by T. A. Miles
“Are you suggesting a traitor?” Fersmyn blurted, and it was just quickly enough to ring true of alarm and frustration, thus absolving him of any suspicion as well.
“I am,” Cayri replied.
The deputy governor cast his eyes briefly to the ceiling and seemed to be deliberately withholding an outburst.
“Our strategy could be at risk,” Deitir said, and Fersmyn blustered a sigh that denoted strong agreement.
“Yes,” Cayri said. “And so might you be.”
“Now it’s an assassin,” Fersmyn complained. When Deitir’s glance called for silence, the elder threw an arm into the air and took a few slow steps from the others.
Cayri watched him begin to pace, then met Deitir’s gaze. “I will allow no harm to come to you,” she promised.
She expected relief and a sensation of reassurance to come to the young man’s features, but instead he continued to surely meet her eyes.
He said with confidence, “I know.” Perhaps it was for his mother’s benefit that he added, “I’m not afraid.”
“I’m to be the one to go with you?” Irslan asked, as if he were roundly shocked by the announcement.
Vlas gave a glance about the room, making a deliberate demonstration of the fact that there was no one else present in the library. “Why are you so surprised?” He turned the book nearest him on the table about and skimmed its open pages. To alleviate further confusion, he added, “Yes, you are.”
Irslan’s confusion accepted no assistance. “But I … well, there’s … not that I’m unwilling….”
“Enough,” Vlas interrupted abruptly. His patience had certainly run its course. The battle for Irslan’s very home was at his doorstep. He should have been prepared to depart already, having anticipated Vlas’ plan. “What an absurd man.” Though the words were muttered with their direction very plain, Vlas did wonder if it was in some way directed at himself as well.
A small silence settled between them, something more for Irslan to fidget with. “Well….” he began, looking over the books spread on the tabletop before him. He seemed wedged between his prior task and the one Vlas had just delivered him.
It was more than Vlas could manage. “We’ve no time for this delay, Irslan,” he said, flipping closed the books between them. “Collect yourself and whatever you may need for a near journey. We’ve very little time to sort a great deal.”
“But….” Irslan began to stand, which at least was a firmer step forward than remaining in his seat and floundering for words. “But what if the battle comes before we return?”
“What of it?” Vlas replied with a suppressed groan. “You’re not a soldier, are you?”
“No.” Irslan said, matter-of-factly, and with a note of reminder that he had no desire to change that.
Vlas nodded. “Right, and neither am I. I have no intention of participating in the battling itself. I’m of much better use away from it, and so are you.”
“I feel abducted,” Irslan mumbled, pushing his chair back and rising fully to his feet.
“Consider it so, if it rests easier on your mind,” Vlas said with a calmer air about him now that Irslan had stopped delaying. He reconsidered the possibility of anyone else in the house who may have inspired such hesitation from Irslan and gave another look about the library. “By the way, where might your cousin be?”
Irslan seemed lost on the subject for an instant, but then found himself and his words. “Oh, she’s returned to her mother.”
That took a small weight off of Vlas’ mind, and set down a new one that he had no desire to discuss with Irslan at this time. In spite of that, he caught himself murmuring, “The adoptive one, I presume you mean.”
“Yes, of course,” Irslan replied with notable confusion this time. “What else would I have meant?”
“Nothing, of course,” Vlas said, looking at him. “Since you may only construct with the materials provided you.”
“Riddles now.” Irslan arched an eyebrow while finally stepping away from the table and the books that might have held him through even a battle taking place on his doorstep. “I wonder at times who the odder man is, Mage Vlas.”
Vlas was less amused by the comment than Irslan, by considerable degrees, but he had brought it on himself for nearly blurting the true origin of the man’s cousin in his haste to get them on their way to the Islands. Pausing to consider, he felt in an awful rush. He understood that he had a generally ill rapport with patience, but he felt as if … as if something were chasing at his heels.
His memory pulled hard back to the imagery of Serawe’s well, populated with a horde of oddly embodied Vadryn. His mind began to replay Korsten’s struggle with the demoness as well.
“By the way,” Irslan said. “Your associate’s horse….”
Vlas found the mentioning of Korsten’s Onyx particularly irrelevant, and vexing. “What of it?”
“I might just tend to the animal before we….”
A crash that was as penetrating as a near lightning strike startled both Vlas and Irslan to a moment of perfect stillness.
While a lingering rumble reverberated through the walls and the very air, they both went to the library window. The largest in the room was two stories of glass that continued to vibrate in the aftermath of the disruption, humming within the panes. Vlas and Irslan looked to the source of the clamor, Vlas’ recent memory taking him back to the Islands cave. He suddenly felt as if Irslan’s house were going to come down on them both, and it nearly had him rushing them both to safety via a Release spell, but his eyes convinced his mind that the threat was not as close as it sounded.
Smoke plumed upward from the direction of the docks. Beneath a darkening sky, the fire feeding the black cloud and the setting sun combined to create an orange-gold rim around the edges of it. In the wake of what was clearly the fire trap having gone off, the peal of bells—presumably from the constabulary—pushed rhythmically through air that had settled only briefly, like the steadying breath taken before one lunges forward … into battle. Morenne had arrived.
The enemy had not waited until night, but thankfully sunset had obscured the light enough that the trap was not readily evident for what it was. The first Morennish ship had sailed into range at a speed that suggested the goal was to intimidate by sheer demonstration of their intention. Perhaps they took the skiffs for some form of preparation, certainly nothing lethal or threatening, and meant to crash over a vital element of the city’s defenses. It was vital, yes, and lethal to the invaders. The magnitude of it was still settling on Oshand’s mind seconds after seeing the point ship kilter with a flaming tear in her side. Two flanking ships were also damaged. One appeared severely crippled and may have been listing into the wake caused by the leader’s sinking. The third had men scrambling to prevent a similar fate.
“Bowmen, fire!” Oshand commanded to the line on the deck. They would take advantage of the wounded ship before the remaining fleet arrived in range to counterattack.
Bolts tipped with flame sailed into the air in arcing steams of smoke and light that streaked the purpling sky of evening. Some smoldered to harmless destinations in the water while others passed through sagging sails, leaving burning holes to grow.
“What’s that?” someone asked urgently.
Oshand glanced to the soldier beside him on the high deck, then to where the man was pointing. At first, he saw nothing. His gaze panned across the water between them and the enemy and he began to ask what the soldier was referring to when he noticed what appeared to be a shadow on the water. With dimensions comparable to an unfurling bolt of fabric, it was not particularly large or menacing just as it was, though it was fast moving. Still, it was unsettling. It seemed misplaced, especially as Oshand looked skyward for whatever may have been casting it; a projectile of some kind and the trailing smoke, he presumed. Yet, there was nothing flying at them. It certainly cou
ldn’t have been anything under the water.
“What is it?” the man asked again.
“I don’t know,” Oshand replied and moved away from the railing, toward the steps that would take him down to the main deck for a closer look.
He was between decks when a second eruption tore across the sky, sourcing from the approaching second wave of Morennish ships and increasing dramatically when whatever had been launched from it met with the furthest extensions of the harbor, bypassing two of their own vessels that had been converted for battle. Smoke, sparks of flame, and splinters of wood were hurled into the air at a rate that was difficult to fathom, even witnessing it. Oshand believed that they now had seen how their enemy utilized the fire tactics of the Islands. In that moment, he felt unsure how to respond. He wasn’t even entirely certain just what he had seen. Was that the only such weapon that they had?
The question was answered almost before it had finished forming with a resounding boom from another of the enemy ships. Oshand heard this one sing by them and toward the city. It was intercepted terrifyingly by one of their own ships. A spray of debris rained over them, setting his own soldiers scattering from harm’s way. Not all of them managed it. Cries of pain and panic joined the ruckus of a sinking ship too close beside them and loads of material being launched through the air by the enemy at swiftly paced intervals.
Oshand had forgotten about the peculiar shadow on the water until a cry sharper and more alarming even than the enemy’s use of fire tactics met his ears. He looked toward the main deck to see blood in the air, in an oddly manlike form. Lit eyes peered out of it for a moment that nearly paralyzed Oshand’s ability to think, let alone move. And then it dissipated. As if it were being sucked into itself, the bloody form shrunk in on itself and a vapory figure remained, lurching over the body of a fallen soldier. Others were backing or running from the sight.
In his horror, Oshand barely registered the hand that fell onto his arm. It was the voice of Constable Imris that shook him around finally.
“We have to abandon ship,” she said briskly.
“We can’t,” Oshand answered automatically, though he had no idea how they would retaliate or defend themselves against what could only have been a demon.
“We have to get everyone off of this vessel now,” Imris urged, tugging once at his arm, then shoving away from him. She went to the high deck and shouted at the confused soldiers to abandon the ship—their posts in defending Indhovan. Their first line of defense couldn’t go down this quickly. They would be overrun.
“Wait,” Oshand started to contradict. But then he saw the demon put its shadowy hand into the man beneath it, the rest of its grotesque apparition-like form following, seeming to gain the soldier’s mass, though that was impossible. Its wicked gaze darted to someone on his way to the railing, still too near. An overly long arm whipped out from its misshapen form and hooked the man before he even got one leg over the rail.
Oshand stopped watching. He looked up to where Imris was urging the others to get away and forcibly turned himself around on the stair and scrambled to join her. Taking her shoulder, he turned her roughly toward him. “Can we stop it?”
She must have had an answer. She had been to the Islands with a mage, and had witnessed things. Oshand would not accept it if she pretended not to know and he refused to believe there was nothing to be done.
“We can do nothing,” Imris said, in spite of Oshand’s unspoken insistence. She shook her shoulder free. “Even if you kill the man the demon has taken, it will only take another. Only a mage can stop them.”
Whether that was true or not, Oshand’s mind refused to move beyond the moment. “Where did it come from?” he asked, recalling the shadow on the water, praying to the gods that these things couldn’t swim. That must have been something else….
The demon must have gotten onboard some other way.
“I don’t know,” Imris told him. “Maybe it came from someone on the enemy ship when it sank. Maybe it was with us already. Let’s go.”
With them already? Oshand struggled with the idea. The sounds of bodies hitting the water as soldiers fled from their compromised posts drew his gaze over his shoulder, where it met with the body of the taken soldier, risen to a stand not far from the demon’s first victims, and looking back at him with a disarming grin. It raised one of the soldiers’ bows, an arrow nocked in place.
“Let’s go!” Imris shouted, taking two fistfuls of his shirt and jerking him forward with tremendous force for a woman so much smaller than himself.
The dull thud of a bolt tip plunging into wood nearby inspired him to accept her direction. He found his footing after her awkward pull and followed her to the nearest railing that overlooked water. They both took hold of it as they arrived and they both felt compelled to look behind them before jumping. The possessed soldier was making his way up the stairs to align another shot. It was unsettling the way it seemed to be mocking them by using their own weapons. Equally disturbing was the surreal vision of the ship that had flanked them, slowly disappearing beneath water salted with bits of flaming debris.
Oshand prepared himself to leap, to abandon his post, hoping to the gods that there weren’t more of the creatures in the water, or that he and Imris didn’t get drawn into the wake of their sinking neighbor.
Imris suddenly let go the railing and turned around, distracting Oshand’s attention from the jump. Eyeing the demon, she slipped her club from her belt loop.
Again, he struggled to take in what he was witnessing. “What are you….”
Before Oshand could question what appeared a mad decision to fight what she had said could not be contended with by them, Imris threw her club, almost recklessly. It tumbled through the air well off course of the possessed soldier … over the low inner railing, and directly against one of the baskets of fire that the bowmen had been using to light their arrows. It toppled over, a trail of the oil from the bottom of the basin threading across the deck.
That may have been the first thing Oshand properly comprehended since seeing the shadow on the water. He and the lady constable said nothing further, nor did they dwell upon the demon’s response. They turned back toward the deck railing and vaulted themselves into the sea feet first.
As the sun set, Sethaniel retired with its light. Korsten had accompanied him below deck and currently sat in the modestly sized cabin afforded the ship’s guests, in a chair not far from the narrow bed where his father lay. Through a small, yet articulate porthole window, he observed the colors of the passing of day to night over unclean glass that was portioned into tidy squares by narrow braids of wrought iron. The frame encircling the window included a delicate pattern of twisting metal as well, mimicking the forms of leaves and branches. There were careful accents throughout, reminding Korsten that the vessel served as a residence as well as a means by which a living was earned by its crew. The intricacy of the craftsmanship reminded him of Indhovan’s architecture, particularly of the porthole-like windows along the wall lining the central channel of water from the falls. That thought led him to the cliff overlooking the city, and to the caves embedded within. When he’d stepped foot into those caves, he had been one step closer to going home. He never would have conceived of such a transpiring of events. He never would have conceived of the crone or what she had become.
He remembered her suddenly. Almost violently, the memory of her malignant presence surged across the solitude of sunset in a quiet room aboard a ship sailing up the coast of Edrinor. Flashes of her face staggered across his mental view, her features widened by her transformation from an obscenely aged woman bent over in the damp dust and bramble she’d collected over an unnumbered period of years to a creature of flesh merged with living wood. He doubted that he could ever forget her sneer as she bid the mages in her presence die, in a moment of self-empowered judgment, of prejudice against those she believed had betrayed nature and the gods
.
“Die, consorts of shadow….”
Korsten’s gaze lingered heavily on the shifting copper and rose tones of evening’s onset, following the gradual movement of shadows over the glass. Arms formed in his imagination, at first tendrils to match what the crone had formed to not only attack the mages in her presence, but to defend herself against an infiltration of demons. The Vadryn and the witches of Indhovan had been involved in a war of their own, well before Korsten and Merran had arrived. In Korsten’s recent memory their representatives battled again, portions of the crone’s stalks and the extremities of the peculiar vessels of the demons breaking apart in the viciousness of the assault on both sides.
He focused on the demons especially, then and now. He had beckoned them to him with the hope of drawing them and their mistress from Dacia Cambir. A child born beneath the shadow of a demon; she had been taken by the beast that had overseen her conception. She was not the first to have been conceived in such a manner; Aevo Grisch also owed his creation to the dark circumstances of a parent possessed by one of the Vadryn. But Grisch had not been in so precarious a state as Dacia, perhaps because he had been taken far from the demon by his mother. He also had not had a demon attempt to take him over, but perhaps if one had, he might have also slipped from sanity’s careful hold and plummeted into his own pool of madness.
Or maybe not. It was possible that he was, for whatever reason, more resilient.
Korsten wondered now. He wondered if Grisch had a worse struggle than he’d let on to Korsten during the brief period they’d known one another at Lilende. He wondered as well if Dacia had truly survived her own ordeal. He knew only that Serawe had left the girl in order to come to him, but how had that left Dacia? Was Merran in attendance to her, even now? Had any of them even escaped the crone?
There was no way to know until arriving back in Indhovan. There was no way to know if Indhovan had even survived. The city itself might well have been washed away, scoured from the earth by the crone’s summoning.