Tangled webs - Elaine Cunningham [84]
The fey gifts that were the inheritance of the Rashemi had granted Fyodor a bit of the Sight, and the things he had glimpsed in that dreadful place had chilled him to the soul. He could not help but wonder what the more magically sensitive drow had felt and seen. As he watched over Liriel's sea-deep slumber, he thanked the ancient gods that drow did not dream.
Rethnor lowered his eyeglass, and a smile of grim satisfaction crossed his black-bearded face as he savored the scene of destruction he had just witnessed. The strange curtain of darkness was gone, and the troublesome Elfmaid was no more. Perhaps Rethnor had not bested the young berserker himself, but the man was dead for all that.
in his mind, all was well enough.
"Turn her about," he ordered the helmsman who stood at the wheel of the Cutlass. "We return to Trisk at once." But Shakti whirled on him, her scarlet eyes blazing. "We were to capture the ship! What of the prisoners? Yours, mine?"
"There is no more ship, and anyone we might have captured is now food for the sea creatures. I am satisfied with the conclusion. If your prize has been destroyed, what is that to me?" he taunted.
To Rethnor's surprise, the elf woman laughed in his face. She snatched the eyeglass from his hand and smacked him in the chest with it.
"Fool!" she spat out, punctuating the remark with another sharp blow. "Look again. There is nothing but a cloud of steam, caused when rebounded fireballs struck the water. If the ship had exploded, there would be more heat lingering in the air, and burning wreckage and blood to warm the waters. Fool!" she repeated scathingly as she hauled back the eyeglass for another attack.
The captain reflexively seized her wrist, and he stared at her in disbelief. "You can see heat?"
"You cannot?" she retorted and pulled free ofhim with an expression that suggested his very touch was distasteful. Rethnor was not accustomed to such insolence from a mere female, and his black brows pulled down into a stern V of disapproval. "Mind your tongue, woman."
The drow glowered at him. "Your eyes are worse than i had suspected, if you mistake me for a woman! i am Shakti, matron heiress to House Hunzrin. You should know the name of the person who brings your death, and i swear by the Mask ofVhaeraun that i will kill you if you presume to lay hands-hand," she sneered pointedly, "upon me, ever again."
He shrugged off this warning. "You are certain the ship has escaped? But how is this possible?"
"The drow i seek is a wizard. She is… powerful," Shakti admitted from between gritted teeth, and then she struck the ship's rail with her balled fists and let out a string of what Rethnor took to be drow curses.
"The wench is not out of reach, not even on Ruathym," the captain said, surprised to find himself giving assurance to the angry elf. "You will have your prisoner yet."
The drow stopped in midtirade and eyed him warily, as if weighing his words on some scale of her own. He returned her stare, letting her measure him as she would. "i had never given thought to how persons might be shaped by the world around them," she mused. "The underground home of the drow is complex, riddled with layers and full of unexpected twists and turns. And you-you are as cold and as deep as this sea, are you not?" she said with obvious approval.
"But little good will that do me!" she mused, her mood turning dark once again. The drow snatched Rethnor's left sleeve, and before he could guess her intent, she lifted the maimed limb mockingly high, as if raising an imaginary sword in a gesture of challenge.
"You wish to kill the man who took your hand," she scoffed, "yet you have not bothered to have it replaced! Only a fool would go into battle without his sword hand!" Again Rethnor stared at the drow, this time with a stirring of fascinated interest. "Replaced?"
"Or improved, if you prefer," Shakti said smugly. "in my homeland, our priestesses could regenerate a limb to its original state, only younger and stronger. or our artisans