The Lost Library of Cormanthyr (32 page)

Turning, Baylee looked back in the direction they’d come from. The lantern lights were barely bright enough to illuminate the huge gray bodies as they swam into view. The alien eyes, bigger than the ranger himself, stared at him.

Then the whales swam into the wreckage of Chalice of the Crowns, smashing it into even smaller bits than it had been. The turbulence created by their passing shoved Baylee from his feet. For a moment, he was tangled in the net with the treasure Uziraff and his two men had gathered. Then he was free, the lantern in hand as he swam for a rocky outcropping.

Uziraff joined him a moment later. “Where in the nine hells did they come from?” the pirate captain demanded.

“I don’t know,” Baylee said. “But I’m glad they didn’t arrive while we were still inside.”

Both major parts of Chalice of the Crowns crumbled to pieces under the giant whales’ assault. In the gathered darkness, Baylee wasn’t sure how many of the creatures there were.

On their next pass through the area, they opened their mouths and shoveled in the broken pieces of the ship, swallowing them whole. More whales glided through the water and raked the silt in the nearby areas, dredging up huge tracts of the ocean floor.

Miraculously, they did not see the two nets Uziraff had been using.

A moment later, they were gone. Baylee pushed himself away from the rocky outcropping, staring at the long ditches where Chalice of the Crowns had lain for hundreds of years.

“I’ll want a boat before I let you strand us out here,” Baylee said. They were back aboard Windchaser, his clothes still dripping cold brine. The whales had completely left the area and, according to the pirate crew, never even broke the surface.

Uziraff stood at the prow of the cog, lanterns throwing light over him. The boom arm creaked threateningly as it lifted the second of the nets free of the ocean floor while the crew yelled in triumph. The pirate captain turned his attention from the glittering gold and silver pieces in the dripping nets to Baylee. “Who are you to make demands at this point? I could have all of you killed, cut up into chum for the sharks, and thrown overboard.”

Baylee was aware of Civva Cthulad shifting beside him. The old warrior’s hands were already on his weapons. “That would be a misadventure on your part,” Baylee said.

“How can you stand there and say that?” Uziraff demanded. “You’re outnumbered almost nine to one!”

“Think about it,” Baylee said in a neutral voice. “How often have you seen me go armed?”

Uziraff leaned on the railing, gazing down at the ranger.

Baylee knew what he was saying was true, and it gave the pirate captain pause.

I promise, Xuxa said, opening her thoughts to Uziraff, that I will kill you if Baylee falls.

“They’re only two men,” one of the nearby pirates shouted out. “I say kill ‘em and be d—” His voice froze in his throat, blocked by the quivering throwing knife that suddenly took shape there. The pirate gurgled, finally managing to yank the throwing knife free of his throat. But it was too late, his life was already spent.

“Anyone else want to venture an opinion?” Baylee asked. He fanned three throwing knives out in front of him, then made them disappear with the grace of a fan dancer. “If you try to attack me, I have nothing to lose.”

None of the other pirates said a word.

“I await your answer,” Baylee said.

Uziraff hesitated only a moment, then gestured to his men. “Give them a lifeboat. We’ve got the treasure. They can’t take that away from us.”

“Well, lad,” Civva Cthulad said in a whisper as they faced the pirate crew, “I must admit I didn’t expect you to kill that man outright so quickly. You seem to be rather laid back for that kind of thing.”

“He would have talked them into killing us,” Baylee replied. “And we would have killed more of them than the one whose life I took.”

“Agreed. But we will be vulnerable to attack while we descend to the lifeboat.”

Not entirely, Xuxa put in. I can watch.

The lifeboat was lowered over the side. “Go first,” Cthulad invited.

“In a moment.” Baylee drew the snap-together composite bow from its waterproof quiver and assembled it smoothly, locking the sections into place. He took up four of the heavy flight arrows, nocking one of them into place while he held the other three in his fist, and stepped over the side. The lifeboat was less than eight feet below and maybe three feet out. He landed in it, crouching to regain his balance, and managed to remain standing. The bow stayed at the ready. “Come on down.”

Cthulad turned and clambered over the side, stepping down quickly into the lifeboat.

One of the pirates heaved an oil lantern toward the lifeboat, hoping to drench the occupants with flaming liquid.

Baylee loosed the shaft he held in his fingers, punching the heavy war arrow through the man’s chest. Another man started raking at his face, coming away bloodied. Xuxa was a leathery whisper of movement just above him a moment later.

The oil from the lantern spread across the ocean’s surface and caught fire. The flames twisted and licked at the lifeboat. Cthulad grabbed the oars and started rowing them away from the cog as well as the flames.

Only two other attacks were made on the lifeboat. Baylee put a shaft through the eye of an archer, and Xuxa ripped the face of another. Then Uziraff’s voice split the night air, calling the pirates into order. Windchaser’s sails filled and she pulled away.

Baylee took the bow apart and put it back into the waterproof quiver. He knelt down and checked the stores under the bench seat in the prow. The dive into the ocean, despite the potion, had taxed his reserves. With wet clothing draping his body, he felt the chill of the night air.

“You’re quite good with the bow,” Cthulad said, putting the oars to rest.

“When I have to be,” Baylee agreed. He found a water flask as well as a wine flask, and a pouch with foodstuffs. For the moment he ignored the food, offering the wine to the old ranger. “I’ve found fighting gets in the way of discovering.”

“But sometimes you can’t have one without the other.” Cthulad hoisted the wine flask in a salute. “To the times of exploration without fighting.”

Baylee drank to that. In spite of the situation, he couldn’t help grinning.

“Why are you so amused?” Cthulad asked.

Because, Xuxa said, he found the ship.

“Yet we’re stranded out to sea, Tyr alone knows how far from any coast.”

“No more than seven or eight miles, actually,” Baylee replied. “The ship was only two hundred feet or so down. I studied nautical charts on the trip out here. The coastal plains don’t drop off sharply into the ocean bed for another three miles or so. We need to head west and south to get to shore. Chalice of the Crowns would not have sailed to the south of Mintarn to reach Evermeet; they would have gone north.” He gestured toward the sky. “We have a clear night, so it should be no problem to steer in the right direction.”

Baylee freed the small mast laying in the bottom of the lifeboat and pushed it into the locks designed for it. When it snapped into place, he pulled the mast rigging into place with Cthulad’s help.

“We’re lucky they didn’t kill us,” the old ranger declared. “Or did you think that Uziraff would play fairly with you?”

“Never once,” Baylee said.

“Then why deal with him at all?”

“Because he had the location of the wreck.”

“And you knew he had that magical map,” Cthulad said.

Baylee moved the sail into position, then dropped the small tiller into the water. “I had heard about it, and I saw it once. I was sure it was what it turned out to be.”

“So he used you to verify the veracity of the ship,” the old ranger said.

“And I used him and his mystical map to locate the shipwreck much more quickly than dredging the ocean bottom for miles. There have been others who were looking for that ship.” In terse sentences, Baylee revealed what had happened below the ocean’s surface, leaving out the books he’d salvaged. “If I had not used Uziraff to confirm the shipwreck’s existence in this area so quickly, the people who killed Golsway might have already claimed the prize. There could have been nothing down there to find.”

“Well, it was a masterful plan, lad,” Cthulad said, relaxing against the thwart. “But Uziraff has taken off with the treasure.”

“Only for a while,” Baylee said, adjusting the sail and looking up at Xuxa hanging upside down from the rigging. “How long do you think it will be before Cordyan Tsald and the Waterdhavian Watch unit arrives?”

Cthulad’s sharp eyes regarded Baylee in a new light. “You knew about that as well?”

“While you were at the weaponsmith’s in Caer Callidyrr?” Baylee nodded. “We had plenty of time to get the things I needed from the apothecary and visit the weaponsmith. Security dictated that we remain together. That would have been one of the firmest principles you would operate by. Yet you split us up. That left the only reason for that behavior as your need to be alone. And why else would you need to be alone?”

“To bring along the manpower we needed to see this through,” Cthulad said agreeably.

“I left word back in Waterdeep that would have set them on our trail,” Baylee admitted. “And I asked the apothecary to get word to them as well as whomever you charged with that.”

Understanding dawned in Cthulad’s eyes. “You wanted them to draw attention away from you,” Cthulad said.

Baylee grinned. “If someone with the ability to scry far distances was searching for me, for this shipwreck, it only made sense to give them a more logical target to search. Would you spend your time searching for a merchant ship, or for a contingent of Waterdhavian Watch?”

“So you never intended to find the shipwreck on your own?”

“Oh, I fully intended to find the shipwreck on my own. And I planned on Uziraff double-crossing us. By the way, how well do you think Uziraff would have gone along with us if Junior Civilar Tsald and Calebaan had been there?”

“By having just the two of us—”

Three, Xuxa put in. Yes, by having only the three of us, Baylee allowed Uziraff to feel confident enough that he was thinking about greed and not survival. That way, he brought us to the site of the shipwreck.

“A masterful plan,” Cthulad said in obvious delight. “Though it irks me that I played a part without knowing it.”

“If you had known,” Baylee pointed out, “you would have done the same thing. Only perhaps not as convincingly.” He hung the lighted lantern he’d used below the ocean from a piece of rope, then ran it to the top of the ten-foot mast. Yellow light belled out around it.

“It appears that you planned for everything.”

“Not everything,” Baylee disagreed. “The whales. I never planned for the whales.”

Krystarn followed Shallowsoul at a dead run. The lich ignored her, fleeing through the library stacks. After a time, he came to a door set in a wall black as anthracite. He waved an intricate gesture at it and said a word of power. A lock clicked.

He stepped through the entrance and Krystarn trailed him, catching the door before it could close.

The room on the other side of the door was a huge cavern with fiery pink walls that met in the rounded shape of a horseshoe nearly ninety feet in height. A huge pool of water three times that height in length eddied in the center of the room.

Shallowsoul stood at the water’s edge and made gestures too quickly for the drow to follow. A moment later, a giant whale surfaced in the pool. At least, it partially surfaced, because it easily exceeded the nearly three hundred feet of space left open in the pool. Water spumed from its blowhole.

Then it opened its mouth, disgorging bits of broken ship in the shallows and on the bank. When it was finished, it sank into the pool again and another took its place.

Krystarn counted eight whales all together. The piles in the shallows grew, containing silt and broken bits of ship, rotted sailcloth, rigging, and the unmistakable gleam of gold and silver.

Shallowsoul gestured toward the pile. Immediately, objects pulled themselves free of the mud and floated in the air. “Leave now,” the lich commanded her.

The drow barely had time to acknowledge the dimensional door that opened beside her, then she was shoved through by a strong gust of wind. She landed in a heap on the stone floor on the other side of the wall in the hallway.

As she pushed herself to her feet, she cursed what little remained of the lich’s soul. She glanced up at the drow warriors awaiting her and found that none of them looked at her. It was good that they chose to not see her ignominious arrival because she could not have spared any more of them. However, Chomack’s hobgoblin army remained available once she found a way to open the dimensional door.

She returned to her quarters without a word, followed by the drow warriors. Inside her room, she took out the crystal ball Shallowsoul had forgotten about. She held it in her palm and concentrated on the lich.

The image in the crystal came slowly, but finally opened on the lich. Shallowsoul was still in the huge pink cavern. Objects danced before him, inscribing abbreviated orbits before aligning themselves.

Krystarn wished she dared to watch the lich longer, but the crystal ball had to remain her trump card. Evidently it was only a tool to Shallowsoul, not a prized possession. And now the lich apparently had what he wanted.

It remained to the drow elf to achieve her own just deserts. She turned her thoughts to the ranger, Baylee Arnvold, and sought to find him.

“There!”

Baylee stood in the lifeboat and gazed in the direction Cthulad pointed. In the distance, sailing through the shimmering fog that lifted from the Sea of Swords, a cog swelled into view. “At least it’s someone,” the ranger said.

I can fly on ahead to find out, Xuxa offered.

Yes, Baylee agreed. But be careful.

The azmyth bat dropped from the rigging, then flew low over the smooth sea.

Baylee watched her go with some trepidation. He guessed that Uziraff wouldn’t hesitate about leaving the area, but there was a possibility the pirate captain might have decided to return to kill them.