I didn’t have to wait long. With the two ravak in the lead, the giant beetle-borne palanquin lumbered down the valley towards me. It was followed by a long tail of Skallgrim warriors blowing horns and thumping shields in a savage, rhythmic beat. What a fool their leader was to come at the head of their army. Eva’s ambush would hopefully destroy them.
An enormous magical presence brushed my mind. The fuck? That was… that was my magic! Except, it was far weightier than my own, strong as I was.
Oh.
Fucking.
Shite.
I suddenly needed to piss. Badly.
That dreadful presence inside the palanquin could only be one thing: another tyrant. And an elder magus at that.
I greet you, Edrin Walker. The voice blasted against my mental defences like a signal-horn held to my ear.
The thoughts were shaped in Old Escharric with inflections of superiority of power and position, the way a master would speak to a servant. It also dripped with Scarrabus stain. I had felt this mind once before, back when I delved into the Scarrabus mindscape through the unfortunate Rikkard Carse’s mind.
He, and it was a he apparently, was an infested tyrant, and the very host of the Scarrabus queen too. It was nightmare fuel for the rest of the world.
Sod the risk, I had to warn Eva. If I could find their minds up there then so could the enemy. It didn’t matter to a tyrant if they couldn’t see with eyes, but I had the advantage of knowing they were there already.
My skin burned all over, and something burst with a wet pop inside my chest, but I found my allies’ minds as masses of nervousness hiding out of sight.
The enemy leader is an elder tyrant, I projected. Run now. The greater the distance the more ground they have to search for you – run before they take you! After a moment of panic Eva leapt into action, signalling our allies on the far side of the valley and then fleeing with her wardens.
Can you hold them? she asked.
I shrugged in my mind. They wouldn’t get far if I didn’t, so we were about to find out. Oh hello there, I said to the enemy tyrant. Are you the big blue bugger I spotted earlier? The one too lazy to walk? I swallowed and gripped my axe tight. The weapon would be useless here, but its solid presence did comfort me.
<Shock> <Anger> <Disdain> You dare talk to me in such a manner you ignorant wretch?
If he knew my name you would have imagined he might have known what to expect from me.
Sure I do. You Scarrabus-vermin have the mind of a gnat if you thought I would be polite about it. In what world would I ever give a crap about being polite to parasites?
There was a moment before realisation kicked in. Ahhh, no, ignorant one. Your thinking is false. You have the highest honour of speaking to the great Abrax-Masud. Bow before me and I shall let you serve me. That name was supposed to mean something, dripping with expectation. If you do not bow you will serve me all the same, as a slave.
I scratched my gore-crusted beard. What, old Abrax from Masud Lane? Pretty sure you were a cobbler, so why are you here in fancy robes? A little old to be playing dress-up are we not? All I could do was still him and keep his attention on me to buy time for the others to escape.
He slapped me with immense power and my mind rocked from the blow, almost torn from this dying body entirely. And yet I could feel that for him it was a mere tap. I burrowed in deeper and held on tight.
I am Abrax-Masud, the last living magus of immortal Escharr, the greatest seat of learning this world has ever known.
I could feel the sincerity in his thoughts. Bollocks on a hot plate, he really was an elder magus, the oldest in existence if he spoke truly, and would be capable of wielding godly power by any reckoning. He would likely be an adept of most known magics, and perhaps a few other arts lost in the fall of Escharr. Oh well, if you dip a toe into cold water you may as well jump right in and get it over with.
Escharr, what those crappy old ruins with architecture that look like children stacked a bunch of blocks? It was about as immortal as my stinky old boots. Pah, greatest seat of learning? You are badly out of date. The Great Library at Sumart in Ahram holds more lore than your shitty little empire ever created. I hear they even have an entire building full of woodcut illustrated sex manuals. I mean, really, did your lot of crusty old farts ever boast anything like that?
And then he killed me.
I looked down at the smoking hole through my chest, confounded and confused. Fucking elders and their fucking magic. He howled with incandescent rage – quite literally igniting the silk palanquin around him.
As this body pitched forward into the snow I tried to flee back to my own, but his power grasped a trailing part of me and held on. He came for me; a raging inferno. The world grew dim and dark as the body I currently inhabited slid towards death, heart stopping, brain starved of blood. Black tendrils of nothingness reached for me, trying to drag my mind down into death along with the flesh.
The cliff above Abrax-Masud exploded, showering the army with massive boulders. Granville stood proud at the jagged edge of the cliff, bushy eyebrows lowered in concentration as he pierced the ravak and Skallgrim with spikes of stone. The proud fool had stayed behind to cover the retreat. Men died screaming, punctured and crushed by stone. The entire valley trembled as more debris hurtled into the path of the army. Even as I danced with death it was awesome to behold. A spear of stone shot towards the burning palanquin.
Abrax-Masud was not afraid of mere fire or stone, but he didn’t care to test his immortality against the death overtaking this body. He let go of me. Granville screamed as the air ripped him from the earth and tore him limb from limb, scattering the spurting pieces all over the army. Me, I escaped by a whisker, with only the chill of oblivion in me and death’s dank breath caressing the back of my neck.
I sat up gasping for air and drenched in cold sweat, back in camp and back in my own body, stitches and all. That had been far too close for comfort. I wrapped my clumsy gloved hands around myself and rocked, trying to forget that cold, dark embrace.
Eventually it dawned on me that if the Scarrabus Queen and its host were here in the Clanholds, then just what the fuck did they have waiting for the Arcanum army at the enemy’s supposed stronghold of Ironport?
Chapter 21
As the human mind is wont to do in order to protect itself, the razor-edged panic of my nearness to death quickly blunted and began fading to a rusty memory. We are so very talented at fooling ourselves. I took deep, regular breaths. When I calmed down, I sensed I had company. A quiet presence had been waiting outside the tent for what I suspected was quite some time. The Eldest of the ogarim had travelled all the way from its weird black pyramid inside Kil Noth for an audience.
I dressed carefully; every movement an agony. My hands were clumsy and nigh-useless things, one a lump of tainted iron and the other taken by fits of twitching and trembling at the slightest movement. I found it immensely frustrating, especially after enjoying the use of two working hands again, borrowed though they were. It occurred to me that we didn’t realise how much we took things for granted until we lost them. A missing leg or hand would make you look at the entire world differently when a step or a door posed a challenge, and it made tying my gods-damned belt an exercise in choking down anger.