Moontide 02 - The Scarlet Tides (53 page)

‘There,’ Filius announced, ‘he’s helpless for a few minutes. Tie him up. I’ll place a Chain-rune on him when you’re done.’

The wind-sailor grabbed a coil of rope and edged forward while Filius ignored Funt and turned his attention to the scroll-case. He rattled it experimentally, then looked at the priest. His eyes held a challenge:
If you want this, you’re going to have to try and take it off me
.

Funt realised that he didn’t have the courage to try.

Filius flipped the lid from the case and tipped the contents into his hands. He looked at the plain, unadorned rod of wood. Boron Funt did too, looking puzzled. Was this truly the prize they’d been seeking? It looked nothing like what they’d been told of it at the Arcanum.

Then an unknown mental voice, one Boron didn’t know, cried,

and a rush of bodies poured up over the lip of the cliff.

Huge reptile-men with snake-bodies instead of legs swarmed toward them brandishing weapons, and the air was suddenly filled with flying spears. Behind them the windshipmen shouted in alarm as voices roared in the woods and the foliage came alive.

Funt swatted away the spears, shielding himself desperately as the windsailor beside Mercer went down beneath a fanged horror with a female torso and paired snake-legs that wrapped about him.

But then he shook his head as if to clear it: he and Filius were not mere men; they were magi –
pure-blood
magi! They could fight back! As if coming to the same conclusion, Filius started to blaze away with lethal gnosis-fire. Funt used Air-gnosis on the first of these creatures to come at him, easily swatting it off the cliff. Then he poured mage-fire into the face of another – but to his stunned amazement, it shielded, not so well that it didn’t take a Hel of a blast that charred its skin and boiled one eye, but still it kept coming, its heavy sword battering against his shields. Its bared teeth were pointed, and two fangs jutted out like those of a viper.

Funt took a step back … just as a hand erupted from the earth and gripped his ankle.

All at once the earth was boiling. He fell backwards and glimpsed the pilot-mage, going down beneath a pair of snakemen who came right out of the earth. One leapt on him and he slammed his hand at it, releasing a narrow burst of force that struck the beast beneath the chin and almost ripped its head off. It collapsed onto him, sliding off his shields as he tried to roll clear. In the background, he heard venators squealing and tearing at their rope bindings.

Then the rest of the beast that had gripped his foot lifted itself from the ground, its jaws wide and teeth bared, and ripped through his shields. Fangs punched through his robes and into his calf and he yowled in pain and anger as his lower leg went numb. He flailed about, using his good leg to kick himself free, and crawled backwards from the thing as it rose over him. It was massive, built like a wrestler, with a shock of snaky-hair. It roared inchoately and lunged at his foot, its mouth widening, then snapping shut over his ankle.

Funt screamed as bones crunched, and something fell from the
snake-monster’s mouth as blood sprayed. The numbness climbed his body.

The venators screamed again. One ripped free into the air and flapped away, trailing a stream of blood, then a spear thudded into its breast and it dropped like a stone. The rest of the venators were torn down by a pile of inhuman figures.

Beside him, Filius was shouting Scripture as fire blazed from his hands. Boron saw more snake-men twist away from him, convulsing. There were half a dozen bodies collapsed about him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Alaron Mercer climb unsteadily to his feet; he barely deflected a combined blast of fire and lightning from Filius – but that distraction was enough for a female snake-creature to lunge at the Acolyte from behind. She latched into his forearm and bit down before he slapped away – but the damage had been done.

Filius howled as his bare arm immediately began to discolour. He staggered dizzily, spewing fire in random directions, his shields faltering. More of the snake creatures threw themselves at him, and within seconds Filius was spitted on three spear-shafts at once. His shrieked prayers became whimpers as he thrashed about for a moment, and then went limp.

Funt tore his eyes from the Acolyte’s dead body, trying to work out why he couldn’t feel his left foot. Then he saw the reason, and he felt a sob bubble up his throat. The foot was gone and blood was fountaining from the stump in great gouts, soaking the ground.
This isn’t happening
, his brain told him.

Just as suddenly, it wasn’t. He was in the training ground at the Turm Zauberin.
I’ve fallen off my horse, that’s all
. ‘Fetch Magister Yune,’ he called, the words coming out oddly high. ‘I think I need a healer.’ He looked around for someone to help him.

Oddly, his friends were nowhere to be seen. There was only Alaron Mercer, of all people. ‘Help me,’ he whimpered as the merchant’s son stumbled towards him, smiling inanely. ‘Mercer, help: I think I’ve hurt myself.’

A dozen alien faces loomed over him: bestial faces that had no place in this dream. He erased them, focusing only on Mercer, who
was carrying a leather scroll-case, one he vaguely recalled as being important. But it wasn’t as important as his poor foot.

‘Help me, you cretin,’ he snapped at Mercer.

‘I blocked both his attacks,’ Mercer said, his voice sounding distracted. ‘I’ve never done that before.’

Imbecile! He has to help me! I fell off my damned horse! Or … something …
‘I seem to have hurt my foot,’ he groaned, wishing he sounded a little manlier just now. But he could, couldn’t he? He could
order
Mercer to do it. He was a pure-blood, after all. ‘Stop babbling, Mercer,’ he snapped. ‘Fetch Mistress Yune! I’ve hurt myself.’

‘Two spells at once … and I blocked them. It was as if the danger cleared my mind of doubt. I felt … fantastic.’

He felt the numbness climbing his leg into his midriff. ‘Please, Mercer,’ he whimpered. ‘My foot—’

Mercer seemed to notice him at last. ‘Why are you here, Funt?’

‘To find you, you moron! Where’s Magister Yune?’ Agnes Yune had always been kind to him. She’d given him sweets, especially when he was homesick. He’d been homesick a lot. He’d always thought of her as a kind auntie. ‘Please, it’s beginning to hurt.’

‘Can we eat him yet?’ something growled.

Funt cringed away from the fierce voice and focused on the merchant’s son again.

‘What happened to Poulos?’ Alaron Mercer said in his ear. ‘He went missing three weeks ago. Did your friends find him?’

Poulos? I’ve never heard of any Poulos. What happened three weeks ago?
‘Where’s Magister Yune, Mercer? I don’t feel well.’

‘Poulos looked like Hypollo here: with snake-hair and lizard-skin.’

‘Oh, that thing? Dranid killed it and we fed it to the venators. Hel’s sake, Mercer, fetch Aggy Yune!’ His voice was faltering. Somewhere close, a lot of somethings were gorging on fresh meat. He could smell the iron stink of blood; he could hear the ripping of flesh. ‘Where are my friends?’ he asked plaintively.

Mercer said softly in his ear, ‘You never had any.’

He opened his eyes as Mercer straightened and walked away. He was surrounded by reptilian faces, creatures from nightmare. His
fantasy of Turm Zauberin evaporated. Filius was being torn apart limb from limb and devoured raw. So was the pilot-mage. He could hear the human crew pleading for mercy.

‘Mercer, please …’

‘He’s all yours,’ said Alaron Mercer, without looking back.

*

The venators had flown south that morning, so Alaron and the lamiae took the stolen windship north first. They flew very low, to keep out of sight of Veiterholt Bridge and its fortresses, then turned northeast, aiming for the coast south of Pontus. The remaining crewmen worked the sails under the close supervision of Naugri and a dozen other lamiae who were proficient in Rondian. They were made to describe everything they were doing, instructing their captors as they went along. They had the look of men trapped in a nightmare, wanting desperately to wake up as soon as possible.

Alaron took the tiller. Windships were much tougher to fly than skiffs, but the same principles applied. The lamiae barely fitted aboard, but somehow they managed, filling the cabins and crews’ quarters with the females and offspring while the males stayed on deck: thirty-four adults and two dozen children on a ship that would normally house no more than two dozen people. They had no pilot-mage, but many of the lamiae had Air-gnosis; they were already stationed below and constantly feeding the keel gnosis-energy.

Their first priority was to reduce the chances of being followed. Alaron ordered anything personal to be chucked straight into the Cut, to cut down the Inquisitors’ ability to scry the ship. It meant disposing of a treasure-trove of weapons and armour, not to mention diaries, prayer-books and jewellery, but the Elders were rigorous in scouring the ship of anything the Inquisitors might be able to trace. The only thing they kept was one of the pilot-mage’s charts. The ship itself could be shielded using energy from the keel, and Alaron ensured those were fully empowered.

It was hard to erase Boron Funt’s final screams, but Alaron was determined not to forget these were the bastards who’d killed Muhren and Mercellus and Ferdi and Poulos and all those helpless
Rimoni. He’d lost his breakfast into the Cut, and after that, he’d shaken himself and done his best to pull himself together. He’d not been able to stop himself from feeling sorry for poor delusional Boron Funt at the end – he’d never expected that – but he couldn’t Chain-rune a pure-blood. There had been no choice.

If he’d shown any remorse for the death of poor Poulos, I might have tried to stop them, but he didn’t even care. Poulos was just a freak to him …

Once all the personal effects had been disposed of, Alaron turned his attention to rendering the ship itself proof from scrying. He worked with Ildena and the strongest of the Air-magi to create wards, leaving Cym to use the main cabin as a surgery, repairing the worst of their injuries.

We defeated two pure-bloods and a mage-pilot who must have been at least a half-blood
. He smiled grimly. He was proud of the lamiae. They’d lost eight warriors, but considering what they’d been up against, it was a stunning victory.
We could even have taken down a couple more …
Then he smiled at himself: ‘We’ was a man-made race of constructs. His people.

‘Something amuses you, Milkson?’ Kekropius called from his position near the stern, where he was watching over
Seeker
, trailing the windship on a long rope.

‘I was just thinking that I feel more akin to your people than to those Inquisition bastards.’

Kekropius acknowledged his words with a faint tilt of the chin.
Pride
.

Above all, he thought of the moment when he was shielding from the pure-blood Acolyte. He’d known that he was likely to be attacked, had already imagined the ways he might shield, but there was only so much one could anticipate. When the Acolyte had used both fire and pure energy together, sheer terror had crystallised his mind, and somehow he’d managed to deflect both attacks.

I wish I could remember exactly how I did it. That must be how a trance-mage feels all the time …

Cym emerged from the cabin, looking shaky, and went to the rail. The Vlk tattoo on her brow was more prominent than ever against
the pallor of her face. She’d been trying to help burned lamiae all morning, but he could see it wasn’t going well. She looked utterly drained, and completely distraught.

As he watched, she shuddered, gripping the rail, and stared down at the rolling lands below. This high up, they could see for miles, but there was still no sign of the sea. There was a big compass set below the tiller, with a gnostic map made of shifting lines of light set into the crystal face. The Elders were poring over the device with great excitement. Their goal felt tangible to them now, for the first time more reality than dream.

Alaron walked over and stood next to her, resting a hand on her shoulder.

‘I can’t save his other eye,’ she murmured. ‘He’s half-blind, and just wants to die.’

He winced, wishing he could do more, but healing was something he had no affinity for at all.

‘What now?’ she asked dejectedly.

He forced an encouraging smile. ‘We’re going to the Promised Land.’

‘And where is that, exactly?’ Cym asked, not unreasonably.

‘Pretty much wherever in Antiopia we like. It needs to be somewhere coastal, within reach, so that means Dhassa or Javon, maybe.’

Cym might never have had geography lessons, but her well-travelled father had taught her the shape of the world. ‘The coast of Javon,’ she suggested.

‘Just what I was thinking. Kekropius agrees. He’s going to persuade the Elders.’

‘Can you find it?’

‘That compass and map device will take us right there.’

‘The Inquisition will follow us,’ she said tiredly.

‘If they can – but I’ve heard venators can’t stay aloft for long. If we go out over the ocean, there will come a point where they can’t follow us, even if their scrying can find us.’ He couldn’t help smiling.

‘Until they get another ship,’ Cym reminded him.

‘Oh. Yeah.’ He felt foolish all of a sudden. ‘Hadn’t thought of that.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Sol et Lune! All this competence you’ve been showing has had me worried. It’s nice to know the old Alaron is still in there.’

‘Cheers. So, what are you going to do about finding your mother?’

‘I’m not sure. I’m a Hermetic Water-mage with a very limited education, remember? I’m no good at Clairvoyance.’ Everything Cym had learned was down to Alaron and Ramon slipping out of the college at night to go through their own lessons with her. There were huge gaps in her skills. ‘I’m going to start trying, though.’

‘That’s dangerous,’ Alaron warned. ‘A poorly cast scrying can attract all sorts of things – it could lead the Inquisitors straight to us. Your mother and grandfather will most probably be in Hebusalim, and that’s occupied by the Rondian Army.’