Mel Odom - The Lost Library of Cormanthyr

Baylee freed the small mast laying in the bottom of the lifeboat and pushed it into the locks designed for it. When it snapped into place, he pulled the mast rigging into place with Cthulad's help.

"We're lucky they didn't kill us," the old ranger declared. "Or did you think that Uziraff would play fairly with you?"

"Never once," Baylee said.

"Then why deal with him at all?"

"Because he had the location of the wreck."

"And you knew he had that magical map," Cthulad said.

Baylee moved the sail into position, then dropped the small tiller into the water. "I had heard about it, and I saw it once. I was sure it was what it turned out to be."

"So he used you to verify the veracity of the ship," the old ranger said.

"And I used him and his mystical map to locate the shipwreck much more quickly than dredging the ocean bottom for miles. There have been others who were looking for that ship." In terse sentences, Baylee revealed what had happened below the ocean's surface, leaving out the books he'd salvaged. "If I had not used Uziraff to confirm the shipwreck's existence in this area so quickly, the people who killed Golsway might have already claimed the prize. There could have been nothing down there to find."

"Well, it was a masterful plan, lad," Cthulad said, relaxing against the thwart. "But Uziraff has taken off with the treasure."

"Only for a while," Baylee said, adjusting the sail and looking up at Xuxa hanging upside down from the rigging. "How long do you think it will be before Cordyan Tsald and the Waterdhavian Watch unit arrives?"

Cthulad's sharp eyes regarded Baylee in a new light. "You knew about that as well?"

"While you were at the weaponsmith's in Caer Callidyrr?" Baylee nodded. "We had plenty of time to get the things I needed from the apothecary and visit the weaponsmith. Security dictated that we remain together. That would have been one of the firmest principles you would operate by. Yet you split us up. That left the only reason for that behavior as your need to be alone. And why else would you need to be alone?"

“To bring along the manpower we needed to see this through," Cthulad said agreeably.

"I left word back in Waterdeep that would have set them on our trail," Baylee admitted. "And I asked the apothecary to get word to them as well as whomever you charged with that."

Understanding dawned in Cthulad's eyes. "You wanted them to draw attention away from you," Cthulad said.

Baylee grinned. "If someone with the ability to scry far distances was searching for me, for this shipwreck, it only made sense to give them a more logical target to search. Would you spend your time searching for a merchant ship, or for a contingent of Waterdhavian Watch?"

"So you never intended to find the shipwreck on your own?"

"Oh, I fully intended to find the shipwreck on my own. And I planned on Uziraff double-crossing us. By the way, how well do you think Uziraff would have gone along with us if Junior Civilar Tsald and Calebaan had been there?"

"By having just the two of us-"

Three, Xuxa put in. Yes, by having only the three of us, Baylee allowed Uziraff to feel confident enough that he was thinking about greed and not survival. That way, he brought us to the site of the shipwreck.

"A masterful plan," Cthulad said in obvious delight. "Though it irks me that I played a part without knowing it."

"If you had known," Baylee pointed out, "you would have done the same thing. Only perhaps not as convincingly." He hung the lighted lantern he'd used below the ocean from a piece of rope, then ran it to the top of the ten-foot mast. Yellow light belled out around it.

"It appears that you planned for everything."

"Not everything," Baylee disagreed. "The whales. I never planned for the whales."

Krystarn followed Shallowsoul at a dead run. The lich ignored her, fleeing through the library stacks. After a time, he came to a door set in a wall black as anthracite. He waved an intricate gesture at it and said a word of power. A lock clicked.

He stepped through the entrance and Krystarn trailed him, catching the door before it could close.

The room on the other side of the door was a huge cavern with fiery pink walls that met in the rounded shape of a horseshoe nearly ninety feet in height. A huge pool of water three times that height in length eddied in the center of the room.

Shallowsoul stood at the water's edge and made gestures too quickly for the drow to follow. A moment later, a giant whale surfaced in the pool. At least, it partially surfaced, because it easily exceeded the nearly three hundred feet of space left open in the pool. Water spumed from its blowhole.

Then it opened its mouth, disgorging bits of broken ship in the shallows and on the bank. When it was finished, it sank into the pool again and another took its place.

Krystarn counted eight whales all together. The piles in the shallows grew, containing silt and broken bits of ship, rotted sailcloth, rigging, and the unmistakable gleam of gold and silver.

Shallowsoul gestured toward the pile. Immediately, objects pulled themselves free of the mud and floated in the air. "Leave now," the lich commanded her.

The drow barely had time to acknowledge the dimensional door that opened beside her, then she was shoved through by a strong gust of wind. She landed in a heap on the stone floor on the other side of the wall in the hallway.

As she pushed herself to her feet, she cursed what little remained of the lich's soul. She glanced up at the drow warriors awaiting her and found that none of them looked at her. It was good that they chose to not see her ignominious arrival because she could not have spared any more of them. However, Chomack's hobgoblin army remained available once she found a way to open the dimensional door.

She returned to her quarters without a word, followed by the drow warriors. Inside her room, she took out the crystal ball Shallowsoul had forgotten about. She held it in her palm and concentrated on the lich.

The image in the crystal came slowly, but finally opened on the lich. Shallowsoul was still in the huge pink cavern. Objects danced before him, inscribing abbreviated orbits before aligning themselves.

Krystarn wished she dared to watch the lich longer, but the crystal ball had to remain her trump card. Evidently it was only a tool to Shallowsoul, not a prized possession. And now the lich apparently had what he wanted.

It remained to the drow elf to achieve her own just deserts. She turned her thoughts to the ranger, Baylee Arnvold, and sought to find him.

"There!"

Baylee stood in the lifeboat and gazed in the direction Cthulad pointed. In the distance, sailing through the shimmering fog that lifted from the Sea of Swords, a cog swelled into view. "At least it's someone," the ranger said.

I can fly on ahead to find out, Xuxa offered.

Yes, Baylee agreed. But be careful.

The azmyth bat dropped from the rigging, then flew low over the smooth sea.

Baylee watched her go with some trepidation. He guessed that Uziraff wouldn't hesitate about leaving the area, but there was a possibility the pirate captain might have decided to return to kill them.

It was an hour or so before dawn, the sky just beginning to lighten in the east, slate gray clouds speared through by pink threads of the rising sun. The northern wind brought a warmer breeze that fought the chill of the sea that soaked up into them.

"The flag at the back," Cthulad said, peering through a collapsible spyglass he retrieved from his kit, "is Waterdhavian."

Baylee's heart lifted at that. He and Cthulad had shared watch during the night, both of them wisely taking what sleep they could against the morning's activities. But he was anxious to get back on the trail again.