Kleef was about to say as much when Arietta’s hushed voice sounded from the bow thwart behind him. “There!”
He turned to look over his shoulder and found her already nocking an arrow. She pointed the tip ahead and a little to the starboard.
“See them?” she whispered.
Kleef followed the arrow and spotted the dim shapes of two longboats crammed with shades. The forms were still too distant and indistinct to tell much about the passengers, but the boats seemed to be diverging-either moving toward separate targets or trying to flank a single one.
A male voice-Kleef thought it sounded like Carlton-called out in the fog ahead. It was answered by Tanner’s voice, at least a dozen paces away. Both longboats altered course, one angling toward Carlton’s voice, the other toward Tanner’s.
“Quieter and faster.” Arietta’s whisper was so soft Kleef could barely make out her words. “Maybe we can take them by surprise.”
With two boatloads of shades to face, the advantage of any surprise they achieved would quickly reverse. Still, Kleef had to smile at Arietta’s enthusiasm. She had the spirit of a warrior and the pride of a lord, and he didn’t quite know what to make of her. Her heart seemed too pure to belong to a noble, yet she had lied about her identity for no reason he could see. It made him wonder if lying was just habit for her, if the practice simply ran in noble blood.
“Kleef, I said …” Arietta let her complaint trail off, then spoke in a more urgent whisper. “Wait! Hold here.”
Kleef let the oars hang in the water, putting just enough pressure on them to slow the skiff without making noise, then glanced over his shoulder again. Arietta was scowling and looking hard to starboard, where the blurry shape of a half-submerged temple could be seen no more than thirty paces distant, sitting on the shore of a rocky islet.
“Something’s wrong.” Arietta pointed in the direction opposite the islet. “Shouldn’t the Roamer be somewhere over there?”
“If it’s still in the passage,” Kleef said. “Maybe Greatorm got lost in his own fog.”
“And sailed across half the reef before running aground?” Arietta shook her head. “I don’t see that.”
Actually, the distance would have been closer to a quarter of the reef, but Kleef saw her point. From what they had seen during the previous day’s low tide, it would have been impossible for any vessel with a keel to cross that much of the reef.
“Maybe they’re wading,” Kleef suggested. “Or swimming.”
“It’s possible,” Arietta said. “But the water would be over their heads in a lot of places, and swimming in this fog would be madness.”
Then the voices called out again-this time from a good twenty paces to the left-and Kleef understood.
“They couldn’t have moved that far.” He spun the skiff around. “It has to be a trick.”
Arietta scowled. “That wasn’t in the plan.” She hesitated, then asked, “Was it?”
“Not that anyone told me about.” He began to row away from the Shadovar. “I don’t even know how they could do it.”
Arietta did not even hesitate. “Malik,” she whispered. “He’s the tricky one.”
The longboats had dimmed to gray blurs when Kleef saw a hazy figure rise in the stern of the farthest one. For an instant, he feared they were about to be attacked, but the shade merely extended an arm over the side of his boat. He spoke a few syllables in an ancient, sibilant language that were clearly audible across the water, then cocked his head as though listening for a reply.
A moment later, a deep murmuring groan bubbled across the water, and the shade sat down again.
Behind Kleef, Arietta let out her breath. “What was that about?”
“Nothing good,” Kleef said. “I don’t think we’re the only ones who realize the voices are a trick.”
He pulled harder on the oars, and both longboats vanished into the fog. An instant later, so did the rocky islet, and Kleef was left with no real sense of where the hidden passage lay.
“Keep a sharp eye up there,” he said. “I have no idea where we’re heading.”
“Just watch our wake,” Arietta said. “Keep it straight, and we should be heading more or less in the right direction.”
Kleef was impressed. “A minstrel, a lady, and a sailor?”
“Not a sailor,” Arietta replied. “Just smart.”
Kleef was about to ask whether he had just been insulted when a tremendous slurping sound rolled through the fog. It was followed by clacking crossbows and a long chorus of screams. Kleef adjusted their course toward the sounds, then began to row so hard the oars slammed against their locks.
“Faster!” Arietta ordered.
Kleef put his legs into it, pushing against the rear thwart-and snapping it off its mounts.
“Any harder and we’ll break up,” he said. “What’s happening back there?”
“How should I know? Just keep …” The sentence ended with the twang of a snapping bowstring. “What is that thing?”
Kleef glanced back to find a writhing mountain of shadow rising ahead, its blurry darkness so pure that it seemed to shed Greatorm’s fog as though it were water. A single enormous eye with a dozen deformed pupils peered out of a pulsing maw, and the maw was surrounded by jointed barbs.
Arietta loosed another arrow, and it was only then that Kleef noticed a flurry of tiny black slivers flying up from below the monster’s immense bulk. He followed the line of slivers down to their source, where he found the silhouette of the Lonely Roamer sitting in a channel of dark water.
Still rowing, Kleef continued to watch over his shoulder as the shadow creature dipped down and grasped the Roamer’s entire bow in its jaws. The screams aboard the ketch grew even more panicked and terrified, and human shapes began to leap overboard. Then the creature lowered the rest of its body to the surface, and the ship began to move backward toward Kleef and Arietta, raising a man-high wave before its stern. A flash of red hair went over the side, and Kleef felt a lump form in his throat.
He doubled his pace, throwing his weight forward and backward so fast the thwart rocked and creaked beneath him, pushing his feet against the hull so hard he feared he would loosen a plank.
The Roamer continued to move toward them, coming fast and pushing the wave ahead of its stern. Kleef moved the skiff out of the way just in time to avoid being swamped, but the wake raised the little boat a good four feet above the surrounding sea, and they had a crystal-clear view of the leviathan as it swam past.
Rippling with muscle and sinew, the thing was as big around as a war galley and as long as Ringfinger Wharf. The dorsal fins along its spine were as tall as houses, and the beat of its enormous tail created such a wave that Kleef barely managed to keep the skiff from capsizing.
Once the wave was past, he started to row again. Immediately, he began to hear screaming and splashing, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw several dim fog-shrouded figures in the water. Some appeared to be swimming better than others, but all were flailing in panic, and a couple seemed to be thrashing their weapons into the sea. Finally, he spotted a fan of red hair about twenty paces away, and a cold hollow formed in the pit of his stomach. Unlike everyone else, this figure was motionless, and it was impossible to tell whether she was alive or dead.
No sooner had Kleef turned the skiff toward her than Arietta pointed in the opposite direction. “Over there, Kleef. It’s Malik.”
Kleef looked over his other shoulder and saw a small figure, also about twenty paces away. The little man was holding his robe in one hand and his sword in the other, flailing madly as he tried to swim.