Strange sensation, he said to Jak, and the little man nodded as they fell.
Pulled by the weight of the anchor, they descended rapidly. The darkness grew profound. Only the lightlessness of the Plane of Shadow compared with the pitch of the depths. Cale's transformed eyes allowed him to see but only to about the distance of a long dagger toss. Shadowy forms moved in and out of his field of vision, all of them finned, and some of them large. They fell through a school of orange fish as big as Cale's forearm. He kept his eyes open for scrags, but saw none. Cale suspected that Magadon had left no survivors.
They descended deeper. Cale looked down and saw only a black abyss. He glanced up and saw only a trail of bubbles left in their wake, spiraling away into the dark. The surface was lost to them. They were alone, sinking into the soundless depths.
Cale had no idea how they would find the slaadi down there.
Trickster's toes, Jak projected. I am at a thirty count and no end in sight. My ears are popping.
Cale nodded. His ears were popping too, and he had deliberately not kept a count. He did not want to know how far down they had gone.
The bottom finally came into view. Cale saw a wasteland of broken rock, hillocks, and rolling dunes of dirt that stretched as far as he could see in every direction. It looked as desolate as a desert.
Cale let go of the anchor before it took them all the way down. He and Jak kicked to end their downward momentum. With their lungs full of water, they hung at equilibrium ten paces above the sea floor. The anchor continued its descent, hit the sand, and in silence sent up a cloud of mud.
They glanced about, looking for any sign of the slaadi. Cale saw nothing. Other than the disturbance caused by the anchor's impact, the sea bottom was as still as a painting-no movement, no life. Cale found the bottom so alien it might as well have been another plane of existence. He was very conscious of the fact that he and Jak were intruders, bringing life and motion to the still death of the bottom.
Eerie down here, Jak projected. An understatement.
Both held their blades in hand. As an experiment, Cale made a stabbing motion with Weaveshear. The water did not interfere with his movement. Jak's spell allowed them to move as easily in the water as they could in air.
Large chunks of broken rock lay embedded in the sea floor below them, scattered across the mud like the gravestones of giants. Several were as large as towers, some as small as a man. Worked stone, too, jutted from the sand: pillars, the limbs and heads of ancient statuary, pedestals, columns.
He remembered Sephris's words and realized that they were looking upon the ruins of a city that had been old when Sembia had been nothing more than a collection of farming hamlets. The sea had kept Sakkors in stasis for centuries.
Cale could see only twenty or so paces in any direction, but he had the sense that the rubble field extended over a vast swath of the bottom. Sakkors must have been a large city, as large as Selgaunt.
What is that? Jak asked, and pointed behind Cale.
Cale turned and saw a diffuse red glow, dimmer than moonlight. He thought it odd that they had not seen it on the way down. Though distance was hard to gauge in the depths, Cale figured the radiance to be a long bowshot away, maybe farther.
Shadows leaked from Weaveshear and flowed lazily in the direction of the light.
Mags, we're on the bottom, heading for a light, Cale projected.
Magadon made no response. Cale and Jak shared a look. The halfling shrugged.
Let's go, Cale said, and they set off, following the rope of shadows that bled from Weaveshear.
Cale saw that they were swimming above a wide furrow torn in the bottom of the sea by the floating city that had crashed into the ocean and rolled along the floor. He did not allow himself to imagine the terror the inhabitants must have felt as they hit the water.
Dark, Jak said. This was no small town. Look at the damage. Imagine the number of people.
Cale nodded. Sakkors was a graveyard for tens of thousands.
The bottom sloped upward as they swam, slightly at first, then more steeply. The light grew brighter with each stroke. They came to a ridge and… the sea floor fell away beneath them.
They stood at the top of a cliff so steep and smooth it looked like the sea floor had been sheared with a vorpal blade. At the bottom of the cliff, easily five hundred paces down, a mass of ruins spread beneath them. Broken buildings lay piled haphazardly on more broken buildings, one after another, until they formed a mountain of ruin. The heap reached a third of the way up the cliff face. Only underwater could such an unstable mass not collapse. The red glow emerged from somewhere within the pile of ruins, near the bottom.
Looking down the cliff face, Cale understood the geography. The smooth cliff must have once faced the sky, part of a massive chunk of mountain that had borne Sakkors through the sky. When the city crashed into the sea, the slab of earth upon which it had been built had come to a stop on its side and much of the city had poured off and slid downward to form a pile at its base.
For a few moments, neither Cale nor Jak said anything. The destruction was too big for comment. The red glow bathed the ruins, cast them in blood. Shadows poured from Cale's blade toward the bottom of the mountain of ruins, toward the red glow.
Jak swam out over the cliff, turned, and looked down.
There are caves carved into the cliff face, he said. Above the ruins.
The scrags' lair, Cale guessed.
Jak gave a start, peered downward.
Cale followed his gaze and saw what had drawn the little man's attention.
Far below them, perhaps a third of the way down the cliff face, three silhouettes knifed through the water. Cale could not see them clearly but the figures were too small for scrags. They swam rapidly, with the speed and undulating movement of something native to the depths.
Is that them? Jak asked.
It has to be, Cale said, but cursed himself for not casting a spell ahead of time that would have allowed him to see dweomers. He might have confirmed for himself that the three humanoids were the shapechanged slaadi and Riven. Now he could cast nothing because he could not give voice to his prayers.
But the darkness would still answer him. Controlling the shadows did not require him to speak. He needed only his will.
Ready yourself, he said to Jak. I'll move us there.
Jak nodded and Cale called upon the shadows. He first molded the darkness of the depths into simulacrums of himself that mirrored his motions. The images flickered about him, continuously changing positions around the real Cale.
Jak tried to follow their motions, failed, shook his head.
Focus on Azriim, Cale said. He will have the Weave Tap seed.
How will we know which is him? Jak asked.
Cale had no answer for that. They would not be able to mark the slaad's unusual eyes underwater.
We will have to improvise, little man.
Jak hefted his blades, nodded.
Cale looked down the cliff, picked his spot, and drew the darkness around them. With an effort of will, he moved them instantly from atop the cliff to the water beside the three forms.
The moment they materialized, the three forms recoiled and shouted a bubble trail. Cale marked Riven as the one-eyed aquatic elf, and the slaadi as the scaled, fanged, and clawed sea devils.
Riven, in the flesh of the aquatic elf, darted backward from the combat and jerked a pair of daggers from his belt. The assassin caught Cale's eye and shook his head as if to say, Not yet!
Cale ignored him, noted a thigh sheath of wands on one of the sahuagin, and knew that was Azriim. He lunged forward and stabbed Weaveshear at the slaad's chest. The surprised slaad responded quickly, darting out of the way of the stab and answering with a claw slash across Cale's exposed forearm. Trailing blood, Cale swung Weaveshear in a reverse slash that bit deeply into the slaad's side. Azriim screamed, bled, kicked, and swam backward away from Cale.