Whisper of Waves by Philip Athans

females with spells, was that he knew he’d lose a few in the first tenday or so. The firedrakes would eat one or two, then the older blacks would take as many as a dozen of the runts. Blood would fill the room long after the last egg hatched.
    Having run out of food for the newborns, Marek knew he had only one recourse and that was to accelerate that natural process as well.
    The black firedrake he pulled out of its egg was heavy, and it looked at the Red Wizard with a dangerous gleam in its eye, so Marek knew that one would live. He cast about him, eggs pressing in on all sides, and scooped up a handful of the slimy yellow tissue that wrapped the growing reptiles inside their shells. He pressed the handful of slime into the newborn’s mouth and it took the protein in hungrily. As Marek searched the floor around him for a more substantial meal, he instructed the unseen servants to do the same. All around him handfuls of yolk sacs were offered up by invisible hands to eagerly snapping jaws.
    The adult female drakes, their red scales shining with the vile-smelling moisture that filled the air, hissed and snapped from the periphery. The smell was starting to excite them and was having the same effect on their black offspring.
    Marek finally found what he was looking for and quickly rattled off a simple spell that sent bolts of blue-violet energy ripping into the still-soft scales of a smallish newborn, one he thought looked weak enough to do without. The spell killed the black firedrake, and Marek dragged it to the creature he’d just delivered. Four others of the stronger newborns fell on their slain sister and fought over every last strip of bloody flesh.
    The same began to happen all over the chamber and Marek, for the first time in a while, felt the icy tendrils of fear tickling at the edges of his consciousness. It wasn’t a feeling he relished.
    “Insithryllax____” he said, looking up at the dragon
    and at the same time calling to mind a spell.
    “Go,” the dragon said. “I will settle things, but you’ll lose more than I know you’re hoping to.”
    Marek looked around at the hellish birthing chamber, the older black and adult red firedrakes were moving in
    slowly, but he could see in the corded muscles of their powerful legs the inevitability of dozens and dozens of feral pounces.
    “This won’t do,” the Red Wizard said, frustration holding the fear at bay at least for the moment.
    “It’s too crowded in here,” the great black rumbled.
    Marek nodded, looked Insithryllax in the eye, and said, “I’ll send for you when I’ve found a bigger lair.”
    The dragon nodded and Marek cast a spell that got him out of there half a heartbeat before all hell broke loose.
    19_
    19 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR) First Quarter, Innarlith
    In what was left of his pain-addled mind, Fharaud made a list of things he had lost:
    Everwind.
    The ship was utterly destroyed. Hardly any two planks were still nailed together when the Cormyrean ship that had been waiting for them in the Vilhon Reach dragged the few bodies, and even fewer survivors, from the unforgiving sea.
    Fharaud, or so he was told tendays later when he first regained consciousness, had been “lucky”—that’s how the priest of Waukeen in Arrabar had put it: lucky—in that he had been wrapped in ropes that remained tied to a larger piece of wreckage and so had been dragged up and out of the water. They’d found him lashed to his makeshift raft and at first thought he was dead, so grievous were his wounds and so shallow his breathing.
    The Cormyreans had dropped the survivors in Arrabar and buried the dead at sea. Ayesunder Truesilver, a Cormyrean naval officer of some note, had been aboard the ship that Everwind was supposed to have met. He’d written
    a short letter and tucked it into one of Fharaud’s pockets. When he regained some sense in the temple of the Merchant’s Friend one of the acolytes had read it aloud to him:
    Master