by T. A. Miles
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 its own being, 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 priest, 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 priest 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 priests 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 priests 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. He had beckoned them to him with the hope of drawing them from Dacia Cambir. 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.
The shadows continued to shift. It felt as if the ship settled with them, low creaks moaning through the space so quietly it lulled. Korsten’s eyes began
to fall closed, and he opened them deliberately when he noticed, focusing briefly on the sleeping form of Sethaniel, then again on the darkening light filtering through the window.
His eyes slid closed again and he drew in slow, deep breaths. He imagined that he stirred when he heard a girl’s voice, but realized he’d been dozing after the fact when he awakened in the same leaned back position in the chair. He looked toward the door, in case Lerissa had entered, but he saw no one and submitted to the quiet darkness yet again.
Once more, he heard a girl’s voice. In brief snatches, he caught bits of dialogue and impressions of a face that belonged to Dacia. Some of the moments were plainly memory, of how he’d met the girl, in the midst of possession and the subsequent Release; of her startled awakening in the home of Irslan Treir, and of the walk through the city to her adopted mother’s house deeper within Indhovan’s complexly networking districts.
As his dream walked him through the casual alleyways and crowded avenues of Indhovan, the light that had been cast down on them shifted. The shadows grew longer, and deeper. It was as if night were descending down upon the streets, but the light overhead remained. It hovered impotently, like a glass plane over a box. Over a pit, Korsten corrected as the shadows reached into every nook and corner…over Hell’s depths.
The form of Dacia continued to move through the blackened passages ahead of him. She was colorless, like an off patch of light beneath a barren canopy of branches that gradually formed fists. The dark arms of the crone…or the blood and dirt-formed arms of the Vadryn. Serawe’s claws raked across his mind, replaying the memory of the wound he’d received on his side. Blood seeped into the dream.
In an instant, he saw Dacia in a panic, the shadow of her unnatural mother and tendrils of blood coiled around her. She struggled to push both off, then thrust her hands out to Korsten when she saw him. Instinctively, he reached for her with both hands.
Instinctively…he Reached. It was the Reach which woke him from his light sleeping, as the environment shifted around him. The close walls of the cabin on the Song of the Coast had been opened up several-fold. The ceiling appeared suddenly vaulted high overhead, supported by pillars and lit with braziers. The heads of the many individuals crowded into the large space turned to look at him. Their expressions varied too widely to ascertain a tone. It seemed almost irrelevant compared to the tone set by a thunderous noise coming from beyond the walls. Not a storm…
“Master Korsten,” came the voice of Dacia Cambir.
Though he hadn’t flinched at the sound of periodic eruptions coming from outdoors, for some reason the sound of the girl’s voice staggered him. Or perhaps, it was the effect of the Reach, after the fact. He had been half asleep, after all.
He steadied himself and looked to the young woman standing nearby. When she came toward him, her manner as if he may have required assistance in the steadying, he merely held an arm out, letting his hand rest on her shoulder while he took in the room and its occupants once more. He followed their faces toward the front of the room, until he inevitably came to the familiar façade of Ersana Cambir. She met his gaze in her quiet manner, though the slightest stitch in her expression suggested she had been caught off guard by his arrival.
It was no dream. This was Indhovan, and the battle had begun.
Ersana approached Korsten with the same implacable mien as he had been introduced to the morning he brought Dacia back to her. He wondered briefly if she might ask him to leave, except that the general atmosphere of the building felt as if it were a refuge, and not anything private or exclusive. He could feel the fear, confusion, and anxiety of those around them, not in the emotional sense, but purely as a fact. The state of their physical condition indicated it; the manner in which their blood currently ran.
It was a peculiar talent to have, to be able to discern one’s condition by feeling how their blood moved. It was his one permanent reason to visit Eisleth regularly, to be guided in something that Eisleth may well have been the only master of. The nature of their relationship to red was the same in the basic physicality of it, but there was a branching away at some point, where Korsten found himself in a territory that few have tread. There were no longer any guides and he now had the task of mapping the region himself. If only black had been another of his colors, but then he supposed that Eisleth would have been his life mentor rather than Ashwin if that had been the case. How differently might things have gone between him and Ashwin if it had been?
There was no time for such musings, he realized, and it was set aside immediately. Rather than wait for Ersana to reach him, he covered the remaining distance across the forum’s central aisle himself, noting that Dacia followed a step or two after the fact and hovered near his elbow.
“I…would not have expected to see you again,” Ersana said, having evidently searched for the words. “Not quite so soon, at least.”
“I might not have expected to see myself, given the nature of my departure,” Korsten replied, and left it at that for the time being. “What became of Merran? I’m presuming the crone was defeated.”
“Mother was stopped, yes,” Ersana said. “Your friend was badly injured.”
Peculiarly, Korsten felt that he froze emotionally in that instant, and it delayed his verbal response. “How badly?” he asked and teetered on the rim of the question—or of its answer—internally.
“His hand was broken severely by Mother’s grip when she fell,” Ersana explained, and the world regained its sense of presence with that, with confirmation that Merran had not been killed, and was not dying. Ersana continued, “He was taken back to your Vassenleigh Order by one of your own.”
“Good,” Korsten said, feeling the beating of relief in his heart. The weight of it was both burdening and strengthening. “Thank the gods. I’ll know where to find him, then. What of the other priests who were here with us? Do you know anything more?”
“It was they and one of your ancients who deflected the wave,” Ersana explained. “We assisted as much as we were able. The ancient one left with Master Merran. The other two remained here. Your Priest Vlas has reconnected Dacia with her blood family, Irslan, who has been assisting the governor’s son, as I’m told.”
“The governor’s son?” Korsten inquired, overlooking the prick of curiosity that came with hearing of Dacia and Irslan’s blood connection.
“The governor himself had fallen ill,” Ersana said. “As a result, his son has taken over.”
Sethaniel’s son. Korsten’s brother. “I must go to the governor’s manor and let my fellows know that I’ve returned and offer what assistance I am able.”
“The battle is underway,” Ersana told him before he had fully turned to leave. It was difficult to tell if it was in reminder or warning.
Korsten issued her a nod, then directed himself toward the doors. Turning about faced him with Dacia, whose arm he touched lightly. He wanted to inquire of her well-being, but as she continued to appear untouched by events of the immediate past, he determined to leave her health to her mother.
“Stay here,” he instructed, because he felt it necessary after the dream. And then he stepped around her and made his way through those who had convened for prayer or shelter, or both.
The forum offered the shelter of solid walls and a deep space, but it remained open to the outside. That would not pose a problem until the enemy made way into the city itself. The air was darkening beyond the archways leading out to the street, though whatever caused the eruptions lit the sky sporadically, like lightning, but again, it was no storm. It reminded Korsten more of Blast, but with a far greater magnitude, one that moved through buildings.
At the entryway, Korsten halted to look at the sky, to see it striated with columns of smoke. A pair of constables arrived, one of them stopping near him. The man lowered a sizeable bag off of his shoulder, unwrapping items Korsten didn’t look at until one was offered to him. He looked at the sword with some mild confusion at the fact that it was being presented
, glancing over his shoulder at the man’s fellow, who was summoning the attention of others, whom he selectively offered weapons to.
“Take it,” the constable beside Korsten instructed, evidently taking his silence for hesitation or refusal. “It may come to all of us to defend the city.”
“No,” Korsten said, then looked at him again. “No, thank you. I’m equipped.”
The man’s expression appeared to argue, but then he must have actually looked at Korsten, for he frowned in a somewhat abashed manner and withdrew the sword on offer. “Spells, then?”
“Among other tools,” Korsten replied, stepping away from the gentleman before the moment could become anymore awkward for him.
The exchange was instantly forgotten by Korsten as he emerged into the open air, which felt warm with friction, alive with conflict that appeared to be coming from the direction of the harbor. So, they had come by sea, after all. And not alone…
Looking toward the water, watching a blast of some weapon or spell trace smoke and a thin layer of clouds with light, he could see the silhouette of something more. His mind immediately wanted to make it a horde of demons taken flight, but that wasn’t it at all. What he saw may not have been tangible in any sense, but only the projection of what he could feel…an imagined manifestation of presence, not only of the Vadryn, but of an archdemon.
Not Serawe, he argued at once. Unconsciously, he was taking steps in the direction of the docks. He’d left her out at sea. She had dissipated in the current, been pulled like threads from fabric, left to drift in an energy that was more powerful than her. She could not have escaped it so soon—if she even could at all. She could not have manifested a new cohesive form so soon. He refused to believe it.
“They have a fleet of at least twenty ships” Fersmyn reported, a frown that appeared both vexed and dismayed on his aging features. He returned to the central table after an exchange of words—presumably of information—at the doorway with a soldier. “Nine came into our harbor initially with more than twice as many looming in the distance, their attack pending, I assure you.”