“They’re not gaining on us by much,” Quenthel observed after a long moment.
“It’s going to take them a while to catch us.”
Halisstra turned and clambered past the bridge to gaze aft. She could see the pursuing boats, just barely. They trailed behind Coalhewer’s craft by a bowshot, black ghosts silhouetted faintly against the dying red smudge that marked the city behind them. A glimmer of white played at the bow of each boat where it parted the waters.
She looked up at the duergar and asked, “Can’t you make this thing go any faster?”
Coalhewer growled and waved a hand at the skeletons driving the craft.
“They’ve been told to go as fast as they can,” he said. “We might speed her up by throwing weight over the side, but there’s no telling if it’d be help enough.”
“How far are we from the southern wall of the cavern?” asked Quenthel.
“I don’t know these waters well. Three miles, I’d guess.”
“Then keep to your course,” the Baenre decided. “Once we’re ashore, we’ll be able to outdistance any pursuit, or pick our ground to fight on if we decide not to run.”
“But what of my boat?” Coalhewer demanded. “D’ye have any idea how much I paid for it?”
“I’m certain I hadn’t invited you along, dwarf,” Quenthel replied.
She turned her back on the duergar and settled down to wait, absently stroking her whip as she watched the pursuing boats draw closer.
The boat churned on, passing more stalagmites jutting up from the waters as the pursuing boats edged closer. Halisstra and Danifae watched carefully for obstacles ahead, but despite herself, Halisstra could not resist the impulse to glance over her shoulder every few minutes to check on their pursuers. Each time she did, the boats had closed a little more, until she could actually make out discrete individuals moving around on their decks. Fifteen minutes after they’d first come into view behind Coalhewer’s boat, the duergar vessels began to fire missiles after them—heavy crossbow bolts that fell hissing into their wake, and clumsy catapult-shot of great flaming spheres that soared past the boat to smash against the dank columns littering the surrounding waters.
“Zigzag a bit,” Quenthel told the dwarf. “We don’t want to be hit by one of those.”
“They’ll gain faster on us if I do,” Coalhewer protested, but he began to ease his wheel from one side to the other, trying to avoid keeping straight on any heading for too long.
“Ryld, Valas, return fire at the lead boat. Don’t use more than half your arrows or bolts. We may need them later on.” Quenthel glanced around, and nodded at Halisstra. “You too, Halisstra. Danifae, keep watch forward. Pharaun, answer those catapults.”
Valas turned around on the bridge and braced himself against intersecting rails, fitting an arrow to his string. He aimed for the lead boat, and loosed an arrow. Ryld and Halisstra followed a moment later with bolts of their own. After a long heartbeat of flight time, the tiny figure of a gray dwarf threw up its arms and reeled over the side of the boat, vanishing beneath its flailing paddles. Other dwarves scurried for cover, raising large mantlets to cover themselves.
Pharaun stepped forward and gestured boldly at the leading boat, barking out the words of a spell. From his fingertips a small orange bead of flame streaked out, darting across the dark water with the speed of an arrow. It seemed to vanish into the blackness, swallowed by the bulk of the leading boat—and a brilliant blast of flame erupted right at the pursuer’s prow, scouring the foredecks with a roar that echoed through the great cavern. Duergar wreathed in flames lurched and stumbled in the distance, with more of them falling or throwing themselves over the side.
“Well done!” Quenthel cried.
Even Jeggred roared in glee, but a moment later a buzzing globe of blue energy rose from the second ship and streaked back at them. Pharaun started a spell of deflection or warding, but he was unable to parry the blow, and glaring streaks of lightning enveloped Coalhewer’s boat. The very air roared with dozens of thunderclaps and explosions as crawling arcs of electricity detonated barrels, casks, and fittings, or sizzled into flesh. Halisstra cried out and buckled to the deck as a bolt stabbed through her left hip, while Ryld collapsed jerking to the deck, his breastplate glowing blue-white with the lightning ball’s energy. The skeletal rowers kept at their toil, driving the boat onward.
Pharaun jerked out his wand and hurled a bolt back at the boat that had launched the lightning ball at them. A skipping meteor of blinding fire flew at them from the leading boat, bounding across the water with an almost animate hunger. By a stroke of good luck, the missile struck a low-lying rocky outcropping and detonated behind them, spreading a slick of burning fluid across the water’s surface. The third boat fired its catapult again, sending a cometlike ball of flame whizzing clear over the bridge to explode a short distance ahead.
“Damnation,” Coalhewer snarled. “They’ve got the range on us!”
“It seems that I am somewhat outnumbered,” Pharaun called out between spells.
“Perhaps we should redouble our efforts to escape?”
Arrows hissed past them, clattering against the boat or sticking into the zurkhwood decks with heavy tchunks!
“Halisstra,” the wizard called, “would you take my wand—the one in my hand, I mean—and use it to discourage that fellow on the first boat?”
Halisstra ignored the hot ache in her hip and scrambled aft. She took the iron wand from the wizard’s hand, aiming at the lead boat as she barked out its command word. The air crackled with sparks and ozone as the bolt blasted back at the pursuing boat, only to flare impotently against some kind of spell shield that had been raised by the duergar wizards behind them.
Pharaun chanted out the words of another spell, and a thick white mist arose in their wake, its billows spreading across the water with startling speed. Almost instantly, it sprawled across their stern like a wall of white, completely blocking the pursuing boats from view.
“There,” said the wizard. “That should slow them a bit.”
“It’s fog. Won’t they just sail right through it?” Ryld asked.
“That is no ordinary fog, my friend. That fog is thick enough to arrest an arrow in mid-flight. Best of all, it is highly acidic, so that anyone blundering about in there will be slowly eaten away.” The wizard smiled and folded his arms. “Ah, damn it, I’m good.”
Quenthel opened her mouth, most likely to take issue with the wizard’s self-congratulations, when Danifae called from the bow, “Stop! Rocks ahead! Stop!”
“Bloody hell!” gasped Coalhewer. “All back full! All back full, ye great bony louts!”
The turning skeletons slowed their furious pumping, unable to arrest the heavy wheels all at once, and slowly began to spin the paddles back the other way. The dwarf did not wait on them, slamming his wheel hard over to veer away from the black line of fanglike rocks ahead. The lake seemed to come to an end, shoaling up quickly to meet the plunging ceiling. The shoreline extended left and right for as far as Halisstra could see. The boat slued to an awkward halt, its starboard bow rebounding from a thankfully rounded rock in their path. The impact staggered everyone on board, and nearly pitched Danifae headlong over the bow.
“Now what?” Ryld asked, picking himself up off the deck. “They’ve got us pinned against the cavern wall.”
“How long will your fog delay the gray dwarves?” Quenthel snapped at Pharaun.
“No more than a couple of minutes,” he answered. “They might choose to back out and go around, of course.”
Pharaun stared intently at his handiwork. In the distance, duergar screamed in pain, their cries of agony oddly muffled by the insidious white mist.
“The spell is unlikely to kill or disable very many of them,” the wizard added,