The Lost Library of Cormanthy - Mel Odom [110]
"Well, it was a masterful plan, lad," Cthulad said, relaxing against the thwart. "But Uziraff has taken off with the treasure."
"Only for a while," Baylee said, adjusting the sail and looking up at Xuxa hanging upside down from the rigging. "How long do you think it will be before Cordyan Tsald and the Waterdhavian Watch unit arrives?"
Cthulad's sharp eyes regarded Baylee in a new light. "You knew about that as well?"
"While you were at the weaponsmith's in Caer Callidyrr?" Baylee nodded. "We had plenty of time to get the things I needed from the apothecary and visit the weaponsmith. Security dictated that we remain together. That would have been one of the firmest principles you would operate by. Yet you split us up. That left the only reason for that behavior as your need to be alone. And why else would you need to be alone?"
"To bring along the manpower we needed to see this through," Cthulad said agreeably.
"I left word back in Waterdeep that would have set them on our trail," Baylee admitted. "And I asked the apothecary to get word to them as well as whomever you charged with that."
Understanding dawned in Cthulad's eyes. "You wanted them to draw attention away from you," Cthulad said.
Baylee grinned. "If someone with the ability to scry far distances was searching for me, for this shipwreck, it only made sense to give them a more logical target to search. Would you spend your time searching for a merchant ship, or for a contingent of Waterdhavian Watch?"
"So you never intended to find the shipwreck on your own?"
"Oh, I fully intended to find the shipwreck on my own. And I planned on Uziraff double-crossing us. By the way, how well do you think Uziraff would have gone along with us if Junior Civilar Tsald and Calebaan had been there?"
"By having just the two of us-"
Three, Xuxa put in. Yes, by having only the three of us, Baylee allowed Uziraff to feel confident enough that he was thinking about greed and not survival. That way, he brought us to the site of the shipwreck.
"A masterful plan," Cthulad said in obvious delight. "Though it irks me that I played a part without knowing it."
"If you had known," Baylee pointed out, "you would have done the same thing. Only perhaps not as convincingly." He hung the lighted lantern he'd used below the ocean from a piece of rope, then ran it to the top of the ten-foot mast. Yellow light belled out around it.
"It appears that you planned for everything."
"Not everything," Baylee disagreed. "The whales. I never planned for the whales."
Krystarn followed Shallowsoul at a dead run. The lich ignored her, fleeing through the library stacks. After a time, he came to a door set in a wall black as anthracite. He waved an intricate gesture at it and said a word of power. A lock clicked.
He stepped through the entrance and Krystarn trailed him, catching the door before it could close.
The room on the other side of the door was a huge cavern with fiery pink walls that met in the rounded shape of a horseshoe nearly ninety feet in height. A huge pool of water three times that height in length eddied in the center of the room.
Shallowsoul stood at the water's edge and made gestures too quickly for the drow to follow. A moment later, a giant whale surfaced in the pool. At least, it partially surfaced, because it easily exceeded the nearly three hundred feet of space left open in the pool. Water spumed from its blowhole.
Then it opened its mouth, disgorging bits of broken ship in the shallows and on the bank. When it was finished, it sank into the pool again and another took its place.
Krystarn counted eight whales all together. The piles in the shallows grew, containing silt and broken bits of ship, rotted sailcloth, rigging, and the unmistakable gleam of gold and silver.
Shallowsoul gestured toward the