The ship lurched forward, logs and debris rumbling against its hull as it began to break clear.
The great raft of debris went rushing seaward, and now the townsmen on their various watercrafts began to scream and do their best to push themselves away from logs that rumbled toward them.
Myrrima stood with her watery staff still swirling in her hand. She threw the whirling staff back into the surging tide. It danced upon the surface a moment, like a waterspout, and the water at its base began to swirl faster and faster.
“Bring up the dead!” Myrrima called to the waves. The whirl pool churned and foamed, became a waterspout rising into the air; from the foam a body surged, a dead man large and pale, his eyes already plucked out by fish. The water made a moaning noise as it rose, as if the dead declared their pain.
Then a young girl surged into the waterspout, and in an instant dozens of other corpses bobbed into the air as if eager to be free of their watery grave, and all of them spun about in the plume, rising fifty feet in the air, as the moaning in the waters continued to build.
There had recently been a village here, a thriving hamlet. It had had tidy streets and quaint shops. A man in town had made stained-glass windows for a living, and every shop and house along the street was provided with a window to advertise his wares. Rain had envied the folks who’d lived here.
Their corpses rose, faces blue from the depths, hideous and terrifying, whirling as they swirled up the waterspout and then went flying through the air like fat dolphins.
The mayor and his men groaned in wordless terror and sought to escape, paddling away in a hurry, as horrid corpses began to splash around their boat in a gruesome hail.
Suddenly the ship burst through the last of the flotsam, groaning and scraping as it ran over a submerged log.
The Borenson family broke free of the narrows and headed out into the open sea.
11
Whispers
Beware the sound of whispers as you breach a wyrmling stronghold. As a lich lord sloughs its physical shell, it loses its vocal cords. Thus it can never speak above a whisper.
An hour before dawn, heavy fog from the sea besieged the watchtower at the wyrmling fortress so that its single black stone pinnacle floated above an ocean of clouds. Crows circled the tower, cawing, troubled by the movement below.
All around the tower, the clouds were lit a sullen red from beneath. Hundreds of bonfires ringed the tower so that the fog glowed like dying embers.
From the fires below voices rose up, human voices cruel and cold, singing songs of war:
Though the black basalt walls of the great tower looked smooth and unscalable from a distance, it was assailable—for a small man with clever fingers and a few endowments of grace and brawn.
So the runelords came, nine of them, eeling up through the fog, as swift as lizards, barefoot and unarmored, garbed only in sealskin, their long blond locks braided and dyed in blood. They bore sharp daggers in their teeth and carried ropes coiled over their backs.
With three or four endowments of metabolism each, they seemed to race up the nearly vertical slope.
Few were such runelords among the warriors of Internook. These were old men, cunning warlords who had lived in wealthier days. Most of them had little left in the way of endowments, for the majority of their Dedicates had died over the past de cade. But they came nonetheless, for they were bold men, and fierce, and endowments of attributes alone do not a warrior make.
The first runelord neared the top of the tower, reached back with one hand, hurled a grappling hook over the lip of a merlon, and scrambled up.
A wyrmling guard saw the hook and rushed to cut the rope. But he had never faced a warrior with endowments and was therefore unprepared for what he met.
The small man raced up the rope so swiftly that when he hit the battlement, he seemed nearly to have been hurled into the air by some invisible force.
The wyrmling grunted in surprise, then swung his battle-ax down, trying to slice the man in two and cut the rope in a single blow. But the little warrior sidestepped the attack, swung up with a short half-sword, and plunged it deep into the wyrmling’s throat, slicing through his esophagus and severing his spinal cord.
The wyrmling guard dropped without so much as a grunt, and lay for a moment, staring at the stars, bright and inaccessible, as his life’s blood oozed from his throat.
Dark shadows passed before his eyes as human runelords flitted into the tunnels.
Bells began tolling in the Fortress of the Northern Wastes, deep bells that reverberated through stone, carrying their warning through Crull-maldor’s feet. She stood in the Room of Whispers, a perfect dome lit only by glow worms along the ceiling, a room riddled with miniature tunnels in the walls. Each tunnel contained a glass tube, a special glass designed to conduct sound. And each tube went to a different reporting post.
At each end of the tube, the glass flared wide. By talking into the tubes the wyrmlings could communicate the entire length of the fortress.
“They’re coming!” a messenger shouted, his voice emitting an urgent whisper from the tube. “Humans have breached the tower!”
There were shouts of challenge, the clash of arms, roars of pain, the sounds of wyrmlings dying, followed almost instantly by more reports from another tube, urgent whispers: “Enemy spotted, Tower Post Two!”
“Death Gate One—humans coming!” a third voice cried.
In the perfect acoustics of the Room of Whispers, it seemed that the voices came from everywhere and nowhere, like the distant hiss of the sea. It was as if the guards were incorporeal, like Crull-maldor herself.
Crull-maldor smiled inwardly. She had anticipated this attack, but she had not thought that it would come for another day or two. She had underestimated the runelords.
Two hours past midnight, bonfires had begun to blaze upon the nearest hills, summoning the small folk to battle. Within minutes fires had burst forth upon distant peaks all along the coast.
The runelords came. They raced through the night more swiftly than Crull-maldor had anticipated.
She’d thought that they would first attack at the Death Gate, as the previous men had done, but they had surprised her by scaling the watchtower. To wyrmlings, with their huge bulk and clumsy fingers, the tower looked unclimbable.
At Crull-maldor’s side, her new captain reported, “Their numbers outside are great. We cannot see them all for the fog, but their numbers are easily in the tens of thousands. Their elite troops have scaled the tower, but a larger force is rushing the tunnels.”
“Perhaps their numbers are great,” Crull-maldor mused, “but if all that you could see from the tower was their fires . . . ? It is an old trick, to try to dismay an enemy by building many fires in the night. By having your troops sing loudly, five thousand can sound like fifty thousand.”
She spoke comfortingly, but Crull-maldor knew that the humans really did outnumber her troops. They might even be strong enough to overwhelm her wyrmlings.
Yet she hoped that powerful runelords would lead this group so that she could decimate them.
No humans had escaped from the warrens alive in the first assault. So the small folk would have no choice but to send stronger forces.
The humans would not be prepared to face a wight. She wanted to crush the spirits of the human inhabitants of the island, and thus begin her dominion over them.
“Milord,” a wyrmling reported, the voice rising in a whisper. “Human forces have secured the tower level.”