Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (33 page)

These erstwhile raiders had scoured all the abandoned pavilions for weapons. Each man had probably amassed as many blades as the rest of these people trapped in the anchorage could have put together between them.

‘We will come.’ The raider squared his bare bronzed shoulders as though readying himself for the challenge.

Archipelagan born by his speech, he clearly had mainland forebears on both sides of his lineage to bequeath him that complexion. His new comrades’ colouring ranged from ebony to a sallow tan.

‘Thank you.’ As Hosh headed for the next pavilion, he heard the bronzed swordsman calling out to rouse his allies.

There was no grass growing around this next set of steps. These five surviving women had scoured all encroaching vegetation away, just as they had thrown open all their chosen pavilion’s shutters and doors when they claimed it. They weren’t interested in keeping watch though, but in sweeping away the wind-blown dust and broken discards from Anskal’s earlier plundering.

Of course there had been more of the women then. Nine, all told. One in four of the mageborn.

Was that usual, Hosh had wondered, on that other island of Hadrumal? He had so little knowledge of magecraft, though he did recall tavern tales which spoke of lady wizards.

This morning, their doors and shutters were tight closed.

‘Good day to you!’ As Hosh waited for a response, he looked over towards the other pavilions, beyond the blasted wreckage of blind Grewa’s house.

A handful of Archipelagan slaves now squatted in the
Reef Eagle
’s master’s home. He had seen them beseech the women or the swordsmen to give them some task to earn their favour.

Hosh could see the sense of staying on good terms with such heavily armed warriors. He wondered what the slaves thought they might get from the women. There’d been no sign that the remaining handful were willing to cook, clean or launder for anyone but themselves.

As for any other services, Anskal had shown no sign of interest in spreading their thighs—

‘What do you want here?’

It wasn’t one of the women opening a window up above. One of the mainlanders had appeared around the corner of the pavilion’s broad stone foundation.

A second followed, growling. ‘We get first split, shit-face.’

The third man simply leered, one hand already inside his loosened trews, trifling with his stick and stones.

At first Hosh had found these three men’s behaviour as incomprehensible as their accents. Then he overheard the two Lescari lads condemning them as mercenaries. Lice sucking the blood of honest men in their homeland’s recent strife. This last craven remnant of some defeated warband had evidently been captured in battle and sold down the river to the Relshazri slave markets.

Hosh backed away, empty hands raised. ‘I came to tell you that you’re wanted over yonder.’ He gestured towards Anskal’s pavilion. ‘He won’t like to be kept waiting,’ he warned.

The first mercenary grinned. ‘He can wait.’ He brandished a fist at Hosh, a thick brass ring catching the morning light. ‘What’s he going to do? Flog us for being tardy?

The other two nodded in comfortable agreement.

Hosh took another step back. ‘I’m only the messenger.’

‘Then take him this message.’ The first mercenary took a menacing step. ‘We’ll come when we’re good and ready.’

‘I will.’ As Hosh continued retreating, the three mercenaries went up the stone steps to contemplate the pavilion door.

Hosh looked frantically towards the pavilion where the other mainlanders had chosen to shelter; the two Lescari militiamen and four from Ensaimin with the weathered skin and hard muscles of lifelong seamen.

He heard splintering wood up above as a shutter was ripped open. A woman screamed. Another cursed.

Hosh turned tail and ran to Anskal’s pavilion. He scrambled up the steps, slipping onto hands and knees in his haste.

The Mandarkin was standing in the doorway, an uncorked bottle in one hand.

‘You must do something!’ Hosh point a shaking hand at the women’s pavilion, at the dark void of the broken window where the mercenaries had forced their way in. The women’s shrieks and curses rang through the clear air.

Anskal smiled lazily. ‘It is none of my affair.’

Hosh gaped at him.

The Mandarkin merely shrugged, taking a long swallow of his palm wine.

As Hosh whirled around, movement caught his eye on the terrace outside the Aldabreshin raiders’ pavilion. All six men had emerged, armed and armoured, looking in the direction of the women’s house. Even at this distance, Hosh could see they were appalled.

He ran down the steps and across the beaten earth. ‘You must do something! This isn’t right!’

He couldn’t tell if they had heard him. Regardless, they were already making their way down their own pavilion’s stair. Falling instinctively into step, every man drew a blade. They were all ready to defend each other, their instincts born of years of survival amid deadly peril.

Hosh hesitated. He had no sword, unless he recovered the one he had hidden. If he did, what help could he offer those women that a handful and more of expert warriors couldn’t?

Before he could take another step, another scream soared above the muffled sobbing inside the women’s house. Hosh only had an instant to realise that was a man’s screech cut brutally short.

Surprise equal to his own halted the advancing Aldabreshi. They stopped, blades ready, as tense as hunting dogs.

Hosh saw a man inside the building stumbling backwards towards the broken-shuttered window. He was swearing in the vilest terms to ever soil a Tormalin tongue. The low sill caught him behind the knees and he fell out on to the terrace.

Two women leaped through the window after him. One landed to kneel on the mercenary’s chest, beating him around the head and face with already bloodied fists. Hosh didn’t need to understand her dialect to know she was cursing him to some unspeakable torment. The man flailed ineffectual hands, his retching indicating that she had already struck a mighty blow to his manhood.

The second woman seized the mercenary’s ears. She lifted his head to smash it down on the unforgiving stones. Even after he went limp, Hosh expected her to continue until the man’s brain began leaking out of his ears. Instead, the woman turned her attention to the man’s hand. He had a melon knife. She took it and ripped it across the senseless man’s throat. Springing to her feet, she vaulted the window sill with her sister in arms following her back into the building.

That spurred the Aldabreshin raiders to action. As they ran for the pavilion and up the steps, Hosh followed. As he reached the terrace, he saw the other mainlanders approaching, all open mouthed at this commotion. The former slaves dithered on the
Reef Eagle
pavilion’s terrace.

One of the raiders kicked in the women’s door with a well-practised foot. He immediately stepped backwards, throwing his sword away and raising empty hands. At his sharp command, all the other Aldabreshi sheathed their blades and spread their own arms wide. All the men retreated to the precipitous edge of the terrace.

Left alone at the top of the stair Hosh could see into the pavilion’s entrance hall. The woman with the melon knife stood over the second man she had killed. The first mercenary who had ripped open the shutter lay sprawled on his back. His tunic was rucked up and his trews were bunched around his ankles. Loops of bowel protruded from the ragged gash across his naked belly.

Another woman stood in the inner doorway. She was all but naked, her bitten breasts bare for all to see. Her loose tunic had been torn from hem to neck by her attacker and her skirt or trews were nowhere to be seen. Her own violated blood trickled down her inner thighs. Tears from one swelling eye mingled with blood trickling from her split lip.

Undaunted, she took a step forward and brandished a knife at Hosh. ‘You want to try your luck with us?’

Another woman appeared in the doorway, carrying a cleaver smeared with gore in one hand and a severed head in the other. Hosh recognised the man who’d been polishing up his stick in anticipation of beating these women into submission.

‘Enter and be welcome.’ Her smile was as friendly as one of the sharks who followed the galleys.

‘If you dare.’ The fifth woman emerged from a doorway to the rear of the hall. She carried a kitchen blade as well and looked just as eager to use it.

‘I don’t want—’ Hosh took two steps back in hasty denial.

‘Then leave us be!’ The woman with the cleaver hurled the heavy steel at him.

Hosh was ready to jump and risk the drop rather than try escaping down the stairs. Instead, a shove of sapphire magelight sent the cleaver skidding across the black stones. Every man and woman recoiled from the brutal burst of wizardly radiance.

Anskal stepped out of the fading glare. ‘So now you see.’ He smiled with vicious satisfaction. ‘Magebirth does not save you from attack. Yet working together, the weakest can defeat lustful fools.’ He acknowledged the women with something approaching a nod of respect. ‘Especially those brave enough to wait until such a fool is rutting like a fevered dog.’

Hosh looked aghast at the woman who’d been raped. Had she yielded to such violation for the sake of getting close enough to the mercenary to gut him with that knife? In order that his companions would be so rapt at the sight that her house sisters’ attack could surprise them?

The implacable resolve in her unswollen eye convinced him she had indeed traded her body’s immediate sufferings so that those three brutes could be taken unawares.

Mainland born brutes. Hosh could be certain that Saedrin would bar the door to the Otherworld while Poldrion’s demons savaged them for an eternity. Though he decided against offering that consolation to these women.

‘All of you, heed me now!’

As Anskal’s words echoed oddly, Hosh saw the mainlanders and the slaves on their distant terraces stiffen. He guessed more magic was carrying the Mandarkin’s words to their ears.

Anskal tossed an embroidered leather pouch to the woman with the melon knife.

She untied the drawstring and shifted the pouch in her hand for a better view of the contents before looking up at the wizard. ‘Is this recompense?’ Anger choked her.

‘No.’ Anskal gestured and the fallen cleaver spun through the air towards Hosh.

He couldn’t help flinching as it rebounded from the arm ring’s magic.

‘You may be mageborn but you know nothing of magic. You cannot so much as defend yourselves against fools with knives. So I will give you a little such bound magic to protect yourself, for the moment.’

He gestured towards Hosh and smiled as the woman’s expression turned to wary comprehension. She took a fine silver gorget on a chain from the pouch. Dropping her knife, she fastened it around her neck.

Anskal grinned and sent a twist of sapphire magic to hurl the cleaver at the woman. Hosh gasped along with everyone else as the heavy steel crumbled into rust before it came within a handspan of her cringing shoulder.

‘I have more such valuable trinkets. Their magic differs in strength and effect.’ Anskal’s smile turned sly. ‘The first to submit to me will be given the choicest. You know you need me to teach and guide you, if you are not to be as easily killed as these blind fools!’

As the Mandarkin gestured, contemptuous at the dead mercenaries, his challenge rang back from the walls of the distant pavilions.

Before anyone else could speak, he vanished in another blinding flash of light. An instant later the same bright blue radiance flared inside the furthest pavilion. No one need doubt where Anskal was waiting for their homage.

The women retreated into their pavilion, into the chamber beyond the entrance hall to close an unsplintered door on the slaughter. The raiders disappeared as promptly into their own bolt-hole and the slaves hadn’t yet got half way so they scurried back to their lair.

The mainlanders stood gathered together below the pavilion’s steps. Their conversation was too low-voiced and too swift for Hosh but their decision was soon apparent.

They came up the stairs and four went into the entrance hall to retrieve the headless corpse and the gutted rapist’s body. The remaining two Ensaimin grappled with the dead man below the window. Throwing all three off the terrace to begin with, the men then went down the steps, retrieved the bodies and began carrying them away.

Hosh followed them to the headland on the southern side of the anchorage. He spared a wary glance for Anskal’s pavilion as they passed by but there was no sign of the wizard.

As the mainlanders approached the headland, reef eagles and yellow-eyed gulls began wheeling overhead, eager to feast on the carrion. The sweating men threw the dead mercenaries into the breaking waves instead.

If they had been Aldabreshi, they would have waited to see if sharks or sea serpents appeared to feast on the windfall. Ensaimin and Lescari alike had no interest in such portents.

‘What do you want?’

The last of the men to pass him as they headed back stopped to stare at Hosh.

‘I—’ Hosh didn’t have an answer so he asked a question of his own. ‘Do you want to be subject to that man?’ He gestured towards Anskal’s pavilion.