by Ben Galley
Vicious wind swirled around them. Sand whipped his face. Eyrum held onto a palm tree and turned to look back at the stragglers who sprinted or hobbled in all directions from the black ocean beyond the fire.
Eyrum could smell it now: faint sulphur and the stink of scorched flesh. Ko-Tergo tugged at him, barking gruffly, but the Siren wouldn’t move. Instead, he hauled his axe from behind his back and held it high.
A fork of lightning carved the night a blinding wound. Eyrum felt the wind change direction in the snap of fingers. Palms bent sideways as a screeching rose to a banshee’s pitch. The rift of white light tore wider. The Siren clasped his ears.
Cloudless thunder rocked the beach. Lightning burst in a flash that turned the entire coastline to daylight. He saw no more: a shockwave of sand threw Eyrum against a tree. Breath driven from his body, he choked on a mouthful of beach before he managed to avoid suffocating. He could hear panicked yells. With his good eye still clogged, he threw himself and his axe blindly at whatever foes stood before him.
The clang of metal meeting metal reverberated through Eyrum’s body. The axe was almost shaken from his hands. With a frantic hand, he rubbed the sand from his face and found a wall of iron plates standing in his way. Runes had been chiselled across them.
Confounded, Eyrum stared up to a gigantic wooden hull. As he recognised bulwarks and black sails, he heard the cheers and yells of surprise.
Crushing palm trees and the Jar Khoum village, the Summer’s Fury rested on the land, lopsided and planks still shattering under her own enormous weight.
Eyrum dropped his axe. An unbridled yell broke from him unbidden. He could not wait to see the look on Nerilan’s golden face.
Farden collapsed on the deck once more, spent and shaking. Gunnir steamed quietly in his hand. He glanced around, desperate to see where he had crashed the bookship. By the sand drifting through the air and the smell of campfires, he had missed the ocean. The air was hot and humid in his lungs.
At his side, Ilios vomited with a whine. He was not alone. Half the crew lost their guts under the force of magick and nausea.
Lerel staggered to the railing, pale as the snow. ‘By Njord’s arsehole, you did it, Farden! You missed the water and broke my ship by the feel of it, but we’re home.’
‘Where is this home you’ve found?’ he gasped.
With Mithrid and Hereni insisting on helping, Farden dragged himself to her side. A pearl beach curved into the cloying night. Waves whispered softly across it. Palms swayed in the dust cloud and swirling eddies of the spell. Swarming from the forest came the survivors of Scalussen in their thousands. They cheered and hollered at their return. Mages let off light and fire spells. Minotaurs roared and performed odd dances of celebration for their Warbringer, who stood like a statue at the bulwark. Voidaran was stretched to the starless sky.
Below, he saw Eyrum, wounded sorely and missing half a leg. Ko-Tergo, in full white yetin form, was his crutch. The High Crone Wyved knitted thick patterns in the air with their flocks of sparrows and finches that sang as if it were dawn. Nerilan stood like a rock in a stream of bodies, arms crossed and face impassive. Whatever he had missed, the queen looked wonderfully inconvenienced by their return.
‘A dark night made brighter by your return!’ boomed the Old Dragon, as he alighted on the deck with an enthusiastic thud. He bowed his head low to the mage, golden eyes closed. ‘And you have returned our dragons to us, more to my heart’s content. We were wrong to doubt you, Elessi.’
Elessi, looking as tired as Farden felt, managed a smile but not a word except to Farden. ‘A long story.’
The dragon chuckled. ‘With a fine ending. It is good to see you, old friends.’
Farden did his best to bow back without stumbling onto his face. ‘The feeling is wholeheartedly mutual.’
Towerdawn was immediately intrigued by Gunnir. ‘So this is what drew you to lands forgotten? What has added years to your face?’
Farden held it before him, but the dragon shrank away respectfully.
‘Does Loki live?’ he asked.
Farden had not the energy for wasting a moment of thought upon the god of lies, nor his infuriating knack for escape. There would be time enough for justice. Rest called to him at last. ‘That he does,’ was all Farden said.
Mithrid spoke up. ‘Malvus lies dead and defeated, once and for all. We can take some comfort from that.’
The dragon’s serpentine head swung across the deck. Golden orbs pierced the shadows. ‘I do not see Durnus or Aspala,’ he growled in a sombre tone.
The silent shaking of heads was enough to silence Towerdawn on the matter. ‘There will be time enough to speak of it all. Of lost friends and enemies survived, and the stars extinguished. Tonight, Farden, Elessi, Mithrid, we can rest. The war against the empire is finally won.’
Farden could not remember hearing a sentence so beautiful before.
Though his legs were fit to crumble, he stood by the bulwark as the gangplanks were lowered and the Fury slowly emptied. The crowds enveloped the crew and the others who had survived the east and the ocean. Mithrid looked back at the mage before she was whisked further up the beach. A simple nod was traded between them, and that was all that was needed.
Farden found Lerel lingering at his side. Her eyes had always held a feline glint to them, especially at night. He held her curious gaze, watched her lips toy with the idea of a smile.
‘I hope you’re not planning any other long excursions any time soon?’ Lerel asked.
‘If I can help it. I think my feet might murder me if I tried.’
Lerel tapped at the ruby eyes of the wolf on his Scalussen breastplate with her rough and sea-worn finger. ‘The lone wolf, home at last,’ she mused. ‘A little greyer perhaps, but whole, thankfully. Are you coming? Your subjects await to cheer their king’s return.’
‘Shortly.’ he replied in a quiet voice, barely heard over the noise of his kingdom.
Lerel held him by the cheek for a moment before striding down the gangplank, grinning wildly at a gesticulating Admiral Sturmsson.
Farden clenched his jaw. He let the voices fill his ears as he lay Gunnir flat in his palms and studied its spiral runes and etching, so perfect he became lost within it. Once more, its power crept through his body in wave after subtle wave, like a second heartbeat.
Farden, came the whisper, not as clear as a dragon’s call, but louder than the muttering of the Grimsayer. He stared at Gunnir with narrowed eyes until he heard it again, just as soft. The whisper of a pyre’s ashes in a breeze.
Hello, old friend.
The mage found a smile cracking his weary face. Necromancy had its benefits after all.
EPILOGUE
There was no carrion like the remains of a battlefield.
Crows and white ravens vied with seagulls to tear at the broken and mauled bodies. The giant carcasses of beasts lay infested with swarms of the cackling, arguing birds.
Wolves and dogs had come from the deserts to have their fill, finishing off the few survivors the daemons had left behind. The ones that crawled by inches through the slush and snow and blood, gasping for breath and cursing the masters that brought them to this wasteland of carnage.
Queen Peskora was one such soul, clinging onto the life that ebbed from her body to the dripping of her blood. A daemon had driven a spear through her before biting the head clean from High Cathak Tartavor. Not a single one of his Cathak tribe had survived the battle. Her detestable cousin and Belerod had fled them in an enclave of his golems. Peskora’s own soldiers had routed, abandoning her, running screaming with their backs aflame.
The snow fell upon her face in skittering flakes. She blinked, listening to the crunch of bones in nearby jaws. Hours had passed since the last magick had scorched the ground.
Peskora dragged herself onto her belly as a crow came to peck at her eyes. The wound in her stomach complained, squelching blood. The rest of her body had fallen numb with cold. She stared at the empty fiel
d, where the creature lay beheaded.
Not a single bird or beast touched the body. Her vision was clouding, but she could still see where a dark rift hovered in the air, dark as night and smoking softly. Though the mage and the cursed witch of a girl had disappeared, long gone and escaped, their magick remained.
The queen made it several feet before her body failed her feverish determination. The whine of the wolves made her flinch. A corpse-cold wind blew across her bloodied scalp. Spears and discarded swords around her wavered.
One eye now closed, and with the echo of her heart becoming nothing but a shiver, she stared at the rift. She scraped snow from her face once, twice, to make sure it was not a trick of death.
There, a foul hand curled around the ragged lip of the rift. Mottled grey and green was its skin. Six fingers flickered in the air as if tasting the blood on the breeze. A plain of steel wasteland lay beyond. Abject and constant night streaked with the green spirals of unknown stars.
The fluttering of her heart halted, and Peskora remained staring, lifeless, as a fell-dark face of golden eyes emerged from the shadow.
Scalussen will return in
TO KILL A GOD
SCALUSSEN CHRONICLES BOOK THREE
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All books by
Ben Galley
THE EMANESKA SERIES
The Written
Pale Kings
Dead Stars – Part One
Dead Stars – Part Two
The Written Graphic Novel
THE CHASING GRAVES TRILOGY
Chasing Graves
Grim Solace
Breaking Chaos
THE SCARLET STAR TRILOGY
Bloodrush
Bloodmoon
Bloodfeud
STANDALONES
The Heart of Stone
SHORT STORIES
Shards
No Fairytale
ANTHOLOGIES FEATURED IN
Lost Lore
Heroes Wanted
Lone Wolf
Inferno! 5
The Art of War
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Heavy Lies The Crown?
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