An opposing power slapped-or perhaps flicked-his awareness back inside his skull with an effortless violence that jolted him. He belatedly realized there was only one entity that could do this, and that might mean he was in real trouble after all.
When he reached out again, his psychic tone was deferential. Unfortunately, it made no difference. The Bitch Queen rebuffed him again, and with equal brutality.
The watery vortex slammed and scraped him against the chamber walls until he feared that even his preternaturally powerful body would come apart. He felt a pang of dread at the possibility of enduring eternity as a detached head or something similarly broken and helpless.
Then, at last, the whirlpool drew in on itself and dumped him on the floor. A waterspout rising from the central pool once more, it took on definition until it was the looming torso of a blue-green woman with seashell ornaments and a cloak made of jellyfish.
Common sense suggested that the water couldn’t simultaneously hold the steady form of a woman and swirl, but even so, Evendur felt that somehow, he could still see the raging tumult of the waterspout as he looked at her. Or maybe the violence was in her smile, all but unbearable with an infinite love of ruin.
Not unbearable to her Chosen, though, and given that, unlike Imbras, Evendur was still intact, he dared to hope he retained that status. He clambered onto his knees and bowed his head. “Goddess,” he said.
In response, pain ripped through him, and he cried out. The torment was Umberlee’s way of telling him she was angry. And that he would be wise to hold his tongue.
“I tasked you to be my hunter,” snarled the Queen of the Depths. “To seize the Morninglord’s Chosen and offer him up to me. And instead I find you playing at diplomacy.” Her malice lashed him again, and then again.
Jerking, Evendur endured the bursts of agony as best he could. A part of him wanted to protest that on other occasions, the deity herself had commanded him to forge alliances like those he’d been pursuing in Impiltur, but he sensed such a plaint would only further enrage her. Reason and fairness were alien to her nature.
After perhaps twenty strokes of the psychic lash, the punishment stopped, although the lingering anger in her voice made it sound as if she might yield to the urge to resume at any moment. “Because of your blundering,” she said, “Red Wizards have seized the Chosen of Lathander. They’re sailing east from Westgate to give him to Szass Tam, who will then put him to death.”
Inwardly, Evendur flinched. This truly was bad. He was supposed to kill the boy prophet in a sacrificial ritual that would both augment his mystical power and discredit the reborn faith of Lathander in the eyes of those who might otherwise have credited its message. According to Umberlee, it was the one sure way to ensure the supremacy of her church across the Sea of Fallen Stars, and it obviously couldn’t happen if the infamous lich lord of Thay slew the child instead.
“Seize the boy,” the goddess said. “Do it with your own hands, and do not fail. You can catch the Thayans’ galley in the straits between Pirate Isle and Gulthandor.”
The towering figure of water lost cohesion as she ceased inhabiting it. With a splash that soaked Evendur all over again, the brine plunged back down into the well.
Though he no longer needed air to survive, the habits of life still lingered, and he took a long, steadying breath. Linked as he was to the Queen of the Depths, he generally rejoiced in her transcendent ferocity. But not when she directed any measure of it in his direction.
He strode through the temple until he found one of the senior waveservants. He told the priest what he wanted done in his absence, then returned to the pool.
There, he roared words that sounded like a raging gale and surf pounding against rocks. Unlike common waveservants, he’d never studied the secret languages of the sea or any form of magic. But his ascension had put the knowledge in his head.
The spell didn’t agitate the pool below him in any visible fashion, yet he could sense it changing. It felt like a door opening, and when it finished swinging wide, he jumped in.
He then swam down the shaft as quickly and agilely as any squid or eel. That was another of Umberlee’s gifts. So was the inhuman sight that allowed him to see despite the rapidly gathering gloom.
The well twisted just where it always had, but shortly thereafter, he swam across a kind of threshold. He couldn’t see the discontinuity, either, but he felt it as a surge of exhilaration. Grinning, he kicked and stroked faster, until he shot out the end of the passage.
The mouth of the tunnel was likewise invisible when he glanced back around. The whole of Pirate Isle was gone. Instead of emerging adjacent to the promontory on which the temple rose, or near any other land, he was in open water.
Specifically, he was floating in the heart of Umberlee’s watery realm. He had only to open his mind to sense currents flowing endlessly on through a thousand reefs teeming with huge, brightly colored fish and the dark gliding or lurking things that preyed on them. Before his transformation, he might have felt alarm upon perceiving the latter, for the least of them could have gobbled up a mortal man without difficulty. But now, fearing them would have been like fearing himself.
In other places, the sea floor dropped away to frigid gulfs where different predators dangled glowing lures on fleshy tendrils, and blind things crawled and slithered in the ooze. Those creatures were Evendur’s kindred, too, and their grotesqueries made him smile like a child beholding a clown’s capers.
In fact, had he permitted it, he could have drifted for a long while marveling at the wonders swimming or scuttling on every side. But that was unlikely to please Umberlee, so he thrust the temptation aside.
Thanks to the esoteric lore the goddess had implanted, he knew that every body of water in the mortal world linked to this ultimate ocean. More, he knew a further secret, one that ordinary priests and mages might never discover in decades of study: Any spot here connected to every place in or on the mundane world’s seas. But only if a mystic possessed the might and skill to force open the way.
Evendur pulled his rotting hands in gathering motions and croaked words that made it sound as if he were drowning all over again. At first, intrigued by the power they sensed accumulating in the water, gigantic hammerheads and rays came swimming close to investigate. Before long, though, the alternating waves of hot and cold became intense enough to alarm them, and they fled.
On the final word of the incantation, awareness pierced Evendur like a hundred arrows hurtling from as many different directions. It was like possessing countless eyes and using each one to peer through a different porthole.
But people, even undead Chosen of Umberlee, were meant to possess only two eyes and use both to look in a single direction. Evendur could make no sense of his jumbled perceptions and felt as if they were punching holes in his mind.
He imposed order by willing his ethereal eyes shut one at a time until only one still peered at a stretch of the rolling gray surface of the Sea of Fallen Stars. He cast about. When certain no ship was in view, he closed the first eye and opened another on a vista that was nearly identical.
The third perspective revealed squawking seagulls perched on the floating carcass of a pilot whale and pecking and tearing at the meat. But still no ship.
Evendur wasn’t counting on spotting the Red Wizards’ galley. That would take considerable luck. But he needed a vessel of some sort. Feeling increasingly impatient, he opened more eyes in quick succession.
On his twenty-seventh try, he found what he was seeking, a caravel on a starboard tack off the southern coast. In fact, it was the Iron Jest, a vessel that had sometimes cooperated with his own now-sunken Abattoir in raids on ports and merchant convoys.