Corsair (32 page)

“Where are they?” he muttered. “They must have seen us by now.”

“I don’t care for the looks o’ the shore,” Andurth said in a low voice. “I can beach if you insist on it, but we’ve a deeper hull than that galley there, and I fear we’ll be stuck fast. It’ll be a devil of a job to get back in the water.”

Geran frowned. The dwarf was right; there was good, deep water by the quays in the city proper, but he was not about to tie up in the middle of the ruins. The shore the pirate ship was drawn up on looked wide and muddy. “Very well. We’ll land by boat.” He hesitated then asked, “Hamil, can you see anyone ashore?”

The halfling shook his head. “It looks like there’s a camp on the beach, but there’s not a soul in sight. I’d suggest that perhaps they’re all belowdecks on Moonshark or sheltering from the rain in the ruins, but somehow I don’t really think they are. I don’t like the looks of this, Geran.”

“Nor do I,” Geran answered. “But we’re here, and we need Moonshark’s compass.” He sighed and looked over to Andurth. “Master Galehand, drop anchor and put the ship’s boats in the water. I’ll take twenty hands ashore.”

“Aye, Lord Geran,” the dwarf answered. He shouted commands to the sailors on deck. The crewmen aloft began to furl the sails one by one, while others hurried to the ship’s anchor or began to unlash the ship’s boats.

Geran absently listened to the bustle and commotion. His attention was fixed on the mist-wreathed ruins looming over the harbor, concealed by veils of rain. Some dire peril awaited within, he was certain of it. But he had no idea what it might be.

12 Marpenoth, The Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)

Wet gravel grated under the longboat’s keel as it grounded on the strand a bowshot from where the silent Moonshark was drawn up. Geran vaulted over the side into knee-deep water and splashed ashore in the cold, steady rain, sword in hand. Weathered gray battlements and crumbling temples towered over the landing party, clinging to the edge of the steep bluff that marked the western side of Sulasspryn’s bay. The harbor proper lay several hundred yards to the east, where the remnants of a stone jetty sheltered the city’s old quays from the Moonsea storms. On this side of the harbor, a causeway ran out to the old customshouse across a thirty-yard-wide strand at the foot of the bluff. It was the only place in Sulasspryn’s bay flat enough for a ship the size of Moonshark to haul her prow out of the water—and it was well hidden from ships passing by at sea, not that many ever had reason to sail along this desolate coast.

“It seems your guess was right,” Sarth said to him. The tiefling pointed to the camp set up not far from the beached galley. Several fresh logs lay stacked there, partially stripped of their bark. The ship’s bow was braced atop two more logs set like rollers under the keel, and a simple framework of timbers held her in place. “Murkelmor must have decided he could not sail any farther without first mending the damage to the bow.”

“He would’ve been wiser to find a cove a few miles back, then,” Geran said. He reminded himself that few in Moonshark’s crew had any reason to be wary of Sulasspryn. None of them hailed from Hulburg or the lands nearby, after all. But he would have imagined that any grim old ruin of a city should have commanded some respect. Everyone knew that all sorts of curses, ghosts, and hungry monsters might lurk in any long-abandoned

castle or city, even if few of the pirates were familiar with the specific perils of these ruins.

“There aren’t many trees along the coast, but there seems to be some good timber here,” Hamil pointed out. “Or perhaps Murkelmor was counting on the reputation of the place to ward off pursuit and chose to land here for that very reason.”

“We’ll ask Murkelmor when we see him,” said Geran, although he was beginning to doubt that they would. He had a hard time believing that the pirates of Moonshark would have been willing to strand themselves beneath Sulasspryn’s brooding ruins even for a few hours, let alone the days of work that would be needed to effect serious repairs. He waited for his armsmen to drag their longboats up onto the beach and then motioned for them to follow him. “Come on, fellows. Stay close, and keep your eyes and ears open. Assume it’s a trap until we know for certain that it’s not.”

They marched toward the pirate galley, boots crunching in the pebbles underfoot. As they neared, they saw that the pirate crew had set up a worksite on the beach to cut and shape new timbers for their ship. It looked as though they’d simply walked away from their work. Saws, axes, and other tools lay scattered around the site. The Shieldsworn and sellswords with Geran kept their thoughts to themselves, but Geran noticed that they redoubled their vigilance, watching the bluffs to their right and keeping a wary eye on the shadows of doorways and windows above.

Where are they? Hamil said silently to Geran. Did they flee into the ruins when Seadrake appeared in the bay? I can’t believe Murkelmor would let us have his ship without fighting for it.

“I don’t know,” Geran murmured in reply. He circled around the prow of the galley with caution, just in case his former shipmates were waiting in ambush behind the ship’s hull—and then he found the first of Moonshark’s crewmen. The body sprawled at the water’s edge, facedown in the small wavelets lapping alongside the black hull. His back was a gory mess, ripped open in great furrows; several small, pale crabs scuttled away from the corpse as Geran approached.

“I think that’s Khefen,” Hamil said in a low voice. He grimaced. “Poor bastard.”

Geran glanced around and then crouched by the body to study it closely. “Dead a couple of days, I think. The wounds show a lot of tearing. Claws or talons, not blades. If I had to guess, I’d say that some beast drove him

to the ground from behind and ripped him to shreds. Kara could tell us more, if she were here.”

“Whatever it was killed him here and left him,” Hamil said. “Most animals would have dragged him off or eaten their fill.”

“There’s another over here, m’lord!” one of the Shieldsworn guards called. He stood by one of the large logs at the side of the worksite. A moment later another guardsman peering into the tangled scrub and brush at the foot of the bluff added, “And half a dozen here in the briars, m’lord!”

“None of this is our affair any longer,” Sarth said in a low voice. “We should retrieve the compass and go.”

“You’re right.” The longer they stayed, the more likely it was that whatever had fallen upon Moonshark s crew would fall on Seadrake as well. And while Geran would have been happy to take away any surviving pirates who appeared and asked to leave, he didn’t feel obligated to search them out, not when the lives of Mirya and Selsha might be hanging by a thread on some far island in the sky. To the soldiers poking around the campsite, he called, “Gather up the bodies you can find without straying too far and bury them together in the sawpit. But keep your weapons close to hand!”

The corsairs had rigged a simple rope ladder with wooden rungs from the half galley’s deck to the beach. Geran caught hold of it and climbed to the main deck, followed by Hamil and Sarth. He saw two more dead crewmen on the deck, both by the door leading to the captain’s cabin, which hung open.

“They must have tried to barricade themselves inside,” Hamil said. “There may be survivors belowdecks.”

“We’ll check in a moment,” Geran said. Keeping a wary eye on the dark opening to the cabin, he climbed up the short ladder to the quarterdeck. A heavy canvas hood covered the binnacle Murkelmor had built for the compass. He used the blade of his sword to slice through the cords knotting the hood together and dragged the cover away.

The starry compass was still there.

Geran breathed a deep sigh of relief and peered closely at the dark sphere. In the dull gray daylight, it seemed little more than a smooth round ball of black glass—although the longer he looked at it, the more he saw of its hidden depths, in which tiny glittering pinpoints of light hovered like stars in the night sky.

“It’s here,” he said aloud.

“Good,” said Hamil. “Lets get it and go. I don’t like this place.”

“Agreed,” Geran said. He produced a small sack from his belt. Together he and Hamil detached its silver collar from the wooden stand Murkelmor had built for it, wrapped it in a woolen blanket, and placed the orb carefully into the sack. Geran had no idea how breakable the thing was, but he certainly didn’t want to take the chance that it was, not when lives depended on it. With that done, they left the quarterdeck. A quick check belowdecks revealed another half-dozen crewmen dead in the midships bunkroom amid a scene of extreme violence; blood splattered the bulkheads, and furniture lay splintered or upended throughout the lower decks.

“Call me a coward, but I’m not sure I want to linger long enough to provide a decent burial for these fellows,” Hamil said. “What happened here?”

“Come on,” Grean replied. “Let’s go see if we can hurry things along and get back to Seadrake.”

They returned to the beach. Geran sent several of the soldiers to collect the bodies from the ship, slung the compass in a satchel over his shoulder, and then lent a hand with the unpleasant task of burying Moonshark’s dead—or the ones that were near at hand, anyway. By his count there were at least thirty or more still unaccounted for. If they were lucky, Murkelmor and the others had fled the city outright; if not, Geran guessed that most were dead somewhere in the ruins above the harbor.

Finally, after half an hour of grim work in the steady rain, the dead pirates were laid in the campsite’s trenchlike sawpit. Several of the Shieldsworn began to shovel damp sand and earth over the bodies. Geran looked around the beach, making sure they hadn’t missed anything or left anything behind. He certainly didn’t want to leave something else on Moonshark that he’d have to come back for later.

Something gave voice to a harsh, croaking cry from the heights overlooking the beach.

The Shieldsworn stopped where they were and looked up. Several archers laid arrows on their strings; other men hurriedly unslung their shields and fit their arms inside. “What was that?” Hamil muttered to himself.

Geran didn’t bother to guess. He watched the heights warily for a time. For a long moment nothing else happened. He was just about to relax his guard and tell the soldiers to finish up their work when several

more cries of the same sort echoed back and forth through the steady pattering of the rain. A small stone, dislodged from somewhere above, fell down to the beach, bouncing from the bluff several times. The harsh voices called back and forth, snarling and rasping unintelligibly. He realized that the creatures above, whatever they were, were talking to each other. He glanced over at Sarth to see if the sorcerer had any idea what might be above them, but Sarth just shook his head.

“Let’s head for the boats,” Geran said to the people around him. “Slowly, now. Stay together, and keep your weapons in hand.”

They started back toward the longboats, marching across the wet gravel—and then the creatures attacked. With a sudden thunderstorm of wingbeats and earsplitting cries, scores of winged creatures leaped from their hiding places in the ruins above and swooped down at the men on the beach. They were grayish black in color, with oversized talons, lashing tails, and horned heads. Fangs jutted from their wide mouths. More of the creatures raced out over the bay, heading for Seadrake a half mile away.

“Gargoyles!” Hamil shouted. He raised his short bow and loosed an arrow at the nearest of the plunging monsters. His hard-driven arrow struck the creature near the center of its chest, yet it barely sank an inch into the gargoyle’s stony flesh. With a shrill cry of pain, the creature wrenched the arrow from its wound. More arrows sleeted up from those Shieldsworn who were holding bows, but few did much harm. Hamil swore then shouted, “Eyes or throat! Shoot for the eyes or throat!”

Sarth intoned words of arcane power and blasted a pair of the monsters out of the air with a crackling blue bolt of lightning. Then gargoyles dropped amid the shore party in a wave of rending claws and snapping fangs. Screams of terror and inhuman croaks of anger or pain rose from the fray. The monster’s talons were hard enough to rend steel mail, and sword cuts tended to bounce off their tough hides, but a hard-driven swordpoint could pierce their flesh. Even as Shieldsworn went down under bloody claws, gargoyles spitted on Hulburgan steel shrieked and flailed desperately.

“Cuillen mhariel! “Geran snarled, invoking the warding of his silversteel veil. Argent mists swirled around his body, deflecting the flurry of slashing talons reaching for him. Then he invoked another spell to set his sword aflame and hurled himself headlong into the fray. His sword blazed with arcane fury as he slashed and stabbed at the flapping monsters around

him, leaving long, black-scorched gashes in gargoyle hides. “Stand your ground!” he called to the Shieldsworn. “Guard each other’s backs! We can fight them off!”

Just out of his reach, a gargoyle dropped down behind a soldier, clenched its talons in his shoulders, and then leaped back into the air, carrying the screaming, writhing man aloft. An archer shot through its wing and sent it crashing back to earth, only to be plucked off the ground himself by another of the monsters. Still other gargoyles clutched and dragged soldiers away, seeking to carry their victims aloft or pull them away from the melee. The creatures croaked and hissed with dark glee as they singled out their prey.

“Narva saizhal!” Sarth roared. He wheeled and flung a lethal blast of icy darts at gargoyles rushing him from behind. Geran leaped to cut down another of the monsters as it threw itself at the tiefling’s back. Despite their stonelike flesh, the gargoyles were susceptible to the sorcerer’s spells and Geran’s swordmagic. And, as Hamil had said, they were vulnerable to well-aimed blows; the swordmage caught a glimpse of a gargoyle plummeting to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, one of Hamil’s arrows standing a handspan deep in its eye.

For a moment, Geran believed they would repel the first assault without much loss—and then a thin ray of grayish light lanced down from overhead, striking a Shieldsworn soldier in the chest. The man groaned once, staggered back a step, and then toppled to the ground, eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. More rays stabbed into the knot of fighting soldiers, rays that burned, rays that corroded, rays that knocked men senseless and left them virtually defenseless against the gargoyle attacks. Geran looked up and saw a large, round-bodied creature floating thirty feet in the air behind the gargoyles. It had one great staring eye, fixed on the battle below, and a number of tendrils with smaller eyes flailing around it. From the lesser eyes the deadly magic rays lashed out, scouring Seadrake’s landing party even as they fought to fend off the swooping gargoyles.