Darkwell - Douglas Niles [57]
Tristan stared at the rough ground, the dirt he had piled with his bare hands. He had never felt more forlorn. But all the time he had labored, a grim resolve had begun to crystallize in his mind, a determination that this drifting of his life into chaos must end.
* * * * *
Hobarth decided that the community before him must be the largest on this forsaken shore. He stood on a high, bald hilltop less than a mile inland from the town. From the summit, he could see the wooden and animal-skin buildings scattered around the shore of a small cove. Rickety wooden piers jutted into the water, and a number of small boats bobbed at rest.
It wasn't much of a town, but the other human settlements he had discovered were even smaller, tiny fishing villages of a score or two buildings. The north coast of Gwynneth seemed a poor place for an attack, if plunder was the object. The plans of Bhaal were not obvious to his humble cleric, however. Here Bhaal had ordered the attack, and so here it would be.
The waters of the strait were devoid of boats, as the filth of pollution now spread thick across the surface. In the far distance, he could vaguely make out the bulk of Oman's Isle, faintly outlined through the haze. The sun had passed into afternoon, but many hours of daylight remained.
The cleric spent several minutes exploring the hilltop, finding a jumble of rocks that marked its highest point. He walked in a tight circle around this summit, chanting a careful litany and dropping a powder made from finely crushed diamonds. As he cast, a glowing pattern of lines formed across the rocks, until he had inscribed a circle of magic around the crest. The lines seemed to have been carved into the rock itself, and they shimmered with a silvery cast, enclosing the cleric in a circle of enchantment.
His glyph of warding cast, Hobarth could now prepare his major spell in security. He knew anything trying to interrupt him would be stopped by the glyph, or surprised very rudely if it tried to penetrate the magical barrier.
Finally Hobarth sat upon the summit and closed his eyes. He called upon all the faith in his black heart and all of the knowledge in his twisted mind, then began the spell of summoning. For long minutes, he sat as motionless as a statue, his face wrinkled in concentration, his eyes tightly closed. Only the flaring of his wide nostrils gave visual proof that he still lived.
But if an observer could have looked beneath the veneer of optical senses, he could have seen the real proof of Hobarth's vitality. Concentrated in the invisible employment of magic, the cleric's spirit sent out a call deafening in strength to those who could hear it, and compelling in nature to those same listeners.
Beneath the brackish waters of the Strait of Oman swam one listener who heard and immediately moved to obey the summons. Ysalla, high priestess of the sahuagin and devoted cleric of Bhaal, had long awaited the call from her human counterpart.
Ysalla hovered in the upper reaches of the sea, where the sun's illumination penetrated dimly. The water here was shallow, and the smooth bottom was heavily layered with silt, but the priestess took no notice of this. She drifted slowly between the surface and the bottom, waiting.
All around her waited the legions of the sea. Standing abreast upon the bottom stood the rank of ogre corpses that had perished in battle, only to be reanimated by her priestesses and the power of Bhaal. The fat bodies resembled monstrous maggots, swollen from their immersion. The blue-black water swirled around them, but the stolid corpses remained immobile, awaiting the command of the priestess and the black power of her god.
Behind the ogres came the dead of the sea, the thousands of drowned sailors, fishermen, and soldiers who had also