“I’ll help-” offered a voice, speaking in elven.
“Get below!” the Patryn snarled, enraged, the interruption unweaving an entire fabric of runes. He didn’t see whether the elf obeyed him or not. Haplo didn’t care.
He was intent upon the creature, analyzing it. It had ceased using its potent magic, turned again to brute force. Dull-witted, stupid, Haplo decided. Its reactions had been instinctive, animal-like, unthinking.
Perhaps it couldn’t consciously control the magic- He started to stand up.
The blast of wind hit him with hurricane force. Haplo struggled against the spell, creating dense and complex rune constructs to surround him, protect him.
He might have built a wall of feathers. The raw power of the crude magic seeped through minuscule cracks in the sigla and blew them to tatters. The wind battered him to the deck. Branches and leaves hurtled past him, something struck him in the face, nearly knocking him senseless. He fought against the pain, clinging to the wooden rails with his hands, the gusts pummeling, hammering. He was helpless against the magic, he couldn’t reason with it, speak to it. His strength was seeping from him rapidly, the wind increasing in force.
A grim joke among the Patryns purports that there are only two kinds of people in the Labyrinth: the quick and the dead, and advises, “When the odds are against you, run like hell.”
It was definitely time to get out of here.
Every move taking a supreme effort against the force of the wind, Haplo managed to turn his head and look behind him. He spotted the open hatch, saw the elf crouched, waiting there, his head poking up. Not a hair on the elf’s head was ruffled. The full force of the magic was being expended against Haplo alone.
That might end soon.
Haplo released his hold on the rail. The wind blew him across the deck, toward the hatch. Making a desperate lunge, he grabbed the rim of the hatch as he slithered past, and held on. The elf grasped him by the wrists and fought to drag him below. The wind fought them. Blinding, stinging, it howled and pounded at them like a live thing who sees its prey about to escape.
The elf’s grip loosened, suddenly broke. The elf disappeared.
Haplo felt his hold on the rim weakening. Inwardly cursing, he concentrated all his strength, all his magic into just hanging on. Down below, he heard the dog barking frantically, and then hands had hold of him again-not slender elf hands, but strong human hands. Haplo saw a human face-grim, determined, flushed red with the effort the man was expending. Haplo, with his failing energy, wove his magic around the man. Red and blue sigla from the runes on his own arms and hands twisted and twined around the human’s arms, lending him Haplo’s strength.
Muscles bunched, jerked, heaved, and Haplo was flying head first down the hatch.
He landed heavily on top of the human, heard the breath leave the man’s body in a whoosh and a grunt of pain.
Haplo was on his feet, moving, reacting, ignoring the part of his mind that was trying to draw his attention to his own injuries. He didn’t glance at the human who had saved his life. He rudely shoved aside the old man who was yammering something in his ear. The ship shuddered; he heard timber cracking. The creatures were venting their rage against it or perhaps endeavoring to crack open the shell protecting the fragile life inside.
The steering stone was the only object in Haplo’s line of sight. All else disappeared, was swallowed up in the black fog that was slowly gathering about him. He shook his head, fought the darkness back. Sinking to his knees before the stone, he placed his hands upon it, summoning from the deep well within him the strength to activate it.
He felt the ship shudder beneath him, but it was a different type of shudder than the one the creatures were inflicting. Dragon Wing rose slowly off the ground.
Haplo’s eyes were gummed almost completely shut with something, probably his own blood. He peered through them, struggled to see out the window. The creatures were behaving as he had anticipated. Amazed, startled by the ship’s sudden lift into the air, they had fallen back away from it.