by Marc Turner
At that instant, though, Galantas didn’t care. It was the devilship’s influence, he knew. The demon bound to its frame was poisoning his thoughts, so much so that when an Augeran arrow thudded into the binnacle, Galantas felt the Fury’s rage as a rush of blood to his face. His crew would feel it too. If they could use that rage against the stone-skins, that would even the odds somewhat. Plus if Galantas took a battle here, might his kinsmen on the other ships be shamed into joining him? He looked south at the Willow Reed. At the rate Tub was approaching, he should arrive in time to play some part in the conflict.
But the Needle had only nine warriors with him. Why should he court death now when he’d worked so hard to stay out of trouble at the Rent?
Galantas pushed his doubts aside. Sometimes the odds were stacked so high against you that you had to run them. And if he could find a way to win, his name would become legend in the Isles. If he couldn’t, well, he wouldn’t be around to worry about it.
“No,” he said again to Barnick. “We fight.”
The mage considered, then shrugged. Of all those aboard the Fury, Barnick had least to fear from a battle, because if the Rubyholters lost, he could simply jump overboard and swim to safety.
The wave beneath the Fury receded.
The stone-skin two-master drew closer.
Some of Galantas’s crew shouted to him to find out what was happening, but he did not answer. Let them assume Barnick had been prevented from carrying them clear by the stone-skin mage on the approaching ship. In any case, the rising bloodlust inspired by the devilship would soon take his kinsmen past caring.
Galantas retreated to the break of the aft deck.
With the stone-skin ship riding high on its wave of water-magic, all he could see of the enemy was the first line of warriors at the starboard rail. They carried shields that sparkled in the sunlight. More arrows whipped toward the Fury, and a choked scream sounded from on high. When Galantas looked up, he saw a crewman with a shaft through his throat tumble from the crosstrees, only for his leg to catch in the rigging. He hung suspended above the main deck. When a drop of his blood fell to the boards, the devilship’s response was like a shot of oscura in Galantas’s veins.
Someone started singing the Scourge. Within moments the rest of the crew took it up, their eyes fever-bright. Galantas wanted to join in, but a captain had to remain apart. One man dipped his fingers in the dead archer’s blood on the deck and smeared it across his cheeks. Others banged the hilts of their weapons against the boards. Some idiot of a Squall decided to show defiance by standing up and twirling his sword over his head. An arrow through his eye shut him up. As he collapsed to the deck, Galantas felt another jolt in his blood.
The quartermaster crouched behind the ship’s wheel. “Drefel,” Galantas said, “we need a reserve. Pick five men and bring them here.”
Drefel nodded and scuttled away.
Qinta took his place at the main deck’s rail, and beside him was Noon. The Storm Islander was plainly fighting to keep his emotions in check, for his eyes were closed, and he was taking deep breaths. Cayda, by contrast, stood relaxed beside the mainmast. She seemed in no hurry to take part in the fighting, but her turn would come.
Galantas remembered then the alien sorcery unleashed against the Lively, Allott’s talk of the ship’s rigging coming to life. He glanced at the lines overhead.
Nothing.
“Here they come!” Qinta shouted.
The wave beneath the stone-skin ship receded. The dregs of it slapped into the Fury’s hull, throwing up a shower of spray that drenched the men squatting behind the rail. Galantas’s bladder felt fit to burst. A dozen grapnels arced out from the Augeran ship. Most were caught by the crouching Rubyholters and tossed back, but a handful bit on the Fury’s rail. Someone with an ax rose to chop at a line, only for Qinta to haul him back down.
“Wait till she’s made secure!” the Second bellowed.
The ships came together with a thud.
Twenty black-cloaked stone-skins boiled over the gunwale.
The Fury’s crew rose to meet them, shrieking as they wielded their swords and boarding pikes. Qinta raised his pike to intercept a female Augeran. A full armspan of the shaft punched through her chest and out of her back, and the Second drove the point into the stomach of another enemy to leave two stone-skins impaled on the same weapon. To his left, a Rubyholter had climbed to the rail and now jumped across to the Augeran ship as if he meant to take it single-handed. He succeeded in carving his sword through an opponent’s neck before he was hacked down by a trio of stone-skins.
Galantas sensed Drefel at his shoulder, straining to join the fray.
“Wait,” he said.
* * *
Sitting up in her bed, Romany watched her quarters transform. There was blood on the walls—spots, splatters, and smears—so old its color had faded from crimson to brown. There was blood on the floor too, sprinkled across tiles newly lined with cracks and edged with grime. There was even blood on the metal bars that had materialized over her window, mixing with darker patches of rust. Outside, the sky was a sharp blue, but inside the light had turned leaden as if the Alcazar were passing into dusk. Romany wrinkled her nose. The air smelled charred. And it wasn’t wood burning, either.
She stood up and crossed to the door. Beneath her sandals, the floor felt sticky. From all about came a scuttling and a scratching as if rats moved behind the walls. Then Romany heard the reverberating footsteps of something huge lumbering along the corridor outside. Her spells of deception remained intact in the passage, meaning the owner of those steps probably didn’t even notice her door as it approached. Yet still she held her breath. Must be the executioner, to set the floor trembling like that.
Romany wasn’t minded to peek outside to check.
The footsteps receded.
Safe for now at least.
She looked about her. For all her shock at what had happened, she still found herself admiring the perverse artistry in Hex’s creation. Okay, so the color scheme wasn’t one she would have chosen, but there was no denying the man’s sense of theater, or the skill with which he’d fashioned his conception. She reached out with her mind toward the wall. Hex’s magic was like a skin spread over the stone. Spread thinly, too, but that was hardly surprising if it encompassed the entire Southern Wing. When she tried to pierce it with her sharpened awareness, her sorcery passed through as easily as a needle through mexin. Around the puncture, the blood and grime retreated to reveal a white circle of stone.
Interesting.
Romany’s heart started to beat more easily. True, she’d made only a small hole in the Augeran’s construction, but there was no reason to think that a large hole would prove more challenging. Escaping this otherworld should be a straightforward matter. If there were bars over the windows, there would probably be gates blocking the exits as well, yet all Romany had to do was find one and punch a hole in it. And while she’d have to pass through the corridors to get there, she’d have what remained of her web to warn her of trouble ahead—plus the skills she’d inherited as an assassin, if it came to a confrontation.
With her way out assured, she turned her mind to other considerations.
The noise of fighting came through her window from the floor below. Sorcerous concussions landed on her web like raindrops on a spider’s weave, making the whole thing shudder. But still she was able to detect a concentration of Hex’s power below and to her right—a concentration that surely signified the man’s conscious will was being exercised. Worth investigating further?
Absolutely.
Returning to her bed, she lay down and let her spirit drift free of her body.
She floated through the door and into the corridor. It was darker here than it had been in her quarters, and beneath the blood and gore on the walls were veins that pulsed with a liquid sound. Romany grimaced. The charms of Hex’s otherworld were already wearing thin, but in her spiritual form, those charms were no more dangerous to
her than if the stone-skin had conjured up images of moonblossom and honeyheather. Moonblossom. She tried to hold that picture in her mind.
She drifted through the floor to the lower level. Explosions came from her left followed by blooms of fire. Fortunately her destination lay to her right, and she hastened in that direction. She could see barely twenty paces in front, which meant she heard before she saw the monstrosity approaching from the other direction: a naked man with a shuffling gait, whose fingers had been replaced with metal claws. Worse still, his head had been twisted round the wrong way and now lolled forward. Or should that be backward?
Romany sped past.
The concentration of Hex’s power came from around the next corner, and the priestess knew then what her destination would be. The room where Mazana met the emperor yesterday. The room where they had agreed to meet again today. When she glided inside, she found the chamber bore no resemblance to the one she remembered. The desk was covered with so much blood it might have had a body dismembered on it, while the walls looked like leprous skin covered in lesions and blotches and cuts sewn together, the stitches still in place. Those cuts throbbed as if something moved behind them. The air was sprinkled with flies.
A portcullis had fallen across the door barring access to two Gray Cloaks in the corridor. Near the desk stood Mazana Creed alongside Kiapa, Jodren, and the executioner. There was no sign of the emperor or his retinue. Kiapa was stony-faced as he took in his surroundings, Jodren looked like he’d bitten into something rotten, while even the executioner wore a frown, as if he’d taken a wrong turn and was trying to work out where he’d ended up. Mazana’s face was pale, yet her gaze was unwavering as she stared at a red-cloaked figure in front of her.
Hex.
Romany floated closer.
The Augeran looked as solid as the other people here, but the priestess sensed she was seeing merely a copy of the man, a sorcerous construct. His cloaked swirled about his legs as he performed an extravagant turn. He was talking to Mazana.
“… trust you will find your new accommodation to your liking.”
When the emira responded, her voice was mild—too mild, it seemed to Romany, considering her predicament. “I assume it’s too late for me to take up that offer you made?”
“To deliver the emperor’s head, you mean? I think you’ll find we never needed your help on that score.” Hex’s next twirl took him closer to the gated door, and the Gray Cloaks beyond it retreated. “Forgive me if I leave you here, but you’ll appreciate my priority must be the Erin Elalese. Never fear, though, I will be back for you sooner than you please. Hee hee!”
“You think you can hold me here?”
“Why not? We’re a little far from the sea for you to call on your power.”
Mazana smiled. “My power, yes.” Then she shifted her gaze to the crimson-smeared desk as if noticing it for the first time. She rested a hand on it. “My, my,” she said, looking back at the Augeran, “what do we have here? Blood?”
And suddenly Romany understood the reason for the woman’s lack of concern. Spider’s blessing, the blood! And so much of it, too! The priestess swallowed. What had Hex done?
Mazana closed her eyes and opened her arms. All about, blood started coming away from the surfaces across which it was daubed—fat red drops where it was fresh, thin brown flakes where it was dried. It drifted toward her. Where it came into contact with her flesh, it was absorbed. Her skin turned first crimson, then purple-red, then red-black. Her lips parted, and she let out a shuddering breath. The air in the room shuddered with her, the very Alcazar seeming to sigh. Flies alighted on her arms and legs.
Then she opened her eyes to reveal orbs the same hue as her skin.
Jodren and Kiapa, standing to either side, stepped back. The executioner, by contrast, might have not noticed the change for all his reaction. Hex, too, showed no alarm at her transformation. But then the stone-skin wasn’t even watching her, Romany realized with a start. Instead he appeared to be looking …
Straight at her.
Her heart skipped a beat. No, it wasn’t possible!
He winked at her with the eye above that always-bleeding cut. A red tear rolled down his cheek.
Then he looked back at Mazana and gestured.
The sewn cuts on the walls ruptured in sprays of pus and blood. From one, a two-headed … thing emerged, dripping slime. From another was disgorged a seething mass of spiders, bloodroaches, and other creatures Romany wasn’t hanging around to identify. She’d seen enough already, thank you very much.
She fled back to her body.
CHAPTER 21
SENAR LOPED along the corridor, squinting into the gloom. The temptation to break into a run was strong, but he couldn’t see more than a dozen steps ahead, and he wasn’t about to pick up his pace if it meant blundering into the laps of the enemy. A staircase materialized from the murk, but he ignored it. The sounds of battle all came from the lower level.
With each step he took, the temperature rose. At times he thought he could hear footsteps tracking his own, yet always when he looked back he saw nothing but darkness. The walls were spattered crimson like someone had gone berserk in a slaughterhouse. There were bloody prints on the ground as well, following the same course he was.
Showing him the way to go.
Round the next corner, a naked figure awaited him. Senar’s pulse kicked in his neck. Not a stone-skin, but a man covered in weeping cuts and wrapped in coils of knotted wire. The wire opened up more gashes as he parted his arms to draw the Guardian into a prickly embrace. Senar lashed out with his Will, and the apparition fell against a wall with a screech of metal on stone that set the Guardian’s teeth on edge. The man righted himself just in time to meet Senar’s sword swing. The blade tore open his throat before snagging in a loop of wire. Senar wrenched his weapon free.
The apparition collapsed. A smell of decay hit Senar like he’d carved a chunk out of a piece of putrid meat. Maggots squirmed in the dead man’s cut.
The Guardian screwed up his face and went on.
From ahead came the thump of a sorcerous concussion, and the walls of the passage trembled. A rush of air, a patter of mortar. Another figure shambled into view: a woman with a shroud of hair hanging across her face. Along the ground she dragged a mace with a head so large Senar doubted even the executioner could have lifted it. The only thing she’d be harming with that thing was the floor tiles, yet when he drew near, he didn’t stay his hand. There was no place for mercy in a battle. The enemy you spared one moment might cut you down the next.
His sword smashed her forehead to splinters. She toppled wordlessly, still clinging to the mace as if her hands were welded to its shaft.
If only all of Senar’s opponents today would go down so easily.
Along the wall to the Guardian’s right, the doors gave way to windows looking out on a murky courtyard. The sun was a gray smear overhead. Battling figures flitted through the gloom: Breakers, Revenants, and stone-skins, along with a panoply of the grotesque. Senar saw Kolloken amid the throng, his hair and face so slimed with blood and gore he might have sliced open an enemy’s belly and shoved his head in. He traded sword strikes with a hunchbacked swordsman whose body twitched so violently it looked like he was seizing.
Beyond, the wall of the yard collapsed into rubble as a blast of sorcery struck it. Over the stones scuttled a woman with two extra arms instead of legs. She sprang at a gray-cloaked spearman, grasped his wrists in two of her hands while her other two reached for his throat. They went down in a tangle, then wrestled in the rubble until a stone-skin swordsman reared up and dispatched them both.
Senar blinked. So the Augerans were fighting the apparitions too?
What in the Nine Hells was going on?
He slowed and scanned the yard for the executioner, knowing if the giant was there, then Mazana would be too. But there was no sign of either of them. Through an archway ahead, a swordsman backpedaled from the square into the Guardian’s co
rridor. He wore a sleeveless white jerkin and trousers, and his blade whined as it cut through the shadows.
Strike.
The bodyguard’s clothes seemed to glow in the darkness. He faced no fewer than three stone-skin opponents, but by withdrawing through the arch, he had prevented them from coming at him together. As the first—a woman—tried to follow, Strike’s blade flickered out. The Augeran reeled back cradling her sword arm, her weapon jarring from her hand.
Then from the gloom along the passage another stone-skin appeared—a man so big he seemed to fill the whole corridor. He had golden spiral tattoos on his cheeks and forearms. Senar shouted a warning to Strike, but the bodyguard had already seen the danger and turned to face this new adversary. His sorcerous blade moved with freakish speed to intercept the Augeran’s first stroke, yet still he could manage only a half parry, his opponent’s sword bursting through to graze his shoulder. Strike retreated a step, his enemy following.
Senar couldn’t use his Will on the stone-skin while Strike was between them. He rushed to the bodyguard’s aid.
Too late.
A whirlwind exchange, and suddenly Strike’s head was lifted from his shoulders by a backhand swing that seemed to pass through the bodyguard’s block. Two jets of blood reared up like snakes from the stump of Strike’s neck.
His legs buckled.
Swearing, Senar drew up. Avallon’s bodyguard was dead, and he’d lasted no longer than a handful of heartbeats. Senar was under no illusions that he could have defeated the man so swiftly.
His tattooed conqueror was breathing mightily. Keeping his gaze on Senar, he knelt to wipe his blade on Strike’s trouser leg, first one side, then the other, leaving crimson stripes on the cloth. Then he straightened. His frown gave him a studious, almost apologetic look, yet there was a note of arrogance too as if he wasn’t sure Senar warranted the time it would take to cut him down. The stone-skin glanced into the courtyard. Would he snub the Guardian to join the larger battle? Would Senar let him?
Like hell he would.
