The light from her helmet did little to pierce the darkness. When she looked down into the water directly, the blue beam broke into a thousand reflections in the black water, giving her the illusion that the boat was gliding across the surface of a vast Khyber shard, its binding magic calling out to them, hungry and eager. She looked up again quickly, shaking the thought away.
As she did, she thought she saw a dark smudge in the distance. Moving forward carefully, she pointed it out to the drow, who nodded.
“We are nearing the opposite shore. Once we set foot on land again, we will be in the domain of the Spinner of Shadows.”
“Who-or what- is the Spinner?” Sabira asked. Boroman ir’Dayne had said that the Spinner, or She, of Shadows was a deity peculiar to the Umbragen, but the drow spoke of her as though she were an actual, physical being, something akin to a queen.
Xujil looked at her, uncomprehending.
“She is… the She,” he said at last, “is the Spinner of Fate, the Queen of Shadow, the Well of the Umbra, the Womb and the Pit. She is Tarath Marad. She is… all.”
“Yeah, okay. Sorry I asked.”
She moved back to her position near Greddark at the stern of the boat, staring out over the water at the approaching shore. They were getting closer. She could feel it.
Something moved below the surface of the lake a few feet off the starboard side of the vessel, humping up above the waterline and then back down again before she could point it out to the others. She’d never bothered to replace her shard axe in its harness, and now she put her makeshift oar down and grabbed the weapon, leaning over the edge of their floating mushroom cap.
“What is it?” Greddark asked, instantly alert.
“I thought I saw something,” she said, scanning the opaque water.
“A leviathan,” Xujil said from the front of the boat, paddling faster.
“ What?” she and Greddark exclaimed in unison.
“We happened upon one on our last crossing, but the sorceress defeated it. They are normally solitary. I did not expect to encounter another.” Xujil had told them that Tilde’s party had fought something in the water. He had failed to adequately communicate what that something was. “I would suggest we increase our pace.”
Sabira grabbed her oar again and the four of them rowed in urgent unison, racing toward the ever-expanding shoreline. She actually thought, for a moment, that they might make it.
Then she felt something bump into the rubbery hull of the boat.
“It’s under-” she began, but before she could get the rest of the warning out, the prow of the boat lifted out of the water, dumping Xujil and Jester into the dark drink. Sabira dropped her oar as the boat continued to rise, grabbing her urgrosh in one hand and clutching at the lip of the cap with the other.
And then the boat was flying through the air, her and Greddark along with it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Far, Barrakas 27, 998 YK
Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.
As Sabira splashed into the icy water and went under, she caught a glimpse of something huge, yawning, and full of teeth snatching the upended mushroom cap out of the water and disappearing back beneath the surface.
As the thing submerged again, Sabira could feel the pull of its wake carrying her down. She fought against it, hampered by the shard axe in her hand but unwilling to release the weapon. The frigid water leeched both the warmth and the strength out of her limbs and her lungs were burning by the time she breached the surface.
Treading water, she fumbled her urgrosh back into its harness and cast about frantically for her companions. She saw a blue light bobbing off to her left, then begin moving toward land. That must be Greddark. She peered ahead, trying to make out Xujil, who had not been wearing a helmet, but she couldn’t find him. And though she swam in a circle, scanning the water all around her, there was no sign of Jester.
Sabira struck out for the shore, expecting at any moment to feel the jaws of the leviathan closing around her, but she reached the shallows without incident. She climbed wearily to her feet and waded toward Greddark’s light. Xujil was helping him up out of the water and as she neared, she saw a deep gash in his thigh where he’d been scored by the behemoth’s teeth. She hurried forward and grabbed his other arm, and together she and the drow half-carried, half-dragged him up the rocky beach until they found a flat rock they could set him on.
Once he was propped up, Sabira pulled the pack that was still miraculously on her back off and handed it over to the drow.
“See what you can find to help him.”
As she turned back to the lake, her hair a sodden copper veil in front of her eyes, Greddark stopped her.
“What are you doing?”
“Going back for Jester,” she said, brushing wet locks out of her face in annoyance.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sabira. He’s a warforged; with all that metal, he would have sunk to the bottom by now. You’re not going to be able to find him, no matter how deep you dive.”
“But I-”
“-he also doesn’t need to breathe,” Greddark said, speaking over the top of her, “so he can just walk along that bottom until he reaches the shore. If we wait, I’m sure he’ll come climbing out of the water in proper bardic fashion in no time.”
They did wait, into the night and for most of the next day, but Jester never resurfaced. Sabira spent much of her time walking along the edge of the lake peering into its impenetrable depths, searching vainly for the faintest glimmer of blue. Greddark gave up trying to dissuade her early on, instead turning to drying out their cloaks and the contents of his myriad pouches, and taking stock of their now very limited supplies. He’d quaffed the last healing potion and the wound on his leg was already a faint scar. When Sabira returned from her latest circuit up and down the lake shore, she saw him paging through what was left of the Draconic dictionary.
He looked up as she approached.
“Ruined,” he said regretfully, showing her the ink-smeared pages. She could make out a few individual words here and there that hadn’t been destroyed by the water, but by themselves, they meant nothing. “I can’t believe they didn’t ward it against water damage.”
“I doubt they were expecting any rain in the Catacombs,” Sabira answered, but the sarcasm was perfunctory. Her mind was still out on the lake. Under it.
“Though it does look like a few entries survived here where the pages stuck together… hmm…,” the dwarf trailed off as he set the book back in his lap and began gently prying the leaves apart.
“How long do you intend to wait here, Marshal?”
Sabira looked over at Xujil, who’d returned from his own reconnaissance of the lakeshore, though he hadn’t been looking for Jester. He’d already written the warforged off.
“As long as it takes.”
“I should think that is highly inadvisable. The Spinner’s followers do patrol this lake, however irregularly. And there is still the matter of the sorceress, and your rescue miss-?”
“Don’t you dare try to tell me my duty,” Sabira snarled, interrupting him. “Nobody knows that call better than a Deneith, and no one answers it faster.”
She clenched her fist at her side to keep from punching him in the face. Mainly because he was right.
Xujil blinked at her.
“And stop doing that! What are you, some Hostdamned bird?”
The guide was spared from trying to formulate a response that wouldn’t get him hit by Greddark.
“Ha! I was right!”
Shooting Xujil one last furious look, Sabira turned back to the dwarf, attempting to rein in her temper.
“Right about what?”