Laaqueel stopped in front of him and waited.

Only running lanterns glowed on board the pentekonter, enough to obey the Waterdhavian harbor rules. Little of the deck was occupied, but the sailors were more of the wererats Iakhovas had involved in the raid.

The weak light traced patterns across Iakhovas's face. He would have been handsome by human standards, Laaqueel knew, even with the scars that tracked his features. No matter what magic he'd worked over the past fifteen years to rebuild himself, he hadn't been able to remove those scars. He'd grown a short beard and mustache that covered some of them. A sea-green patch that matched his cloak covered his empty eye socket. Even his hair had grown, filling in the patchy areas and dropping past his shoulders now, turned coal black.

"How may I aid you, exalted one?" she asked.

"Why, little malenti, I merely wanted you to join me at the beginning of our triumph over the surface dwellers," he stated. He shifted, lithe as a dancer on his feet in spite of the moving deck. "You have your own desires for power, though it's remained somewhat elusive for you in spite of the fact I've raised your station in life and among your own people. I've recognized you for your worth though they didn't. For all of your years of support, you deserve that." He waved a hand at the port city, then clasped it into a fist. "I would offer you a kingdom, little malenti, if I ever cared enough to share."

Laaqueel knew him well enough to know that was the real reason. Iakhovas wanted an audience for his conquest-an audience who knew all of the truths, or at least knew more of the truths than the sahuagin tribes who'd listened to him did. He loved the complexities of his own plotting, and the layers of subterfuge he manipulated seemingly so easily, loved the way his whispering voice seemed to have a hypnotic effect on those who listened. He had the power to advance his ideas and make others believe they'd thought of them.

"Gaze upon Waterdeep, little malenti, which the surface dwellers descry and proclaim as the crown jewel of all Faerun," Iakhovas said. "I have been told that people journey to this place, expecting to enjoy pleasures they don't have at home, and feel safe and secure in their rented beds." He smiled, and the expression was filled with evil. "Ah, but tonight, tonight we strip that from them, never more to return, as we shatter the spine of her navy."

The Waterdhavian Naval Harbor lay farther to the north, managing two water gates of its own. The navy was one of the chief concerns the malenti had about the night's raid. The Waterdhavian Navy had always defended the shores of the city well, and of course there were the mermen.

"We've not gotten the bulk of our forces past the harbor gate yet," she reminded.

Despite the power he held over her and the potential he offered, she couldn't always simply agree with him. He was no true sahuagin, even though the others believed he was. In the intervening years, she'd come to understand why the sahuagin of her own tribe hadn't readily accepted her even after Baron Huaanton had named her as a protected ward after her birth. Her own exterior was an accident of birth. Iakhovas only masqueraded as a sahuagin. In her heart, she was sahuagin.

She'd helped him manage that masquerade only through coercion, and even now it didn't set well with her. After she'd found him, he'd made her spend two years with him in the Veemeeros where she'd found him, teaching him about Faerun. Everything seemed new to him, but he was careful not to reveal anything about his own origins. Even Laaqueel's spy training hadn't helped her gather information about him.

Once they'd returned to her village, he'd used his powers to turn himself into a sahuagin hatchling, and she'd introduced him into a hatchling area. He'd maintained his own development in the village, but had kept contact with Laaqueel. She had named him in the brief ceremony after the surviving hatchlings were introduced into the tribe, giving him his own name at his request, though it wasn't a sahuagin name. Everyone in the village had believed it was because she was malenti, wanting to flaunt her difference, but Baron Huaanton had allowed the name to stand.

Now, though, Baron Huaanton was King Huaanton and Iakhovas, though only age thirteen in the sahuagin years, was a prince. Normally it took almost three hundred years to attain such a rank by serving the community and taking advantage of events that transpired, but he had used his magic and curried favor with Huaanton by maneuvering a duel with Huaanton's senior and killing the last prince in battle. Unable to take the position himself because of the sahuagin code regarding such advances, Huaanton had become prince. Huaanton had also realized how dangerous Iakhovas was for the first time and had stood behind Iakhovas's bid for the baronial vacancy. None of the other chieftains had tried to challenge his right to do that. When Huaanton had slain the last king and taken over the position, he'd promoted Iakhovas again. Laaqueel had never discovered if it was because Huaanton feared Iakhovas, or if the sorcerer had helped place Huaanton on the throne.

"Oh, little malenti, do you have such a small faith?" he asked.

"No," she admitted, choosing not to react to the insult. Her faith resided where it always had: with Sekolah. She had received no sign that she wasn't doing exactly as the Great Shark wanted her to, "but the forces arrayed against us are formidable."

He turned and gazed again out across the harbor. "Those forces are only formidable when pitted against a lesser opponent. Make no mistake, little malenti, I'm not that and never have been." He smiled, oozing confidence. "No one these days has ever seen anything like me. Even in my own day, no one was like me."

"But to take Waterdeep…" Laaqueel said.

"Stand corrected, little malenti, we're not taking Waterdeep," Iakhovas said. "We're presenting the surface world their options, throwing down the gauntlet so to speak. The surface dwellers need to be put on notice that they're living near these waters only on my sufferance. I will take back that which is rightfully mine no matter how many of them have to perish." He touched the patch covering his empty socket unconsciously. "I will be made whole again, and I will reclaim my proper station as the oceans' master."

"If we can't take the city, why send all these sahuagin to their deaths?" she asked.

"More humans will die this night than sahuagin," he told her. "You have my promise on that."

The way that he always referred to the humans as their species, and a despised one at that, let Laaqueel know he didn't consider himself one of them. For awhile she'd thought he might be of elven blood, but he had the gills and webbed hands and feet of a sea elf and used magic as easily as a sahuagin spilled blood. The accursed sea elves knew no magic except for that granted to their priests and priestesses.

He offered no clue as to what he truly was.

His power of illusion was incredible, steeping him in layers of deceit and trickery. She wasn't certain if she'd ever seen the true being she knew as Iakhovas. The sahuagin recognized him as a fellow being, and the wererats and other humanoids saw him as one of their own, even when they were all standing in the same place, and no one questioned it.

"Why should any sahuagin die if it's not necessary?" she asked.

"Because, little malenti, I have need of their deaths, and they must prove their fealty to me if I'm to champion their cause in this world." Iakhovas surveyed the nearing warning lights of Waterdeep Harbor. Anchored buoys clanged in the distance near Deepwater Isle, warning of the shallows there. "Sacrifices must be made. As I've learned, this is the last day in Ches, a time of holidays in Deepwater."

Laaqueel had learned that even as Iakhovas had. The Waterdhavians called the festival Fleetswake. During that time the mariners and the city gave homage to Umberlee, the dread sea goddess. Umberlee's Cache lay in the belly of the sloping bowl of Deepwater Harbor on the other side of Darkwater Isle. In years past, offerings to Umber-lee had been dropped on the harbor floor, then mermaid shamans had broken that floor open to the great cavern system below that no one had ever mapped out. Every now and again, the malenti spotted the magical beam of the lighthouse near Umberlee's Cache skate below the dark waters ahead of them. It was used to guide the merfolk that were part of Waterdeep's defense hierarchy.