Chapter Sixteen
After bidding farewell to Tanna, Lorath made his way through the encampment down toward the docks.
He found that a company of Amazons had stayed behind to maintain and defend the fort, going about their various duties and chores as if nothing had changed.
When Lorath had been a young, inexperienced soldier, he probably would have considered them the lucky ones, and he might have felt some envy toward them, even if he refused to admit that to himself or anyone else.
But that was before he joined the Horadrim, and before Malthael changed the world.
Now Lorath was eager for the battle and glad to be heading toward the front; perhaps Donan was right, and he really was perpetually looking for a fight.
By the time he reached the wharf, it appeared that fifteen or twenty warships had departed the harbor, judging by the empty slips. He marched along the dock and then out onto the floating pier where the Arabel sat at anchor. Keldon moved about the top deck, preparing her to sail.
Lorath stowed his gear aboard and said, “I’ll go find a rowboat to tow us—”
“No need,” Keldon said. “Cast off, and I’ll show you.”
Confused, Lorath did as the sailor ordered, freeing the Arabel from her moorings and pushing off from the pier.
Then Keldon called him down to the helm, where he stood at the tiller, and Lorath noticed a new wooden spar reaching up and over the aft cabin from the stern like the shaft of a heavy oar, its end secured to the deck by a line.
“You remember Adreona said the Arabel needed oars?” Keldon said. “Well, I rigged her for sculling with help from the blacksmith—she forged the metal fittings. All you have to do is pull it back and forth with that line. The weight of the oar and the machinery should do the rest.”
“The captain is wise. You really have kept yourself busy.”
“Aye,” Keldon said. “Now, get us moving.”
Lorath took hold of the line and hauled it from side to side as directed.
The motion took some effort, but within a few moments, the sloop pushed forward.
They seemed to crawl at first, inching away from their berth.
But as Lorath kept heaving the oar, the ship gained speed and enough momentum that he had to ease off in places so Keldon could steer them through the surrounding docks, out into the open harbor.
Lorath wondered if the guards at the sea-gate would even allow them to leave, but it seemed Keldon had already come to an understanding with them.
The gates opened before they had reached them, allowing them to glide through without the need for Lorath to break the rhythm of his stroke.
Outside the fenced harbor, a strong wind swept around the island. Keldon showed Lorath how to cinch a line on the sculling oar to lift it out of the water, and then the two of them set about raising the sails. Before long, they were underway, plying northwest along the eastern coast of Athulua.
The Arabel made good time. As they rounded the island’s northern headland, with its cliff-top temple of white towers, they turned to the southwest, and Lorath glimpsed the Amazon fleet in the far distance, sailing into the misty sea east of Atanos.
Under normal conditions, Keldon’s sloop might have overtaken the heavy square-rigged warships, but the Amazons supplemented their wind power with the stroke of their oars.
“They’ll get there ahead of us,” Lorath said.
“I’m guessing we’ll still have our share of fighting to do, if that’s what you’re worried about. Or is there something else that troubles you?”
“Such as?”
“Could it be you’re concerned about a certain Amazon captain?” The old sailor raised his brow in a knowing, suggestive way.
“I’m concerned about the Askari who will die if an undead army conquers this island.”
Keldon bowed his head in acceptance, but with a wry smile. “She won’t thank you for rescuing her, you know. A woman like that ain’t looking for a savior. What she wants is an ally.”
“Then that is what we will be.”
On they sailed, and that afternoon they reached the boundary of fog that lay upon the water like a sickly, dissipated cloud.
Their first encounter with that dead sea had been accidental, driven by the will of a storm.
This time, they sailed into those shallow, sluggish waters knowingly, but at least Keldon now had a chart for navigation.
As the mist closed in around them, Lorath felt smothered and cut off from the rest of the world.
He attended to every wave and splash, listening intently for signs of the Drowned in the water around their boat.
The wind slackened but did not die completely this time, allowing them to push on slowly by sail.
Night came without incident, but the going was more perilous with their field of vision limited by the darkness and the fog.
Lorath lit an oil lantern and hung it from the prow, keeping watch for obstacles that might not appear on the map that Keldon had acquired back at the fort.
Ordinarily, they would’ve hove to and waited for dawn, but with every moment potentially counted in lives lost, they could afford no such delays.
The next day arrived, and the fog began to thin, allowing them to glimpse more of the surrounding sea and rough terrain.
The pieces of land that rose above the water appeared cracked and broken, waterways and channels running through them like fissures through shattered crockery.
Jagged shards of rock jutted upward among boggy sumps and marshy hillocks, and ravens and other carrion eaters screeched from hidden perches.
The feeble currents and waves did little to circulate the water, allowing waterweeds and slicks of algae to bloom in stagnant basins.
Even more so than the Blood Marsh, the sea near Atanos gave Lorath the impression of a cursed land, utterly wasted and destroyed. A fitting home for the Drowned.
Keldon tried to keep the Arabel to the deeper channels marked on his nautical chart, but there were times when Lorath had to man the sculling oar, which allowed them to better navigate the twisting corridors of tortured stone.
The slowness of their pace at times drove Lorath mad—the rage within him yearned to swing his polearm, not a sculling oar—but they passed another day, and he hoped that the third would bring them to the battle at last.
That evening, Lorath lit the lantern again and kept watch at the prow, though the fog continued to thin, and the moon could be seen fading in and out of desultory clouds.
“Narrows up ahead,” Keldon called from the stern. “According to the map, that is.”
Not long after, two low shelves of craggy rock emerged from the mist, stretching out of sight to the east and west, with an ominous cleft between them. If Lorath looked at the feature like a soldier, the choke point was not unlike the entrance to a keep, which set him on edge.
“I don’t like that,” he said. “Can we sail around?”
“Depends on your eagerness for a delay,” Keldon said. “I think the Amazons will have come this way.”
Lorath conceded this through his silence, but he remained alert as they approached the two shoulders of land and then sailed between them.
The cliffs were not tall, but they loomed high enough over the ship to afford the advantage of elevation to any assailants who might be hiding, waiting to attack.
Lorath gave so much of his attention to watching the rims above them that he almost missed a disturbance in the water.
First one lump floated by, like a piece of pale driftwood, and then another, and another, until their ship was surrounded. Lorath leapt across the deck for his polearm, ready to fight the Drowned he expected to board, but none came over the gunwale.
“I think these undead are dead,” said Keldon, craning to peer over the stern.
Lorath looked again. The old sailor was right.
Even in the darkness, he could now see that the corpses in the water had all been burned and chopped apart.
Amazon arrow shafts protruded from many of the bobbing lumps of charred flesh.
Milky eyes looked up at the Arabel without seeing, and a residual film of oil coated the water with an iridescent sheen.
“Glad to see your time in the stables did nothing to dull your instincts,” said Keldon. “The warships were attacked here.”
Lorath gripped the gunwale, shaking his head. “I’d rather have been wrong. An attack here shows clear strategy, as if the Drowned really are displaying some level of intelligence.”
“It looks like the Amazons gave them one hell of a fight, though.”
“And cleared the way for us,” Lorath said.
The wind had subsided, so they switched to sculling and pushed their way through the charnel waters.
Lorath watched for Amazon bodies among the remains of the enemy but saw none.
That meant either the warships had suffered no casualties on their way through or they had reclaimed their dead to prevent them from joining the Drowned. Lorath hoped for the former.
They transited the strait and continued onward, steadily sailing south.
Toward dawn, the pulsing, chaotic glow of many fires reached through the fog ahead of them like a fitful sunrise on the wrong horizon, accompanied by the thunder of distant explosions.
Lorath began to hear faint sounds of battle, which only grew louder with each league they traveled.
The clang of metal, war cries, the hateful shrieking of the cursed, the screams of the dying, all soon reached his ears.
He felt his blood quickening, his rage rearing as they bored through a final bank of mist, and the battle came into view.