Red Tide (69 page)

Mazana closed her eyes and opened her arms. All about, blood started coming away from the surfaces across which it was daubed—fat red drops where it was fresh, thin brown flakes where it was dried. It drifted toward her. Where it came into contact with her flesh, it was absorbed. Her skin turned first crimson, then purple-red, then red-black. Her lips parted, and she let out a shuddering breath. The air in the room shuddered with her, the very Alcazar seeming to sigh. Flies alighted on her arms and legs.

Then she opened her eyes to reveal orbs the same hue as her skin.

Jodren and Kiapa, standing to either side, stepped back. The executioner, by contrast, might have not noticed the change for all his reaction. Hex, too, showed no alarm at her transformation. But then the stone-skin wasn't even watching her, Romany realized with a start. Instead he appeared to be looking …

Straight at her.

Her heart skipped a beat. No, it wasn't possible!

He winked at her with the eye above that always-bleeding cut. A red tear rolled down his cheek.

Then he looked back at Mazana and gestured.

The sewn cuts on the walls ruptured in sprays of pus and blood. From one, a two-headed … thing emerged, dripping slime. From another was disgorged a seething mass of spiders, bloodroaches, and other creatures Romany wasn't hanging around to identify. She'd seen enough already, thank you very much.

She fled back to her body.

 

C
HAPTER
21

S
ENAR LOPED
along the corridor, squinting into the gloom. The temptation to break into a run was strong, but he couldn't see more than a dozen steps ahead, and he wasn't about to pick up his pace if it meant blundering into the laps of the enemy. A staircase materialized from the murk, but he ignored it. The sounds of battle all came from the lower level.

With each step he took, the temperature rose. At times he thought he could hear footsteps tracking his own, yet always when he looked back he saw nothing but darkness. The walls were spattered crimson like someone had gone berserk in a slaughterhouse. There were bloody prints on the ground as well, following the same course he was.

Showing him the way to go.

Round the next corner, a naked figure awaited him. Senar's pulse kicked in his neck. Not a stone-skin, but a man covered in weeping cuts and wrapped in coils of knotted wire. The wire opened up more gashes as he parted his arms to draw the Guardian into a prickly embrace. Senar lashed out with his Will, and the apparition fell against a wall with a screech of metal on stone that set the Guardian's teeth on edge. The man righted himself just in time to meet Senar's sword swing. The blade tore open his throat before snagging in a loop of wire. Senar wrenched his weapon free.

The apparition collapsed. A smell of decay hit Senar like he'd carved a chunk out of a piece of putrid meat. Maggots squirmed in the dead man's cut.

The Guardian screwed up his face and went on.

From ahead came the
thump
of a sorcerous concussion, and the walls of the passage trembled. A rush of air, a patter of mortar. Another figure shambled into view: a woman with a shroud of hair hanging across her face. Along the ground she dragged a mace with a head so large Senar doubted even the executioner could have lifted it. The only thing she'd be harming with that thing was the floor tiles, yet when he drew near, he didn't stay his hand. There was no place for mercy in a battle. The enemy you spared one moment might cut you down the next.

His sword smashed her forehead to splinters. She toppled wordlessly, still clinging to the mace as if her hands were welded to its shaft.

If only all of Senar's opponents today would go down so easily.

Along the wall to the Guardian's right, the doors gave way to windows looking out on a murky courtyard. The sun was a gray smear overhead. Battling figures flitted through the gloom: Breakers, Revenants, and stone-skins, along with a panoply of the grotesque. Senar saw Kolloken amid the throng, his hair and face so slimed with blood and gore he might have sliced open an enemy's belly and shoved his head in. He traded sword strikes with a hunchbacked swordsman whose body twitched so violently it looked like he was seizing.

Beyond, the wall of the yard collapsed into rubble as a blast of sorcery struck it. Over the stones scuttled a woman with two extra arms instead of legs. She sprang at a gray-cloaked spearman, grasped his wrists in two of her hands while her other two reached for his throat. They went down in a tangle, then wrestled in the rubble until a stone-skin swordsman reared up and dispatched them both.

Senar blinked. So the Augerans were fighting the apparitions too?

What in the Nine Hells was going on?

He slowed and scanned the yard for the executioner, knowing if the giant was there, then Mazana would be too. But there was no sign of either of them. Through an archway ahead, a swordsman backpedaled from the square into the Guardian's corridor. He wore a sleeveless white jerkin and trousers, and his blade whined as it cut through the shadows.

Strike.

The bodyguard's clothes seemed to glow in the darkness. He faced no fewer than three stone-skin opponents, but by withdrawing through the arch, he had prevented them from coming at him together. As the first—a woman—tried to follow, Strike's blade flickered out. The Augeran reeled back cradling her sword arm, her weapon jarring from her hand.

Then from the gloom along the passage another stone-skin appeared—a man so big he seemed to fill the whole corridor. He had golden spiral tattoos on his cheeks and forearms. Senar shouted a warning to Strike, but the bodyguard had already seen the danger and turned to face this new adversary. His sorcerous blade moved with freakish speed to intercept the Augeran's first stroke, yet still he could manage only a half parry, his opponent's sword bursting through to graze his shoulder. Strike retreated a step, his enemy following.

Senar couldn't use his Will on the stone-skin while Strike was between them. He rushed to the bodyguard's aid.

Too late.

A whirlwind exchange, and suddenly Strike's head was lifted from his shoulders by a backhand swing that seemed to pass through the bodyguard's block. Two jets of blood reared up like snakes from the stump of Strike's neck.

His legs buckled.

Swearing, Senar drew up. Avallon's bodyguard was dead, and he'd lasted no longer than a handful of heartbeats. Senar was under no illusions that he could have defeated the man so swiftly.

His tattooed conqueror was breathing mightily. Keeping his gaze on Senar, he knelt to wipe his blade on Strike's trouser leg, first one side, then the other, leaving crimson stripes on the cloth. Then he straightened. His frown gave him a studious, almost apologetic look, yet there was a note of arrogance too as if he wasn't sure Senar warranted the time it would take to cut him down. The stone-skin glanced into the courtyard. Would he snub the Guardian to join the larger battle? Would Senar let him?

Like hell he would.

He sheathed his sword, then extended his hand and used the Will to call Strike's blade to him. The weapon stuck for a moment in the bodyguard's grip. His sword arm pulled straight, then his body swiveled to face Senar and began sliding across the blood-streaked floor until the blade abruptly came free and flashed through the murk. Its hilt settled into the Guardian's palm. He closed his fingers around it.

The tattooed stone-skin smiled faintly.

A strange reaction, that, to Senar's display of power. In the Augeran's eyes there was a look akin to recognition, but if Senar had met the man before, he was sure he would have remembered. Then understanding came to him.
He doesn't recognize
me,
he recognizes the Will. He knows me for a Guardian.
There was more to it than that, though. Something in the stone-skin's look suggested Senar should know him too—should know something that had a bearing on their coming clash. Something that went beyond the skill the Augeran had shown in brushing Strike aside.

Senar gave the bodyguard's sword a swing. Its whine was like the buzz of a needlefly. The earth-magic invested in it made it light as a wooden practice blade. He'd owned a sword like this many years ago, a sword he'd taken from a Kalanese pasha that he'd assassinated outside Kal Kartin. Alas, a blade only held its enchantment for a few weeks, and there was never a powerful earth-mage around when you needed one to top up the sorcery.

Earth was dominant over air, meaning the weapon would cut faster through the air than a normal sword, and land with the weight of an anvil besides. Judging by the tattooed stone-skin's size, though—he was almost as big as the executioner—that was likely to afford the Guardian only parity in their duel.

He moved forward and halted in front of the pool of Strike's blood. The Augeran remained still. Who would attack first? Who was most content to wait if it meant keeping the other out of the fight in the yard?

From the opposite side of the square, the thunder of a sorcerous concussion rattled Senar's teeth. He caught a glimpse of the emperor, surrounded by Breakers.

Then the stone-skin kicked Strike's head toward him and charged in after it.

*   *   *

Amerel watched from behind the mainmast as stone-skins swarmed over the devilship's rail. Noon was in the thick of the action, fighting with two swords. The Breaker caught a stone-skin's thrust on one blade, then hacked down with the other, cutting clean through his opponent's shoulder. The Augeran's arm fell to the deck. As he opened his mouth to scream, Noon's shoulder caught him in the midriff and pitched him back into the woman behind. The Erin Elalese slashed his sword across her throat before she could recover. Continuing his swing, he chopped through the ankles of a man on the rail, and the Augeran toppled shrieking back into the close-packed ranks on the enemy deck.

Not bad. For a Breaker.

Up until this point, only black-cloaked stone-skins had been doing the fighting, but now a dozen Red Cloaks came howling into the fray. A woman leapt over the rail and exchanged a series of blows with Tattoo before tripping on the recently severed arm. The Rubyholter's backhand cut split her skull with a clicking sound that Amerel heard even above the tumult. Farther right, another Augeran charged in behind his shield and knocked two Islanders off their feet. For a moment there was a gap in the Rubyholt line, but as the stone-skin pushed through it, one of his fallen enemies grabbed his leg and sank his teeth into it. Maybe he'd missed breakfast. The Augeran bellowed and slammed the rim of his shield down onto his attacker's skull.

A swing of Noon's sword lifted the stone-skin's head from his shoulders, but more of the foe were pressing in behind.

Now, Galantas,
Amerel silently urged.

Galantas had been holding back a reserve of men, and—right on cue—he drew his sword to signal the advance. Alas, such was the quantity of blood already on the deck that the charge became a slipping, slithering dash that carried one of the attackers straight onto the blade of an enemy swordsman. Another Islander barreled into a kinsman and knocked him into the Augeran he'd been fighting. All three went down. The two Rubyholters reacted first, grabbing a handful of their opponent's hair before ramming his head into the boards.
Crunch, crunch,
the stone-skin's face dissolved into blood and splinters of bone.

Shouts sounded from the south, and Amerel glanced across to see another Rubyholt ship rushing toward the
Fury
on a wave of water-magic. Improbably, it looked like Galantas's kinsmen meant to come to his aid. The way things were going, though, they would arrive too late. Amerel was needed on the main deck. Of course, she'd have liked nothing better than to wade into that shitstorm. First, however, she had a task to perform that might even the odds a little in the Islanders' favor.

The devilship's wailing made her head throb as she scanned the stone-skin ship. Unlike Barnick, the Augeran mage hadn't obligingly advertised his presence by wearing blue robes, yet picking him out should still be straightforward.…

There!

Sheltering beside the binnacle was a red-cloaked man half a head shorter than the two spearmen flanking him. At his hip was a sword with a gilded hilt too ostentatious to be anything but decorative. His eyes twitched this way and that, searching for an arrow with his name on it.

Gathering her power, Amerel reached out and curled her Will around the hilt of a dagger in the baldric of one of the mage's guards. She took a breath.

One movement to draw the knife from its scabbard, another to turn it and plunge it into the throat of the sorcerer.

The mage didn't even see the blow coming. It took him a heartbeat to process what had happened. Then he gave a frothy gurgle and raised his hands to his neck as if he thought he could staunch the flow of blood.

His two minders looked on, slack-jawed.

Amerel withdrew.

*   *   *

“Their mage is down!” Barnick shouted.

Galantas swayed back from a sword slash and felt his opponent's blade cut the air in front of his face. The Augeran blocked Galantas's counter, and their two swords locked long enough for Galantas to get a whiff of the stone-skin's last meal. Then the deck shuddered. That shudder would be Barnick's work, Galantas knew. The mage was stirring up the seas, thinking the Rubyholters were more used to fighting on a pitching deck than their foes. He seemed to be right too, for Galantas's assailant tottered back against the rail, then threw out his arms for balance.

Galantas ran him through. “Kill them!” he yelled. “Kill them all!”

Not that he expected anyone to hear him above the clamor, or be able to carry out his command if they did. His men were now battling just to hold their ground, for if the stone-skins pushed them back from the rail, they would be outflanked and overwhelmed. To his right six Augerans carrying shields had formed a wedge allowing their kinsmen to gain the
Fury
's deck behind. A red-cloaked swordsman climbed to the rail only to take a Rubyholt arrow in the neck and topple backward. But more would surely follow in his wake.