Philip Athans - Whisper of Waves

Shaking himself, Fharaud broke his own reverie and went back to his visual inspection of the ship. The rigging was strong, the sailors manning it appeared capable, and the harbor pilot looked as content as such a man could while so deep in the trenches of his specialty.

Fharaud stepped to the pilot’s side, not failing to note how stable the ship was in the water, and said, “You’ll be taking us straight away to the portal?”

Sanject gave him a slightly irritated glance and said, “Aye.”

Fharaud had known the answer but found himself desperate for conversation.

“The crew,” he went on, “is performing to your satisfaction?”

“Aye,” the man said again, and Fharaud was reminded of Ivar Devorast.

He thought it possible that Devorast had been one of the people lined up along the quay to watch the great ship pull away, but perhaps he wasn’t. He had stayed behind simply because he was no sailor and knew that he would serve only limited function aboard. Other business had started to come in the closer they got to the launch of the great ship, and someone had to stay behind to begin those new projects, however small they seemed in the shadow of the mighty Cormyrean cog.

Still, Fharaud couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps there had been a bit of fear at work as well. Though Ivar Devorast had never shown a lack of courage, he had also made his mistrust of the portal clear, and there had been accidents of late.

“The portal,” Fharaud said to the harbor pilot. “Is everything …?”

The pilot only barely glanced at him but said, “The item is ready, and I’ve used them before. The enchantment is of the highest quality, made by the finest native mage in Innarlith. You have nothing to worry about.”

Of course, Fharaud did have something to worry about, and he knew it. Though ships had passed through portals to the Vilhon Reach and elsewhere many times before, there had been an increasing number of accidents, costing the lives of some of Innarlith’s better people, even a few senators. There were whispers of deliberate sabotage, mostly by the wizards-including the major Sanject had such confident in-whose handiwork had come into question. But nothing had ever been proved, and those ships had all been much, much smaller.

Still, King Azoun expected a ship, and as Devorast had pointed out time and again during and before its construction, the ship could never be carried overland.

Fharaud kept to the fo’c’sle, shaped with intent like the guard tower of a keep, battlements and all, for the half an hour or so it took the ship to reach the safety of open water. Sanject climbed the stairs, returning from a final round preparing the crew to enter the portal, and stepped to Fharaud’s side, facing forward. In his hands, the pilot held a wand of clear crystal tipped on each end with shining platinum. With a word he could use it to open the portal.

“The vessel is ready, Master,” the pilot said. “Are you?”

Fharaud saw the hint of scorn the pilot let show in his eyes but ignored it. He cleared his throat, nodded, and said, “Proceed.”

The pilot held the wand up over his head and spoke a word that Fharaud thought sounded like it must have hurt his tongue to pronounce.

The portal opened in front of them faster and closer to the end of the bowsprit than Fharaud had expected, and he took a few steps back despite himself. The wind blew in all directions at once, disrupted by the sudden hole in the air in front of them. The ring of purple magelight that outlined the enormous circle fought with the dull overcast of the day to give everyone and everything a sickly, unnatural, bluish cast. The sound of the wind in the sails, the creak of the ship so new it still had years of settling ahead of it, and the shouts of the sailors behind them made Fharaud’s ears ring.

As it was, he almost didn’t hear Sanject ask, “You never told me, sir, what is her name?”

Fharaud looked at the man, shook his head, and turned back to the portal just as the ship started to cross that preternatural threshold.

“Sir?” the pilot shouted. “The vessel’s name?”

Fharaud looked up, watched the circle of violet light pass directly over his head, and called to the pilot, “Everwind . Her name is Everwind.”

Then they started to fall.

The rumble and clatter of the passage through the portal grew to a deafening cacophony of sailors’ screams and something else like thunder or a wind so powerful its sound was like the disintegration of an entire city. The deck bucked hard, throwing Fharaud off his feet to sprawl onto his back on the hard deck planks. He saw a sailor fly past right over him, arms pinwheeling and his face a mask of mortal terror. It was the first time in Fharaud’s life that he’d ever seen the face of a man who knew he was going to die.

“No,” Fharaud managed to utter through lungs that were constricting in his chest, then the ship pitched violently forward.

Something drew his eyes to the aft of the vessel and Fharaud watched the brilliant purple glow of the portal edge dwindling. At first he thought the ship was pulling fast away from it. An instant later, though, he knew the truth: the portal was closing.

“Wait!” he shouted and reached out with both hands hoping to find something, anything, to hold on to.

His right hand found a rope and he tried to pull himself up to a sitting position, aided by another sudden forward lurch of the ship. He squeezed the rope for all he was worth, and he sat up right next to the rail on the forward, starboard side of the ship.

A huge explosion of grinding wood and shattering glass burst behind him, sending shards and splinters onto his head and back. The portal closed around the back of the ship, shearing off the aft tenth of her and the realization of where that left them flashed through Fharaud’s panic-stricken mind. They would never hold water with the aft end off. Everwind would go down and go down fast.

Down.

That word took on new meaning as Fharaud whipped his head forward when the ship pitched again, even more violently.

The bow turned down and Fharaud slid forward on the deck, but only so far, as he managed to keep his grip on the rigging. He found himself looking down, straight down, at the surface of a wine dark sea a hundred feet below them.

He couldn’t have explained how he’d judged the height, but something primal in him mixed with a naval architect’s background in the tangible weights and measures gave him that figure: one hundred feet.

The ship rode a torrent of the Lake of Steam’s sulfurous water down that whole hundred feet. Sailors screamed as they were torn from the deck by the twisting, lurching, chaotic fall made all the worse for the enormous sail that took on some of the air, slowed them, then released it and turned them sharply-utterly useless and out of control, it couldn’t save them from the impact.

Fharaud closed his eyes and held his breath but couldn’t hold it long enough. He let the breath out but kept his eyes closed. More screams, the crack of wood, the whip of rope torn loose from fittings, the cries of a dying vessel filled his ears.

When they hit the water Fharaud tried to scream, but every bit of air he had in him was driven out by an impact so violent and sudden that his teeth cracked in his head, one bone after another snapped like so many dried twigs, and his life became a mad maelstrom of pain, screaming, suffocating, and defeat. Everwind exploded around him and he was in the water before fickle Tymora blessed him with unconsciousness.

16 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

With the aid of half a dozen unseen servants, Marek Rymut played midwife to a hundred hatchling firedrakes.