“Well, Little Brother,” Grimsoar One-Eye said. “This is not the farewell I had expected.”
“To be sure. Silken sheets and lovely ladies make a proper deathbed. But this may not be a deathbed, and the lady is lovely enough, at any rate. Indeed, I’ll wager the price of a set of silk sheets that we’ll be back.”
“Who pays me if you lose?”
“Ask Lady Eskaia.” Pirvan jerked his head to the far side of the hold, where the two women were embracing clumsily, trying not to cry or fall.
“Aye.” Grimsoar lowered his voice. “There are a few of the lads who say that they don’t care if you come back, as long as we’re rid of the dragon.”
“Oh they do, do they?”
“No more than I can handle, to be sure.”
“Tarothin-”
“Begging your pardon, Brother, but sailors are sailors. They’ll take my fist in their face and call it a fair fight. With Tarothin, they’ll cry out, and others might listen.”
“As you wish.”
They gripped shoulders, then suddenly Haimya was beside him and it was time to ride the dragon.
* * * * *
“Ready above!” someone shouted. At least it sounded like that, above the endless creaking of the ship and the howl of the storm.
“Ready below!” Pirvan replied. Haimya said nothing, merely gripped her harness with one hand and patted Hipparan with the other.
“Both hands and no sentimentality, Lady,” the dragon grumbled. “You don’t think I’d be doing this if I didn’t think I still owed you?”
Any human reply was lost in the squeal of the hatch cover sliding free, the crash as it struck the deck, and the shriek as the storm burst into the hold. Haimya shifted to a two-handed grip and leaned back into her harness, then shut her eyes. Pirvan kept his open-until Hipparan’s first leap seemed to sink them all the way to the back of his skull.
He opened them again on deck, and the wind promptly tried to blow them shut. He remembered a picture of a dragon-mounted knight of Huma’s time, wearing something over his eyes. Too late to worry about that now.
The sailors were shouting and waving. Pirvan couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t have heard a thousand clerics chanting songs to the gods over the storm. He raised a hand to wave-and had only a one-handed grip when Hipparan leaped into the storm.
For a moment, Pirvan saw the waves above and the sky and Golden Cup’s masts below. He noticed that more than a few ropes had joined the scraps of canvas in flying loose on the wind. The dragon seemed to fall upward, the waves reached out, then paused-and at last began to recede.
By the time Hipparan rolled over to fly upright, Pirvan had a two-handed grip. He even had his eyes open-though the first thing he saw made him want to shut them again.
Hipparan was climbing swiftly toward the base of the clouds. They were too high for spray, but not for rain. Through the murk of rain and spray Pirvan saw Golden Cup, already shrunk to the size of a child’s toy boat bobbing in a bath.
Except that no bathwater ever had the sinister gray hue or oddly crinkled appearance of the storm-beaten ocean. And children’s toy boats were always neat and colorful, not battered and drab.
Then Hipparan plunged into the clouds. Pirvan’s last glimpse was of Haimya, her eyes so tightly closed and her face so pale that he could hardly tell if she was alive. He uttered a brief prayer to Habbakuk and closed his own eyes, for now there was nothing whatever to see.
Chapter 15
The world was storm for a time no human could have measured, and the only other being in the storm was a dragon too busy staying aloft to talk to his riders. Pirvan had never heard of the Abyss being an endless storm through which you rode on the back of a dragon, and in any case it ought to be an evil dragon.
He looked down and saw Hipparan’s copper scales unchanged. No, not unchanged. Brighter than they had been, as if they were wet, or had been polished, or-
The clouds turned from gray to white and then fell away as Hipparan soared into the sunlight.
Pirvan realized that he was as cold as he had ever been in his life. In the sudden silence of the high skies, he thought he heard teeth chattering.
“Haimya?”
“Y-Y-Yes?”
At least they were hers, though his own weren’t quite steady-not at all, in fact. His next words came out:
“Are you all r-r-right?”
He wasn’t sure if she laughed or stammered “Yes,” again.
“That’s as well,” Hipparan said. “I know it’s cold up here for humans soaked to the skin, and none too comfortable for me. But I don’t dare go back down for a while. Some of the clouds are right down to the water. I can’t see in the clouds, and I can’t skim the waves, not in this storm.”
“We weren’t asking you to do any such thing, believe me,” Haimya said. Now Pirvan wanted to laugh at her fervent tone. She was probably just as glad as he to see sunlight again, but she would doubtless rather have fingernails pulled out than admit it.
Hipparan wheeled in two full circles, peering upward at the sun to establish its position and his best course to the Crater Gulf. Pirvan hoped that the dragon knew navigation but would not let a word of doubt pass his lips.
He would have called Hipparan a young dragon even if Tarothin hadn’t said so. The dragon had a bright youth’s common vice of claiming to know more than he actually did, then sulking when one questioned his claim.
It was a vice with which Pirvan was too familiar-and those who had cajoled, argued, or beaten it out of him even more so. He hoped that Hipparan did not have as painful a journey on the road from youth to wisdom, but that was as the gods willed.
* * * * *
“Lady, it’s time to leave the deck. You’ll catch your death if one of those waves breaks over you.”
Lady Eskaia had to look well upward to meet Grimsoar’s single eye. He grinned down at her, like an indulgent uncle with a favorite niece.
“I can’t get any wetter, Grimsoar.” Indeed, she felt already as if she’d jumped into a pond with all her clothes on. From the looks she was receiving, she wondered if they were clinging in interesting ways.
She gripped the safety line and continued to stare into the clouds that had swallowed Haimya and Pirvan, as well as the dragon.
“Lady, I don’t want to pick you up and carry you-”
“I don’t wish you to. So we agree.”
“As you wish. But Tarothin’s wearing himself out with the sick we already have. It might be too much for him to heal you of lung fever.”
That was true. It also might be true that the lung fever would leave her weak, even with healing. Wet clothes, a wet bed in a wet ship, no hot food or even drink-it was not only the poor without healing who died of the lung fever, when it came on strongly enough.
She wanted to release Haimya to her betrothed standing and facing them both, not wheezing in a damp bed.
“Here.”
Grimsoar was pulling off his hooded shirt and handing it to her. He must not have been on deck long; it was still dry.
“Now who’s going to catch his death-?” she began, pointing at his massive bare chest.
Then a thunderclap hammered down from aloft. Half a dozen throats tore in shouts.
“Down!” Grimsoar roared.
Eskaia started to fling herself on the deck, then found herself flying through the air. Another sailor caught her, knocked her down, then covered her with his own body as the sky seemed to fall about everyone on Golden Cup’s deck.
It wasn’t the sky. It was only the mainmast going over the side, followed by the new foremast. The mizzenmast lasted just long enough for Eskaia to stagger to her feet, then it too joined the others in the water.
It seemed a minor eternity before the sky stopped raining ropes, blocks, spars, and all the assorted gear ships seemed to carry high in their masts. Most of it went mercifully straight over the side. Some of it came down like stones from a high roof, to hammer flat anything below.