Jherek stood beside her, raking Agenais with a spyglass as well. The port city's streets remained empty. Even the ships in the harbor were untended.
"Now we know where the drowned ones came from," Tarnar said. "I have to worry about my ship."
"The kelpies seem to have attacked the civilized areas first," Azla said. "Since you weren't anchored near a port, maybe they've survived."
"If they didn't decide to come looking for me."
"By the end of the day," Azla said, "you'll know."
Resolutely, Jherek kept the spyglass trained on the shore. Azla had ordered the helmsman to keep Azure Dagger far enough away from the evil kelpie bed that the haunting melody they sang was barely audible. There was no hope in his heart, but he wasn't ready to go back to the small room where Sabyna lay just yet. He wasn't helpful there and the rasp of her strained breathing tortured him. At least here he could search for someone who could help her.
"Survivors!*" the pirate in the crow's nest shouted. "Survivors starboard!"
Reflexively, Jherek swung his gaze around and spotted the small boatload of people a quarter of a mile or more out to sea.
Azla gave orders to pick them up and the crew hung the sails. Silently, Jherek hoped one of them would be a priest or a healer. Unfortunately, priests had proven extremely susceptible to the call of the kelpie beds.
XXIV
14 Marpenotn, the Year of the Gauntlet
Laaqueel swam above the army advancing northeast to Voalidru, lost in her own thoughts and fears. The two previous merman cities had fallen after a considerable amount of bloodshed.
The sea zombies Iakhovas had raised from the shallows around the Whamite Isles had proven to be the turning point of the sweep through Eadraal's holdings. Despite their fierceness and their familiarity with the terrain, even the strong-willed merman warriors had given ground. The once-dead were harder to kill the second time around.
The malenti priestess also knew that, as large as the army was, it was also extremely vulnerable-not from external forces, but from internal pressures. T'Kalah and the other sahuagin princes grew steadily more displeased with Iakhovas's decisions.
What had once been jealousy over the crown turned now to unrest with how the war progressed. That feeling was spreading through the sahuagin of both the inner and outer seas as they marched to the very eye of the storm between all the nations of Seros. If they chose to unify, they could attack the sahuagin from three sides. Only the retreat back to the Xedran Reefs seemed secure.
Adding the legions of undead from the Whamite Isles had been strategically the best move to increase the army's strength, but the sahuagin didn't believe Sekolah had anything to do with the sudden appearance of the sea zombies. Scouts that had ventured too close to the kelpie beds had succumbed to the ancient magic as well, becoming undead themselves. Those were the hardest of all to bear, and Laaqueel had destroyed them as soon as she'd discovered them.
If it hadn't been for Laaqueel, the sahuagin wouldn't have been put back to take care of the flanks, away from the undead. The koalinth saw the sea zombies as flesh-and-blood battering rams that softened up the merman defenses so they could roll over them more easily.
She gazed down through the murky water, watching the drowned ones swim through the currents toward Voalidru as Iakhovas had commanded them. They looked like a school of scavenger fish hugging the sea floor along the shallows.
"Little malenti, you think too much. Your thoughts cause doubt instead of hope."
Startled, Laaqueel looked up in time to see Iakhovas glide into position beside her.
"There's much to think about," she said, then glanced back and saw Tarjana in the distance.
"On the contrary, the time for thinking is almost over. Voalidru will be mine within hours."
"Perhaps, but the merfolk will continue to fight to win it back."
"I'm not intending to hold it," Iakhovas said. "It will only be a staging area for the attack on Myth Nantar."
"Then what happens?" Laaqueel asked because she knew it was expected. She no longer really cared, but Iakhovas enjoyed taunting her.
"Then the High Mages save the world," Iakhovas replied, "just the way their legends say they will-but not before I get what I came for."
Laaqueel studied him, noting how confident he was of himself His manner was so sahuagin it hurt, yet he talked casually of defeat while hinting that everything was going as he'd planned.
"How can you be so sure Myth Nan tar won't prove your undoing?" she asked.
"Because I know how those people think. They care more for their precious City of Destinies than anything else. The whole idea of unity in Seros is based around Myth Nantar."
"But it didn't work," Laaqueel protested. "I've read some of their histories. In the end, Myth Nantar failed because they fought over it as well."
"As it might fail again. But for now, they'll believe, and they'll attempt to save it and themselves. You'll see. Every step of this war has been carefully orchestrated. None have been born, little malenti, who will ever get the best of me."
Laaqueel was silent for a moment, knowing he wouldn't like what she next had to say. She didn't pause out of fear for herself; there was none of that left. She let the pause add weight to her words and glanced at Iakhovas to see his reaction.
"You hadn't planned on the boy in the cave, had you?"
With a mocking smile, his golden eye gleaming, Iakhovas gazed at her.
"No," he admitted, "I hadn't. He was a surprise engineered by someone else."
"Who?"
"I don't know, nor do I care. He is no threat to me. He is too lost in his own pain to look past that."
"His sword cut you when you thought it wouldn't."
"There's not much that can now," Iakhovas said. "I am almost whole."
"But he did."
"It's no matter. Don't irritate me, little malenti. I've got victories to arrange and a war to lose."
In the next instant he faded from the water.
Laaqueel assumed he'd teleported back to Tarjana. The fact that he no longer bothered to hide his magic bothered her as well. She reached up to touch the white shark symbol between her breasts and tried to feel the connection to the Shark God she'd once had.
It wasn't there. Still, the powers granted by her love and devotion to Sekolah worked. When a priestess truly lost her faith, those went away as well. How was it then, she wondered, that she could doubt so much yet still retain them?
She had no answers and nowhere to turn. So she swam, heading to Voalidru because there was nowhere else to go.
"Lady, I do hope that Glawinn was right and that you can hear me,* Jherek whispered.
He took a fresh compress from the water pitcher by Sabyna's bed and placed it across her fevered brow. Even the paladin's daily attempts to heal her and Arthoris's attentions with his waning supply of healing potions didn't stave off the infections that wracked her body. She enjoyed a brief respite from the fevers, but the bite marks deepened, turning black around the edges, drawing in the flesh around them as they consumed her. Both of the wounds were the size of one of his hands now. It had been seven days and still she had not regained consciousness.
Azla had ordered Azure Dagger to sail north but they lingered still around the Whamite Isles. At present the nearby seas were filled with drowned ones, morkoth, koalinth, and sahuagin. Once they'd even been turned back by a merman patrol claiming the waters as something called "Eadraal's."
The young sailor ministered to Sabyna with care. Tears filled his eyes as he listened to her harsh breathing and his hands shook as he touched her hot flesh. Over the days he'd cared for her, he'd found he talked incessantly. He'd told her of his life aboard Bunyip and in Velen, of Madame Iitaar and Malorrie, and of the mysterious voice that had led him this far by speaking the cryptic, Live, that you may serve. And he'd talked of her; what she'd shown him, what she'd come to mean to him.