Troy Denning - The Veiled Dragon

The witch filled her lungs with air and spun around to see a huge black fin slicing toward her, albeit on a somewhat crooked course. She pushed her head beneath the water and, summoning her voice from deep down in her bowels, bellowed. Again, the sea pulsed with her fear and anger, and again the great fish rolled on its back.

Ruha turned toward her rescuers and saw six more of the beasts floating with their bellies toward the sky. They all had wedge-shaped snouts and small, pitiless black eyes and shovel-shaped mouths. She began to pull herself through the surging waters. Her head was spinning from the loss of blood, and she did not know how she would find the strength to reach the raft before the monsters recovered and swarmed her again.

The witch had taken no more than three strokes before Captain Fowler grabbed the reluctant sailor by his collar and belt, and pitched him into the sea. The man splashed down two yards away. Ruha expected the fellow to turn away and swim for the raft, but instead he cast an angry glance in her direction and thrust out his hand. She stretched forward and caught his wrist, digging her fingernails deep into the flesh of his forearm. The sailor scowled, but rolled onto his back and started to kick his legs. Captain Fowler hauled on the rope, pulling them back toward the raft.

Ruha looked over her shoulder and saw the stunned fish already beginning to twitch and squirm. She wrapped her hand into the short length of rope holding up the sailor’s dingy trousers.

“Cover your ears!” The man cringed at the sound of Ruha’s booming voice. “And keep kicking!”

After the sailor put his hands to his ears, the witch pushed her face beneath the surface and let out another bellow. The concussion once more stunned the small fish into inaction, but the monster was too far away. Its fins continued to flutter, and its immense body slowly rolled in the water.

Ruha felt Fowler’s thick hand in her hair. He twisted his fingers into her unbound tresses and lifted her out of the water. It was a painful way to be hauled from the sea, but the witch did not complain. She grabbed a lashing and scrambled completely aboard, hissing in pain as she dragged her savaged leg across the wet planks. She rolled onto her back and saw the sailor clutching the edge of the raft, struggling in vain to pull himself aboard. Behind him, the huge fish had righted itself and was already swinging its snout toward the raft.

“By the burning face of Afar!” Ruha snarled, swearing her oath in the name of the fiery Bedine sun goddess. She thrust her hand into her aba and rummaged through its blood-soaked pockets. “That monster has troubled me enough!”

The sailor looked back toward the great fish. The creature was half-submerged, snaking a slow, crooked path toward the raft. Captain Fowler reached past Ruha to grab the man’s shoulder, but the fellow shook his head and swam away. At first, the witch did not understand what he was doing; after his initial reluctance to help her, he hardly seemed the type to draw a sea-monster away from his companions. Then, when the beast did not change course, she noticed the slippery red ribbon she had left on the raft planks. Perhaps lions and jackals could not follow blood trails through water, but they did not breathe the stuff.

Fish did.

Ruha withdrew two small packets from her pocket, one filled with sand, the other with lime. She poured the contents of both packages into her palm and spit on them. As the witch mixed them together, Captain Fowler took a boarding axe from his belt and stepped forward to meet the advancing fish. She grabbed the half-orc’s leg and pulled him roughly back.

“This fish belongs to me, Captain.” Though Ruha was trying to speak quietly, Fowler flinched and instinctively retreated from her thunderous voice. She drew him to her side. “Help me stand.”

The captain glanced at the approaching monster, which had now submerged almost completely. Only the tip of its dorsal fin still showed, slicing across the face of a heaving dune. Fowler slipped a hand under Ruha’s arm and pulled her up.

The dorsal fin was only five yards away when the rising dune swallowed it. With Fowler’s help, Ruha retreated to the back of the raft. A dull buzz started to drone in her ears, and swirls of dark fog swam along the edges of her vision. The witch had lost too much blood to be standing. Her knees buckled, and, had it not been for the captain’s support, she would have fallen.

As Ruha struggled to call her spell to mind, a huge gray snout burst from the water and crashed down on the corner of the raft. A pair of tiny, wide-set eyes flared briefly; then the monster squirmed forward. The raft listed toward the trough of the dune, and the witch feared they would flip over. Her vision narrowed to a black tunnel. She reached out and slapped the fish on the nose, smearing the sand mixture over its rough hide.

The fish twisted sideways, temporarily preventing the raft from tipping farther, and opened its mouth. The beast’s teeth were as large and ugly as spearheads, and Ruha knew they would tear her into bite-size pieces with a single snap. She uttered the incantation of a stone spell, at the same time hurling herself backward into Fowler’s arms. They fell onto the deck together, leaving their attacker’s great jaws to clap shut on empty air.

A pearly sheen swept over the head of the great fish and down its huge body. The creature squirmed farther onto the raft, forcing Ruha and Fowler to the very edge of the vessel’s high side. It slapped the water with its tail, driving itself forward, and the magical luster of the witch’s spell suddenly drained from its gritty skin. The beast grew as drab and gray as ash, and the duller it became, the slower it moved. By the time its jaws were within striking range, the monster’s entire body had grown as drab and motionless as a mudstone sculpture.

Captain Fowler stretched a tentative leg toward the gaping jaws and, when his foot did not get bitten off, pushed the monstrous head off the raft. The fish slipped from sight and vanished beneath the dark water as swiftly as a stone. The witch slumped onto the deck and began fumbling at her buckle, praying she could stay conscious long enough to tie her belt around her bleeding leg.

Ruha had barely unlocked the clasp before her head thudded onto the planks and her vision went entirely black. She felt Fowler’s stout fingers tugging at the belt, then the tinny sound of a man’s fading voice: “Hey! These sharks …”

Sometime later, the witch awoke to a throbbing leg and the sound of arguing voices.

“… witch for?” whined the sailor. “She’s the reason we’re here, I say!”

“I don’t give a squid’s lips what you say, Arvold! I order a man to swim, I’ll not have to throw him!”

Ruha tried to open her eyes, found the effort too tiring, and settled for reaching down to feel her savaged leg. Her thigh was girded by a crude tourniquet, and her aba was torn clear to the hip-that would cost her the use of a few sand spells, depending upon how easy she found it to reconstruct the torn symbols. Her flesh was not yet numb and still warm to the touch, so the witch guessed she had been unconscious no more than two or three minutes.

“There’d have been no need to throw me, if it were worth going in,” growled Arvold. “But there was no call to swim for the witch. We should’ve let the sharks take her.”

“That’s for the captain to say, not you!” Captain Fowler’s declaration was followed by the creak of a weapon’s blade being torn from a plank. “I’ve no use for cowards, sailmender!”

“Captain Fowler, you have little room to be calling other men cowards.” The spell of loudness had lapsed when Ruha fell unconscious, so her voice sounded as weak and frail as that of any woman who had nearly bled to death. “I fail to see how a man who hurls another into danger is any braver than his victim.”