by D. P. Prior
“You mean, he could already be dead?”
Albert nodded like a mad man, but Plaguewind lifted his glassy eyes and looked slowly around the shadows collecting in the corners of the warehouse.
“What’s in those bottles, anyway?” Ilesa said. “Potions?”
Plaguewind’s head snapped round. “Albert is friends with—”
“Associate,” Albert said. “An associate of.”
“Magwitch the Meddler,” Plaguewind said.
“The mad mage?” Magwitch was the crazy the Senate used for all their security. His talents were legendary, but hardly anyone could afford his services. Many a guildmaster had tried coercion, but the magical backlash was enough to persuade them never to try again.
The men were taking up positions all around the warehouse, each with nothing but a bottle in hand. Ilesa strode over to one, snatched the bottle from him and read the label.
“Global Tech? Isn’t that Sektis Gandaw’s old company?”
Histories were already being written, since the Technocrat had been brought down and his plot to unweave all of Creation had been thwarted. Quintus Quincy’s was the only one she’d heard, badly declaimed at the Dog’s Head, but there’d been just enough Urddynoor history in among the bad poetry to keep it interesting.
“Magwitch has a stock of them. Says they used them to win wars on Urddynoor. One swig of that stuff and a man will grow twice as strong, twice as fast, and twice as aggressive,” Albert said. “Well, I may be selling it a bit short. Ten times would be more accurate.”
“Gandaw used magic? But I thought—”
“Science,” Albert said. “And quite the science at that. I’ve had a good look at them, being something of a chemist myself, and I have to say—”
A shadow descended behind Plaguewind. Ilesa opened her mouth to warn him, but thunder cracked, and she averted her eyes from a blinding flash.
Silvery motes lit up around Plaguewind in a sphere—his magical ward.
The shadow landed lightly on the floor of the warehouse. Not a shadow: a cloak, fanned out like the wings of a bat. The hood fell back to reveal a face as white as bone. Pink eyes took in everything in the warehouse in a single sweep. In the same instant, Ilesa registered every detail, like it was burned forever into her mind: Small. Barely the height of a child. Shaven head, the stubble white; box beard, pallid hands, each of them gripping—a wand? One was smoking, the other coming to bear on Plaguewind’s sparking shield. It boomed, and the shield flashed argent and fizzled out.
“My eyes!” Plaguewind cried, hands flying to his mask. “My eyes!”
The other weapon bucked and roared, and this time Plaguewind screamed as he pitched to the floor, clutching his thigh.
“Now you see me,” the assassin said, as he leveled both weapons at Plaguewind’s head. “Now you—”
“Potions!” Plaguewind cried. He groped at the air, pivoting his head and clearly seeing nothing. “Now!”
The men knocked back the contents of their bottles without hesitating.
The assassin turned one of his weapons on Albert, kept the other covering Plaguewind.
“Shadrak…” Albert said, holding up his hands.
One of the men clutched his throat and keeled over. His bottle smashed as it hit the floor.
Plaguewind gasped. “What’s happening? What—”
Another man collapsed, and another, until all ten Dybbuks fell amid the shower of breaking glass.
Shadrak dropped his aim on Albert. “Good boy,” he said.
Albert let out a huff and made a show of mopping his brow with his handkerchief. “Anyone would think you didn’t trust me.”
“You…” Plaguewind said, trying to locate him by the sound of his voice. “You betrayed me.”
Albert shrugged and set about folding his handkerchief with great precision.
“Ilesa?” Plaguewind turned his mask, trying to find her. The slump of his shoulders told her he knew it was over. “Change,” he said. “Change!”
Into what? A rat, like the last time she’d shifted? A snake? That was all she’d achieved under his instruction. In Portis, she’d managed a mermaid to please Davy, and there was that one time that wasn’t under her control. A wolf-man like she’d become then could have ripped out Shadrak’s throat, but—she eyed the weapons that were once more both pointing at Plaguewind—even then she’d have to get close enough.
First one weapon fired, then the other. Plaguewind slammed back against the floor, bright blood blossoming from his shoulder and guts. He tried to stem the flow with his fingers, even as Shadrak advanced to stand over him.
“Change, you shogging bitch!” Plaguewind croaked, looking around blindly. “Help me!”
“I can’t,” Ilesa mouthed, no sound coming out. She wanted to tell him, tell him she would if she could.
Shadrak turned his pink eyes her way and put a booted foot on Plaguewind’s throat. “Mustn’t forget the bint now, must we?” he said. “Shame for you, darling, is that you saw me. Imagine the shogging inconvenience if I had to change my moniker. Can’t go round being called Shadrak the Seen, now, can I?”
A shiver ran through Ilesa’s body, and she swayed as if she were aboard a ship on a stormy sea. She heard the boom of Shadrak’s weapon, winced against the pain, but felt nothing.
“Shog!” Shadrak said. Suddenly, he seemed a giant, looming over her. “Where’d she go?”
She’d scuttled halfway across the floor before she realized she’d changed without knowing it.
Not a rat. Not a snake. Something even more appropriate, she thought as she found a crack in the wall and crawled though it.
A cockroach.
Plaguewind cried out once more, a plea that turned into a wail and was cut off by a final resonant boom.
LAST STAND OF ARNK
The Sea of Insanity lashed the shoreline with waves of jade, silver, and gold. A chaos of rip tides wrenched the waters every which way. White horses galloped across the wave tops, leaving a trail of virulent foam, and prismatic plumes of steam rose from the boiling surface, speckling the shimmering air with a kaleidoscope of motes and vapors.
Nameless stood atop the hills east of the village of Arnk, cradling the woodman’s axe the locals had armed him with. He blinked against the raging miasma of the sea, fought down the nausea threatening to spill his guts.
The farm-folk flanking him leaned on their scythes and pitchforks, faces painted somber. Jethor Lult’s makeshift phalanx of villagers armed with saplings stripped of leaves and branches and whittled to points held the center. Twenty men wide, but only four ranks deep. It was the best they could muster. Anyone who could fight, would fight.
Lult stood out like a sore thumb in his moth-eaten cloak and tunic, the sandals, kilt, and rectangular shield he’d brought into retirement with him from his days as a New Londdyr legionary.
A ragged line of youths with hunting bows made up the left flank. Some of them had leashed rabbit hounds lying obediently at their sides.
It wasn’t much. It might not be enough. But it was either stand and fight, or pack up and leave, because the reavers were coming, and this time they were coming in force.
One by one, their metal ships emerged from the scintillant mist. They were high-prowed and broad-faced. Flaking gray paint clung like dead skin to corroded keels riddled with rust. There were no sails among them. They drifted toward the shore by some sorcerous means of propulsion.
Six, Nameless counted. Then seven, then eight. Each packed to the brim with things that may have once been men.
Murmurs passed among the farmers standing with him. There was a tangible wilting of resolve, and some started to inch back. They’d known what was coming, and they’d prepared as best they could. But imagining a battle and actually waiting for it to start were two different things.
“Courage, laddies,” Nameless said, voice a resonant rumble from within the scarolite great helm.
Someone pointed off to the gully that afforded some
degree of protection to their right flank.
A woman crested the rise. A big-boned lassie with a massive spiked club over one shoulder. Her hair was woven into gray dreadlocks. Bone piercings disfigured her face, and her flabby arms were blue with tattoos a baresark would have been proud of.
“That’s Taryn Glave,” an old man said with hushed awe. To Nameless, he explained, “She lives alone in the woods; comes to the village from time to time with skins to barter.”
“Aye,” another said. “She was a chieftain near Illioch, till the tribe chased her off for not siring an heir.”
She stood twenty yards from them, glared, and then nodded. She was here to fight.
Dom Nilo, the closest thing Arnk had to a mayor, came up the slope behind, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with bottles. He was followed by a stick-thin man in a black coat and hat.
“Thank you for staying, Nameless,” Dom Nilo said. “We’re going to need all the help we can get. Since the wolf-men came, we’ve been vulnerable, and the reavers know it.”
Nameless had only intended to stay the week. It was the same everywhere he went: he always needed to allow travel time back to the Perfect Peak, so Aristodeus could re-feed him.
“It’s my honor, laddie. You’ve all treated me like one of your own, and that means a lot to me.”
“You are one of us,” Dom Nilo said. “We’re all wanderers and outcasts in Arnk, just looking for some place to call our own. I wish you’d reconsider staying.”
“Perhaps one day, I will,” Nameless said. A year roaming the wilds of Malkuth was starting to take its toll. As a penance, it was warranted, but there was no sign it was working.
Maybe a place like Arnk was where he belonged: a village of those whose faces no longer fit anywhere else; people who had brought their skills with them to throw into the community pot. There were tanners and fletchers, hunters, fishers, former soldiers, crooks, thieves, bandits. But, from what he’d seen this past week, there was no crime. The simple law of Arnk was pull together or perish, and no one seemed to disagree.
“But till I can get this bucket off my head, I’m bound to the Perfect Peak. Now, these reavers that are coming: it sounds to me a lot more than raping and pillaging.”
“It is,” the skinny man said. He looked Nameless up and down with snake eyes. His face was sallow, crusted with flakes above the eyebrows and round his lipless mouth. And it was indeed lipless. Diseased gums and jagged teeth gave it the appearance of a sphincter. “Their numbers are swelling. The Cerritus Isles they hail from are overrun with the vermin.”
“Nameless, this is Bolos the Skink,” Dom Nilo said. “Bolos used to be a Maresman; spent most his life hunting the husks coming over the Farfall Mountains.”
“Just don’t say nothing,” Bolos said, issuing a warning glare to Dom Nilo. “Only ex-Maresman is a dead Maresman, the way they see it. It’s only the obscurity of Arnk that’s kept me out of their way.”
“The same obscurity that stopped them coming to our aid when the wolf-men came,” Dom Nilo said, like he was scoring points. “Yet, when the pack moved on to savage Portis, the Maresmen rode to their aid.”
“Eventually,” Borlos said.
“Portis has a big fishing industry,” Dom Nilo explained. “Serves the best eateries in New Londdyr; so you can guess why they thought it was important enough to save.”
Borlos’s cold eyes panned the shoreline, taking in the eight boats that were even now beaching.
“Well, these reavers ain’t husks, but in some ways they’re worse. A husk doesn’t choose what it is. They were just dreamed into existence that way. But these shoggers: I don’t know what they are, but I do know there’s lore in those boats of theirs, the way they move against the tide, and I’ve seen what they do up and down the coast. Husks are what the dog-head dreams them to be, but reavers…” He shuddered. “They’re the kind of evil that only comes from working at it.”
The ramps at the front of the boats clanged open, and giant men spilled out, each a head and a half taller than the tallest human, and twice the height of a dwarf. They were naked, save for flesh-toned loincloths—flesh-toned to a human, that was, because the reavers themselves had skin as livid as a corpse’s. In place of hair, their scalps were ridged with spines, and they each had a single, plate-sized eye, a sickly yellow disk with no pupil. They were armed with cutlasses and spears, which glinted in the fierce light of the twin suns.
Dom Nilo wheeled his barrow in among the farmers and started handing out bottles.
“Don’t drop them,” he cautioned. “There’s an alchemical mixture within that will explode. And make sure you don’t get any on your skin or clothes. It burns and burns, and goes on burning; and water only makes it worse.”
Borlos shook his head and cursed. “Tells me he learnt to make it down in Pellor, among the sorcerous bastards who brought it back from Qlippoth.”
“People went into Qlippoth?” Nameless asked, eyes fixed on the assembled reavers below. “And came back?”
“Not many. Some. The founders of Pellor returned with lore from the Stygians, some of the nastiest husks you’ll ever find.”
An arrow arced through the air toward the reavers and fell short.
“Hold your fire,” Jethor Lult yelled from the phalanx. In case the boy-archers hadn’t heard, he dispatched a runner to make it crystal clear.
It would have been a fine thing, picking them off with arrows, but there weren’t enough bows. The boys had been drilled to fire and run, keep harrying the reavers’ flanks, while Lult drew them into the center. His phalanx was on the low ground between two hills. If the plan worked, Nameless was to lead a charge against the right flank. If it didn’t, and the reavers came for the two-score farmers that stood with him, they’d have the hill to contend with, but unless the farmers could fall back to the flat, Lult and his makeshift pikemen would be worse than useless.
But that was the beauty of battle, Nameless supposed. Even the best laid plans were prone to being thwarted. In the Ravine Guard, Thumil had drilled them for every conceivable situation, and they’d trained year in, year out at the Ephebe, but real combat like this… In Nameless’s lifetime, the Red Cloaks had only been put to the test the once, and that was when he had emerged from Gehenna with the black axe.
The reavers fanned out along the shore in a single line. Those at the flanks moved inland a ways, forming a broad semicircle, with the beach in between an open space, like an arena.
“What the shog are they doing?” Dom Nilo said. “Why don’t they attack?”
“They’ve seen through Jethor Lult’s little ploy?” Nameless suggested. “You’d have to be a shogwit to cede us the high ground; and to attack the center where the pikes could hold them long enough for us to crush their flanks… only a baresark drunk on Ironbelly’s would fall for that.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?” Borlos said.
“Me? I’m just an grunt with an axe, laddie. Lult’s the local strategist, and I respect his command.”
“Even if it’s foolhardy?”
“It’s just the way of things. Back home, you disobey a superior and you lose a week’s worth of tokens. Next time, it’s a month’s. If the lack of mead doesn’t kill you, the shame of it would. And any scut persistent with their insubordination will end up making a living from the circle fights, till some great big baresark chokes them out or snaps their spine.”
“Sometimes orders are meant to be broken,” Borlos said.
“That why you’re here, laddie? Why you left the Maresmen?”
Borlos narrowed his eyes to slits, then he glared down at the beached boats and the hundred or so reavers stretched out in front of them.
“They’re waiting for something,” Borlos said. “And I dare say it ain’t good.”
Nameless noticed the former Maresman had no weapon. He recalled the husk hunter he’d encountered on the road to New Londdyr with Shadrak and Shader. That one had a flame-wreathed fist, which he used to devastatin
g effect.
One of the reavers broke from the line and strode along it, barking out guttural sounds that may have been words. He held something aloft in one hand.
“What is that?” Nameless asked.
Borlos squinted. “A conch shell.” He turned his eyes on Nameless. “This doesn’t feel good.”
The lone figure of Taryn Glave took a step toward the sloping face of the hill. She’d seen it, too, and something about it unsettled her. She rolled her spiked club from her shoulder and thumped the head into the ground so she could lean on it.
The reaver with the conch returned to the center of his men, then turned toward the defenders and approached, until he stood midway between both forces. He raised the twisted shell like a threat.
One of the farmers dropped his britches and showed the reaver his arse. Nervous laughter passed along the ranks of defenders.
“Careful, laddie, you don’t want to give him an idea where to shove that cone-shell.”
Blushing, the man re-fastened his britches.
“Just saying,” Nameless said, “but I don’t disagree with the sentiment.”
Turning to face the sea, the reaver lifted the conch to his lips and sounded a single sonorous note. It carried eerily across the foaming chaos, amplified tenfold as it struck the multicolored mist. It lingered long in the air, then trailed away to silence. Nothing now but the background susurrus of the surf hitting the shore and receding.
The waters grew agitated further out to sea. They roiled and bubbled. Froth sprayed and eddies swirled, and then something dark burgeoned beneath the surface. It grew larger as it cut a line for the shore. Scaly bumps rolled above the waves, undulated toward the beach, and the reavers opened their line to welcome it.