Twilight of Kerberos: Wrath of Kerberos

by Jonathan Oliver

  “I take no delight in your suffering, Keldren,” Silus said. “We have returned because we need that song ship.”

  “I don’t understand. Are we going to sail through time?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  IN THE WORLD’S Ridge Mountains they had made a pyre for Emuel’s body, laying him beside the corpse of the dragon. Katya had enfolded the boy in one of the creature’s wings; Silus had been about to ask her why, but the look she gave him halted the question before it could be formed. It had taken them many hours to collect enough wood for the blaze – little grew this high above the world – yet Silus had endured the search in silence, a penance that was not nearly enough to pay for what he had done. When the wood was ignited and smoke began to shroud Emuel’s body, he had wished that Bestion was still with them. The priest would have known what to say, would have sent Emuel’s spirit into the hereafter with a few suitable words. As it was, no one came forward to say a eulogy for the boy. All stood in silence as he burned. At one point the wood beneath Emuel shifted, sending a sheet of lilac flame high above the pyre, and, for a moment, the hiss of escaping gas sounded like a voice raised in song.

  Later, as they gathered around the heat of the embers – wrapped in their cloaks, breaths misting before them – Silus told them of his plan.

  “When we return, we’re going to want to ensure that we’re found by the Final Faith as quickly as possible.”

  “The Final Faith! Are you out of your mind?” Katya said.

  “Hear me out,” Silus said, as more voices rose in protest. “The peninsula must be united against Hel’ss, and who holds the balance of power on Twilight, who has the largest army on the peninsula? The sooner we can make Katherine Makennon aware of the true nature of Kerberos and the threat Hel’ss poses, the sooner we will be entrusted to aid in the battle.”

  “Okay, but how are we going to attract the attention of the Faith?” Kelos said.

  “We make sure we return in style. We steal a ship. More specifically, we steal a song ship. We know that Makennon has been trying to recover the Llothriall, so we give it to her. Or, at least, something that looks like it. If we return in a song ship and skirt the western coast of the peninsula, the Faith will be on us in seconds.”

  And so they had returned to Da’Rea and there boarded the last intact song ship in the bay.

  The wind took the sails and the ship began to move out of the harbour and, despite the smoke rising over the city behind them and the detritus that cluttered the surface of the water, Silus felt his spirits rise. The sea had always been a balm for his suffering, the salt spray and the pitch and yaw of the waves provided him with something very like comfort. When this was all over, he and Katya would find a quiet little coastal village and there they would take up the life they had been so brutally torn from. They would have more children, and he and Zac would teach them the fisherman’s trade. Silus could almost smell the sharp odour of a fresh catch and hear the rapid tattoo of fish tails flapping on boards.

  When he turned to see Katya and Zac, sitting on a thick coil of rope by the mainmast, the smile on his face died. His son was huddled into his wife’s arms, looking at Silus as though he didn’t recognise his father. No, there would be no going back to their old life. They had all travelled too far from each other for that to ever be a possibility. When this was all over, they would part ways and the best that Silus could hope for was that his son would not grow up to hate him.

  Silus heard a snatch of Keldren’s song, as the hatch to below opened and Dunsany and Kelos climbed onto deck. Kelos had discarded his robe, it having become all but shredded in the battle with the dragon. His bare arms were criss-crossed with many scars, some of them still weeping, and his face was a patchwork of bruises. In his hands he held a crystal decanter filled with a thick amber fluid.

  “Used to contain brandy,” the mage said, gesturing with the vessel. “Rather good brandy as it turns out. Don’t worry, I’m sure any residue won’t have diminished the potency of the dragon’s blood.”

  “And you’re sure the spell will work this time?” Silus said. “I don’t want us to be stranded millions of years from now.”

  “This time, without a doubt, the spell will work. Keldren has helped me prepare and we have gone through the nuances of the spell several times just to be sure. No casting on the fly this time. I’ll get us all home, don’t you worry.”

  “Okay, Kelos. Let’s get this over with.”

  Silus went to stand at the prow. Even with the strong wind gusting over the ship’s rail, he could smell the heavy incense of magic – cinnamon and burned stone – as Kelos unstoppered the decanter. The mage first poured the dragon’s blood over his hands, and used the remaining contents of the vessel to paint various symbols onto the deck. He muttered to himself as he inscribed each character, a look of intense concentration on his face. Dunsany knelt beside him, holding a book open before his friend, which Kelos consulted from time to time as he laid down the arcane script of the spell. When the last drop of blood had been used, he got back to his feet.

  “Technically, you know, this is necromancy,” Kelos said to no one in particular. “Not my field at all. But Keldren has briefed me on the ins-and-outs of it, and it really isn’t that much more complicated than the practise of elemental magic. Of course, one thing that any act of necromancy requires, to be effective, is a death.” Kelos glanced at his feet, beside which sat a wicker cage that occasionally shook and emitted a cluck. “Necromancers generally prefer to work with human death, or deaths. But, really, the nature of the death isn’t important. Necromancers are just naturally attracted to melodrama, preferring a human death – or twenty – to empower their spells. Fortunately, I am not as enamoured of such ostentatious gestures.” Kelos paused. “Dunsany, I know exactly what look you are giving me, and I will ask you to stop it now. Thank you.

  “Anyway, for this act of sorcery, the death in question will be given by nothing more significant than this chicken.” Kelos produced the bird from the wicker basket and held it against his chest. “And we need to do nothing more dramatic than this.” With a twist of his right hand, he broke the chicken’s neck. Kelos then produced a dagger and slit the creature’s throat, sprinkling its blood liberally over the symbols on the deck.

  “No, my friends. The death is not the dramatic part of this spell at all. This, however, you will find far more impressive.” Dunsany handed Kelos the book he had been holding. “I just hope my pronunciation is accurate. Otherwise, this could go horribly wrong.”

  The mage licked his index finger, turned a page and then cleared his throat and began to read.

  As he announced each incomprehensible word, the symbols painted onto the deck began to burn with an intense light. Silus closed his eyes against the glare, only to find the afterimage of one of the characters floating in the darkness behind his eyelids. He turned away and opened his eyes, and saw the symbol hanging in the air just beyond the prow of the ship. For a moment, he was afraid that it had been permanently seared into his retinas, but when it began to grow and dark tendrils flowed from it to caress the ship, he realised that it was all part of Kelos’s spell.

  “And so the door is written onto the very fabric of the universe,” Kelos said, closing the book and handing it back to Dunsany. “Now, all we have to do is open it.”

  Kelos gestured and the sky beyond the prow of the ship shattered, falling like a cascade of stained glass. Before them now was darkness, unrelieved by any light. A warm wind breathed from the void, rippling the sails and sending the ship into a gentle roll. Already the figurehead had been swallowed by this unmitigated night and Silus was afraid that they were all about to be plunged into oblivion when a gust of freezing cold wind threw his hair into his eyes and the deck pitched violently beneath his feet. This was a feeling he knew well. These waves that now towered about them were like old friends; indeed, just beyond them, to the north-west, Silus could see the tumult of the Storm Wall – the perpetual maelstrom tha
t raged a handful of miles from the peninsula’s coast – and he knew then that they were finally home.

  He ran across the deck to Dunsany. “Hand me your glass,” he said, before taking the telescope and training it on the horizon.

  Just visible to the east was the dense huddle of Malmkrug, clinging to the cliffs that surrounded it. But something was wrong: whole sections of the city had been demolished or razed by fire; the ancient breakwaters that stood guard before the harbour had been broken and now protruded from the sea like the shattered tusks of a beached leviathan. As Silus watched, a vast plume of emerald smoke rose from the centre of the city, followed, moments later, by a thunderclap.

  “That was sorcery,” Kelos said, coming to stand beside him. “What in the name of all the gods is going on?”

  Silus increased the magnification on the telescope and he could now see the people crowding the city’s streets. Most were fleeing the destruction taking place all around them, hurrying inland now that a maelstrom of fire had begun to consume the harbour, but others were fighting. However, although the conflict was confined to the narrow alleys and thoroughfares of Malmkrug, this was no guerrilla assault. Silus recognised the livery of the Pontaine military and the distinctive red and blue stripes of the Vos National Army. And the battle was not confined to this one coastal settlement, for as Silus scanned along the peninsula, wherever he looked he could see flames and the clash of armies. It would seem that, just as had happened so many times in the past, the peninsula had gone to war, Vos and Pontaine once more fighting for dominance of Twilight.

  “Silus,” Kelos said. “Look.”

  Silus took the telescope away from his right eye, to see Kelos pointing to the sky, his own eyes raised. He looked up.

  A new scarlet moon hung beside the vast sphere of Kerberos. It was about one-fifth the size of the azure deity and its surface was pitted and scarred, crowded with craters that resembled nothing so much as vast pools of blood. A hazy corona partly shrouded the sphere and from this, reaching towards Kerberos, snaked a host of thin red pseudopods. Where they touched the upper atmosphere of the god, bolts of lightning lanced down into the gas giant. Silus felt each strike as a pain, deep in his guts.

  “That would be Hel’ss?” he said to Kelos.

  The mage nodded, his face pale.

  “Are we already too late?”

  To this Kelos had no answer. Something seemed to have caught his attention to the east.

  A galleon was heading towards them, its sails bearing the crossed circle of the Final Faith.

  “Well, at least something is going as planned,” Silus said. “Katya and Zac, get below. There may be violence, and I don’t want you on deck if that happens. Dunsany, tell Keldren to bring the ship to a halt.”

  Moments after Dunsany went below, the song came to an end and the sails fell limp, although a strong wind still howled in from the west.

  “I must admit, I didn’t think to see the Faith quite so soon,” Silus said.

  “They’ll have had mages scrying this area of the coast round the clock,” Kelos said, “ready to give the order to launch at the first sight of the Llothriall.”

  “I just hope that Makennon is so delighted to have her ship back that she forgoes the torture,” Dunsany said, climbing back on deck, sword in hand.

  When the galleon pulled in alongside, it was not the soldiers of the Final Faith that greeted them, but a ragtag crew of men and women, some dressed in leather cuirasses and wielding shields and swords, others appearing to be nothing more than civilians along for the ride.

  A heavily bearded man, wearing a mismatched uniform – the helm of a commander in the Swords of Dawn and a tabard clearly filched from a soldier of the Pontaine army – leapt between the ships and thudded onto the deck in front of Silus.

  “No civilian vessels are to be sailed in these waters. We’re commandeering this ship.”

  “Hang on a moment,” Silus said, “you’re not Final Faith.”

  The men on the deck of the Faith ship laughed at this.

  The bearded man grunted and spat at Silus’s feet. “We are now.”

  “But what’s happened to the soldiers of the Faith? Why are a bunch of mercenaries crewing one of their vessels?”

  “There’s been something of a change of management, sunshine. The Red Chapter is now in charge. So, are you going to do the decent thing, climb over the side and attempt the swim back to shore, or are we going to take this ship by force?”

  In reply, Silus unsheathed his sword and drove the point into the mercenary’s right eye and through into his brain. There was a stunned silence from the Faith ship as the bearded man slid from Silus’s blade and fell to the deck, before the hiss of unsheathed weapons filled the air and bodies hurled themselves across the gap between vessels.

  The odds were hardly stacked in their favour – there were at least twenty mercenaries and only three of them – but Silus and Dunsany were skilled swordsmen and Kelos was a master of elemental magic, and the element he was most adept with was the one which currently surrounded them.

  As Dunsany and Silus stood back to back, blades dancing amongst the mercenaries, occasionally lunging out to strike one of them dead, Kelos withdrew to a quiet part of the deck, closed his eyes and began to mutter to himself, weaving complex patterns with his hands.

  When he opened his eyes, five mercenaries dropped their weapons and clutched at their throats, their faces turning purple as a flood of brackish seawater issued from their mouths. Another gesture from the mage brought four columns of water bursting up from the sea to either side of the ship. They stood for a moment, swaying like a snake caught by the music of a charmer’s flute, before they lunged at the deck, snatching up men and women and throwing them far from the ship. Kelos was still raising water elementals when he realised that the remaining mercenaries had all been accounted for, their blood soaking the deck around the feet of Dunsany and Silus.

  “Well, that was unexpected,” Dunsany said. “Something must have gone seriously wrong at Scholten if mercenaries are now in charge of the Final Faith.”

  “And, thus, getting to see Katherine Makennon is going to be rather trickier than we had imagined,” Kelos said. “What are we going to do?”

  “If we take their ship, we’re less likely to be stopped again. Flying the colours of the Final Faith, we should be able to follow the river Anclas all the way to Scholten,” Silus said. “There... well, we’ll just have to think of something, won’t we?”

  Keldren climbed onto the deck, his face paling when he saw the dead mercenaries.

  “What about the song ship?” Kelos said. “We can’t just leave it here.”

  “This is the brave new world that you would have me inherit?” Keldren said, taking in the chaos that had gripped the peninsula. “Gods, where have you brought me?”

  “Keldren, I’m sorry, but we don’t have much time. We have to board the mercenaries’ ship.” Silus said, attempting to guide him by the elbow.

  “No, I don’t think so. I would die out there. I will stay with the ship. Perhaps find some quiet bay to anchor her in and wait for this conflict to blow over. This is not the world I was expecting.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kelos said, though Silus didn’t entirely believe the regret in the mage’s voice. After all, the elf mage had held him against his will, conducted vile experiments on his friends. Now they no longer had any use for him, it was fitting that they should leave Keldren to fend for himself. They said their goodbyes and watched from the Final Faith ship as the song ship skirted the shore, Keldren’s song fading as it rode away on its tide of magic.

  Silus took charge of the Final Faith ship, but it was horribly unresponsive. The boom came round arthritically slowly, and the ropes and masts screamed in protest as the wind pushed against them. The ship’s wheel was badly in need of oiling and as he turned it, Silus could have sworn that he heard something break deep within the vessel. He only hoped that the craft would hold together long enough for t
hem to get to Scholten.

  Soon the jagged banks of the river Anclas rose to either side, playing host to a vast colony of gulls, whose stench and clamour rolled over them in a heady tide. When the sails fell lifeless for no apparent reason and the ship keeled to port, Silus only just managed to prevent it running aground.

  “Gods, you can tell why the people of Malmkrug never used this as a trade route,” Dunsany said, as he came to stand by Silus’s side. “The currents are lethal.”

  Silus could only nod in agreement as he struggled with the wheel.

  To the east, the sky took on a vermillion glow and he was just beginning to think that it was far too early for sunrise when, with a deafening screech, a blazing ball of scarlet energy arched overhead and impacted with the cliffs towering over their port side, sending fractures racing through the rock face. Silus pulled hard on the wheel, but whatever had broken earlier now caused the mechanism to jam, and they found themselves heading straight towards the cliffs, slowly breaking apart as they did.

  “Kelos!” Silus shouted. “A little help?”

  The mage raised his arms and cried out, and silence fell. A pearlescent light surrounded the ship. Silus watched in terror as an avalanche of boulders tumbled towards them, only to be deflected by Kelos’s magic.

  “Thank you,” Silus said, “Kelos – can you go below and see to whatever is broken? If I can’t turn the wheel we’re not going to get very far.”

  Thankfully, whatever was broken was easily repaired. Within a matter of moments, the wheel was turning again.

  Though the distance between Malmkrug and Scholten was not a considerable one, their progress was slow. Every mile was a constant battle against the fierce current and the detritus of war that crowded the river’s surface. The bodies were the easiest to deal with, as they either knocked harmlessly against the ship’s side or broke apart on the prow; the collapsed sections of riverbank, however, were another matter entirely. Several times they had to stop and sound the depths with the anchor before they could progress through a narrowed channel, and by the time they neared Scholten – its peaks just visible over the high walls of the river bank – Silus was beginning to flag, his eyes growing heavier with each passing moment.