Arietta crouched lower in the skiff. “What’s Greatorm waiting for?” she hissed. “Yder must sense a trap by now!”
When no answer came, she glanced over her shoulder to find Jang looking back at Kleef, who sat tense and upright, teeth clenched and eyes wide with dread. Fearing that Yder had found a way to visit Kleef during his waking hours, Arietta reached for her bow … then felt a dark menace searching for her, something savage and profane, the same unholy hunger that had violated her when Malik revealed the Eye of Gruumsh-and she knew why Greatorm felt so confident in his trap.
He was dangling the ultimate bait.
“What are they doing?” Jang’s voice was muffled and hard to hear, no doubt because he was looking in the opposite direction, back toward the Lonely Roamer. “Have they gone mad?”
The last thing Arietta wanted to do was reveal herself to the Eye by looking in its direction, but the confusion in Jang’s voice was too alarming. If Malik and Joelle were doing something foolish-or even treacherous-she needed to know about it.
Arietta reluctantly twisted around and looked toward the ketch, which was about two hundred paces away, bobbing gently against her anchor chain. The pocket of deep water in which she lay was a little calmer than the shallows covering the nearby reef, a difference that would soon be obvious to any seamen aboard the Wyvern. The Eye was nowhere in sight, but several figures could be seen pursuing a larger shape-no doubt Kleef’s man, Tanner-toward the bow of the little ship.
“Relax, Jang,” Kleef said, finally opening his eyes. “They’re just setting the hook.”
“You knew about this?” Arietta asked.
A tight, half grin came to Kleef’s mouth. “My idea,” he said. “Yder has been trying to get me to steal the Eye for him. I thought we could use that against him.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Arietta demanded.
Kleef shrugged. “Joelle was nervous about exposing the Eye,” he said. “She wanted to keep it a secret until the time came.”
Arietta hesitated, feeling a little excluded, then finally nodded. “I see. Well, that makes sense.”
Aboard the Lonely Roamer, the chase had reached the bow, where Tanner stumbled and fell. His pursuers fell on him immediately, and the profane hunger of the Eye vanished at once. The Roamer’s anchor chain began to clatter through the hawsehole, and a dense white fog spilled over her bulwarks and crept across the water toward the reef. In seconds the ketch was no longer visible, and Arietta knew that if all went according to plan, the vessel would soon be escaping through the hidden passage.
“Even better than promised,” Jang said. “I had not expected it to be so fast.”
“Indeed,” Arietta said, still worried. Greatorm had promised that the Shadovar would not be able to dispel the fog, but he had refused to reveal how he created it. “I just wish he had told us how it works. ‘Trust me’ is not very confidence-inspiring.”
“Greatorm is a smuggler,” Kleef said. “You can’t expect him to give away his tricks.”
The fog soon washed over them. It had a salty, acrid taint that burned Arietta’s nostrils and made her think of brimstone, and there was a yellow tinge to it that made distant shapes difficult to see.
Shouts of alarm and frustration drifted across the water from the direction of the Wave Wyvern, and an urgent creaking grew audible as the oars put on speed.
“Sounds like it’s time,” Kleef said. “Let’s move.”
Jang took up their own oars and backed the skiff out of the pool in which they had been hiding, then carefully began to row them around the half-submerged temple. By the time they arrived on the far side of the little islet, Greatorm’s gnomish fog had swallowed everything in sight. The only way Arietta could tell that the Wyvern was crossing ahead of them was by the shriek-splash of her oars.
Then came the deep burbling growl of a keel running aground, followed almost instantly by the crash of tumbling gear and the cries of startled crewmen. The tumult continued for only a moment, then quickly faded as the ship slowed to a dead stop. Jang continued to row, and the Wyvern finally grew apparent, a faint darkening in the fog, about twenty paces ahead.
“Hold here,” Kleef whispered. “Let’s see what they do.”
Jang brought the skiff to a stop without so much as the sound of a swirling oar. For the next few minutes, Arietta and her companions sat listening to an angry Yder yell commands and questions in his native tongue. The longer she listened to his raspy voice, the higher the flame of rage and sorrow rose within her. Farnig Seasilver may not have been a paragon of the noble class, but he had still been her father and a grand duke of Cormyr, and he had not deserved the death Yder gave him. That alone would have been reason enough to fight-even had she not understood the importance of helping Joelle and Malik stop Shar from releasing the Shadowfell across all of Toril.
Winches groaned as the Shadovar lowered longboats into the water. Arietta set her quiver at her knee and nocked an arrow, then prayed to Siamorphe to quiet her pounding heart. This would be only the second time she had gone into a life-or-death fight-the first had been when she joined Kleef on Deepwater Bridge-and she found that the waiting frightened her far more than had the actual combat.
At last, a pair of long gray silhouettes glided past the bow of the galleass and faded into the fog. They were trailing no lines and taking care to move as quietly as possible, so it seemed clear that instead of attempting to free his own vessel, Yder had decided to board the Lonely Roamer from the Wyvern’s longboats-just as Greatorm had predicted.
Jang began to move the skiff forward again, and Arietta scanned the Wyvern’s looming silhouette for any sign of a Shadovar lookout. It took only moments to find a dark shape moving aft from the bow. She drew her bowstring taut, but did not loose.
The Wyvern had not grounded so solidly that the reef was holding her steady. Instead, she was rolling slightly on her keel, lifting and lowering the target in a steady cycle. Arietta waited until she had the rhythm, then let out her breath and let the arrow fly.
A heartbeat later, it took the dark silhouette in the center of the head and sent him flying back.
Arietta already had her next arrow nocked and, when a second silhouette appeared at the bulwark, she was ready. She loosed instantly this time-and saw the arrow tear through the Shadovar’s throat. He stumbled two steps back, then collapsed out of sight.
Not a head shot, but it would have to do. Arietta nocked another arrow and waited, but no more Shadovar appeared as the Wave Wyvern changed from gray shape to wooden ship. Once they’d drawn to within a few paces, Jang stopped rowing. Kleef stood and tossed a hook-and-rope onto the bulwark of the Wave Wyvern, then held the line steady as Jang ascended hand-over-hand.
The Shou was nearly at the top when a Shadovar peered down at him, his glassy blade already descending to cut the line. Arietta planted an arrow in his dusky face, and Jang was over the bulwark, drawing his slender sword and removing the head before the body had fallen out of sight.
Slinging her bow and quiver over her shoulders, Arietta took the rope next. While the distance wasn’t great, she was not as strong as the Shou, and the rocking of the Wyvern made the climb a difficult one. It was nearly a dozen seconds before she neared the top of the rope-and saw Jang reaching down to help her the rest of the way.
“Thank you,” she said, clambering onto the deck. “How many remain?”
“I’ve beheaded the three you hit.” Jang pointed to three headless bodies lying on the deck between them and the bow. “I will look for others.”