The serpent ships sailed north from the estuary for days. Grieve paced the deck, and Chalk followed him like a puppy. The king placed his iron-knuckled hand on the shaman’s bony shoulder. “We’ll be at the Bastion soon.”
“The Bastion,” Chalk cried. “Home!” He ran up to Bannon, leaned close, and repeated, “Home!”
Grieve’s expression darkened as he turned to his shaman. “I hoped Ildakar would be the center of my new empire. What went wrong? What didn’t you foresee? We should have been victorious!”
Chalk’s pale eyes gleamed with a cracked edge of madness. “There will be war, a big war! I promised a war. Many ships. My Grieve, King Grieve! They’ll all grieve!”
“Soon,” the king vowed.
The serpent ships sailed onward. For Bannon and Lila, the days were an endless blur of being chained on the open deck or sweating in the miserable hold as they worked the oars. When the wind picked up and stretched the sails, the oars were withdrawn, and the slaves remained bound with nothing to do but fear their fates.
One afternoon, the lookout called from the top of the mast. “Selka in the water! Starboard side.” Grieve strode to the bow, where he shaded his craggy brow and stared out on the waves.
Bannon raised himself up so he could scan the water. “Do you see them?” he asked Lila.
“What are selka?”
Squinting across the choppy water, he felt a thrill of terror as he spotted five swimming figures. “They look human, but they are definitely not human.”
Lila’s brow furrowed. “Fish people?”
“That’s as good a description as any. A race of humans long ago altered to live under the water. They can rip sharks apart with their claws.” He shivered even under the hot sun. “Nathan told me that during the great war thousands of years ago, powerful wizards manipulated captives, gave them gills and changed their skin in order to form an undersea army. The war is long over, and the selka have built an entire civilization beneath the surface. They hate humans and they still prey on ships.” He swallowed hard as the memories washed over him.
“They attacked the Wavewalker when we were traveling south. The selka swarmed over our ship at night, killed the entire crew to get revenge against the wishpearl divers that raided their reefs. Nicci, Nathan, and I were the only ones to survive when the Wavewalker wrecked on the Phantom Coast. The selka queen had some connection to me, didn’t want to kill me?.?.?.?for whatever that was worth. But they were unstoppable.”
“The odds are better now. This time you have me to fight beside you,” Lila said. “And I am a morazeth.”
With her hands bound and her ankles shackled, Bannon doubted even Lila could do much against a selka attack.
At the railings, the Norukai held their bone-tipped spears, ready to hurl them at the swimming figures, but the selka kept their distance. Grieve bellowed a challenge out on the water. “Come close enough for us to kill you!” The selka remained tauntingly out of reach.
Chalk groaned with fascination. “Selka fish! Fish people!” He nervously ran his palms over the puckered, scarred skin of his stomach. “I don’t want to be gutted, King Grieve, my Grieve.”
The king glowered down at him. “I won’t let them gut you, Chalk.”
The shaman chanted in a singsong voice, “Wrong, wrong, wrong!”
As if bored, the selka swam away, while the Norukai doubled their lookouts to keep watch on the water.
Lost in his memories, Bannon mused quietly to Lila, “I don’t know why the selka queen spared me the first time.” When he was much younger, he had stolen a small fishing boat and sailed away from Chiriya Island without charts or knowledge. He drifted for days until he ran out of water and food, sunburned, in despair. He’d been sure he would die at sea.
“I knew stories of the selka,” he told Lila, “but I’d never seen one. I thought they were just fisherman’s tales, but that night when a sea fog closed in, I huddled in my boat and fell asleep. In the darkness, something pulled my boat, brought me back to the island. When I woke, I was home, and the boat was dragged up on the rocky shore. I saw only the imprint of a webbed foot in the beach.” He looked at her. “When they attacked the Wavewalker, the selka queen seemed to recognize me.”
Lila gave him a skeptical look. “I believe you overestimate your charm and attractiveness, boy.” Her voice was flat, but he thought she was teasing him. “But if the queen wishes to be your lover, I will fight her.”
He shuddered at the thought. “I don’t ever want to see her again.”
CHAPTER 43
After Ava’s spirit ransacked the archives, Cliffwall went on high alert. General Zimmer dispatched scouts out of the canyons to monitor the oncoming army that was already marching out of the mountains. Nathan called an emergency meeting so that everyone could discuss how they might possibly prepare against such an overwhelming force.
As he and Verna hurried toward the gathering chamber, the prelate said with hard skepticism, “I’m not confident we have any viable options. This archive is no longer hidden, and Utros is on his way. How can we defend Cliffwall?”
Nathan clucked his tongue. “I’m sure we’ll find something, my dear, if we just think hard enough.”
She walked ahead of him into the large gathering chamber. “You sound like a naive fool.”
“I prefer the term ‘optimist.’ Remember, I’ve helped save the world before.” But he’d had the help of Nicci, and Richard, and others. Knowing that Nicci was still alive did not help him, because she wasn’t there. He had no idea where she actually was, only that she had somehow killed the sorceress Ava.
The prelate responded with only a roll of her eyes.
Franklin and Gloria sat at a speakers’ table before the anxious audience. Zimmer shifted uncomfortably in his seat; his D’Haran armor was clean and professional, as if he were reporting to Lord Rahl himself. Nathan and Verna took the remaining seats at the front table before the gathered crowd. Intent scholars filled the room, sitting on the available benches while others stood shoulder-to-shoulder. The low buzz of conversation was not the casual talk usually heard at such meetings.
Thorn and Lyesse stood with weapons at their sides. Eight Sisters of the Light sat watching the prelate, confident and waiting to learn how they could help. O
liver and Peretta remained close to Amber.
Gloria nodded to her memmers as the Cliffwall inhabitants asked questions of one another. Scholar-Archivist Franklin folded his hands in front of him, waiting for the crowd to quiet down. Crowded at the entrance to the chamber, some of the ungifted workers listened in, deeply worried.
Nathan cleared his throat. “We don’t have time to waste, and someone needs to call this meeting to order, although I believe meetings are often a waste of time when action is required. The enemy army knows exactly where to find us. A hundred thousand soldiers will take over this archive, unless we figure out a way to stop them.”
“How can we possibly stop that many?” cried one of the memmers.
“By killing them,” Thorn interjected, as if the answer were obvious.
Verna looked annoyed. “An excellent suggestion, but unhelpful. We have to prevent them from capturing all the knowledge stored here. They cannot have it!”
“At the pace of their march, they are maybe four days away,” Zimmer said. “But my scouts suggest they have picked up speed.”
A wave of anxious whispers rippled through the chamber.
Lyesse said, “The soldiers are gaunt and hungry, and they are stripping the landscape clean, devouring everything in sight.”
“But they continue to march nevertheless,” Thorn added. “On our last reconnaissance, we killed six of them.”
“Each,” Lyesse added. “For good measure.”
Captain Trevor spoke up, frustrated. “We cannot stop them one or two at a time.”
“With the maze of narrow canyons, the sheer cliffs, the mesa rising above the valley, Cliffwall is defensible,” Zimmer explained. “A small number of fighters can hold the bottleneck at the mouth of the canyon. With the proper preparations, we could ambush the enemy, slay thousands as they funnel into the canyon.”
