Darkwell - Douglas Niles [11]
"I understand."
"And you will obey?"
"I shall obey."
* * * * *
Claws raked Robyn's calf as she slipped on the blood-slick deck. She whirled toward the sahuagin that had seized her, cracking her staff sharply against its spiny head. The creature dropped like a stone, its skull crushed. Forked tongues flicking from between rows of razor-sharp teeth, others scrambled across the deck as the Defiant heeled sideways. Robyn lurched against the rail, still dizzy and unbalanced, but the faintness seemed to be fading.
Tristan slashed at a fishman. The Sword of Cymrych Hugh sliced through the air, and as easily through the flesh of its victim. The sahuagin leaped backward, clutching the stump of its arm. It opened its mouth wide, showing hundreds of teeth in the gaping maw, and then hissed its hatred.
The king leaped forward, and the monster dove cleanly into the sea. Tristan stopped at the rail and stabbed another creature just as it tried to scramble over the gunwale into the boat. It fell back into the water, dead, and he looked about the deck. He saw Daryth behead one of the monsters as it lunged toward Robyn's back, and Pawldo's keen dagger disemboweled another as the nimble halfling ducked beneath the monster's grasping claws.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the killing ended. The bodies of a score of sahuagin, and several sailors, lay in chaotic disorder across the deck. Red human blood, and the pinkish froth from sahuagin veins, mingled on the planks.
But there was not a moving sahuagin to be seen. Captain Dansforth stood with a knot of his sailors amidships, while Daryth, Pawldo, and Robyn were near Tristan on the foredeck. Tristan's great moorhound, Canthus, stood beside the druid. The dog's back was higher than her waist, and its shaggy brown muzzle was stained with sahuagin blood. More than once this day, he had saved the lives of his master and mistress.
"They still fight," said Robyn, pointing at the longship, where the battle still raged.
Tristan smiled grimly at the sight. He could see the northman chief, Grunnarch the Red, poised before the mast of his graceful ship. His men stood with him in a circle, facing outward, while twice their number of sahuagin slashed toward the kill.
"Make sail!" cried Captain Dansforth, sending his men to line and beam. He nodded at the king. "We can make a break for it before they finish 'em off!"
The Defiant had placed her port side to the wind as she drifted during the melee. In another second, the sail came taut, and the Defiant heeled sharply into the wind. As her nose passed the drifting longship, Tristan saw another northmen dragged into the mass of sahuagin.
"Come alongside!" he called, noting the shock in Dansforth's eyes. "To the rescue!"
"You're -"
The captain was about to call him mad, Tristan realized. The thought startled him, and he realized that his order must seem mad by most logical arguments. Why should they help the raiders who had, minutes earlier, been bent on their own destruction?
"Hurry! And send your bowmen forward, man!"
Dansforth only hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he curtly gestured to four of his men who held heavy crossbows. "You heard the king! Move!"
The Defiant crashed against the waves again, slicing a path that would take her just past the longship. The distance closed rapidly while the bowmen knelt at the rail and took aim.
"Oh, good!" Tristan was startled by the shrill voice behind him. "C'mon, Yaz – we didn't miss the whole battle!"
"I'm scared – scared! W-W-We better get below!" answered another, equally shrill voice.
The bright orange shape of a tiny dragon, its butterfly wings fluttering excitedly, suddenly appeared beside the king, popping from invisibility as faerie dragons