Unfortunately, the spell didn’t appear to have harmed Kymas, but it did make him whirl in Umara’s direction. When he did, Anton’s head cleared.
The Turmishan drew his blades and charged down the strip of deck that ran between the upper banks of oars. Now lashed in place, the fallen mainmast took up part of the walkway.
Anton’s dash snagged the attention of some of the Thayan mariners, distracted though they were. A couple oarsmen-two of the ones who were still alive instead of zombies-started to scramble up from the benches onto the deck with the manifest intention of blocking the way. But then someone called, “Belay that!” Whereupon the rowers faltered.
Meanwhile, the capacious sleeves and voluminous folds of his robe billowing like the wings of a huge red bat, Kymas sprang from the main deck onto the quarterdeck. The crewmen who’d been adjusting the stern rudder recoiled.
So did Umara. But when Kymas plunged down on top of her, she vanished.
A heartbeat later, a second Umara appeared in front of the drooping awning and the entrance to the vampire’s cabin. She too had her hand outstretched, and with a crackle, a twist of lightning leaped from it to burn into Kymas’s back. The vampire shuddered.
Anton grinned. By combining illusion and invisibility, Umara had kept the other Red Wizard from attacking her for a critical moment. Better, she’d maneuvered him to a place where she could smite him with a powerful destructive spell without risking further damage to their already leaking, floundering ship.
But neat as the trick was, it didn’t end the fight. When the spear of lightning winked out of existence, Kymas spun around toward Umara, snarled words in the innately repellent conjuring language Anton had heard him use before, and slapped at the air.
Seething into view, already in motion as it emerged from nothingness, a disembodied hand as long as a man was tall and seemingly made of shadow slapped at Umara. She jerked backward and avoided the blow but nearly pitched herself overboard in the process.
Her murky attacker instantly reversed direction for a backhand swipe. Meanwhile, an orb of gray-black crystal appeared in Kymas’s fingers, and he brandished it over his head as he started another incantation. Distorted faces appeared, stretched, and split into new visages inside the dark but gleaming sphere.
Flanking the entrance to the cabin and the strip of sagging sailcloth that shaded it, two companionways ran up to the quarterdeck. Umara was in front of the one to starboard, so Kymas was looking in that direction. Hoping to avoid notice, Anton sprinted for the larboard steps.
But to his disappointment, though not his surprise, the undead wizard pivoted in his direction, shouted a word of power, and stamped his foot. The cry became a roar loud enough to jab pain into Anton’s ears and jolt through the larboard half of the quarterdeck and the steps the pirate ascended.
Staggered, he felt the risers breaking apart under his feet. In another moment, they’d give way, and he’d fall, perhaps over the side. He made one more bounding, ascending stride, leaped, and landed teetering on the very edge of the ragged hole his foe had just torn in the planking above his cabin.
Anton windmilled his arms and the blades in his hands, caught his balance, stepped to safety, and then, as he came on guard, shot Kymas a grin. “That was foolish,” he said. “Now it’s going to rain in on all your things.”
“It truly is sad,” the vampire replied, “that you didn’t know your place.” The crystal orb vanished, he held out his hand, and a red staff flew up out of the hole in the deck and slapped into his palm. Taking it in his other hand as well, he shifted into a trained staff fighter’s middle guard and shuffled forward.
When facing a staff fighter, Anton liked to cut at his adversary’s fingers. Taking care not to look into the vampire’s eyes, he advanced and feinted low. As he’d hoped, the staff snapped down to block, and then he made the true attack, a slash at Kymas’s right hand.
An instant before the saber would have sheared flesh and bone, Kymas’s extremity burst into mist. Striking right through the gray vapor, the blade rebounded from the staff. Spinning his weapon one-handed, the Red Wizard caught the saber in a bind and nearly tore it from Anton’s grasp before he could twirl it free.
At once, Kymas snapped the staff at Anton’s head. Anton parried with the cutlass, and though he knew by a telltale glimmer deep in the steel and the light, somehow eager feel of the weapon that it too was enchanted, the impact still jolted his arm to the shoulder. Plainly, the vampire had extraordinary strength and skill to match; otherwise, he couldn’t have wielded a staff to such vicious effect with two hands, let alone one.
That was unfortunate. So were most aspects of this situation, including Anton’s physical condition. He’d promised Umara he could fight if need be, and in fact, at the moment, energized by combat, he felt more or less like himself. But it was likely he wasn’t moving as quickly or surely as he would in better circumstances, and likelier still that he’d tire soon.
Still, he thought, I’m not pulling an oar or breathing zombie stink, so why am I complaining?
He tried to hook the staff with the cutlass and yank it aside to clear the way for a saber cut to the chest. Both hands solid and gripping his weapon again, Kymas stepped back just far enough for the cutlass to fall short, then clubbed at Anton’s forearm with a stroke that would surely have shattered bone if the pirate hadn’t evaded in his turn.
They traded attacks for the next several heartbeats, neither quite managing to penetrate the other’s defense. Anton was too busy fighting, avoiding Kymas’s gaze, and trying not to step in the hole to spare a glance to see how Umara was faring. He could only hope she was still alive. Or rather, he hoped she’d destroyed the shadow hand and was about to strike Kymas with another spell.
The vampire whispered words that made wood creak, crack, and crunch all around him although that was apparently incidental to the incantation’s actual purpose. Hoping to at least spoil the casting, Anton rushed in and cut to the head. Kymas parried and nearly knocked the saber out of his hand.
As Anton fumbled to recover a firm hold on the hilt, Kymas hissed the final word of his spell. Likewise hissing, only louder, a scaly length of flesh burst out of the wizard’s abdomen and through the scarlet folds of his robes. Eyeless, it spread its fanged jaws wide and struck at the man in front of it.
Caught by surprise, Anton just managed a thrust with the cutlass. The short blade stabbed into the pallid roof of the tentacle snake’s mouth.
The thing’s jaws snapped shut anyway, and only the cutlass’s curved brass guard kept its fangs out of Anton’s hand. The violent action in defiance of the weapon drove the blade deeper, and the bloody point popped out of the snake-thing’s dorsal surface.
Surely, Anton thought, that had hurt it badly, and if Tymora favored him at all, hurt the undead mage who’d grown it out of his belly, too. But apparently Lady Luck wasn’t smiling in his direction. The tentacle ripped itself free of the impalement, nearly yanking the cutlass from his grasp in the process, and then both it and Kymas attacked as fiercely as before.
Swaying back and forth and up and down, alternately trying to bite Anton or loop around an ankle or wrist, the tentacle serpent added a new complication to a duel that hadn’t been going notably well as it was. Step by step, Kymas pushed him back, and the cramped confines of the broken quarterdeck wouldn’t permit him to back very far. Another retreat or two would drop him over the side.
Having evidently rid herself of the shadow hand, Umara crept up the remaining companionway, which put her at Kymas’s back. Her lips moved as she whispered something too faint for Anton to hear. She whipped her hands through diagonal clawing motions.
Kymas jerked and stumbled. Though Anton couldn’t see the wound from his vantage point, he surmised that Umara’s spell had produced an invisible something that was tearing at the vampire from behind.