“He is here,” MacQuieth said quietly. “Close to the sea.” the edge of the promontory, Michael glared impatiently down the cliff face at the two soldiers Fergus had chosen, hovering on ropes over the rocks below.
“What do you see?” he shouted into the rain-heavy wind.
One of the men looked up to the precipice and shook his head.
“Keep going!” he screamed. “She’s down there! I know she’s down there!”
You know nothing. You only hope she is down there.
The voice of the demon-spirit seethed with disgust.
Michael clawed at his face. “Silence!” he screeched. “Stop taunting me!”
Very well. I will leave that to the woman if you find her.
Down at the sand beach to the south the seneschal’s eye caught a nicker of movement; he turned to see Fergus, who was posted below, waving triumphantly.
He looked down the edifice below, where the two soldiers hung suspended over the thundering waves and black, jagged rocks. He made a beckoning gesture. The wind, in response, carried their voices up the cliff face to him.
“Cave down here, m’lord!”
“I knew it!” the seneschal shouted, clutching his hands tightly in excitement. “Rappel deeper, keep going.”
He was staring down into the updrafts from the sea, the salt spray buffeting his face, when he noticed that an odd sound, a vibration of a sort, had been scratching at his eardrum. He waved it away, like a bothersome fly, but the noise only grew louder, more intense; a moment later it grew almost painful.
He turned in the breeze and stared off to the east at the wide edge where the promontory began.
Three figures stood there in the mist, or two and a partial figure, he noted an instant later. To his left, farthest north, was a vague figure swathed in mist, blending into the heavy vapor as naturally as the rain itself. He wouldn’t have even noticed the figure if not for the sword it wielded, a sword that glowed intensely blue.
A sword he recognized from the old land.
Kirsdarke, he mused, his mind running slow. I thought it had been lost with the Island.
The demonic voice in his brain fell suddenly silent, giving him the sensation, for the first time since he had agreed to take it on, that he was alone in his own skin.
To his right, southward, stood another figure, this one draped in black. Its hand was raised in the air in a gesture of halting.
Between his ears he felt an explosion as the demon panicked, cursing in the profane language of its race.
A Dhracian, it spat.
Michael’s head turned quickly to the figure between them. At one time the man might have been tall, but now was bent, bowed with age; he stood, frail, looking as if the wind itself could blow through him, hanging back, out of the fray.
“I don’t have time for this!” the seneschal bellowed. “Begone!”
Achmed was in the throes of the Thrall ritual when the figure that MacQuieth had led them to gestured at them. “I don’t have time for this—Begone!”
The irony caught him off guard, almost made him break the ritual, swallowing the wry laughter that welled up within him.
So appropriately named, he thought, clearing his mind again. The Waste of Breath.
He raised his left hand, calling to each of the four winds, the entities that gave the Thrall ritual its power.
Bien, Achmed thought. The north wind, the strongest. He opened his first throat and hummed the name; the sound echoed through his chest and the first chamber of his heart. He held up his index finger; the sensitive skin of its tip tingled as a draft of air wrapped around it.
Jahne, he whispered in his mind. The south wind, the most enduring. With his second throat he called to the next wind, committing the second heart chamber. Around his tallest finger he could sense the anchoring of another thread of air. When both vibrations were clear and strong he went on, opening the other two throats, the other two heart chambers. Leuk. The west wind, the wind of justice. Thas. The east wind. The wind of morning; the wind of death. Like strands of spider-silk, the currents hung on his fingertips, waiting. Four notes held in a monotone.
The man on the edge of the promontory stared at him in shock, then reached to his side and drew his blade.
Tysterisk came forth from its scabbard in a blast of keening air. It hissed and howled like a gale blowing around a mountaintop.
Achmed’s hand contracted, and with a graceful swing of his arm he tossed the ball of wind that had formed in his palm, feeling the four winds knot together, anchored to his palm, around the demon-spirit that dwelt with Michael.
He tied the net, then wrapped the metaphysical threads around his palm.
Ashe, seeing the signal, stepped forward out of the mist that came both from his cloak and the rain-heavy air.
“Where is my wife?” he demanded, his voice ringing with the multiple tones of the dragon, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass; it vibrated through the earth of the precipice on which they stood.
Michael smiled, then turned and pointed off to the southwest at the shadow of a ship hovering in the sea.
“Servicing my crew,” he said, his grin broadening. “They are taking turns with her. By now she’s doubtless on her third or fourth round. I have ravaged her seven times myself. Like old times, it was. And will be again. And again.”
Fury roared through Ashe; he found himself stepping forward, then stopped, waiting for the sign that the Thrall had taken.
Achmed jerked his arm, drawing the threads of the wind taught with a snap.
Michael’s eyes widened; even from the distance they could see the white gleam suddenly in the gray head.
His body lurched slightly in Achmed’s direction.
The Dhracian’s excruciating song grew louder.
As Achmed slowly approached the edge of the precipice, balancing the invisible web of wind, he noticed Ashe shifting his grip on Kirsdarke’s hilt.
Michael stood as if thunderstruck, watching them approach, his sword hilt in hand, not moving.
When they were within a few paces of the seneschal, Achmed wrapped the net of wind tighter, and gave it another pull.
Michael’s arm wrenched back.
Ashe began his approach, lifting Kirsdarke, its blade running in frothing rapids of blue and white, aiming for the seneschal’s throat.
With a vicious sweep, Michael sliced through the air in the direction of the Dhracian, severing the ropes of wind.
Hrekin! I should have known, Achmed thought as he desperately tried to gather the tattered threads of the Thrall.
Michael gestured savagely and Achmed felt his breath ripped from his body, choking off his strange song in midnote.
A gust of wind exploded over him, blasting him into the air, hurtling him off the promontory and far into the sea.
53
Ashe reared back in shock as the Bolg king’s body flew over the edge of the cliff. He raced the few steps to the point of the precipice and pointed the sword at the pounding surf, reaching into his own elemental bond to the sea, commanding it to bring forth a wave to catch the Dhracian and speed him away from the rocks, knowing that while it would spare him death from the impact, it would not save him from drowning.
Michael threw back his head and laughed into the wind; the breeze caught the dual tones of his voice, the joyous chortle of the man, the harsh, cackling screech of the demon.
“You did this in jest, did you not?” he said to Ashe, who was staring desperately between the waves, searching for signs of Achmed’s black robes. “You thought you could contain me with a Thrall ritual? I command the wind, you fool. I am the wind, the Wind of Fire, the Wind of Death.” His voice grew harsher as the demon came forth, causing the clear blue eyes to redden at the edges.