Serpent Mage by Weis, Margaret

“What do you want us to do, sir?” asked the elf.

“First, what’s your real name?” Haplo growled.

“Devon of the House of—”

“Devon will do. What or who’s steering this ship? Not you, I take it. Who else is on board?”

“We . . . don’t know, sir.” Devon said helplessly. “We assume it’s the dragon-snakes. Their magic . . .”

“You haven’t tried to change course? Stop the ship?”

“We can’t even get close to the steerage. There’s something horrible in there.”

“What is it? Can you see it?”

“No,” Devon admitted, ashamed. “We . . . couldn’t get close enough to see anything.”

“It’s a terrible feeling, I tell you!” stated Grundle sullenly, defiantly. “Like walking into death.”

“Which is exactly what you’re doing now,” Haplo snapped.

The three glanced at each other, lowered their heads. Children, lost and alone, facing a dreadful fate. Haplo regretted his harsh comment.

You don’t want to frighten them too much, he cautioned. You’re going to need their help.

“I’m sorry I upset you,” he apologized gruffly. “But we have a saying in my world: The dragon is always smaller in the eye than in the mind.”

“Meaning it’s better to know the truth,” said Alake, wiping away her tears. “You’re right. I’m not nearly as frightened as I was. Though, if what you say is true, I have more reason to be.”

“It’s like having a tooth pulled,” said Grundle. “You always suffer more thinking about it than having it done.” She cocked a bright eye at Haplo. “You’re pretty smart … for a human. Where did you say you came from?”

Haplo looked sharply at the dwarf. A shrewd thinker, that one. He would have to keep an eye on her. Right now, though, he didn’t have time to waste fending off her needling jabs.

“You shouldn’t be as concerned about where I’ve been as where you’re going unless we can get this ship turned around. Which way’s the steerage from here?”

“But how will you do that?” Alake asked him, drawing near. Her eyes, when she looked at him, were warm and soft. “It’s obviously being controlled by powerful magic.”

“I have some knowledge of magic, myself,” said Haplo. Ordinarily, he preferred to keep such knowledge to himself, but in this case, the mensch would see him using his magic. Better to prepare them in advance.

“Do you?” Alake drew a deep breath. “So do I. I’ve been admitted to the Third House. What House are you?”

Haplo recalled what little he knew of the human’s crude talent for the arcane, remembered that they loved nothing more than to shroud even the most rudimentary magical spells in mystery.

“If you are that high in the ranking, you must know that I am not permitted to speak of it,” he said.

His mild rebuke did him no harm with the human girl. By her shining eyes, her admiration for him increased.

“Forgive me,” she said immediately. “It was wrong of me to ask. We’ll show you the way.”

The dwarf cast him another shrewd glance, tugged at her side whiskers.

Alake guided him through the small, narrow corridors of the ship. Grundle and Devon came along, the dwarf pointing out to him the various mechanical devices that powered the vessel, which she called a “submersible.” Haplo, glancing out the portholes, could seeing nothing but water, lit by a soft, blue-green light, above, below, and all around.

He was beginning to think that this so-called world of water was, in truth, a world made of nothing but water. There must be land somewhere. Obviously, people who built boats to sail the seas didn’t live in those seas like fish. He was intensely curious to know about the seamoons the dwarf had mentioned, must try to think of a way to find out that wouldn’t start the wheels turning in the heads of these mensch. He also needed to know more about the seawater itself, whether his growing misgivings about it were true.

Grundle and Devon were, between them, explaining how the submersible operated. Built by dwarves, it was powered by a combination of dwarven mechanical ingenuity and elven mechanical magic.

It seemed, from what Haplo could piece together out of the somewhat confused explanation given him by the dwarf, that the main difficulty in sinking (sailing) a vessel was to get it away from the influence of the seamoons. Due to the gravitational push (not pull) of the moons, the submersibles, which were filled with air, were naturally less dense than the water around them and tended to float toward the worlds as though being drawn by a rope. In order to cause the submersible to sink, it was necessary to increase the density of the ship without flooding it full of water.

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