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Storm winds and crashing waves continued striking the Waterdhavian crafts as Drifting Eel pushed toward the Dock Ward shoreline. The battle in the harbor had reached the docks. Mariners bolted from taverns and from the Helmstar Warehouse, the Mermaid's Arms festhall, and Arnagus the Shipwright's building. Lights blossomed up and down Dock Street. The streets started to fill, and sahuagin were filling them as well.

Some of the Fleetswake revelers had pitched tents along the docks and others had even gone so far as to place tents across their boat decks. Lanterns blazed at some of them, throwing shadows across the tents as the drunken sailors and merchants tried to rally against the invading sahuagin forces.

Drifting Eel raced for an empty loading berth among the docks as lantern lights from ships at anchorage played over the deck. Iakhovas called down the hailing tube himself, ordering the sahuagin rowers to reverse direction. The sorcerer dropped the anchor himself with a wave of his hand that sent the man-sized weight spinning through the air, stopping the play of chain as soon as the anchor touched the harbor bottom. Drifting Eel halted too late, slamming into the dock pilings and knocking them loose from their moorings.

Laaqueel fell but rolled to her feet while the wererat deckhands went sprawling. She brandished her sword as she pursued Iakhovas, who hadn't lost his footing at all, standing as surely as an outcropping of coral.

The sorcerer bolted over Drifting Eel's side and dropped four feet to the splintered dock. He reached inside his cloak and drew out a rapier with an ornate handle fashioned from an impossibly large shark's tooth.

The malenti hesitated only a moment before following the sorcerer. She dropped to the dock, trailed immediately by two dozen wererats. Iakhovas was already in motion, leaving her no doubt that he was already moving on whatever hidden agenda he'd planned for the night.

She turned and glanced back out into the harbor in time to see the first fiery catapult launches from Water-deep Castle high overhead. The flaming loads arced across the black sky like comets, then crashed down amid the three sahuagin ships with uncanny accuracy. Two of the ships broke under the onslaught and started sinking as Waterdhavian rakers closed in.

The storm created by Iakhovas's spell continued growing, gathering force. Four foot waves rippled up on the harbor water, then cascaded over the side of Dock Street in spite of the ramparts. The sea wall around the harbor also served as a breakwater against storms that traveled inland from the Sea of Swords. Against a storm that started within the harbor itself, there was no protection.

A raker bore down on the surviving sahuagin ship. Before it could reach its opponent, a dragon turtle rose up from the depths and capsized the raker. The creature was over fifty feet long from its snout to its tail. The shell alone was thirty feet around and was dark green in color with sections that came to sharp points. The huge clawed feet spread over two yards with the webbing between the toes. Horned ridges stood out on its wattled neck. Fierce orange eyes glowed in the dark, and its mouth was a curved, cruel sword slash. Its attention drawn to the Waterdhavian sailors, the monster turtle's head darted out and it gulped down three in quick succession.