Mel Odom - Rising Tide

"Afraid?" one snarled at her as it changed into a rat man.

Laaqueel ignored the creature, feeling no disgrace at allowing it to attack the shopkeeper. Three wererats leaped at the man, driving him backward as they swung their short swords and snapped their vicious teeth.

A cold shiver prickled through Laaqueel as she took up the chase again. The young woman's own abilities for magic had been revealed when she saw through Iakhovas's illusion and the man's by his club. The malenti knew it probably didn't end there, but she gave chase, skirting around the snarling bodies of the wererats taking the shopkeeper to the ground by force. Still the man fought them, even knowing he was going to die. Every time the hand-carved club landed, wererat bones broke.

The extra effort required simply to breathe above the surface drained Laaqueel. Her gills flared open in an effort to compensate. The two women ahead of her grew closer, though, and none of the residences around them threw open their doors to help. Book Street remained deserted.

The women rushed into an alley to the left.

Laaqueel caught the corner of the building with her free hand and whipped her body around. The alley surprisingly turned sharply, almost switching back on itself to the right.

The woman who'd seen through Iakhovas's illusion reached for a perilously stacked pile of refuse at the side of a fishmonger's shop. Standing taller than a man, packed with fish tripe and bones from a few days' business as well as rotting vegetables and other garbage, the pile came down in a wet rush.

Battered by the garbage coming down on top of her and swarming underfoot, Laaqueel nearly fell. She caught herself on one hand and kept going forward. Huge rats came down in the refuse as well. One of them whipped through her hair in its fright, and two others clung to her body. She swept the one from her hair, then hurled herself up against the side of the building to knock the ones off her back.

The women continued to scream fearfully.

Hoarse voices shouted overhead, and a few lights came on. No one came to investigate and no one peered too closely from the windows above ground level.

The malenti caught up with the second woman first. She swung her sword, bringing the flat of the blade down hard. The woman stopped running at once, dropping to the ground and laying stunned.

Still in full stride, Laaqueel grabbed the other woman by her hair and yanked her from her feet. The woman came down hard on the muddy cobblestones. The breath left her lungs in a rush.

Breathing hard, her gills not quite able to meet the demands being made on them, the malenti held her sword under the woman's throat. She looked into the surface dweller's eyes, seeing the fear there and relishing it. Fear meant power.

Tell me-" Laaqueel gasped,"-tell me-what you saw!"

The young woman cried, tears flowing freely from her eyes as she shook her head and panted, "I can't."

Knowing the wererats were going to be on them within minutes, Laaqueel yanked the woman up and dragged her back to where she'd left the first woman. The malenti laid her sword on the ground and held the woman with one hand. She laid her other hand on the unconscious woman's face. She prayed in her tongue, the sahuagin clicks echoing in the alley even over the continued shouts by the people inside the houses.

In answer to her prayers to Sekolah and to the power she wielded in the Great Shark's name, the unconscious woman's face writhed with sudden infection-filled weals. As she finished the prayer, the weals erupted in bloody pus. The woman moaned with the pain even though she was unconscious, barely clinging to her life.

Laaqueel fixed her hot gaze on the woman and shook her. "Tell me!" she roared. "Tell me what you saw or she'll die in agony!"

It took two attempts for the woman to get any words out. "I can't!" she cried finally. "Tymora help me, what I'm telling you is the truth. I was doing a true seeing, looking at an object brought to us by a sailor who wanted to know if it had any magic about it. When we heard the screams coming from the harbor, I went outside. I didn't mean to see you."

"What did you see?"

She shook her head. "The rat men," she said. "You, and-"

"What about the other man?"

She struggled to make her mouth work.

"Better you welcome Umberlee's dark caresses than leave yourself in my hands, child," Laaqueel promised.

"I can't tell you," the woman said, "because I've never seen anything like it."

"What?" the malenti demanded. She heard the slap of feet on the cobblestones, coming closer. Whether they were wererats or Waterdhavian Watch, she was almost out of time.

"It was huge. Fearsome. All fins and teeth and-evil of the darkest sort. It hungers?'

Before Laaqueel could ask anything further, a green glow surrounded the woman. In the next instant her body came apart in thousands of flying sparks.

The malenti leaped back, startled and fearful of getting burned. The green sparks held neither fire nor heat, though, swirling into the air and winking out in a matter of heartbeats. Nothing remained of the woman. Laaqueel forced herself to her feet, seeing Iakhovas at the alley's mouth.

He gave her a baleful glare with his single eye.

The creaking wheels of a wagon drew Laaqueel's attention. She shifted to face the alley, spotting the black plague wagon rolling toward her at once. Ebony sheets fluttered in the wind.

No driver held the reins, and no draft animals pulled the wagon. It rolled slowly at Laaqueel, and the malenti knew she was looking at more of the hated surface dweller magic.

12 Mirtul, the Year of the Gauntlet

"Wake up, boy!"

The stern voice scratched Jherek from the comfortable womb of darkness that had settled over him like a shroud. He wanted to tell Malorrie that he was dead, but he knew it wasn't true. The quarrel still burned deeply in his chest.

"Who did this to you?" Malorrie demanded.

Jherek ignored the question as he opened his eyes. "What are you doing here?" His voice carried a whistle with it, and he knew it was caused by his left lung filling up with blood from the puncture wound. It already felt like rocks had been shoved into his chest, making it harder to breathe.

"You were late home to sup, boy," Malorrie said. "Madame litaar sent me to bring you home. She knew when Butterfly put into port and how long she takes to off-load." He made a sour face. "From the looks of things, she's going to be properly vexed that she didn't send me sooner."

"It's been kind of inconvenient for me as well," Jherek told him honestly.

"You'll not die."

Jherek didn't disagree. If anyone knew death, it was Malorrie. The old phantom had never admitted when he'd died, nor given any details on the how of it.

He knelt over the young sailor, concern etched in his translucent eyes, his gaze as always made somewhat confusing because he could be seen through. He was dressed as he always was in warrior's chain mail with a deep scarlet tabard that hung to his ankles. It carried no coat of arms, no insignia of any kind. He carried a broadsword sheathed at his hip, stripped of any ornamental designs that might have offered a clue as to the phantom's background. His face belonged to that of a man in his middle years, and his nature made it hard to tell the color of his skin or hair or the thin mustache that stained his upper lip, but Jherek always felt the phantom's eyes in life had been the blue of the seas.

"Mayhap you should lay here, boy, until I get some help."

"No," Jherek croaked. "This is Seven Cuts Court, remember? It's a wonder I'm not dead already."

"That arrow sticking out of your chest… it's possible the ghost that haunts this place thought you were already dead." The statement was Malorrie's attempt at a joke, but he spoke truth as well.