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Mel Odom
Mel Odom
THE SEA DEVIL S EYE
Forgotten Realms – The Threat from the Sea Trilogy – Book Three
2000
Prologue
The Alamber Sea, Sea of Fallen Stars.
4 Flamerule, the Year of the Gauntlet
A man's dying scream drew Pacys's attention. To his right, the Sharksbane Wall extended across the sea floor until it disappeared in the gloom. Below and to the left, for as far as Pacys could see, the wall lay in ruins. Chunks of stone and coral lay in a fan shape, as if a huge hammer had shattered the wall.
"Marthammor Duin," Khlinat breathed somewhere above and behind the old bard, "watch over them what wander far and foolishly." The dwarf was thick and broad. Unruly gray whiskers stuck out around his wide face and his hands caressed the hafts of the two hand axes at his waist. He kicked out with his good foot. A gray-green coral peg took the place of his lower right leg.
Elf, merman, and sahuagin all warred below. From this distance, they looked tiny against the wall, but Pacys felt their terror and courage. Those emotions transmuted to musical notes in his mind. He carefully braided and twined them, piecing together the songs that haunted him.
The hum of sahuagin crossbow strings rolled over the sharp clash of coral tridents against stolen or salvaged spears.
Even the whisk of the sea devils' barbed nets echoed across the terrain, picked up by the old bard's heightened senses.
For the moment, Pacys was the battle. He was the life and death of every one of the hundreds of warriors at the Sharksbane Wall. He wore only a sea elf's diaphanous gown of misty blue. The magic of the emerald bracelet on his wrist allowed him to breathe underwater and kept him comfortable even from the occasional chill. Though he kept his head and jaw shaved, his silver eyebrows hinted at his age. The bard was seventy-six years old, still vigorous but in his waning years.
"Hallowed wall, prized from death,
Built on blood and mortised by fear,
Stood broken, shattered, crumbled,
No longer protecting those here.
The loyal warriors warred, sinew against sinew.
They fought, and they died,
Clamped tight between unforgiving fangs
Of those who followed the Taker's dark stride."
It wasn't a song of victory. Despite the excitement at having found another piece of the song he'd searched for, the old bard's heart grew cold and heavy.
His trained eye noted the whitish colors of the rock, nearly a dozen hues that he could pick out at a glance, all colored by pearled iridescence from the millennia the wall had stood. The blue sea had texture, the color of a sky rent by gentle summer rains. The uneven terrain at the foot of the Sharksbane Wall spilled in dozens of cliffs and gullies where schools of brightly colored fish cowered.
Through it all, clouds of blood twisted and spun, caught by the shifting ocean currents and the movements of those who fought and died. Even though the bracelet gave him the ability to breathe underwater, it didn't remove the harsh metallic taste of iron.
