Knights of the Crown

Chapter 7

The pleasure voyage did not last much beyond the Delta.

They passed down the Great Channel (a name that had been carried by four different passages through the Delta since Istar was founded) the next day. Once they touched ground, but lightly and on a rising tide. In an hour they were afloat and bound seaward again.

At dawn the next day they were clear of the Delta and heading north down the Bay of Istar. The southern stretch of it was hardly wider than the river, but it rapidly widened until by noon they were out of sight of land from the deck. Pirvan was willing to take the word of The Mariner’s Almanak about the features of the shore, rather than climb up the mainmast again with a spyglass to see them for himself.

Toward nightfall they took in sail, as the wind was rising and confused, and lumpy waves were making Golden Cup sway clumsily, rather like an owlbear trying to do a Plainsman fertility dance. Gusts seemed to be coming in from all directions, and Pirvan saw Kurulus frowning as he watched the sails alternately fill hard as a breastplate, then flap like empty sacks.

“Oh, it’s not as bad as it could be, and it’s not likely to get that bad at this time of year,” the mate said. “The most of the storms come up from the southwest, and if we have the searoom we can tack right out of the gulf into the open sea faster than we could without the storm.”

“What about storms from other directions?”

Pirvan had heard sailors describe “tacking” for many years, but understood it hardly better than he understood Tarothin’s magic. He knew that it allowed a properly equipped ship to sail without the wind blowing from directly astern, but how it was translated into the movements of the ship’s three tree-tall masts and six broad sails, Pirvan did not pretend to know.

“I’d just as soon you kept this to yourself,” Kurulus said. “If we’ve searoom and nothing carries away, we can beat about in the middle of the gulf until the blow passes. Otherwise, we might be needing to put in at Karthay, no good thing, or face even worse.”

Pirvan did not ask about the “even worse,” because he suspected he knew what it was. He had never been in a shipwreck but knew some who had; he preferred not to join their ranks.

As for Karthay, the mate’s expression was that of a man who can be persuaded to answer but would rather not. Again, Pirvan suspected the answer. In his profession, the affairs of the mighty were of only moderate interest, and he had little need to know where Istar’s rule was real and where it sat very lightly. Karthay and its outlying ports were among those where Istarians walked softly and in pairs-and because without Istar’s fleet, Karthay would command the larger city’s sea routes to the rest of Krynn, it was a matter of no small moment.

Pirvan walked to the railing and made a small rite to Habbakuk to avert really dangerous weather-one did not ask him for gentle breezes and smooth seas, thereby implying that one lacked both courage and sea legs. Then he looked forward and aft along the deck, and took some consolation from the view.

Golden Cup was a hundred and forty feet from prow to stern, with the bowsprit jutting out another forty feet beyond the prow. The ship carried one sail on the bowsprit, two square sails on the foremast, two on the mainmast, and a single large triangular sail on the mizzen. Forward and aft, one deck was piled on another, like miniature castles, and even amidships, where the hull was lower, the railings (“bulwarks” was the name he’d heard) were solid wood and higher than a man, the hatchways massive structures with covers bolted on and tarred canvas lashed down.

This construction, so he’d heard, was mostly intended to make the ship proof against pirates. They could hardly climb aboard at bow and stern, and if they came over the railings and amidships, the defenders could rain arrows on them until they were as dead as the deck planking. Also, the high bow and stern would stay above the waves, which could wash over and through the bulwarks amidships without harm unless the hatch covers gave way.

This would have consoled Pirvan more if he had not talked with men who’d swum away from a ship whose hatches had caved in from the battering of a storm. They’d barely made it to shore, and seen most of their shipmates drowned or taken by something in the water they did not care to describe.

* * * * *

At dawn the next day, the sun illuminated mountain ranges of clouds to the south and west. Higher up to the south rode more clouds, as dark as a flight of black dragons. The wind had risen further, but it seemed to have steadied to almost due south. Golden Cup was throwing up rainbows from its bow wave and a millrace from its wake as the sails caught the wind.

Pirvan was walking back from the bow, where he’d been talking with Grimsoar, when he encountered Haimya. She wore a mate’s garb with her own boots and an expression that defied anyone to comment on the greenish pallor of her face.

The way the breeze whipped her hair about her face did more in that cause, to Pirvan’s way of thinking. He knew that he could find it hard to remember that she was betrothed if he did not make the effort.

“Good day, Haimya,” he said.

“To you likewise, Pirvan. I expected to find you aloft, admiring the sea.”

Pirvan looked at the masthead, swaying through a moderate portion of a circle, and shuddered. “The sea will do well or ill, whether I am watching it or not.”

“You don’t think we are in danger?”

Asking that question was a large admission of being like other folk than he had expected to hear from the warrior-maid, this side of her deathbed. He tried to be both truthful and reassuring.

“I believe it takes much worse weather than this to affect a ship of this size.”

He thought the moan of the wind and the hiss of water alongside would conceal minor flaws in his speech. A moment later, he had cause to think again.

“And how many voyages have you made, Pirvan the Sailor?” She’d mustered from somewhere the will to quirk up one corner of her mouth.

“This is my first real one.”

She thrust out a hand. “Very well. Let us seal a bargain. Whichever one of us sees land first after the ship goes down, she guides the other to it.”

Pirvan was torn between smiling at her determination and his distaste for words of ill omen. He wondered if Tarothin had any weather spells, and if so, whether he could be persuaded to use them.

“You can swim?”

“It’s one of the few things I knew from girlhood. My father thought it doomed my hopes of marriage. My mother knew I was not much inclined that way, and said I should be good at as many things as I wished. ‘Man or woman who is good at nothing,’ she said, ‘is hapless, hopeless, and helpless.’ ”

Pirvan nodded, looking upward again. His eyes were not on the rigging, however. They were looking inward, at a picture of Haimya swimming-a pleasant picture even if she garbed herself, for wet clothes clung tightly.…

A faint laugh broke off suddenly in a choking sound. Pirvan looked about the deck to see Haimya thrusting her head and shoulders over the railing. Her torso heaved and twisted for a moment. When she drew herself back, water dripped from her face and her hair was plastered down her cheeks and forehead.

Silently, Pirvan hoped that the weather would grow no worse, or if it did, that Haimya would have no urgent duties until it quieted.

* * * * *

Pirvan’s hopes were disappointed.

Toward late afternoon, the high, dark clouds swept forward and turned black, then swelled and seemed to burst. A howling wind swept across the sea, churning up the waves into gray hillocks. Rain and spray swept across the deck, turning the planks as slick as the surface of a glacier.

The sail on the bowsprit and the triangular mizzensail had long since been taken in and the yards double-lashed. Now men struggled aloft to take in the topsails on the fore- and mainmasts. Pirvan watched from the aftercastle, though he had offered to go aloft.

“No place for even the best climber if he doesn’t know the way of a wet sail,” Kurulus told him firmly. “You’ve duties to Lady Eskaia, more, I wager, than you’ve told me. You splatter on the deck or go over the side, the lady’ll have my blood.”

Pirvan didn’t like the hint in those words, but he also knew that the mate would have been better spoken if he’d been less worried. Golden Cup was in no easy circumstances; the faces of the men going aloft said as much. The fair-skinned ones were many of them as green as Haimya; the darker ones looked as if they were forcing themselves to climb the rigging rather than hang over the railings.

One man did go off the main topsail yard, and in this gale there was no hope of picking him up. But he struck the mainyard on the way down, and fell bonelessly limp and probably already dead into the sea, spared the ordeal of drowning alone as his ship sailed on.

The remaining sails kept the ship manageable until after nightfall. Pirvan had gone to his cabin and was beginning to drowse in spite of the motion of the ship and the uproar of the storm, when it happened.

A shout, then several, then a scream. Wood cracked thunderously. Another shout: “All hands on deck!” Then even more thunder, drowning out the gale and sounding like some great tree falling.

Pirvan had been out of his bunk at the cry of “All hands on deck!” As he flung open his cabin door, he felt the deck under his bare feet taking up a new motion. Then it tilted, farther than it ever had, sending him slamming backward against the wall. For a terrible moment he thought the ship would never come back, and that he and everyone belowdecks faced gurgling out their lives as the ship sank.

Then the deck began to level out, with more shouts from above, cracking and creaking of wood, and screams from the cabins. The deck tilted as far the other way as it had the first way, and this time flung Pirvan forward. He would have slammed into the opposite wall if something both soft and solid hadn’t broken his fall.

He struggled clear of his companion and discovered that it was Haimya, clad in a loinguard that covered no more than his did, with a sword in her hand. He noted that she offered no unpleasant surprises unclad, then gripped the nearest handhold as the ship began another roll.

“Haimya, I think it’s something in the ship, not pirates. If you go out on deck, you’ll need both hands.”

She looked at her sword, then at herself. “Perhaps more than that,” she said, and in the dimness he could have sworn that she was blushing. Then she vanished toward her cabin as Pirvan lunged out on to the deck, lurching back and forth as the ship did the same under his feet.

He kept his balance and his sea legs alike until he reached the deck. Then two steps outside, and a foaming wall of water reached his chest and swept him off his feet. Something told him not to trust the bulwarks to catch him, and as his head went under, he spread arms and legs wide.

A foot caught on something solid enough to hold him until the wave receded. Then he found a rope almost hitting him in the face and clutched it with both hands. He didn’t know whether it was a shroud, a stay, a line, or a dragon’s tail; sailors’ fancy terms didn’t matter as long as it kept him aboard and alive.

He survived three waves before he saw the problem. The foremast had snapped off a man’s height above the deck. In falling, it hadn’t quite cleared the ship, but flattened a long stretch of the bulwarks to starboard. Now every time the ship rolled, waves boiled in through the gap.

Already sailors were hacking at the wreckage, some holding on with one hand and working with the other, others tied to the ship and trusting to their safety lines. Other less lucky ones were struggling on the deck, or, knocked senselsss, washing back and forth in the surge of incoming waves and the rolling of the ship.

Pirvan saw one of the unconscious men wash overboard before his eyes. He also saw that the rope he held would let him reach most of the deck. He tied it around his waist and began methodically following the senseless men. He had little knowledge of even nonmagical healing, but a man who didn’t slide overboard and drown might live to be healed by someone more skilled.

One by one he overtook them. He lost count of how many, and he cursed gods and men alike when a wave snatched one of them out of his hands and overboard. Other waves slammed him against protrusions from the deck, or wreckage against him, or him and the man he was trying to save together. He knew he was bruised all over and bleeding in at least one place, but ignored that until he heard a wild cry from above.

Even then, he kept crawling about the deck in search of more men to snatch from the sea, until someone shouted in his ear.

“The mast’s free. Get back below and be tended to, you fool!”

It was Grimsoar One-Eye. Pirvan looked up. His friend recognized him and shrugged, then said, “So be it. You’re not a fool. You still look as if you’d been wrestling sea trolls.”

By now, Pirvan’s exalted mood had worn off and he’d begun to feel the same way. He gripped Grimsoar’s arm, and with his help rose uncertainly to his feet.

“You said the mast’s cut away?”

“Gone, and a man with it. It won’t pound any holes in the hull now. We’re safe until we fetch up on the Gallows Reefs. This ship’s too stout to founder, but she can’t survive the rocks.”

“What else can we do?”

“Besides pray, you mean? I’ve heard a mate say we’ve a chance to make the Flower Rocks, but how much I don’t know.”

Pirvan had never heard of the Flower Rocks, but they sounded like a place where you had to work hard to be saved. This meant more wrestling with the sea in a few hours or a few days.

And that meant doing what Grimsoar suggested.

* * * * *

Prayers must have reached at least some well-disposed gods; they were still afloat and off the Flower Rocks at dawn. Or so Pirvan heard someone say.

He was on the main deck, too low to see anything more than a ship’s length away through the spray and the murk. All he saw was the length of anchor chain in his hands, and the sailors of the hauling party ahead of and behind him.

The Flower Rocks, he had learned, were a series of rocky mounts with deep water close inshore on all sides, enough for the largest ship men could conceive. Prudent seafarers some centuries before had sunk stout iron and stone mooring posts (“bollards” or some such word) into the rocks on all four sides. A ship that could moor to a set of bollards could ride out most gales in the lee of the rocks. Sometimes the lee of the rocks alone cut the wind enough to let a ship anchor safely.

Anchoring was the plan for Golden Cup, as its captain seemed not to wish the ship too close to the rocks themselves. The main bow anchor was ready to let go, but the light chain on the stern anchor would never survive this blow.

The Mate of the Hold and her gang had broken out a heavier chain from below. Now all available hands had turned to, for hauling the chain aft and securing it to the anchor.

“We’ll be letting both go together,” Kurulus had told Pirvan. “Riding on one anchor in this sea, we lose chain, anchor, and most chance of staying off the rocks even if it holds for a bit.”

What would happen if the anchor didn’t hold, needed no explanation. The ship’s motion had thrown Pirvan out of his bunk three times, until between the lingering pain from his half-healing, fresh bruises, and the heaving deck, he gave up trying to sleep.

Tarothin slept through everything, strapped into his bunk and with most of his possessions wedging him in even more tightly, with more straps around the bags and boxes. Pirvan had suggested that it might not be easy to leave his bunk quickly if it became necessary; he had not forgotten the wizard’s reply.

“If we strike or founder, it’s hardly going to matter how fast I go anywhere. I can’t swim a stroke, and I don’t command any spell that will let me breathe underwater long enough to walk to shore.”

Pirvan held his tongue after that.

Now he held his tongue because he needed every breath in his body for hauling on the anchor chain. Even if he had not, the sight of the waves would have left him speechless.

The ship no longer seemed to be taking solid water over the main deck. But on either side the waves leaped up, white crested, like an endless pack of wolves howling around a great stag. The stag still stood tall, but how long could this last before the wolves dragged it down?

Pirvan shivered from more than the cold, then saw that the hauler ahead of him was now Haimya.

“Haimya!” he shouted, above the moan of the wind. “Are you a shapechanger now?”

“Eh?”

“Never mind. How fares your lady?”

“She said that one of us ought to join this work.”

“You say-”

“I insisted on going instead of her.”

“Your lady has more courage than sense, and more sense than strength.”

He did not add that the same could be said of Haimya. Her face was no longer greenish, but it was still pale and set. It was as though a long and wasting fever had just broken, leaving her well but weak.

How long they hauled before the stern anchor was ready to lower, Pirvan never knew. He remembered only a moment when he realized that the wind had dropped, and even spray no longer blew over the deck. Then came a second moment, when he realized that Haimya had turned to Grimsoar One-Eye.

The big man was hauling with a will, but his single eye seemed aimed at the sky.

“Now what’s wrong?”

Pirvan knew he sounded petulant, but he was tired. He found distasteful, to say the least, the possibility of safety being snatched from them at the last moment.

“I don’t like this lull,” Grimsoar said. The wind was so mild now that he could make Pirvan hear him without raising his voice much above a whisper.

“It could be the end of the storm,” Pirvan said.

“Maybe. Maybe also just the eye, or even a sign the wind’s about to shift.”

Pirvan did not need to ask for the details of that last danger, or wish to contemplate them. With the wind from any direction but the south, they had rocky lee shores far too close to give them much hope of surviving if the storm lasted beyond a few more hours.

At some time while Pirvan was considering this, the trumpets blew for the anchoring party and someone led Pirvan aside. Another someone pushed a cup of hot tarberry tea laced with brandy into his hands.

It was only after the third swallow that he realized that the hands holding the tray were white, clean, and lavishly ringed.

“My lady?”

He looked up as a puff of wind blew Eskaia’s hood back from her head and made her dark curls dance. So did her eyes, with both mischief and determination.

“I promised Haimya that I would not haul on the line. Nothing more.”

Pirvan did not care if Eskaia had promised her guard-maid some dwarf-forged armor and a castle on Lunitari. The less time she spent on deck, the happier he and many others would be.

Before he could say anything, however, a wild cry came from aloft, and more cries from forward echoed it.

“The anchor’s parted!”

* * * * *

It was the chain to the main anchor that had parted, being the only one over the side. Lowering both together, it seemed, would have taken more hands than were available for the work. So the captain had gambled on the lull in the storm holding for a few minutes longer.

The lull held for the most part. But enough wind remained blowing, and imperceptibly shifting as well, to pull the chain hard against a sharp edge of rock. As the wind rose and the anchoring party rushed aft to lower the second anchor, the rock sawed at the stout chain like a notched sword at an ogre’s neck.

Moments after it parted, Pirvan felt a puff of wind that turned into a steady blowing-from the northwest. In the time since they’d sailed into the lee of the Flower Rocks, the wind had shifted around until now the rocks were themselves alee shore!

If every soul aboard Golden Cup had been twins, there would still have been work for them all in the next few minutes. Pirvan was caught up in it all, turning his hands to whatever work he was ordered to do or saw not being done. He could not have said from moment to moment what was going on, as the ship’s people struggled to save it and themselves, but he remembered what he saw when he could at last look up from the deck.

Golden Cup’s stern had turned toward the wind and was driving south, with the Flower Rocks seemingly close enough to touch. The ship also seemed to be making some way toward the east, with every scrap of sail set that its two remaining masts could carry. Somebody had even tied something to the stump of the foremast, and it was beyond there that Pirvan saw it:

Tarothin stood by the railing, both hands raised, one of them holding his staff. Tarothin, the healing-weakened wizard who could not swim a stroke, stood by the railing with neither rope around his waist, nor floatbelt around his torso, nor anybody at hand to catch him if he slipped.

Pirvan dropped some work he could not remember having picked up and sprinted for the ladder. The deck seemed to drop out from under him as he clutched the rungs and hauled himself upward more than climbed. A dash, a second ladder, the ship lurching wildly again, and he was a sword’s length from Tarothin.

There he stopped. To either side, the waves surged and foamed into the shallow water and over the rocks. Over a good part of the area astern, the wind seemed to have halted. Pirvan saw spray rising farther off to the north, flung toward the ship, and caught in the air to shimmer like heat rising from a fire.

He also saw one of the men working on the foremast snatch up a short spear-a boarding pike, Pirvan had heard them called-and lift it, ready to throw.

Whatever Tarothin might have in mind, he could not be meaning to sink the ship with Lady Eskaia aboard. Not unless so many people had lied to Pirvan that Golden Cup was already doomed.

His dagger came out in a heartbeat and flew through the air as the sailor brought his arm back. Before the pike left his hand, the weighted pommel of Pirvan’s dagger smashed into his shoulder. The spear went wild, more nearly hitting Pirvan than Tarothin. The thief lunged forward, kicked the sailor in the stomach, snatched up the dagger as the man crumpled, and made ready to hold the man’s comrades at bay.

“Don’t touch the staff!” someone shouted. Pirvan thought wizards couldn’t talk while working a spell, then realized that it was Grimsoar who had shouted. He stormed across the deck with a coil of rope under one arm and a hefty club in the other. He looped the rope around Tarothin’s waist several times, then tied it with just as many knots to the railing. By the time Grimsoar was finished, Tarothin was more firmly a part of the ship than much of the surviving deck gear.

By that time, too, the sailors had retreated and Pirvan had attention to spare for what Tarothin had been doing. There was a passage in the Flower Rocks from north to south, narrow and high-walled, more like a canyon than anything else but wide enough for the largest ships.

With the wind as it had been, even a landlubber like Pirvan could see that they would never have made it. But with Tarothin’s spell shifting the wind, Golden Cup was making steady progress toward the passage.

It was not steady all the way; the bowsprit came to grief halfway through, as the surge of the waves overpowered both wizard and helmsman. But in time there was open water ahead, where there had been solid rock too recently for anyone’s comfort, and orders being shouted that Pirvan knew he should obey.

“I’ll keep any witlings off him,” Grimsoar said.

“Unless they need-your strength,” Tarothin said. His voice rasped as if his throat was filled with sand.

“We need you.” Grimsoar said. “Either Grimsoar stays or you go below.”

Tarothin seemed not to hear. He gripped the railing and stared out over the waves. Even in the lee of the Flower Rocks, they had regained their wolfish aspect-and the stag had lost several prongs from one of his antlers.

The orders came from below, louder this time, and Pirvan turned and scrambled down the ladder.

* * * * *

The work the mate of the deck had called Pirvan to do was repairing the safety lines. He knew as much about ropes and knots as some of the sailors, so his hands flew, and meanwhile he listened to the sailors talk.

They weren’t out of danger yet, it seemed. If the wind backed around to the south again, they had only one anchor to keep them off the rocks. If it stayed northerly, they could still be driven south to the Finburnighu Shoals. That was another feature of the Gulf of Karthay that Pirvan had never heard of and would have been glad not to hear of now.

As he strung a safety line across a gap in the bulwarks, Pirvan saw one of those sets of bollards on a shelf in the rocks, a long bowshot away. He also saw the water boiling between the ship and the rocks, and the distance opening between it and the bollards.

“Wind’s one way, current’s another, tide’s a third,” Kurulus said. He lowered his voice. “You can ship with me any time you please, Brother Pirvan.”

Pirvan nodded silently. An idea was forming in his mind.

“Do we have a boat left?”

The mate shrugged. “All smashed, but they made a raft of barrels yesterday. If it’s in one piece-but now, you can’t steer it through that.”

“What if it was on a rope?”

“A line?”

“Whatever you call it.”

Pirvan’s patience with the fine points of the sailors’ vocabulary threatened to run out. So did every other sort of patience. He could see the gap between the ship and the bollards opening steadily, and who knew where the next set was?

“I can swim to the bollards with a line. Then the men on the raft can pull themselves ashore. Five or six men can pull a heavier line ashore. One line and the anchor should hold us.”

“Can you swim well-?”

“Well enough to reach the rocks, and then it will be more a matter of climbing. That I can do better than anyone aboard, I wager.”

“Like I said, Brother, when I have my ship-”

“I accept the offer, if we both live long enough.”

“Better if your wizard friend could throw the rope with a spell.”

“I don’t know if he knows levitation. Also, that wind block weakened him all over again.”

Kurulus and several sailors who’d gathered just within hearing looked sour. Pirvan wanted to curse. First they’d been ready to kill Tarothin for casting a spell. Now they seemed ready to kill him because he couldn’t cast the one they needed.

And who should come shouldering through the sailors but Haimya, at this moment about the last person he wanted to see. (There were a few men who’d taken his thefts as cause for blood feud, but two were dead and none of the living aboard this or any other ship.)

At least the warrior-maid might not have heard him and the mate talking-

“You’ll need two of us swimming the line ashore, Kurulus. Now, don’t argue,” Haimya added. “I swim better than Pirvan, even if he does climb better than I do.”

It did not seem like a good time to mention Haimya’s seasickness. Time was passing, the bollards were receding, the wind seemed to be rising, and possibly the prospect of action had cured Haimya’s seasickness.

And possibly the three moons might do a perfect hesitation dance that very night.

Pirvan pulled off his shirt and began looking around for a suitable length of rope.

* * * * *

The wind continued to rise as Pirvan and Haimya made their preparations. As swiftly as they worked, the first bollards were out of sight by the time they were ready. By the favor of the gods and long-dead masons, a second set was coming into sight as they stepped to the bulwarks.

Pirvan wore only his loinguard and gloves, Haimya a loinguard, a sailor’s shirt, and sharkskin buckskins. Both carried daggers, Haimya a beltful of wooden pegs, and Pirvan a small mallet. Both had ropes around their waists.

“Now, remember, nothing fancy, and are you sure you wouldn’t have float-?” the mate of the hold said. She was short and sturdy, likewise old enough to be Pirvan’s mother and right now behaving much like one.

“We’ll be doing as much climbing as swimming,” Pirvan said. “Ready, Haimya?”

“Haimya-” Lady Eskaia began. She’d come on deck even though she now looked as sick as Haimya had been. Then her voice failed her and she only hugged her guard-maid.

Grimsoar came up, at the head of the men assigned to the raft. “Brother, Tarothin says-”

Pirvan scrambled under the lifeline and balanced on the ragged edge of the deck. Nothing from Tarothin could be worth standing here a moment longer, listening to the wind howl and wondering how many moments he had yet to live.

A wild cry rose above the wind. Haimya soared into the air, bent double, and plunged from sight under the foam. Pirvan waited only long enough for her head to reappear, then dived after her.

* * * * *

The rope snapped tight around Pirvan’s waist, burning his skin even in the chill water. It also squeezed the breath out of him, so that he had barely enough air in his lungs to reach the surface. He gulped in air, his lungs stopped burning, then a wave broke over him and he choked on the water.

A strong arm slid under him, lifting him, while an equally strong hand grabbed him by the hair and lifted his face out of the water. He churned with both arms and legs, lifting himself higher, above the next wave and the one after it. By then he could breathe normally again.

No words were needed. He just looked his thanks at Haimya and began to swim toward the rocks. So did she, but with a sureness of movement in her shapely arms and legs that proved the truth of her words. She could have covered two feet to Pirvan’s one if she hadn’t deliberately slowed so that they approached the rocks together.

In the lee of the Flower Rocks, the waves weren’t shattering both themselves and swimmers on the outcrop-pings. It was still like climbing out of a boiling pot with a rim two men high. Pirvan trod water for a moment, looking for the best way up.

A crack about as wide as his head seemed the best way. As long as he wasn’t washed in too far and wedged tightly underwater, or swept out and battered against the rocks-

It was then that he saw Haimya’s head vanish below the surface.

He thought for a moment that she’d dived away from the rocks, or been caught in an undertow. Then he saw the men aboard Golden Cup waving their arms and pointing. They also seemed to be shouting, but into this wind they might have been in Qualinesti for all he could hear them.

It was Haimya’s bubbling scream that brought him fully alert. That, and her head popping up suddenly, with something huge and shapeless in the water barely ten feet behind her.

Alertness flowed into action in the space of a single breath. Diving with a dagger in your hand was a good way to lose it; Pirvan’s steel was still in his belt as he entered the water. He deliberately dived deep and rolled over on his back as he drew the dagger, looking for his enemy.

The water was murky from the storm, but he could make out Haimya, thrashing in the water with both arms and one leg. One leg? He looked at the other, and saw that it hung limply, as if something had broken it or even worse, shattered the hip.

No blood, though-but Pirvan sensed something large and evil, circling them just beyond the limits of vision. He even thought he heard a peeping, like a newly hatched chick but far harsher, just at the upper limits of his hearing.

Then a serpentine shape came out of the murk, and Haimya thrashed still more wildly. Pirvan had just time to see her other leg go limp, then lunged at the shape. It was gray and shaped more like a sausage than a serpent, but it had scales and a face that was a nightmarish parody of a human one.

A water naga-and an evil one, or else one that thought for some reason Haimya and Pirvan were enemies. No time to argue with it, either, even if it were intelligent enough to understand.

Pirvan’s dagger skidded off scales but upward and inexorably toward the left eye. The paralysis spell struck him, but on the other arm-then the dagger drove into the naga’s eye and pain erased its ability to cast spells.

Pirvan stroked toward the surface, using his one good arm and two good legs, searching for Haimya both above water and below. He saw her head in the middle of a circle of foam her arms had made, then saw it slide out of sight.

Pirvan dived after her, largely convinced that he would never surface again.

At least I won’t have to explain to Gerik Ginfrayson how she drowned before my eyes.

As he dived, he felt a tingle in his paralyzed left arm. He commanded it to move, and wanted to shout as it obeyed the command. He wanted to shout a second time as Haimya swept up past him, thrashing frantically with both arms and both legs!

She was on the surface waiting for him, staring all about her, eyes wide with alertness and (although Pirvan would never even think it) more than a little fear. He didn’t blame her; the water seemed far colder at the mere thought of the naga’s paralysis spell.

“Can you climb?” he called. “I can pull up if you want to wait in the water-”

Haimya’s answer was to fling herself at the rocks.