"Where are you going?" Evrel asked.
"Under," Cale said.
The captain was too dumbfounded to speak.
"We will return," Cale said.
Evrel only nodded.
"I've got the pressure and swimming," Jak said.
"And I have warmth and breathing," Cale answered.
Both cast simultaneously-one spell, then another, then another, each including the other in the effect of their spells. In moments, both were insulated against cold, free to move easily even in water, able to breathe both water and air, and safeguarded against the pressure of the depths.
"And one more so I can see," Jak muttered, and he made a last plea to the Trickster.
When he finished, Cale asked, "Ready?"
Jak grinned, actually grinned. "As ready as I can get. I hate the sea. Give me a calm lake every time."
"Follow me," Cale said, and he sprinted toward the bow.
Magadon had said that Riven and the slaadi had changed forms. No doubt they had transformed into aquatic creatures that could swim fast. Even with the assistance of spells, Cale and Jak would not catch them unless....
In the bow sat one of the four anchor lines aboard Demon Binder. Cale used Weaveshear to cut the thick rope. He took hold of the anchor. Even with his shadow enhanced strength, he found it hard to bear.
"Take hold of me, little man," he said, and Jak did.
Cale pulled the darkness around them, eyed the waters near the slaadi's ship, and made the shadows move them there.
They materialized in the open sea perhaps a bowshot from the slaadi's ship. Cale had only a moment-he thought he saw trolls aboard, it, too, and they were also clutching their heads and dying-before the anchor pulled them under.
Sound fell away. Light disappeared. The sea enshrouded Cale and he took comfort in the darkness. They sank like a stone into the deep.
CHAPTER 13
THE SOURCE
The water swallowed them. The surface fell away. Cale held his breath out of instinct and it took a conscious effort of will to inhale water. When he did, the fluid stung his nose as it rushed into his lungs. He could not control a reflexive fit of coughing. It passed soon enough, and after only a few deep breaths, inhaling water felt as natural to him as breathing air, save that his chest felt heavier.
Strange sensation, he said to Jak, and the little man nodded as they fell.
Pulled by the weight of the anchor, they descended rapidly. The darkness grew profound. Only the lightlessness of the Plane of Shadow compared with the pitch of the depths. Cale's transformed eyes allowed him to see but only to about the distance of a long dagger toss. Shadowy forms moved in and out of his field of vision, all of them finned, and some of them large. They fell through a school of orange fish as big as Cale's forearm. He kept his eyes open for scrags, but saw none. Cale suspected that Magadon had left no survivors.
They descended deeper. Cale looked down and saw only a black abyss. He glanced up and saw only a trail of bubbles left in their wake, spiraling away into the dark. The surface was lost to them. They were alone, sinking into the soundless depths.
Cale had no idea how they would find the slaadi down there.
Trickster's toes, Jak projected. I am at a thirty count and no end in sight. My ears are popping.
Cale nodded. His ears were popping too, and he had deliberately not kept a count. He did not want to know how far down they had gone.
The bottom finally came into view. Cale saw a wasteland of broken rock, hillocks, and rolling dunes of dirt that stretched as far as he could see in every direction. It looked as desolate as a desert.
Cale let go of the anchor before it took them all the way down. He and Jak kicked to end their downward momentum. With their lungs full of water, they hung at equilibrium ten paces above the sea floor. The anchor continued its descent, hit the sand, and in silence sent up a cloud of mud.
They glanced about, looking for any sign of the slaadi. Cale saw nothing. Other than the disturbance caused by the anchor's impact, the sea bottom was as still as a painting-no movement, no life. Cale found the bottom so alien it might as well have been another plane of existence. He was very conscious of the fact that he and Jak were intruders, bringing life and motion to the still death of the bottom.
Eerie down here, Jak projected. An understatement.
Both held their blades in hand. As an experiment, Cale made a stabbing motion with Weaveshear. The water did not interfere with his movement. Jak's spell allowed them to move as easily in the water as they could in air.
Large chunks of broken rock lay embedded in the sea floor below them, scattered across the mud like the gravestones of giants. Several were as large as towers, some as small as a man. Worked stone, too, jutted from the sand: pillars, the limbs and heads of ancient statuary, pedestals, columns.
He remembered Sephris's words and realized that they were looking upon the ruins of a city that had been old when Sembia had been nothing more than a collection of farming hamlets. The sea had kept Sakkors in stasis for centuries.
Cale could see only twenty or so paces in any direction, but he had the sense that the rubble field extended over a vast swath of the bottom. Sakkors must have been a large city, as large as Selgaunt.
What is that? Jak asked, and pointed behind Cale.
Cale turned and saw a diffuse red glow, dimmer than moonlight. He thought it odd that they had not seen it on the way down. Though distance was hard to gauge in the depths, Cale figured the radiance to be a long bowshot away, maybe farther.
Shadows leaked from Weaveshear and flowed lazily in the direction of the light.
Mags, we're on the bottom, heading for a light, Cale projected.
Magadon made no response. Cale and Jak shared a look. The halfling shrugged.
Let's go, Cale said, and they set off, following the rope of shadows that bled from Weaveshear.
Cale saw that they were swimming above a wide furrow torn in the bottom of the sea by the floating city that had crashed into the ocean and rolled along the floor. He did not allow himself to imagine the terror the inhabitants must have felt as they hit the water.
Dark, Jak said. This was no small town. Look at the damage. Imagine the number of people.
Cale nodded. Sakkors was a graveyard for tens of thousands.
The bottom sloped upward as they swam, slightly at first, then more steeply. The light grew brighter with each stroke. They came to a ridge and... the sea floor fell away beneath them.
They stood at the top of a cliff so steep and smooth it looked like the sea floor had been sheared with a vorpal blade. At the bottom of the cliff, easily five hundred paces down, a mass of ruins spread beneath them. Broken buildings lay piled haphazardly on more broken buildings, one after another, until they formed a mountain of ruin. The heap reached a third of the way up the cliff face. Only underwater could such an unstable mass not collapse. The red glow emerged from somewhere within the pile of ruins, near the bottom.
Looking down the cliff face, Cale understood the geography. The smooth cliff must have once faced the sky, part of a massive chunk of mountain that had borne Sakkors through the sky. When the city crashed into the sea, the slab of earth upon which it had been built had come to a stop on its side and much of the city had poured off and slid downward to form a pile at its base.
For a few moments, neither Cale nor Jak said anything. The destruction was too big for comment. The red glow bathed the ruins, cast them in blood. Shadows poured from Cale's blade toward the bottom of the mountain of ruins, toward the red glow.
Jak swam out over the cliff, turned, and looked down.