Caelum also looked over the side, feeling a little foolish for bragging about how his magic would prevent the corpses from boarding the dhow. The little craft was already as high as the treetops and rising. Far below and ahead, the corpses were still loading boulders into their catapult spoons, but the dwarf did not think the stones would come high enough to strike their craft.
As they came nearer to the cutters, Caelum noticed that not all of the corpses on the decks were decomposing. On each ship, one looked strangely preserved, with leathery skin and an emaciated body. The shriveled faces of these figures looked remarkably similar, with gaping cavities for noses and eyes of green fire. But each also had a distinctive feature setting him or her apart from the others: a pair of smoking horns, fingernails as long and sharp as needles, chitinous scales of armor, lacy wings of fire, a sharp beak instead of a mouth.
“What are those things?” Neeva asked. She pointed first at the corpse with the smoking horns, then at the one with the chitinous armor.
“They’re the ship commanders-some sort of spirit lords,” offered Sadira. “And I doubt they happened on us by chance. Borys probably sent them.”
The one with fiery wings leaped off his ship’s deck and shot up to intercept the dhow.
“There’s no need to worry,” Caelum said. He glanced up at the red sphere still shining down from the top of the mast, hoping his spell would prove useful after all. “He can’t come into the light.”
“Who’s worried?” Rikus asked. “But we can’t let him follow us, either. Better to kill-er, destroy-him now.”
The mul gripped his sword with both hands and stepped into the bow. It was the only place on the dhow where the protective light of Caelum’s spell did not extend beyond the gunnels, and so it was the only place the corpse could attack the craft itself.
The spirit lord seemed to sense this, for he streaked straight to Rikus. The mul swung. The corpse fanned his fiery wings and stopped instantly, allowing the Scourge’s blade to flash harmlessly past his face.
“Stupid mul!” the spirit lord hissed. “Come with me!”
The corpse slipped to the side of the blade and clamped both hands over the mul’s wrists. The lord’s wings flapped furiously, trying to back away and pull Rikus from the dhow. Each time they beat forward, long tongues of flame curled off the wings’ lacy edges to lick at the mul’s face and arms.
Screaming in pain, Rikus dropped down to shield himself behind the bone prow. He braced his feet against the gunnel and pulled, trying to draw his attacker into the glowing circle cast by Caelum’s spell. The two foes seemed evenly matched. The mul’s wrists remained poised at the perimeter of the rosy light, trembling with strain and agony. The corpse’s wings beat madly, filling the air in front of the dhow with yellow whorls of flame.
Neeva ducked under the sail and stepped forward, chopping at the spirit with her axe. The steel did not bite into his flesh, but she caught the crook of the blade behind the corpse’s neck. She added her strength to Rikus’s and pulled, dragging their enemy across the gunnel into the rosy light of Caelum’s spell.
The spirit lord howled in pain. Black tendrils of smoke spewed from his body, and his flesh fell away in flakes of black ash. Caelum could hardly believe what he was seeing. The spell was having an effect, but hardly what he had expected. The corpse had to be as powerful as a banshee. Otherwise, he would have been consumed by crimson flame as soon as he was pulled into the circle.
Caelum turned a hand toward the sun, calling for the magic to incinerate the spirit. A red glow crept over his hand, and he pointed his finger at the corpse.
Before the dwarf could cast his spell, Sadira uttered an incantation from the back of the boat. A bolt of black energy streaked past Caelum’s head, striking the spirit in the center of the chest. A tremendous bang shook the dhow, nearly knocking the cleric from his feet and blasting the corpse out of the bow. A ball of ebony fire swallowed the lord, and he plunged toward the shoals below. By the time he reached the ground, all that remained of him was a cloud of ash.
Caelum sighed, feeling more useless than ever. He went to the mul’s side and said, “Let me see those burns, Rikus.”
The mul shook his head and started to rise. “Later,” he said. “They’re not serious.”
Caelum laid his palm on the mul’s blistered arms. “I’ll tend them now,” he insisted. “If all I’m good for is healing other people’s wounds, at least let me do it well.”
With that, the dwarf released his healing energy. The mul hissed as the magic poured into his body. The blisters quickly subsided, leaving only a red tint to show where the mul’s skin had been burned.
“Thanks,” Rikus said. “That does feel better.”
The clatter of catapults sounded from below. Caelum looked over the gunnel in time to see a volley of gray boulders crossing paths beneath the hull. The four ships that had fired the stones were almost directly below the dhow, one pair to each side of the silt passage. The fifth cutter lay a short distance ahead, still blocking the narrow channel between the shoals.
In spite of the catapults’ obvious inability to hit the dhow, the mindless crewmen cranked the spoons down to reload. “Go ahead, try again!” Rikus yelled.
As they passed over the last cutter, a loud sizzle sounded from the ship’s deck. A brilliant flash of blue streaked from its stern. There was a deafening boom, and the whole dhow bucked. The hull erupted into a spray of gray splinters. Caelum grabbed the gunnel to keep from flying out and felt his feet dangling free. Realizing the dhow had no bottom, he looked down. The cargo casks, the floater’s dome, Neeva’s axe, the Dark Lens, even the boat’s sail and mast were arcing toward the shoals far below. Only the people remained, clinging to the gunnels for their lives.
Caelum watched the dhow’s cargo fall. With the sail still attached, the mast was caught by the wind and lost its forward momentum the fastest. It landed about a hundred paces from the cutters, plunging through a shoal’s mud crust and standing upright. The water casks and Neeva’s axe were strewn over the crusty banks a little distance beyond, while the Dark Lens continued the farthest before plunging into the silt channel.
“No!” Tithian screamed. “The Lens!”
The king released his grip and dropped away, raising a plume of dust as he followed the Lens into the dust passage.
“What now?” cried Neeva.
“Turn around,” answered Caelum.
The dwarf looked back toward the cutters. Already, the spirit lords were leaping off their ships. “I don’t care about Tithian, but we can’t lose the Lens.”
“Swing in low near the sail, Sadira,” Rikus ordered. The mul pointed at the dhow’s mast, which still had the rosy orb of the dwarf’s protection spell glowing from the top. “Caelum and I’ll drop off to hold them back. Then you take Neeva back to find the Lens.”
Sadira brought the dhow around. She swooped in so low that Caelum could have counted the cracks in the beach below. The dwarf waited until they passed into the rosy glow of his protection spell, then let go of the gunnel.
Almost before he felt himself falling, Caelum slammed into the crusty mud and felt it crack beneath the impact. He allowed his momentum to carry him forward and tumbled head over heels across the hot ground. He came to a rest on his back, staring straight up the mast at the red sphere of his spell. The mast was wobbling slightly, as if it might fall at any moment, and it was tilting toward the silt channel at a slight angle.
Caelum noticed that he felt nothing from the waist down and feared the fall had broken something in his back. He tried to kick his legs-and nearly choked on the resulting cloud of dust.
Realizing that he had nearly rolled into the dust channel, Caelum pushed himself back. He stood, already raising a hand toward the sun, and spun around to face the spirit lords.