Mel Odom - Rising Tide

One of the wererat archers staggered back from the railing, transfixed by one of the giant crossbow bolts that had crashed through his thin chest. Bone shards glinted in the moonlight.

Iakhovas tossed the bloodstone bubble into the air and it promptly disappeared. Laaqueel noticed the harbor breezes died suddenly. A moment more and a sudden wave erupted from under the harbor's surface and drank down the Waterdhavian raker. There were no survivors.

The spell was subtle in other respects, spreading out across the harbor without giving away where it had started. Laaqueel knew none of the magic-fearing sahuagin would attribute it to Iakhovas, only to Sekolah.

Storm winds and crashing waves continued striking the Waterdhavian crafts as Drifting Eel pushed toward the Dock Ward shoreline. The battle in the harbor had reached the docks. Mariners bolted from taverns and from the Helmstar Warehouse, the Mermaid's Arms festhall, and Arnagus the Shipwright's building. Lights blossomed up and down Dock Street. The streets started to fill, and sahuagin were filling them as well.

Some of the Fleetswake revelers had pitched tents along the docks and others had even gone so far as to place tents across their boat decks. Lanterns blazed at some of them, throwing shadows across the tents as the drunken sailors and merchants tried to rally against the invading sahuagin forces.

Drifting Eel raced for an empty loading berth among the docks as lantern lights from ships at anchorage played over the deck. Iakhovas called down the hailing tube himself, ordering the sahuagin rowers to reverse direction. The sorcerer dropped the anchor himself with a wave of his hand that sent the man-sized weight spinning through the air, stopping the play of chain as soon as the anchor touched the harbor bottom. Drifting Eel halted too late, slamming into the dock pilings and knocking them loose from their moorings.

Laaqueel fell but rolled to her feet while the wererat deckhands went sprawling. She brandished her sword as she pursued Iakhovas, who hadn't lost his footing at all, standing as surely as an outcropping of coral.

The sorcerer bolted over Drifting Eel's side and dropped four feet to the splintered dock. He reached inside his cloak and drew out a rapier with an ornate handle fashioned from an impossibly large shark's tooth.

The malenti hesitated only a moment before following the sorcerer. She dropped to the dock, trailed immediately by two dozen wererats. Iakhovas was already in motion, leaving her no doubt that he was already moving on whatever hidden agenda he'd planned for the night.

She turned and glanced back out into the harbor in time to see the first fiery catapult launches from Water-deep Castle high overhead. The flaming loads arced across the black sky like comets, then crashed down amid the three sahuagin ships with uncanny accuracy. Two of the ships broke under the onslaught and started sinking as Waterdhavian rakers closed in.

The storm created by Iakhovas's spell continued growing, gathering force. Four foot waves rippled up on the harbor water, then cascaded over the side of Dock Street in spite of the ramparts. The sea wall around the harbor also served as a breakwater against storms that traveled inland from the Sea of Swords. Against a storm that started within the harbor itself, there was no protection.

A raker bore down on the surviving sahuagin ship. Before it could reach its opponent, a dragon turtle rose up from the depths and capsized the raker. The creature was over fifty feet long from its snout to its tail. The shell alone was thirty feet around and was dark green in color with sections that came to sharp points. The huge clawed feet spread over two yards with the webbing between the toes. Horned ridges stood out on its wattled neck. Fierce orange eyes glowed in the dark, and its mouth was a curved, cruel sword slash. Its attention drawn to the Waterdhavian sailors, the monster turtle's head darted out and it gulped down three in quick succession.

Men shouted around Laaqueel, but none tried to attack her as they manned posts along the harbor. She assumed that the illusory glamour Iakhovas was using remained in place. Turning, she sprinted to catch up to him, making it easily since he wasn't traveling fast.

"What are we here for?" she demanded when she drew even.

"Fear not, my little malenti, my reasons for being here coincide with your own," he answered. "To properly fight a war, weapons require careful choosing. In my studies, I have unearthed the fact that one is here, one that I desire greatly."

"You staged this invasion, sacrificed my people, to get something that belonged to you?" Laaqueel, even after the fifteen years she'd seen him in action, couldn't believe it.

He turned his dark eye on her, glaring. "Don't ever presume to question my methods or my reasons, little malenti, otherwise you'll never grow to be the sahuagin you want to be so badly. I no longer require your services these days as much as would benefit you. Do not be foolish enough to disregard that. It is a true fact." He continued walking, turning onto an alley off Dock Street and heading east.

She fell into step at his side and slightly behind him, following in silent protest. It wasn't the first time he'd intimated that he could change her into a sahuagin. Judging from his power, she assumed it was possible.

Possible, but only if he didn't get them all killed while foraging through Waterdeep. She tightened her grip on her sword and trailed him into the waiting darkness of the alley.

12 Mirtul, the Year of the Gauntlet

Jherek's heart hammered as he poised on the balls of his feet, the cutlass naked in his fist. The heavy humidity from the sea left a sheen of sweat across his body from his run. No one else had responded to the woman's shrill screams for help, but it was possible no one else had heard her over the noise from the docks.

Seven Cuts Court occupied a wide space in the street leading to Drake Gate and to the wooded coastal trails to Murann and Tordraken. Sandwiched between a building that had once housed a bakery but now stood vacant since a string of unsolved murders had begun there and a leather goods shop specializing in used overland travel gear, Jherek gazed out at the court. The only sound now was the gurgle of the fountain, fed by the artesian well, in the court's center.

Shadows draped the area. No lights burned there after the sun went down. Every mayor to hold office in Velen since the murders started tried to find a means of lighting the court and ending the curse there, but none had ever been successful. Torches and lanterns were lit, but mysteriously extinguished as soon as full dark had claimed the city.

The curse began when a severed foot was found in the court. Most in Velen believed the foot was placed there as a warning to someone, but the stories varied as to who the warning was for. Some said it concerned a Shadow Thief who'd failed in his assignment. Some said it was a warning to Hieydl, the old baker whose son had moved the family business, over an affair of the heart. The foot, over the years, ended up belonging to hundreds of people in the stories that circulated.

There was one truth about Seven Cuts Court in all of Velen: no one went there alone at night. Since the morning the foot had been discovered in the court, people who foolishly ventured into the court at night alone ended up dead-all of them from seven similar deadly slashes- and the victim's right foot was always taken.

Most believed it was the work of a vengeful ghost. For all its acceptance of its ghosts, Velen also housed a number of poltergeists that had to be banished from time to time. None of the clergy or professional ghost-chasers had been able to exorcise whatever haunted the court after dark.