A feeling straddling pain and ecstasy swept over her. Her flesh grew gooseskin beneath her robe, a chill crept down her back, wrapping about her spine like a centipede with icy, frigid legs. She felt her voice catch in her throat, unsure how to respond to the feeling. Then, with a suddenness that made her knees buckle, the chill twisted inside her body, becoming violently hot.
The sun seemed incredibly oppressive at that moment, as though it reached down with a golden hand to glide past cloth, flesh, muscle and bone. It seized her essence in a scalding, fiery grip and shook vigorously. She could feel it pushing down upon her, a great pressure forcing her skin in upon itself.
She would never have noticed Dreadaeleon’s hand clenching about her arm had she not spied his scrawny fingers. He seized her with a strength belied by his frailty, he stared at her with an intensity she’d never seen in him. Behind the dark orbs of his eyes, crimson light danced like a flock of agitated fireflies.
‘What. .’ Her voice came reluctantly to her lips. ‘What are you-’
‘You feel it.’ He spoke with a firmness not his own.
‘Feel. . what?’
‘It. Cold. Hot.’
With surprising strength, he tightened his grip on her left arm. She felt her heart leap into her throat. He knows, she screamed in her own mind, he knows, he knows, he knows. Of course he knows. He knows everything. He knows what it is. She tensed her fingers, the burning returning. It’s hot enough to torch him. He knows.
If he intended to act on that knowledge, however, he did not. At least, not the way she expected. Instead, he pressed his palm against hers. It felt freezing, then hot enough to rival even her own heat.
‘You can sense it,’ he whispered, ‘can’t you?’
‘Sense what?’ she asked, hysteric as she tore her hand away from his. ‘I don’t know what you’re-’
‘Venarie. Magic.’
The fireflies behind his eyes, the ever-present, if faint, mark of wizardry in his stare, went alight. His gaze became a pair of pyres, crimson energy seeping out in great flashes. He turned his scowl out to sea, the pyres becoming thin red gashes.
‘There is. . a wizard out there.’
Her gaze followed his, towards the only thing present upon the sea.
The black ship drew into Irontide’s ominous shadow, blending into the darkness. But Asper could still see it, clear as a fire on fresh-fallen snow. Though she knew she stared into darkness, she felt the ship, sensed it as she might an itch between the shoulder blades. She felt it throb, felt it twitch.
And then she felt it stand up and stride to the prow of the ship.
Something stirred atop the tower’s battlements. A chorus of chattering teeth and throaty gibbers cut through the sky. The great crown of white shifted as a hundred bulbous blue eyes spotted the ship.
Like a wound bleeding white, the Omens toppled from the tower, pouring over the side with flapping wings and gnashing teeth. In twisting, chattering harmony, they reared, their mimicked voices of the long dead clashing off one another in a hideous howl as they rose, then descended upon the purple invaders.
‘NYUNG!’ The command went up from the longfaces, audible even over the cacophony.
The vessel came to a sudden halt, bobbing upon the water like a floating coffin. Purple figures rose, drawing back bows made of the same black wood as the ship, arrows aimed at the descending gibber.
The male stood before them, his white hair whipping about his face, his robes billowing about his frail body as he turned a defiant stare towards the winged frenzy.
‘Here it comes.’
Asper was numb to Dreadaeleon’s voice, numb to everything save the freezing sensation coursing through her body and the sudden weight in her left arm.
The Omens swooped upon the ship in a twisting column, shadow and sky painted writhing white as they tucked their wings against their plump bodies and turned their hooked noses and yellow teeth to the longfaces.
With an eerie casualness to his movements, the male raised his hands. His purple, bony fingers knotted together in agonised symmetry as they bent in ways they were not meant to. He shouted a chorus of words not in his own tongue, nor the tongue of humans. They were familiar, if incomprehensible to Asper, and her eyes widened as she realised she had heard them from Dreadaeleon’s mouth before.
‘Magic,’ she gasped.
His voice boomed, granted an unnatural echo. An un-present wind swept his hair back, revealing a frigid blue glow engulfing his eyes. He continued to speak the words and the azure energy bathed his fingertips, sweeping up his arms.
The spectacle was not lost on the Omens.
Those in front reared in mid-descent, colliding with the ones still swooping, and the column became a messy cloud. The flying parasites beat each other with their wings, bit each other with their needles, struggling to get free of the mob of feathers and flesh. Their crazed gibberish became a unified howl of terror as the blue glow rose from below.
‘This,’ Dreadaeleon gasped, ‘will be big.’
He was not mistaken. The longface’s words of power ended with an echo that stretched into eternity as his mouth opened wide. In the wake of his voice, a howl rose.
The ship shuddered as an angry gale tore itself from the longface’s mouth. The air became blue, shimmering blades tinged with razor shards of frost. From the slight, wispy creature, a maw of frigid azure and ivory swept up to crunch rime-laden teeth about the Omens.
The gale grew high, kissing the battlements and devouring the creatures’ wailing. The Omens were swept inside it, caroming off one another in bursts of black blood and broken bones. They thrashed, bit, rent each other as they struggled to escape. Many died immediately, limp bodies twisting silently in the wind. More lived, thrashing even as their feathers hardened upon their flesh.
The maw glowed with a horrific blue. The Omens lost their colour in it, frozen bodies becoming so many flakes inside it. Still and silent, the statues clashed against each other, frozen anatomies snapping to become lost in the wind. Hooked noses, lipless mouths, bulging eyes: one by one, they snapped off, crashed against wings, feet and heads before twisting off to crash into torsos, tails and scalps.
Only after there was nothing left to crash did the longface close his mouth.
His trembling fingers undid themselves, his eyes returned to their heavy-lidded whiteness and the wind that had whipped his hair vanished. Folding his hands inside his sleeves, he turned and took a seat at the end of the ship.
As though nothing had happened, the females took up their oars in resignation to duty. The chant resumed, the rowers worked. The ship glided across the sea, towards Irontide, through an artificial snowfall of powdered blood and pulverised flesh.
Asper could but stare. In an instant, the harbingers of hell, the precursors of horror, the Omens had been reduced to nothing. Reduced to nothing, she added to herself, by a display of magic she had not even dreamed possible. And now the ship continued forwards, the male’s expression as casual as the hand that brushed red flakes from his shoulder.
Asper could but stare as they continued towards Irontide. Asper could but stare as such a force continued towards her friends.
Dreadaeleon seemed much less indecisive.
‘Come,’ he said, brushing past her with a forcefulness that she might have gone agog at, were she not already dumbstruck. ‘We have to go.’
‘What?’ she gasped, breath returning to her. ‘Now?’
‘That longface is a heretic.’
‘You don’t even know what religion he is.’
‘Not a heretic of whatever made-up god you choose to serve,’ the boy snarled at her. He gestured towards the ship. ‘Look at him! He’s not even breathing hard!’
Asper frowned; she could sense his calm well enough, as she had sensed his power before. Without seeing the longface, she knew Dreadaeleon was right. Dreadaeleon, of course, wasn’t waiting for her approval. He waded out from the shore, inhaled deeply and blew a cloud of frost over the ocean. In the few gasping breaths that followed, a small ice floe had formed, bobbing upon the surface.
‘It violates all laws of magic, all laws of the Venarium.’ The boy climbed upon the white sheet, surprisingly sure-footed. ‘That, at least, is worth getting involved over.’
‘But not your friends?’ Asper asked, raising a brow.
‘Friends die. Magic is for ever.’ He glanced down at her, extended a hand that seemed far too big for him. ‘Are you coming, or would you rather sit and savour the irony for a bit?’
She glanced out over the sea at a sudden stirring. The male was up and at the prow again, she sensed, his hands outstretched. She felt with her arm the explosive power boiling between his palms. She saw with her eyes the prow aimed at Irontide’s great, rock-scarred wall.
Waiting to see what he was about to do seemed decidedly unwise. With a grunt, she waded into the surf and took the boy’s hand.
‘It’s not ironic. .’
THE PROPHET
The explosion came to Lenk as a muted thump, shaking the stones in the ceiling and sending gouts of dust to lie upon the black water. He rose to his feet, scrambled to the wall.
‘Kat?’
The wall gave no answer.
‘Kataria?’
The stone offered no reply.
‘Kat! Denaos!’
His fist against the rock slab was half-hearted, all his energy drained from previous pummellings with nothing to show but throbbing fingers and a stone that seemed to smile at the futile effort. He did not expect it to miraculously crumble under his desperation, but the dull rumble spurred him to action.
If his pitiful attempts could be called such, he thought.
He had heard only faint noises since the slab had fallen behind him: the gurgling sounds of the Abysmyths, a shrill whining and the collective croak of the frogmen. Of his companions, he had heard nothing; nothing to suggest they had heard his furtive cries, nothing to suggest they were still alive.
What, he wondered, had made him not listen to Denaos? What had made creeping into a demon-infested, dying fortress seem the logical choice? Greed? Some bizarre, misplaced desire to do the proper thing? No, he told himself, that doesn’t work for adventurers.
A lust for some breed of unpleasant death, then?
That seems more likely.
Whatever the reason, the stone did not answer. With no more hope to drive him to beat answers out of it, he sought to bring it down with his head. Sighing, he rested a hot brow against cold rock, giving up on it as he had given up trying to find a way out of the forsaken chamber.
He had wondered, when panic had dissipated and calm prevailed, if there was a mechanism of some kind to make the slab rise. After all, he had thought, something must have made it fall. That hope was foetid and rotting now as calm gave way to futility. He swept his gaze about the large, circular room; if such a device existed, he’d never find it.
