Coming in from the east were a half dozen... large birds? Nothing should be able to fly out here, unless we were close enough for them to come out from the hidden island. Privateer opened up his spyglass.
    "Wyvern." He called the man in the nest down, and everyone readied weapons, except for those of us who more or less are weapons, by which I mean Thunderbolt.
    "Argh, laddies! We'll be having dragon-meat tonight!" the second mate yelled.
    The creatures circled above us about thirty feet out, taking stock of the wall of swords and spears waiting for them.
    I lifted a hand and murmured to myself for a moment, sending a ray of brilliant light from my palm. It singed the wyvern a bit and seemed to irritate it. Privateer aimed his special-made crossbow and fired two bolts at another of the beasts in rapid succession just as it was about to swoop; the second bolt hit it in the eye. It screamed, thrashed at the air and focused its remaining eye on the pirate captain.
    Phoenix Talon—who never does things on a small scale, unless he's being sneaky—used his Dimension Door to land on the back of one of the wyverns, wrapped his legs around the thing's neck, and hacked at its slender length with his sword, not quite severing it. The wyvern shrieked, gore spouting liberally onto the monk as it gained altitude, trying to get away from him.
    Not to be shown up, Thunderbolt targeted a fireball between two of the unwounded wyverns, catching both of them in the blast. They tumbled for a moment, badly scorched, before regaining control over their flight. Scott poured his length up the mast and lashed out at the remaining wyvern from there, staving in a couple of ribs.
    That one and the two Thunderbolt had targeted turned tail and fled east. Phoenix Talon's unwilling mount struck with its poisonous tail. He caught it in his left hand. The other two swooped on the ship, one of them going straight for Privateer, undeterred by the efforts of the crewmen to defend him. One man was struck by the bony spurs on a wing and collapsed. A claw snatched at Privateer as he swirled his cloak up to try to fend off the strike of its tail—he failed—and the jaws tore at his flesh before it swooped back out. Fortunately, his hardy constitution proved sufficient against the poison's onslaught.
    The other wyvern buffeted down a couple more men, snatched a red-shirted crewman in its claws and flew off. In midair it stung the helplessly thrashing man to death and bit him in half. He would be avenged; I touched the mummy hand and the wyvern unraveled, the mingled bodies of monster and man falling to a shared ocean grave. Privateer fired another pair of shots at his flying nemesis, but the creature was still alive.
    Phoenix Talon twirled his sword around and slammed it into the base of the thing's spine, finishing it off—sending both of them plummeting toward the sea. He then took out the Ebony Fly, climbed aboard, and flew it toward the remaining wyvern. The crew stared, dumbfounded.
    That remaining wyvern was soon a charred cinder making its way to the ocean bottom as Thunderbolt's lightning bolt struck it. The men cheered. Phoenix Talon decided not to take on all three retreating creatures himself and returned to the ship. I turned my attention to healing those crewmen who had sustained injuries; only one had been killed, and it lay beyond my skill to help him even if we were able to recover his body. What was left of it.
    Privateer tracked the wyvern in his spyglass—we were going in the same direction after all. Shortly before sunset an island appeared on the horizon, a single volcanic peak thrusting skyward, its walls almost vertical but only about a hundred feet tall. The wyvern were clearly exhausted as they reached it; they had found us at the outskirts of their range.
    The map showed one sheltered cove where The Future could anchor, which supposedly had a path leading up the side of the mountain. Naturally, we didn't trust this information worth a damn, but we did have options. One them was to wait until nightfall and give Thunderbolt my carpet and Privateer's spyglass while he put on his Goggles of Night, and Stephanie jumped aboard for a reconnaissance trip.
    "Are you sure you can trust the cat?" Talon asked. Lions might be a sacred animal to Da'an, but he doesn't trust cats otherwise.
    "I don't have any choice." She was his familiar, after all.
    He flew out from the ship, keeping well above the water, and did a circle around the island's perimeter. Stephanie crouched at the edge of the carpet looking down into the water, hissing occasionally.
    There are things in the water, she observed.
    "What kind of things?"
    Big, snaky things.
    They continued their circle; Thunderbolt marked what looked like climbable routes where the ship could drop our group off and then sail elsewhere to find harbor. Sorcerer and cat reached the cove marked on the map, which did look as if it would provide safe anchorage. It would also provide the wyverns with a mobile buffet, being completely open to aerial attack. Farther on he found another possibility, a sheltered place that looked better, with a crack in the mountain's wall at the end—a cave? It might be big enough for The Future, but there wasn't a good way up the mountainside there. Of course, we had other ways up. He drifted up to see what awaited within.
    What looked from below like jagged lumps around the top of the cliff were revealed to be five slumbering wyvern, perched gargoyle-like around the otherwise smooth rim of the caldera. None of them looked wounded, and he spotted several nests as well. Inside the ring of stone was a grassy space and then heavy forest, the ground sloping upward toward the center. The growth looked heavy enough that the wyvern would not be able to stoop upon anyone beneath the trees, which somehow failed to reassure him.
    Thunderbolt eased the carpet back over the wall. Stephanie dug her claws into his leg; two wyvern were flying overhead. One of them dove down, into the volcano, and came back up with a huge elk in its claws. It briskly stung the creature to death and carried it over to one of the nests, to share the feast with another. These looked like they might be two of the ones that had fled from the battle earlier.
    Thunderbolt decided he had seen enough, and he had also finished his circle, so he came back to report.
    One of the men seemed to be thinking hard. "Captain, while you're up there—there must be other ships that have tried to do this—there must be booty at the bottom of that cove! Argh!"
    Privateer slapped him upside the head.
    "Think about how they got there," Scott suggested.
    After some discussion of the alternatives, we decided to give the smaller cove with its possible cave a closer look. By the predawn light we could tell that the sea serpents were not in fact serpents, but dire eels. This was not a particular improvement. They didn't seem interested in The Future, swimming around it peacefully enough and occasionally bumping into it, though we had no doubt they would quickly rend any luckless body that entered the water. They did not seem interested in the cave at all. Scott went in to take a look.
    Nothing seemed to live in there. It was very dark until he cast a minor spell. It looked like it would be just big enough for the ship, though the keel was going to scrape on the entrance before it deepened a little. The place certainly hadn't been designed for this use. He checked the ceiling and under the water, still nothing, came back and reported his findings.
    It was Privateer's ship; we left the decision to him, and he decided to chance it. We would not be able to leave in a hurry, but that seemed a better risk than leaving his men exposed to the depredations of wyvern and whatever else might inhabit the place.
    There was some scraping, but the ship came through intact and dropped anchor; the cave deepened slightly and took a sharp turn to the left after the initial opening. I wondered if some ancient waterfall had carved this depression, before the gods made use of this tiny land. The men were not happy, particularly about the darkness, but they obeyed orders.
    We wondered if the wyvern might be more active in the day, and it would be better to start at night, but didn't know enough about their habits.
    "Oh, we can kill them anyway, let's just go."
    "Thank you, Phoenix Talon. Knew we could count on you to reach that conclusion," I smiled.
    We did some exploring to see if any side caves might lead into the center, but they all dead-ended after a short way. So it was the open way after all. Thunderbolt and Privateer used the carpet, and the rest of us our own means to approach the lip of the crater as quietly as possible on one of the routes where climbing would be possible later, moving in a strung out file. Privateer muttered under his breath something about Thunderbolt might as well be carrying around a flare.
    A shadow moved rapidly over the ground; a stooping wyvern had seen the carpet.
    "Now, when you incinerate it, it's still going to be plummeting at us," Privateer noted calmly.
    Thunderbolt decided to use a Magic Missile and try to drive it off, rather than go for barbecue. The wyvern screeched and changed course slightly, but continued on and caught Thunderbolt in its claws. Stephanie screeched, and the carpet wobbled at the abrupt shift of weight. Then the tail drove home its poisonous payload, sending weakness sweeping through his body. Privateer sent the carpet chasing downward after the wyvern, readying his crossbow and trying to get in position to catch Thunderbolt if the thing dropped him. It screeched again as the bolts struck home, but did not release its prey.
    "Fly Cavalry! Forward!" Talon shouted as he zoomed in on his bizarre mount, blade flashing and opening two gaping wounds on its throat. The eels swarmed below as blood spread through the water. Thunderbolt reached up and grabbed the thing's legs, ignoring the pain as its talons bit into his shoulders. Electricity flowed from his hands; its wings flapped spasmodically, and it let go.
    I swooped down to catch him, his weight almost too much for my strength, so we were both dragged down briefly in a sickening drop before I regained control and bore him toward the carpet. The wyvern spiraled down and crashed into the ground.
    Oh, that was brilliant, Stephanie remarked. Well done. You're a big idiot. She jumped onto his shoulder.
    Scott and Phoenix Talon proceeded to the volcanic lip to see if any more were coming, but the skies were clear. I neutralized the poison still in Thunderbolt's system and healed his wounds, but we were going to have to wait for the morning before I could do anything about the extensive damage he had already suffered; he was still very weak, sweating and shaking, and I resolved to keep an eye on him. We continued to the lip and climbed down into the bowl.
    Everyone else seemed to disappear into the grass. I felt very conspicuous walking toward the trees, but that's not unusual. Several wyvern flew overhead; one looked as if it had spotted me, before the fog cloud that was Scott hid me from its gaze.
    The living things we saw tended to be excessively large; rabbits the size of dogs, elk seven feet at the shoulder, and once among the trees we found the tracks of massive boar.
    "Let us hope there are no snakes or weasels on this island," Talon noted.
    "Or insects," Scott agreed.
    It is perhaps worth noting that Jarl, god of the frost giants, is fond of, well, giant things. He usually likes things colder than this, though; while anything would have seemed comfortable after a couple of weeks on the ship, if anything the island air seemed unusually warm.
    The trees were large as well, although not like the Western Wood, their tangled branches dense enough to cast the interior in darkness. Stephanie padded along and opined that she didn't really want to see the mice, given the size of the rabbits; we kept our eye out for any other predators, but there didn't seem to be any. The food chain appeared to be on the thin side. There were plants, that were eaten by the rabbits and the elk, and the rabbits and the elk, that were eaten by the boars, and the elk and boars that were eaten by the wyvern. To the best of my knowledge (and Thunderbolt's, who knows the most about these things) boars aren't usually hunting animals, but given the kill sites we found as we continued, there was little doubt that they were doing it here.
    Phoenix Talon cut slashes into trees to mark the way back. Scott drifted ahead of us to watch for boars and found a family of five, which he guided us around carefully. One of them was gnawing on a wyvern's thigh-bone. Moving stealthily and avoiding boar encounters, it took most of the day to reach the center of the island; the sun had dropped below the caldera's lip when the forest stopped at a little beach that circled a very calm lake. In the center of the lake was another island.
    Scott drifted over the water, looking down curiously. There were some large fish, he wasn't sure what kind, or if they were larger than they were supposed to be.

| Top |