The Brush of Black Wings

  He reached inside his shirt and slipped off the necklace he wore. The delicate chain threaded through his fingers, a pendant of colored glass swinging from its loop. The glass encased a tiny curl of brown hair. Once the means by which Martise’s old master kept her enslaved, the necklace was now a favorite possession of Silhara’s. He’d crushed the spirit stone that entrapped a part of his wife’s soul and replaced it with the pendant that held a bit of her hair. He wore it when he traveled without her to Eastern Prime’s markets, keeping her close even when she was far from him. Now, the pendant would be a tether to bring her home. He buried the chain under a loose pile of small rocks to keep the crows from snatching it.

  Cloaked beneath a sullen sky, Silhara initiated the first of two rituals—this one to reveal a relic buried longer than generations of memory.

  Ritual spellwork hid numerous traps, especially when the mage worked alone. Silhara always worked alone and had paid dearly for the preference more times than he could count. Burns, frostbite, teal-colored skin, orange eyes, hair loss, blisters and a month’s worth of impotence when he was seventeen that had terrified him enough to actually offer a sincere prayer to the gods for help.

  The gods had ignored him, but his mentor had shown mercy—along with a generous heap of ridicule—and reversed the damage of a poorly executed ritual. Except for his brief alliance with Conclave to kill the god Corruption, Silhara remained a solitary practitioner. He was, however, far more careful with his spellwork now than when he was a juvenile sorcerer with more arrogance than sense.

  His caution served him well in the broken temple. Incantations, combined with a rigid pattern of steps and the scatter of certain herbs, illuminated the wheel, revealing the entire design instead of the few lines not yet faded away by time and the elements.

  The illumination held the wheel’s shape and began to rotate. Small mounds of snow collapsed as the ground thrummed with a low vibration, reminding Silhara of Conclave acolytes and their chanting during dawn prayers.

  He built spell upon spell, connecting revelation summonings with ward-break invocations until a complex web of light and resonance engulfed the temple. Stone groaned across stone as the shallow staircase leading to the structure’s center broke at the left seam and slid to one side.

  Success!

  Silhara turned his spellwork toward the opening revealed and invoked a string of incantations. The tremors under his feet strengthened, and his teeth chattered against each other more from the vibrations than from the cold. These were old wards, inhuman ones. Without the lich’s grimoires to aid him, he might never crack them open.

  Blood streamed from his nose and coursed down his cheeks in thin rivulets from his eyes. Powerful magic, whether benevolent or malevolent, always demanded a tithe of some sort, and Silhara had bled for it numerous times.

  Shards of lightning crackled from the dark hollow, and he caught the clanking sound of metal scraping across stone before a flash of movement twinkled in warning. Quick instincts and a finely honed sense of self preservation saved him from impalement. He jerked back as a blade whipped out of the shadows. It cleaved the air, almost slicing off his nose as it shot past him to bury the first quarter of its tip in a nearby tree trunk with a solid thunk.

  The embedded weapon oscillated from the impact then went still. Cerulean light still bolted down the blade, and in the woodland hush, Silhara heard the faintest hum—like far-off voices canting funereal dirges. The sound raised the hair on his arms, and he approached cautiously.

  Bark began flaking off the tree’s trunk where the sword stuck, bits and pieces turning to dust before they even fell to the ground. Wood rotted at unnatural speed, creating a patch of decay that grew to the size of a dinner plate before stopping. The gnarled oak, probably as old as Neith itself, visibly shivered, its leafless branches cascading snow to the ground. Silhara suspected that were the oak younger, the wound left by the ensorcelled sword would have killed it. Instead, the trunk’s ligneous grip, softened by sudden rot, gave way. The sword fell, landing with a soft thud in a pile of dead leaves that instantly disintegrated to powder. The wounded oak shivered once more, and Silhara didn’t imagine the sylvan groan of relief that echoed from the roots below ground.

  He crouched beside the sword for a better look. He was neither swordsmith nor warrior. What fighting skills he had, he’d learned as a wharf rat on Eastern Prime’s docks and in her dangerous closes. He’d honed them as a rebellious novitiate during his brief tenure at Conclave Redoubt. He was handy with a knife, his fists, his spells and a savage will to survive that was bequeathed to all rats.

  Spells were his area of expertise, but he knew enough about swords and the type of fighters who wielded them to find this one puzzling. Whether forged as enchanted or later turned that way, the blade surprised him. He expected something more spectacular from a Wraith King.

  The weapon reminded him of his cane knife. Single-handed, single-edged and guardless, it was more long knife than sword. Its slender, slightly curved blade was made for slashing and thrusting instead of cleaving and blocking. The hilt lacked any ornamentation. The pommel bore the design of an avian head in profile. Plain like the hilt, its only nod to decoration was a tiny river stone inset to represent the bird’s eye.

  He didn’t need a swordsman’s gaze to see the edge remained sharp—lethal in a skilled hand. Still, this was not a sword bequeathed to a king or even a nobleman. Far too humble and unassuming, even with sorcery of the dead and the demonic infused in its metal and lightning coursing down its fuller.

  Megiddo Anastas. Wraith King, dark god, commander of demon hordes. Not a collector of the ornate.

  Silhara returned to the exposed alcove beneath the steps and incanted another spell. A scabbard usually accompanied a sword, and his guess proved correct when one rose from the same spot as the sword before dropping to clatter down the steps and landed at his feet.

  As plain an affair as the weapon itself and protected from age and decay by the same blend of dark sorcery, the scabbard offered no hints to its origin or maker. The smooth onyx wood was waxed and would have shimmered softly from a fine polish, even without the help of the eldritch light.

  Silhara pulled the pair of harvesting gloves he’d brought with him from his belt. They shielded his hands from the orange trees’ vicious thorns but weren’t much use against sorcery. He’d enchanted them with protection spells in preparation for holding whatever artifact he retrieved from underneath the temple. While the sword’s unassuming appearance surprised him, its necrotic effect on anything it touched didn’t. Demon kings didn’t wield death in half measures. What the blade’s edge didn’t accomplish, the sorcery would. And it was highly likely the scabbard was no less dangerous to the touch.

  He invoked additional wards that enclosed the sword within an invisible barrier. Silhara left nothing to chance. He might be able to freely touch the sword with a pair of enchanted gauntlets, but without the safeguards of barrier wards, nothing else on his person was safe while in its proximity. The last thing he needed was for the weapon to brush against his arm or leg.

  The sword hissed when he wrapped his fingers around the hilt. It literally squirmed in his palm as if trying to break free of his grip. Silhara shook it in warning. “I only need part of you to do what I want. Keep still or I’ll break you in half and melt you down for tithing coins.”

  Sentient or not, the sword quieted at the threat. Even the dirge-like humming stopped as the hilt settled peacefully in his grasp long enough for him to retrieve the scabbard and slide the sword inside. Silhara was still tempted to melt it down despite its acquiescence. Conclave would collectively piss itself at the idea of necromantic coins hiding in its treasury.

  The forest settled into an even deeper hush as Silhara, sheathed sword in hand, began siphoning off the curse magic he held over these woods to protect Neith. Magic of the black arcana offered great power to its practitioners, demanding great strength in return. His sorcerous skills came not only from
his generous Gift but from impressive physical prowess. The curse magic weakened but didn’t debilitate him, and he was almost as formidable without its parasitic drain. When, however, he reclaimed it for himself, the potent surge left him breathless.

  Flush with power and in possession of the thing that tethered the demon king to this temple, Silhara began the second ritual, drawing sigils in the air as he walked widdershins over the wheel pattern and uttered spells written in old blood on the pages of a grimoire bound in human skin. God-smiter or not, Conclave would light him up like a torch without so much as a by-your-leave if they caught him at this ritual.

  A hot pain blossomed between his eyes, growing from a pinpoint to a voracious agony that reverberated in his skull as if he were trapped inside the mouth of a ringing bell. He clenched his jaw and invoked magic through gritted teeth even as he wept more blood. Crimson streams poured from his nose to splatter on the steps.

  The temple’s center suddenly blazed in a burst of emerald light, coruscating and tightening into a spinning column just like the one Martise had described for him. The lit column was empty, and he growled low in his throat as he scampered up the broken stairs. The demon had already captured his intended quarry.

  No plan and no time to make one. But Silhara had will, rage, and the strongest incentive. Nothing, and no one, would stop him from taking his wife back. He leapt the last two stairs and threw himself into the light.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Martise’s first impression of the half world to which she had been taken was the stench. She dry-retched at the smell—the same charnel house odor that surrounded Megiddo when he first appeared to her in the temple. She bent at the waist, ready to empty her stomach between her feet. Mercifully, nothing came up, and she straightened, using her free hand to shield her nose and mouth as she breathed.

  Neith’s snow-flocked forest had yielded to a gray wasteland. Spires of mountains rose in a far distance, silhouetted against a dull twilight with no emerging stars. Martise’s first glimpse of this strange place lasted only a moment before she yanked her hand out of the demon king’s icy grasp, his geas on her broken. She fled, pain rippling up her wounded calf as she raced toward a horizon where bleak sky met dead earth. There was no logic to her flight, no destination she tried to reach—only the terrified instinct of prey escaping predator.

  Her shallow pants sounded thunderous in her ears, the only noise in a place drowned in silence as she ran. And she ran for naught.

  Megiddo Anastas suddenly appeared out of thin air in front of her, once again enrobed in fabric made of shadow and the souls of the damned. Martise yelped, almost cannoning into him before she veered to the side and fled in another direction.

  They played this diabolical game for several minutes until Martise, whose frustration began to eclipse her fear, stopped and glared at her captor. A foul wind rose from the gods only knew where, whipping dust into small whirlwinds that danced across the barren landscape. Neither cold nor hot, it whipped her loose hair across her face, obscuring her vision until she tucked it behind her ear. She and the demon king stared at each other as the wind keened around them.

  “You can run forever, and you will find no end.” He still spoke in Glimming and as someone who once tried fleeing as she did and discovered an unavoidable truth. Martise shuddered. “Where will you go?” he asked, head cocked in puzzlement, as if she were the most interesting thing he’d come across in a long time.

  “Away from you,” she snapped.

  He smiled, and the hairs on her arms rose in warning. If he were representative of his brethren, then the five Wraith Kings were aptly named. Megiddo might be handsome were he human. He possessed an elegant face with a high forehead and long, patrician nose accentuated by the way he wore his hair-scraped back at the top and sides. The slight upturn to his rigid mouth hinted at humor, though considering the smile’s wearer, Martise wasn’t inclined to return it. His features were younger, more refined than Silhara’s. Not nearly so harsh and so much more dead.

  Leached of color, his skin was a ghastly marmoreal in both shade and texture. No human, no matter how fair, sported so pallid or smooth a complexion and still breathed. Even the lead paints the Calderes aristo women wore on high holy days or during festivals didn’t bleach their faces like this. His strange eyes crackled with the same lightning that washed down the sword blade he’d carried in her dream vision. Instead of round, his pupils were horizontal and slit-shaped like those of a goat. The wind lifted his hair as it did hers, but the strands didn’t move as hers did. They were like his robes, living tendrils of smoke that seemed to move of their own free will. Tenebrous locks drifted over his shoulders, coiled and uncoiled around his neck or melded with the robes.

  His grip on her hand had been cold as a burial slab but solid, real. His appearance belied his touch. Spectral, eerie and strange. Almost incorporeal. Wraith.

  “What is your name?” Even his voice, precise in its articulation, sounded hollowed out.

  Surely he didn’t think her that stupid. “Kashaptu.” She stumbled back with a gasp when suddenly he winked out of sight only to appear so close in front of her that he threatened to step on her toes.

  “Clever,” he said. His eyebrows rode lower on his brow than Silhara’s did. One slid upward as he scrutinized her.

  She glared at him, scared and tired of his antics. “What do you want from me?”

  Megiddo shrugged and spun away. Martise swore for a moment he walked on air instead of ground. “I should think that’s obvious, don’t you?” He held up a finger to forestall whatever else she might say. “First, I’d have you meet someone. She’s been waiting for you almost as long as I have.”

  He didn’t let her wonder at that enigmatic statement, appearing next to her once more with that same unnatural speed. His hand on her arm froze the blood in her veins. The ground didn’t shift beneath her feet or her surroundings move, but suddenly she stood with her captor before the door of a small cottage set incongruously in the same bleak landscape, only now the mountain spires rose from a different direction.

  She didn’t know what was east or west, north or south. There was no sun or moon and no stars, only a flat, lifeless sky the same shade as the equally flat and lifeless ground.

  Martise caught a brief glimpse of the cottage’s exterior before Megiddo opened the door and hauled her inside. “Damkiana,” he said, and her eyes widened at the term as well as the sudden change in his tone. So brief she might not have caught it were she not so close to him, the softer modulation disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. “I’ve brought someone for you to meet,” he said. “This is the kashaptu with no name.” He kicked the door closed behind him and crossed his arms with a pleased smile. Martise fervently prayed she’d not just been delivered as someone’s main course for supper.

  Light steps sounded from the depths of a hallway off one side of the main room. Martise couldn’t have been more surprised if her erstwhile master, Cumbria of Conclave, had suddenly appeared before her.

  This was no old and haughty bishop but a woman. Young, probably close in age to Martise, and there the similarity ended. To the person who mattered most to her, Martise was beautiful. To others and to herself, she was plain. The woman who watched her with the same intense scrutiny as Megiddo did was the antithesis of plain. The antithesis of wraith for that matter.

  Long, curly hair the color of strong-brewed tea and skin burnished brown by heritage instead of the sun, she had a soft, round face and dark eyes framed by thick lashes. Megiddo had addressed her as “Damkiana,” an old Makkadian word that meant “mistress of earth and heaven.” Whether her true name or a term of endearment, it fit.

  She glanced at Megiddo, her features expressionless, before she walked slowly around Martise and paused behind her. “You have blood on your skirts.” She spoke in Glimming as well, and her voice was cool, except for the thread of disapproval Martise sensed was reserved for the Wraith King.

  “My dog accidentally b
it me.” The reminder of her wound caused the pain to return, and Martise shifted her weight and resisted the urge to bend down and massage her throbbing calf.

  Megiddo’s voice, tinged with that enigmatic humor Martise had spotted in his smile was less hollow. “Not me. Magehound. Who doesn’t attack those with magic. Will wonders never cease?”

  The woman circled to stand in front of Martise again. “He bit her. Sounds like an attack to me.”

  Martise shook her head. “He was trying to save me.” She glanced over her shoulder to scowl at Megiddo. “I have no magic.”

  “And that force throwing me back through the portal was simply a strong breeze. Clever and a liar.”

  She was stopped from arguing by the sight of Damkiana pouring water from a pitcher into a bowl. She dropped a cloth into the water, rang out the excess and handed it to Martise. “Here. To wash your leg. The wound won’t heal, but it won’t worsen either. You can at least wash the blood off before it dries and starts to itch.”

  Confused by such a mundane action paired with such a strange statement, Martise offered a startled “Thank you.” She held the cloth but waited, determined to get an explanation for her abduction. She turned fully to Megiddo. “Why have you taken me? I am no witch, no mage. I have no magic.”

  Every one of those statements could be defined as either the truth or a lie, depending on who knew her and who interpreted them. Martise had no intention of verifying her Gift even to the most harmless human, much less a king of demons. The fact that her Gift had chosen not to fight him off a second time frightened her.

  She still felt it inside her, a presence, a weight, but it had retreated for some reason—burrowed itself deep, no longer her aggressive protector.

  Megiddo leaned against the door. At some point, between their time outside and when her back was to him, his grotesque robes had disappeared, revealing a simple tunic and trousers in various shades of olive green and brown. He was tall—long-limbed and broad-shouldered. Not as tall or as rangy as Silhara, but with an otherworldly grace her husband lacked. Probably because he wasn’t human and Silhara was.