Paul Kemp - Realms of War

According to the ship's quartermaster, the bottom was a hundred and ten feet below. Peilam's Nose sat somewhere in the general vicinity.

If you figured those charts and currents right, Rytagir reminded himself. Sea currents, especially two hundred and seventy-eight years of them, were hard to figure.

Rytagir was of medium height and wide-shouldered, arms and legs sleek with muscle and bronzed from years of swimming, diving, and salvaging in rivers and oceans. Good leather armor covered his body. He carried a long sword at his hip and a pair of knives in his knee-high boots. He wore his yellow-gold hair cut so short it wasn't long enough to lie down.

His eyes were the gray-green of the sea. A past lover had told him that his eyes were so much that color that it seemed as though part of the sea had seeped into him and claimed him forever.

Rytagir supposed that could have been true. Lovers never stayed long. They preferred men who could at least be distracted from their other passions more than a few hours or a day. Rytagir's whole life had been about his studies, and about the things he'd found. He'd learned everything his father, a ranger in Cormyr, could teach him of the wild. But it was the seas of Faerыn-not the forests, to his father's eternal dismay-that called out to him.

Quickly, Rytagir spoke a few arcane words, then drew a symbol in the air. Power quivered through him. He vaulted over the cog's side toward the sea breaking against the wooden hull.

The crew rushed over to peer down at him.

Instead of crashing through the waves, Rytagir stopped only a mere inch or two above the water, held there by the magic he had worked. He flexed his knees to absorb the shock and remained standing, though it was a near thing because the sea was so rough. The water-walking spell kept him on top of the ocean, but the waves still provided an uneven surface.

With a flourish-and he freely admitted that he often adored attention far too much than was good for him, which his father had never been happy about because he'd always been a modest man himself-Rytagir turned and bowed to the ship's crew.

They crouched along the starboard side of the ship in fearful dread. The storm had unnerved many of them. Normally the storms were over by summer, and any squall that blew up after that tended to be disastrous. There was already talk of this being a cursed wind. Bad waters and bad winds had taken ships to the bottom over the years.

Rytagir walked precisely one hundred thirty-two strides north, northeast of Azure Kestrel's position. He'd gotten the cog's precise position from the stars the night before. The sea harbored her secrets well, and the seeker who went there had to know where to look to find them. Then he ended the spell and sank like a stone beneath the waves.

The cold sea leached the warmth from Rytagir's body as he sank. He felt the pressure growing as he slid unimpeded toward the bottom a hundred and ten feet below. Fish swam around him, but there were no sharks. Small fish swimming freely in the area was a good sign because it meant there were no large predators around.

He reached under his leather breastplate and took out the small silk bag that rested on a necklace. A pearl, a simple white ball no larger than the nail of his little finger, mounted on a plain white gold chain rested inside. He took the necklace out and slipped it over his head.

When the necklace was in place, the pearl gleamed with spun moonlight for just a moment, and Rytagir opened his mouth and breathed. Instead of the sea, he breathed in air magically extracted from the sea. He no longer dropped toward the ocean bottom either. He hung suspended, free to make any move he wanted to.

The pearl was a gift from a sirine he'd met while exploring the Dragon Reach near Ravens Bluff in Impiltur. Most sirines tended to be destructive and often led sailors onto rocks and reefs while teasing them with their nearly naked, beautiful bodies and heartbreaking songs.

This one had been different. She'd been scared and helpless against the slavers that had taken her captive. Then, as now, Rytagir had been searching for a legendary ship taken to the bottom.

That time, he hadn't found his prize. However, he had managed to rescue the sirine from her captors. As a gift for res shy;cuing his daughter, her father had given Rytagir the enchanted pearl to aid in his diving.

For a time, he'd dwelt among them. In the end, as always, he'd had to leave to find the next mystery, the next nearly forgotten thing. It was his life and he was sure it would be until the day he died.

A horrible death, probably, he reminded himself as he hung weightless in the sea.

Even those bad thoughts didn't weigh him down. The pearl's magic also allowed him to move however he wished in the water with no regard to depth or natural buoyancy. Without the spell, his leather armor would have dragged him to his doom if he couldn't shed himself of it in time, though the armor was enchanted as well. The armor's enchantment protected the leather from the damaging effects of seawater and also allowed him to free it from his body at a word-which was something he was loath to do because it was a very expensive and hard to replace garment.

He fanned his arms and legs as though swimming. When he'd pointed himself downward, he swam down into the darkness of the sea.

Peilam's Nose lay mired in sand on the ocean bottom on her port side. She was a large cargo ship that had sailed from the Old Empires to the Dragonmere to trade with Cormyr. Her home port had been Skuld, along the Mulhorandi coastline.

According to the texts Rytagir had read-a ship's log, a merchant's journal, and two reports dictated to the Skuld merchantmen's guild because some of the cargo aboard the lost ship had belonged to the king and an accounting had had to be made- Peilam's Nose had been attacked by a sahuagin raiding party.

The ship's mage and a contingent of guardsmen aboard hadn't stood a chance against the sea devils. The sailors were slain to a man, and the ship's mage gutted and flown from a cross timber of the main mast. Most of the crew had been eaten by the sahuagin.

After that, Peilam's Nose had been scuttled and sent to the bottom more than eight hundred miles away. It had taken Rytagir almost a month to plot her probable course once she'd gone under.

One of the old bardic songs that had fallen out of favor in the Inner Sea also contained a germ of truth about the attack. Rytagir's interest had first been caught by that song while in the Tattered Sails Tavern in Milvarune in Thesk almost a year earlier. He had been there researching some of the villages that had been left in ruins by the Tuigan Horde.

From that germ of the tale carried in the bard's sad, liking voice, Rytagir had spent a tenday researching Peilam's Nose. And what her cargo manifest might have included.

When an explorer-which was how Rytagir thought of himself-didn't have a vessel and he needed one to recover lost artifacts from a shipwreck, he learned to find the details that would encourage others to invest in his knowledge and experience. In this case, he'd put together a probable manifest of the ship's cargo to tempt Captain Zahban into becoming his partner and lending his ship to the effort.

Rytagir stopped his descent only a few feet above the shipwreck. Despite the magic woven into the pearl, his vision wasn't able to penetrate much of the gloom at that depth.

He swam slowly and surveyed Peilam's Nose from the broken keel to the distinctive prow that named her. She'd been christened for the man who'd built her, a dwarf woodworker who'd forsaken the forge for a lathe in a lumberyard.

Even half-buried, the prow showed the fierce profile of a dwarf. His blunt nose projected well ahead of the rest of his features. The eye that Rytagir could see looked undaunted. Peilam's beard showed in the scalloped trim that flowed back over the prow until it gradually faded into the hull on both sides.