Sighing, Shimmer raised her gaze to the shore. Hidden animals still roared and hooted in the distance in answer to Gwynn’s great blast of power. Masses of strange birds churned, flapping their huge ungainly wings over the ragged treetops. You humans, the woman had said. You humans.
Shimmer drew a hand down her slick hot face; it came away wet with blood that dripped from her palm to the decking. She felt a terrible foreboding that somehow they were never going to get out of this jungle.
* * *
Of course a Hood-damned storm would gather as he and Sour unravelled the last of the chains coupled to their dolmen anchors. Only four now remained, each at a compass point, and beneath the centre of the plaza the thing this entire installation was constructed to contain jerked and struggled like a gaffed dhenrabi the size of a war galley. Murk gestured his disgust to the massed black clouds blotting the night sky as the wind, the discharge of thunder, and the combers crashing into the shore made conversation almost impossible. From where he crouched next to the dolmen, Sour caught the wave and answered with the expression he was named for. Rain pelted down but at least it was warm rain, not like the freezing sleet of north Genabackis. Yusen emerged from the sheets to lean close to Murk.
‘Now?’ he asked.
Murk nodded and raised a hand in the mount up sign. Yusen gave a curt jerk of his head and went to his men, signing orders. Murk found Sour’s squinted gaze and they turned to where Spite sat cross-legged facing the plaza, her back blade-rigid. Sour gestured him over and now Murk gave a sour look, but he went.
Kneeling next to the woman the first thing he noticed was the heat. The great fat raindrops actually hissed to steam as they touched her shoulders and hair. Her gaze was locked ahead, the eyes an eerie all-carmine that churned like flame. ‘Which one next?’ he shouted.
The eyes did not shift, did not so much as blink while Murk waited. Silent, the woman extended an arm to point opposite. Murk grunted his understanding and retreated to Sour.
‘Across the way,’ he told Sour, then signed to Yusen.
Sour packed up his sodden leather satchel of shells, bits of wood, and other found bric-a-brac that he used to somehow ‘read’ the maze they faced. A team of five mercenaries led by the three big swordsmen Ostler, Tanner and Dee jogged up to join them, plus the silent scout Sweetly and the lieutenant, a Seven Cities native, to judge by her sharp coffee-hued features beneath a bright domed helmet woven round by a cord of yellow silk.
He and Sour started tracing the border of the plaza. The team spread out round them. When they reached the dolmen Sour clambered down into the excavation pit and laid out his satchel. Murk crouched, peering down. The rain dripped from his nose and snaked down his ankles. The squat little fellow studied the base of the dolmen for a time. He picked up the bits and pieces he’d gathered together and let them fall on the soaked leather. This pattern he studied for a while. Then, as before, he raised his Thyr Warren and reached in towards the pulsing cable of power wound about the stone to manipulate it as one might a knot or trick puzzle. Murk had no idea how the unimpressive fellow managed it. He definitely was no bright spark; wordplay blew right past him; and he could be as slow as the son of the village idiot. It must be instinctive — that was the only explanation Murk could think of. A freak talent like that old man he’d heard tell of that the prince of Anklos kept in his court who could give you the day’s date in any calendrical system you would care to mention.
Murk had his own Warren at his fingertips and so he saw when the bound energies tore free of the dolmen like a whip and snapped Sour backwards with a crack that echoed from every stone. He ran to where the fellow lay immobile, his chest steaming in the rain, and tapped one unshaven cheek with the back of a hand. ‘Sour? You with us?’
The fellow coughed and Murk caught a whiff of rotten breath and turned his head aside. He stood and prodded the man with a toe. ‘You all right?’
Sour nodded, blinking as the rain pattered down into his eyes. ‘Got a kick like a mule.’
‘Yeah, well. You should stop getting intimate with them.’
The fellow peered around confused then screwed up his eyes to squint. ‘But I never have …’
‘Never mind.’ He reached out a hand and Sour took it. Murk pulled him upright. ‘Last one.’
Sour frowned, then brightened. ‘Oh, yeah.’
Murk signed to their bodyguard mercs. Sour went to collect his gear.
This time either Sour got it just right, or was more careful. In any case the sizzling band of power slipped away as easily as a released fishing line and he grinned up at his partner like the naughty boy who’d let it go. ‘Damn good,’ Murk said, hands on his knees. ‘Let’s see Miss Nibs.’
Spite was standing when they found her in the sleeting rain. A steady pounding announced the surf crashing on to the nearby strand. Something seemed to echo that pulse from within the roiling gravel of the plaza. ‘You will aid me,’ she told them without so much as turning her head.
‘Yes,’ Murk answered — though he didn’t think they could contribute much of anything.
Spite simply stepped forward to sink straight down into the gravel as if it were a pool. In a panic, Murk struggled to follow her through his Warren. He found her approaching the small object at the centre of the installation where it jumped and kicked very much like that proverbial hooked fish; except that the power this captive bled would’ve boiled off any lake. Held only by the remaining two chains of woven potency it swung wildly now, hissing through the gravel as if the tons of stone did not exist. Spite closed warily, her hands raised.
Murk had no idea what her plan was — but he most certainly did not expect her to simply snatch out and grab hold of the thing as it swung by. The resulting explosion of energy tore through the plaza. In that curious double image available to a mage viewing a scene through both his Warren and his mundane vision, Murk watched the underside of the gravel plaza sear and boil even as the surface erupted upwards, sending the mercenaries running and ducking under their shields.
Murk reduced his Warren-sensitivity against the roaring forge-like energies. He saw that whereas Sour had applied an uncanny delicacy of manipulation to undoing the bonds, Spite was all pure force and overwhelming power. Spite, it seemed, possessed no subtlety whatsoever. The rock-grinding might being brought to bear made Murk’s teeth ache.
‘Like some damned Ascendant!’ Sour yelled next to his ear. Murk nodded his appalled agreement. ‘Ever hear of any one of these Chainings being broken?’ Murk shook his head.
Then with a crack as of a stone cleaving, it was done. The two remaining bonds sizzled, swinging and snapping loose like whips. Spite weakly churned a path through the gravel, making for them. She held something that was painful to look at through his Warren.
An arm broached the surface of the heated stones where the rain hissed and misted, then a head. Spite drew back her arm and heaved something towards them. Appalled, Murk watched it arc through the air. Shit, was all he could think. ‘Don’t touch it!’ he bellowed.
But everyone was half deaf from the cracks of thunder, the pounding rain and the blasts of power. One of the mercenaries reached for the object, and screamed — briefly. Murk and Sour ran for the fellow. They pushed through the gathered bodyguards to find a blackened corpse, ribcage curving up through crisped flesh, arms ending in white sintered bones, yet head and face completely unmarred. The moustached fellow looked as if he’d merely closed his eyes in sleep. The object lay within the seared carcass: a smoking casket of black stone, chased and edged in silver, like a lady’s jewellery box.