Starlight's Children

by Darian Smith

  Brannon frowned. “Exactly. It's too obvious. Especially at a time when international relations are just starting to improve. Ylani's not stupid.”

  “No, but she doesn't necessarily know everything in her government. Look at what happened with Roydan and the swords. And who else could it be? The Djin?”

  Brannon thought about it. The Djin were excellent sailors and he had very little knowledge of what the limits of their particular brand of magic were . . . but they didn't trade with other countries and had no currency of their own. He shook his head. “They'd have no use for gold. It doesn't have to be a political power at all. It could just be a simple robbery.”

  Draeson gestured around him. “There's nothing simple about this.”

  “No, there isn't. This was very well planned.” Brannon turned slowly, taking in the empty hold and the bodies of those who had guarded the missing cargo. The gold was gone, but there were still a few crates of food and a stack of spare sails in the corner. He rubbed the scar on his face. Even the best-laid plans had flaws in them. Something always went wrong. “Okay, this isn't over yet. There has to be something here that gives us a clue about who this was and how they did it. We'll spread out and search the boat, starting here. We know for sure the thieves were in the hold because that's where the gold was. Then we'll check everything else and get the bodies back to the morgue.”

  He paced the hold, seeking anything that would provide a clue to what had happened and how. There was little to see—scuff marks on the floor that could have been from anything, a few dropped scraps, a dead rat. He kept his breathing slow and deep, focusing on the task at hand. Anger simmered in his chest, but he pushed it down. He'd seen more than his share of killing during the war, but this was peacetime. This shouldn't happen during peace.

  Whoever these robbers were, they had specifically chosen mass murder as their method. If, as he'd surmised, poison was used and administered through a needle, then a sedative would have been just as effective and left the sailors alive. So what had the sailors seen that would be so great a risk to the thieves that they needed to be permanently silenced?

  Or was it simply that the perpetrator preferred to kill? It was a sneaky, unnecessary kill; cruel and predatory.

  He moved back to the fallen sailors by the entrance. These men had been on guard. Surely they, of all those on the boat, would have been the most vigilant, the most likely to see something was amiss and put up a fight. There had to be a clue.

  The dead man on the left was blond and slumped against the wall like a broken doll. He wore a sword on his hip but had made no attempt to draw it before he was struck down. His eyes were open and staring. Brannon leaned closer, lifting the corpse's hands and looking them over, to see if he'd grabbed anything from his attacker. The fingers were rough and calloused from working with rope and the elements, but Brannon couldn't see anything that seemed out of place.

  He dropped the man's arm and the weight of it pulled the body off balance, tilting it to one side. Tucked behind it was a small creature. At first Brannon thought it was another dead rat, but it was a little smaller than that—about the size of his palm—and had eight long hairy legs curled up over its body. A large dead spider.

  “Blood and Tears,” Brannon muttered. He drew his dagger, crouched down and poked at the spider. There was no response. “Taran, come and have a look at this, could you? Is this what I think it is?”

  “Um, what do you think it is?” The young priest made his way over and Draeson followed, seemingly bored with the search.

  Brannon gestured to what he'd found with his knife. “Am I crazy, or is this one of those things you keep as pets in your lab?”

  Taran's eyes widened. “A creagor spider. But . . . they're from the desert—it's not hot enough for them here.”

  “Unless it was planted,” Brannon said. “They're poisonous, right? Those pinpricks could be bite marks. Could this be what killed everyone?”

  Taran shook his head. “A spider would only bite one person—two at the most. They've been used for assassinations before, but this doesn't fit their nature.”

  “What if there are more of them?” Brannon looked around uncomfortably.

  Draeson snorted. “Enough to have one bite every member of the crew? Do you really think we wouldn't have noticed that many Hooded great spiders running about?”

  Taran knelt down beside the spider. “They're very territorial anyway,” he said. “They fight if put together.”

  “Okay. So it's yet another mystery.” Brannon sighed. “I wonder what killed it.” He used the tip of the dagger to flip the spider over.

  The creature's back was torn apart as if burst open from the inside. The body was hollowed out. Blood and ichor had oozed over its eight tiny eyes. Brannon startled, almost losing his balance, and stood up.

  “Blood of the Wolf!” Taran's voice cracked.

  “What is it?” Brannon glanced up as the priest stumbled back.

  “We have to get off the ship.” Taran's eyes were wide, the whites stark against his pupils. “Now!”

  Brannon exchanged a glance with Draeson. “Why?”

  Before he got an answer, the corpse at his feet quivered. Brannon froze, his eyes fixed on the dead man's face. Something moved under the skin. A lump the size of a thumb wriggled up the man's neck and across his cheekbone. Then a second lump moved across his temple, the gray dead flesh rippling like river water with fish swimming just below the surface.

  “What the . . . ?”

  The dead man's eyeball burst like a squeezed grape. Ichor spurted out in globs and slid onto the floor. An insect crawled from the empty socket. It was shaped like a wasp but had large forelegs like a praying mantis and a long double stinger like the curved tines of a fork. Its wings were wet with dark blood and crumpled against its body. It paused, perched on the sailor's cheek, and its body pulsed like a heartbeat, expanding with each pulse as if to fill the space of its newfound freedom. Its wings quivered and stretched.

  Beneath the surface of the corpse's gray skin, more bumps began to shift. The flesh on his arm parted and another of the wasps broke free.

  Taran shoved Brannon toward the exit. “Run,” he screamed. “Run!”

  They ran.

  Behind them, more wasps crawled out of the body and began to flutter their damp wings. As they ran past the open doors of the cabins, Brannon could see the other corpses writhing, insects struggling toward the surface, ready to burst out of the dead flesh like deadly seeds from a pod. The sound of those that had already broken free built to a droning buzz as their wings grew stronger, bigger, ready to carry them forward.

  Brannon reached the hatch leading to the upper deck and began to climb the ladder.

  Taran pushed him from behind. “If they sting you, you're dead,” the priest said. “Hurry up!”

  Brannon glanced behind him. The first of the wasps was airborne. The wings were a sickly green above the black body almost as long as a hand. The large front legs reached forward, grasping, and the double stinger hung down, vicious and serrated.

  Draeson jerked his hand forward and a ball of lightning shot from it, striking the wasp. The insect shrieked as it burned, falling to the floor. “I can't keep doing that,” the mage said. “How do we get rid of these things?”

  “Freeze it!” Taran said. “Freeze the whole Hooded ship!”

  Brannon hauled himself onto the deck. A crackling sound echoed behind him and a blast of cold air followed him out of the hatch, misting the warmer air.

  Taran tumbled out of the hatch and ran for the gangplank. “We have to get off the boat!”

  All around Brannon, the bodies of the dead sailors had insects wriggling inside them. They had moments, at best, before the wasps broke free of their corpse cocoons and were loose in Alapra.

  He looked down the hatch. Draeson had stopped halfway up the ladder, his face tight with concentration, ice and mist pouring from the roaring dragon tattoo on his outstretched right hand, his left one cli
nging to the rungs. Frost coated the ladder and spread out across the deck. Brannon could feel the biting cold through his boots, digging into his toes.

  Draeson's fingers on the ladder started to slip.

  “Come on!” Brannon knelt down and reached into the hatch. He grabbed Draeson by the wrist and hauled him upward until they both tumbled onto the frosted wood of the deck.

  Draeson's magic continued to spill ice chunks onto the deck, but the mage himself was still, his eyes closed. Ice crept toward the corpses still threatening to unleash their dangerous cargo.

  Brannon pulled the magus into his arms and stood up. “Keep going, Draeson,” he whispered into the man's ear. “You can do it.”

  Slowly, he edged them back toward the ramp leading down from the boat to the pier and the relative safety of the city.

  Taran and the soldiers called for him to run, but he couldn't. Not yet.

  The ice got thicker, spread further. It covered one quivering body and held it still. Then another. And another. He could see the chest of the last corpse starting to split open, a broken piece of rib tore through the sailor's shirt . . . and then the ice rolled over it like an incoming wave and the horror was swallowed up.

  Draeson's hand fell limp and the ice stopped.

  Brannon carried him off the boat.

  Chapter Eleven

  The boat was now encased entirely in magical ice. Brannon stumbled to the bottom of the gangplank and a few of the soldiers of the King's Guard, including Darnec, hurried forward to help him with the barely-conscious mage.

  Among them was a woman not in guard uniform. She had shoulder-length brown hair, held back from her face with pewter clips, and wore trousers and a shirt like those worn by many of the sailors that frequented the docks, although much cleaner and less threadbare than most. Her eyelashes were long and dark, framing concerned eyes. She strode toward them, her steps outpacing the soldiers, and touched the mage's arm. “Ahpra's Tears, Draeson. Are you okay?”

  Draeson roused and struggled so Brannon put him down so he could stand, but the mage's knees buckled almost instantly and he needed support to stay upright. “I'm fine, Natilia,” he insisted. “I'm fine. Exhausted, is all.” The dragon tattoo was curled into a tight ball on the back of his hand, the color of the ink faded almost to a shadow.

  “How soon will you need to see the king?” Brannon asked quietly, tapping the sleeping creature. The lack of color meant its power was seriously depleted. Draeson needed to reconnect with the royal bloodline to keep his pet—and the power it supplied—from returning to whence it came.

  “Soon.” Draeson tugged his sleeve down to cover the tattoo. “Just don't ask me to do anything magical for a while.”

  The woman called Natilia put her arms around Draeson, almost knocking Brannon aside. “What happened?”

  Brannon could see Darnec's lip curl as he stared at the woman and the mage. “That's what we'd all like to know.”

  “Um.” Taran rubbed at this face with his hand as if trying to reassure himself there was no insect there. “Goela wasps,” he said, his voice cracking. “They could easily wipe out the city.”

  The nearby guardsmen muttered to themselves, eyeing the boat with trepidation.

  “Well, they're contained now,” Brannon said loudly. “Guardsmen, please report back to the king and let him know we will inform him of more details shortly.” As the soldiers saluted and moved off, he lowered his voice. “Let's discuss this in more depth privately.”

  “Good idea,” Natilia said. “My office isn't far. I'm the harbor master.”

  “And my girlfriend,” Draeson added.

  Brannon felt his eyebrows rise and forced himself to lower them again. “Your office would be perfect. Thank you. Lead the way.”

  She seemed hesitant to let go of Draeson.

  “Darnec can help me with him,” Brannon assured her.

  Draeson straightened his spine. “No need.”

  They made their way to the harbor master's office at a slow pace, Natilia leading. Draeson stumbled a few times but refused any more help than Brannon's hand under his elbow. Taran and Darnec followed, talking to each other in voices too low to make out.

  The building was a single-story stone structure built into the side of a warehouse, with full view of the docks. Inside were a range of nets, pullies, ropes, and spare sails available for purchase. A large table with several padded chairs dominated the far side of the room and held blank copies of docking forms for boat captains to fill out and sign on their vessel's arrival.

  Natilia pulled out one of the chairs. “Sit him down and then tell me what's going on in my port.” She leaned back against the wall and folded her arms.

  “Something we'd all like to know,” Brannon muttered as he helped Draeson to the chair.

  “A Hooded disaster, that's what,” Draeson said as the others arranged themselves around the table.

  Brannon looked at Taran. “You seem to know what those insects are. Start talking.”

  The young priest blinked. “Oh. Yes.” He swallowed and glanced nervously at the harbor master. “I have a certain . . . experience with some things, as you know.”

  “Yes.” Brannon nodded. If Taran didn't want to expose his history with the Children of Starlight in front of a stranger, Brannon certainly wasn't going to force him to. “So you've seen these before? Or know of them. What are they?”

  Taran took a deep breath. “They're called goela wasps. They're one of the most dangerous creatures of the desert. They can wipe out a caravan in a matter of hours; a village in days, at most. If they'd gotten free in Alapra, the entire city could have been wiped out in a week.”

  “Nonsense,” Draeson scoffed. “If such a thing were possible we would have heard about it before now. We would have used it in the war.”

  Taran shook his head. “No one would be stupid enough to try that. They're impossible to control. Anyone who tried to use them in that way would likely end up dead themselves.”

  “Really?” Brannon said. “Because someone obviously has.”

  “I don't know how,” Taran said. “Their entire lifecycle is predatory. When they sting you, they inject you with a paralytic and their eggs. You collapse on the spot, alive but unable to move. Then the eggs hatch. The larvae eat you from the inside, consuming your internal organs until there's nothing left. Then they hibernate and convert into the adult wasps. But they stay dormant in that form and only hatch out of their victim's body when there's another live creature nearby to sting and lay more eggs into. If there's anything left alive, they continue and multiply until everything is dead.”

  “By the Wolf,” Brannon swore. “How do we stop them?”

  “Right now, we don't need to. They're in ice so they're stopped. Thank the gods, the adult wasps only live a very short amount of time. They sting and die. That's it.”

  “Okay, good.” Brannon scratched at the scar running down his cheek. “That's a blessing, at least. But this is far too coincidental to think their presence is an accident. Somebody deliberately used the goela wasps to incapacitate the crew so they could steal the gold shipment.”

  “It had to have been in the spider,” Taran said thoughtfully. “Goela wasps are one of the few things that would take on a creagor spider. The spider would have been host to the larvae and slipped onto the boat somehow. I . . . just don't know how they could have got it there without risking them hatching along the way.”

  “Wait a minute.” Natilia held up her hands. “I don't know what's going on with spiders and wasps, but did you just say someone tried to steal the gold shipment?”

  Brannon sighed. “They didn't just try. They succeeded.”

  “Are you kidding me?” She stared at each of them in turn. “The gold shipment from Sandilar? The shipment that's so Hooded secret that all the communications were in code and my staff weren't told when the boat was due to arrive until your guardsmen showed up? That one? Someone just swooped in and helped themselves mid-transit?”

/>   “That's the one,” Brannon said wryly.

  She rolled her eyes. “Brilliant. Well worth all the hassle then, wasn't it? What am I supposed to put in my report?”

  Darnec reached out to stroke her shoulder. “Don't worry, Nat. There's nothing you could have done.”

  She pulled away and scowled. “What do you mean by that?”

  His face reddened. “Nothing. I just meant I'm sure you did everything right.”

  The muscles in her jaw tightened. “You're Hooded well right, I did. You're not blaming me or my people for this, I can tell you that right now.”

  “I wasn't—”

  “Ignore him, Natilia,” Draeson said. “He's just a boy.”

  Brannon cleared his throat loudly. “Perhaps if we stay focused on the issue at hand,” he said. “Natilia, you mentioned coded communications. Is there any way that could have gone amiss? Do you have paperwork?”

  She pressed her lips into a thin line. “I don't see how. As I said, my people and I were kept in the dark. If there was an information leak, it wouldn't have come from here. But I'll get you the paperwork and you can see for yourself if it makes any sense.” She strode through a doorway beside a pile of shipping supplies, into a back office.

  Brannon looked at Draeson and tilted his head in the direction she'd gone. “So you and Natilia . . . I thought you'd learned not to have your flings with people we have to work with.”

  The mage's eyes narrowed. “I met her before we received this assignment and she's not just a fling.”

  Darnec snorted and turned his back.

  Brannon looked from one to the other, then back again. “Exactly how did you meet?”

  “Through a mutual acquaintance,” Draeson said, his voice mild.

  Darnec turned, his hands clenched into fists. “For Hooded's sake, at least have the spine to say it how it is, magus. You met my girlfriend and you took her for yourself. Because who am I to compete with the high and powerful Draeson? You don't truly care about her. You never care about anyone! You only keep this so-called relationship going to torture me.”