"If… if I could only untie these bonds," gasped Caramon, water sloshing into his mouth when he opened it to talk. "You might have a better chance alone."

"I!" declared Sturm, shocked. "I'd never abandon you! It would be dishonorable."

"Anyway," acknowledged Caramon, casting a fleeting glance at Sturm, "I can't budge them, so I guess we're stuck with each other."

A silence grew between them for several minutes. "The mast is a curse," said Sturm at last, his voice grim. "It keeps us afloat, but just barely… just enough to torture us. Drowning would be preferable." He paused, glancing away. "There! There they are again!"

A pair of aquatic predators had been circling them for a day. Four round, blackened eyes set in a massive forehead poked out of the water now and again, when one of the creatures surfaced to gulp some air. The helpless companions could see the creature's thick, knobby hides and webbed claws. They could also glimpse powerful maws lined with rows of triangular teeth. Although the creatures were huge, broad of back, and at least eight feet in length, they had kept a respectful distance for a day now, circling for hours, diving underwater for long intervals and then returning to circle and watch.

"Vodyanoi… cousins of the umber hulk," rasped Caramon. "I've heard tales that they existed in deep waters. Why don't they attack?"

"Vodyanoi are cunning," said Sturm in a bare whisper, "but they're are also cowardly. This must be a mated pair. You can bet if they were with a pack, we'd be dead by now. But they know that we're tiring. It won't be long now. All they have to do is wait. If s much simpler than fighting."

Summoning all his strength, Sturm kicked out in the direction of the bulky sea animals. The two vodyanoi opened their huge jaws, let out piercing screeches and dove under the water.

"Don't worry," murmured Sturm, closing his eyes momentarily. "They'll be back."

Sturm didn't think he and Caramon would make it through the day. His stomach felt poisoned, on fire. His legs hung lifelessly, mere dead weight. Once or twice he looked over and saw Caramon, almost asleep, his chin balanced precariously on the bobbing mast. Sturm tried to warn his friend to stay alert, but his parched mouth couldn't form the words.

A shadow flickered across the water in front of Sturm. Looking up, he thought he saw a black dot circling above in the hazy sky, but he couldn't be sure. He thought he had seen that black shape before, too… yesterday? What was it? Another predator, like the vodyanoi, he guessed. This one from the heavens, waiting for them to die.

There it was again, the cawing that he thought he'd heard before. It seemed to come from the black dot. Was it a giant bird, then, taunting him and Caramon?

Abruptly something plopped in the water almost directly in front of him. It was square, grooved, and several inches thick, a kind of thick, flat bread, floating in the water very near the Solamnic.

Sturm reached out and caught it in his teeth. It was as hard as wood, but it wasn't wood. It was a thick slab of bread. Hungrily he bit down on it, digging his shoulder into Caramon.

The big warrior stirred, easing his eyes open. Sturm let half the bread fall back into the water, nudging it toward Caramon. Caramon had enough wits left to seize it in his teeth, devouring it in several gulps.

The caw sounded again, more distant this time. Caramon and Sturm looked up into the sky, squinting, barely able to see the black speck as it arced over them and vanished from sight.

The thick, hard bread was no substitute for Otik's spicy potatoes, but in their present circumstances, it tasted almost as good.

The warmth of the seawater lulled them. The torpid haze drained their energy. The monotony of the waves drowned their senses.

Trancelike, they drifted aimlessly.

Sturm dreamed of his father and wondered what had become of brave, doomed Angriff Brightblade. One day he would find him and know the answer. For now, the clues were few and far between, like stepping-stones scattered across an endless pond. Whenever Sturm began to step on one of the stones, it turned into a lily pad, and he sank to the bottom.

Caramon dreamed of a warm inn and a comely wench.

Neither of them noticed that the haze had begun to lift, and that the water was losing its muddy brown color.

The kender paced the perimeter of his stone cell in an underground annex of the palace. Tasslehoff Burrfoot seemed to be the only prisoner in this part of the building. Dogz had told him that he was a special prisoner of the minotaur king. This made Tas proud, even if it meant that he was in for some very special torture and inquisition.

Dogz did not administer the torturing. Once a day, he brought what little gruel the minotaurs permitted Tas to eat. It was disgusting stuff, even to Tas, who like most kender was open-minded about what he ate.

The one in charge, Cleef-Eth, did not administer the torture, either. It was he who asked the questions between the torturings.

Cleef-Eth demanded to know why Tasslehoff had bought the crushed jalopwort from the minotaur herbalist, Argotz. Cleef-Eth now possessed the crushed jalopwort, as well as the contents of the rest of Tas's pouches, but it appeared what he really wanted to know was why the kender had sought the rare ingredient in the first place.

Tas might have answered if he had happened to know the answer, but only Raistlin knew. In general, the kender always tried to be courteous and helpful. But Tas knew that Argotz had been murdered and that after murdering him, the foul-smelling minotaurs had come after him and Caramon and Sturm and somehow conjured up a magic storm-he must remember to ask Raistlin about the mechanics of the magic storm-which had transported them all to the far eastern rim of the Blood Sea.

So Tas didn't answer the question, and the minotaurs had been torturing him for days now.

Poor dumb, ugly, squalid cowheads. They needed a lot of help with their torture techniques. From Tas's point of view, the minotaur torture masters were pretty confused about the question of how much to hurt him in order to make him tell them what he knew, without hurting him too much or killing him or incapacitating him. If they killed Tas or incapacitated him without extracting the necessary information, somebody called the Nightmaster would be very upset.

"Be careful, you fools!" Cleef-Eth mentioned several times during the torture process. "The Nightmaster has given strict instructions that the kender must be kept alive until he talks!"

That meant they couldn't cut out his tongue-which was too bad, Tas reflected, because that was quite effective as a torture tool.

After the torture masters had spent a couple of days punching and kicking him without much result, except for the bruises and the blood, the kender tried to help out Cleef-Eth and his lieutenants with more imaginative suggestions.

"Why not hang me up somewhere by my topknot?" advised Tas.

Cleef-Eth thought that was a good idea, so for an entire day and night, during which he didn't get much sleep, Tas hung off the ground from a hook embedded in the ceiling, dangling from his topknot. His face turned beet red, and he nearly strangled. Tas had to admit that it really hurt. He congratulated Cleef-Eth on his excellent torture, but it didn't produce what the minotaurs wanted to know.

"Cut off my topknot so that I am shamed," suggested Tas, improvising. "A kender without long hair is a social leper, sort of like a cowhead without horns."

Cleef-Eth thought that was worth a try, too, so the minotaur torturers snipped Tas's topknot right down to his pate. Tasslehoff was extremely ashamed-for about five minutes. After that, he realized the only people who were going to see his shorn topknot anyway were these smelly minotaurs. He also decided the effect was not entirely unhandsome, and perhaps he ought to cut off his topknot more often. All the same, polite to the core, he congratulated the minotaurs on their torturing ability and their willingness to try new techniques.