Sorcerers' Isle

by D. P. Prior

  “The chief of every clan, and ten warriors,” Snaith said.

  “What else do you know?”

  “That I will be accompanying you.”

  Bellosh’s two bodyguards exchanged nervous glances. Halik Braw’s hand rested lightly on the pommel of his sheathed sword. They had expected more. Bellosh had expected more. They all knew Snaith was holding something back.

  The three crones had their eyes on the floor, as if there were an interesting stain on the tiles. How much had Theurig kept them informed? Did they expect Snaith to share information with them? Later, perhaps, when the chief had gone?

  “Why now?” Bellosh said. The slight whine in his voice seemed to add, “Why during my time as chief?”

  “Is it war?” Halik Braw said, then immediately clamped his lips shut at the look he received from Bellosh.

  “What did the missive from the High King say?” Snaith asked.

  “Just to be there. And no fighting among clans.”

  Snaith spread his palms. “Then that is all you need to know.” He gestured toward the open doorway to the entrance hall, and to his relief Chief Bellosh turned to leave, both guards going before him.

  “The Weyd be at your right hand,” Snaith said.

  Bellosh paused, back to Snaith, and nodded. “And also at yours. One last thing, Snaith, before I go.” He swiveled round slowly, eyes glinting with intensity.

  Snaith glanced behind at Meldred. She flinched and looked away. Caught in the act, though what act Snaith couldn’t say. He turned back to the chief; found him waiting patiently for permission to ask his question. Spineless cretin. As scared of me now as he was of Theurig. He nodded for Bellosh to go ahead.

  “Did Theurig die well?”

  “A sorcerer’s death, Chief.”

  “And you will say no more than that?”

  Snaith shook his head.

  “Then I wish you well in your new role,” Bellosh said. “It may take a little time, but the clan will accept you. Any trouble, come and see me.”

  “Likewise,” Snaith said.

  Bellosh smiled, satisfied, then swung round and followed his men.

  “Right,” Snaith said, turning his attention to the crones. He faltered. There was hardness in their eyes. Accusation. The wrinkles on their sagging faces seemed patterned against him. He fought against taking a step back. That would cede them too much respect. The warrior who retreated in the circles invariably lost.

  He recalled the three hags of myth who were said to work the Weyd’s retribution. A story that, for all Snaith knew, could have been invented by Theurig. Maybe that was why the sorcerer had kept the crones in his house: to bolster the myth, and to make anyone think twice before coming against him.

  Were they loyal to Theurig? To his memory? Had they been more than servants to him?

  He raised his clawed hand, forced the fingers to twitch. As one, the crones cowered, arms raised to protect their faces.

  “My mother and father,” he said. “Where are they?”

  Graef muttered something. Velyg hissed at her.

  “Meldred,” Snaith said.

  She looked up.

  “Theurig spoke of a cure for the rot.”

  She rolled out her bottom lip. Gave a half shrug.

  “Told me that you made it.”

  “No, no, not me,” Meldred said, glancing at her companions for support.

  Snaith lashed out with his good hand, grabbed her by the shawl. She shrieked, and he clubbed her with his bad arm. In the face. On top of the head. Crushed her to her knees. Hit her again, splitting her lip.

  Velyg and Graef swayed in place, wailing.

  Snaith let go of Meldred’s shawl, and she crumpled to the floor. He poked her in the ribs with his foot, to make sure she was still breathing.

  When she coughed, he said, “Find them. Bring them here. Make them better.”

  Velyg stepped forward, a shadow flitting across her gaze. “I will take you to them.”

  “And the antidote?”

  “Meldred will instruct me,” Graef said. “It will be ready when you return.”

  “It had better be.”

  ***

  They lay in a glade just west of the village. Bas and Jennika Harrow—the parents who had brought him into the world. His last link to what he had known. To what he once was.

  Blue and stiff with the rigor. A jagged slit across both their throats. The bloom of dried blood beneath their heads. Rents in their clothing. Gouges in their flesh. Teeth marks.

  Velyg let out a hacking cough, covered her mouth with a hand. It came away speckled with crimson spots.

  “Should have buried them,” she said. “No one deserves to get ate.”

  Snaith choked out a response. “You did this?”

  “Will of the Weyd.”

  He stood petrified. Not by horror. By rage.

  “You know what this means?” he said.

  Velyg nodded. “I know.” She broke out into another coughing fit, a fine spray of blood issuing from her mouth.

  “You’re already dying, aren’t you?”

  “Weyd cursed me. That’s what you get for saying no to Theurig. Only time I did, too. Told him I was too old for messing around. Time he took a young’n.”

  “He poisoned you?”

  A chuckle. A cough. Again she wiped blood from her lips.

  “Meldred and Graef done nothing. It’s me you should vent your strife on.”

  Even as she said it, Snaith knew he couldn’t stop at one. He felt the compulsion take root, a taskmaster every bit as exacting as his need to rap three times on the door jamb whenever he went in or out. Velyg, Graef, and Meldred. Clear as day he could see the hand of the Weyd in this. Three crones for the Malogoi sorcerer. Three culprits to atone.

  Velyg gasped.

  Without any awareness of it happening, Snaith had her by the throat. Raised her up on tiptoes. Squeezing. Choking.

  Purple cheeks. Eyes rolled up into her head. Velyg twitched a couple of times, then sagged. Snaith released her, and she hit the ground a flaccid lump. Damp blossomed on the front of her skirt.

  Snaith stared at the hand that had throttled her, turning it up, then down, flexing the fingers, studying the throbbing of the veins in his wrist.

  His bad hand.

  It had come back to life.

  THE HÉLUM DELEGATION

  The sky above Gosynag Bay was a canopy of skin, corpse-gray, porous with stars. The clouds were blemishes, the moon a gibbous scab. Amid the backwash of granulating light, the angry welt of sunrise bloomed, first purpling, then dissolving into the yellow of fading bruises.

  Tey stood alone at the water’s edge, clawed foot curled into the sand, anchoring her against the waves. The tide was coming in; she knew that much from her trip to the seashore with her father. And with the tide, the ships from Hélum, though if they were there, they were shrouded by the morning haze and a bank of fog that was slowly lifting with the breeze.

  Her ears were assaulted by the screech of seagulls, her nostrils filled with the smell of seaweed and brine. Cool water massaged her good leg up to the knee, but the black-scaled one may as well have been leprous, for all the sensation it had. Where she’d hitched her dress up to her waist to prevent the hem from getting wet, she could see the inexorable advance of her affliction: the dark discoloration that crossed her pelvis and touched her belly. A cancer that marched to the beat of her deeds. Its passage had picked up alarmingly these past few days.

  She craned a look behind at the assembled clans, clustered in their village groupings farther up the pebbled incline. Crumbling groynes of stone banded with iron extended into the water from the sea-defenses of a town long-since crumbled to dust—before the time of the Shedim, she’d heard someone say. Before even the coming of the Wakeful. Where the pebbles of the beach ended, heaps of rubble littered the near distance.

  Far along the shoreline to the west, chalk cliffs loomed. Beneath them an outcrop of rock thrust into the sea, surroun
ded on three sides by frothing white horses. A stone tower rose at its seaward end, capped with a patinated minaret, below which were windows of glass or crystal.

  The clans were intermittently pointing out to sea and speaking in hushed voices. Tey’s eyes were drawn to ten warriors in grey skins, faces enclosed by the yawning jaws of wolf heads. Their chief was a burly brute, more beast than man, their sorcerer a hard-bodied hag with a crinkly face and salt and pepper hair, wearing scarcely more than a fluffy tail attached to her slender girdle.

  A few yards shy of them stood another ten warriors and their chief, emaciated bodies painted ocher, bones highlighted with ashes. These had to be the Krosh, but Pheklus the Clincherman was not among them.

  There were drooping-tongued savages with shrunken heads knotted to their belts—presumably the Skaltoop; a few score kilted northerners; metal-clad men and women with bronze shields and iron swords. Fifty or more clans from the length and breadth of Branikdür, and with them, her birth clan, the Malogoi.

  She half wanted to run to her people, half wanted to hide. Each of the tattoo-chested Malogoi warriors caught her eye and looked away. Chief Crav Bellosh may even have snarled. But their sorcerer met her gaze for a long time.

  And it wasn’t Theurig.

  Snaith looked every inch the part in his hooded cloak: inscrutable, somber. Tey’s dry eyes itched. She blinked but could summon no moisture, and she lost focus. An inky aura blurred around Snaith, as if dark secrets seeped from his skin. The secrets of a man who had killed.

  Of course he had, if Theurig was missing. If Snaith had replaced him, same as she’d replaced Slyndon Grun. So much had changed for them both, in so short a time.

  She inclined her head, letting Snaith know that she’d seen and understood. Told him with her smile that she had done the same, that she was proud of him, her special one. Her husband.

  Snaith turned his back on her, and immediately Crav Bellosh engaged him in animated conversation, gesturing toward a group of axe-wielding warriors surrounding the High King, beside whom stood Anathoth Xolor, the Archmage himself.

  Tey felt her brow knit with consternation. Something about the way Snaith had looked at her. As if he knew what she’d done—to Vrom and the others, impossible as that was. As if they were strangers now.

  She ran her fingers through her hair as far as the knots would allow. Licked cracked lips. Became acutely aware of the grease and grime of countless days caking her skin. And she stank. Gods, how she stank. Was that why he spurned her?

  When had she last bathed? All she could remember was endless callers at the house: sick Valks looking for a cure, spurned lovers seeking curses, the bereaved craving solace. Word had reached them of Slyndon Grun’s successor. They had even called her name through the closed door: Witch of the Valks. Maela must have told them while Tey was away at the Wakeful Isle. Everyone and their chickens, it seemed, wanted to try her out.

  She’d not let them in. How could she, with no one to mop up the blood? She’d thought about taking their lives, too, but her well was already full to bursting. Sated on the essence of her household. She couldn’t take care of herself, never mind meet the needs of the people. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat. She was beyond hunger. Beyond caring. Kaffa was all she desired now. Unlike the potions, the ground beans dissolved in boiling water kept her alert and ready. But ready for what? The Weyd’s justice for all the blood she had spilled?

  She’d not touched a potion in days. Hadn’t even brought any with her. Just the thought of mixing one reminded her of Vrom.

  Then the chief of the Valks had showed up with questions, had the front door broken down when no one let her in. The chief! That was a joke in itself. A woman known solely as the Spirit. A gossamer-draped tart that Slyndon Grun had clearly been fucking. Tey could tell by the questions the Spirit asked about the dead sorcerer, the intonation of her voice. In a strange sort of way, she could almost smell it.

  She hadn’t answered a single question. Silence was her strength. It created a mystique. And it was all she could muster. The Spirit couldn’t disguise her repulsion, and that was also good. Repugnance was a close cousin to fear. She told Tey about the High King’s summons, asked her about what she knew, how they were going to get there. In reply, Tey had pulled out the map Vrom had fetched for her, and stabbed her finger at Gosynag Bay.

  Tey turned back to the sea, reached for the costrel slung at her hip. Fingers shaking, she unstoppered it and took a swig of cold kaffa, swilled the bitter fluid around her mouth then swallowed. Another swig and her heart resumed its skitter. Her thoughts picked up their whir and buzz, flitting from one subject to the next. She tipped her head back and drained the costrel, then slung it out to sea, where it immediately started to bob back to shore with the tide, a dead and darkening fish.

  Dead.

  Like Vrom and Maela.

  Like they all were, the survivors of Slyndon Grun’s cellar, the servitors of his house.

  A loathsome, gurgling chuckle. The Witch Woman’s. Tey’s and not Tey’s. Either way, it came from her mouth. She clamped her jaw shut. Let the chill reality sink in. The Witch Woman was all she had now. Her thoughts were Tey’s thoughts. Her voice the only sound to pass Tey’s lips.

  Dead, she thought again.

  All of them.

  But their deaths had served a purpose.

  Tey interlaced her fingers over her belly. A thrill of power tingled through her palms, fizzed along her veins. Their deaths had filled her well. Stretched it beyond all reason. Inwards. Deeper and denser. She was bloated with their essence. Her scars were whetted lips, crying out all over her skin, hungering for more. And for something else. Something that was missing. As if the scars, too, wanted to expand. No, not expand: add on. Continue their pattern in some other direction—perhaps the virgin canvas of her back. For some other purpose.

  And she could feel the Shedim, mingled with her blood, her bone, her flesh. There was a lazy contentment about its presence now, as if it were pleased by her actions. As if it thought it had won. And judging by the spread of her scales, maybe it had.

  The crunch of pebbles coming across the beach toward her. A man cursed. Tey turned in time to see him gingerly regaining his feet, hopping from a twisted ankle. One of the Valk warriors who’d accompanied her to the bay. She didn’t know his name.

  Behind the limping man, two more warriors supported the elbows of the Spirit. The remaining seven followed in a ragged line, teetering on the three-inch heels of their sandals, designed no doubt to make them appear tall and otherworldly. Tey had to laugh at that. If anything, they looked ridiculous. Lithe with long limbs. Even longer scimitars. White leather harnesses that covered very little. Both men and women hairless from head to toe. Slenderness and nudity seemed a hallmark of Valk culture.

  The Spirit stopped a few paces from Tey. She shrugged off the help of her warriors and straightened her gown. If you could call it that. Diaphanous wisps of some see-through fabric the texture of cobwebs, the dark nipples of her pert and pointed breasts visible beneath. She was even taller than the warriors, largely on account of the soles of her sandals being at least twice the height of theirs. White-painted skin. Sapphire eyes—a trick, no doubt. Ethereal. Fae. A creature that lived on nothing but air. Another lie. The Spirit ate—meat and cheese for the most part. She fatigued. She betrayed flashes of emotion. She’d even once stalked off into the bushes to shit. No power but the appearance of power.

  With the deliberate, graceful motion of a dancer, the Spirit steepled her hands above her head then drew them down to her belly—a mystical gesture with no meaning for Tey, and was likely just an affectation. It seemed an attempt to convey divinity, omniscience, but the lie to that was given when she asked a question in a whispering, cadenced voice every bit as fake as the hue of her skin.

  “What is it, Witch?”

  Tey squinted out to sea, where forms were starting to coalesce amid the dispersing fog. Red sails. A fleet of ships not long past the headland into t
he bay. Too many to call a delegation. A flotilla, perhaps.

  An armada.

  Behind her on the beach came the rush and clack of pebbles, as the clans slid and surfed their way down the incline to get closer to the shore. Divisions between rival groups started to blur, now they were faced with a common concern. More than a concern. Tey could see that from the way everyone seemed to be watching the High King’s response.

  Drulk Skanfok played his part well. He stood hands on hips, staring out at the approaching galleons. A study in calm and confidence.

  The Archmage, though, was flustered. He looked off to one side, covering his mouth with his palm, thinking, scheming, planning for what to do next. Clearly, he’d not expected so many ships.

  Anathoth Xolor’s agitation rubbed off on Tey. She found herself splashing through the shallows toward the High King’s entourage, watching their every move. She reached for her well, and in an instant was exulting in its pregnant power. With a thought she punctured the near-tangible womb that contained all those essences, drew out a thread of puissance, and set about kindling her scars.

  [Your new reserves won’t be enough,] the Shedim said, at last awakening from its slumber. [You lack the patterns for attack and defense. Your scars are solely for draining. Without the vambrace, without the abomination you crafted from the remains of Slyndon Grun, there is little you can do. But you must do something. Give the Hélumites a reason to be intrigued by you. You will suffer, but that is nothing new. And in the end, you will prevail.]

  Tey’s mind was still racing from the kaffa, skipping from one train of thought to the next. First time she’d used her scars, she’d drained Slyndon Grun in the throes of death. With Hirsiga she’d added passion. The others, though, the servants at the house, Grun’s former prisoners, Vrom, she’d drained with but a touch, then slit them open when they were already unconscious. Not as much essence as when lust and fear were present, but at least she hadn’t had to endure their pawing and panting. Increasing proficiency made it easier each time, until she wondered if the touch was necessary anymore.

  The red sails were growing rapidly. She could see black designs on them now: the Wyvern of Necras.