"Realms of the Deep - Philip Athans.2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthologies)

at him. He'd assumed it was some new boon the sahuagin priestesses had sought
from Sekolah. Certainly, he'd survived because he was sahuagin, tougher than any
sea elf and blessed with true senses beneath his malenti skin.
Shemsen had expected to find sahuagin beyond the miasma, but there were only
sharks so wrought with blood frenzy that no malenti could hope to dominate them.
It had taken Shemsen's remaining strength to resist their call as they tore
through the sea elf survivors. He couldn't say, then or now, why he'd resisted,
except that however much Shemsen had despised his neighbors, he hadn't wanted to
be anyone's last living vision.
Exhausted from his private battle, he'd fallen to the sea floor in a stupor.
When he'd opened his eyes again the miasma was gone and he was neither alone nor
among sahuagin. A handful of villagers had survived. They were numb and aimless
with grief. Shemsen had easily made himself their leader and led them west with
the prevailing current, toward the sahuagin village he hadn't seen in decades.
He anticipated the honor that would fall around his shoulders when he, a
malenti, finished what the miasma and sharks had left undone.
Ten days later, they swam above deserted, ruined coral gardens. A year, at
least, had passed since Shemsen's kin had swum through their ancient home and
he, suddenly more alone than he'd imagined possible, did not tell his look-alike
companions what had happened. True, there had been no entwined instructions
waiting for him the previous spring, but that hadn't been unusual. In Shemsen's
centuries of spying on the sea elves, he'd often gone four years, even five or
six without contact. He'd never considered that something might be wrong.
He'd never know what happened to his kin. If there'd been survivors, none had
thought to leave him a message. Shemsen didn't think there had been sur-
vivors. Knowing what had been there, he saw the scars of violence and
destruction. Sahuagin did war against each other, for the glory of Sekolah, who
decreed that only the best, the strongest and boldest, were meant to survive,
but in none of the many tales Shemsen knew by heart did sahuagin abandon what
they'd won or lay it to waste.
It had seemed possible that both villages, sahuagin and sea elf, had fallen to
an unknown enemy, a shared enemy. A mortal mind did not want to imagine an enemy
that was shared by sahuagin and sea elves.
Shemsen hadn't embraced the sea elves that day above the ruined sahuagin
village. Neither compassion nor mourning were part of the sahuagin nature, which
was Shemsen's nature, if not his shape. Still, a sahuagin alone was nothing and
faced with a choice between nothing and sea elves, Shemsen chose the elves. He
made them his own, his sacred cause, and led them north, to fabled Waterdeep. By
the time they arrived, his loathing had been transformed into something that
approached friendship.
So he rolled over in the water and called, "And peace with you, for your pain,"
to the woman before making himself heavy in the water.
Shemsen had heard that as recently as sixteen years ago, the Cache was a
maelstrom that spewed or sucked, depending on the tide, and chewed up any ship
unfortunate enough to blunder across it. Then the merfolk had arrived in
Waterdeep. In the name of safety, their shamans had gotten rid of the maelstrom
and poked a ship-sized hole in a goddess's bedchamber.
That was the merfolk. Half human, half fish, half mad. Except they, too, were
refugees with tales of
black water and annihilation weighing their memories. Perhaps they'd known