“What you all be about?” Toytere burst into their midst, carrying a sack full of gold and jewelry. “I can-the dead walk!” He faced the horde of rats, dropped the bag, and grasped his cane in both hands.
As one, the rats drew back and hissed. Kalen raised his blades.
“They’ve stopped being adorable,” Myrin said. “Bit scary now, actually.”
The rats surged toward them.
For the first time, Kalen regretted parting with Vindicator. He had two daggers-one that was Waterdeep Guard issue, the other of fine dwarven steel-but they hardly seemed adequate against a horde of rats.
Nonetheless, he stepped in front of Myrin, his blades ready. Three rats leaped at them and he sliced them to pieces. “Go,” he said over his shoulder. “Get back to the deck.”
“Hardly.” Myrin snapped her wand at the swarm, sending a fan of flames into the thick of the rushing creatures. Rats burst into crackling flames, falling away from Kalen. “You run, if you’re afraid.”
Kalen couldn’t quite suppress a smile. “Good,” he said.
“Good,” she agreed.
He defended Myrin as she slashed her wand at the rats again and again, sending them sailing back with bursts of flame and thunder. He kept them at bay with blade and boot, killing rat after rat as it surged through the deadly swath of Myrin’s magic. Finally, the creatures fell back, unwilling to launch themselves into certain death.
They made a fine team, Myrin blasting the swarm, Kalen slaying the stragglers. For a moment, he thought they would win-until he saw rats mustering in the hundreds. He braced himself and opened his mouth to tell Myrin to flee.
Then the halfling joined the fight.
Hissing in challenge, Toytere leaped in front of them both, a slim rapier scraping from his cane. The blade whistled as it cut through the air. Bolstered by the sound, Toytere slashed into the oncoming horde. His momentum diverted the rats, sending dozens rippling back along their path. Ugly things of more bone and fur than flesh, they chattered madly as they scrabbled. But more boiled up to take their places, and the halfling staggered back. The wave of rats overwhelmed him, scrabbling all over his body. A loud hiss emerged from Toytere’s mouth, or perhaps that came from the rats. Toytere slavered, his eyes wild.
“Toy!” Myrin cried. Rather than a fan of flames or crack of thunder, she summoned forth an arrow of magical force-the same spell she’d cast at Sithe on the deck-which blasted a huge rat away from Toytere’s leg, allowing him to stagger free of the swarm’s clutches.
“Can you get to him?” Myrin asked.
Kalen thrust his blades into a rat and looked. The vermin flowed like a living river between him and the halfling. “Yes,” he said. “But if I do, you’ll be on your own.”
“Don’t worry,” Myrin said. “Get to him and get down.”
Kalen looked to her quizzically, his eyes widening as burning runes spread out across her face and down her arms. Fire surged around her hands.
He ran and leaped, his boots flashing with fire. The magic sent him sailing over the stream of rats, and he slammed into Toytere, knocking them both to the floor. He covered the small body with his cloak.
Fire flared from Myrin in an arc that slashed through the air barely a hand’s breadth over their heads. A hundred voices screeched as the flames cut through the swarm like a scythe. The magical force spun across to cleave two of the support beams of the main deck before finally bursting out the far wall to soar heedlessly over the sea. Smoldering bits of rat corpses rained down in the scythe’s wake.
Kalen had never seen Myrin do anything quite like that before. It filled him with trepidation and excitement. Gone was the timid girl he’d known a year ago.
Toytere wriggled out from under Kalen. “Me thanks, Little Dren.”
A few paces away, Myrin stood tall, her hair drifting on the hot winds of her magic, her eyes blazing. Her mouth curled into an unsettling smirk, as though inflicting that sort of destruction pleased her considerably. She saw them looking and her dangerous look went away, replaced by a beaming smile.
The swarm roiled, half its number twitching and dying on the floor. The surviving rats milled aimlessly, hissing and wailing. Kalen thought their voices sounded entirely too human. That chilled him.
“Er,” said Toytere. “Perhaps we be running, no?”
Suddenly, all around them, creatures rose from the rubbish-strewn hold. Rats streamed from holes in the deck, from fallen barrels and shattered boxes, from ceiling beams. They dwarfed the first swarm-if Myrin had slain a hundred rats, a thousand now surrounded them, creeping from all sides.
The three of them ran.
As Kalen made for the stairs, he slipped on a bloody rat corpse and staggered. When his knee hit the floor, a cough rose up in his chest and stayed him. Toytere reached back to grasp his wrist. He flashed a grin full of sharpened teeth.
Teeth.
Kalen looked over his shoulder. The rats gnashed at him, looking to bite and savage and infect. He remembered his first day in Luskan and the Dustclaw who’d gone insane. He saw again the welts on the man’s back in the alley.
That was it. That was how the Fury spread.
“We have to warn-” Kalen winced when Toytere clasped his wrist hard. The halfling’s eyes were wild. Kalen understood. “No,” he said.
“Oh, aye,” Toytere said. “This be for Cellica.”
He pulled Kalen forward and planted his left fist-weighted with an iron knuckle duster-into Kalen’s face.
The world shattered into darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
23 KYTHORN (MIDNIGHT)
Up on the deck, Rhett Hawkwinter again tried to speak to Sithe. The genasi seemed like a patch of deeper darkness against the night-a blur in his eye. He kept trying to break the silence, but words failed.
Finally, the eighth time, Sithe turned her face a fraction toward him. “Speak.”
“A question, Lady of Darkness,” he said. “Since we’re just sitting here.”
She nodded slightly.
“What are you doing with my master?” he asked. “In the duels, I mean. I can fake sleep as well as the next man. I know he takes Vindicator and meets you on the roof.”
Sithe stared out into the darkness, as though Rhett didn’t exist. Abruptly her lips parted. “He had an apprentice.”
Her voice came so suddenly that Rhett jumped up from where he’d been sitting and readied Vindicator. The significance of the words hit him then. “What do you mean?”
“I can see it in the way he treats you-the way he fights,” Sithe said. “He hesitates to take you for a squire, because he had one and failed him. Recently.”
“You must be mistaken,” Rhett said. “Saer Shadowbane would have told me.”
“You remind him of a past he tries to forget, as does she,” Sithe said, nodding toward the cargo hold. “He is drawn to you both-the woman especially-and yet he flees. He uses me as a means to escape.”
Perhaps it was anger at the implications, but Rhett spoke without thinking, his words sharp. “And in what way does he use you, lady?” he asked. His mind reasserted itself and he added: “I mean, why do you do it? Do you … enjoy him?”
Sithe turned her dark eyes on him and he thought for a heartbeat that her lips quirked toward a smile. “He has the potential to be somewhat greater than he is,” she said. Then her axe was in her hands and she spoke a single flat word: “Prepare.”
“Prepare for-?” he started.
A fiery scythe burst out the side of the ship, trailing ashen bodies of rats into the sea. War had broken out on the abandoned derelict.
Glancing behind her as she climbed the steps toward the deck, Myrin saw only Toytere. “Wait,” she said. “Where’s Kalen?”
“If he be falling behind, we can do naught.” The halfling seized her hand to draw her on. “Come, me lady. We-”