THE TRYPHON ODYSSEY (The Voyage Book 1)

by S. D. Howarth

  "Now, we wait." Van Reiver murmured, forcing himself to be sociable, and felt Carla stir. The magus in question remained oblivious, only here as a body.

  Mathyss inclined his head, but Carla mumbled, "How long does Gabriel take when scouting?"

  "As with the traditional way, it depends on how far he travels. The chief advantage is he can travel faster than by foot, and he need not be at the destination in person. It will leave him weary, so not wholly advantageous for us. Could be half an hour, depending on how thorough he is, as a wild guess. Worst-case, he follows behind and catches us up."

  Mathyss looked up, a dark frown suggesting a dislike of the idea. "It seems an unusual talent for a sunjammer magus to possess, is it not? Is it correct they call themselves sea leaches?"

  Van Reiver cracked a lopsided smile. "It is and they do. Many disciplines have nicknames; sea leach for sunjammer's, body leach for healers, mind leach for telepaths, and so on. I believe some are different. Flamers for fire magus, icers for ice magus, and for the others you will need to ask the mighty wizard.

  "You need to understand, Dagmar. To him, his magic is not an art that is coveted by a specific spellcaster guild, or specialised area of expertise. He sees it as a single discipline. Some things you have an aptitude for, some things you don't. It was not a philosophy that went far with his tutors, which I heard about at inordinate length. A fire magus should not be interested in arcane spells, but stick to his own and perfect it as far as talent dictates. As a carpenter picks one tool to smooth a board and another to chisel out a hinge. I see what he means, but I don't understand how The Citadel regulates the subdivisions. Whatever the system, it must work for them, for all the coins going into their bottomless coffers."

  "That sounds like an understatement?" Mathyss grinned wider, settling into his crouch as his curiosity took hold.

  "He carries histrionics around with him like flies on shit. Some justified, most not in fairness. Many of his tutors thought he was a mystical heretic and should be expelled. Fortunately, his Citadel mentor grasped Dag's abilities and supervised his study within academic limitations. I guess it worked as there are a dozen dominant guild disciplines, and he had offers from most. He could have had others, but he loathes battle magic and the guild heads hold long grudges, or demand unplayable bribes.

  "He experimented with several guild disciplines and significantly for us, he has a wonderful memory of his studies. I used to think his mind was a repository for magic as he spent far more time reading and boring me rigid compared to practising it. The bugger talks to himself when reading, which is damn annoying."

  "Fortunate, or of great significance?"

  "Huh?"

  "Perhaps this is his destiny and your path? After all, your previous choices led you both here." Mathyss said, gesturing with his arms at the village and doing a partial rotation. "This is his entelechy."

  "You're pulling my leg." Van Reiver exclaimed, scrabbling to understand the obscure word. It sounded familiar, somewhere on the tip of his tongue, and he gave the elf a flat stare for several seconds. Mathyss had a queer sense of humour, novel to the other elves. Mathyss laughed after a lengthy pause, confirming Van Reiver's suspicions.

  "Not entirely, we believe in fate more than you humans seem to." Mathyss' loquacious banter caused Carla to sigh and lever herself up.

  "You said he is tense," she accused. Her lack of sleep added a wariness to her face and hardened her jawline.

  Van Reiver tried to ignore the crabbiness—which would be his fault—and stifled a laugh behind his hand.

  "Yup." Van Reiver's amusement faded. "On a serious note, once sleeping beauty awakens, keep an eye peeled. If something happens, stay near Grimm, or Merizus, please."

  "Are you saying I cannot take care of myself, because I am a woman?" she flared, her anger rising.

  Mathyss' face locked down, and he glanced away, feigning disinterest. Unsurprising with all but two of his scouts being women. Van Reiver huffed at the horizon. Shit! So much for trying to be helpful if every remark provoked an argument. He was sure he felt Carla shake as she calmed herself.

  "Don't put words in my mouth, please. We're in a strange place, with an unknowable situation, and they're bigger. Much bigger, that's all," Van Reiver grumbled, then looked to his friend. "Dag, hurry and relieve me from this torment!" Mathyss snorted, then barked a laugh.

  40

  Dagmar wished he could hurry. With the audience, it took long, endless minutes to subdue his emotions and ascend. Spiralling upwards with the agility of a darting swift, his spirit form circled the pair of trees and skimmed his way through the canopy of the surrounding forest, before orienting himself above the hamlet. Glancing down at the scurrying men, he hastened south over the ridge to flit down the trail to the next village, before pausing miles ahead.

  In the monochromatic light, he determined a faint plume of smoke rising over a distant treeline in the direction they would travel. It was the only active sign of habitation he'd observed on their entire journey. He squinted, looking about with a growing wariness. His parents at court in Tregallon would laugh at his caution, with the hot words exchanged before he entered The Citadel. Caution, yeah... It wasn't something he envisaged with himself. By the end of this trip, if anyone survived, they would be a changed person. He would be a changed man.

  At a fork in the trail, he paused. To his right, he saw the smoke. To the left was a smaller trail, leading to a headland with a square watchtower. He turned right but hesitated. Dagmar looked back to the headland where a glint piqued his interest. He sated his curiosity, as there was something, a feeling pulling at him, tugging. Even with his detached emotional state in spirit form, it exuded a presence.

  He lowered himself down several feet above the ground and crept along the path, shaded by long narrow-bladed leaves. He scanned everything with care. Adumbral—no abiosis, was how Dagmar would describe the forest, and he didn't want to think on the shiver creeping down his back. Fucking kurchizzle! A drunk afternoon bonding with Van Reiver while sifting through the academy library copy of lexicon of words might now kill him through distraction. He forced slower, shallower breaths. Calming himself to release a shudder and concentrate.

  Down the trail, through the murky light between the pillars of tree trunks and denser vegetation, he encountered several metallic glints flickering with sunlight under the rich canopy. Feeling ridiculous, he moved nearer with exaggerated caution, as though playing a sneak thief at the theatre.

  Dagmar rotated to a standing position and glanced around. The hairs on his neck rose, sending a chill shiver down his spine. Something incontrovertible was awry and left an unpleasant aura. A residue so strong, he could smell it. Taste it on the tip of his tongue. Gag on it. He shook his head angrily, unable to disassociate his emotions when not standing there. With a sigh, he pushed into the undergrowth and halted, petrified. Unable to hold his breath indefinitely, he succumbed, gasping air into protesting lungs.

  He'd found the missing scouts, or what remained of Mathyss' scouting party. Broad, heavy marks on the trail and through the surrounding undergrowth screamed to his untrained eye that something big had launched itself at the leading scouts. One heavyset elf lay on his back, torso torn apart, long dried blood coated tufts of grass behind him in an arc of crimson paint. A smaller, slight woman lay near in an unnatural posture around a bole with her head twisted to face behind her, a hand span from her feet. Dead. Wrecked. Smelling.

  He stepped over bodies long cold and around a small bend where the engagement had spread. Something had tumbled a score of spearmen into a shrubbery and mangled them beyond recognition. Only fragments of armour and their weapons showed an elven ancestry. Towards the rear of the column, dotted around the headland trail in defensive locations, were a dozen archers. All dead, bodies and weapons smashed like a maddened child frustrated with a toy. Four of the heavily armoured swordsmen had positioned themselves to their rear only to be piled off the trail.

  The tangle of
bloodied forms showed they'd died fending off something behind them. At the centre of their last stand lay a spell book, a little longer than a hand, with a dazzling cover of turquoise and green mother-of-pearl covered in flies. A small smeared thumbprint and dancing insects marred it in blood. It glowed with the hum of modest energies and exuded a faint tugging towards him. A pace away, the golden wire hilt of a shattered longsword and a twisted buckler also glowed. Another bloodstain, black from the sun's heat, was several feet away. Buzzing. Smudged.

  Dagmar guessed one elf had dragged their way over a dozen agonising feet towards cover. However, there was no corpse and a darker patch of charring formed a slight indentation in the ground where the blood trail ended as though amputated. From the dichotomy between spellbook and sword, he surmised two of the elves were absent. One of them with life-threatening injuries. The commander and caster, his instincts teased, cluing him into the skirmish. To the death written on the earth in crusty guts and gore.

  He circled the scuffed patch of beaten earth, checking for footprints and other clues, to yield another four insects covered bloodstains and deep gouges in the soil. Beyond them, drag marks and bloody smears led behind a fallen tree trunk to more deceased elves. Despite lacking scouting experience, something had feasted here. Bloodied globules of flesh were spread from where the thing—he had to call the fucker scaring him shitless something—had torn the elves apart. To gorge on chest cavities, scouring out the juicy goodness and ignoring ropes of intestines. He retched, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. It was not over. His sordid fascination tugged him further, deeper, weeping, to masochistically witness greater savagery.

  As though his hearing adjusted, he detected the heavy drone of flies swarming over the corpses, delighted by an easy feast on anything still fluid. He tried to look past the gore without gagging, for signs of what had committed the brutal act. For something large. Fiendish. A foot-long clover-type leaf rammed four inches into the hardened earth was the only evidence of the creature prowling through the area, leaving behind a smear of blood. Two weeks past, if he'd encountered a nightmarish scene of mutilation and death, it would have sent him cowering in abject terror, if not complete catatonic shock. Now he cried soundless tears of frustration and terror.

  While horrifying, he realised, the dead here were at least no threat to him. It would be a far, far different matter if he stood near Emporion, Sparta, or Samothrake. Here he was thankful there was no smell beyond his own imaginings, and the shadows were unlikely to contain unlife. Instead, he hoped their sacrifice would serve as a timely warning to his party. The means to an end, he thought. To allow them to depart the destruction that turned this paradise into a slaughterhouse.

  He turned around without a second glance. It would be of more value for one of the skilled scouts to determine what—or who—committed the carnage with a talent he lacked. Dagmar shook his head. By the Gods, could he send more women here to pick through the disaster? Through bloated friends, relatives and maybe their lovers. It wouldn't be pleasing to speak to Mathyss, but he reckoned it might not surprise the hard-faced commander.

  .*.*.

  The small horseshoe-shaped coastal village was a scene of even greater devastation. The wooden huts on the perimeter and several of the tree-house structures in the centre creaked. Wrecked and burning. Carved wall panels with delicate carved details on slatted shutters in vibrant rainbow of colour. To magus eyes it seemed to blend in with the textures of the thatched roofs with delicate ease. To their enemy it burned with a dread, gleeful ease. Two of the towering yellowwood trees had been uprooted, adding to the rampant destruction.

  Despite his elevated vantage point, he saw no corpses, but came across the occasional blood stain and possession crushed into the earth. The scattered remains showed life had been present during the attack. Other than smouldering embers near an oversized fire pit, there was no evidence this was anything other than a brutal act of nature.

  Oozing trepidation, he edged towards the fire pit, only to gag at a humanoid leg on the far side blackened to a crisp. It was a mirror to his own in terms of size. Even in ethereal form, he knew the flesh had been consumed by fire, not a beast. It made his stomach roil, knowing something—someone?—had placed the limb to cook. He circled the crude iron frame and blackened spit, unable to suppress violent shudders of disgust.

  It defied comprehension and incited a revulsion he couldn't articulate into words. Fuck! Eating the flesh of people, elven people? When did that get to be entertaining? He struggled to swallow down sour bile. Thoroughly sickened, his senses felt raped. An abhorrent, rhetorical question unless you were a denizen from the blighted Greek islands. It made his hands shake. To consider there could be undead to fight. The stories of the Knights of Sanctuary and the southern Atlantean campaign around the Straits of Messara often kept a man his age awake at night. Creeping around on his own in untamed lands raised his terror and his heartbeat. He did not want to join the phalanxes of the undead, or become a meal for something powerful and end up here.

  Dagmar grimaced, then rose upwards, happy to depart the horror. Circling the carnage, his mind sought further clues. What had done this? It was a question he needed answered. Answered without doubt or illusion. Shit! Shit! Shit! A dozen feet higher, he paused as a warm glow from the tip of the headland at the distant end of the village across the bay appeared through the smoke. He loitered to perform a scan of the horizon and seeing nothing, edged closer, gliding in cautious spurts over the sand and shingle.

  .*.*.

  The beach was empty aside from a single footprint near the surf. If it was from a humanoid, or Reviled One—as the Knights of Sanctuary called the undead—it was on the large side, out-sizing his own at least a dozen times over. Oh shit! He almost suffocated on the overwhelming terror he felt. An arctic tempest was calming in comparison, and easier to face at the sight. Easier to endure. Dagmar panned around. There was nothing beyond the soothing swish of the incoming tide that caressed, then smothered the giant footprint. The luminescence grew stronger. Perhaps from a campfire, or slotted lantern, he guessed. From who? From what?

  He should return. He considered it—yearned to fucking do it and go. Place the burden on someone else. The pounding of his heart became all-consuming, deafening. He looked back along the beach and shook himself. A calming routine to focus on spellcasting helped, along with several unsteady breaths. Gulping, he slinked closer, hands shaking and useless at his sides. His mind imagined the rock surrounding the cave belonged to a monolithic skull set there to rattle his creaky courage. An ominous crack in the dappled-grey rock face, the nose socket. A glance inside held a battered, rusted oil lantern, which explained the light. Trap! shrieked his subconsciousness.

  Nothing was evident to his senses. Nothing sounded beyond the natural. Nothing seemed out of place. The hiss of the sea scratching the shingle, the slap of surf on rocks prying at limpets. Just the occasional squawk of seabirds seeking food while mobbing the smaller woodland birds venturing from the treeline. The lack of something grotesque, big and nasty that would eat elven-folk for a snack gave him the jitters. He wished he could cast defensive spells, but his spirit form limited his abilities. He felt the same with his courage. Alone and exposed in a hellish place was the most terrifying experience a person could face.

  Dagmar peered around the cave entrance on the side with the lantern. The interior was lit by a dim fire in a chamber down a brief passage. He slid along the rough wall within the shadows. The surface appeared natural and not hand-hewn. Halfway along, he had to stifle a gasp when he noticed a low rough-textured ledge with hair-like moss was not a rock outcrop, but legs. Large legs. Huge legs. Monumental fucking legs. It wasn't the sea outside he'd been hearing, but the deep thrum and slow in and out of slumber.

  The tunnel angle and extra light highlighted the limbs under a blanket of tents or maybe an awning. As he crept closer, he saw a prodigious bosom rising and falling in impossible leaps, caressed and shaded in the warm oran
ge glow. Soft rasping snores echoed with the crackling of the fire within the massive chamber. Dagmar felt the hairs on his neck erupt as he slipped into the chamber. He froze and waited immobile with only his eyes moving. Stifling a gasp to avoid giving himself away, he regained his own slow breathing when he saw the vast arm draped over a giant furred animal. If it had not snuffled, he would have only noticed the beast he walked into it.

  For several seconds he waited, with his heart trying to explode in his chest. Dagmar eased around the crackling logs for a better look. This was what had decimated the elves. It looked savage enough to do the job. Mangle hardened warriors into rotting meat. Snuffling again, it rolled from its belly onto its side, allowing him to see its head and—the second head.

  Just as he had moments before, he froze, only now he resisted the uncontrollable impulse to shriek, unable to believe his eyes. Horrified, he saw a massive mottled bear, huge and terrible. Twelve feet from the single stubby tail to paired feral heads. The right a larger dull-black, the left a mottled greyish-brown, similar to the body fur. An aberration, or a mystical merging? Fuck!

  The elves must have managed some resistance as several arrow shafts jutted from its matted skin and fur. Scabs of dried blood surrounded the token injuries with a dozen fat oily-black flies spiralling lazily around them. It had bitten the shafts buried in the left shoulder short. The rest projected full length and feathered between the heads, scabbed tight where the teeth from two terrifying maws couldn't reach. He wondered why the oversized owner hadn't removed them, but that was a distraction. He needed every grain of concentration, all his awareness, as the situation felt wrong. Staged for his benefit? How could you trap a spirit?