Douglas Niles - The Coral Kingdom

"And what is the ransom?" Robyn asked. Only her daughter heard the slight tremor in her mother's voice. Alicia's own heart had soared for a brief moment, until the grim reality of the situation became clear. The fat man's visage shimmered, and slowly his human appearance melted away, as if his features were wax, heated by an intense flame. They distorted, a grotesque mask of slimy meat, to a chorus of gasps and screams from all sides. People scrambled away in horror, toppling tables and benches to the ground, while the creatures eyes dripped streaks of ichor as they blazed with infernal hatred.

"You, the humans of the Moonshaes, must abandon the seas to us," hissed the now featureless horror. The mouth was a mucus-streaked gap in the flowing ooze that had replaced its face. "And you must furnish slaves, five hundred in number-humans that we will take to the Coral Kingdom and put to work in our mines! Only when your ships-all of them-have been drawn onto the shores and the slaves have been delivered to our warriors will the king of Moonshae be returned to his people."

"This is madness!" shouted Alicia, fury overcoming self-discipline. Quickly she sprang to her feet, wishing she wore a weapon.

"Wait." Robyn's hand, on her daughter's arm, had the effect of a calming spell upon the princess. Alicia stood still, breathing deeply but slowly, as the High Queen confronted the messenger from the depths. Robyn's demeanor accented the sudden pallor of her face with an expression that might have been etched into the surface of an icy cliff.

"Your ghastly missive cannot be met with other than loathing," Robyn declared, pure force running like bedrock in her voice. "Presuming for the moment that I were willing to deliver my people into certain death, the High King himself would never consent to such an exchange. But even more contemptibly, you seek to inflame with a bit of a corpse the hopes of a widow and a kingdom. You tell us that he who is dead lives, and for this you deserve worse than scorn!"

Alicia noticed that her mother's left hand had remained still for some time. Now the queen abruptly made a chopping motion with that hand. Immediately the crossbows of the guardsmen came up. Ladies screamed, and Ffolk dove for cover all around the commons. The princess seized a long carving knife and sprang over the table, Hanrald and Brandon diving forward to stand at her sides.

The princess heard dual intonations and sensed that both Keane and her mother were casting spells. Alicia paused in a fighting crouch, ready to defend the pair with her blade should the hateful ambassador or his party attack.

All of this happened in a scant few seconds, but the next split moment became a frozen image in Alicia Kendrick's mind. She saw a wall of fire spring from the ground, sputtering upward among the visitors-her mother's druid magic, she knew. Crossbow quarrels whistled through the air, a deadly crossfire of steel-headed death. And then Keane's spell thundered, followed by a deluge of rocks from the sky, pounding like meteors into the pulpy earth.

But amid the chaos of the lethal attacks, the princess saw one other thing in that split second before the murderous barrage impacted its target. The visitors, the ambassador and his entire party, had disappeared!

"Stop! They're gone," announced the queen, raising a hand to the reloading crossbowmen. The flames sank back into the earth, and the meteor barrage ceased.

"To where?" asked Prince Brandon, bashing his fist into the palm of his other hand. "We'll be after them with the first tide!"

"To the Coral Kingdom," Alicia remembered. "At least, that's where he said…." Her voice choked in helpless fury as she remembered the words that the horrifible visitor had uttered.

"A legendary place, the Coral Kingdom-at least, so I had always thought," announced Tavish, the most well traveled of them all.

"Where is it?" demanded Alicia.

"Hundreds of miles to the south of here, somewhere across the Trackless Sea," explained Keane when no one else answered.

"There's nothing for a thousand miles," objected Alicia. "Barely a few tiny islands!"

"You heard it was a legend. That's because no human has been there to prove its existence. The Coral Kingdom lies a hundred fathoms beneath the sea," concluded Keane, grimly quiet.

Talos chortled in unholy pleasure. The stroke of good fortune that had brought Tristan Kendrick into the hands of his undersea minions was too sweet, too ironic. Also, there was the fact of the mirror. The princess had discovered it and used it. Her power and ambition burned like a fire in the glass, with an allure that drew the evil god's interest and desire.

Now he was nearly ready to move for mastery of the isles, but first, he would take one more precaution. In the wake of his earlier defeat, he had determined to seek an immortal partner. A pair of divine beings, coupled in the same destructive goal, would certainly allow the cause of evil to gain justly deserved vengeance. He cast about for the name of a likely ally, and he decided to approach Malar, the Beastlord. That vengeful god was known for the force of his wrath. Indeed, he had recently demolished an entire community of elves for no purpose other than his own gruesome pleasure.

Thus he was interested when Talos proposed to him that they unite to attack the Moonshaes. But one question was paramount to the Beastlord.

"Are there elves? I must smite the elves!"

"Aye," rumbled Talos. "Called the Llewyrr, they are-but they are elves."

As proof, Talos summoned the image of the mirror, unknown to Princess Deirdre, who slumbered nearby. The Stormbringer showed Malar an image of Synnoria, with its pristine lake and crystal city.

"That can only be a place of elves," grunted Malar, pleased with his discovery. As he studied the scene more intently, his pleasure turned to keen excitement. He looked closely, drawn by powerful emanations that pulled his attention stronger than any visual cue.

"There!" he spat, focusing on one of the elves in this sylvan vale, on one particular elf who walked at the head of a group. That one bore a platinum triangle at his waist, and Malar knew he had found the answer: For centuries, elven populations had escaped him through the use of that hateful talisman. They had disappeared, untraceable and immune to his vengeance, because he didn't know where they had gone.

Now he did.

"You've heard of the Coral Kingdom?" By habit, Alicia asked the question of Keane. The wreckage left by the brief battle with the unnatural ambassador still smoldered around them, and they all struggled to grasp the truth-or falsehood-of the visitor's extravagant claims.

It was Tavish who replied, however. "Those legends, that's all-so foreign to humankind that it remains completely unknown, if in fact it exists at all."

"An undersea domain," added Robyn. "As immense in its own way as all the isles of the Moonshaes combined, and even more inviolate in its territory. It is ruled by the sea trolls, the scrags. They are even more horrible than the sahuagin-the fishmen, whom we've had to fight before."

"Then Father. . then the king must be dead," Alicia argued, to herself more than anyone. "How could any human survive in such a place?"

"It is possible," the mage, Keane, observed tentatively. "There are many spells that will grant one the ability to survive without breathing for a matter of hours, long enough for the sahuagin or scrags to drag a victim to an undersea lair, there to imprison the unfortunate soul in an air-filled cave. No cell can be more impervious to escape."

Alicia's heart leaped again, wanting to believe beyond all reason that her father still lived. The loss of a hand didn't matter. In fact, a powerful priest could repair such damage. What was important was that Tristan lived!