Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 17

The Wavewalker had been mortally wounded. Two of her masts were broken, and the torn sails whipped about like spectral streamers. The battle with the selka had smashed the vessel’s bow, torn the ropes and the rigging. The deck boards were splintered, and an even greater slaughter had taken place in the lower decks. The smell of blood and offal wafted up from the open hatches.

Nicci and her companions stood together, the only survivors on the ship, tense and waiting for some renewed attack from the undersea creatures. Unable to maintain the flow of magic, she finally let the manifested sphere of wizard’s fire dissipate in her hand. She hoped they were safe from further attack, even though the selka queen had made no promises. As the fireball faded, she heaved a deep breath and clung to the tattered remnant of a ratline to keep her balance.

As the Wavewalker rode up on the high crest of a wave and crashed down again, they were all thrown to their knees.

“Sorry I couldn’t help you during the battle, Sorceress.” Nathan sounded both baffled and afraid. He looked at his hands. “I could not find the magic inside me. I tried to summon spells I’ve used all my life, even simple ones. I couldn’t do them.”

“It was the heat of the battle. You couldn’t concentrate,” Bannon said. “But your sword proved deadly enough. You saved me.”

“Oh, more than once, I expect.” Nathan forced an unlikely smile. “But you saved me as well. We made a decent accounting of ourselves.” His shoulders rose and fell, and he turned to Nicci again. “Try as I might, I couldn’t touch my Han.” He reached up, ran his fingers gingerly along his neck. “Is there an iron collar I can’t see? An invisible Rada’Han placed on me to prevent me from using my powers?”

Nicci knew full well how the Sisters in the Palace of the Prophets had controlled their gifted male students through the use of an iron collar, which blocked them from using the force of life. Nathan had worn such a collar for much of his life as a captive prophet, and Richard had been forced to wear one when he was taken for training by the Sisters.

“I’m not aware of any outside force neutralizing your gift, Wizard,” Nicci said as they stood back up. “But you were losing your magic earlier, even before the selka arrived. You couldn’t even summon a flame as a trick to show Bannon.”

Nathan hung his head. “Dear spirits, I knew I’d lost my gift of prophecy, but now I have lost my magic as well? I don’t even feel whole anymore.”

Rain continued to pelt them, and the wind was so heavy the droplets felt like thick pellets of ice. Another broken yardarm splintered, cracked, and crashed to the deck after a loud gust of wind wrenched it loose. The waves smashed the prow, sending a violent shudder through the entire ship, and Nicci barely kept her feet by clinging tighter to the ropes.

“If we make it through this night, I will be happy to consider further explanations,” she said.

Bannon struggled to make his way closer to them. Water ran down his face, and Nicci couldn’t tell whether he was crying. “What do we do now?”

Nicci found a grim strength in her answer. “We survive. That is up to us.”

The deck had begun to tilt alarmingly, and the Wavewalker rode much lower in the water. “We should search belowdecks,” Bannon said. “There might be other survivors.”

“Yes, my boy, we’d better check.” Nathan gave Nicci a knowing glance. They both understood there would be no survivors.

Nicci remembered hearing the sea creatures smashing about, battering the hull boards. “We also need to see what damage the selka did. I think they intended to wreck the ship even after they killed us all.”

They climbed down through the open hatches. The confined spaces reeked of blood and entrails, a gagging stench like a butcher shop filled with chamber pots. They found the cow’s head and scraps of its hide that the selka had peeled away and left like discarded drapes against the bulkheads.

The selka had left the ravaged bodies of dead sailors down in the crew decks, hammocks torn loose from the bulkheads and support beams. One young sailor hung by the back of his skull from a hammock hook.

A thundering sound of rushing water down in the cargo hold was even more ominous. When they lifted the hatches and stared down into the lower hold, Nicci managed to create a small hand light to illuminate the inky shadows. Part of the hull had been smashed and splintered from the outside, the cracked boards pressed inward. Swimming beneath the vessel, the selka must have attacked the wooden planks until they opened a jagged hole. Water roared in now, unstoppable, filling the hold.

“The Wavewalker is going to sink,” Nathan said. “It’s only a matter of hours.”

“We can seal the hatches,” Nicci said. “Confine the flooding to the bottom hold. That might buy us half a day.”

“Can’t we patch the hull?” Bannon asked. “I could hold my breath, swim down there, and do some work.”

Seawater gushed in, already half filling the lower hold. Nicci understood that the force of the flow would shatter any repairs as quickly as they were put in place.

“If I had my magic,” Nathan said, “I could restore the planks, grow more wood in place.”

“Let me try,” Nicci said. It was Additive Magic, using the wood itself, building upon what already existed. She reached into herself, but her every fiber trembled, wrung dry. She had already used so much magic in the battle, and the insidious poison still hadn’t worn off.

Nevertheless, the ship was sinking, and she had no time to lose. Nicci squeezed her eyes shut, focused her thoughts, summoned all the magic she could find. With her gift, she sensed the shattered hull planks, found the ragged edges, and used magic to draw more wood, making it grow. She pulled the smashed hole together like a scab over a wound, but the ocean continued to push its way in, and her newly formed wood broke apart, leaving her to start all over again.

Nathan grasped her shoulder as if to force strength into her, but she could draw nothing from him. Instead, she thought of her anger, thought of the murderous selka, thought of Sol, Elgin, and Rom and what they had done to her—what they had done to the entire crew of the Wavewalker. The repercussions went far beyond their attempted rape, because if those fools hadn’t poisoned her, Nicci would have been at her peak strength as a sorceress, and the selka would never have defeated them.

In the flash of her disgust and fury she found another tiny spark, pulled more magic, and made the planks grow again, closing up, until she forcibly sealed the hole that the selka had smashed through the hull. When the water finally stopped pouring in, she shuddered. “It’s fixed, but still fragile.”

Bannon sighed with delight. “Now that we’re not sinking anymore, we have time to find scraps of wood! I’ll dive down and shore up the patch. We can make it solid.”

For the next hour the young man threw himself into the task, holding his breath like a wishpearl diver and plunging down into the flooded hold. Remnants of cargo and crew floated all around: crates, heavy casks, bolts of sailcloth, and several bodies. But Bannon eventually succeeded in reinforcing the patch of magically repaired wood.

Outside, the storm continued with full force, and when they finally climbed back to the open, tilted deck, they looked in dismay at the torn rigging, the broken masts, the charred spots where wizard’s fire had burned the prow.

At the stern, the chart room was a shambles. The navigator’s wheel had been knocked off its pedestal. The currents and winds pushed the wreck onward, unguided. They had no captain, no charts, no way to steer. Though the night had already seemed endless, the darkness remained thick, strangled with clouds.

Standing at the bow, shielding his eyes, Bannon pointed ahead. “Look at the water there. That foamy line?” Then he yelled in alarm. “It’s reefs! More reefs!”

With added fury, the storm shoved the helpless ship forward, and Nicci saw that they were being inevitably pushed toward the fanged rocks and the churning spray.

“Brace yourselves!” Nathan shouted.

Nicci tried to manipulate the wind, the waves, but the ship was an ungainly, doomed hulk. The sea had an implacable grip. The winds were ugly and capricious.

With a terrible grinding roar the ship drove up on the reefs. Dark rocks broke the keel and gouged open the lower hull. The deck boards splintered and scattered apart. The mizzenmast toppled into the water.

As the night thickened through flickers of lightning, Nicci thought she saw the dark silhouette of a distant coastline. Impossible and unreachable, the land provided only the mocking hope of safety. But only for a moment.

Angry seawater rushed aboard as the great ship broke apart and sank.