"You ride," he said, "and I'll hold on, levitating behind. The animal will be able to move faster that way. With luck, we'll reach the forest and make contact with the priestesses before the spell you cast on me runs out."
"Not luck," Halisstra chastised. "With the b-blessing of the g-g-goddess."
She gave him a brief kiss?with lips that seemed as cold as those of the dead?then she climbed, still shivering, into the saddle.
Chapter Thirty-five
An instant before the demon reached Pharaun, the spell activated, and an enormous glowing hand interposed itself between them. The hand slammed into the demon, smashing it down against the deck and dragging it across the bone-white boards away from Pharaun. Squeaking with fury, the demon tried to squirm free, but the magical hand was too strong for it.
As the uridezu struggled, unable to move, Pharaun cautiously approached and grasped the two ends of the broken chain. Holding them together, he cast a cantrip, glad that he had been forced to use that form of binding. A pentagram, once broken, had to be redrawn entirely, but a chain used in a binding spell could always be restored with a simple mending?assuming one had the magic to actually restrain the demon, first.
The instant the chain mended itself, Pharaun stepped back and dispelled the magic hand. The demon leaped to its feet, eyes slitted with fury. As it yanked, futilely, on the chain, Pharaun turned to look for Quenthel and Jeggred. He spotted them a moment later?they'd managed to escape from the whirlpool by levitating and were floating in the eye of the storm. Unable to reach the ship, they were rapidly being left behind. Quenthel shouted something at him, but Pharaun couldn't hear her over the crash of waves and the howl of the wind. Her message was plain enough, however, from the waving of her arms. She wanted Pharaun to use his magic to fetch them back to the ship.
Pharaun made a show of cupping his ear and shrugged theatrically. Then he turned away, chuckling. He stared at the demon, which once again had lapsed into surly submission.
"Now then, demon," he told it. "You said the mouth was in the ship's hold?"
The demon snarled and said, "Go see for yourself."
Pharaun took a step toward the open hatch, watching the demon out of the corner of his eye. When it tensed expectantly, he paused.
"I think not," he said.
Instead he pulled from his pocket the jar of ointment and rubbed a little of it on his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, he saw that his caution had been well founded. There was indeed a hatch on the deck, but it didn't open onto stairs and a darkened hold. The edges of the hatch were actually a wet pucker of flesh resembling lips. Inside, where the stairs had appeared to be, were rows of jagged teeth. Beyond those, the hold was filled with bones and skulls. Red light flickered around them, shining up through the eye sockets like the glow of angry coals.
The mouth was breathing, exhaling a rank smell that was a combination of burned flesh and charred bone, overlaid by the stench of rot?worse, even, than Jeggred's breath. Wincing, Pharaun pinched his nose shut and backed carefully away from it. He was glad that he'd had the good sense to have the demon open the hatch. He was certain that if he'd opened it himself, he would have been sucked into the mouth and consumed?utterly.
Too bad he hadn't instructed Quenthel to open the hatch, instead. That would not only have produced an amusing result?but also a practical one. In order for the demon to sail the ship out of the storm, the mouth had to be fed something.
Pharaun paused. Or did it? For all he knew, a ship of chaos could sail for years on a single meal. Centuries, even. But could it sail from one plane to the next without feeding? That was something he'd have to find out. A bluff was in order.
He folded his arms against his chest and looked the demon in the eye.
"We've wasted enough time," he told it. "Get the ship under way. Set sail for Plane of Shadow."
The demon mirrored Pharaun's action, crossing its own arms.
"Stupid mortal," it said with a disdainful smirk. "You know nothing. We can not travel that far. Before the ship can enter the Shadow, it must feed. Permit me to gate in a worthless mane, and I will stoke its fires."
Pharaun returned the smile. The demon had unwittingly told him what he needed to know. He wasn't about to allow it to cast any spells? it wouldn't be manes stepping through the gate, but another uridezu.
"The fires are stoked enough for the moment," Pharaun told it. "We'll sail out of this storm first and see about feeding the ship. Remember?the sooner you complete the task I've set for you and get us into the Abyss, the sooner you'll be free."
For a few heartbeats, the demon tried to stare Pharaun down. Then its whiskers twitched, and it looked away. It lifted its foot, indicating the thin length of chain that bound it to the deck.
"Someone must take the tiller," it said.
"I'll do it," the Master of Sorcere said. "Just get the ship moving." Then, noticing the sly took in the demon's eye, he added, "And no tricks. I want smooth sailing?or at least, as smooth as possible in this storm." He paused as spray from a breaking wave crashed over him, re-drenching his already sodden piwafwi. He pointed at his bare feet, still stuck firmly to the sloping deck, thanks to his spell. "As you can see, I don't wash overboard easily."
Pharaun turned and made his way against the wind and spray?one slow, sticky step at a time?to the stern of the ship. The tiller, he found, was, like the test of the ship, made of bone. Not of powdered and compressed bone, like the boards that made up the deck, but of a single bone?an enormous radius, by the look of it, nearly ten paces long. It was slender and light enough that it must have been hollow, Pharaun decided, as he twisted it in its socket. It probably came from a dragon's wing. Gripping the handle, Pharaun glanced down over the stern and saw that the rudder was an enormous sickle blade.
"Get us under way," he shouted at the demon.
The uridezu snarled, then raised clawed hands above its head. As it swept its hands forward in the direction of the bow, the tattered skin sails above stopped luffing in the wind and belled out, straining at their lines. The ship began to move more rapidly in its circuit around the inside of the whirlpool. The demon continued to move its hands, plucking at the air with its claws, and with each motion the lines that controlled the sails either tightened or loosened, trimming the sails.
Experimentally, Pharaun moved the tiller to the left. A lurch sent him rocking backward as the ship turned in the opposite direction. He clung to the tiller as the bow swung around until it was pointing straight up at the cavern ceiling. Sails straining and boards creaking, the ship began climbing the inside wall of the whirlpool. After a few moments the bow came level with the surface of the lake and began climbing into the waterspout itself.
The ship teetered, then pitched violently forward. For a few terrible moments Pharaun fought to hang on to the tiller as the wall of water smashed into him, but then the ship was free of the waterspout and floating, level at last, on the surface of the lake. Shaking his head to free his face of the sodden hood of his piwafwi, Pharaun grinned at the demon, still fastened securely by its chain to the middle of the deck.
"Smooth sailing," the wizard said, chuckling as the ship glided across the choppy surface of the lake, away from the storm.
He flicked wet hair back out of his eyes, glanced up at the ledge where they'd first entered the cavern?some distance away?and turned the ship in that direction. He'd collect Danifae and Valas first and retrieve Quenthel and Jeggred from the eye of the storm later.