Scarlet Odyssey

by C. T. Rwizi

  Salo’s hand trembles as he lets Tuk pull him up to his feet. “My staff. I need my staff.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” Ilapara says but stops before she goes too far. “Looks like Mukuni’s already bringing it.”

  Indeed, the large cat pads over with the witchwood staff caught between his jaws. Salo could swear the cat’s getting more autonomous by the day.

  “Maybe you want to get behind us, Salo.” Tuk’s eyes are now pitch black as they settle on something in the mists. Salo sees it, too, a formless shadow drifting over the waters.

  While he accepts his staff from Mukuni and moves as Tuk commanded, Ilapara grips her spear with both hands, stretching her neck muscles. “Any idea what we’re facing here?”

  “Not really,” Salo says. “But I think we have to survive it until the second sunrise.”

  “You think, or you know?”

  “It must be the test he needs to pass to prove himself worthy,” Tuk says while he tracks the moving shadow. He clicks his tongue in a typically Yerezi expression of frustration. “I can’t believe I missed your communion.”

  “They’re here!” Salo shouts.

  The first one appears on the aft deck. It coalesces from the white mists behind the vessel, nebulous at first but becoming more and more solid as it seeps onto the deck. Its skin is colorless, drawn taut over stringy limbs that mildly adhere to human proportions. Any pretense of humanity is further marred by the waterweeds mushrooming out of its bloated stomach and out of its head, as well as the fine gauze of white mist wafting around its form.

  Salo has never seen such a creature before, but the fire that ignites in its empty eye sockets, bright as the white sun, is chillingly familiar. And there’s no denying the Black magic emanating from it.

  A tikoloshe, he realizes. Different in appearance from the ones that attacked his kraal—a creature of the water, not of the earth—but the power they draw from is the same.

  Thoughtless panic makes him edge backward so he can put Tuk, Ilapara, and Mukuni between himself and the tikoloshe. The others stand their ground, their muscles tense and ready for anything.

  “My goodness,” Tuk breathes, watching the wraith with wide eyes. “Did you say there were more of these?”

  The wraith springs forward with a limping gait that shouldn’t be fast, and yet it closes the distance in a few strides, staggering toward them in a blur of mist and stringy limbs. Its growl is like a thousand bones breaking at once, its mouth a black horror of sharp, rotted teeth.

  “Get behind me!” Ilapara is the first to move. She steps forward to meet the wraith with the cutting edge of her pole arm, swinging it in a wide arc.

  The tikoloshe ducks, showing surprising speed, and Salo’s heart stops beating for a terrifying moment. But Ilapara isn’t cowed; she presses her advantage, seeking the creature’s skull with her spearpoint. It lurches backward, but only to evade, because the next instant it’s lunging at her with a clawed hand. Salo doesn’t know how she does it, how she manages to move fast enough to sidestep such a lightning-quick blow, or how evasion quickly becomes counterattack, but somehow she’s spinning on her feet to cut the thing down in a wide diagonal slash. Bones snap at the blow and explode into white mist, then dissipate into nothingness.

  More shadows begin to coalesce all around the vessel, and a host of unnatural eyes starts to flicker in the mists like fireflies. Two wraiths lunge from the port side with open talons; Tuk barely has time to duck before they fly over him, landing on the deck just behind him.

  “Tuk!” Salo shouts. “Watch out!”

  Tuk’s response is instant: the golden rings on his fingers flash like moonlight, and he pulls two blades straight out of thin air. They materialize in his hands in a brilliant shimmer, two finely crafted swords of a radiant golden metal, each with a single sharp edge. Salo recalls seeing such a blade in Seresa, though it was longer than either of these.

  The delicate engravings on each flash with red lightning just as he ducks a swipe destined for his head. He leaves twin echoes of red light in the air as he retaliates, hacking into one of the tikoloshe with well-timed blows to the neck and head. His victim is still crumbling to white mist when he neatly dodges a sweeping attack from the second wraith; he swings his blade in a mesmerizing arc to decapitate this new enemy—even while the point of the other blade streaks toward a third tikoloshe’s rib cage.

  To Salo’s horror, more and more of the things have made it onto the deck. They keep coming from the aft sections of the vessel, where the rigging and netting aren’t dense enough to prove an obstacle to boarding.

  Like the coward he knows he is, Salo backs farther and farther toward the bow, selfishly keeping Mukuni’s growling form in front of him while Tuk and Ilapara fight for their lives.

  And by Ama, fight they do.

  Tuk’s swift and relentless movements remind Salo of a three-eyed suricate of the southern savannas: small but quick, tenacious, and stupidly brave. The water wraiths slash at him like angry vipers, but he weaves his form among them with deft footwork, answering their lunges with quick one-twos, cutting through skulls, femurs, ribs, and backbones with his arcane swords.

  Next to him Ilapara is like a dancer with her spear, and it baffles Salo that she can move as fast as she does when she carries no blessing in her bones. A ray of the risen sun pierces through the mists and glances off her silvery breastplate as she pivots to chop down a tikoloshe from skull to rib cage. It bursts into a cloud of mist, but more wraiths press toward her.

  Salo holds on to his staff with a trembling hand, shamed by the bravery of his companions. Get a grip! They can’t keep fighting like this. You heard what the Lightning Bird said: use the gift he gave you to save yourself and everyone else.

  He slaps his face several times to wake himself up from his paralysis. Tuk and Ilapara are here because of him; they deserve better than a coward who won’t even try to defend them.

  The staff in his hands is like a lens; he directs his scattered thoughts into it, and they come out more focused. Only then does he probe his mammoth new spell. Nothing at all like his other spell of Storm craft, which he can cast instinctively, without prior calibration. This spell requires that he understand the exact nature of the lightning barrier he wishes to summon: how much space to bend, what shape to bend it into, how much lightning—a thousand other such parameters. In fact, it isn’t so much a spell as a framework for designing spells; once he knows the parameters of the barrier he wishes to conjure, he could cast it at will just like any other spell.

  But he’s never reached into the Void before, and right now he feels like a child dipping his toes into a vast ocean. Surely he isn’t expected to figure out how to use it to conjure space-bending barriers in the heat of battle? And surely he isn’t expected to then electrify said barriers with lightning, is he? It would take him hours at least to come up with anything even remotely practical.

  By Ama, we’re going to die here.

  Tuk spins away to evade the swipe of a claw even as he cuts into the clavicle of another wraith, his blade shattering bone and cutting through flesh across the chest. His other blade is already coming up to part yet another wraith from its head even before the first has crumbled to mist. Ilapara’s red veil swells with the wind as she swivels yet again, the point of her weapon arcing through the air like a sliver of light. Two tikoloshe lose their heads in a single strike, only for more to take their place.

  One of them slips past her and lurches toward the bow. Black leeches cling to its pallid skin, and the weeds boiling out of its stomach are almost long enough to touch its knees. The deck trembles as Mukuni roars and pounces, batting the wraith into the ship’s netting with a fierce metal paw. But then another comes at him, and then another, and another. He tears them down with his teeth and paws and sweeps them away with his powerful tail. And still they keep coming.

  Something moves behind Salo, and he looks. A tikoloshe with white fire in its eyes has slipped through the opening in the ne
tting above the bowsprit. Salo’s nostrils catch the unholy fetor wafting away from it, and he almost gags.

  Tuk shouts his name in the background, but he barely hears the call. Without thinking, he fills his shards with essence and unleashes Storm craft into his surroundings, commanding the winds to obey him. But the magic curves away from the wraith, and the winds blow harmlessly around it, like it’s cocooned in a bubble of space where the laws of nature will not obey Salo. Its white-hot gaze glows brighter as it moves closer, and Salo could swear the thing smiles at him.

  He’s not sure what comes over him—maybe he suddenly remembers that he has trained with spears and sticks before—but when the wraith gets close enough, he grips his witchwood staff with both hands and thrusts its bottom end with all his strength. He feels resistance, but the staff breaks into an eye socket and punches through something soft. The next thing he knows, he’s standing in front of a haze of white mist.

  “Salo!” Tuk shouts somewhere behind him. “Salo, are you all right?”

  Wide eyed and terrified, Salo turns around in time to see Tuk pay for his moment of lapsed concentration. The young man cries out in pain as a tikoloshe catches him in the right arm with a claw, ripping a long gash that instantly pearls blood. He retaliates with a decapitating move and lets out a string of curses.

  “We’re not going to last much longer!” Ilapara shouts next to him. “There are too many of these damned things!”

  Salo knows she’s right. He can see a myriad of torch-like eyes drifting in the mists, slowly closing in on the vessel. But how the devil is he supposed to use his new spell to fend them off? The most useful barrier he can design at a moment’s notice is nothing but a small and simple wafer-thin geometric shape, and that wouldn’t even work as a protective shield unless . . .

  Unless . . .

  “I’ve got an idea!” he shouts as inspiration hits him like a lightning bolt. “Hold on just a while longer!”

  Neither Tuk nor Ilapara has enough breath to reply, occupied as they are with stemming the tide of tikoloshe. Salo sinks his mind into his staff and lenses himself into focus. His thoughts accelerate. He awakens his talisman, closing his eyes to better interface telepathically with its high-speed core. Then he begins to string ciphers together faster than he has ever done in his life.

  35: Ilapara

  Lake Zivatuanu

  Ilapara had heard that facing a Primeval Spirit entailed an element of danger. She’d heard that many a mystic who set forth to commune with one never returned.

  But she did not know that it would be this dangerous.

  Her aerosteel spear is a streak of silver in the air around her. The speed in her bones is a reserve she has nearly depleted, and yet she keeps pushing herself, diverting all her body’s resources until the world closes in around her and all she can see and hear are the tikoloshe.

  Tuksaad is a swiftly moving blur somewhere nearby. They have never fought together, but their bodies move in sync; he seems to know where she will strike, and she is able to read his cues even without looking at him. Tikoloshe fall to their blades one after the other.

  But there is just no end to them.

  She casts a fleeting glance at Salo and sees him standing in the dwindling pocket of safety they have carved for him, one hand wrapped tightly around his staff, the other raised. Magic is swirling away from the raised arm in a luminous grid, and the look on his face is pure concentration. Whatever you’re doing, Ilapara prays, do it quick.

  She begins to tire. Her spear grows heavy in her hands. Its charm of Storm craft has all but expended itself, and the red sparks that sputter along the blade are now largely harmless. She mistimes a swing, loses her footing, and rights herself in time to see a claw slashing toward her face. Her reflexes give her enough speed to dodge, but she puts too much into it and winds up falling on her back, hitting her head hard on the deck.

  “Ilapara!”

  While the skies spin above her, a group of wraiths gathers to look down at her, like they know she’s finished. Her spear has rattled somewhere out of reach, so she is helpless as one of them raises its talons.

  “Ilapara!”

  I have given my all, she tells herself, bracing for what’s coming.

  A storm of feathers erupts onto the deck from somewhere above, sending a score of tikoloshe flying off in a shock wave. It should blast her away, too, but all she feels is a light prickling all over her skin. Magic.

  When she lifts her head to look into the heart of the feathers—ravens, she realizes—she glimpses the faint outline of a young woman wielding knives that pulse visibly with shadows. As she watches, one of those knives whirls away from the stranger’s hand and impales a tikoloshe across the deck right between its eye sockets. Another blade materializes in that same hand not a heartbeat later, and the stranger pivots to hew a second wraith’s skull in half. Pale beads and red steel glitter in the maelstrom as she spins from one tikoloshe to another almost faster than Ilapara can track her, leaving only a trail of dissipating mist.

  An Asazi.

  For a moment, Ilapara isn’t sure whether to be relieved or concerned. But she doesn’t let that paralyze her for too long; the Asazi has given them some breathing room, and that’s all that matters.

  Drawing from a new fount of energy, Ilapara picks herself up from the deck and finds her spear before rejoining the battle with renewed zeal. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Tuk decapitating a wraith with his left blade. He looks pale now, and his right side is drenched in blood from a frightful wound, but he’s still fighting with the viciousness of a red mamba. The deck shudders as the totem roars behind him, his metal claws slicing left and right with enough force to snap tree trunks. She thrusts her spear into a grinning skull and is satisfied to see it crumble into mist. They fight and fight and fight some more, until Ilapara starts to feel like her limbs are coming out of their sockets.

  Only as the tide of tikoloshe starts to ebb does she notice the change in her surroundings: a barrier has slowly taken shape around the waterbird, visible only because of the arcs of crimson lightning that briefly and repeatedly spread along sections of its surface in tessellated hexagons. Like the barrier was built one invisible hexagon at a time, upward from the bottom of the hull, bulging outward to encompass the wing structures, and then curving inward high above the deck. The hexagons are all about a foot in width and are visible only when currents of electricity throb down their edges.

  By Ama, he’s casting a ward the size of a building.

  She looks up just as the structure closes above them into a protective dome encompassing the entire vessel. It pulses regularly with currents that shimmer across its surface. A wraith caught outside claws at the ward and is instantly electrocuted, bursting into mist. More wraiths perish to the ward, sending off sparks of lightning every time they strike it.

  Ilapara puts them out of her mind and moves to finish off the few tikoloshe caught within the ward. With Tuk, Mukuni, and the Asazi helping, it’s not long before the deck is clear and they’re all panting and staring at each other. Staring and panting.

  The Asazi relinquishes her ravens and becomes corporeal, but she holds on to her Void weapons. Her pale beads and kitenges weave down her body in a manner that accentuates more than it clothes. She is dark skinned and bald, pretty like Asazi often are. A calculating gleam shows in her eyes as she watches Tuk, the totem, and then Ilapara.

  Ilapara has never gotten along with Asazi, never liked their cunning and aloofly academic ways or their proclivity for deception, and she can tell straightaway that this Asazi fits that mold perfectly. For one thing, she’s certain she’s seen those ravens of hers stalking them several times over the last few days.

  She holds her spear tightly in her hands, ready to move at the slightest provocation.

  Tuk flashes the Asazi a grin, and the Asazi smiles back.

  “Everything all right back there, Salo?” he says without ever glancing away from her. His right arm is bleeding, but Ila
para has seen him fight; she knows how quickly he could move if it became necessary.

  The Asazi remains still, though she doesn’t take her eyes off Tuk and Ilapara.

  “Salo?” Tuk says again.

  “I’m fine,” comes Salo’s reply. “I just need to concentrate if this ward is going to stay up.” He’s leaning on his staff with both hands, frowning in concentration. Ilapara suspects his eyes are closed behind his spectacles as he battles to repair the patterns of his ward faster than the wraiths can destroy them with their pummeling.

  “We have an uninvited guest, if you haven’t noticed,” Tuk says, which makes the Asazi smile again.

  “Oh, I noticed.”

  Tuk twists the shiny blades in his hands as he eyes the Asazi’s knives. “It’s just that I’d like to know if this is going to be another fight.”

  “Look, I need silence right now,” Salo says. “Distract me, and we might all end up dead.”

  Tuk obeys, and the three continue to watch each other, at least until the Asazi seems to get bored and slowly starts to wander the deck, admiring Salo’s ward. Beyond it the wraiths are a sea of pale limbs and waterweeds clamoring to break through, even though they keep bursting into mist every time they touch the ward.

  Mindless creatures.

  Even so, the ward is quite unusual to Ilapara. A physical barrier, so there must be space-bending magic involved, but the lightning means there’s Storm craft as well. But how is Salo doing this so soon after his awakening? Shouldn’t he be struggling with the most basic spells?

  A flash as golden light washes across the world beyond the dome. The fog rapidly burns away, taking the horde of tikoloshe with it, and what was once an impenetrable blanket of mist gives way to a glittering lake that stretches toward an unbroken line of dense jungle.

  “The second sunrise,” Tuk says, glancing east, where Ishungu, the yellow sun, has just peeked over the horizon. The crescent moon is a thin red sliver not far above it. “Does that mean it’s finally over?”