Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (65 page)

‘Captain?’ Reven turned to face the pavilion.

Corrain could see the sick terror in the boy’s eyes as more golden magelight spilled out through the doorway. Then, with a searing shock, the radiance died.

No matter. A more punishing brightness was illuminating the entire anchorage. White and yet not white, it shimmered with all the colours of the rainbow on the very edge of seeing.

‘Run!’ Corrain barely took half the steps to the ground before trusting to luck and jumping the rest. Halferans landed all around him. If any of them had broken or sprained an ankle, that didn’t slow them.

Corrain fled, half turning with every second stride, back and forth. He was desperately trying to see what unknown menaces might pursue them as well as what enemies might lie ahead.

He could barely make out the pavilion now veiled by that eerie radiance. Sharp-edged magelight burst out through the shattered windows and doors in successive waves; sapphire, emerald, amber and ruby. The rainbow colours in the white wall enclosing the pavilion grew brighter. The shifting patterns stilled. The colours trying to force their way through darkened against the brilliance.

A blade of azure magelight scythed through the wall and shot towards them. The white magic blazed and the cobalt crack was sealed. The azure magic vanished.

The Halferans had all dropped to the damp ground regardless. As he threw himself down, Corrain wondered what good such instinctive action could have done them. If it hadn’t been cut short, that killing magic would have cut them all in half before their knees had reached the ground.

‘What’s happening?’

Corrain didn’t know who was begging for an answer. It hardly mattered. He had none to give.

‘Anskal’s mageborn were in there.’ Hosh alone was still standing, using his sword to point at the mesmerising lights. He spoke as casually as a man idling by a tavern.

‘Good to know.’ Rising to his feet, Corrain gently took the bloodstained weapon’s hilt from Hosh’s slack grasp.

‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘we should make our way back to the wizards.’

Dragging his gaze from the eerie mage battle enveloping the pavilion, he looked towards the beach. If the ships and their crews were destroyed, then their work here was done.

Then Jilseth and the other wizards could send them home and they were welcome to kill Anskal in whatever fashion they chose. Corrain hardened his heart. They could inflict as vile a death as the Mandarkin had wished on that unfortunate woman and do so with his blessing.

He flinched as another spear of magelight tore across the night. This time the tip glowed white as a branding iron, dulling through venomous orange along its length to a sullen red. Corrain glimpsed the outline of a trireme before the menacing light winked out.

He squinted into the darkness but found it was impossible to make out any more detail along the shore. His magesight was long gone and looking at the brilliance shrouding Anskal’s pavilion had left him completely night-blind. The rawest recruit lighting a candle for company on the midnight watch had a better chance of seeing something than he did.

He could hear shouts and cries from the beach but none told him what he so urgently needed to know.

‘Come on.’ Corrain headed for the beach where the ships had grounded regardless. His sense of direction hadn’t deserted him and if they encountered some fleeing corsairs, they had the sorcery in their skin and blades to call on.

‘Halferan! Halferan!’ he yelled. He didn’t want to run into a careless Tallat sword imbued with that deadly black sorcery.

The men following him did the same.

Corrain had barely taken five paces before he was blown off his feet. Helpless as a rag doll, he tumbled across the sand, the plaything of a wind such as he’d never encountered before.

The sky was suffused with a pale blue light as bright as a double full of the moons and the air was ringing with the cacophony of trees falling all across the island.

‘Captain!’ someone screamed.

Someone else grabbed his arm. Boots and elbows struck his back and his thighs as all his men were swept helpless back towards the pavilion which they had just fled.

Corrain struggled to breathe, not because he’d had the wind knocked out of him but because the roaring air pressed so hard on his chest. He felt as though his ribs were bound tight. His lungs were burning. All he could hear was the thunderous wind.

He struck the front face of the terrace with a bruising thump. The rest of the Halferans were blown against the masonry with the same merciless force.

At least Corrain was able to struggle to his feet, clawing at the black stones, bracing himself against the wind pummelling his back.

The sharp snap of beams overheard made him look up. He saw the heavy tiles ripped from the roof and floating away like autumn leaves. The sight defied all common sense with the brutal wind pressing him so hard. Trusses and rafters followed, plucked like straws from a harvest stook to drift away in lazy spirals.

Corrain shifted to brace one shoulder against the stones, trying to see who among his men were on this side of the steps. Were the rest safe on the far side of the stone stair?

Movement towards the shore caught his eye. He saw the triremes and galleys tumbling over and over in the shallow water. The ships were smashed to heaps of kindling. How many Caladhrians lay dead amidst the broken lumber?

How soon would he and these other Halferans join them at Saedrin’s door? The masonry beside Corrain cracked from top to bottom. He could only hope this incessant wind would stop the stones from collapsing on top of them all. Only then, of course, there would be nothing to stop them being swept to their deaths. Blown across the headland, they would either perish with every bone smashed on the rocks of the shore or be drowned in the surging waters beyond.

The terrace shuddered. Corrain could see ochre light in every joint between the stones. As the magelight brightened, the gaps widened. The pavilion’s very foundations were crumbling away. He could hear the walls cracking overhead.

He staggered and fell amid roiling stones. He could see his guards struggling like drowning men. Their arms flailed desperately to save themselves from being overwhelmed by the collapsing rubble.

It took a few moments before Corrain realised that however violently he was being jostled, he wasn’t being hurt by the sharp-cornered stones. One block rolled across another in front of his face, trapping his hand before it went on its way. He saw the flash of golden magelight beneath his skin. So Jilseth’s armouring spell was proving its worth.

That was meagre consolation. He had no hope of fighting his way free. Now great lumps of plastered wall and splintered doors and shutters were smashing down on top of them all. Corrain lost sight of his men entirely. All he could see was the wreckage trapping him.

What about Hosh? The poor, fool, valiant boy didn’t have Hadrumal’s magecraft to protect him. Corrain fought ferociously to free himself. In vain. His legs were trapped. One arm was pinned. He couldn’t reach anything that might give some purchase to haul himself free.

Scarlet light crackled along some splintered laths sticking through a slab of plastered wall jammed hard up against his cheek. They looked like broken bones piercing skin.

Corrain smelled smoke. He watched the dusty wood darken. Faint yellow crept along the charred lath’s edge towards his eye. The colour deepened and a little flame blossomed. It grew. The next lath kindled. Sparks flew through the air to fasten on the frayed end of a snapped beam jutting up beside his shoulder.

He twisted, trying to see where the flame was heading, but in vain. He was irretrievably stuck. Now the wind roaring in his ears deepened to the ferocious rage of a fire tearing through the Caladhrian marshes at the end of a long dry summer.

Corrain remembered riding the Halferan coast highway one year not so long after he’d formally joined the guard. The saltings were left to burn; there was no hope of fighting the blaze skimming the marsh’s surface and the plants rooted beneath the water would recover.

His troop was keeping watch for any new blaze started by wind-borne embers falling in the drained and valuable pastures on the inland side of the road. Corrain recalled seeing a marsh deer dashing out in front of his horse, too maddened by the pain from its burning hide to fear the bigger animal.

When the flames in the saltings had finally died, they had found countless smaller beasts burned to blackened skeletons amid the ashes and stumps of the twisted thorns. He had wondered how they could be so foolish. Even an animal should know to run away from an approaching fire.

Perhaps the lizards and weasels had been surrounded as he was now. Perhaps the same deadly despair had consumed them just as surely as these flames were about to be his death.

Corrain closed his ears and clamped his jaw shut. Whatever was going to happen, the last thing that his men heard would not be him screaming.

He could hear the timbers and laths amid the tumbled masonry burning, crackling and spitting. He could feel the warmth on his face growing ever hotter. He braced himself for the first agony.

Would his hair catch alight? He recalled a careless village woman who’d set her own skirts on fire when he was a boy. As she fell into the hearth in her panic, so village gossip around the well had said, her braids had blazed like rush lights.

Corrain screwed his eyes tight, trying to drive such ghastly images out of his imagination. All around him, the heat grew. Fiery brightness penetrated his closed eyelids as the sounds of burning buffeted his ears.

But the pain didn’t come. Was this what the wizards’ magic had saved him for? Enduring an eternity of such assaults on his senses, helpless to escape?

Something surged up beneath him. His legs felt cold and wet, all the more shocking with the scorching heat threatening his face.

Then the vividness searing his closed eyes dulled. The fiery threat receded. Where the masonry and timbers trapping him had been grinding together like stones in a mill, now they were rolling away. Giving him room to move.

Corrain forced his eyes open as he ripped his sword hand free. Now he had both arms above the shifting surface of the wreckage. But the rising water was up to his chest now. He kicked frantically for some foothold but every time his boot struck something solid, it floated away.

Green-laced foam was washing through the ruins of the pavilion. Except the wood was still burning, even when the waters sloshed right over the flames. That wind was blowing ever stronger, rucking up the rising waters into swelling breakers.

One such wave swamped him entirely. Corrain broke free of its trailing side, spitting and cursing as he looked wildly around for any sign of his men.

All he could see was a featureless sea dotted with burned flotsam. Here and there a gout of foam burst boiling from the depths to scatter the debris more widely or to suck it down in a murderous whirlpool.

Corrain looked up. All he could see overhead was starlight. Then something dragged him beneath the waters.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
S
IX

Halferan Manor, Caladhria

Autumn Equinox Festival, 5th Day

‘W
HAT HAPPENED, EXACTLY
?’