<u>14</u>


    Down below, a bit earlier:


    Shanella’s personal shielding and magic had warded most of the palace and part of the city, but the cries of the dead… of her people… clogged her hearing and clawed at her heart. Angry, the sea-elf queen ignored a brief, flickering missive from the voidlings above, refusing negotiation.


    Her son was alive and fully responsive, returned to her from wherever his soul had been wandering. Meanwhile, the Tarandahl lordling had vanished, blasting a hole through the palace that still glowed red at its edges. His aunt was present, though, doing her best to calm Zaresh.


    Shanella ought to have struck back at once, but compassion for the terrible plight of her subjects won out over revenge. Using her magic, Meliara’s and that of the willing druid, she set to work lifting debris, instead. Reached out with contagion magic to pull dragon-flame into Averna’s broiling vent, whispering: “Lesser to greater, like unto like. Fly to the source of all fire and heat, Wrath of Serpents.”


    The business took time, but slowly, great boulders of shattered coral and stone rose shimmering off of the seabed. Like ponderous meteors flying reversed, the blocks and walls lifted, sometimes releasing survivors, but mostly revealing just squashed, tangled corpses below.


    The wood-elf druid had sheltered all that he could. As a mage, his power rivaled her own… but so many thousands had perished; crushed, burned, or pulped by massive shockwaves. Shanella could not bring herself to speak anything else than commands, not even to thank him for helping.


    Soon, the queen’s heart turned from pity to rage.


    Dragon-flame twisted and streamed from its shriveled fuel to the boiling vent, scoring her city’s “sky” with searing bright gashes. Bits of people and creatures hung in the water, bloodless and torn; too much for even the ocean’s currents and scavengers to deal with.


    “I will have vengeance,” whispered Shanella. “For myself, and for those who believed I could save them. The ones I failed to protect.”


    Turning to face Meliara, she said,


    “Princess of Air, you have done as you promised… after bringing destruction and death to my realm. For the return of my son, I am grateful. Leave. <u>Now</u>. Depart from me with all those you care for, and never be seen here again.”


    Meliara rose from tending the bound and struggling prince. There was nothing to say, and she wasn’t fool enough to attempt an apology. Merely bowed her head in assent. When a tendril of magical seaweed quested into the chamber, the oracle let it take hold of her wrist. It was a sending of Gildyr’s she sensed; one stretched out from the druid’s position. Still hard at work fighting to rescue survivors, he’d heard the queen’s order; felt her rage and her pain.


    Meliara vanished moments later, along with the tendril of weed. Shanella scarcely noticed. To the dead, those of her folk whose roughly-torn souls yet lingered, she cried,


    “Rise! Find and destroy the ones who have done this thing. Father Ocean, grant me blood in repayment of blood, measure for measure, in unending torrents!”


    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX


    Overhead, a sudden sharp rap on his cabin door roused Lord Arvendahl out of his plotting. He rose to his feet in fierce anger, for he’d left orders that he wished no disturbance.


    Vancora’s first officer was an elf whose name Arvendahl hadn’t bothered to learn. She knelt in the passage just beyond the cabin’s carved threshold.


    “My Lord,” gasped the officer, bowing her head to the deck. “Creatures rise from the ocean. The fleet is under attack, Sir.”


    Arvendahl snarled in frustration. Stilling the contact-globe with a gesture, he kicked the officer out of his path, then strode back onto the deck of his airship. Summoned his sword, Grassfire, igniting its blade as he went. Using magic, he reached down for the earth that lay below water, ready to trigger apocalypse.


    Outside, the walls of that hurricane eye were fast closing in. Waterspouts whipped like jellyfish tendrils, lashing at drifting airships. The fleet, he saw, was being driven apart. More, though… dead sea-elves and merfolk and things of the deep had arisen in sodden, furious droves.


    As the wind shrieked and howled… as lightning raked the dark skies, overwhelming his shields… a horde of undead rose from the maelstrom below like slavering ghouls. Dripping fluid and ectoplasm, these crushed and burnt corpses clambered up over the gunwales and onto his vessel in hundreds. Thousands.


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    Arvendahl was no coward. Shouting,


    “Repel boarders! Defend Vancora!” He leapt to the fray. Turning his head, he commanded his limping first officer. “<u>Climb</u>! All vessels, best speed through the eye and out of this storm!”


    “Yes, Lord!” she called back, barely audible over the sudden fury of tempest and battle.


    An elf-lord in wrath is a blood-freezing sight. Arvendahl glowed like a star. Wielded by the High Lord, Grassfire blazed like its namesake; fierce, hot and unstoppable, devouring all in its path. As the shrieking undead poured onto his ship, as Vancora surged wildly upward… deck slanting, mage-engines roaring… Arvendahl battled and slew like a demon.


    Cutting, slashing, spinning away from attack. Gutting, beheading, bisecting and kicking the very-much dead off his blade. Meanwhile, his crew and officers fought as they were expected to. His Lordship barely took notice, battling to defend himself and his airship as the hurricane closed like a fist. Waterspouts claimed first Raptor then Varg, turning the airships to shattered kindling and windmilling bodies.


    Rain lashed, painting the decks with pinkish rivers of blood. Wood splintered and metal rang under sword-cut and spear-thrust. Undead monsters landed with wet smacks on the planking, bringing down shrieking half-elves and officers.


    Meanwhile, Vancora drove for the skies, for that one bright dot overhead. Her mage-engines howled with the strain, shaking the sea-dragon nearly apart. She got there, by Oberyn’s grace, just as a screaming nix-body dropped onto His Lordship from up in the rigging. He twisted wildly, trying to get his sword out and around. Too late, as Grassfire’s blade was caught on the stoven-in ribs of a merman.


    A tide of reeking undead scrambled over the struggling elf-lord, hauling him into their fetid embrace. Blood thundered and rang in his ears. His breath came raggedly fast, but… he… would… not… die. Not here, not this day. Bitten, slashed, gouged at, he released manna wildly; a sudden, unfocused burst that incinerated Vancora’s mainmast and shrouds, along with the dead, and most of Vancora’s crew. Their screams blent with the last cries of those torched ocean corpses, were carried away by a mild, gusting wind that whistled high over the cloud band.


    Purple-dark, shot through with lightning, the storm below closed on all of the fleet except Vancora, Terroc, Deathstroke and Falcon. Everything else was gone. Arvendahl straightened, sheathing Grassfire. His flesh was torn in many places, the wounds already darkening. One eye was gone… but he lived. As Vancora leveled, her straining engines dropping from howl to low purr, he snapped,


    “All captains, report!”


    At his command, the glowing image of three elves… one just a terrified mid-shipman… appeared on the deck before Arvendahl.


    “My Lord,” they chorused raggedly, bending the knee. Then,


    “Terroc reports all clear, Milord, with half-power remaining and loss of twenty-four crew, three officers,” said Shevann, captain of the Terroc. The smaller airship drifted to port about ten miles away. The vessel’s commander was still breathing hard, clutching a wadded cloth to a streaming wound on her side, but she managed to stand as she made her report.


    Arvendahl nodded. Turned his eye next to a stoic male elf with black hair, blue eyes and an upsettingly familiar face. Tormun, master and commander of Deathstroke; some five miles away, dead ahead.


    “My Lord… Deathstroke is secure,” said the tall elf, father of traitors and exiles. “Power is low but climbing. Thirty crew lost, and all but my first officer, dead. I resign my commission… Milord.”


    Once again, High Lord Arvendahl nodded. Deathstroke’s first officer was present, a mere shadow behind Captain Tormun. Addressing that half-glimpsed first mate, Arvendahl said,


    “Resignation accepted. First officer assumes command. Throw him overboard, Captain. The gannets and crabs may have him.”


    He did not linger to see the job done. To watch a small, flailing dot plunge from Deathstroke, down to the storm below. Tormun’s image vanished moments later, though, replaced by a grim-faced, light-eyed female.


    Next, the High Lord’s gaze shifted to the young midshipman, all that remained of Falcon’s bridge crew. Falcon was listing badly, one of her manna tanks ruptured by lightning, all but six feet of her mast gone. The red-haired boy bowed again.


    “M- Milord… Falcon is damaged, but able to fly. I… have tasked people to patch the main tank and… and raise a spare mast. Three crew still alive, Sir, and… and just me.” He was crying, which Arvendahl couldn’t abide. “W- We tried, Sir. There were so many, and Captain Varric, he…”


    “Enough sniveling. Pull yourself together and lead your ship, or I’ll send someone across to replace you,” growled the High Lord.


    The boy hiccupped, dashing at tears with one clenched fist, the other still gripping tight to his sword hilt. Someone placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, giving the lad a brief shake. Murmured something that Arvendahl couldn’t hear, but which put some iron back into the sagging young boy.


    “Yes, Milord. My apologies, Sir. It will not happen again.”


    Arvendahl had turned by that time, no more interested in one feeble lad than he’d been in the death of a traitor.


    “We return to Milardin,” said His Lordship. “Half speed, to conserve manna, flying over the clouds. All officers to check in on the candle-mark, as lit now.”


    At Arvendahl’s gesture, a magical taper appeared at his side, striped all along its wax length. Similar candles materialized on the decks of Terroc, Deathstroke and Falcon. All four sparked to light together, synchronizing ship’s time. Then,


    “Crew to work on the mast. Healer, to me!” snapped the High Lord, whose wounds were beginning to stiffen and burn. He would have himself put to rights and then… more than ever… take care of the matter with Tarandahl.