The Coral Kingdom - Douglas Niles [79]
Alicia twisted to look, gasping in horror as a huge head, blunt-snouted and leathery-skinned, reared into view. Wultha's axe crunched into the broad nose, but then the creature's monstrous jaws spread wide. They closed about the bellowing northman, abruptly silencing his cries. When the dragon turtle's head vanished over the side, only the stumps of the huge warrior's legs remained standing grotesquely in place, bitten off cleanly at the knees.
The longship reeled to another crushing attack, and this time timbers splintered and cracked, and water burst through the hull.
* * * * *
The man sat in his emerald prison and wondered about the passage of time. He knew-or sensed, in any event-that he hadn't been here all his life. He remembered things of the outside-a sun, trees, highlands looming overhead, the feel of wind on his face.
Where were those things now? That was a question he couldn't answer. There were so many important questions-fundamental mysteries of his own life, his own past-and yet the answers to all of them seemed impossibly distant and unattainable.
Another important thought came to him then-not so much a piece of knowledge as a bit of a feeling. With a shiver, he looked over his shoulder, recognizing the feeling.
Menace. There was danger here.
"But where?" he groaned out loud. "Where am I?"
Food and water had come, he saw without surprise-the usual tortoiseshell bowls of clear water and raw fish. That had been his sustenance for a long time, he remembered, but not forever.
Menace. He reminded himself of the danger. But who was his enemy? How was he threatened?
Suddenly he remembered a huge shape, dark and indistinct of feature, wielding a horrible knife. By the gods, that knife! With a scream, the man seized the stump of his wrist with his other hand, staggering backward and slumping to his stone bed as the memories flooded back…
He was screaming in those memories, and his arms and legs were restrained by terrible creatures with brutal claws. The man's face was bleeding and bruised, but more than one of the monsters had retreated, nursing a broken limb, before he had been fully subdued.
But then had come that knife!
And afterward, a drink. Now he was beginning to remember-a steaming goblet of sweet juice, delightful in taste and invigorating in sensation. He had drunk it greedily, and it had brought him some measure of relief.
But after he drank it, he had begun to forget. Now it had taken him great mental effort exerted over many hours just to remember that much. It was the drink that had made him forget!
Other memories trickled back, each slowly and reluctantly, like a timid hare lured from its burrow by a patient snaresman. He had been given the drink several times, he remembered vaguely, though only that first time did he recall with clarity.
Now he resolved, deep within a heart that had known long years of firm resolution, that he would not take the drink again. He didn't know how he had risen above its stuporific effects, but he knew that he would not willingly suffer those effects again.
He vowed to himself in the name of… he couldn't remember. Suddenly movement in the pool of water disturbed his meditations. He barely had time to throw himself backward upon the bed, feigning comatose slumber, before a large creature splashed to the surface and climbed from the pool.
He looked through narrowed lids and saw a huge sahuagin, the leering face a cross between a lizard and a fish. Bands of gold chain wrapped the creature's chest and loins. Webbed feet, studded with curving claws, flapped across the smooth floor as the creature advanced.
The sahuagin's back, he saw, bristled with long spines connected by thin webbing. The spines stood erect and alert now, and a pointed tongue slipped in and out of the distended, tooth-studded jaws. The man looked lower, to the monster's hands, which were webbed and clawed like its feet. One of these cautiously clasped the jeweled hilt of a scimitar borne at his waist, and