The Brush of Black Wings (11 page)

“
Saruum Buidu.”
Acseh
stumbled on the words.

Martise stared at the spot where her nemesis
had stood only a moment earlier. “Abomination.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

If the king was the sword and the sword the
king as the lich’s books stated, then Silhara had exactly what he
needed to grab a demon king by the bollocks and twist.

The blade hung at his hip, hidden by the folds
of his cloak. A light sword, well-balanced and designed for
speed-draw, it dragged at his belt, made cumbersome by the weight
of dark magic infused in the metal and his own wards that protected
him from its touch. His skin crawled any place the scabbard knocked
against his leg. He’d drop the thing into the nearest blacksmith’s
forge and toast its destruction with a cup of Dragon Piss were it
not useful for his own purposes. Given half the chance, he’d toss
Megiddo Anastas in there with it and toast a second
time.

The magic he used to iron-crow his way into
the demon’s prison had depleted some of his strength. The success
of his endeavor lay before him, a barren wasteland in all
directions. The only points of interest were a jagged line of
mountains on a far horizon and the sky above him, wreathed in
flashing images of people, places and events. They careened across
the celestial road in an ever-changing panorama—lives lived across
time and kingdoms, revealed yet unreachable.

His wife was trapped somewhere in this
gods-forsaken place, captive of an entity with the desire to break
free of its cage and a certainty she was the means to do so.
Silhara snarled and promptly gagged.

“
Bursin’s armpit!” he said into
his sleeve as he covered his nose with his forearm. The reek of
this world overrode the copper smell of his own blood drying in his
nostrils. His eyes watered with true tears instead of blood, and
his stomach bounced under his ribs in warning. The taint of the
demon’s mark on Martise’s clothing had made his nose twitch but was
only a ghost of the odor saturating this air. It was as if an
entire world had dumped the rotting corpses of its dead here. The
bodies had turned to dust, but the smell remained.

He breathed cautiously through his mouth and
pivoted to better survey the landscape. The barrenness wasn’t as
strange as the lack of noise. Even the fetid wind was silent as it
whipped his cloak around his legs and his hair into his eyes. In
some ways, it reminded him of Corruption’s plane of existence with
its lifeless ocean and a beach made of burnt bone. That plane caged
an exiled god, this one an exiled king.

A spike of warning prickles shot down
Silhara’s back. This world might be mute and rank, but it wasn’t
blind. Something watched him, and the previously quiet sword began
to whisper and rattle in the scabbard.

He smiled grimly. “Sense your master nearby,
do you?” The hush deepened, reminding him of the stillness just
before a thunderstorm broke over Neith. “Come out, come out,
wherever you are,” he taunted in a soft voice.

He leapt back as the ground in front of him
erupted into a howling geyser of dirt. Soil and rock spewed upward
to coalesce into a floating miasma. It hovered there only a moment
before shifting shape into a javelin and hurtling toward him.
Silhara flung a spell back at the makeshift weapon where it
disintegrated into a harmless shower of dust.

He laughed aloud, his mirth devoid of any true
humor. “King Megiddo. Demon handler and dirt-mover. Hardly worthy
of the title
‘saruum.’”

The first attack had been a test, one to gauge
not only his fear or lack of it, but also his power. Silhara had
offered a hint but couldn’t do much else until his adversary chose
to confront him for a prolonged period. Mockery worked wonders in
making men react; demons were no exception.

A shrieking black whirlwind spiraled across
the empty plain towards him. The cacophony bludgeoned Silhara’s
bleeding ears. Screams of the dying, of the tortured and the
mutilated. He had witnessed plenty of suffering in his lifetime. He
was far less sensitive to it than Martise, but everything inside
him recoiled at the sounds emanating from the whirlwind.

He held his ground as the monstrous vortex
spun ever closer, revealing the outlines of racked limbs and
shadowy faces distorted in horror. The force of the wind lifted him
off his feet, and nebulous hands extended from the cloud to clutch
at his clothing, yank his hair and rake claws down his arms and
legs.

The spell he bellowed into the whirlwind
halted its spin abruptly. It collapsed like a spinning top
flattened by an impatient hand. Silhara dropped from his midair
tumble and landed on his feet with a quick stagger. He shoved his
wind-tangled hair away from his face and frowned.

This isn’t what he expected—minor spells of
wind and movement easily defeated or deflected by counter sorcery
mastered by a third-year Conclave student. Silhara had prepared to
engage in full-on warfare. So far, he hadn’t even broken a sweat.
He stayed on his guard. Demons were known to play with their
food.

He braced himself for a third confrontation
when the same black whirlwind gathered itself once more. Instead of
aiming for him in a straight line, it zigzagged over the terrain,
pausing at odd intervals to stir up dust in various spots. He
pivoted slowly, tracking its movements, curious. He rolled his eyes
once he realized what the vortex was doing.

Barrier circles made for handy self
protection. Silhara had used them on various occasions when he
worked dangerous magic. They made terrible cages for a mage with
any reasonable skill and power. He left the barrier alone for the
moment, puzzled as to why his adversary chose to construct it,
especially when its power barely registered to his senses. No more
than a fly’s buzz and even less annoying.

The whirlwind spun tighter and faster,
shrinking until it was no more than a thin black line that suddenly
blossomed into voluminous robes made of the same shadowy, agonized
faces and twisted limbs. The being who wore it possessed the visage
of a man, but a man who had lost his humanity to the darkest forces
and walked soulless among the living.

Silhara inclined his head in mock salute.
“Megiddo Anastas.”

“
Who are you?”

The question surprised Silhara. He had
expected more guttural utterances, demonic gibberish and possibly a
lot of spitting. Instead, the Wraith King spoke a dialect of
Glimming and watched him with strange eyes—steely and reflective
like his sword’s blade, with the same blue lightning crackling in
their depths. His voice didn’t echo in this muffled world, but
Silhara sensed a vast abyss in the words, akin to Corruption’s
lifeless seas.

“
It doesn’t matter who I am,” he
replied in the same tongue. “You’ve taken something of mine. I want
it back.”

Megiddo cocked his head, his steel-plate eyes
narrowed. “You have something of mine as well. You used it to open
the gate.”

Hardly, but the demon king didn’t need to know
that. Silhara smirked. “Shall we bargain?”

Diplomacy had never been his strongest virtue
but he was a decent negotiator. He never imagined the skills he
employed to sell his produce at Easter Prime’s markets would serve
him here, where he’d bargain with a Wraith King for his wife’s safe
return.

“
Give me the sword and open the
gate. I’ll give you the
kashaptu.”
Megiddo’s grotesque robes
writhed around his body, their fluid faces snapping fanged teeth at
Silhara. The sword at Silhara’s hip tugged on his belt, straining
toward its master. Yearning.

Silhara snorted. He avoided using Martise’s
name and suspected the demon didn’t know it—yet. “Give me the
woman, and I’ll return the sword.”

As much as his gut clenched at the thought of
the sacrifice involved, there was no possible way he’d reopen the
portal into his world and let this loathsome thing through to wreak
havoc.

Megiddo’s features drew into even gaunter
lines. “Open it or I kill the woman,” he almost snarled.

Silhara snapped his fingers outward in a wide
palm stretch. Sparks sizzled off his fingertips. A dull clap of
thunder followed, and the barrier circle around him flashed twice
before crumbling. The sigils drawn in the dust by the whirlwind
scattered. “I’m no cull to fear threats from the rejected refuse of
a respectable midden. Kill her, and I’ll destroy the blade.” He
slapped the squirming blade at his hip, as much to subdue it as to
make his point.

Megiddo’s glance darted to where the sword
hung, hidden by Silhara’s cloak. “Unlike the
kashaptu,
I
won’t die.”

“
But you will wither and spend
eternity here the shade of a shade.”

The words struck home. Megiddo’s eyes
lightened from polished steel to white-hot metal, blazing in his
equally pale face. Silhara watched, waited and pounced at the
demon’s first twitch of his shoulder.

“
Hold!” he commanded, his hand
wrapped around the scabbard. Fire coursed through his arm, the
cold, unclean fire of both necromantic and goetic
sorcery.

Megiddo froze, wrenched to a shocked
standstill. His wide eyes lost their blaze, and the robes writhed
back on themselves, twisting and convulsing until they cocooned the
king in a tightly wrapped shroud. His body flickered and wavered,
like the illusionary waves on a near horizon that tricked a thirsty
traveler on a hot day. The demon opened his mouth to
speak.

Silhara slammed another spell into the
sheathed sword, smiling grimly as it screeched a thin protest. “Be
still, dog,” he commanded the bound Megiddo. “Be silent.” He’d
swear to any who asked that he heard the demon’s back teeth snap
together in an unwilling clench.

He strolled to where the Wraith King rocked
unsteadily on his feet. The robes squirmed, reaching for him.
Silhara’s lip curled. “Thought you’d nip off for a little murder to
force my hand, did you?” The mute demon’s wrathful gaze promised
retribution far more unpleasant than mere murder.

Silhara kicked the side of Megiddo’s knee,
sending him toppling into the dirt with a muffled thump. “Stay,” he
ordered.

He walked away from the prone king and turned
in a slow circle, allowing his senses to expand in the flat, muted
plane. The power he’d bled off from the spells protecting Neith’s
environs surged through him to swell his throat and fill his
mouth.

“
Apprentice,” he said in a low
voice, and the gray world vibrated beneath his feet with the word’s
resonance. It swelled, spilling across the featureless plain in
invisible waves, carried to the distant fanged mountain peaks on a
sorcerous tide.

He listened, breath held in hopeful
anticipation, and closed his eyes on a sigh when a thin cry carried
back to him on the soundless wind. “Master.”

The spell he used to cast his voice captured
hers, spinning a delicate thread that bound her to him. He grasped
the line, recited another spell and left the Wraith King recumbent
in the dirt.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The spell known as Half-Death had earned its
name in more ways than one. Conclave considered it an outlawed
incantation, its use punishable by imprisonment as well as various
painful incentives designed to convince the offending mage not to
try it again.

A spell which could transport its user from
one place to another in an instant exacted its own heavy toll.
Silhara nearly killed himself employing it as a way for him and
Martise to escape a lich. Three rapid-fire transports of two people
together and he’d been reduced to a senseless bloodied
heap.

This time he suffered no damage from the
spell. The gray plane in which he traveled didn’t resist his
manipulations as hard or drain his power as much as the living
world did. The most he suffered was a popping in his ears and the
welcome impact of his wife’s body as she threw herself at him with
a glad cry.

“
Sil...Master!”

Martise’s arms wrapped around his neck, nearly
strangling him in her enthusiasm. He lifted her off her feet,
trying to not shake with relief at having her in his arms once
more, safe and sound. He pressed his face into the spot where her
shoulder curved into her neck and breathed. The putrid reek
permeated everything in this gods forsaken place, but Silhara
fancied he still smelled the hint of orange flower on her skin and
the soap she and Gurn used to launder the blankets.

He wanted to hold her like this for hours, an
indulgence that would have to wait until after they escaped.
Martise must have thought the same thing because she ended their
embrace and stepped back to stare at him with a critical
eye.

“
Blood all over you. You faced
Megiddo.”

“
I did, but this is from spellwork
getting here. I’ve leashed your king for a moment, but it won’t
last.”

She winced and caressed his arm with her
fingertips. Her hair was a tangled mess, and fatigue painted
lavender shadows under her eyes. She’d obviously dressed under
enchantment and without benefit of a light. Her skirts were inside
out, and she had donned one of his shirts instead of hers. It fell
almost to her knees, and the sleeves were rolled to her elbows. No
woman ever born was more beautiful.