Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (48 page)

‘So what do we do now?’ the most weather-beaten of the mainlanders demanded of Anskal.

The Mandarkin shrugged and the shadowy visions vanished along with the emerald radiance casting them up from the scrying bowl.

The assembled mageborn gasped and protested, some angry and others more shocked. As Hosh blinked he realised how strong the daylight had now become. True dawn was not far off.

‘If you wish to fight, you need to see your enemy.’ Anskal pointed towards the door. ‘They hope to catch you sleeping,’ he added with some amusement.

‘Will you not fight?’ the second Lescar demanded.

Anskal looked at him with that secretive smile. ‘I have no need to fight. I can be a thousand leagues away from here in a single stride.’ He looked around them all. ‘Prove to me that you are worthy of learning such magic by driving off these invaders. Then I will teach you all that I know.’

The Ensaimin mariners and the two Lescari were first to the door. Hosh saw them skidding on the entrance hall’s tiles in their urgency to reach the terrace. The raiders followed closest with the slaves barely three paces behind.

The women looked at each other, swapping their thoughts in such brief, swift sentences that Hosh couldn’t catch their intent. Then they hurried out.

Anksal followed at a leisurely stroll and Hosh stayed close behind him. Standing in the entrance, they saw the raiders, the slaves and the mainlanders all crouched along the edge of the terrace.

Stealthy shadows were now creeping through the pathetic remnants of the abandoned huts. The multitude following stirred the trees further away like the rising wind of a winter storm.

Hosh pressed himself against the doorpost. Couldn’t the invaders see the waiting mageborn? Then he realised that the pavilion’s cringing defenders must be all but invisible with no need for magic; motionless in the dusky shadows beneath the wide eaves.

The advancing Aldabreshi had no reason to pay exclusive attention to this most distant building. They were dividing their attention and their forces between the other dwellings where they hoped to catch and kill the sleeping mageborn.

As they surely would have done, Hosh reflected, if Anskal hadn’t been keeping watch for such an attack. The raiders’ and the sailors’ sentries could not have raised an alarm quickly enough for the rest to save themselves.

As the Mandarkin moved a few paces along the terrace, Hosh followed as closely as he could.

He was clinging to one hope. Anskal had come here with Corrain. The Mandarkin had said as much himself. Hosh knew that the captain didn’t have a mageborn bone in his body. So that must mean that one wizard’s magic could sweep two people across infinite distances.

If he stayed within arm’s reach of Anskal, if the battle went against the mageborn, if he saw the Mandarkin about to depart, if he grabbed a handful of his tunic, perhaps the magic would carry him to safety?

As long as he didn’t miss his moment. As long as Anskal didn’t strike him down, thinking that Hosh was attacking him or merely to punish him for such temerity. As long as a wizard didn’t have to deliberately choose to carry a passenger along with his magic. If so, there was every chance that Anskal would opt instead to abandon Hosh to his ghastly fate.

With all these frantic doubts and fears, the advancing Aldabreshin threat seemed almost trivial by comparison.

Anskal was oblivious. He was watching the women. Hosh realised the five of them intended to circle around the building to make sure there was no assault sneaking up from behind the pavilion, where the headland sloped down to a rocky shore.

‘Girl children learn the value of attacking from an unsuspected direction since they lack the strength to take down an assailant directly,’ the Mandarkin observed.

Hosh’s terror momentarily ebbed as he wondered yet again what manner of place the Mandarkin realm might be, where such violence was seemingly so commonplace.

Then the first wave of Aldabreshin attackers surged towards the shuttered dwellings where the slaves and the mainlanders had sheltered and all such thoughts fled.

Now that they had got so close, the Archipelagans abandoned all thought of stealth. Screaming incomprehensible abuse, tens and tens of men swarmed up onto the stone platforms that supported the pavilions. They came from all sides, not bothering with the narrow steps. The first men bent low, their linked hands offering a step for those that followed. Those first attackers were thrown bodily upwards to land balanced and alert, their swords ready to kill. As soon as they found themselves unopposed they began hacking the shutters to kindling.

‘Why swords?’ one of the Lescari demanded of the raider kneeling beside him. ‘Why not burn us all with sticky fire hurled from triremes? Isn’t that the island way to raze a settlement to the ground?’

‘When wizards can turn fire to do their will?’ The raider stared intent at the unfolding destruction. ‘The only way to know your foe is truly dead is to hold his severed head in your hands.’

In the time it took the raider to share this wisdom, a second line of armoured men followed those pathfinders up onto the terraces. They advanced ready to slaughter anyone breaking out of those shattered windows.

The third wave dropped momentarily to one knee on the terrace edges, empty hands extended downwards to haul more armoured assailants up to join them. Those in the vanguard were already inside the buildings, smashing their way through empty rooms, yelling their threats and hatred.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
S
IX

Black Turtle Isle

In the domain of Nahik Jarir

E
VEN AT THIS
distance, the noise of the onslaught on the pavilions was deafening. The Aldabreshin assault had reached the women’s dwelling and the raiders’ house. The attackers smashed their way inside with the same swift violence.

Hosh recalled Captain Corrain scaring callow recruits to Halferan’s guard troop into stammering confusion. He would run at them yelling a torrent of obscenity in the midst of a peaceful sword drill.

Noise was as much a weapon as their blade, so Corrain had told them. Hadn’t they just seen the proof of that? Couldn’t he have stabbed each one of them a handful of times while they stood there gaping? If they found themselves in a battle, they should yell and curse with the language their grandmothers threatened would turn a bad lad’s tongue black as the Eldritch Kin’s.

Hosh remembered Corrain sticking out his own tongue to show the trembling recruits that hadn’t yet happened to him, to ease their shock with relieved laughter.

There was nothing to laugh at here. Yet more Aldabreshi came, contingent after contingent clad in mail and brandishing swords. Some swarmed through the abandoned huts, ripping every last crude shelter apart to leave no hiding place for anything larger than a mouse. And still they came. There was no sign of a rearguard emerging from the line of ironwood trees between the settlement and the bloody hollow.

What would they do when they found no one inside those ransacked pavilions? When they realised that this lone building must surely house their prey?

Hosh looked at Anskal and wondered if the Mandarkin was somehow hiding this furthest dwelling with his own wizardry. He didn’t imagine that Anskal would do so for those coerced mageborn’s sake but the wizard had the highest regard for his own hide.

Were any of the mageborn going to act? Hosh was beginning to doubt it. He readied himself to grab Anskal’s tunic at the slightest sign that the Mandarkin was about to flee.

The oldest of the Ensaimin swore under his breath in the dockside slang of Col. Standing upright, he flung out his calloused hands. A vast crack appeared in the stone foundation of the raiders’ pavilion. Amber magelight shone in the depths of the cloven stone. The terrace split from the edge of the steps to the front door, leaving a void too wide for a man to step across.

The Aldabreshi recoiled, their shouts coloured with alarm. They could not move fast enough to keep their footing though. The dark gold radiance pulsed to match Hosh’s heartbeat. That first gulf cut deeper into the house. The wall beside the door began to crack. From the depths of the widening crevice, magelight spread outwards, cutting angled lines between the closely laid stones. Tiles began to slide from the roof as the walls shivered with their footings crumbling away.

One of the Ensaimin’s shipmates stood. He jabbed a hand at the distant pavilion, ire twisting his face. Darts of golden magelight shot from his fingers.

Each dazzling flare was drawn to a falling tile, a lump of cracking plaster, as surely as pins to a lodestone. In the instant that magic touched the debris, each piece was transformed into a deadly missile. One of the slaves sprang up with an exclamation of belated understanding. His hands moved with swift certainty, his own magelight twice as bright.

Now the Aldabreshi weren’t only fighting to keep their footing on the disintegrating terrace. Swords were little use against lumps of rubble smashing their hands and faces into bloody ruin. Armour was ineffective against crippling blows to the backs of their heads and the sides of their knees and elbow joints.

Anskal said something in his own tongue. Hosh didn’t understand the words but he could hear the wizard’s approval. Nevertheless, the Mandarkin watched the assault unfolding on the invaders with impatient expectation.

All the mageborn were on their feet now, savage intensity in their eyes. Hosh shivered in a chilling breeze as the two Lescari summoned jagged lumps of ice out of the humid air and sent them hurtling to knock Aldabreshin swordsmen senseless.

Two of the raiders came to stand beside them, joining in that bombardment. The same green radiance was now wrapping them all in a fine cold mist though none of them seemed to notice it. Hosh could feel the chill creeping through the very stones beneath his cringing unshod feet.

Swathes of Aldabreshi were collapsing; dead or stunned.

‘Saedrin!’ Hosh was startled into an exclamation as the raiders’ pavilion convulsed.

Amber magelight flared from every door and window as though oil had been thrown onto a fire within. The tilting roof collapsed as the walls crumbled inwards. The screams of crushed Aldabreshi were lost in the roar of the building falling all the way down into the cellars within the foundation.

Anskal laughed. Hosh saw why. Before the clouds of dust had risen up beyond the falling beams and roof tiles of the raiders’ erstwhile shelter, the same golden promise of mageborn destruction zig-zagged through the carefully laid black stones underpinning the women’s dwelling. In the next breath, the foundation of the
Reef Eagle
pavilion cracked asunder with that same glow.

But Hosh saw no sense in Anskal’s delight. However many Aldabreshi were dying, crushed in those ruins of the pavilion, however many lay knocked senseless or killed outright by the lumps of ice or rubble, countless more Archipelagans survived.

They were all turning towards this distant pavilion. The rainbow hues of magelight swirling around the terrace left no doubt where the wizards were gathered. Their fierce magic outshone the rising sun.

The Aldabreshi gathered together, heedless of their injured comrades. They stood shoulder to shoulder between the pavilions. Their ranks massed ten and twenty deep. The throng stretched back further than Hosh could count.

The foremost began to advance. If they were reluctant, they were given no chance to show it with so many more armoured men pressing so close behind them. As the front rank broke from a walk into a run, the rest followed hard on their heels. Upraised blades glinted in the fresh sunlight.