Finally came the ocean bottom, a wasteland of silt-strewn plain dotted with the occasional skeleton-like framework of a ship or the bones of some great sea creature. The plain of the ocean's floor stretched, featureless and flat, for many miles. Then yawned a place where the descent plunged still farther as a great chasm cut like a raw wound through the flatness of the seabed. Sheer walls plummeted into the unimaginable deep, farther still below the realms of light where the fish and the fauna dwelled. Yet even at this frightful depth, under the burdens of pressure and darkness, there was life.
Within this undersea canyon, occupying both sides of the steeply sloping walls, the sahuagin had built their city of Kressilacc. The aquatic humanoids were constantly vicious and hungry, the mortal enemies of air-breathing humankind. Covered with hard scales and, on the males, bristling dorsal spines, the fish-men formed a horrific army when they ventured forth. They carried bronze weapons, wore shell shields, and swam in great, swarming companies.
From Kressilacc, twenty years earlier, the Deepsong had thrummed, luring hordes of the fish-men into war with the Ffolk and northmen of the surface world. It had been a war during which the sahuagin armies fared very badly indeed.
After the battles, their ranks decimated and their pride savaged, the proud warriors of this evil submarine race had returned to their remote city, there to lick their wounds, to praise their dead, to punish their clerics. . and to let their hatred fester.
The clerics had been followers of Bhaal, and it had been their exhortations that had led the sahuagin into the ill-starred war. Bhaal was now a vanquished god. And so the priestesses had died-slowly, with much suffering, which is the way the sahuagin prefer to dispose of their enemies.
The king of Kressilacc, a great bull of a fish-man called Sythissal, had barely escaped the slaughter wreaked upon the clerics-indeed, it had only been his vehement cries for vengeance, claiming that he himself had been dazzled by foul sorcery, that had shifted the rage of the sahuagin away from the one who had led them to disaster.
Thus King Sythissal's hatred of the surface dwellers was even more profoundly rooted than was the vengeful bloodlust of his subjects. And yet, though he loudly declaimed human treachery and greed and often sent his leanest warriors forth to harass and sink the ships of men, the king had never returned to the surface since the last battle, a disaster that had culminated with an abject collapse of morale. His army fled in disarray from the base of Caer Corwell back to the sheltering darkness of the sea.
This defeat had done another thing to King Sythissal. It had inflicted upon him a deep and vengeful mistrust of all things clerical.
Temples to gods of chaos and evil had long stood in the wide galleries and long, curving balconies of the cliff-wall city. Images of Bhaal, and Malar the Beastlord, and Talos the Destroyer and Auril Frostmaiden and many others had occupied these holy places for untold centuries, but the king ordered them all cast down. Thus at the same time as the New Gods secured their grip upon the worship of the Ffolk, the evil gods worshiped in the deep were cast aside, abandoned by their followers, their power spurned with them.
All except one, that is. The faithful priests and priestesses of Talos the Destroyer foresaw, quite accurately, the day when the power of their god would gain prominence in the Moonshaes. With a surface world swept free of interference by the gods of good and their pitiful human tools, these scaly priests understood that the sahuagin would be able to attain ultimate power. Mastery of the isles was a dream that could soon become real!
The key to the future of the sahuagin race, Sythissal knew, lay in defeating the hated humans and the air-breathing dwarves, elves, and halflings who were their allies. His loathing of the surface peoples grew into a palpable abhorrence, a hatred so strong that, for the King of Kressilacc, it became a reason for living.
The clerics of Talos prepared their king for the coming of their god. They sent to him nubile priestesses for the Great Spawning, and these pleased him well. While the king rested, the priestess fish hissed premonitions to the piscine monarch, and Sythissal dreamed of a great messenger. That one would come with word of a plan, the king saw, wherein the humans would bring about their own destruction. Talos and his faithful would rule!
Sythissal saw one whose skin had scales like his own. But this messenger claimed all the skies as its sea and moved through those lofty heights with the same ease that the king glided through brine. Sythissal saw that the messenger was a thing of death, but also of unspeakable power.
To prepare for this messenger-one the king did not yet know as the harbinger of Talos-the great sahuagin desired gifts. He wished to meet this great one in a fashion that would indicate the might and richness of Kressilacc. Thus Sythissal decided to personally lead a war party to the surface, reveling once more in the taste of warm human blood.
The sahuagin city lay in the Sea of Moonshae but wasn't far removed from the trading routes connecting the eastern cities of the isles-most notably Callidyrr-to the wealth of the distant Sword Coast. Instinctively the king desired to strike at the Ffolk for his treasure raid; a lingering sense of vengeance required it. Too, their vessels tended to be slower than the longships of the northmen, making easier targets for the swimming fish-men.
For the first time in two decades, King Sythissal led a great host of his warriors forth from the city, upward and eastward toward the realms of sunlight and air. He would find a prize, he knew, and claim it for his own. Then when the messenger of the gods came to them, the sahuagin would be ready with appropriate offerings.
Soon now, the priestesses told the king, that messenger would come to the Moonshaes. Then the sahuagin vengeance could begin.
Following Alicia to the council, Keane understood why the princess felt no concern that her father would punish her tardiness. The king indulged the whims of Alicia and her sister Deirdre in a manner that the tall tutor often found annoying. As High King, Tristan Kendrick was the mightiest ruler in the Moonshae Islands, yet still his daughters had always been uppermost in his thoughts and cares, to the point where both of them had become somewhat spoiled, in the opinion of their hardworking teacher.
Keane watched Alicia walk. The princess moved with the confident swagger of a warrior, inexplicably coupled with an alluring sensuality that allowed no mistaking her for a man. He shook his head, embarrassed but not surprised by the awareness of her femininity. It was a knowledge that intruded into his consciousness with disturbing frequency. For years he had quashed it, but now that she had reached full adulthood, Keane found it harder to stifle.
Alicia trusted him and usually treated him with respect. Of the two girls, she was the more enjoyable to teach, though days like this made him wonder. But whatever Alicia did-even when it was simply to complain about her tasks-she did with energy and enthusiasm and humor.
A perfect counterpoint to Alicia, Keane knew, could be found in her younger sister, Deirdre. Born barely a year after Alicia, Deirdre seemed to be her sister's opposite in every way. She was dark and quiet, even sullen, where Alicia was fair and outgoing to the point of boldness. They were tutored by the same man, but Keane felt none of the rapport with the younger sister that he knew with the elder. Indeed, sometimes Deirdre disturbed him, for she seemed to remain completely distant from any of his attempts at friendship, at the same time absorbing completely whatever information he happened to be imparting.
In their studies, he had to admit that Deirdre outshone her older sister in every category. Always focused and intent, the dark-haired girl would brusquely confront him if he tried to short-cut an argument or present as fact some knowledge not fully documented.