Black Halo

by Sykes, Sam

  ‘Fine,’ the voice muttered in response to his thoughts. ‘We speak later, then.’

  Ignore it, he told himself. You can ignore it now. You don’t need it now. All you need is …

  That thought drifted off into the fog of ecstasy that clouded his mind as he reached under the deck, fingers quivering. It wasn’t until he felt his shoulder brush against something hard that he noticed the two massive red legs at either side of his head.

  Coughing a bit too fervently to appear nonchalant, he rose up, peering over the leather kilt the appendages grew from. A pair of black eyes stared back at him down a red, leathery snout. Ear-frills fanned out in unambiguous displeasure beneath a pair of menacing curving horns. Gariath’s lips peeled backwards to expose twin rows of teeth.

  ‘Oh … there you are,’ Lenk said sheepishly. ‘I was … just …’

  ‘Tell me,’ the dragonman grunted. ‘Do you suppose there’s anything you could say while looking up a Rhega’s kilt that would make him not shove a spike of timber up your nose?’

  Lenk blinked.

  ‘I … uh … suppose not.’

  ‘Glad we agree.’

  Gariath’s arm, while thick as a timber spike, was not nearly as fatal and only slightly less painful as the back of his clawed hand swung up to catch Lenk at the jaw. The young man collapsed backward, granted reprieve from the voice by the sudden violent ringing in his head. He sprawled out on the deck, looking up through swimming vision into a skinny face that regarded him with momentary concern.

  ‘Do I really want to know what might have driven you to go sticking your head between a dragonman’s legs?’ Dreadaeleon asked, cocking a black eyebrow.

  ‘Are you the sort of gentleman who is open-minded?’ Lenk groaned, rubbing his jaw.

  ‘Not to that degree, no,’ he replied, burying his boyish face back into a book that looked positively massive against his scrawny, coat-clad form.

  From the deck, Lenk’s eyes drifted from his companion to the boat’s limp sail. He blinked, dispelling the bleariness clinging to his vision.

  ‘It may just be the concussion talking,’ he said to his companion, ‘but why is it we’re still bobbing in the water like chum?’

  ‘The laws of nature are harsh,’ Dreadaeleon replied, turning a page. ‘If you’d like that translated into some metaphor involving fickle, fictional gods, I’m afraid you’d have to consult someone else.’

  ‘What I mean to say,’ Lenk said, pulling himself up, ‘is that you can just wind us out of here, can’t you?’

  The boy looked up from his book, blinked.

  ‘“Wind us out of here.”’

  ‘Yeah, you know, use your magic to—’

  ‘I’m aware of your implication, yes. You want me to artificially inflate the sails and send us on our way.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And I want you to leave me alone.’ He tucked his face back in the pages. ‘Looks like we’re all unhappy today.’

  ‘You’ve done it before,’ Lenk muttered.

  ‘Magic isn’t an inexhaustible resource. All energy needs something to burn, and I’m little more than kindling.’ The boy tilted his nose up in a vague pretext of scholarly thought.

  ‘Then what the hell did you take that stone for?’ Lenk thrust a finger at the chipped red gem hanging from the boy’s neck. ‘You said the netherlings used it to avoid the physical cost of magic back at Irontide, right?’

  ‘I did. And that’s why I’m not using it,’ Dreadaeleon said. ‘All magic has a cost. If something negates that cost, it’s illegal and thus unnatural.’

  ‘But I’ve seen you use—’

  ‘What you saw,’ the boy snapped, ‘was me using a brain far more colossal than yours to discern the nature of an object that could very well make your head explode. Trust me when I say that if I “wind us out” now, I won’t be able to do anything later.’

  ‘The only thing we might possibly need you to do later is serve as an impromptu anchor,’ Lenk growled. ‘Is it so hard to just do what I ask?’

  ‘You’re not asking, you’re telling,’ Dreadaeleon replied. ‘If you were asking, you’d have accepted my answer as the decisive end to an argument between a man who is actually versed in the laws of magic enough to know what he’s talking about and a bark-necked imbecile who’s driven to desperation by his conflicts with a mule-eared savage to attempt to threaten the former man, who also has enough left in him to incinerate the latter man with a few harsh words and a flex of practised fingers, skinny they may be.’

  The boy paused, drew in a deep breath.

  ‘So shut your ugly face,’ he finished.

  Lenk blinked, recoiling from the verbal assault. Sighing, he rubbed his temples and fought the urge to look between Gariath’s legs again.

  ‘You have a point, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘but try to think of people besides yourself and myself. If we don’t reach Teji by tomorrow morning, we are officially out of time.’

  ‘So we don’t get paid in time,’ Dreadaeleon said, shrugging. ‘Or don’t get paid at all. Gold doesn’t buy knowledge.’

  ‘It buys women with knowledge,’ another voice chirped from the prow.

  Both of them turned to regard Denaos, inconsiderately long-legged and slim body wrapped in black leather. He regarded them back, a crooked grin under sweat-matted reddish hair.

  ‘The kind of knowledge that involves saliva, sweat and sometimes a goat, depending on where you go,’ he said.

  ‘A lack of attachment to gold is an admirable trait to be nurtured and admired,’ Asper said from beside him, ‘not met with advice on whoremongering.’

  Denaos’ scowl met the priestess’s impassively judgemental gaze. She brushed his scorn off like snow from her shoulders as she tucked her brown hair behind a blue bandana. Her arms folded over her blue-robed chest as she glanced from Denaos to Dreadaeleon.

  ‘Don’t let it bother you, Dread,’ she said, offering a rather modest smile. ‘If we don’t make it, what does it matter if we go another few weeks without bathing?’ She sighed, tugging at the rather confining neck of her robes to expose a bit of sweat-kissed flesh.

  The widening of the boy’s eyes was impossible to miss, as was the swivel of his gaze to the aghast expression Asper wore. Powerful as the boy might be, he was still a boy, and as large as his brain was, Lenk could hear the lurid fantasies running wild through his skull. Asper’s movement had sparked something within the boy that not even years of wizardly training could penetrate.

  A smirk that was at once both sly and vile crossed Lenk’s face.

  ‘Think of Asper,’ he all but whispered.

  ‘Huh? What?’ Dreadaeleon blinked as though he were emerging from a trance, colour quickly filling his slender face as he swallowed hard. ‘What … what about her?’

  ‘You can’t think she’s too comfortable here, can you?’

  ‘None … none of us are comfortable,’ the boy stammered back, intent on hiding more than one thing as he crossed his legs. ‘It’s just … just an awkward situation.’

  ‘True, but Asper’s possibly the only decent one out of us. After all, she gave up her share of the reward, thinking that the deed we’re doing is enough.’ Lenk shook his head at her. ‘I mean, she deserves better, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She … does,’ Dreadaeleon said, loosening the collar of his coat. ‘But the laws … I mean, they’re …’

  Lenk looked up, noting the morbid fascination with which Denaos watched the unfurling discomfort in the boy. A smile far more unpleasant than his gaze crept across his face as the two men shared a discreet and wholly wicked nod between them.

  ‘Give me your bandana,’ Denaos said, turning towards Asper.

  ‘What?’ She furrowed her brow. ‘Why?’

  ‘I smudged the map. I need to clean it.’ He held out his hand expectantly, batting eyelashes. ‘Please?’

  The priestess pursed her lips, as though unsure, before sighing in resignation and reaching up. Her robe pressed a little tighte
r against her chest. Dreadaeleon’s eyes went wider, threatening to leap from his skull. Her collar, opened slightly more than modesty would allow at the demands of the heat, slipped open a little to expose skin glistening with sweat. The fantasies thundered through Dreadaeleon’s head with enough force to cause his head to rattle.

  She undid the bandana, letting brown locks fall down in a cascade, a single strand lying on her breasts, an imperfection begging for practised, skinny fingers to rectify it.

  Lenk watched the reddening of the boy’s face with growing alarm. Dreadaeleon hadn’t so much as breathed since Denaos made his request, his body so rigid as to suggest that rigour had set in before he could actually die.

  ‘So … you’ll do it, right?’ Lenk whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ the boy whispered, breathless, ‘just … just give me a few moments.’

  Lenk glanced at the particular rigidity with which the wizard laid his book on his lap. ‘Take your time.’ He discreetly turned away, hiding the overwhelming urge to wash apparent on his face.

  When he set his hand down into a moist puddle, the urge swiftly became harsh enough to make the drowning seem a very sensible option. He brought up a glistening hand and stared at it curiously, furrowing his brow. He was not the only one to stare, however.

  ‘Who did it this time?’ Denaos growled. ‘We have rules for this sort of vulgar need and all of them require you to go over the side.’

  ‘No,’ Lenk muttered, sniffing the salt on his fingers. ‘It’s a leak.’

  ‘Well, obviously it’s a leak,’ Denaos said, ‘though I’ve a far less gracious term for it.’

  ‘We’re sinking,’ Kataria muttered, her ears unfolding. She glanced at the boat’s side, the water flowing through a tiny gash like blood through a wound. She turned a scowl up at Lenk. ‘I thought you fixed this.’

  ‘Of course, she’ll talk to me when she has something to complain about,’ the young man muttered through his teeth. He turned around to meet her scowl with one of his own. ‘I did, back on Ktamgi. Carpentry isn’t an exact science, you know. Accidents happen.’

  ‘Let’s be calm here, shall we?’ Asper held her hands up for peace. ‘Shouldn’t we be thinking of ways to keep the sea from murdering us first?’

  ‘I can help!’ Dreadaeleon appeared to be ready to leap to his feet, but with a mindful cough, thought better of it. ‘That is, I can stop the leak. Just … just give me a bit.’

  He flipped through his book diligently, past the rows of arcane, incomprehensible sigils, to a series of blank, bone-white pages. With a wince that suggested it hurt him more than the book to do so, he ripped one of them from the heavy tome. Swiftly shutting it and reattaching it to the chain that hung from his belt, he crawled over to the gash.

  All eyes stared with curiosity as the boy knelt over the gash and brought his thumb to his teeth. With a slightly less than heroic yelp, he pressed the bleeding digit against the paper and hastily scrawled out some intricate crimson sign.

  ‘Oh, now you’ll do something magical?’ Lenk threw his hands up.

  Dreadaeleon, his brow furrowed and ears shut to whatever else his companion might have said, placed the square of paper against the ship’s wound. Muttering words that hurt to listen to, he ran his unbloodied fingers over the page. In response, its stark white hue took on a dull azure glow before shifting to a dark brown. There was the sound of drying, snapping, creaking, and when it was over, a patch of fresh wood lay where the hole had been.

  ‘How come you never did that before?’ Kataria asked, scratching her head.

  ‘Possibly because this isn’t ordinary paper and I don’t have much of it,’ the boy replied, running his hands down the page. ‘Possibly because it’s needlessly taxing for such a trivial chore. Or, possibly, because I feared the years it took me to understand the properties of it would be reduced to performing menial carpentry chores for nitwits.’ He looked up, sneered. ‘Pick one.’

  ‘You did that … with paper?’ Asper did not conceal her amazement. ‘Incredible.’

  ‘Well, not paper, no.’ Dreadaeleon looked up, beaming like a puppy pissing on the grass. ‘Merroscrit.’

  ‘What?’ Denaos asked, face screwing up.

  ‘Merroscrit. Wizard paper, essentially.’

  ‘Like the paper wizards use?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, we use it. But it’s also made out of wizards.’ His smile got bigger, not noticing Asper’s amazement slowly turning to horror. ‘See, when a wizard dies, his body is collected by the Venarium, who then slice him up and harvest him. His bones are carefully dried, sliced off bit by bit, and sewn together as merroscrit. The latent Venarie in his corpse allows it to conduct magic, mostly mutative magic, like I just did. It requires a catalyst, though, in this case’ – he held up his thumb – ‘blood! See, it’s really … um … it’s …’

  Asper’s frown had grown large enough to weigh her face down considerably, its size rivalled only by that of her shock-wide eyes. Dreadaeleon’s smile vanished, and he looked down bashfully.

  ‘It’s … it’s neat,’ he finished sheepishly. ‘We usually get them after the Decay.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Decay. Magical disease that breaks down the barriers between Venarie and the body. It claims most wizards and leaves their bodies brimming with magic to be made into merroscrit and wraithcloaks and the like. We waste nothing.’

  ‘I see.’ Asper twitched, as though suddenly aware of her own expression. ‘Well … do all wizards get this … posthumous honour? Don’t some of them want the Gods honoured at their funeral?’

  ‘Well, not really,’ Dreadaeleon replied, scratching the back of his neck. ‘I mean, there are no gods.’ He paused, stuttered. ‘I – I mean, for wizards … We don’t … we don’t believe in them. I mean, they aren’t there, anyway, but we don’t believe in them, so … ah …’

  Asper’s face went blank at the boy’s sheepishness. She seemed to no longer stare at him, but through him, through the wood of the ship and the waves of the sea. Her voice was as distant as her gaze when she whispered.

  ‘I see.’

  And she remained that way, taking no notice of Dreadaeleon’s stammering attempts to save face, nor of Denaos’ curious raise of his brow. The rogue’s own stare contrasted hers with a scrutinizing, uncomfortable closeness.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ She turned on him, indignant. ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Had I said anything remotely similar to the blasphemies that just dribbled out his craw, you’d have sixty sermons ready to crack my skull open with and forty lectures to offer my leaking brains.’

  His gaze grew intense as she turned away from him. In the instant their eyes met as his advanced and hers retreated, something flashed behind both their gazes.

  ‘Asper,’ he whispered, ‘what happened to you in Irontide?’

  She met his eyes, stared at him with the same distance she had stared through the boat.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘You would know, wouldn’t you.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Lenk interrupted rogue, priestess and wizard in one clearing of his throat. ‘If we’re spared the threat of drowning, perhaps we can figure out how to move on from here before we’re left adrift and empty-handed tomorrow morning.’

  ‘To do that, we’d need to know which direction we were heading.’ She turned and stared hard at Denaos, a private, unspoken warning carried in her eyes. ‘And it wasn’t my job to do that.’

  ‘One might wonder what your job is if you’ve given up preaching,’ the rogue muttered. He unfolded the chart and glanced over it with a passing interest. ‘Huh … it’s easier than I was making it seem. We are currently …’ He let his finger wander over the chart, then stabbed at a point. ‘Here, in Westsea.

  ‘So, if we know that Teji is northwest, then we simply go north from Westsea.’ He scratched his chin with an air of pondering. ‘Yes … it’s simple, see. In another hour, we sh
ould see Reefshore on our left; then we’ll pass close to Silverrock, and cross over the mouth of Ripmaw.’ He folded up the map and smiled. ‘We’ll be there by daylight.’

  ‘What?’ Lenk furrowed his brow. ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘Who’s the navigator here?’

  ‘You’re not navigating. Those aren’t even real places. You’re just throwing two words together.’

  ‘Am not,’ Denaos snapped. ‘Just take my word for it, if you ever want to see Teji.’

  ‘I’d rather take the map’s word for it,’ Asper interjected.

  Her hand was swifter than her voice, and she snatched the parchment from the rogue’s fingers. Angling herself to hold him off with one hand while she unfurled the other, she ignored his protests and held the map up to her face.

  When it came down, she was a twisted knot of red ire.

  The map fluttered to the ground, exposing to all curious eyes a crude drawing of what appeared to be a woman clad in robes with breasts and mouth both far bigger than her head. The words spewing from its mouth: ‘Blargh, blargh, Talanas, blargh, blargh, Denaos stop having fun,’ left little wonder who it was intended to portray.

  Denaos, for his part, merely shrugged.

  ‘This is what you’ve been doing this whole time?’ Asper demanded, giving him a harsh shove. ‘Doodling garbage while you’re supposed to be plotting a course?’

  ‘Who among us actually expected a course to be plotted? Look around you!’ The rogue waved his hands. ‘Nothing but water as far as the eye can see! How the hell am I supposed to know where anything is without a landmark?’

  ‘You said—’

  ‘I said I could read charts, not plot courses.’

  ‘I suppose we should have known you would do something like this.’ She snarled, hands clenching into fists. ‘When was the last time you offered to help anyone and not either had some ulterior motive or failed completely at it?’

  ‘This isn’t the time or the place,’ Kataria said, sighing. ‘Figure out your petty little human squabbles on your own time. I want to leave.’

  ‘Disagreements are a natural part of anyone’s nature.’ Lenk stepped in, eyes narrowed. ‘Not just human. You’d know that if you were two steps above an animal instead of one.’