hand away from the reins and risking what little control of the horse he had left to try to tuck it
away.
Serge and Doyle nodded.
“We need shelter,” shouted Doyle.
Maximilian looked up to the sky, squinting.
BroadWing and his three companions were still there, black dots high in the sky, riding a
wild current that buffeted them about like leaves that tumbled across the roadway.
Maximilian momentarily waved an arm at them, hoping BroadWing would somehow
intuit his meaning.
Find shelter.
His horse plunged to the left, and Maximilian grabbed at his reins again, pulling the horse
up barely an instant before he totally lost control.
“Anywhere,” said Maximilian between clenched teeth. “We need to find shelter now.”
StarDrifter thought that he needed to get belowdecks very soon. The storm front was now
only a few minutes away. The clouds hung like a thick veil before the ship, lightning forking
through them in angry flashes of white and gold.
The sense of power was not only growing stronger, but far more unsettling.
Deciding he”d waited too long, StarDrifter began to move, slowly, trying to get to his feet
without tangling his legs in the sodden cloak and slipping on the soaked deck, or being blown
away by the increasingly violent gusts of wind.
A few drops of rain splattered across his face—a different feel to the spray: harder, more
aggressive.
Icy. Sharp.
The wind threatened to unfoot him with every move he made, but StarDrifter finally
managed to stand, clinging with one hand to the overhanging eaves of the bridge.
The Weeper whimpered.
“I”ve not forgotten you!” StarDrifter muttered, wondering how he was going to hold on
to the bronze deity and still manage to reach the safety of belowdecks.
Perhaps if he could fashion a sling from his cloak…
The boat suddenly tilted down the side of a huge wave, and the Weeper slid toward the
edge of the deck.
StarDrifter made a grab for it.
The Weeper shrieked.
StarDrifter managed to get one hand on it, then two, then cried out himself as he felt ice
burn through his hands.
The boat tilted back the other way, and both the Weeper and StarDrifter slammed back
against the bridge.
Prata partly opened the door, yelling something indecipherable.
StarDrifter tried to release the Weeper, but was unable to remove his hands from the
frozen deity.
The boat, as suddenly as it had just moved, tilted the other way once more, just as a
massive wave crashed over the deck.
StarDrifter and the Weeper were washed overboard.
Maximilian, Serge, and Doyle had given up trying to ride. It was almost impossible in
this wind, and the horses were so frantic they were unrideable.
The last glimpse Maximilian had of the Icarii was of them tipping their wings, sliding
through the air toward the ground, and Maximilian hoped they were able to find a safe harbor.
For himself and the two guardsmen, there seemed little likelihood of anything save a
shallow and somewhat damp gully to the seaward side of the road. They”d been caught out on a
particularly isolated stretch of the road into Narbon, one that led through the vast marshlands
bordering the northern aspects of the city. There were no houses here. No villages, and the
marshlands that stretched a few leagues inland were too risky for Maximilian and his men to
venture, even in this storm.
The marshlands were known for their treacherous sands, and many were the tales of
travelers who had sought shelter in them never to be heard from again.
“Come on,” Maximilian yelled, pulling his reluctant and terrified horse down the slope
into the gully. “We can wait it out here.”
“So long as there”s no storm surge,” Serge said.
StarDrifter turned over and over in the turbulent water, eyes and mouth tightly closed,
trying to fight his way to the surface.
The Weeper was gone, torn from his hands as they were dashed into the sea.
StarDrifter had no doubt at all that the Weeper had pulled them overboard. He was aware
that the deity had expended a massive surge of power just before the fishing vessel had tilted that
final, terrible time, and he”d felt both himself and the deity being pulled toward the sea.
StarDrifter had no idea why the Weeper might want him to drown in the Widowmaker
Sea, and right now trying to drum up a reason was the last thing on his mind.
All StarDrifter wanted to do was survive.
His clothes—the cloak, his boots, his heavy jerkin and trousers—were pulling him ever
downward, no matter his attempts to fight his way to the surface, and he tried to pull them off.
The cloak floated free fairly easily, although it tangled in his legs as it went, causing
StarDrifter a moment of sheer panicky terror. His jerkin, a thick leather affair, and trousers, of
similar material, were harder to dislodge, however, particularly when his lungs felt as if they
were about to burst.
He started to sink, and he stopped struggling with his clothes and tried to work his way to
the surface.
He sank farther.
It began to feel almost like flying.
StarDrifter stopped fighting altogether, overwhelmed by the sensation.
He”d missed flight so desperately. To re-create the sensation, even for a moment, would
surely be worth death.
Wouldn”t it?
Suddenly a powerful light blazed in the water before him, searing through his closed
eyelids, and StarDrifter”s eyes flew open. Something gripped his upper arms, and StarDrifter felt
himself being drawn toward the surface.
Maximilian, Serge, and Doyle crouched in the lee of a boulder, trying to shelter
themselves as best they could from the driving wind and rain.
Their best was pitiful little.
The horses had bolted almost as soon as they”d been tied to a strong hewen bush. So great
was their fright, nothing could have held them, and Maximilian had signaled to the two
guardsmen to let them go.
Trying to catch them in this storm was not an option, and all they could do was trust that
their horses might find some degree of shelter rather than dash themselves to death in terror.
The three men huddled behind their boulder, faces turned away from the storm front,
bodies crouched into as small a ball as possible, crowding themselves together for what little
shelter and warmth they could provide each other. They did not talk—there was no point.
Maximilian hoped that BroadWing and his companions had managed to find shelter, and
that he and his two companions would manage to survive.
He thought they could. They were in no danger so long as Serge had not managed to
curse them with a storm surge through his pessimism. The night would be wild, and very wet and
cold, but they were strong, and even though the boulder offered little comfort, it did shelter them
from the worst of the weather.
Just as he”d managed to make himself feel a little easier, something twigged at
Maximilian”s consciousness.
Almost like a distant shout.
And then his Persimius ring screamed—so loudly that Maximilian himself shouted in
shock, rolling away from Serge and Doyle into the full fury of the storm.
Maximilian heard one of them call out, the sound a thin and diminishing wail in the
tempest, and then he was gone, the wind so vicious, so powerful, it rolled him over the lip of the
gully toward the pounding surf on the beach.
Toward the beach? But that was against the wind!
Maximilian tried to grab at bushes, rocks, the occasional thin trunk of a stumped tree, but
he was being pulled so fast toward the surf that his fingers did not manage to maintain a grip on a
single thing.
He felt something tear in his shoulder, and he gave a hoarse cry of pain that was instantly
lost within the maelstrom.
The blazing light—the Weeper, StarDrifter knew that somehow, impossibly, it was the
Weeper—had somehow managed to drag him to the surface.
Here the danger felt even closer, for the waves loomed huge above them before crashing
down on his head, and every so often he was dragged into the wrath below.
But now StarDrifter was almost entirely encased within the light, and whenever a rogue
wave dashed him down, he bobbed back to the surface just at that moment when he thought his
lungs would explode.
He was covered in scratches and bruises from debris in the water.
StarDrifter hoped it was not the wreckage of Prata”s boat.
The coast! the Weeper said in his mind. StarDrifter, look, the coast.
StarDrifter blinked, but his eyes were blinded by the sea and spray and the mountainous
waves, and he had no idea how the Weeper expected him to see any farther than his nose.
Maximilian will be there, the Weeper said. Maximilian will be there for us.
Maximilian managed somehow to hook the fingers of his left hand into the thickness of
the damp sand at the surf”s edge, then get his right hand wedged behind a boulder.