‘Something, nothing.’ The reply was guttural, the words misshaped by a malformed throat. It was the sound of pain, enduring and unyielding.
‘Which?’
Another twitch, passing, Brohl realized, for a shrug. ‘Footfalls on dead land.’
‘An Awl war-party?’
‘No.’ The hooded head pivoted until the shadow-swallowed face was directed at the Overseer. ‘Heavier.’
All at once Brohl Handar recalled the enormous taloned tracks found at the destroyed homestead. He straightened, one hand reaching for the Arapay scimitar at his side. ‘Where? Which direction?’
A long pause, then the K’risnan pointed with a clawed hand.
Towards the supply camp.
Where sudden screams erupted.
‘Cohorts at the double!’ Brohl Handar bellowed. ‘K’risnan, you and your warlocks – with me!’ With that he spurred his horse, kicking the startled beast into a canter, then a gallop.
Ahead, he saw, the Arapay Preda who had been escorting the two cohorts had already commanded them into a half-jog. The warrior’s helmed head turned and tracked the Overseer and his cadre of mages as they pounded past.
Ahead, the braying of terrified oxen and mules rose, mournful and helpless, above the sounds of slaughter. Tents had gone down, guide-ropes whipping into the air, and Brohl saw figures now, fleeing the camp, pelting northward—
—where a perfect Awl ambush awaited them. Rising from the high grasses. Arrows, javelins, sleeting through the air. Bodies sprawling, tumbling, then the savages, loosing war-cries, rushing to close with spears, axes and swords.
Nothing to be done for them – poor bastards. We need to save our supplies.
They reached the faint slope and rode hard towards the row of hospital tents.
The beast that burst into view directly before them was indeed a demon – an image that closed like talons in his mind – the shock of recognition. Our ancient enemy – it must be – the Edur cannot forget –
Head thrust forward on a sinuous neck, broad jaw open to reveal dagger fangs. Massive shoulders behind the neck, long heavily muscled arms with huge curved blades of iron strapped where hands should have been. Leaning far forward as it ran towards them on enormous hind legs, the huge tail thrust straight back for balance, the beast was suddenly in their midst.
Horses screamed. Brohl found himself to the demon’s right, almost within reach of those scything sword blades, and he stared in horror as that viper’s head snapped forward, jaws closing on the neck of a horse, closing, crunching, then tearing loose, blood spraying, its mouth still filled with meat and bone, the horse’s spine half ripping loose from the horrid gap left in the wake of those savage jaws. A blade cut in half the warlock astride that mount. The other sword slashed down, chopping through another warlock’s thigh, the saddle, then deep into the horse’s shoulder, smashing scapula, then ribs. The beast collapsed beneath the blow, as the rider – the severed stump of his leg gushing blood – pitched over, balanced for a moment on the one stirrup, then sprawled to land on the ground, even as another horse’s stamping hoof descended onto his upturned face.
The Overseer’s horse seemed to collide with something, snapping both front legs. The animal’s plunging fall threw Brohl over its head. He struck, rolled, the scimitar’s blade biting into his left leg, and came to a stop facing his thrashing mount. The demon’s tail had swept into and through their path.
He saw it wheel for a return attack.
A foaming wave of sorcery rose into its path, lifting, climbing with power.
The demon vanished from Brohl’s view behind that churning wave.
Sun’s light suddenly blotted—
—the demon in the air, arcing over the crest of the K’risnan’s magic, then down, the talons of its hind feet outstretched. One closing on another warlock, pushing the head down at an impossible angle into the cup between the man’s shoulders as the demon’s weight descended – the horse crumpling beneath that overwhelming force, legs snapping like twigs. The other raking towards the K’risnan, a glancing blow that flung him from the back of his bolting horse, the claws catching the horse’s rump before it could lunge out of reach, the talons sinking deep, then tearing free a mass of meat to reveal – in a gory flash – the bones of its hips and upper legs.
The horse crashed down in a twisting fall that cracked ribs, less than three strides away from where Brohl was lying. He saw the whites of the beast’s eyes – shock and terror, death’s own spectre—
The Overseer sought to rise, but something was wrong with his left leg – drained of all strength, strangely heavy, sodden in the tangled grass. He looked down. Red from the hip down – his own scimitar had opened a deep, welling gash at an angle over his thigh, the cut ending just above the knee.
A killing wound – blood pouring out – Brohl Handar fell back, staring up at the sky, disbelieving. I have killed myself.
He heard the thump of the demon’s feet, swift, moving away – then a deeper sound, the rush of warriors, closing now around him, weapons drawn. Heads turned, faces stretched as words were shouted – he could not understand them, the sounds fading, retreating – a figure crawling to his side, hooded, blood dripping from its nose – the only part of the face that was visible – a gnarled hand reaching for him – and Brohl Handar closed his eyes.
Atri-Preda Bivatt sawed the reins of her horse as she came between two units of her reserve medium infantry, Artisan on her right, Harridict on her left, and beyond them, where another Artisan unit was positioned, there was the commotion of fighting.
She saw a reptilian monstrosity plunging into their ranks – soldiers seeming to melt from its path, others lifting into the air on both sides, in welters of blood, as the beast’s taloned hands slashed right and left. Dark-hued, perfectly balanced on two massive hind legs, the demon tore a path straight to the heart of the packed square—
Reaching out, both hands closing on a single figure, a woman, a mage – plucking her flailing into the air, then dismembering her as would a child a straw doll.
Beyond, she could see, the southernmost unit, seven hundred and fifty medium infantry of the Merchants’ Battalion, were a milling mass strewn with dead and dying soldiers.
‘Sorcery!’ she screamed, wheeling towards the Artisan unit on her right – seeking out the mage in its midst – motion, someone pushing through the ranks.
Dust clouds caught her eye – the camp – the Edur legion was nowhere in sight – they had rushed to its defence. Against more of these demons?
The creature barrelled free of the Artisan soldiers south of the now-retreating Harridict unit, where a second sorceror stumbled into view, running towards the other mage. She could see his mouth moving as he wove magic, adding his power to that of the first.
The demon had spun to its left instead of continuing its attack, launching itself into a run, wheeling round the unit it had just torn through, placing them between itself and the sorcery now bursting loose in a refulgent tumult from the ground in front of the mages.
Leaning far forward, the demon’s speed was astonishing as it fled.
Bivatt heard the ritual sputter and die and she twisted on her saddle. ‘Damn you! Hit it!’
‘Your soldiers!’
‘You took too long!’ She spied a Preda from the Harridict unit. ‘Draw all the reserves behind the mages! North, you fool – sound the order! Cadre, keep that damned magic at the ready!’
‘We are, Atri-Preda!’
Chilled despite the burgeoning heat, Bivatt swung her horse round once more and rode hard back towards the valley. I am outwitted. Flinching on every side, recoiling, reacting – Redmask, this one is yours.
But I will have you in the end. I swear it.
Ahead, she could see her troops appearing on the rise, withdrawing in order, in what was clearly an uncontested retreat. Redmask, it seemed, was satisfied – he would not be drawn out from the valley, even with his demonic allies—
The camp. Sh
e needed to get her soldiers back to that damned camp – pray the Edur beat off the attack. Pray Brohl Handar has not forgotten how to think like a soldier.
Pray he fared better than I did this day.
The shore is blind to the sea. Might as well say the moon has for ever fled the night sky. Chilled, exhausted, Yan Tovis rode with her three soldiers down the level, narrow road. Thick stands of trees on either side, the leaves black where the moon’s light did not reach, the banks high and steep evincing the antiquity of this trail to the shore, roots reaching down witch-braided, gnarled and dripping in the clammy darkness. Stones snapping beneath hooves, the gusts of breath from the horses, the muted crackle of shifting armour. Dawn was still two bells away.
Blind to the sea. The sea’s thirst was ceaseless. The truth of that could be seen in its endless gnawing of the shore, could be heard in its hungry voice, could be found in the bitter poison of its taste. The Shake knew that in the beginning the world had been nothing but sea, and that in the end it would be the same. The water rising, devouring all, and this was an inexorable fate to which the Shake were helpless witness.
The shore’s battle had ever been the battle of her people. The Isle, which had once been sacred, had been desecrated, made a fetid prison by the Letherii. Yet now it is freed once again. Too late. Generations past there had been land bridges linking the many islands south of the Reach. Now gone. The Isle itself rose from the sea with high cliffs, everywhere but the single harbour now. Such was the dying world.
Often among the Shake there had been born demon-kissed children. Some would be chosen by the coven and taught the Old Ways; the rest would be flung from those cliffs, down into the thirsty sea. Gift of mortal blood; momentary, pathetic easing of its need.
She had run, years ago, for a reason. The noble blood within her had burned like poison, the barbaric legacy of her people overwhelmed her with shame and guilt. With the raw vigour of youth she had refused to accept the barbaric brutality of her ancestors, refused to wallow in the cloying, suffocating nihilism of a self-inflicted crime.
All of the defiance within her was obliterated when she had seen for herself the birth of a demon-kissed monstrosity – the taloned hands and feet, the scaled, elongated face, the blunt tail twitching like a headless worm, the eyes of lurid green. If naught but the taloned hands and feet had marked the demon’s seed, the coven would have chosen this newborn, for there was true power in demonic blood when no more than a single drop trickled in the child’s veins. More than that, and the creation was an abomination.
Grotesque babes crawling in the muck of the sea’s floor, claws gouging furrows in the dark, the sea’s legion, the army awaiting us all.
The seeds thrived in the foaming waves where they met the land, generation upon generation. Flung high onto the shore, they sank into the ground. Dwelling within living creatures, prey and predator; bound inside plants; adhering to the very blades of grass, the leaves of the trees – these seeds could not be escaped: another bitter truth among the Shake. When they found a woman’s womb where a child was already growing, the seed stole its fate. Seeking . . . something, yet yielding naught but a shape that warred with that of the human.
The demons had been pure, once. Birthing their own kind, a world of mothers and offspring. The seeds had dwelt in the sea found in demonic wombs. Until the war that saw the bellies of those mothers slit open, spilling what belonged inside out into this world – the seeds even the sea sought to reject. A war of slaughter – yet the demons had found a way to survive, to this very day. In the swirling spume of tidal pools, in the rush of tumbling, crashing waves. Lost, yet not defeated. Gone, yet poised to return.
Seeking the right mother.
So the witches remained. Yan Tovis had believed the coven obliterated, crushed into extinction – the Letherii well knew that resistance to tyranny was nurtured in schools of faith, espoused by old, bitter priests and priestesses, by elders who would work through the foolish young – use them like weapons, flung away when broken, melodramatically mourned when destroyed. Priests and priestesses whose version of faith justified the abuse of their own followers.
The birth of a priesthood, Yan Tovis now understood, forced a hierarchy upon piety, as if the rules of servitude were malleable, where such a scheme – shrouded in mysterious knowledge and learning – conveyed upon the life of a priest or priestess greater value and virtue than those of the ignorant common folk.
In her years of Letherii education, Yan Tovis had seen how the arrival of shouldermen – of warlocks and witches – was in truth a devolution among the Shake, a devolution from truly knowing the god that was the shore. Artifice and secular ambition, withholding sacred knowledge from those never to be initiated – these were not the shore’s will. No, only what the warlocks and witches wanted.
Taloned hands and feet have proved iconic indeed.
But power came with demonic blood. And so long as every child born with such power and allowed to survive was initiated into the coven, then that power remained exclusive.
The Letherii in their conquest of the Shake had conducted a pogrom against the coven.
And had failed.
With all her being, Yan Tovis wished they had succeeded.
The Shake were gone as a people. Even the soldiers of her company – each one carefully selected over the years on the basis of Shake remnants in their blood – were in truth more Letherii than Shake. She had done little, after all, to awaken their heritage.
Yet I chose them, did I not? I wanted their loyalty, beyond that of a Letherii soldier for his or her Atri-Preda.
Admit it, Twilight. You are a queen now, and these soldiers – these Shake – know it. And it is what you sought in the depths of your own ambition. And now, it seemed, she would have to face the truth of that ambition, the stirring of her noble blood – seeking its proper pre-eminence, its right.
What has brought my half-brother to the shore? Did he ride as a Shake, or a Letherii Master at Arms for a Dresh-Preda? But she found she could not believe her own question. She knew the answer, quivering like a knife in her soul. The shore is blind . . .
They rode on in the dark.
We were never as the Nerek, the Tarthenal and the others. We could raise no army against the invaders. Our belief in the shore held no vast power, for it is a belief in the mutable, in transformation. A god with no face but every face. Our temple is the strand where the eternal war between land and sea is waged, a temple that rises only to crumble yet again. Temple of sound, of smell, taste and tears upon every fingertip.
Our coven healed wounds, scoured away diseases, and murdered babies.
The Tarthenal viewed us with horror. The Nerek hunted our folk in the forests. For the Faered, we were child-snatchers in the night. They would leave us husks of bread on tree stumps, as if we were no better than malignant crows.
Of these people, these Shake, I am now Queen.
And a man who would be her husband awaited her. On the Isle.
Errant take me, I am too tired for this.
Horse-hoofs splashing through puddles where the old road dipped – they were nearing the shore. Ahead, the land rose again – some long-ago high tide mark, a broad ridge of smoothed stones and cobbles bedded in sandy clay – the kind of clay that became shale beneath the weight of time, pocked by the restless stones. In that shale one could find embedded shells, mollusc fragments, proof of the sea’s many victories.
The trees were sparser here, bent down by the wind that she could not yet feel on her face – a calm that surprised her, given the season. The smell of the shore was heavy in the air, motionless and fetid.
They slowed their mounts. From the as yet unseen sea there was no sound, not even the whisper of gentle waves. As if the world on the other side of the ridge had vanished.
‘Tracks here, sir,’ one of her soldiers said as they drew to a halt close to the slope. ‘Riders, skirting the bank, north and south both.’
‘As if they were hunting some
one,’ another observed.
Yan Tovis held up a gauntleted hand.
Horses to the north, riding at the canter, approaching.
Struck by a sudden, almost superstitious fear, Yan Tovis made a gesture, and her soldiers drew their swords. She reached for her own.
The first of the riders appeared.
Letherii.
Relaxing, Yan Tovis released her breath. ‘Hold, soldier!’
The sudden command clearly startled the figure and the three other riders behind it. Hoofs skidding on loose pebbles.
Armoured as if for battle – chain hauberks, the blackened rings glistening, visors drawn down on their helms. The lead rider held a long-handled single-bladed axe in his right hand; those behind him wielded lances, the heads wide and barbed as if the troop had been hunting boar.
Yan Tovis nudged her horse round and guided it a few steps closer. ‘I am Atri-Preda Yan Tovis,’ she said.
A tilt of the helmed head from the lead man. ‘Yedan Derryg,’ he said in a low voice, ‘Master at Arms, Boaral Keep.’
She hesitated, then said, ‘The Watch.’
‘Twilight,’ he replied. ‘Even in this gloom, I can see it is you.’
‘I find that difficult to believe – you fled—’
‘Fled, my Queen?’
‘The House of our mother, yes.’
‘Your father and I did not get along, Twilight. You were but a toddler when last I saw you. But that does not matter. I see now in your face what I saw then. No mistaking it.’
Sighing, she dismounted.
After a moment, the others did the same. Yedan gestured with a tilt of his head and he and Yan Tovis walked off a short distance. Stood beneath the tallest tree this close to the ridge – a dead pine – as a light rain began to fall.
‘I have just come from the Keep,’ she said. ‘Your Dresh attempted to escape arrest and is dead. Or will be soon. I have had a word with the witches. There will be Tiste Edur, from Rennis, but by the time they arrive the investigation will be over and I will have to apologize for wasting their time.’