With feline surety they landed on all fours, rolling up on two legs in a sinuous swaggering motion that suggested their incredible arrogance and sense of superiority. Their eyes were alive with lustful anticipation of the kill, and just the smallest mote of amusement at the defiance of the human cattle in front of them.
Their slow advance into the square was intended to make their prey quail. Beside him, Vulkan could feel the other warriors’ tension. He also saw the pack mentality in the dusk-wraiths’ formation. It put him in mind of the leonid, the alpha-hunters that stalked the Arridian plain. These creatures, these pale-skinned, androgynous things possessed none of the majesty of those great maned beasts.
Vulkan’s lips curled into a sneer, “Soul-shrived ghost-walkers; that is all you are.”
He stepped forwards.
“Return,” he bellowed. “Return to your ships and be gone. You will only find steel and death waiting for you here, and cattle no longer for your culling knives.”
One of the witches laughed. It was a chilling, evil sound. She said something to one of her kin in the barbed dialect of the dusk-wraiths and a lesser male snarled obediently. His eyes were tarry pits that narrowed as they settled on Vulkan. With a shrilling cry he raced at the Nocturnean who had dared to defy the slavers. He was fast, like a lightning-adder.
Vulkan told the others, “Stay back,” and rushed to meet the dusk-wraith. The creature held his jagged knives behind him, leading with the angular point of his jutting chin. He wore no battle-helm or mask, but a serpent tattoo was painted on the left side of his face.
The distance between the combatants closed in moments, and just before the clash the dusk-wraith shifted his line of attack and blurred around Vulkan’s flank intending to gut him from his blind side. But Vulkan had seen the feint coming. Unclouded by fear, his battle instincts were honed to a monomolecular edge that the slaver could not possibly have accounted for.
He blocked the blow meant to cripple him with the haft of his hammer and brought the other one down on the witch’s skull. A stunned silence fell over the crowd, both Nocturnean and dusk-wraith, as Vulkan pulled his weapon from the gory smear he had left behind.
He spat on the corpse then glared at the female witch.
“Not wraiths at all, just flesh and blood.”
The witch smiled, her interest and her ardour suddenly piqued. “Mon’keigh…”
She licked her lips then blended back into the shadows. Before Vulkan could come after her, the gate to the town of Hesiod exploded in a storm of splinters and fire.
Vulkan was engulfed, reduced to a dark and hazy silhouette as the fire rolled over him. Shielding his eyes, he knew he would not die and stepped from the conflagration unharmed. That alone gave the dusk-wraiths aboard the skiff pause as it confronted him through the ragged gap in the wall.
Warriors, the ones in night-black armour, spilled around the edges of the skiff, eagerly brandishing hooks and blades. Vulkan snapped a dusk-wraith in half as it swung at him then crushed another with a blow from his fist.
Behind him, he heard his kinsmen attack as the people of Hesiod fought back against the slavers that had plagued them for centuries.
Vaulting over a horde of warriors, their blades cutting harmlessly through air, Vulkan landed in front of the skiff. Fingers like iron bolts dug into the lamellar nose of the machine as the Nocturnean turned it over. Screeching slavers fell from the tipped vessel before Vulkan tossed it aside like an unwanted spear. The battered skiff rolled over the ground before erupting in a ball of fiery shrapnel.
Two more came in its wake, the first harbouring a cohort of warriors. At the orders of its driver, the skiff accelerated to ramming speed intending to impale Vulkan on the spiked prow. Timing his jump to perfection, he leapt onto the floating barge at full pelt and raced up the vehicle’s plated snout like it was the shallow flank of a mountain crag.
The warriors came at him, spitting hell-shards from their rifles or lunging with jagged blades. Vulkan smashed their attacks aside and was amongst them, hewing with his hammers.
Hatred fuelled his every swing, together with a determination that the cycle of torture and fear would end here at this very dawn. He tore loose the command throne of the skiff’s driver, the warriors a broken mess behind him, and threw it at the third vehicle.
An energy blossom flashed as the improvised missile struck a protective field surrounding the last skiff, but Vulkan hadn’t slowed and was charging through it. Skin burning as he passed through the energy shield, he landed on the deck of the vehicle and faced off against a cadre of warriors. They looked brawnier than the others and toted bladed glaives that crackled with unnatural power. Each wore a face-plate as white as alabaster in stark contrast to the visceral red of their ornate armour. The ghosts glared at the interloper imperiously. Behind them, the slaver-lord looked through the jagged eye-slits of a horned helm. A rasped utterance through the fanged mouth grille unleashed his warriors.
One of the ghosts advanced silently and swung his glaive, but Vulkan dipped from the blow that left a blazing trail in the air behind it. A second glaive jabbed at him and this time Vulkan swatted it down into the skiff’s deck plating, but was left with a smoking haft in his hand. Another blow reduced his other hammer to ash as he was forced to parry again.
Rising from his seat, the slaver-lord snarled his displeasure at the Nocturnean’s continued existence.
With their enemy disarmed, the ghosts’ arrogance overflowed and they prepared to finish him.
Vulkan growled with contempt. “I need no weapons to kill the likes of you.”
In a devastating display of speed and brutality, he took the bodyguards apart. Impaled and beheaded by their very own blades, Vulkan threw their shattered remains over the side of the skiff and into the melee below.
Levelling a finger at the slaver-lord, he promised, “This terror ends with your life.”
The dusk-wraith pulled a glittering sword from the scabbard nestled next to his throne. A dark mist coiled from the blade and pricked at Vulkan’s nose. A hollow, hacking sound escaped from the slaver-lord’s lips. It resonated through the mouth of his monstrous fright mask. It was laughter.
Vulkan then noticed a needle-like gauntlet on the dusk-wraith’s other hand. He pointed it at the Nocturnean in mocking symmetry of the threat he’d just received.
“Paaaiin…” he hissed.
Even with superhuman speed, Vulkan couldn’t reach the slaver-lord before he unleashed the gauntlet weapon.
“Son!”
N’bel’s voice rang out above the clash around him. Instinct told Vulkan to reach out with his open hand. A subtle change in the breeze suggested something moving through it. His senses alive to everything, Vulkan’s fingers closed around the worn haft of a smiting hammer and plucked it blindly from the air. It left his grip a split second later, spinning towards the slaver-lord then splitting his ugly mask before the thought had even entered his mind that he was doomed. His face cloven in two, the slaver-lord dropped his sword and toppled off the end of the skiff.