Quenthel clambered off Jeggred’s back, but she continued to hold onto his mane, steadying herself against the rise and fall of the deck. She stared at the demon, the serpents in her whip tasting the air next to it with flickering tongues, and she wrinkled her nose. Even with its body held in stasis, the demon stank of sulfur and rot.
“It’s small,” she noted derisively. “Not even a match for Jeggred.”
The draegloth, mired in the web up to his elbows, grunted his agreement.
“Don’t let its size fool you,” Pharaun cautioned, wrinkling his nose at Jeggred’s panting breath, which was almost as bad as the stench from the demon. “One bite from those needle teeth, and you’d be paralyzed.”
Quenthel tried to back up a step but a lurch of the ship caused her foot to land squarely inside the sticky web. She fell sideways, arms flailing. She landed in an undignified sprawl in a thicker patch of web and immediately erupted into muffled cursing.
“Dispel this!” she spat, struggling to rise from the tilting deck and only getting herself further mired. “Dispel it at once.”
Her serpents, too, were stuck in the web and spat violently at each other in frustration. Jeggred tried to help, but was unable to free his hands from the web. Frustrated, the draegloth turned to growl at Pharaun, instead.
With an effort, Pharaun fought down his mirth. It wouldn’t do to laugh, not with Jeggred’s hackles raised—even though the sight of a priestess of the Queen of Spiders being caught in a web was too good to be true. Instead he inclined his head in a bow.
“As you wish, Mistress. But you’re going to need something else to anchor yourself to the deck, or you’ll slide right off the ship. Allow me, if you will, to provide an alternative.”
He pulled out a second wad of bitumen and broke the gummy mass in half. He passed a piece each to Quenthel and Jeggred, and when they had swallowed them, cast the spell that would allow them to cling like spiders to anything—even a spray-sodden deck. He then dispelled the web.
Clambering to her feet, purple-faced with suppressed rage, Quenthel looked around the ship.
“I see no mouth,” she spat. “Belshazu lied.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Pharaun said dryly.
Indeed, having had a chance to look around, he could see that Quenthel seemed to be right. The deck of the ship was a flat expanse of bone-white board, devoid of a cabin or any raised structure. There were rails at the edges of its deck to prevent crew from falling overboard, but the only other thing rising above the desolate flatness of the deck, besides the three masts with their tattered, patchwork sails, was a tiller at the stern of the ship. Seeing no hatches, he wondered if the ship had a hold—or if its hull was solid bone. He’d heard a faint noise, a moment before, that might have been cargo shifting, but it was probably just the sound of the storm.
“We’ll have to ask the uridezu where the mouth is,” he said. “Let’s just hope I can dispel the stasis.”
That said, he set to work. Dispellings were among the first spells wizards learned at Sorcere, and a quick incantation and a brief gesture were enough to dispel simple spells. But a temporal stasis was tricky. Only the most powerful mages could cast it. That the demon was indeed held by such a spell was readily apparent. Peering into its open, snarling mouth, Pharaun could see red, blue, and green glitters on its tongue—a dusting of the powdered gems that had triggered the spell.
A greater dispelling was certainly needed—one that was tightly focused, so it wouldn’t negate the binding spell. Taking a deep breath, Pharaun began his incantation.
Quenthel must have seen the unease in his eyes, for she drew her whip. Beside her, Jeggred absently picked at the deck’s caulking with a claw, scratching out chunks of black, congealed blood.
Extending the finger on which he wore his magical signet ring, Pharaun touched the demon between the eyes. The ring flashed a bright silver as the symbol of Sorcere activated, lending its power to the spell.
As the dispelling took effect, a shudder ran through the demon’s body. Pharaun jerked his hand back. Quenthel and Jeggred also tensed, but for several long moments, nothing happened. The only sounds were the muted splash of water against the dome that still held the elements at bay and the faint, curious hissing of the whip vipers.
Sighing, Pharaun shook his head. The dispelling had failed.
“Try again,” Quenthel ordered.
“Repeating the spell won’t help,” Pharaun told her as he stepped forward to inspect the demon more closely. “The mage who froze the demon in time must have been an extremely powerful?”
He’d half turned as he answered Quenthel, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the demon blink—and that was what saved him. With a shriek of centuries of pent-up rage, the demon leaped forward, claws lashing at Pharaun’s throat. Pharaun threw himself backward, but his boots were still stuck to the deck. He crashed onto his back, banging his head. Blinking away stars, he managed to focus his eyes just in time to see the demon at the apex of a full-out leap. Still confused from the blow to his head, Pharaun wondered why he was moving away from the demon, then realized that his fall had jerked his feet our of his boots; he was sliding rapidly down the sloping deck. In that same instant, the demon jerked to a stop in mid-air, then crashed facefirst into the deck on the spot where Pharaun had just been lying.
Groggily, Pharaun realized that the chain around its ankle had tripped it.
He also realized that he was still sliding down the tilting deck. He slapped sticky hands down onto the boards, jerking himself to a halt just before he hit the edge of his dome of force. Meanwhile the demon leaped to its feet and fell upon the slender chain that held its ankle, gnashing at it with yellowed teeth.
Quenthel backed up a pace, her whip held at the ready and an undecided look on her face. Then she gave a grim chuckle.
The demon gave up gnawing on the chain to glare at her.
“You dare laugh?” it said in a voice that squeaked like twisting chains, its tiny red eyes bulging. “I will feed you to the maw.”
Pharaun sat up, rubbing a tender spot on the back of his head.
“That’s just what we’d like to talk to you about,” he told the demon. “The ship’s mouth. Tell us where?”
He never got the chance to finish. Jeggred, hackles raised by the insult to his mistress, chose that moment to leap forward. Howling with rage, he raked the demon with his fighting hands, tearing deep slashes in its chest and thighs.
Pharaun sprang to his bare feet—which, thankfully, were still sticky from his earlier spell.
“Jeggred, stop!” he shouted. “That’s what it wants!”
Already he could see what the demon was doing—it fell back under Jeggred’s attack in a move that left its bound leg exposed. The demon could neither harm nor remove the chain that bound its ankle itself, but if a careless swipe of Jeggred’s claws did the job...
Quenthel, for once, thought quickly. She lashed out with her whip—not at the demon, which was probably immune to her serpents’ poison—but at Jeggred, instead. Her vipers snapped a hand’s breath over his bare back, splattering his mane with their venom.
“Jeggred!” she shouted. “Leave him.”
The draegloth glanced back over his shoulder, suddenly aware that his mistress was angry. Instantly he cowered on the deck, ignoring the raking kick the demon gave him.
Foiled in its escape bid, the demon hunkered down, whiskers twitching.
Pharaun clambered up the steeply sloping deck.
“Now then, demon,” the Master of Sorcere said, “to get back to my question about the ship’s mouth. I want to know where it is and what we need to feed it to get this ship going. You’re going to sail us out of this whirlpool and into the Plane of Shadow.”