Sighing, Mara picked up a glass of wine. She eyed her commander’s scaled back. That armour. Gift of Ardata, he called it. Everyone else had abandoned their metal armour as useless in this constant damp. Now heavy layered leathers couldn’t be purchased for anything less than their weight in silver. Yet no rust or stain marred that blackened scale coat. And it seemed nothing could penetrate it. Perhaps that’s why Ardata had been unable to retrieve it when … well, when they parted ways.
‘Our Master of the Inner Circle remains committed?’ Petal asked in his slow and deliberate manner.
‘Quite,’ Skinner answered, keeping his back to them.
Petal pursed his thick lips, nodding. He tapped a blunt finger to the documents. ‘I calculate this force to be a full third of the entire Thaumaturg military. Their only currently assembled field army. Leaving but scattered garrisons across their lands …’
Mara lifted the glass, saluting. ‘To its success, then.’ She cocked a brow and offered a mocking smile. ‘May it advance far indeed.’
Skinner returned and picked up his glass to answer her toast. ‘As far as it is able.’
‘To the very end,’ Petal added.
Mara’s raised senses detected a familiar, and unwelcome, arrival.
The insolent one has returned
. She swallowed her wine while lifting a hand for silence. ‘Our would-be master approaches.’
Skinner grimaced his distaste. ‘Again? He is most insistent.’
The three faced the tent portal where the dusk was obscured by a shadow and the ragged figure of a beggar or itinerant monk slipped within. He glared as if enraged, his eyes black and wide behind the strings of his matted hair. ‘Your cowardice and delay have cost us dear!’
Skinner’s frown deepened. ‘What is this?’
‘While you have sat upon your hands others have moved against us!’
‘Clarify …’ Skinner ground out, his voice low and menacing.
‘My lord demands you accompany me now.’
‘Where?’ Petal asked.
‘To where you should have been and gone had you any shred of initiative.’
‘Explain—’ Skinner began.
But the priest gestured and the interior of the tent seemed to blur. ‘Enough! We go.’
It seemed to Mara that the tent spun while the damp earth of the floor grew soft. They sank as if through a slew of mud, the soil tinged by a hot acidic burn of chaos. After a sickening plunge and twist they emerged into rain. Petal straightened nearby, slapping at his robes and snarling his outrage. Mara leaned over, her stomach roiling from the obscene touch of raw chaos, and vomited violently. A hand in an iron gauntlet steadied her: Skinner. She straightened while wiping the bile from her mouth.
Beneath massed clouds a plain of standing stones surrounded them. Lightning illuminated the scene, slashing almost continuously. It seemed to be concentrated … sizzling energy overwhelmed her groping senses. Its waterfall coursing blinded her and drove a spike into her forehead. She turned away, gasping her pain, to face the scowling priest of the Crippled God, who glared, free of any sympathy. Through the stars flashing in her vision Mara blinked at the man and grated: ‘Do that again and I will kill you.’
He ignored her. ‘Know this place, King of Chains?’ he demanded, sneering.
‘The Dolmens of Tien,’ Skinner answered, his voice oddly hollow.
The Dolmens!
Mara turned to him but his back was to her.
Where he and Cowl imprisoned K’azz. With, some whispered, Ardata’s connivance
.
‘Yes! Where what lies within ought to have been ours by now!’
Skinner adjusted his full helm and advanced into the forest of standing stones. Mara and Petal followed. The priest trailed in a curious hopping and jerking walk. Soon a shimmering wall of Warren-magics came into view. ‘Hold!’ Mara called to Skinner.
‘I see it,’ their commander answered, sounding annoyed.
She and Petal exchanged a wondering glance.
He sees it?
‘Can it be breached?’
‘Perhaps,’ Petal answered.
While Skinner waited, arms crossed, she and Petal examined the
layered
warding. ‘Kurald Galain,’ she opined. Petal gave a ponderous nod of assent.
‘And more. Something very rare. Something I haven’t seen since …’ His gaze flicked to Skinner then held hers. ‘Starvald Demelain.’
That most ancient Warren! Some said progenitor to all magics. And one accessible to … Ardata
. She nodded in answer to the man’s silent message. She knew she was out of her depth here in any case; stone and earth were her strengths. Petal was the researcher into the ways of the Warrens. Was this
her
work? If so, it had come too early. Their plan called for a much later confrontation – if any at all. ‘A slide?’ she suggested.
Petal nodded again, his chins bunching. ‘Yes. It appears to have been woven to allow passage … we merely have to find the correct …’ He hissed a breath between clenched teeth as he worked his Warren manipulation: a personal admixture of elements of Thyr and Mockra. The borderlands of both, he’d once told her ‘… the correct …
note
… and we may pass as well.’ He grunted then, and wiped the rain from his face with a sleeve just as sodden. ‘There we are. Safe enough.’
She eyed him, as did Skinner. Neither moved. Petal smoothed his robes down the broad slope of his stomach and sighed. ‘Very well … if I must.’ He stepped through in his ungainly rocking gait then turned to them and described a mocking bow.
Skinner gave a laugh of appreciation. ‘Well done, Petal.’ And he stepped through. Mara followed. The priest hopped past, flapping his arms as if he could push the churning energies aside. Skinner led them to the edge of a central circular marshalling ground or plaza. Here he stopped and crossed his arms, seeming to survey the scene.
To Mara at first it appeared completely still. Then she noted how the stones shifted and humped as if something beneath were heaving or turning.
Like the surface of a lake where huge creatures swim. And just what creature might this be?
Aside, she noted the many impressions of footsteps.
Most of similar kind: heavy boots. Uniform. A military force? And recent excavations around the inner stones. These pits now pooled in rainwater. Come and gone, in any case
.
Something punched through the surface of the fine white gravel and Mara jerked, startled, a hand going to her throat. She immediately pulled the hand down, growling her anger at the instinctive reaction. Skinner had knelt to one knee. The black skirting of his armour rustled and spread about him like a pool of glistening night.
It was an arm, human, seemingly, and it scooped at the stones as a swimmer might pull at the water, making for shore. Another hand appeared and as they flailed closer Mara came to doubt their humanity. The fingers appeared more like bird’s claws, the flesh scaled and ending in amber talons. Scraped and raw, they dug at the gravel, making a slow advance towards the stone ledge of the field.
Mara cast an uncertain glance to Petal whose brow was furrowed as he studied the amazing demonstration. Skinner, his back to them, had tilted his head aside as he watched, neither shrinking away nor offering aid of any kind.
In time a scalp of grimed long black hair broached the surface and was thrown back with an exultant yell and gasp of air. It was female, whatever it was. Her eyes blazed in the night like twin flaming suns.
‘
Get me out of here!
’ she demanded.
‘Where is that which was within!’ the priest yelled, now daring to dance in closer.
The woman ignored the priest: her gaze was fixed upon Skinner. She threw out an arm, reaching for him. ‘Take my hand! Break the bonds … you can do it.’
Their commander did not move. ‘What happened here?’ he asked gently.
‘Pull me out and I’ll tell you,’ she snarled as she dug at the stones like a drowning swimmer.
Skinner straightened. He shook his helmed head. ‘Nothing better than that?’
‘Damn you to the Abyss,’ the woman growled. With an immense surge of effort she managed to lurch forward and slap one hand on to the cut stone ledge. Her thick talons scraped and gouged the stone.
Skinner continued to shake his head. ‘No. I think it best you remain out of contention for a time.’ And he drew back his armoured boot then swung it forward, kicking the woman across the face.
She slewed backwards into the wide field of stones. If her gaze had been furious before it now fairly crackled with dazzling insane fury. She drew a hand, all sinew and amber talons, across her bleeding mouth as she was dragged backwards, sinking, and she yelled: ‘Jacuruku will consume you, Skinner!’ Then she disappeared once again as the stones hissed and collapsed in a smoking slurry.
Skinner turned away, murmuring, ‘As has been prophesised.’ He now regarded Mara and Petal from behind the slit of his helm. ‘Well? Which way have they gone?’
Mara started, jerking a quick bow. As did Petal. ‘Yes – of course. Right away,’ she said shakily, still rather shocked by the brutal – and audacious – act. They headed off, following the trail.
The priest came along hopping and jerking at Skinner’s side like a mongrel dog. ‘You were too hasty,’ he complained. ‘We could have questioned her …’
‘Shut up or I will cut your head off,’ Skinner told him.
The man’s mouth shut with a snap.
The trail led Mara and Petal to a shore cluttered in wave-wrack, the aftermath of the storm. Mara cast her awareness out to sea, seeking a vessel, but discovered nothing. However, by the light of the Jade Banner, as some named it here, it was clear that the party had not entered the surf. Rather, they had milled about for a time then headed south.
She and Petal followed for a few leagues just to be certain. They stopped before the seemingly impenetrable jungle wall at the base of the peninsula. The priest hopped from foot to foot in his impatience. ‘Well? What are you waiting for? Go, now. Retrieve it!’
Skinner shook his head. ‘They have entered Himatan. There is no finding them now. The jungle will deal with them. We will wait. Your treasure will be found among their bones.’
The priest grew still. He gnashed his yellowed rotten teeth. ‘What? You refuse? Very well then. I demand you accompany me to another! Now. Immediately.’
Oh no
. Mara threw out an arm. ‘No! Not like that.’
‘Your master demands fulfilment of your terms, Disavowed.’ The air about them grew opaque, tearing into streamers of sickly grey roiling power.
Mara clutched her head and the nauseating agony swelling there. Petal grunted as he fell to his knees. The obscene oily touch of raw chaos enmeshed them and the dune shore, the massed clouds, all disappeared in a snap of displaced air.
* * *
Saeng warmed herself over a meagre fire of wood scraps and dry moss. She squatted near the vine-choked mouth of their cave on the floor of centuries of rotting leaves and droppings. Her outer clothes hung on branches over the fire, drying. She’d stink of smoke but that would be better than dying of the wet-lung. Hanu stood just within the opening, keeping watch.
While she rubbed her hands over the weak flames a spider emerged
from
the moss seeking escape. Its bulbous red body announced to all its poison. She used a twig to flick it aside. On another side a snake squirmed out from under dead leaves, attracted by the heat. Its glowing yellow and orange bands shouted its deadliness. She scooted it aside as well.
Spiders, snakes, bats, rats, tigers, rhinoceroses, ghosts … ye gods. Everything under the sun and those that avoid it into the bargain!
It was a miracle they were still alive and not stung, bitten or sickened unto death.
Well, me at least … Hanu seems impervious to everything
.
‘I think we should return,’ she called to him. ‘They’ve moved on by now, surely.’
He turned his helmed head, gave a slight nod.
He’s not enthusiastic about returning. What does he expect to find? She’s just an old lady! What would they do to her? She must be fine. And speaking of fine …
She eyed the glimmering opalescent blues and emerald greens of her brother’s armoured back.
‘What will you do?’ she called. ‘You cannot return … can you?’
‘
No
,’ he answered with his thoughts. ‘
I must leave this land or be hunted down
.’
She wanted to dispute that assertion but knew it to be true. She stared at the licking flames. ‘Where will you go?’
‘
Somewhere – it matters not where
.’
‘Well … what will you do?’
‘
I will easily find employment as a guard to some rich merchant or noble. Or I could join a travelling freak show as a living statue
.’
Her gaze snapped to him to find his helmed head tilted her way. ‘I’m serious!’
‘
As am I. An income will be no issue
.’
‘Perhaps I could—’
‘
No. You must remain. You belong here
.’
‘So you say. I—’ A deep growling roar from the jungle interrupted her. It shook the ground like a minor earthquake. The hanging vines vibrated, pattering down droplets.
‘
Your friend wants his cave back
.’