"Yer eyes've improved in the sunlight," Bruenor remarked.
"Credit Deudermont," Catti-brie explained.
"My eyes," Drizzt added, "and my perceptions of intent."
"What're ye babbling about?" Bruenor asked, but the ranger held up his hand, motioning for silence. He stood staring intently at the distant ship whose sails now appeared to the other three as tiny black dots, barely above the horizon.
"Go and tell Captain Vaines to turn us to the west," Drizzt instructed Regis.
The halfling stood staring for just a moment, then rushed back to find Vaines. Just a minute or so later the friends felt the pull as Quester leaned and turned her prow to the left.
"Ye're just making the trip longer," Bruenor started to complain, but again Drizzt held up his hand.
"She is turning with us, keeping her course to intercept," the drow explained.
"Pirates?" Catti-brie asked, a question echoed by Captain Vaines as he moved up to join the others.
"They are not in trouble, for they cut the water as swiftly as we, perhaps even more so," Drizzt reasoned. "Nor are they a ship of a king's fleet, for they fly no standard, and we are too far out for any coastal patrollers."
"Pirates," Captain Vaines spat distastefully.
"How can ye know all that?" an unconvinced Bruenor demanded.
"Comes from hunting 'em," Catti-brie explained. "And we've hunted more than our share."
"So I heard in Waterdeep," said Vaines, which was why he had agreed to take them aboard for a swift run to Baldur's Gate in the first place. Normally a woman, a dwarf, and a halfling would find no easy-and surely no cheap-passage out of Waterdeep Harbor when accompanied by a dark elf, but among the honest sailors of Waterdeep the names Drizzt Do'Urden and Catti-brie rang out as sweet music.
The approaching ship showed bigger on the horizon now, but it was still too small for any detailed images-except to Drizzt, and to Captain Vaines and the man in the crow's nest, both holding rare and expensive spyglasses. The captain put his to his eye now and recognized the telltale triangular sails. "She's a schooner," he said. "And a light one. She cannot hold more than twenty or so and is no match for us."
Catti-brie considered the words carefully. Quester was a caravel, and a large one at that. She held three strong banks of sails and had a front end long and tapered to aid in her run, but she carried a pair of ballistae, and had thick and strong sides. A slender schooner did not seem much of a match for Quester, to be sure, but how many pirates had said the same about another schooner, Deudermont's Sea Sprite, only to wind up fast filling with sea water?
"Back to the south with us!" the captain called, and Quester creaked and leaned to the right. Soon enough, the approaching schooner corrected her course to maintain her intercepting route.
'Too far to the north," Vaines remarked, striking a pensive pose, one hand coming up to stroke the gray hairs of his beard. "Pirates should not be this far north and should not deign to approach us."
The others, particularly Drizzt and Catti-brie, understood his trepidation. Concerning brute force at least, the schooner and her crew of twenty, perhaps thirty, would seem no match for the sixty of Vaines's crew. But such odds could often be overcome at sea by use of a single wizard, Catti-brie and Drizzt both knew. They had seen Sea Sprite's wizard, a powerful invoker named Robillard, take down more than one ship single-handedly long before conventional weapons had even been used.
"Shouldn't and aren't ain't the same word," Bruenor remarked dryly. "I'm not knowing if they're pirates or not, but they're coming, to be sure."
Vaines nodded and moved back to the wheel with his navigator.
"I'll get me bow and go up to the nest," Catti-brie offered.
"Pick your shots well," Drizzt replied. "Likely there is one, or maybe a couple, who are guiding this ship. If you can find them and down them, the rest might flee."
"Is that the way of pirates?" Regis asked, seeming more than a little confused. "If they even are pirates?"
"That is the way of a lesser ship coming after us because of the crystal shard," Drizzt replied, and then the other two caught on.
"Ye're thinking the damned thing's calling them?" Bruenor asked.
"Pirates take few chances," Drizzt explained. "A light schooner coming after Quester is taking a great chance."
"Unless they got wizards," Bruenor reasoned, for he, too, had understood Captain Vaines's concerns.