Her trembling transformed to laughter. 'Fish-brains! You're Keithland's first sane Firelord, and still you haven't a feather-weight of good sense.' With that, the Dreamweaver surged forward and caught Ivainson around the neck. Half-grinning, half-weeping, she dragged him down into her nest of soggy sails.
Jaric stiffened in surprise. Then, as her cheek nestled into his shoulder and her tears fell hot on his throat, he caught her close in his arms. 'Will you always arrive in time to haul me out of trouble by the heels?' But he did not wait for her answer; instead he threaded both hands in black hair, bent his head, and stopped her lips with his kiss.
The Firelord's cloak tumbled unheeded to the deck. Taen traced her fingers along the line of Jaric's collarbone. Gone to the Vaere as a child of ten, she had never known a man. Aside from the premature development that resulted from her mastery, in years and experience she was still very near to a child; but contact with elders on Imrill Kand had influenced the sensitivity that later gave rise to her Dreamweaver's powers. In some things the girl possessed an understanding far beyond her age. Taen snagged laces of braided gold and deftly began to untie them. 'Did I hear you say I was cold? That's a lie.'
Her reward was Jaric's quick laugh. 'Shrew. I'll change that to no sense of propriety. Will you marry me on Imrill Kand?'
Taen freed the last tie and squirmed to reach his belt. 'No.' Hands busy, she kissed his chin. 'I won't wait that long. Corley can marry us at sea.' Sharply she tugged at his buckle.
Jaric twisted and caught her wrists. 'Wait.' He raised her and settled her comfortably against his side. 'You can rush the wedding all you like, but not this. I love you. All Keithland can wait while I tell you so.'
Gently he touched her face, her neck, her shoulders. Then he kissed her, softly as mist clinging to a flower. His hands moved, and he kissed her again. Taen felt the heat in his blood. In his restraint, she discovered something finer than the joyless appetites of the men from Imrill Kand. Tension, nervousness, and all fear inside her loosened. Jaric was here, now, for her, and she would never lose him. Warm fingers slipped the clothing from her shoulders. As the stars wheeled over the Isle of the Vaere, a Dreamweaver's robes of silver-grey joined the Firelord's cloak and tunic on the deck. By dawn, two lovers lay tangled asleep in the sails, heated by a tender glow of happiness.
* * *
Taen woke, this time to sunshine that was real. She lay with her head in Jaric's lap. By minute movements of his muscles, she realized he had roused ahead of her and busied himself with a chore. She opened her eyes, found him weaving a splice with his marlinspike, and promptly pinched his flank. 'Haven't you anything better to do?'
'I didn't want to waken you.' Jaric jammed his marlinspike through the plies in the rope and caught her teasing fingers.
But Taen's other hand remained at liberty, and with that she explored his person with provocative delight. She discovered him naked of clothing. Sitting up to admire the view, she saw that his skin had turned fair as ivory during his stay in the grove of the Vaere. 'Kor's mercy, stay sitting in the sun and you'll ripen like a turnip.'
'So.' Jaric grinned. 'You're right.' He dropped the halyard he had been mending, caught her laughing in his arms, and lifted her strongly.
'Jaric!'
But Taen shouted too late. Her man stepped solidly over the rail and ran with her into the sea. They stayed there most of the morning, cradled in each other's arms amid the swell of the waves. Only when both had loved to exhaustion did Jaric remember his unmended halyard. Callinde could not sail to weather with no headsail; back on board in the heat of the day with duty on his mind, Jaric sought a linen shirt to protect his back from the sun. But, clad like a sea queen in nothing but a wet and extravagant fall of hair, Taen sat squarely on the locker that contained his clothes.
'You'll spoil the fun,' she teased.
Jaric laughed. Soaked himself, and caked with sand to the shins, he tried to protest. 'I smell like a fish.'
'Not to another fish.' Taen uncoiled from her perch and piled full force into his middle. Both overbalanced into a loose mass of sailcloth.
Sundown found the two of them curled beneath the patched canvas of the headsail, asleep. Callinde's lines slapped gently against the mast, repaired and ready for sailing. But Keithland waited one more night for the Firelord, while Jaric told his Dreamweaver that he loved her.
* * *
When he wished to be alone, Maelgrim Dark-dreamer preferred the cavern that riddled the rock beneath Shadowfane. There, surrounded by the sullen drip of subterranean springs, he could light oil lamps, or sit in darkness as he pleased, for his demon overlords entered caves with reluctance; their influence could not pierce solid rock. Places below ground made them feel their vulnerability, but Maelgrim did not share that discomfort. Above him rose the crag of Shadowfane, with walls and fortifications enough to ensure his safety. While the passage leading to the dungeon remained open, he had solitude, and a channel through which to implement his mastery.
At present, clad in wire ornaments and a loose-fitting tunic and hose, Maelgrim sat between a pair of unlit lanterns. Darkness helped him assimilate the focus of the Gierj-demons given him by Scait. Although the creatures possessed neither intelligence nor self-awareness, a precise melding of minds enabled them to generate more raw force than a Vaere-trained enchanter. Manipulating a circle of six, Maelgrim had possessed five companies of the Kielmark's men at arms, and obliterated the inhabitants of Morbrith; with twelve, he boasted he could overrun Landfast. But Scait demanded otherwise. Cliffhaven was to be defeated first, and to that end, six Gierj had set sail on the decks of the Kielmark's brigantine Ballad.
From his nook in the caverns of Shadowfane, Maelgrim directed their song of power. One by one he extinguished the lives of additional crewmen captured in the south reaches of the Corine Sea. Aboard Moonless, their bodies lived on, but animated by an extension of Maelgrim's will made manifest by Gierj. The Dark-dreamer smiled in the shadows. Then he rested and dreamed, violent, bloody scenes of himself as Keithland's overlord.
When he woke, he resumed his trance. Far south, in the chilly hour before sunrise, Gierj stirred from sleep on the decks of Ballad. As the creatures opened their eyes, six sets of images inundated Maelgrim's mind: varied views of leaden swells hatched by stays and ratlines, of sanded decking, and a sky pricked by paling stars. The Gierjlings' multiple viewpoint still made him queasy. But demon masters had promised that his body would change to accommodate; over time, he would cease feeling disoriented by the impressions of separate eyes, and by vision that perceived more than a man's.
A shadow moved across Ballad's waist. Secure in his cave, the Dark-dreamer translated images and identified the crewman who had once been first mate. The body might walk, talk, and act as a man, except now he was puppet to a master seated in Shadowfane.
Maelgrim shaped a mental command. Power flared through the Gieij-link like a spark touched into flame, and the mate called out to a sailor by the rail. 'You there! Fetch Captain Corley on deck!'
The sailhand seemed unsurprised by an order to manhandle a superior. As stripped of spirit as Ballad's officers, he hastened down the companionway to bring the Kielmark's first captain topside.
Maelgrim waited. Taut with anticipation, malleable to his every mood, the Gierj transmitted his restlessness. Claws scraped planking on the quarterdeck, and even the man on watch at the helm tapped his fingers against the oaken spoke of the wheel.
Gierj-images showed the sailhand's return in kaleidoscopic duplication. He prodded a second man ahead of him, one whose movement seemed drugged and slow. Demon perception revealed a greenish shimmer of light surrounding his body; that aura offered the only means to distinguish the living from the dead in thrall to the Gierj-link.
In the cave, wire clinked over the ceaseless drip of spring water; Maelgrim wrapped his forearms around his knees and studied his prisoner in multiple detail. Moonless's captain wore the same clothes he had at the time of his capture. But fin
e linen lay crumpled across his shoulders, and his tunic showed waterstains from the bilge. Ensnared by the Dark-dreamer's influence, his wide cinnamon eyes stayed fixed as polished stone. Maelgrim smiled in the darkness of his lair. Horribly, uncannily, Corley's lips echoed his overlord's expression. even as the sailor's dead hands prodded him up the companionway to the quarterdeck.
The captain stopped beside the mizzenmast. Maelgrim's view tumbled dizzily into change as, with wiry, insectlike movements, the Gierjlings surrounded their captive. The link stabilized, showing multiple views of Corley, silhouetted against a silvered predawn horizon, backed by the red glare of the binnacle lantern, and as a tall shadow with salt-matted hair looming against the mizzenmast shrouds. Maelgrim savoured the moment well. Here at last stood the captain who had carried the false flag of surrender, luring Tathagres and eight demon allies into a trap of double intrigue that had foiled the compact's conquest of Cliffhaven. For that, Scait had commanded that a shape-changer impersonate Moonless's master and later assassinate the Kielmark. The process would destroy the original captive. Gloating like a spider with a fly, Maelgrim Dark-dreamer vowed to see Corley die screaming.
The unimpressed shape-changer imported from Shadowfane quickly scented its victim. Slimy and featureless as a slug, it slithered from its tub in the galley and wormed across the open deck. Atop the companionway, it subsided, a greyish puddle of flesh nestled between coils of rope. Everything stood ready. Carefully, triumphantly, Maelgrim Dark-dreamer eased the constraints upon Corley's mind; awareness returned for the first time since Moonless's capture.
The captain blinked, shook his head once, and frowned, for the helmsman was no crewman from his own command. Next he noticed demons ringing his feet: Gierj, lean and furtive as weasels, with eyes glowing lambent as a ghost ship's lanterns; at that moment Corley remembered. He stood, not on his own brigantine Moonless, but on the quarterdeck of Ballad. Both vessels now were prizes under Shadowfane's command. A spasm of anguish crossed the captain's face.
'You live at my mercy,' Maelgrim Dark-dreamer whispered through the Gierj-link.
Corley's head jerked up. He looked wildly around, but saw no speaker. He reached for the knives at his wrists, but found only empty sheaths. Belatedly he recalled that no steel could remain on his person in the presence of Gierj; then Maelgrim bound his limbs from movement. Corley fought, straining until the veins stood out on his neck. In a white heat of rage he never noticed that his enemy played him like a hooked fish. While he struggled, a Karas shape-changer's jellied mass quivered and slowly began to take form within a bight of rope to one side.
Through the Gierj-link, Maelgrim watched his victim's shirt become patched with sweat. The captain's hands locked into rigid claws, and breath escaped his throat in heaving gasps. The thing in the rope coils acquired two nostrils, and air began to sigh through them in unison. Corley heard. He attempted to turn his head, and with a sneer of contempt the Dark-dreamer allowed his captive that liberty. Maelgrim's lips parted with laughter as the captain jerked back in horror.
The Karas shape-changer now resembled a lump of softened wax, grey-white and gross except for two eyeballs of vivid, cinnamon brown. Even as Corley flinched, his reaction spurred growth. A smeared line opened beneath the creature's nostrils. Folds appeared, firmed, and shaped a recognizable pair of lips. Toothless and tongueless, the mouth was the mirror image of Corley's.
'You see now,' Maegrim taunted through the link. 'You exist this moment expressly to serve Shadowfane.'
Corley's features twisted. 'Never!' But even as he protested the thing at his feet puckered and flowed and changed. Tissue slimy as raw egg white filmed over, firmed, and developed a peppering of hair follicles.
Within moments, it grew a beard textured chestnut and grey, strand for strand a counterpart of the captain's. The lips, fully fleshed, now worked; they mimed the original with chilling perfection.
'Enjoy yourself,' said the Dark-dreamer. 'Few men ever witness a shape-changer's metamorphosis.'
Clued that his struggles might key the creature's alteration, Corley forced himself to relax. If he stayed passive, the loathsome creature's development might be arrested. Hope was probably in vain. Still, the captain closed his eyes. He did not think, but concentrated on sensations, from the lift of Ballad's deck beneath his feet to the clean scents of sea and wet wood, overlaid by a sour tang of tarred rope. Aft, a pot clanged in the galley; as if the day were ordinary, the cook lit his fire and sliced sausage for sailhands about to come off watch. The unbroken adherence to routine raised a chill on Corley's flesh, aggravated by the step of the quartermaster, arrived to relieve the night helmsman. Sunrise brightened the east, tipping wave crests with sequin highlights; but the Kielmark's first captain felt cold to the heart. He stood still, listening to the wind, while Gierj coiled sinuously around his feet. Their limbs interwove until they resembled a ring of braided yarn, dotted with eyes glowing greenish as sparks from a drugged candle.
Corley concentrated on the immediate. Ballad sailed to a following breeze. An unoiled block squeaked with each roll, and one of her headsails luffed lightly. On Moonless, such lapses would earn the mate on watch a sharp reprimand.
'Such is the difference between the Kielmark's senior captains, and their underlings,' Maelgrim interjected, as if trying to prompt conversation through the Gierj-link.
Corley ignored the intrusion, following only the splash of spray off the bow. He ached; keeping still required an alarming amount of muscle tension. With his attention immersed in the rolling wash of the wake, the captain subdued the macabre need to see whether the shape-changer had evolved any further. Still no effort of will could prevent him from noticing sounds not normal to a ship working on a broad reach. Something flopped on the deck by the pinrail, like a fish, but not.
Corley felt his skin raise into gooseflesh. He stood sweating until the Dark-dreamer jabbed through the Gierj-link and compelled him to look.
The captain opened his eyes to unmitigated horror. A half-completed replica of himself lay beyond the ring of Gierj. Hands, feet, face, and forearms, it matched his every detail, even to scars of former battles and the callouses of everyday living. But beyond wrist and neck and ankle, where clothing covered his body, the thing was formless jelly. One hand twitched and touched a deck fitting. Two fingers bent grotesquely, jointless as worm flesh, for as yet neither bone nor muscle supported the structure underneath.
Corley's stomach heaved; and even his revulsion triggered growth. The abomination quivered and firmed, its abdomen acquiring the semblance of a rib cage. Sweat traced Corley's spine. The feeling of moisture trickling over his anatomy detailed the beginnings of an indentation on the shape-changer's back, made visible as it flopped across the deck. Sickened by the mirroring twitch of his nemesis, Corley averted his face.
Maelgrim's laughter echoed across the link. 'Ah, captain, you begin to understand the nature of Shadowfane's miracles.' Bored with passive observation, the Dark-dreamer reached through the Gierj. He forced his victim to watch while the unfinished shape-changer scrabbled clumsily upright, then advanced on wobbling feet. It crossed inside the ring of demons and stopped at the captain's side.
Driven to tears of frustration, Corley beheld eyes, a complete face, identical to his own. 'Why?' he gasped, revolted as the thing echoed with a slurred attempt at speech.
The Dark-dreamer revelled in the captain's discomfort. In reply, he had the quartermaster turn from the helm and speak in words of his choosing. 'Can't you guess, my captain? The shape-changer will replace you, and sail Moonless to Cliffhaven. The Kielmark will never guess his first captain disguises as a demon, until too late. Your replica will run a knife through his heart.'
The words struck Corley like the killing thrust of a sword. Through trust in his closest friend, the Kielmark would be betrayed. In anguish, the captain whispered, 'No! Fires take you, not while I live!'
Maelgrim laughed through the mouths of Ballad's crewmen, then made them chant in eerie un
ison. 'But you won't live, my flag-bearing turncoat. Karas shape-changers devour their victims after metamorphosis to fix their final form. And through Gierj-power I shall keep you alive, while the Karas chews through your vitals one bite at a time.
Corley said nothing. White-faced, trembling with despair, he stared unseeing at the sea while the shape-changer pawed and fumbled, ineptly removing his clothing. Its touch proved corrosive; each brush of its fingers raised welts, sharp and painful as hornet stings. Try as he might, the captain could not contain his reaction. His muscles flinched and shivered in agony, each cord and tendon defined beneath his skin. As he suffered, his structure became faithfully recorded by the Karas, down to the smallest bulging vein, and the last bead of sweat.
Breeches, shirt, and knife sheaths lay in a tumbled pile on the deck when the Dark-dreamer made Corley dance. Up, down, around, he sprang in dizzying gyrations that forced the fullest range of extension from his body. The Karas followed suit, its contours moulding ever closer to the brawny frame of the captain. Gasping, wretched and sick with exhaustion and harrowed dignity, Corley knew that now not even his mother would recognize him from his demon counterpart. He wished himself dead; had the Dark-dreamer of Shadowfane relinquished control for an instant, the captain would have sought immediate means to end his life.
The Karas bent with mannerisms identical to Corley's and donned knife sheaths, then breeches and shirt. It ran its fingers through chestnut hair, adjusted a wrist strap, and laughed.
'Once it tastes your flesh, its form becomes permanent.' Maelgrim allowed satisfaction to seep across the link. 'Your skills, your memories, even your innermost secrets will all be inherited intact.'
With a look of wry humour still on its face, the Karas reached for its counterpart's wrist. But the instant before contact, a burst of light shattered the horizon. The Gierj started up in alarm, eyes flaring like flame as the sun vanished into mist. Maelgrim's smile faded, and even the Karas paused. A shimmer like sheet lightning rent the sky. Thunder pealed, rattling timbers in the deck, and wind sprang out of nowhere, backwinding Ballad's sails with a violence that snapped a stay.