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Seven: The Bird and the Snake

"'Jiam' will do," the old, white haired man greeted, tossing Falcon Wing's captain a bulging leather sack of coins. "I hope you're prepared."

Lebram deftly tied the sack's strings to her belt without taking her eyes away from her client's face. "Oh, we're prepared," she said with a toothy grin. "You won't be sleeping through the ride, I can promise you that, but Falcon will get you where you need to go."

Unexpectedly, the man's mule spun around and began galloping back up the peninsula toward Boendal. Tolinom shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and caught Dola's arm when she made as if to run after the animal and retrieve it for the old man. Jiam didn't even appear to notice his mule's departure, instead measuring Captain Lebram with a piercing gaze that Tolinom was happy enough not to have directed at him.

"You're certain every man in your crew has the stomach for this?" Jiam asked.

Lebram opened her mouth, but before she could say anything in reply, the old man turned and lifted his hand, palm outward, as if waving to someone on the mainland.

Of all the things Tolinom had imagined he might witness during the Veporligh that day, the earth exploding at an old man's casual gesture was far down the list. In a single instant, he forgot that he'd so recently been accused of stealing and was even now fleeing from both his old tutor and Boendal's peacekeepers. He'd only _thought_that his life had been turned upside down before. Now, as the ground rained down out of the sky like a meteor shower, turning the already heaving waves into a roiling mass of white froth, his life had well and truly been upended. He wasn't sure whether his heart had stopped beating entirely, or was racing in such a panic that each beat flurried into the next too rapidly to notice.

He thought that he heard a shout from the other end of the peninsula's wreckage, where a haggard looking woman stood beside a light brown horse at the edge of what remained of the stone finger's mainland end, but couldn't make it out above the loud splashes still rising all around him.

He wasn't given time to dwell on it, in any case. Before he could begin to recover from his shock, Captain Lebram was shouting at Dola and him from the boarding plank behind them. "Unless you two plan to swim back, climb aboard. Consider yourselves paid in full." When they were able to do nothing except turn and stare at her, still stunned, she barked, "Now!" in her uncompromising voice, and Tolinom found his legs moving of their own accord, carrying him up the plank onto the swaying ship's deck. Dola was right behind him.

Two bare-chested men from Falcon Wing's crew began pulling the wide board up as soon as Dola stepped off of it, while another pair of men were laboring at two cranks along the ship's far edge, hauling twin anchors on thick chains out of the heaving water. Tolinom turned to look back at the destroyed peninsula behind him, but suffered a moment's disorientation when he found the mainland was beyond the back of the ship now, rather than its side. The wind had somehow turned them until they were facing directly into it, he realized, though with the ship rocking beneath his feet, he hadn't noticed it rotating. It seemed more as though the world had spun while they stayed still.

"Make ready for a strong tail wind!" Jiam said in a strong, commanding tone from behind the upper deck's front railing, and Tolinom climbed the small staircase to stand behind the old man and Captain Lebram, feeling in the way of the crew dashing purposefully around both decks. At Jiam's order, though, every man in the crew stopped what they were doing, confused. Even Tolinom could tell the wind was blowing straight in from the bay, the direction the ship was now pointing toward.

Lebram leaned toward the old man while Dola stumbled up beside Tolinom. His friend was having trouble keeping her footing on the rocking deck. "Setting her up for a tail wind will see us beached in front of Neutral Landing," the captain told Jiam in what Tolinom took as her tactful voice. "If we're headed south, we'll have to tack into the wind."

Jiam just looked at her. "The winds are about to change."

Tolinom's eyes widened, remembering the peninsula, and Lebram seemed to understand the old man's meaning at the same time. "You heard the man," she yelled at her waiting crew, and they sprang into action even before she finished her orders: "Spread her wings and let her fly. Hurry it up!"

With remarkable coordination, the crew pulled the foremast's crossbeam to the right, lashing it to the ship's rail perpendicular to the wind while doing the same in the opposite direction to the large, center mast. The wind made the large, triangular sails billow in the wrong direction, and for a brief moment they were pushed backward, the sailor at the ship's wheel next to Tolinom struggling to hold its rudder straight. Then, just as Jiam had foretold, the wind suddenly changed direction, stopping entirely for a single heartbeat before gusting down from the north with a vengeance. Tolinom stumbled backward when the ship lurched in the opposite direction, and by the time he regained his footing, they were racing across the bay so quickly that the ship's hull bounced from the tip of one wave to the next, some passing beneath them without even touching Falcon Wing's belly. The mainland swiftly grew distant behind them, and it wasn't long before Tolinom couldn't make out the pier's individual docks. If the sailors were taken aback by their uncanny speed, though, they were too busy to show their concern, hauling at lines and making constant adjustments to the ship's "wings" to compensate for changes in the wind or waves too minute for Tolinom to notice.

He staggered forward to lean against the rail between Jiam and Dola, who would have likely lost her footing as well had she not been clutching the rail in a terrified grip ever since she'd climbed onto the upper deck. Captain Lebram stepped away from them, walking effortlessly over the deck to show a young man how to properly secure the aft mast's crossbeam, angled to the right in imitation of the larger, foremost sail.

"So," Jiam said companionably, as though he were merely enjoying the Veporligh during a calm, relaxing ocean voyage, "what brings the heir of Bandarethe to Boendal?"

Tolinom whipped his head around to stare at the man, his mouth agape for so long that the salt in the ocean wind began to dry out his palate.

The sorcerer just laughed at his panicked, dumbstruck expression. "My apologies," he said. "It's been a long time since I've enjoyed such lack of subtlety. No need to worry, though, I'm very good at keeping secrets." He laughed again, apparently enjoying their recklessly swift voyage.

Tolinom finally regained enough composure to speak. "How did you know?" he asked hoarsely, glancing down at the back of his right hand with sudden worry. The saltwater spray wasn't washing away his disguise, was it? He turned to study Dola, but her fur was as black as ever, still the only constant in the colored light shifting around them. His friend was braced with arms and legs slightly bent, her long tail thrashing behind her in a futile effort to help her keep her balance on the rocking and bouncing deck while she used the railing to hold herself upright. It took Tolinom a moment to realize that he was in almost the same position.

"I was in Eyrasabi when you and your father visited," Jiam answered, though he was peering so intently at the horizon to their left that Tolinom was surprised he could spare the attention for conversation. Nonetheless, the man went on. "You wouldn't remember me, of course. You were just a child, then, and I wasn't exactly foremost among Eyralian nobility."

"You claim to recognize me after so long, even with my fur dyed?"

"Do you claim that I don't?" the man responded with an amused smile, and Tolinom grimaced. He couldn't pretend to be anyone else, now that he'd as much as admitted to being the heir. Still, there was something about Jiam's calm demeanor amongst so much chaos that made him unable to dislike the man.

"You never answered my question," Jiam said when Tolinom remained silent. "How is it you've come to Boendal? Is it true you've been kidnapped, as everyone has been whispering?" The old man directed that amused smile across Tolinom's shoulders at Dola.

She returned his smile, though her voice was as unsteady as her footing when she said, "Rather the other way around, actually."

"I've been taking on more responsibilities recently back in Bandarethe," Tolinom explained, surprising himself by being so open. "I guess I just wanted to see some of the world before matters of state train me to look at everything behind a veil of politics."

"Ah," Jiam said with an understanding nod, "and what better excuse for a vacation than to witness the Veporligh, yes?"

"It does only happen once every few generations, after all," Tolinom agreed with a nervous grin. Friendly though Jiam may be, the Oncan couldn't easily forget how he had so casually destroyed a long column of land, or how the wind had apparently changed direction at the old man's suggestion.

Before Tolinom could say anything else, Captain Lebram returned on Jiam's other side, her eyes darting back and forth between her busy crew and the bay in front of them while she spoke. "We're not far from the reefs, now. We'll have to time our approach carefully to make sure we don't sail into any deep valleys in the waves." That explained why the crew was beginning to give the sails a little slack, letting the masts' crossbeams angle slightly away from the wind. They wanted to slow the ship so they could choose the right moment to cross the dangerous shallows that threatened the hull.

But Jiam was shaking his head. "Have your men keep the sails taut, Captain. We'll leave the bay without incident."

Lebram turned her attention to the old man, frowning grimly. "I want your word that no harm will come to this ship or my crew. Three years' wages isn't worth dying over."

"You have my word that I'll help keep Falcon Wing safe as best as I'm able," Jiam promised, but Lebram's wind lined frown only deepened. He hadn't agreed to exactly what she'd demanded. "Don't forget," he added, "my life depends on the ship's safety, as well."

The captain glowered at him for a few seconds longer, then shouted at her crew loudly enough that Tolinom cringed away from her piercing voice. "Keep those wings spread, boys, the time is now! Give her all she's got!" She turned back to Jiam and the Oncans. "If you three are going to insist on staying up here instead of in the cabin, where it's safe, lash yourselves to the rail. There won't be any retrieving anybody who falls off the side because their feet forgot to stay under them." With that, she vaulted the upper deck's front rail and hurried forward to help the men struggling to pull the mainsail perpendicular to the wind again, growling at them about making her do everything herself.

A moment later a bronze skinned youth appeared beside Tolinom and handed the Oncan a coil of rope half as thick as his wrist. "Captain wasn't joking," he told them. "The waves start getting big once we leave the bay."

"They _start_getting big?" Tolinom and Dola repeated in unison, but the young man had already dashed back to man the half mast. Without another moment's hesitation, Tolinom wrapped the rope in a loop around his waist, swung the long end around the upper deck's front rail, and handed it to Dola, trying his best to tie a knot in his end while his friend looped the other half of the rope around her own waist. They both had a hard time of it, having to reach out and grab the rail to steady themselves every time the deck shifted under their feet, but eventually they were tied securely to the railing.

Too late, Tolinom remembered Jiam, but when he looked guiltily at the old man and began to apologize, Jiam just smiled at him and shook his head. "No need to worry. I'm going to need to be able to move about." The man leaned forward as the ship began to climb a large swell, more a saltwater hill than a wave, and Tolinom would have tumbled backward had he not tied himself to the rail. "Rope or no rope, you should hold on," Jiam told them. "We're over the reefs now."

As they climbed, the huge wave beneath them seemed to grow, its peak remaining above the ship's prow even with the wind pushing them forward so swiftly. When at last they reached the wave's apex, they crossed over the ridge of water at an angle, and the ship tipped sharply to the left as it began to descend the liquid mountain. Dola cried out wordlessly beside Tolinom as they raced at an angle down the side of the enormous wave, and when he saw what she was looking at over the ship's left rail, his breath caught in his throat. In the watery valley below them, strewn about the sea bed like a vast, alien city, the coral reef glistened under the Veporligh's crimson light, jagged, beautifully colored formations waiting for Falcon Wing to dive into them and dash itself and its passengers to splinters.

And dive they did, but the wave they were descending was surging forward at an angle beneath them, the water matching the wind's speed so that they grew no closer to the fatal coral below. On Tolinom's other side, Jiam was laughing exultantly, still leaning forward into their reckless dive while his white cap of hair whipped around his face. Tolinom barely noticed the crazy old sorcerer; he was too busy hugging the railing to his chest and trying to work the hitch out of his diaphragm so that he could breathe again.

When he felt rain drops patter down on his shoulders and between his ears, he looked up, but immediately wished he hadn't. The tidal wave's upper ridge was curling in on itself as it pushed the ship along, an arc of white foam stretching out over the upper tips of the ship's masts until it blocked the red light of the sun and painted moon overhead. The arc's edge splashed down over the deck like a waterfall as they hurtled along, thoroughly drenching everyone aboard. Then it extended past the left side of the ship, forming an aquatic tunnel through which the ship surfed at a heart stopping speed.

All of a sudden, Tolinom really, really had to pee.

With the liquid curtain now blocking his view to the left he could no longer see the bright coral reef that waited like teeth to devour them, but he could hear the water crashing against it like a storm raging against unyielding cliffs. The roar continued several dozen heartbeats longer before their tunnel caved in on itself and cascaded down over their heads, blinding and deafening Tolinom with a barrage of saltwater so heavy it nearly dropped him to his knees.

Certain they'd been capsized and had all drowned, he didn't open his eyes until a loud chorus of exhilarated, victorious cheers arose all around him. They'd passed safely from the bay over the perilous reefs to the vast Infuli Ocean, the cliffs of Eyralia now a mere band of gray land lining the northern horizon behind them. The sailors were all still occupied with holding the ship steady under the unyielding wind, but they celebrated their survival with a great racket of whoops, laughs, and shrilling whistles.

As Tolinom tried to remind himself how to breathe, Dola burst into giddy laughter beside him. "You look like a weasel that fell into a river!" she exclaimed.

He tried to glower at his friend, but when she lost her balance at one of the ship's sudden lurches and landed on her bottom, still laughing hysterically, he couldn't help but be overcome by the same relieved joviality as everyone else. "You're not in any better state, you know," he laughed, sitting beside her with a squelch of soaked trousers and fur and stretching the short rope that tied them both to the railing to its limit. "This is turning out to be one exciting Veporligh, isn't it?"

"You could put it that way." Dola wiped dripping, black fur out of her eyes and looked around them. "Where's the sorcerer?"

For a frightening moment, Tolinom worried that the old man had been washed overboard, but then he saw him on the lower deck, speaking with the drenched captain, and he pointed Jiam out for Dola.

When Jiam turned away from her and made his way to the ship's prow, Lebram faced the upper deck and shouted at the helmsman, "Forty-five to port! We fly southeast!"

"Where do you suppose we're going?" Tolinom asked his friend while the crew settled into their familiar rhythm of tying and retying the web of lines securing the sails. Though they were turning somewhat to the left, the wind remained behind them, and the sailors seemed to be correcting adjustments they'd made in preparation for a slight crosswind.

"I'm not sure if the captain even knows," Dola said. "She seems to be following Jiam's lead, but there's nothing in the sea southeast of Boendal." She flopped onto her back, tucking her tail between her bent legs and shielding her eyes from the Veporligh's glare with a dripping hand. "Wherever we're headed, though, it shouldn't take long to get there, as fast as we're moving. Just look at those clouds."

Tolinom did so, leaning back on his elbows to take in the sky ahead of them, careful not to look straight up at Parol and the sun where they merged at the sky's zenith. Flat, wind-lashed clouds flew by overhead in the opposite direction as the ship's course. Even though Tolinom could sense their speed by the way the ship leapt from one roiling wave to the next, the clouds seemed to be moving more swiftly than their pace could account for. Besides that, shouldn't the clouds be matching their speed and direction with the wind now blowing out of the northwest? "That's odd," he began, but Dola interrupted him by grabbing his shoulder and using it to pull herself back to a sitting position, shifting to let her tail flick behind her again.

"That can't be land, can it?" she asked, pointing toward a long, dark gray stripe covering the horizon in front of them. As they raced toward it, the stripe stretched skyward, slowly blotting out the Veporligh's orange tinted rays.

Tolinom bolted to his feet, and Dola followed him up hastily, brought to attention by his sudden alarm. "No," he said. "I don't think it is."

He saw Jiam making his way back over the tilting lower deck when one of the sailors shouted, "Waterspout, aft and starboard!"

One of the men holding the mainmast's crossbeam steady yelled, "Off port side, too! There're two...no, three more of them!"

Tolinom wasn't sure what "starboard" and "port" meant, but when the young man steadying the aft half mast cursed loudly and shouted, "Behind us, Captain!" panic making his voice crack, the Oncan turned and saw what had so unsettled the crew.

Chasing the ship was a small army of what looked like tornados made of water, spinning with a roar that Tolinom only now noticed above the wind pushing the ship along. Even as he watched, three more columns spiraled up out of the ocean, linking the angry waves to a thick, gray cloud overhead while other columns fell behind. Tolinom felt the fur on the back of his neck stir at the uncanny sight. He'd heard reports of tornados devastating entire villages across the Eyralian countryside, and he could count at least fifteen of the swaying pillars dancing in the long "V" of the ship's wake.

As Jiam calmly climbed back to the upper deck with Captain Lebram close on his heels, Tolinom felt a fat raindrop hit the back of his already dripping hand where he held the railing. They were almost underneath the dark clouds that had so recently been a barely visible line against the southeastern horizon.

"Don't fear the spouts," Jiam said. He didn't shout, but his voice was pitched to carry to everyone on board. As he spoke, more of the watery twisters began forming at their sides, beginning to surround the ship, and rain started falling in force, pattering wetly over the deck. "They're just the results of wind shear, and won't harm us." Returning to his position on Tolinom's right, in front of the ship's wheel, he explained to Lebram in a quieter voice, "It would be pointless to have all the wind at our backs. We travel down a tunnel of wind pushing us forward while the air outside the tunnel blows the other way."

"Then you're causing this?" Tolinom asked, holding a hand out palm up to indicate the strengthening rain falling around them.

"The waterspouts, yes," Jiam answered, and as if summoned by his words, more pillars of spiraling water climbed out of the ocean in front of them, but as he'd promised, the ship sailed safely through a valley of water straight between them. "They form in the crease where our tunnel of wind brushes the air flowing in the other direction, but I can keep them at bay. The wind remains under my control. This storm, however, is very much under his."

"Whose?" Dola asked, but Lebram was talking at the same time, and Jiam turned toward the captain.

"You say the wind outside this tunnel you've conjured is blowing out of the southeast?" The old man nodded at the woman's question. "Then you're trying to catch up to someone, I take it. And he's a mage, too?"

"Yes," Jiam said, "in a manner of speaking."

Lebram pointed up at the mass of dark clouds blotting out the eclipse above them. "Then this storm is his doing. I gather he doesn't much want you to reach him."

Jiam merely smiled. "Don't worry, captain. I won't let him hurt your ship."

"He may have already. Falcon wasn't built to weather a storm like this, even if you can keep those water spouts away from her."

"She will," the sorcerer said confidently, then turned to the Oncans. "All the same, you two had best take shelter down in the cabin. You should be safe enough with that rope, but it's best not to take any chances. Besides, I'm sure you'll be more comfortable out of this rain."

"He has a point," Dola said.

At first, Tolinom wanted to agree; the two of them did look wretched with their fur matted down, rain streaming off their elbows and tails like little rivers. But they had gotten themselves caught up in events more exciting, and very likely more important, than anything he'd experienced back home in Bandarethe, and he was reluctant to miss a second of it. "It's not like we can get any wetter," he said. "We might as well let the storm wash the salt out of our fur."

Dola laughed breathlessly, but shook her head. "We're as wet as we can get, true, but we could be a whole lot dryer." She began plucking at the knot she'd tied in the end of the rope looped around her waist. "You can wash as much salt out of your pelt as you want. I think I'm going to take Jiam's advice."

She was having a more difficult time untying her knot than she'd had tying it in the first place back in the bay, though. The storm-whipped waves were much more choppy now, bouncing the ship to and fro, and the knot had apparently grown tighter now that it was soaked through. It couldn't help that they had sailed beneath the thickest of the storm clouds, which blocked nearly all of the day's light. The Veporligh eclipse appeared only as a paler patch of gray in the cloud straight above them, the thinner stretches of cloud eerily glowing a dark green. As the Veporligh's green light faded to blue, they seemed to pass completely into night. Tolinom could barely see his hands where they grasped the railing.

Despite her challenges, though, Dola gave a staccato laugh of success as she pulled the rope free around her waist. "I'll be dry and cozy in the cabin if you need me, river weasel." As his eyes adjusted to the new darkness, Tolinom could see her making her way toward the top of the left stairway leading to the lower deck, a silhouette staggering along among the blue shadows beside the railing.

Halfway down the stairs, the ship tilted forward as the wind slackened and it crept down a wave it would have otherwise leapt across, and Dola tumbled down the last three steps with a startled yelp. The sails fluttered limply against a nearly nonexistent wind, and as the rain pattered down on them from straight overhead, the wailing water spouts around them sank back into the dark waves.

"Are you all right, Dola?" Tolinom called to his friend while the captain asked Jiam why he'd let the wind slacken.

When Dola yelled back, "I'm fine," and climbed to her feet, squatting low while she tried to find her balance on the rocking deck, Tolinom turned his attention to the sorcerer on his right.

"Because he's here," Jiam was saying in answer to Captain Lebram's question. "Tie off that rope, Tolinom, if you're sure you want to stay up here. Quickly, now." The old man leaned forward, squinting at something in the storm ahead of them, though when Tolinom followed his gaze, he could see nothing except a wall of darkness. "Too late," the man said grimly, and as a tinge of red laced the faint violet light limning the thick clouds, Tolinom realized that the dark wall was a tidal wave raging straight toward them, larger even than the wave they'd ridden out of the bay. "Hold on," Jiam ordered, then repeated himself loudly enough for all to hear: "Everyone hold onto something!" The sails billowed at a gust from behind them. "Steer us straight up and over it!"

"We'll capsize!" Lebram protested at the same time as Tolinom shouted over the tsunami's rumble, "Shouldn't we ride along its side, like we did over the reefs?"

Jiam shook his head. "This wave isn't of my making. It would devour us."

Then it was upon them. The ship's prow angled up along the base of the aquatic mountain, Jiam's wind pushing them straight up its side. The ship tilted ever farther back, and Tolinom had to hook the railing under his armpits, his feet scraping with claws extended against a deck that was swiftly changing from a floor to a vertical wall. Everyone else was clinging to different parts of the ship in a similar manner, most of the sailors dangling from the masts' crossbeams, and he could hear Dola call his name from where she lay against the cabin's outer wall, now above him. She hadn't made it safely inside.

The arch of the tsunami's crest curled above them. If they continued on much farther, that plume would flip them over and dash them against the sea waiting beneath them. Hanging to the railing beside Tolinom, Jiam made a swift gesture at the last moment, and a split in the water parted the crest at the wave's apex above them. They shot through that cleft of spray with such momentum that, for a heart-freezing instant, the entire ship was airborne and weightless. Tolinom clung to his rail desperately, suddenly unable to tell where the ship was in relationship to himself; they'd sailed straight up into a cloud, and he could see nothing except the thick, maroon fog as the world spun around him.

Then the powerful jolt of the ship crashing belly-first into the gentler slope of the wave's broad back tugged the railing harshly out of his grasp, and he was flung upside down forward over Falcon Wing's lower deck, the looped rope slipping free of the railing, as well. The backs of his shoulders slammed into the mainmast's crossbeam between two staggering sailors, and the rest of his body whipped up to slap against the broad sail's bottom edge. Gravity overcame his crushed momentum, and he barely managed to get his arms under him before he fell on his head. The blow's pain didn't reach him until he flopped heavily onto his stomach, but when it came, he felt like he'd been trampled by a stampede of oxen.

Dola was suddenly beside him, shaking his bruised shoulder. Where had she come from? "Tolinom! Tolinom, are you okay?"

He tried to tell her that he was, but it came out as a painful cough. He opened his eyes with a groan, and found himself looking at the angry waves past the left side of the ship.

A "V" of spray was spreading in the wake of something large darting toward the ship just beneath the ocean's dark surface, apparently intent on broad siding them. Tolinom scrambled onto his hands and knees, ignoring the complaints of his back and chest as he grabbed Dola's wrist and tried to brace them both for the impending impact that he had neither the time nor the breath to warn her about.

In the instant that it should have broken through the ship's hull, though, the approaching object simply vanished, the spray of its wake the only evidence that anything had been advancing toward them as it splashed over the deck's edge, joining the downpour soaking the Oncans and the crew.

"What's wrong, Tolinom?" Dola asked, and at the urgency in her voice, he realized that he must have been hurting her wrist. Letting her arm go, he just hung his head between his shoulders, trying to regain his breath.

He wasn't the only one who had noticed whatever had tried to assault them, though. "What was that?" one of the sailors standing next to the Oncans asked.

"I swear I saw a fin," another said. "Was it a sea monster?"

"When he wants to be." That was Jiam. Tolinom could hear the man's boots crossing the deck behind him, stopping when they reached the mainmast's base. "He's taking this very seriously."

Tolinom let his friend sling his arm over her shoulders and help him to his feet, but nearly fell again when she spun them both around toward the sound of a loud splash beyond the right side of the ship. All Tolinom was able to see was a long, ebony tail disappearing up into the storm cloud above them. From the ship's front mast, one of the sailors stammered, "A d-dragon," his voice choked with awestruck terror.

Without explanation, Jiam slipped his hand behind the fold of his sopping wet tunic and drew out a long, slender dagger. Holding the weapon blade up at arm's length in front of him, he opened his hand, and the dagger hovered at chest height above the deck, matching the sorcerer's subconscious shifts of weight as the ship rocked. "Enough games," he said, a frown deepening the creases in his brow. "I've run out of time."

The man made no move that Tolinom could see, but the dagger abruptly darted up into the clouds blade-first, like an arrow shot into the sky.

Tolinom should have been leading Dola to the safety of the cabin, its door not two strides to their right. He'd lost any desire he'd had to witness the end of the sorcerer's mad chase when he'd been flung across the ship like a child's discarded toy. But just like Captain Lebram, Dola, the crew, and Jiam himself, he couldn't seem to wrench his eyes away from the dark sky, waiting with expectant dread for whatever catastrophe the sorcerer would save them from next.

Something glinted red in the air above them, a brighter crimson than the light now saturating the storm clouds, and a high pitched whistle preceded the dagger's spinning return. It flew back to the ship as swiftly as it had departed, its handle landing safely in Jiam's outstretched hand. Something dark and wet flung from the dagger's blade as Jiam caught it, making a small splash against the mainmast beside him that sizzled until the rain washed it away.

"Finally," the sorcerer muttered, but if anything, he looked more grim now than ever.

A wide oval of red light illuminated the ship, then, as the clouds shrouding them parted. Despite remembering the pain of the Veporligh eclipse's blinding brightness, Tolinom couldn't stop himself from craning his neck to look through the gap in the storm straight above them. Parol was now directly in the sun's center, a circle of gold ringing a sphere so piercingly white that it brought immediate tears to Tolinom's eyes, but this time, he didn't look away.

What was at first a black speck in the heart of the eclipse quickly grew into the shape of the dragon, diving straight down toward them. As the creature eclipsed the Veporligh itself, the sun and moon became a halo of ruby light at its back, its body a sharp-edged, black void around which rays of bloodied light stretched and danced among the waves around Falcon Wing. A fountain of orange and yellow eclipsed the dragon in its turn, a crest of fire spewing from its mouth and nostrils that blurred its form into a confusing smear of light and shadow.

Jiam waited with hands upraised in front of Tolinom, blood darkened dagger held above him as if it were a sword poised to deflect a killing blow. Maybe it was.

The fire reached them first, but just as it fell to the height of the ship's main mast, it parted around an invisible dome. Tolinom barely had time to feel its heat make steam rise from his fur before the dragon plummeted into the top of the dome. Then he, Dola, and the crew found themselves weightless as the ship fell out from underneath them. The sea rushed up over the walls of the dome that had shielded them from the dragon's fire until the water met above the ship's center mast and surrounded them in momentary darkness. Then the ship's deck lifted up and knocked Tolinom's breath out of him again, and as though they were mere baubles jingling within a giant child's ball that the dragon had dunked beneath the ocean's surface, they sprang back up under the gray clouds, the ship launching everyone several feet into the air again before it settled on the waves.

Dola landed heavily on top of Tolinom and rolled away from him so that they both lay on their backs, coughing and groaning. Above the ship, the dragon circled, weaving in and out of orange tinted clouds and screaming furiously like an enormous bird of prey.

Of everyone aboard Falcon Wing, Jiam was the only one left standing, turning now to track the dragon's progress. As the creature cried out its bestial challenge, a familiar, broad cone of water spiraled up toward the clouds, swiftly growing into a towering waterspout thicker than any that had escorted the ship through Jiam's tunnel of wind. Waiting in the middle of the dragon's aerial path, it tilted toward the black creature when it banked to the side evasively, but the spinning column couldn't move as quickly as the dragon. It flew past the spout with room to spare, heading up the left side of the ship toward its prow, but had to roll through the air to duck between two smaller spouts that sprang into the clouds in front of it.

In the time it took Tolinom to climb to his feet, the air around the ship became a forest of spinning pillars of water, all leaning toward the dragon as it dodged between them with formidable grace. Falcon Wing sat in a bowl of calm water, the waves around the ship all being gathered into the spouts' swirling bases.

Eventually, the air became too thick with watery columns for the nimble dragon to weave around them. One clipped its wing as it tried to roll through a narrowing gap of clear air, knocking it off its course, and though it recovered quickly, it had lost its chance to escape the cage of spouts closing in on it.

From where he stood on the ship, Tolinom could just see the dragon from behind two dark, spinning columns as it dived, trying to reach the water's haven. Just as the surrounding twisters converged, though, yet another exploded up from the ocean directly under it and met its dive, tumbling it up into the sky like a piece of flotsam. The other waterspouts angled in when it tried to flap away from the barrage of water lifting it, trapping the dragon between them as though they were the fingers of an enormous sea god, and curved at an angle through the sky away from Falcon Wing. Forming a huge archway of braided water, the aquatic tornados pushed the dragon ahead of them down into the ocean with such force that Tolinom thought it surely must have been crushed against the sea floor.

Perhaps it had been. Certainly, after the twisting water arch collapsed inward and fell into the waves with a thunderous crash, nobody spotted the dragon rising again from the ocean around them. The gap in the clouds above bathing them in the Veporligh's golden, rose-speckled light grew wider as the dragon's conjured storm scattered on a barely felt breeze.

In the sudden quiet, Tolinom could hear Jiam murmuring, "Go back to your son," though it was unclear who the sorcerer was speaking to. "Hope is not yet lost."

All eyes were on Jiam as the calm stretched on. Even the confident Captain Lebram seemed to be waiting for the old man to tell her what to do, but he just went on mumbling quietly to himself. At first, Tolinom thought he must have been evoking a complicated spell under his breath, but when the Oncan strained his ears, he could make out the man's words. They might as well have been a magician's spell, for all the sense they made.

"I ask once more that you grant me passage to a living planet, one in poor health. I have a bypass, now, should you refuse again." He paused, as though listening to someone else speak. "Please, don't force my hand. I don't want to risk leaving a bypass in place any more than you do. Once I am gone, I won't be able to remove it." Jiam's jaw set as he waited again, and he lifted his dagger out before him once more, a dark red bead of liquid still reflecting the Veporligh's yellow light on its tip. "So be it. I hope you are prepared for what may come through."

The drop of dragon's blood lifted upward away from the dagger's blade and spun slowly in front of the sorcerer's resigned face. Gradually, the blood droplet changed color until it matched the Veporligh's shifting, greenish yellow light, before disappearing entirely, as though absorbed into the moon filtered sunlight.

His attention rapt on the sorcerer, Tolinom had been matching the ship's gentle rocking and keeping his balance without even noticing it, so when the angle of the tilting deck abruptly stopped shifting, he stumbled to the side and bumped into Dola, who didn't so much as budge. Surprised at her steadiness, he looked at his friend, but she was still watching Jiam with a haggard, puzzled frown on her face, never blinking.

She wasn't breathing, either.

Tolinom pulled his hand from where it had fallen on her arm as though he'd been burned. "Dola?" He nudged her shoulder but her tunic didn't even shift under his fingers. The black fur on her face shined wetly, but no strand so much as fluttered in the breeze.

That's when Tolinom noticed that there was no breeze. The air lay still and heavy around him, and as he pulled his eyes away from Dola's statuesque form, he realized that he and the sorcerer were the only two people left moving on Falcon Wing's deck.

Almost the only people, anyway. From the ship's foremast, Tolinom heard a broad-shouldered sailor swear and yell, "What in blazes is going on, now?"

Tolinom just shook his head mutely, eyes wide. He had turned to glance past the ship's left rail, and couldn't tear his eyes from what he saw. The ocean's waves stood motionless, as though they'd been frozen into dark blue ice within a single heartbeat. Their smooth valleys and sharp ridges might as well have been carved from stone.

Beside him, three nearly transparent drops of water hovered in midair, one above the next, frozen where they had been dripping from the lowest curve of a rope tied around the mainmast's crossbeam.

Jiam's boots thumped sharply on the ship's deck in the disquieting stillness as he stepped beside Tolinom. "Move with caution," the sorcerer warned, loudly enough that the sailor would be able to hear him as well while he made his way around his motionless comrades to stand next to the Oncan and sorcerer. Jiam reached down and with one finger tapped the pointed tail of the topmost water drop where it levitated below the coiled rope, then held his hand up to display the blood beading on his fingertip. He locked eyes with Tolinom pointedly, then showed the sailor his bleeding finger. Looking back toward the prow where he'd just walked from, then up at the motionless sails above them, which might have flung razor-tailed water drops to any corner of the ship, the crewman blanched visibly, his sun darkened face turning a much paler shade of brown.

"Is this more of that dragon's magic?" the sailor asked, glancing around himself for anything else that might have suddenly become dangerous in its immovability. Jiam just shook his head, making his way to the left side of the ship and staring out over the chiseled waves. "So this is your doing?"

"No," Jiam answered curtly.

"Then who--" Tolinom began, but the sorcerer cut him off by holding his hand up in a gesture asking for patience while tilting his head as though once again listening to a voice only he could hear.

"My name is not important," Jiam said to the empty air after a second or two of complete silence, confusing Tolinom until the Oncan realized the sorcerer was addressing someone else again. "I ask that you admit me, but you must know that my request is only a courtesy. I have already bypassed Gotrala's watcher, and will do so to you, as well, if I must." He paused and closed his eyes, listening to some silent response. "Wait. Those with me haven't given their consent. I didn't know you would be sending others when I set the bypass." The sorcerer frowned, and Tolinom shared a nervous glance with the sailor who had also remained unaffected by whatever spell had been cast on everything and everyone around them. "Very well," Jiam said into the silence. "I will ask in our Watcher's place."

Jiam turned away from the ocean with a tired sigh, looking both Tolinom and the sailor in the eye, one after the other. "I'm sorry. I didn't expect anyone else to become so deeply tangled in this mess." Tolinom opened his mouth to ask a question, but Jiam just held his hand out again to silence him. "As you can see, time has stopped moving around us. While time has been at a standstill, though, all three of us have moved from the places we stood when it first stopped. Soon, time will begin flowing again, and when it does, our bodies will return to where they were before this spell was initiated. The change in position will be immediate, without transition, so sudden that the change in our bodies' locations will leave our souls behind."

"What?" Tolinom and the sailor exclaimed at the same time.

"In all practical terms," Jiam said in the emotionless, pragmatic tone of a healer telling a patient that he would not recover from his illness, "we are going to die."

"But all we have to do is get back to the places we were standing before the spell was cast, right?" the sailor asked, and turned to do just that, returning to the foremast without concern for any lethal drops of water that might be hovering in his path. Unable to think of any better option, Tolinom crossed in front of Jiam to stand beside Dola again, but for the life of him, he couldn't remember exactly how he'd been standing before time had stopped and knocked him off balance. He was pretty certain his eyes hadn't been this wide before, though.

"You can't hope to match your earlier positions precisely," Jiam said. "Try if you like. I can't be sure it won't work, but--" The sorcerer shook his head sharply, as if to discourage a mosquito buzzing in his ear. "Not yet," he said, staring at the deck in front of him. "Give them a chance to give their consent."

"Give our consent to what?" Tolinom cried, driven past the limits of his mental and emotional endurance.

"Give your consent to let your souls be moved to different vessels." The sorcerer was talking in a rush, then, clearly in a hurry. "He won't be able to move your souls back to your own bodies..."

"Why not?" the sailor and Tolinom both shouted.

"It would take too long to explain. Just--" The sorcerer's free hand rose to his temple, while his dagger fell from suddenly limp fingers and stabbed into the deck with a solid thunk. "No," he whispered urgently. "Not yet!"

It happened just like the old man had said. One moment Tolinom was watching the sorcerer, his heart pounding with growing horror, trying to brace himself for an impact that he could neither see nor hear coming. The next, he was lost in sightless, soundless, sensationless emptiness.

There was no transition.

The one thought that was able to rise through his consciousness before the emptiness overwhelmed him was an inward wail of how much he didn't want to die.