Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (62 page)

Black Turtle Isle

In the domain of Nahik Jarir

38th of For-Autumn

‘
A
RE WE ALL
ready?
’ Sannin’s calm whisper floated through the burning circle hanging in the air.

Crouched beside Jilseth in the Archipelagan darkness, Tornauld turned towards the bespeaking. ‘Are you?’ His voice was uncharacteristically sharp.

‘Is the Archmage?’ That was all Jilseth wanted to know.

She heard a distant voice through the spell. Canfor. Then she heard the elegant magewoman reject whatever last minute argument the tall wizard had concocted.

Jilseth was relieved that the night hid her inadvertent smile. It wouldn’t do to antagonise Canfor if he saw her satisfaction through Master Herion’s scrying.

‘
Planir says that everyone here is prepared
,’ Sannin assured Jilseth and all those crouched beside her. ‘
Corrain and his men can make their way to their places, as soon as you are ready
.’

Jilseth looked at the Caladhrian. ‘As soon as we make you ready.’

‘Very well.’

In those two words, Jilseth could hear Corrain’s voice shaking. Though the Forest-born lad, Kusint, looked more relaxed. Had he experienced wizardry’s touch before, thanks to some Soluran mage? Jilseth realised she had neglected to ask.

‘Relax and trust us.’ Merenel laced her slim fingers together. Turning her palms outward, the Tormalin born magewoman flexed her hands back until her knuckles cracked. A shimmer of faintest ruby magelight came and went in the blink of an eye.

‘Are you alright?’ Jilseth heard her own whisper harsh with tension.

At least no one else could hear beyond the six of them, assuming that Tornauld’s silence spell was wrapped as tight as he had promised.

One look at the Ensaimin wizard reassured Jilseth as to that but other doubts tormented her.

All the debate and argument and beseeching and planning for this night’s work would come to nothing if these Caladhrian guardsmen couldn’t set aside their own fears and uncertainty. If they couldn’t make use of the spell which Merenel had now loosed to spread among them as one lurking man touched hands with the warrior beside him.

‘I am ready. We all are.’

Corrain’s resolute answer helped soothe Jilseth’s uncertainty, though nothing could quiet the quivering deep beneath her breastbone.

‘Give me your hand.’ As she reached for him, his touch drew her into Merenel’s spell. Now she could see the kneeling men outlined with faint red radiance, its elemental glow illuminating the trees and shrubs and the narrow goat tracks between them.

With the Caladhrians now able to see in the dark, no glimmer of the dimmest dark-lantern need betray their presence before battle was joined.

Jilseth concentrated on her own magic. She sent her affinity deep into Corrain’s skin. Her magic sought out the roots of every fine hair on his forearm. She could feel each one bristling like a startled cat. Despite all his earlier promises, he recoiled.

‘Stay still!’ she hissed.

He grunted uncomfortably but he stopped moving. Jilseth gathered up the threads of her magic again. Now she was concentrating on that within his skin which was bound on a level beneath seeing to the hair and scale and horn which protected so many living creatures. Within a few breaths, Corrain’s entire skin was imbued with all the toughness of the hardest turtle shell.

‘Pass that on,’ she muttered.

‘Reven.’ Corrain reached for the lad beside him. ‘You won’t like it,’ he warned, ‘but you’ll like a corsair’s sword through the guts less.’

Although Tornauld now relaxed his silence spell enough for the other men to hear their baron’s encouraging words, the haze of amber magelight tracing this spell’s progress was only visible to the four wizards. As Jilseth watched her magecraft spread through the Caladhrian cohort, she stole a glimpse at Merenel. Even through the eerily shifted vision granted by the fire mage’s spell, Jilseth could see that particular wizardry had taken as much out of the Tormalin magewoman as magically armouring the men had drained herself.

And they both had to sustain these intense and subtle workings for as long as they were called on. Jilseth could only hope that Corrain was right, when he swore that this battle would quickly be concluded.

That was all the more likely, given Jilseth had spent the past day and a half darkening the entire cohort’s blades with the black wizardry which Planir had shown her before these same cursed corsairs had attacked Halferan Manor.

After all, as she had told Corrain, there was no telling if Anskal had gifted the corsairs with this same magic which turned the merest scratch from a blade into an ever-deepening gash.

Kusint had recalled how they had seen that very spell for themselves, when Anskal and his fellow Mandarkin spies had been fighting the Soluran mages in the far reaches of the Great Forest.

Planir hadn’t forbidden them this wizardry, Jilseth told herself firmly, when the four of them in this nexus had laid their plans for defending the Caladhrians before the Archmage. Though to be strictly accurate, no one had mentioned the spell at all. Well, if necessary she would face his displeasure when this night’s work was done.

‘We can all see where we’re going now, can’t we, lads?’ Corrain’s whisper strengthened. ‘And I want to see a corsair’s face when he tries sticking a blade into me, eh? So let’s show them what we can do!’

Jilseth heard murmurs answering with growing confidence. With a soft rustle of undergrowth, the guardsmen moved towards the shore and their unsuspecting victims.

‘Don’t touch the mageborn!’ Tornauld sent that last reminder to every ear on an urgent breath of ensorcelled air.

Jilseth could only hope the Caladhrians remembered in the heat of battle. They had been told time and again. They were to kill the corsairs. The wizards of Hadrumal would put paid to the Mandarkin and his minions.

More than anything else they’d been warned, if any Caladhrian got in the way of Element Masters and Mistress’s lethal magic directed at the mageborn, the Archmage would not be answerable for the consequences.

Sooner than she might have imagined, the four mages were left alone amid the humid, strangely scented undergrowth.

‘They are still coming,’ Nolyen said in strangled tones. ‘Scores of galleys and triremes.’

He knelt, hunched over the smallest, most shallow scrying that Jilseth had ever seen. A glow worm would cast more light.

‘They will not prevail against an ensorcelled tide,’ Jilseth assured him.

Whatever she might think of Canfor personally, she would never deny his talents either as a mage or within a nexus. The same was true of Ely and while she had never warmed to Galen, Jilseth was ready to acknowledge his talents with the elemental earth. With Sannin to further strengthen them, Jilseth truly had no doubts that their distant nexus could hold off the approaching Aldabreshin fleets.

Nolyen wasn’t mollified. ‘Why do the Archipelagans have to attack tonight?’

‘Velindre explained. It’s all to do with their heavenly compass.’ Tornauld answered with more tolerance than Jilseth could have managed.

‘Why isn’t Anskal preparing to meet their attack?’ Nolyen persisted.

Why couldn’t he be content that his last scrying into the remaining pavilions had shown them the Mandarkin wizard preparing for bed?

Jilseth’s patience snapped. ‘We don’t know and it doesn’t matter.’

Once again, Tornauld offered an answer. ‘Velindre suspects he wants these southern warlords to attack, so he can drive them off as he did the first fleet. Then word of his power will spread further through the Archipelago. And he’ll show these recently returned corsairs exactly how mighty his magic really is.’

Merenel agreed. ‘So he’s getting his head down before they arrive at dawn. He’s in for a rude awakening.’

Jilseth fervently hoped so, before reproaching herself for this suggestion of doubt. The Element Masters and Mistress’s nexus could surely hide the assembled legions of Toremal, never mind three contingents of Caladhrian guardsmen, from one Mandarkin mage’s scrying or some sentry’s unaided eye.

She looked across the anchorage, beyond the scatter of tents where the line of trees marked the edge of the beach. Was that wretched lad Hosh still sitting on that last pavilion’s terrace while the corsair leader and the captain of his raiders rutted with those mageborn women who knew no better than to debase themselves so?

Jilseth was sorely tempted to ask Nolyen to scry the wretched boy out again. But they had no time for such indulgences. Either Corrain would find Hosh where he had seen him sitting or they would have to wait and hope that the pitiful lad managed to stay alive until the dust of this battle settled.

‘Nol,’ Jilseth prompted. ‘The anchors?’

The Caladhrian mage nodded and closed his hand to extinguish the last glint of his scrying. ‘The water is already moving towards the beach.’

That was good news; that the nexus led by Sannin was indeed managing both to repel the Archipelagans and to send a countercurrent to wash these corsair ships ashore so their crews might meet waiting Caladhrian swords.

Jilseth watched the water between the ships. Amid the woven threads of her own magecraft, she could feel the stone anchors’ indignation as Nolyen’s water wizardry ejected them from the depths, in defiance of all natural order.

‘Tornauld?’

‘Oh, hush.’ He sounded amused.

Jilseth strained her mageborn senses but could hear nothing beyond the Ensaimin mage’s spell. As well as drawing a wall of silence around the Caladhrians so that no one outside might hear them moving through the undergrowth on this slope, Tornauld was throwing a muffling shroud right across the anchorage and far inland.

No startled sentry aboard ship or down on the beach would be able to raise a hue and cry. No one in that last distant pavilion could be roused by some shout of alarm at the sight of those galleys and triremes drifting to shore.

Though that wouldn’t stop some bright spark signalling with a lamp once they realised they couldn’t make themselves heard.

Jilseth glanced at Merenel. The Tormalin magewoman’s face was reassuringly intent. Jilseth looked back at the ships and saw that their night lanterns had already been snuffed.

‘
Make ready.
’

Though she knew to expect it, Jilseth was startled by Master Herion’s voice murmuring through a new bespeaking spell. It was some small consolation to see the other three equally shaken.

‘
The Archmage is readying his nexus once again.
’

Even through the spell, even over such a distance, Wellery’s Hall Master sounded uncharacteristically tense and he wasn’t even involved in the quintessential magic being worked so far away in Hadrumal. Like Velindre, Jilseth knew he had been ordered by the Archmage to stay well apart from such intricate magecraft, keeping watch for those who couldn’t spare any such attention.

Sitting cross-legged, Jilseth reached out to Merenel and Nolyen. As they took her hands, Tornauld settled himself and spread his own arms wide. His grasp secured their circle.

He looked at Jilseth. ‘No doubts.’

‘None,’ she confirmed.

Nolyen’s firm squeeze of her fingers reassured her as did Merenel’s resolute nod.

They could not afford the slightest uncertainty. Their nexus must summon and sustain the quintessential magic which Planir had shown them. That would be their only defence against the attack that the Archmage was preparing. If the four of them could not hold firm, then they would all suffer the fate which Planir had decreed for Anskal and his apprentices.

Jilseth reached deep with her wizardly senses; through the rich earth of this strange little island and into the curious rocks beneath. Jilseth was used to the grainy touch of granite and the solidity of marble. This was something else entirely; raw rock in the aeons-length terms of earth magic, so recently spewed out of some cleft deep beneath the seas.

She reached deeper and deeper still. Now Jilseth could see the boundary between solid and fluid rock. She felt Merenel’s elemental understanding of fire blending with her own affinity. Their doubled magic anchored their nexus’s working all the way down to the molten ores countless leagues beneath their feet.

Jilseth returned her attention to the substances making up this island. The ground beneath the island’s greenery was seamed with finer, lighter rock than she had ever encountered. Layers of the strange stuff had settled, carried by the wind from some distant mountain destroying itself and all the land around it in a fiery cataclysm untold years ago.

The blend of her magic with Merenel’s own was joined and redoubled as Tornauld’s air affinity slid through those unseen layers of powdery grey. This strange rock was as riddled with holes as one of the sea sponges which Aldabreshi traders brought to Relshaz. Velindre had told them she had never encountered a stone so far removed from the elemental antipathy of air and earth. Then the austere magewoman had explained to Tornauld how he could take advantage of that.

Intertwined, their triune magic reached for the breezes drifting through the Archipelago. Now Tornauld bound their wizardry to the invisible tapestry of ever-changing, ever-moving air constantly rewoven across the countless Aldabreshin islands and extending over the vast uncharted seas beyond.