Douglas Niles: Winterheim

“Come on!” Moreen demanded, shaking her head groggily though her voice was strong. She forced herself to her feet and offered him a hand. “Stand up!”

“My leg!” Kerrick protested weakly, shivering under a dizzying onslaught of pain. The water was up to his chest now.

The chiefwoman seized the elf beneath the arms. She was not a big person, but her strength surprised him as she pulled him upright, dragging him toward the base of the ladder. Pneumo shouted, the gnome sprinting through the hatchway in pursuit of the gully dwarf who had fled to the stern. Kerrick shook himself and tried to stand, only to scream in agony as his leg twisted uselessly beneath him. Grabbing a rung of the ladder, he hung limply, teeth clenched as he forced himself to remain upright.

“You go first!” he barked.

Moreen looked ready to argue, which was a pretty standard look for her, but then she apparently decided that she could help him more by lifting from above than by pushing from below. She went halfway up the ladder in a single bound, then reached down to grab the scruff of Kerrick’s shirt.

The elf looked up and saw the gully dwarf called Slyce pop out through the hatch. A gush of water followed as a wave swept over the low hull. Moreen shook the brine from her hair, then tightened her grip on Kerrick’s collar. He grunted as she lifted, then did his best to pull upward, kicking and flailing with his good leg as he sought to stand on the cold steel rungs. Now the air was sweet and pure, spilling right through the open hatch, and the elf exerted every effort to drag himself along.

That sunlit sanctuary was elusive, apparently slipping farther away with each passing second. More cold blue water poured through the hole, blocking the daylight as the submersible slipped below the surface of the sea. Moreen cursed, and her grip broke from his collar as the force of plunging brine drove into them. Kerrick clung to the ladder with one hand, while with the other he pushed upward, pressing her against the current.

The boat was going down. Pneumo had led them this far, but he had been unable to steer between the rocky pillars marking the mouth of Brackenrock Harbor. Instead, he had rammed one of those reefs and doomed his invention and perhaps himself. Kerrick tried to see through the flowage, hoping to catch a glimpse of the gnome or Divid, the other gully dwarf, but there was only the foaming, churning sea. Once again he felt Moreen’s hand on his shoulder, and he groaned at this proof that she was still within the steel hull. He couldn’t let her die, especially not here, within sight of her home.

Resolutely he started to climb, allowing her to aid him, employing all of his strength in a battle against water pouring down. They were near the hatch now, but his broken leg was a dead weight, and the force of the current was too strong. The cold sea surrounded him, but he could feel no trace of the chiefwoman overhead-he could only hope she had escaped.

A sailor throughout his eight decades of life, the elf had faced nautical emergencies on many occasions and always had survived. He believed he could do the same here. A rational corner of his mind told him that he just needed to hold onto the ladder until water filled the sub then swim out through the hatch without having to battle the crushing pressure of the inward flow. The chances for the gnome and the other gully dwarf deep in the hull, sadly, were not very good-the water had them trapped far below, and he doubted they would make it out.

There was nothing he could do for them. Instead, he clutched the ladder and held his breath, feeling the current ease after another minute until it ceased altogether. He exerted himself no more than necessary, conserving the air in his lungs. When he released the ladder, the natural buoyancy of his body actually lifted him up, bore him out through the open circle of the hatch. He looked upward, toward the brightness that was not so terribly far away, and started to swim.

Again he felt the stabbing pain in his leg, agony that would not let him kick. A glimmer of panic took root in his mind. He strained with his hands, tried to kick with his good leg, but he rose very, very slowly.

Another hand took his. He knew that Moreen had dived under the surface, and the sensation gave him a strange sense of peace. She pulled, and he rode along with her. When they broke through the surface and he drew a breath, he saw a boat-a sailboat-and he knew that he and she had somehow survived the long journey home. Either that or death was a wonderful dream.

In another moment he felt strong hands pulling his arms, then the familiar feel of a deck under his body as he collapsed onto wooden planks. He saw people, including a familiar round face beneath a shock of black hair-Mouse, but what was he doing here? — and finally succumbed to a sensation of peace, warmth, and silence.

Moreen Bayguard lay on the deck, too exhausted even to cough. That weariness was almost her undoing, as her breath gurgled in watery lungs and a pleasant darkness began to close across the vision of her one good eye. Her eye patch, the flap she wore over the ruined socket, had been washed away by the sea, and salt burned in the scarred flesh of her face.

Someone wrapped strong arms around her and squeezed with crushing force. The reaction was instantaneous: She spewed a gout of brine across the pine planks then drew a ragged, gulping breath. Again she coughed and again, and slowly the darkness pulled back. Weakly she rolled upon her side, looking up to see a young man’s face, the brown skin furrowed into lines of dire concern.

“Mouse?” she said weakly. “I’m dreaming.”

“It’s me,” said her tribemate, one of Moreen’s most capable aides-and her lifelong friend. “Don’t try to talk. Just breathe.”

“What about Kerrick?” she tried to ask, ignoring his advice and paying for it with another bout of choking and gagging.

“Bruni’s working on him. He’s breathing. The little fellow seems to be okay, too.”

The chiefwoman turned her head and saw the elf, prostrate upon the deck nearby. with the unmistakeably large shape of Bruni leaning over him, wiping his brow with a towel. The heights of Brackenrock rose just beyond, as the sailboat stood in the water just outside the entrance to the harbor. Just beyond she recognized Slyce, or at least the gully dwarf’s hindquarters, as the stubby castaway was bending over to look through a hatch, his head and upper torso sticking down through the hole in the deck.

Questions churned in her mind. What boat was this? How had it come to be here, just outside the entrance to her homeport?

Again ignoring the young man’s advice, she tried to push herself into a sitting position. The sailboat had to be Mouse’s, she realized-his home-built craft, dubbed Marlin , which had been nearly ready for launch when she and Kerrick had departed for Dracoheim. Mouse had taken it onto the sea … and now she noticed that he had passengers, strange folk she didn’t know.

She saw two burly men, unmistakably Highlanders, watching her suspiciously from the foredeck. One of these was huge, nearly as large as Bruni, displaying a gold tooth as he glowered and clenched his jaw. The second was an older man with hair and beard of gray. His expression was unreadable.

“Who are they?” Moreen asked Mouse, as he helped her to a bench in the sailboat’s cockpit.

“The big one is Barq One-Tooth, the other Thedric Drake. They’re Highlander chieftains, and I picked them up on the east shore to bring them to Brackenrock.”

“What do they want?”

“They want to know what happened to Strongwind Whalebone. That is, they want their king back,” the young Arktos sailor said grimly.

“Strongwind …” Moreen declared weakly, despairing anew at the bitter memory. “He was captured by the ogre king … he created a diversion, allowed Kerrick and I to get into the castle.”