I frantically checked my crotch. I was all there. Fortunately he had just eaten linen. These Skallgrim were cracked in the head – I was all for fighting dirty, but trying to bite a man’s cock off was just plain wrong.
A half-dozen people scrambled out behind me, wheezing for air and hissing in pain, their legs and backs blackened and blistered. A handful more crawled out into the muddy street, hair and clothes smouldering. The rest were dead or dying. The sulphurous reek of burnt hair was vile enough, but the fetor of burning human flesh made me gag: that sweetly putrid coppery stench is so thick and cloying that it is more like taste, and not something you ever got used to, or forgot.
The Worm of Magic had uncoiled inside my mind and was begging to be unleashed, promising to extinguish my panic. Magi had never determined if the Worm was real – the urgings of a living magic wanting to be used – or an imaginary personification invented to explain magic’s effects on the human body, but in any case the seduction to use magic was a palpable need, and the more you used it, the more holes the Worm ate through a magus’ self-control. Like a leaky bucket riddled with woodworm, sooner or later most of us gave in and let the magic flow. That was the beginning of the end – there was no patching over holes in self-control if the entire bottom of the bucket fell out. I fought down its urgings to open my Gift wide and let the sea of magic beyond flood through unchecked – when you’ve had magic-sniffing daemons snapping at your heels for ten years it tends to make you wary about advertising your presence, and I’d already been stuck in this dunghill town too long for comfort thanks to those missing ships.
Even lying low, traces of my magic lingered in bodily excretions and the shadow cats would scent it sooner or later, when they eventually got close enough. Their nose for magic was far more sensitive than any human, even the vaunted Arcanum sniffers. The daemons had been hunting me ever since I fled Setharis, were still stalking me long after everybody else thought me dead, forcing me to constantly move from place to place to ensure the damned things didn’t get close enough. By cart, boat and constant subterfuge I had mostly managed to stay two steps ahead. Now I needed to find somewhere well-lit, somewhere safe from prowling shadow cats. Despite the dangerous delay, thanks to the many streams around Ironport I should still be safe – the things couldn’t abide running water – but paranoia had kept me alive thus far.
The serving girl lay face down in the mud, sobbing, her dress burnt onto her back. I stepped over her and squinted into the night, trying to figure out what was happening, which way to run.
It was chaos. Smoke and running battles filled the street. Fire had spread from Sleazy’s Tavern to the adjoining houses but the smelters and smithies had been left intact. Screams and the clash of steel pierced the night as Ironport militia leapt from their beds to repel the raiders. In the smoke and darkness it proved impossible to tell how many were attacking the town. I’d been due to embark on the first ship out in the morning and it was bloody typical they’d chosen to attack the night before I sailed.
I looked out to sea. Ah, cockrot. By the light of the broken moon I glimpsed a dozen more Skallgrim wolf-ships pulling up onto the wide shingle beach, red crystals set into snarling, bestial prows catching the firelight and flaring bright like daemonic eyes. They disgorged bellyfuls of hairy axemen, who charged straight towards the centre of town. Towards me. They were desperate to join the battle before others claimed the best loot. They were accompanied by a shaman in an antlered deer-skull mask. I was no Arcanum sniffer but even I could sense the unfocused magic leaking from him, marking him as strongly Gifted but untrained. He was one of the halrúna, the spiritual leaders of the Skallgrim tribes that ranked above war leaders and tribal chiefs.
The shaman began wailing, harsh voice undulating as he slit his palm with a knife and shed blood in a circle across the pebbled shore, the beginnings of some vile heathen ritual. Drums beat in the night as yet more ships approached the beach, the heavy, primal booming infecting the townsfolk with fear.
Somebody limped up beside me. It was old Sleazy, an iron-bound club held in his scarred hands. He stared at the Skallgrim, jaw working but no sound emerging. Then he spat at his feet and hefted the club, looking as if he expected me to fight by his side.
“Sod that,” I said. “You’re on your own, pal.” With that limp, there was no way Sleazy would be able to escape and I wasn’t about to tangle with any Gifted heathen, however weak his magic. This town was already doomed and I wasn’t going down with it. Heroism could get a man killed.
I raced for the docks. With any luck the sailors were preparing to make a run for it. I rounded a corner and caught sight of the ships. Sailors swarmed over the rigging of a decrepit Setharii caravel and our sleek Ahramish merchantman, readying both to set sail. For once my luck had held. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to lay low in the sodden bowels of that rotting caravel, hugging the coast of Kaladon south to Setharis; me, I was heading out across the Sea of Storms to the librocracy of Ahram in the distant lands of Taranai. I loathed the sea, but any destination that wouldn’t get me killed was better than home.
Shouts and screams rose over Ironport as the raiders overwhelmed the militia and began wholesale butchery. I could sense the tiny sparks of magic that were carrion and plague spirits flocking to the town, invisible mindless mouths drawn to feed and breed on the magic released by spilt blood and death.
The greasy, rancid reek of blood magic filled the air, and with it the wince-inducing shriek of the Shroud tearing, like the metallic screech of a knife across a plate to the magically sensitive. The world cried out in pain as its protective magical skin was punctured by the power of human sacrifice. The Skallgrim’s corrupt shaman opened a portal to alien realms far from this one and ravening daemons crawled through the wound, ripped from their lairs in the Far Realms, other worlds distant and wildly different from ours but every bit as real. Most did not have a Shroud to guard their unfortunate and deadly inhabitants from abduction and domination by blood sorcery.
The burning debris of another wolf-ship floated nearby, the handiwork of an Arcanum pyromancer standing on the deck of the caravel, flames crawling up his bare arms. I grinned, glad that the magus was heading the other way – there was always a small chance the magus might know a name and face as reviled as Edrin Walker’s. Hah, I was safe.
And then the vision pierced my skull. Lynas’ terror surged in through the Gift-bond and I saw through his eyes:
“Help!” Lynas scrambles over the rain-slick cobbles, pounds on another crude door, the stench of blood and smoke all around him. “I need help!” Splinters from the rough wood prick his flesh but he ignores the pain, pounds all the harder. “Let me in, curse you!” He slams his shoulder into the door, but it barely shakes.
No answer, just a dog barking in reply. But then nobody in the slums of Docklands is going to open their door to a stranger at night, not if they know what’s good for them. He’s all too aware of that, but it’s not like he has any other choice. He keeps trying to reach his old friend Walker through the Gift-bond, to somehow warn him in case he doesn’t make it, but with his stunted Gift he knows it’s likely impossible. He’s no magus and has no way to even know if it works.