“Ah, yes,” Vennet said. “Your magic.”
He took a fast step back. His right hand darted to his cutlass and he drew and swung it in one powerful motion. Cira was wearing a white gown. The cutlass slashed the pale fabric with red.
“It could be a problem,” said Vennet.
Cira fell with a startled expression on her face. Karth and Marolis both stared in shock. Tomollan fumbled for a knife but Vennet’s cutlass flashed and the young man reeled back, screaming and clutching his arm. Vennet followed and silenced him with another blow.
For all her pompousness, Feita reacted with the quick reflexes of her race, darting away from the captain’s weapon and trying to get around him, maybe back to the safety of her cabin. Karth started to step forward, to try and restrain Vennet, but the halfelf raised his cutlass in silent threat. His eyes narrowed and he thrust his free hand toward Feita. Where his shirt hung loose across his back, Karth saw his dragonmark shimmer.
Wind summoned by the Mark of Storm howled from Vennet’s outstretched hand to pummel Feita. The gnome staggered, stumbled-then was caught up by the powerful gust and tumbled, shrieking, over the ship’s rail. Her shrieks ended in a splash.
The nearest herons turned to watch with glittering eyes.
“Lords of the Host! Man overboard!” Karth rushed past Vennet and leaped to the rail. Feita was struggling in the water. Even moving slowly, Lightning on Water was already passing her. He spun around to stare at Vennet and his bloody cutlass.
A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up to meet a green-eyed gaze.
“Be at ease,” said Dah’mir.
Up close, Karth could see that the smile on the man’s face was strained, as if he held back tremendous pain. Even before the words were out of his mouth, though, it seemed to Karth that he could feel Dah’mir’s presence pushing at him, overwhelming his will. He tried to struggle, tried to remember that he had just seen his captain kill two people and send a third to her death, but there was a charisma about Dah’mir. The strange man was right. There was nothing to worry about.
He watched Marolis fight and lose the same battle. Vennet repeated his order to bring the ship around and this time Marolis nodded. “Aye, captain,” he said, spinning the wheel.
Dah’mir patted Karth’s shoulder. “Why don’t you dispose of those?” he said with a nod at Cira’s and Tomollan’s bodies. His voice was tired, but still powerful. “Then give the deck a good scrub.”
“Aye, lord,” Karth said above the rising howl of wind. Overhead, the ship’s elemental ring began to churn furiously.
“Coming about,” called Marolis. “Coming about and turning back to Sharn!”
“No,” said Vennet. He bent and wiped his cutlass clean on Tomollan’s tunic. “Not Sharn.”
His world ended in fire. His last sensations were of the human wizard Singe clinging to him, then of a pinprick of heat as the wizard cast a final spell. He’d seen that spell before. He tried to leap away, but Singe’s weight dragged at him, holding him in place for the scant moments it took for the pinprick to explode into an inferno. Flame seared the delicate buds of his skin, burning away every sensation but pain. It ate his chest tendrils and fleshy head growths. The powerful tentacles that sprang from his shoulders flailed in the fiery air-flailed, blistered, charred and finally went numb as they crumbled into ash. He screamed and fire filled his lungs, scorching him from the inside out.
The rage that consumed him was even hotter. As he burned, he tried to strike out at his killer, to take Singe with him into death but the fire finished him too quickly. He fell in silent agony, still raging at the wizard as he died and the world faded around him-
— until a flickering appeared in the stillness. His pain-maddened mind seized on it, tore at it, and the flickering vanished, snuffed out by his attention.
New strength shivered through his arms, though. New awareness woke in him. New … life.
Hruucan rolled over. His skin cracked and flaked away as he moved but he could feel again. Shifting currents of air touched his burned skin and showed him the world once more. It was night-Hruucan could sense it on the air. He could hear, too. He could hear voices.
Only a few paces away, two humans argued. Both of them held spears. One held a stick that smelled of oily smoke. An extinguished torch. The human with the torch shook it at the other. “Toch tabeka tocha’ari! An ano totocha’ario!”
They spoke the language of Dah’mir’s humans, the Bonetree clan. Hruucan rose silently to his feet and drifted forward. He could sense other forms around him: the corpses of fallen orcs and humans, the broken chitinous hulks of dead chuul, the sprawled forms of slaughtered dolgrims. They stank with a day’s decay, the passage of the corrupting sun. He still stood on the battlefield in the shadow of the Bonetree mound, he realized, though the fight was long since over. The Bonetree clan had slunk back to the abandoned field to pick over the bodies of the dead, now cold.
But the humans were warm, the heat of their lives pulsing inside them.
One of the humans sniffed at the air and made an expression of disgust. “Do hiffi eche?” He turned around. His face dropped in sudden fear. “Khyberit gentis!”
Hruucan lunged in a sifting burst of ash. He would have lashed out with his shoulder tentacles, but even through the haze of pain he knew they were no longer there. Instead, he struck the human who had cried out with the heel of his hand, pummeling him just under the ribs. The man went down with a weak gasp. Hruucan whirled on the other human, grabbing him before he could bring his spear to bear and wrapping him in blackened arms. He could feel the heat in the man, feel it rushing and beating …
The heat seemed to reawaken the buds of his skin. A shiver swept over him as they burst through the blackened crust and burrowed into the human’s flesh. The human cried out in agony.
Usually the buds sucked out the moisture of any living creature the dolgaunt cared to embrace. Now they seemed to dig even deeper. Hruucan let out a grating moan as the buds burrowed into the human’s very essence and sucked out his life.
The man’s flesh began to smoke, then to smolder. Then it burst into flame. He died in Hruucan’s arms and the dolgaunt felt stronger for it. Hruucan let the dead man fall and turned to the other human. He was still on the ground, trying shove himself away. His eyes were wide.
Hruucan’s skin still flaked and crumbled as he took a step forward, but beneath the ash was raw flesh. Flames licked his chest, but caused him no pain. In fact, they were very much like the chest tendrils that had been burned away before.
He flexed. They writhed.
He smiled and leaped for the human, wrenching him up from the ground. Skin buds and fiery tendrils tore the life out of him as well and set his corpse ablaze. When Hruucan shoved him away, some of the fire clung to him in long, writhing whips that sprang from his shoulders, drifting in the air. His tentacles given new form.
The night was sharp around him. His senses had been completely restored. More than restored: he could sense the ramshackle camp of the Bonetree clan well beyond the battlefield. Warm forms moved among the half-perceived shapes of the huts. More human lives to feed the furnace of his body.
But there was something else he could feel, too. Something far, far in the distance, pulling at him like a hook in torn flesh. Another being. Familiar. Hated.
Singe.
He turned to face the wizard’s distant presence. His tentacles flared white hot and lashed the air. Singe’s face danced before him and he moved after it, stepping up to the brow of an embankment and sliding down the other side, utterly lost in his anger-until hissing steam exploded around his feet. Pain burst within him and he leaped back.