The Wayward Knights

Chapter 16

Torvik slept the sleep of exhaustion until nearly dawn. He then awoke under the ministrations of Beeyona, whom Yavanna had escorted over from Kingfisher's Claw on Sorraz's orders. He awoke fully when he learned that Mirraleen had disappeared. Indeed, he leaped out of bed and began to dress himself. Beeyona finally told him that if he ran wild after Mirraleen, she would have to put him to sleep again. This time she, rather than nature, would say when he awoke.

"But something could have happened to her!" Torvik said.

"There are as many sea otters in sight as ever," Beeyona said. "This would not be so if a Dimernesti had come to harm."

"There are also as many who hate peace as ever," Torvik replied.

"Unfortunately, this is also true," Beeyona said, emptying two phials into a wooden bowl and stirring the resulting mixture with her thumb. "But I am not one of them, for all that you look at me as if I were."

"I beg your pardon, Beeyona," Torvik said. "But understand that the peace is fragile. Not all of those who attacked us last night have been taken-"

"This is true, and known to all," Beeyona said, licking her thumb to test the mixture. "It is even the subject of a proclamation, signed by Sir Niebar, Gildas Aurhinius, Zeskuk, and Andrys Puhrad. It appoints Sir Pirvan of Tirabot 'War Chief of the Fleet Off Suivinari,' and promises a pardon to all of your abductors who submit peacefully and confess fully within two days. After that they are outlaws, and any man or minotaur may slay them on sight."

The proclamation was encouraging news, if true, and Beeyona was as likely to lie in such a matter as a ship made of iron was to float. Torvik still made one last thrust.

"Then all the more reason to find Mirraleen," he said. "She has a better memory for faces than I do."

Truly. It took you three weeks to stop calling me 'Berylla.' But when she wishes to be found, she will be. Until then you cannot make her well by making yourself sick, or bring her here by going everywhere else. Drink this."

An order from the kingpriest would have had less force, one from a god hardly more. Torvik drank.

It did not taste like something stirred by someone's thumb. Indeed, Torvik was not sure what it tasted like.

He was still wondering when his eyes grew heavy and his breathing slow. His last memory was of wanting to laugh at how neatly Beeyona had tricked him.

A summer-hot day at Tirabot Manor was coming to an end with the heat fleeing before a howling gale. Rain hammered on the shutters of Gerik's chambers, nearly loud enough to drown out the thunder. The lightning was so bright that it crept in around the edge of the shutters, outshining the candles hanging above the table and rising from its center.

"I still call it a bad idea, both you and Bertsa going to burn the supplies," Grimsoar One-Eye said. "We've not only got the manor to defend now, we've the villagers-and anybody else who wants to go-to get across the border into Solamnia. That's one more caravan, maybe two. We've work for two captains here. I may be two men in bulk, but not two captains in skill. Nor can I be in two places at once."

"You're one good, trustworthy captain," Gerik said, "If we can make our enemies stumble before they attack, one will be enough. If we do not, twenty will be too few."

"Then send Bertsa and stay yourself," Grimsoar said. "With you here, attacking the manor is attacking a knight's blood and property, if not the knight himself."

"If House Dirivan cared about law, they would not have lent themselves to the kingpriest's schemes," Wylum said "Nothing will keep their troops from the manor, save the coming of those Solamnics Dargaard Keep was supposed to be sending." Her tone said that she expected them to come when snow fell on Midsummer Eve.

"But the sell-swords they have hired are a weak spot," she continued. "We must first destroy the supplies the hirelings trust to make their work easy. Then, when they have grown reluctant, Gerik and I must both play on their fears of scant reward and dire punishment. Gerik has the right. I know sell-swords' law. I may even know some of the captains."

Her tone implied that under other circumstances, she would not have admitted knowing any sell-sword who would stoop so low as to serve House Dirivan.

Grimsoar growled deep in his throat, like a bear feeding on salmon too long dead. Serafina patted his hand and said, "Do not doubt yourself, my love. Who was it who, single-handed, saved the village?"

"And who afterward had to be saved by a girl not yet twelve?" Grimsoar muttered. "A fine captain he was."

Rubina's escapade was clearly still a sore point with the old sailor. Gerik tapped on the table with his signet ring.

"It must be as we have planned it," he said. "Unless the Solamnics ride up to the gate before sunset, and even then I may ask some of them to join us as witnesses.

"But now, there is something else. It would be proper and just to give Lady Ellysta betrothal rights over me and mine, even had I not called her 'my lady' with half a hundred witnesses. I am of age, and so is she. She has no kin, and none of mine of lawful age would disapprove. Will you all be witnesses to our betrothal oaths?"

If anyone at the table wished to be elsewhere, they were not bold enough to say so. Gerik rose, walked to Ellysta's chair, knelt beside her and said, "My-my lady. This betrothal is my wish, more than anything ever has been. Is it your wish also?"

Ellysta put her hands on Gerik's shoulders. "With all my heart," she whispered.

She rose. "I, Ellysta, of lawful age and birth, here under the roof of just folk and the sky of the true gods-"

For a moment, thunder rolled so that the sky seemed about to be falling on the roof, gods and all. Ellysta tightened her grip on Gerik.

"-in the presence of honest witnesses, declare that I am in my eyes and the eyes of the gods, the betrothed wife of Gerik of Tirabot, with all the duties and rights belonging to that office, and may I meanly perish if foresworn."

It was a short form of one of the standard betrothal oaths, and Gerik noted that Ellysta had put "duties" before "rights," instead of the way his mother would surely have preferred. However, "rights" had little meaning in a battle to the death, and they had no time for long oaths.

At least the betrothal had long since been consummated. That gave Ellysta even more rights than she perhaps realized, including making any child she might bear entirely legitimate.

Now, if the rain would just stop before the roads turned to swamps-or else go on until it washed away the enemy's supply tent and all its contents, and maybe send a few-score sell-swords bobbing downstream after it….

Torvik awoke to see ruddy sunset light filling his cabin. He also awoke to hear a faint scraping close to his ear.

He had just remembered that one of the cabin ports lay there when the port flew open. It nearly hit him on the head. In avoiding it Torvik rolled out of his bunk. So he was on the floor, reaching for steel he was not wearing, when Mirraleen crawled in through the port.

She plucked a splinter of wood from under one fingernail, then swung her feet onto the floor, bent over, and began wringing out her hair. More water dripped from her impartially onto the floor and the bunk. Apart from the water and her old dagger on a new belt, of shells linked together with bronze wire, she wore nothing.

Torvik was annoyed briefly, that she would spend so much time grooming herself before explaining her return from the dead. Then he remembered his mother's words: "Even the fiercest woman will groom herself when she is uneasy. Or when she wants to look her best for her chosen man. In that, we are a trifle like cats."

What moved Mirraleen now? Torvik's heart was not to his throat; indeed, he could not have said precisely where it was. It did seem to be beating faster.

"Welcome aboard, dear friend," he said at last. "I did not command a search for you, because I thought you might have reasons for hiding."

"Also, because you wanted to search for me yourself," Mirraleen said. She unhooked two links of the bronze wire and hung the belt of shells on a peg, then stood up. "It is as well. I wanted to come to you with none knowing."

At that moment, Torvik knew that he would someday tell his sons: "Remember, desire can make the nimblest tongue turn to stone." Certainly his had.

Mirraleen stepped close, then closer still, and kissed him. Her lips tasted of honey and salt, and of something that Torvik could only compare to a summer meadow somehow blooming under the sea, with fish browsing on kelp instead of sheep on the fresh grass.

His arms took on a life of their own. He drew Mirraleen tightly against him, without caring whether either could breathe. He was dimly aware of her hands moving, until he was clad as she.

Then, for a long time, he did not know-or care-where he was or who he was or even if he was a person separate from Mirraleen.

Wilthur the Brown had learned the spell he was now using under the name of the Eye of Uchuno. Whether it still deserved that name, the mage did not know. Certainly Uchuno himself (a Red Robe) would have disapproved of Wilthur's use of this scrying magic, if Uchuno had not been dead for five centuries.

Wilthur, however, was alive. So were a good dozen or more of those who had been led by the Servants of Silence in the abduction of Torvik. Abandoned by their masters, they had fled inland, preferring death amid the magical monsters to what they suspected awaited them in the fleet.

They would have been right, had the mage not unleashed the Eye of Uchuno. The spell needed a large amount of melted volcanic glass as its material element, but in Wilthur's new home that was as abundant as moss in a forest. Sent abroad, it took the form of a gigantic red eye that could blaze with all-consuming fire when its master wished to cease scrying and feed.

Through the Eye Wilthur could feed on many things. Just now he wished to feed on the terror of the man whom the Eye was pursuing. The man had spent all of the previous night and all of today stumbling ever higher on the Green Mountain. Sometimes he wondered why neither animals nor plants attacked him, and once he halted and tried to drink at a stream.

Wilthur promptly turned the stream boiling hot. The man ran off like a mad thing, and his cries nearly warned the minotaurs in their outpost. But there were only five of them now, and they wisely did not step outside Lujimar's warding spell. They had arms and food in plenty to stand off any material attack, or so they thought. Their time would come. Meanwhile, it was the time of the pursued man.

He was a lean, scant-bearded fellow, who from his balding pate had to be older than he seemed. But he ran well, and now that he saw the cliff at his back, he seemed ready to turn and fight.

It would be a pathetic spectacle when he did, one that Wilthur intended to prolong as much as possible. He sought fear now, as some men sought ecstasy.

With a few syllables and a wave of his lesser staff, Wilthur brought a faint crimson glow to the crystal sphere hanging from the ceiling. It was now ready to receive, bind, and preserve the man's fear as a root cellar preserves a sack of turnips in the winter.

Some of Wilthur's more potent spells needed fear, just as others needed blood-in amounts that no necromancer would have countenanced for a moment. But the opinion of others had not bound Wilthur even before he came to Suivinari Island, and still less here.

On Suivinari, he was far more than man, more even than mage. Not yet a god, that he knew, but within his own borders (both physical and magical) all but immune to the gods' attacks.

A good first step.

The Eye began spinning a web of fire around the man, giving pain to lend savor to the fear. The man drew his knife-and the fire melted it in his hand before he could have hoped to slay himself.

Biting his lip against the pain of his charred hand, the man strode toward the cliff, pushing his way through the web of fire as if it were gossamer. Wilthur readied a further tightening of the web, to melt the rock under the man's feet and hold him in place.

Then the ground quivered. It was no more violent than the quivering of a crystal glass touched by a spoon. But the quivering found a fault in the cliff. The whole face of rock, higher than the mast of the tallest ship, peeled away, and the man went with it.

The last sensation Wilthur had from the man was relief, mingled with joy at going to meet his long-dead wife again. Somehow a ghastly death had become a welcome boon. It was no work of his, Wilthur knew. And he doubted that the answer lay on the island.

But if the earthquake came from somewhere else, how had it entered the island's defenses?

He was ready to send the Eye scrying farther afield, when the crystal globe, ready for the dead man's fear, dropped from the ceiling. The table was stone; the crystal shattered. Wilthur saw blood start from a cut on the back of his hand, drop onto the table, and vanish as if it had fallen on sand.

The mage was glad that no other crystal spheres were ready. Otherwise one might have sucked in and held ready his own fear.

Torvik thought that a god might have felt as he did, if the god had taken human shape and joined with one like Mirraleen-if there were any like Mirraleen. The god would also find something missing from his life afterward, as Torvik knew he would find missing from his.

The difference, the sailor thought, was in his favor. He would not have eternity to miss Mirraleen. A mere fifty or sixty years, and he and his memories would be dust, while she still swam sleek and fair through the seas of Krynn.

This hardly worried him now. Indeed, very little could worry anyone in Mirraleen's arms. But something was worrying Mirraleen. She had stiffened in his embrace, then slipped entirely out of it. With the silence of a spirit, she padded across the cabin and opened the port by which she had entered.

Torvik briefly contemplated her, as fair in some ways from behind as she was in other ways from in front. Then he decided that what made her this uneasy might have to do with the sea-and he was still Red Elf's captain.

There was only room for one at the port, and when Mirraleen made way for Torvik, he did not know what he expected to see. Storms, monsters, portents, or Dimernesti swimming openly in their elven form among the ships?

Instead he saw only gleaming slack tidewater, the loom of the island with the two peaks only just falling into shadow, and the lights coming of in the ships. Nothing he had not seen for a score of nights before this.

"Can you hear it?" Mirraleen said.

"Hear what?"

"The-the cry of the mountains, and the sea calling back."

Torvik knew that Mirraleen commanded magic. How else would she have healed herself of the bruises from her beating at the hands of the Servants of Silence? But this went beyond what he was ready to believe.

Or rather, would have been ready to believe before he came to Suivinari for the second time.

He still saw and heard nothing, however. He stepped back from the port and put an arm around Mirraleen, thinking to lead her back to the bunk. There was no such thing as "all passion spent" with Mirraleen.

Then the night was riven by fire, spreading out from the island across the water, lighting up the fleets as all three moons together could not have done. It looked as if a slit had opened in the flank of the Smoker, allowing mortal eyes to see the forges of the Abyss behind it. In the light, Mirraleen's skin took on the same hue as her hair.

Torvik also welcomed the glow. It hid the sudden pallor of his skin, as he realized just how close the gods might be-and other powers as well, less friendly to men.

Drums thudded and the sixteen sailors on the line hauled away. It was usually twelve on the line to hoist a fleet leader aboard, but this fleet leader was a minotaur. Even Thenvor could not have been more eloquent than Pirvan in reminding the sailors what would happen to them if any "accident" befell Zeskuk.

Pirvan stood facing the gangway of Shield of Virtue, just aft of the mainmast. Flanking him were Gildas Aurhinius and Sir Niebar, who really did not look fit to be out of bed but was determined to second Pirvan if he died for it.

Those who would flank Zeskuk were already standing facing Pirvan and his companions. They were Lujimar and Juiksum, and the priest looked ill at ease. Pirvan knew some of the reasons for that and suspected more.

Standing side by side, farther aft, were Fulvura and Sir Darin. Both were fully armed, but for once their role actually matched their name. They were to observe this ceremony of welcoming Zeskuk aboard the Istaran flagship.

Behind the observers stood Sir Hawkbrother and a young Istaran captain, at the head of a dozen guards drawn equally from Vuinlod, Istar, and the Solamnics. Torvik's sister Chuina was one of the dozen. The meeting would not only be observed, it would be guarded.

Not that the meeting would serve much purpose, unless or until Torvik's newly-revealed connection with the Dimernesti offered an equally new way of attacking the island. Torvik had still said nothing, so while Pirvan trusted Jemar's son as much as he could trust anyone, that trust could not be evidence of coming victory.

But Zeskuk had asked to be received aboard Shield of Virtue, if only to repay the humans for their coming aboard Cleaver for the first meeting. It was a matter of honor-and with suspicions still rife and spies probably not yet all run to ground (or fled to sea), no matter of honor could be handled too delicately.

The drums reached a crescendo. Zeskuk in his chair rose above the railing. The sailors shifted their footing and hauled away again. The chair swung inward. In the lanterns' glow, Zeskuk looked somehow shrunken, and as pale as a minotaur could.

That was not entirely a trick of the light. Lujimar had healed his outward injuries, but Zeskuk had refused to be abed long enough for the balance of blood and other humors to restore itself naturally, or to submit to the exhausting spells that would speed that healing.

Darin would have done the same, out of honor. But once released from Lujimar's hands, he was under the care of Tarothin and Rynthala. They would not take no for an answer when it came to completely healing him. So Darin looked ready to fight any minotaur or any three humans on Krynn.

It was in the last moment before Zeskuk touched the deck that the fire blazed on the flank of the Smoker.

True to their discipline (or fear of Pirvan) the sailors did not flinch. They set Zeskuk down as gently as a baby into its cradle or an egg into straw, then they all rushed to the side, staring and pointing. A mate finally outbellowed a minotaur, driving all the sailors back to their post by the aftercastle.

Even then, Pirvan overheard mutterings.

"Reorx's forge is working," one man said.

Another uttered an obscenity, coupled with the name of the dwarf's blacksmith god.

"Hunh," a third man grunted. "I'll take Reorx seriously. The dwarves do."

"You mean you take dwarves seriously?" That sounded like the second man.

Yet another man said, "This is dwarf-work you'd better take seriously, before it's between your ribs. Where I come from, speaking against the dwarves is bad luck, worse than spitting into the wind."

The threatened man made no reply. Now Pirvan led his companions to Zeskuk, and all turned toward the land.

"That is no natural volcanic fire," Lujimar said.

Pirvan wondered if all clerics of every folk had to study how to utter meaningless profundities. From Zeskuk's expression, he thought the same.

"You may do anything you wish, to learn the nature of that fire," Zeskuk said. "Then tell us what it is, not what it is not."

"Anything?" Pirvan would have sworn he heard almost youthful anticipation in Lujimar's age-deepened voice.

"Almost anything," Zeskuk said, then added what sounded like prohibitions, in the minotaur speech, using words Pirvan did not understand. He wished Darin were within hearing-but then Darin might feel that it would be dishonorable to translate.

The simplicity of rejecting all who were not like oneself was very real and appealing, Pirvan knew. So was drinking oneself into madness and wrecking everything in one's path. Some temptations were harmless; hatred was not one of them.

The fire now had sea, island, and fleets so brightly illuminated that one could have read a scroll with ease. Pirvan saw Lujimar fumbling in the pouches on the vest he wore over his robes, with a look also universal to priests: the look of one who needed paper, pen, and ink, but had forgotten where he put them.

Pirvan snapped his fingers at a sailor and ordered, "My cabin, and hurry. Bring back writing materials-everything you find. Lujimar needs them." The sailor gaped, thought better of saying anything, and ran off.

By the time the sailor returned, the fire on the Smoker was fading, like hot coals turning dark under a light rain. Pirvan wondered if the fire was natural after all, but did not dare ask Lujimar.

The minotaur was far too busy asking questions of everyone within hearing, and writing down every answer, whether they made sense or not.

As the blazing light from the Smoker slowly died, Torvik noted that Mirraleen's skin now seemed to be glowing. It was as if she had soaked up the light like a sponge, and now poured it back like phosphorescent seaweed.

As if by their own will, Torvik's hands moved, to find comtortable places on Mirraleen's skin. She looked down and laughed.

My hands were cold," Torvik said. "This is an uncanny night."

"So it is," she said. "But I can warm more of you than your hands." She lowered her mouth as he raised his, and for some time they were occupied warming each other.

For some while after that, they slept. A long while, because when Torvik awoke, the first light of dawn was turning the eastern horizon a translucent green.

Mirraleen, who had fallen asleep in his arms, was crouched on the deck, garbed again in her belt and knife, and contemplating an unrolled chart. Torvik wondered how she had come by it, then saw the picked lock on the chest opposite the bunk.

"I need the human name for what we-I-call Quillfish Lair Reef," she said. "It is just under two leagues to the southeast of the Smoker's Tail, in a straight line. It's hard to recognize unless the wind is from the south, when there's surf over it, but-"

Torvik sat down beside Mirraleen and they both studied the chart. It was noticeably lighter outside when they finally agreed that Quillfish Lair Reef was the same as the one humans called Yuon's Woe.

"Be there at sunset tonight," she said. "Yourself, and enough trustworthy captains to lead-oh, a hundred picked fighters. You need not bring all the fighters, of course."

Torvik doubted that any trustworthy captain would promise his people's service without letting the people see for themselves what was afoot. But he would face that problem when he knew whether or not it would be one.

At last Mirraleen uncoiled gracefully and kissed Torvik, a gentle brushing of lips that seemed to content both of them. Then she squeezed through the port and plunged into the sea.

Watching after her, Torvik saw one arm raised in farewell. Then she was gone into the morning calm, and he turned back into his cabin, to face the work of raising a band of fighters ready to befriend Dimernesti, and with those friends slip into a mage's lair.