Elminster's Daughter - Ed Greenwood [50]
Irmar Amathander of Athkatla
Many Roads To One Ending
Year of the Bright Blade
The harbor water was no cleaner the second time around. Narnra was thankful she couldn't see all the slimy things she was disturbing as she plunged to the depths amid much evil bubbling of rotting things rolling all around her. Kicking against the bottom to start herself upward again, she drew her knees up, struggled to pass her bound arms down under her boots and up in front of her, and came gasping to the surface, just as a magnificent nearby splash announced the arrival of her pursuer.
Of course. She'd almost miss him, if ever she was out and about in Marsember by night without her doggedly pursuing Rhauligan. Almost. Why, every Waterdhavian thieving lass should have one.
With a sour smile on her lips from that thought, Narnra doubled up like a wriggling eel and swam for the other side of the canal. Even with her wrists bound together, Narnra found she could cleave the water quite quickly-and for all their stink, these oily canals were calmer and less crowded than where she'd learned to swim: the just-as-filthy waters around the docks of Waterdeep.
Still, she was used to clawing at the water when she wanted to hurry and using porpoise-wriggles only when trying to keep very, very quiet… and she was growing tired already.
Rhauligan would be up and quiet again to listen for her in another breath or two, and her most likely destination couldn't help but be rather obvious.
In one direction-through Rhauligan-the canal joined the wider tangle of fingerlike canals and slips that made up this end of Marsember's harbor. In the other, just ahead, it ended in a turn-basin choked with rotting nets, a scum of dead fish, and oily refuse. A lone barge, waterlogged and awash, was moored to a dock there. It looked as if only its mooring-chains were keeping it from sinking and that they-brown and crumbling with rust-might soon sigh and give up their task. The barge seemed to belong to a once-grand stone warehouse that looked every bit its rival in the race to become forgotten, abandoned, and utterly decrepit.
Narnra made for the lowest point of the barge rail where it was a good foot or so under water and rolled herself up onto the ancient vessel, scattering chittering rats and startling sleeping seabirds into complaining flight.
Rhauligan could hardly fail to miss that, but 'twasn't as if the kindly gods had left her any choice, now, had they?
Even if he was charging through the water at her now, her first task was to bide right where she was, sitting on something painful and unseen in the stinking, crab-scuttling water of this barge, and try to saw through Rhauligan's bindings with her boot-knife.
Easing her blade out without dropping and losing it was slow work. Wedging it in the rotting barge-planks took but a moment- but cutting her bindings took far too gods-bedamned long and involved a cut finger and some more cursing.
Shaking away drops of blood with a snarl, Narnra stood up and fumbled in her back pouch for the spare draw-string bag she carried-a mere scrap of leather with pierced ends gathered by a single thong-in case she ever found loot enough to need something extra to carry it away in (something that had happened exactly twice in her life thus far). Thong drawn tight, the bag made a clumsy bandage for her finger. She ran hastily along the barge toward its basin-end, where the dock looked more solid and less trash-strewn.
Behind her, blood sank like smoke into the inky water- which boiled up into a long, slender tentacle that burst forth, dripping, to stab hungrily out across the now-deserted barge… right in front of the furiously swimming Glarasteer Rhauligan. He glared at it and plunged right over it, snatching at the nearest mooring-chain.