submerged lava channel and landed face-to-face with Rkard’s captor. The banshee drove the jagged nub of his bony arm into the Dragon’s wrist.

The claw opened, and Rkard fell free.

The young mul bounced off Borys’s leathery knee and tumbled to the ground. As his mother had taught him, Rkard tucked his chin against his chest and stretched out to his full length. He landed on his uninjured side, slapping his forearm against the rough basalt to help absorb the impact.

The maneuver did him little good. From his feet to his shoulders, Rkard’s body exploded into a stinging ache. He heard himself scream. The sound was choked off as pain filled his chest and the air rushed from his lungs. He could not rise, could not even shift his hand-still glowing red with the sun’s healing magic-down to his broken rib.

Far above, Borys jerked his wrist off Jo’orsh’s jagged stump, spraying an arc of hot, yellow blood over the ground. Though the Dragon’s snout and face were scorched, his dark eyes showed no hint of injury-only anger.

“Perhaps I can’t destroy you, but there are those who can,” Borys hissed. He stood so close to Jo’orsh that the yellow fumes of his breath swirled over the banshee as he spoke. “The Lens.”

“Destroy me or not,” said Jo’orsh. “The Dark Lens will remain hidden.”

“Not from my lords!” Borys’s hands shot up and pushed the banshee back toward the submerged lava channel. “Take him, my kaisharga!”

The basalt burst into shards around Jo’orsh’s feet. Six gaunt, withered corpses rose from the lava channel, runnels of molten rock pouring off their blackened hides. A little larger than humans, they had emaciated builds and white-hot talons instead of fingers. Their shriveled faces all looked alike, with gaping dark holes where their noses should have been and eyes of green fire. In spite of their other similarities, each had one feature that set him or her apart: lacy wings of fire, smoking horns, fingernails as long and sharp as needles, huge pulsing eyes, chitinous scales of armor. One even had a mouth shaped like a trumpet.

“Jo’orsh, go away!” Rkard yelled.

“Stay!” commanded Borys, his tiny eyes fixed on the banshee. “If you leave, my servants shall have the child in your place.”

Jo’orsh made no move to flee, and the dead lords began to close in around him.

“He’ll kill me anyway!” Rkard cried. He forgot about his own pain and struggled to his feet. “Disappear!”

Jo’orsh shook his gnarled head. “For better or worse, my long battle is at an end,” he said, keeping his orange eyes fixed on his foes. “I knew that when I freed you.”

All six of the dead lords leapt at the banshee’s gnarled shins and began climbing. The banshee swung his twisted arms at his attackers, knocking the armored ghouls away before they reached his knees. The remaining corpses tore at his legs, ripping away so much bone that the limbs buckled and pitched Jo’orsh backward into a sputtering stream of molten rock.

White flames began to dance over the banshee’s twisted bones. He flailed at his attackers, splashing great arcs of fiery rock into the air.

The corpse Jo’orsh had knocked away earlier dived into the fiery river, then all six of the dead lords began tearing his gnarled ribs away. The banshee’s eyes grew dimmer, and he sighed, expelling a cloud of golden mist.

Rkard’s hand still glowed with the energy he had summoned earlier. The boy stepped toward the fiery stream, intending to cast his sun-spell. He hoped that it would distract the lords long enough for Jo’orsh to escape.

“Rkard, no!” the banshee yelled. “The time has come for you to kill the Dragon-before his minions dispel my magic and learn where the Lens is.”

Rkard stopped. “How?” The heat of the liquid rock was so terrible that he had to shield his face behind his arm. “Tell me what to do.”

Borys stepped forward to straddle the young mul. “Yes,” said the Dragon. His wounded wrist dripped beads of fiery blood all around Rkard. “We’re both very curious.”

Jo’orsh’s orange eyes remained fixed on Rkard. “I can’t tell you how to do it,” he said. “If you can’t find the answer within yourself, then Athas is lost.”

The dead lords pulled away a last rib. Liquid stone poured into the banshee’s chest, and the corpse with the huge pulsing eyes rode the viscous stream inside. Jo’orsh’s orange eyes began to dim.

The Dragon reached down to pick Rkard up, spattering the boy with droplets of fiery yellow blood. The young mul hardly noticed, for he was concentrating too hard on what Jo’orsh had said to him. If he could find within himself the key to slaying Borys, then it seemed most likely that the banshee meant it was a matter of knowledge.

Rkard’s thoughts automatically turned to the greatest source of dwarven knowledge, the Book of the Kemalok Kings. His favorite stories described the adventures of King Thurin, who always defeated his enemies by curing the grievous afflictions that had turned them into monsters in the first place. Afterward, the beasts always became either his devoted friends and servants, or they died peacefully, thanking him for releasing them from their eternal agony.

It struck Rkard that as a sun-cleric, his healing abilities were not so different from the way King Thurin had overcome his enemies. He wondered if that was what the banshee had been hinting at. Certainly, as one of Kemalok’s ancient knights, Jo’orsh knew the stories of King Thurin as well as the young mul did.

Borys’s claws closed around Rkard’s body. “So how will you destroy me, child?”

Rkard laid his hand on the seething puncture in Borys’s wrist. There was a brief flash as the red glow drained from the boy’s hand and into Borys’s scaly hide. The wound sizzled and smoked, then the drizzle of yellow fire slowly came to a stop. The hole’s jagged edges stretched toward each other and met, leaving a black, smoking scar where the injury had been.

A knot of anticipation formed in Rkard’s chest. His magic had sealed the wound-but had it healed the Dragon?

Borys lifted the young mul high off the ground and held him in front of a single black eye. “You are considerate, child,” he chuckled. “To show my gratitude, I shall let you live to see your parents-as I kill them.”

A sick, hollow feeling formed in Rkard’s stomach. The boy could not imagine how he was supposed to kill the Dragon. Back in Samarah, he had used the only other spell he knew when had cast his sun-beacon at Borys’s head. That had worked no better than healing the beast. And during the long trip to this place, he had tried punching, gouging, biting, kicking, and every other kind of physical assault he knew. Borys had not even flinched. If there was some way for a boy his age to kill the beast, the young mul could not think of it.

Far below, Rkard saw Jo’orsh lying in the fiery stream. The last glimmer of light faded from his orange eyes. His gnarled bones began to smoke. Finally, his skeleton disintegrated in a white flash, leaving nothing behind except a few crusts of black cinder. Within moments, the slow, swirling currents of boiling rock devoured even that trace of the banshee.

The dead lords waded to shore and stepped onto the black basalt at Borys’s feet. Orange beads of molten stone dripped from their bodies like sweat.

“The Usurper, Tithian, has the Dark Lens and has joined your enemies,” reported the corpse with the pulsing eyes. He was the one who had slipped inside Jo’orsh. “They want the child returned alive, but they are also determined to kill you.”

The Dragon nodded. “Good. If we present them with a choice between the two, they may hesitate at a critical moment,” he said. “Where will we find them?”

“Jo’orsh left them a day ago, so we cannot be certain,” the lord replied. “But the banshee thought that they would be entering the Baxal Shoals by now.”

“Less than a day from my valley,” hissed the Dragon. His grip tightened around Rkard’s chest, sending sharp pangs of agony through the boy’s lungs. “It is a dangerous thing to attack them so close to Ur Draxa. If they slip away and enter the city with the Lens …” Borys let the sentence trail off, shaking his head.

“Then what?” pressed Rkard.

“You cannot imagine, child,” the Dragon said. “Even your nightmares are not that terrible.”

“The Lord Mariner is lying off the shoals with his fleet,” said the corpse with the smoking horns. “With good fortune, he might intercept them-”

“You would like that, wouldn’t you, Lord Guardian?” spat the lord covered by chitinous armor. “After the Lord Mariner is destroyed, all his warriors-”

“The Lord Guardian is right. The Usurper and his companions must be intercepted,” said Borys. “But the Baxal Shoals are a vast labyrinth. Therefore, all my lords will join in the search. The Lord Mariner will divide you among his ships as he sees fit, covering as many channels as possible.” The Dragon looked at the fire-winged corpse. “You will inform the others, Lord Harbinger.”

“As you wish,” replied the lord, stretching his fiery wings.

“I have not dismissed you!” Borys snapped.

The Lord Harbinger froze in place. Even the flames on his wings did not waver.

“It will be difficult for you to reach the Baxal Shoals tonight,” said the Dragon. “If you fail, those who find my enemies must attack during the day.”

The dead lords cast uneasy glances at each other, then the Lord Guardian asked, “What of Sadira’s sun-magic?”

“She’ll destroy you,” Borys answered calmly. “But you have only one chance to attack. If you wait for night or pause to regroup, my enemies will escape and reach the valley in full force.”

“If we are likely to lose, why have us attack, Great One?” asked the lord with the chitinous armor.

“Your success will not be measured by victory, Lord Warrior,” the Dragon replied. “One of you must steal the mul’s sword. The blade was forged by Rajaat, so I cannot attack whoever bears it-but you can. If you can do this one thing, I will destroy my enemies.”

“In that case, perhaps we should also take King Hamanu,” suggested the Lord Harbinger. “His help-”

“Will be required at the Gate of Doom-along with that of the other sorcerer-kings,” interrupted Borys. “I must be ready in case you fail.”

Rkard frowned, curious as to what the Lord Harbinger thought Hamanu could accomplish in the battle. From what the boy understood, sorcerer-kings could not hit someone bearing the Scourge any more than could the Dragon.

“Remember that I created you for just such a time as this,” Borys said, glaring at his lords. “To survive without the sword is not to survive at all.”