Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (49 page)

Hosh looked up as a shower of glittering metal showed that as yet unseen Aldabreshi had come armed with arrows and bows.

The first surge of attackers was barely two ploughs lengths away. The mageborn would all be hacked into oblivious pieces. Assuming they avoided being filled with so many arrows they looked like his mother’s pincushion.

Hosh couldn’t see anyone wielding any control over this howling mob. The mageborn wouldn’t be captured alive and chained for later punishment. He wouldn’t have the slightest chance to protest that he was no wizard. Not that anyone would believe him if he tried.

So finally, after all his trials, he would answer to Saedrin before this day had got half way towards noon. Hosh found himself surprisingly calm at this prospect of imminent death.

A soaring wave of scarlet light swept through the air. It traversed the advancing Aldabreshin force from the sands by the water of the anchorage to the trees beyond the raiders’ devastated pavilion. The shafts of soaring arrows burned to ash drifting on the breeze as their steel heads plummeted towards the ground.

None of the arrowheads landed. Two slaves and two of the raiders watched the deadly hail intently, oblivious to the rosy flames licking up and down their forearms. Why should they fret, Hosh noted numbly. The magefire wasn’t even singeing the fine down of black hairs on the closest slave’s arm, let alone his skin.

The arrow heads melted. Searing gobbets of liquid metal flew though the air, tracing their path back towards the unseen archers. Tearing screams of fear and pain rose from the rearmost ranks, loud enough to be heard above the yells of hatred close at hand.

The first line of Aldabreshi stumbled. Not singly or in pairs. They fell headlong in tens and handfuls; their feet vanishing up to the knee in cracks cutting through the dusty earth. Those following so close behind couldn’t help trampling their helpless comrades. As the ground continued to fracture, those second ranks fell to be crushed themselves by the inexorable cohorts behind them.

The Lescari and the two raiders who had been hurling ice at their attackers turned their attentions to the straggling undergrowth, lately flourishing in the island’s moist warmth, only to be trampled beneath these invaders’ nail-studded sandals.

The bruised tendrils writhed. They began to grow impossibly fast. Inside a few breaths, vicious green tangles snared the closest Aldabreshi . Within the next moments, red blood flowed where wiry stems cut deep into their flesh.

Hosh pressed a shocked hand to his mouth as he saw one unfortunate decapitated by a leafy noose. Gouts of the man’s lifeblood spurted into the air as the headless corpse teetered; still standing upright, as though the dead man couldn’t believe what had befallen him.

The closest Aldabreshi were swift to try cutting their comrades free. That was a fatal mistake. Any hand or blade touching the mage-inspired greenery was instantly captured by twining tendrils.

Those further behind, in the midst of the undergrowth and the ironwood trees between the anchorage and the bloody hollow found themselves in worse straits. Twigs curled around upraised hands. Branches flexed to pull men bodily off their feet. Where an Archipelagan was caught between two trees, he was ripped into bloody halves.

Hosh saw two of the raiders and one of the slaves conferring on the corner of the terrace. With a resolute nod, they clasped their hands together and reached up for the milk-pale sky.

A deadly shaft of lighting skewered a struggling group of Aldabreshi who had fallen victim to the twin hazards of the ground opening up beneath their feet and the malevolent coils of vegetation. Azure magelight stilled their thrashing. The only movement was the stinking smoke rising from the blackened corpses.

One of the slaves laughed out loud as the three of them summoned a second devastating lightning strike. A third followed and a fourth, as quick as a minstrel snapping his fingers.

Hosh saw the Aldabreshi wavering. Their advance slowed. But enough were driven onward by fear and hatred to kill everyone on this terrace fifty times over.

The raiders and the slaves who had melted the arrows linked their hands. A curtain of crimson fire surged up from the blood soaked ground to ring the pavilion. Hosh pressed harder against the wall at his back. The searing heat struck him like a blast from a blacksmith’s furnace.

The four mageborn grimaced with effort. Slowly the flames began to shift outwards from the terrace. Abruptly, one of the slaves screamed. He leaped backwards away from the rest, looking at his outstretched hands with absolute horror.

His skin was blistering beneath the flames that cloaked his forearms. The magewrought fire darkened to bloody maroon as his skin blackened and cracked to show vivid red flesh beneath. The slave threw back his head with a shriek of despair and the flames surged up to his shoulders. As the wizardry enveloped his skull, his hair blazed in a brief moment of agony. The blaze cascaded down his body, his clothing vanishing in a flare of commonplace flame oddly out of place amid the scarlet magefire. His flesh was utterly consumed within the next moment, leaving only his blackened skeleton to collapse and shatter on the the terrace’s cold stones .

Even as Hosh recoiled from those splintered bones, he saw the remaining three fire mages intent on sustaining their spell. Though he hated himself for it, Hosh was relieved. He didn’t want to see anyone else die like that. He didn’t want to die himself.

He couldn’t see what was happening through that curtain of opaque crimson brilliance. He didn’t need to. They could all hear the screams of the Aldabreshi being burned alive. As the magical blaze advanced with paradoxical slowness compared with the untamed rush of a natural grass fire, their attackers’ charred corpses were revealed. Tears filled Hosh’s parched eyes as he saw those burned bodies now locked forever motionless in a futile struggle against their abhorrent fate.

The wreckage of the raiders’ pavilion caught alight. The mageborn with the air affinity let their clasped hands fall and the lightning ceased. The slave collapsed to lie motionless on the terrace. The raiders clung to each other, each man’s head on the other’s shoulder. Their chests were heaving as though they had just run for their very lives. Untamed sapphire magelight crackled around them.

Hosh saw no such azure bathing the fallen slave. He realised with cold horror that the man’s bony chest wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing.

Now emerald radiance showed Hosh exactly who shared the Lescari’s arcane power over water up to and including the sap within those deadly plants. They seemed less fatigued, perhaps because there were six of them in all. Those four born to command the earth were sitting by the steps, their hanging heads all wreathed in darkening amber magelight.

The flames on the remaining mageborn to fire began to flicker. Their deadly wall of fire started to shrink. By the time it reached the ruins of the women’s house, the crimson blaze was barely man-high. No matter. It had served its purpose. As the flames subsided to vanish into the scorched earth, Hosh could see the fleeing Aldabreshi vanishing out of sight. The plants and trees no longer stopped them.

‘Do they—?’ One of the Ensaimin mariners was so out of breath that he had to make a second attempt at his question. ‘Do they have ships waiting?’

If they did, Hosh couldn’t see any of these would-be wizards were in a fit state to do anything about it. But what of Anskal?

Before the Mandarkin could answer, a figure appeared at the corner of the building. It was one of the women who had taken themselves off to safeguard the far side of the pavilion overlooking the sea.

‘Come!’ She was hoarse with weariness, leaning on the building as though her legs might fail her at any moment. ‘You must see this!’

The urgent exultation in her voice lifted even the two exhausted raiders’ heads from each other’s shoulders.

The woman said something more in the Aldabreshin tongue. Between her dialect and the breathlessness swallowing her words, Hosh barely caught half of it.

‘What is she saying?’ Anskal demanded all the same.

‘She has seen an omen,’ Hosh replied.

All the Archipelagan born were following the woman to the far side of the pavilion. The Lescari and the Ensaimin mariners were drawn along with them, albeit casting wary glances across the island to be certain that they had truly beaten off that Aldabreshin assault.

Since he had done nothing more arduous than stand and watch, Hosh easily outstripped the staggering mageborn.

He found the other women in a state of collapse much like their fellow mageborn. One pointed wordlessly as he appeared. Hosh looked first at the wrecked ships off shore; galleys and triremes alike sunk to their oar rails. Bodies bobbed in the water. For one horrified moment Hosh thought that he saw a desperately waving hand amid a slick of blood, only to see an angled fin betray the shark dragging the lifeless corpse beneath the soiled waves.

‘Rek-a-nul,’ gasped the woman who had suffered rape for the sake of killing the mercenary.

Now Hosh understood. He moved for a clearer view of the sea beyond the bloody catastrophe that had befallen this outflanking attack.

There it was. A sea serpent. It reminded Hosh of an eel; the ones the Halferan villagers caught in the stream that flowed past the manor. Not scaley like a snake or a fish but with a rough dark hide. Like those eels, this beast had a blunt head now questing above the waves. Its gaping mouth was filled with knifelike teeth, small black eyes barely visible. As it plunged back down beneath the waters, the long coil of its sinuous body broke the surface. Sunlight shone through the single translucent long fin running down to the tip of its equally blunt tail.

‘What is that?’ Arriving at Hosh’s shoulder, Anskal was awe-struck.

Hosh could hardly blame him. Unlike those eels at home, this evil looking beast could comfortably have wrapped itself around the entire circumference of the manor wall.

‘Rek-a-nul, a sea serpent.’ Seeing neither explanation meant anything to the Mandarkin, he tried again. ‘It looks like a snake but folk say that it’s some kind of fish, though the beasts can move between the rivers and the sea.’

‘Dastennin save us, where’s the river where something like that could spawn?’ One of the Lescari had come to join them, as astounded as Anskal.

Hosh had to agree. Only the god of storms and oceans could possibly understand such mysteries.

‘What does it mean to them?’ Anskal demanded.

Hosh saw all the Archipelagan-born huddled together, the last glimmers of their magelight fading away. For all their weariness, new animation brightened their eyes. Even the women seemed inclined to share their triumph with the men.

‘The sea serpent is a powerful omen—’ Hosh broke off as the great beast reappeared beside a wrecked trireme.

The waters foamed as the creature thrashed and the stricken ship rolled over to sink to the unseen seabed. The mageborn cheered, all of them including the mainlanders.

‘The stars of the Sea Serpent speak of mysteries, of darkness, of unseen perils and hatreds.’

Those stars were currently on the westernmost horizon Hosh recalled, as he tried to understand what interpretation the Archipelagans were putting on the creature’s appearance here and now. That most westerly arc of the sky was where one looked for omens and portents of foes.

‘Though to see one in the flesh is always considered the greatest good fortune,’ he added, ‘as well as a warning to think deeply on any choices or future paths.’

Anskal waved all this away. He turned his back on the creature now investigating a galley charred to the waterline. The Mandarkin mage looked instead at the assembled mageborn.

‘There can be no doubt as to their future path,’ he said with profound satisfaction.

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