Blood of Aenarion

chapter eight



The wind grew stronger, ruffling Tyrion’s hair with invisible fingers and making the sails crack as they fluttered. The sea was choppier, white caps of foam appearing atop waves that grew larger and larger. The ship rose and fell more as it cut into them. From the east, purple clouds streamed across the sky, covering the sun and overhauling the ship with surprising swiftness.

Tyrion watched with interest. The sailors reacted with practised discipline, tying things down, making sure everything was in place. In the hold, one of the horses whinnied in fear, catching something in the air. The rest of the steeds became uneasy. Tyrion could hear them moving restlessly. One by one the soldiers went down into the hold and began to whisper softly to their animals, calming them.

Slowly it dawned on Tyrion that there really might be something to be uneasy about. The wind was blowing ever more strongly. The gulls perched on the masts were taking to the air. The Eagle of Lothern turned slightly, setting a new course towards the coast. Tyrion was no sailor but he wondered at the wisdom of this. A storm might drive them onto the rocks, run them aground, break the ship up.

‘What is going on?’ he asked Korhien. The White Lion stood near him on the prow of the ship watching the onrushing clouds. He turned to face Tyrion, stretched ostentatiously as an elf without a care in the world. He looked as if he was contemplating simulating a yawn.

‘Big storm coming in. The captain is looking for a safe harbourage although I doubt she will find one on this stretch of coast.’

‘Is that wise? Might we not run aground?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. I am just going with what Malene told me. I think it’s because you are here. Normally they would run before the storm but they don’t want to take any chances with the Blood of Aenarion being onboard.’

Tyrion was not sure whether Korhien meant they were not taking any chances because they valued the lives of himself and Teclis or whether they feared the curse. Perhaps it was a little of both.

‘What should we do?’ Tyrion asked. Korhien laughed.

‘Not a lot we can do, doorkeeper. Neither of us are sailors. We can offer up a prayer to the sea gods and trust in the fact that the captain knows what she is doing.’

Tyrion smiled.

‘You don’t look too worried, doorkeeper.’

‘I wanted to find adventure. It looks like adventure has found me.’

‘You have a good attitude. Let’s hope that your first adventure is not your last.’

‘I am going below to check on my brother,’ Tyrion said.

‘I think I had better close the window,’ said Tyrion. Huge waves were already splattering against the side of the vessel and water was sopping onto the floor. He was very conscious of the swoosh of the sea against the hull.

‘I think you will find that sailors call it a porthole,’ said Teclis. ‘They can get very sniffy if you call it a window.’ He mimicked the tone with which Tyrion had earlier explained the ways of sailors to him with uncanny accuracy. It was a gift he had.

‘Window, porthole, big round thing with bullseye glass panes – whatever it’s called I had better close it.’ Tyrion wrestled with the handles. The wetness was making them slippery and the increased motion of the ship was making it difficult to force the porthole into place. Eventually he managed to. Turning, noticed Karaya standing in the door.

‘I was just sent down below to make sure the port was closed,’ she said. ‘Glad to see it is.’

Tyrion nodded and she ran off up the stairs again. Teclis lay on his bed. His face looked strained and Tyrion could tell he was doing his best not to moan.

‘Spit it out,’ he said. ‘You know you want to.’

‘I suspect the gods have found a new way to torture me. This is worse than normal seasickness – which is quite a feat.’

‘You are not in the least green. And you are not throwing up.’

‘That is because I am too frightened to.’

‘Really?’

‘Not everyone is so stupid that they feel no fear.’

‘You are afraid?’

‘Terrified.’ Tyrion wondered why he almost never sensed his brother’s emotions when he was close enough to see him. Was it because he did not need to know them then?

‘What are you afraid of, brother? Getting wet?’

‘Where do I start? Sinking? Being struck by lightning? Running aground? Being attacked by a maddened sea monster?’

‘Why not all of them at once?’

‘Why do I feel that you are not taking my distress entirely seriously?’

‘We are safe, brother. The crew have been through these storms a thousand times. This ship was built to endure these things.’

‘Ships still sink, brother, despite the best intentions of their builders. Crews make mistakes. Monsters get hungry.’

Tyrion shrugged. ‘There is nothing I can do about any of these things.’

‘You know how to swim.’ Tyrion felt like telling him that under the circumstances that would not make too much difference. He doubted anything could live in a sea like this if the ship went down. Saying that would not improve his brother’s mood though.

‘Don’t worry if the ship goes down, I will save you.’

‘How? We will both be stuck in this cabin. The ship will be a coffin for both of us.’ Now Tyrion sensed Teclis’s fear. It was becoming so intense his own heart was starting to pound. He was feeling a little uncomfortable. Normally nothing much frightened him. It was not part of his nature to let fear rule him. He had never really experienced anything like the terrors he had read about in books save as an echo of Teclis’s fears.

‘Would you be happier on deck?’

‘I think I would.’

‘It might be easier to be swept overboard.’

‘We can rope ourselves to the railings, the way real sailors are supposed to.’

‘You sure?’

‘I would rather be above than trapped down here.’ Tyrion understood. Spending your last few moments watching a small cabin fill with water would not be a good way to leave the world.

Tyrion helped his brother up the stairwell. He was not sure this was a very clever idea. He was confident he was sure-footed enough not to be swept away. He was not so sure about his twin. Teclis could barely walk at the best of times.

Nonetheless it appeared the decision had been made.

The rain splattered onto the deck, huge droplets hitting the wood and bouncing with a flicker that reminded Tyrion of miniature lightning bolts. White foam surged over the prow of the Eagle of Lothern and added to the slick wetness underfoot.

He left Teclis near the afterdeck and went to find some ropes. The sailors looked tense and ready for action, like soldiers getting ready before a battle. Their enemies were the sea and the storm. The officers bellowed last minute instructions. Down below the horses whinnied in panic and it struck Tyrion what a cruel trial this must be for them. How unnatural for creatures reared to race across an endless plain to be imprisoned within a bobbing wooden box as it was battered from all sides by mighty waves.

The ship rose and fell through the long swells. He swayed to keep his balance as he moved. He was surprised to see Lady Malene come on deck and ask permission to join the captain on the afterdeck. He was even more surprised when the officer beckoned for him and Teclis to come up and join them. Malene nodded to emphasise this and the twins went to join the officers. The wind had risen to a dull roar now. The waves smashed against the ship. The decks creaked. The sails boomed and cracked.

‘If you are going to remain on deck, lash yourself to something,’ said Lady Malene. He could see that she was already lashed to the railings. ‘Particularly Teclis. We do not want to lose you overboard.’

He cinched his brother to a banister, making sure the knots were tight and in the style he had observed the sailors using, then he stalked across the deck, sure-footed as a big cat.

No one seemed to want to question them about why they had not stayed below. No one minded that they were on the aft-deck, the sacred space reserved for officers and mages. It seemed that on this ship at least they were regarded as personages of some importance.

Lightning flickered in the distance, and the sullen boom of thunder rippled in its wake. Somewhere down below a horse whinnied in terror and tried to kick its way out of a stall. A rider shouted words meant to be reassuring but which just sounded panicked.

Suddenly the rain intensified. Within heartbeats Tyrion was soaked to the skin and looking at everything as though through a thick, grey mist. The ship heeled to the right as it struck a wave at the wrong angle. The roll was disturbing, as if some great monster had risen from the sea beneath the ship and was trying to push it over. That was not an image he wanted in his head.

The captain yelled something to the steersman, who twisted the great wheel that guided the ship. In response to bellowed instructions, sailors overhead did something to the sails, Tyrion was not sure what. The vessel righted itself. The prow rose like a bucking horse. Tyrion felt himself begin to slide back down the deck. He looked around to make sure that Teclis was still held fast. His twin stood by the rail, clutching it as if it were the only thing that stood between him and watery death, and yet despite this, his gaze was riveted to Lady Malene.

Tyrion followed his look and understood why. An aura of power played around the sorceress, its nimbus visible even to Tyrion’s sight. Tyrion was not sure what she could do against the unleashed fury of the storm, but he sensed enormous power pooling within her.

The rain lashed his face, and his eyes stung with salty tears. It was difficult to tell where the rain ended and the sea spray started. It was hard to remember that only a few minutes ago the waters had seemed relatively calm and he could see all the way to the horizon.

The ship’s timbers creaked and groaned now and he realised that something, somewhere was putting the hull under enormous stress. The wind and the waves roared like angry daemons.

The worst of it was that he had no idea of how likely things were to go wrong. It seemed entirely possible to him that the whole ship could break in two at any instant, or that the power of the waves could swamp the vessel, filling the hold with water and sending them to the bottom like a stone.

He glanced at the captain and at Lady Malene and then at the rest of the officers. They looked tense but not worried and he decided that it would be best to take his cue from them.

Part of him realised that they were in the same position as him. Even if they knew the vessel was about to break up, it would do them no good to panic. It helped that they remained calm. The sense of authority radiating from them affected the crew, who went about their duties with a will. If the officers had seemed frightened, the crew might panic as well, and in that panic the whole ship could be lost.

There was a lesson in the duties of command here that was not lost on Tyrion. He filed it away in his memory for future reference, swearing that he would remember the demeanour of the captain and the mage if and when he was ever in a similar situation.

Lightning erupted in the sea in front of them, so brilliant that it was blinding. Someone, somewhere, screamed and Tyrion wondered whether the bolt had hit the ship. An instant later thunder bellowed like an angry god overhead. A huge gust of wind and a giant wave hit the ship simultaneously. Water crashed over the deck and surged towards Tyrion like a moving wall.

Despite the raging seas, despite the swaying deck, despite the lightning flare and the thunder roar, only one thing held Teclis’s attention – Lady Malene. She had begun working magic almost as soon as the storm started, a slow, subtle weaving that most elves would never have spotted but which was obvious to Teclis with his peculiar sensitivity to the flows of power.

He watched, fascinated. He had never seen anyone work magic like this before. His father was a wizard, for sure, but his craft was the slow, subtle assembly of runes and flows of power that went into making and moulding things. It was rare he had ever seen his father do anything that was not directly connected with the armour of Aenarion, and even that was usually small, trivial stuff like the making of light or fire.

This was something of an entirely different order. He was not sure what Lady Malene was going to do but he was sure it was going to be something much greater than anything he had ever seen Prince Arathion cast.

Malene summoned more and more of the winds of magic to her. She pulled power from the very air surrounding her and moulded it with gentle, small motions of her hands and body.

Teclis watched, understanding instinctively what was happening. He was tempted to copy it the way a child copies the action of a parent but he was sufficiently conscious of what was happening to know that any interference on his part might prove disastrous. Instead he made himself watch and memorise, hoping that at some point in the future he might be able to recreate what she was doing.

As the storm intensified, Lady Malene wove her spells. Teclis moved as close as the ropes binding him to the ship’s railings would allow so he could hear what she was saying over the howling of the wind. There was magic in the words and in her voice. They were laced with power and his magic-attuned senses caught what she was saying in a way his hearing alone never could have if she was merely speaking words.

He saw the relation between her words, her gestures and the flow of the winds of magic. She was the still centre and she was doing something that manipulated the forces around her. Something about her mind and her spirit anchored the whole structure of spellwork she was creating.

Even as he watched, she made a gesture like a fisherwoman casting a net, and a lattice of power, complex and tight, flew forth from her hands.

It enmeshed the Eagle of Lothern, bolstering its timbers and strengthening them against the storm, aiding it to cut through the water. The ship, which had been heeling before the wind, righted itself. The timbers creaked but held. He sensed that in some way Lady Malene was communing with the vessel. It was bound to her as she was bound to it.

An enormous wall of water smashed over the prow and raced towards them. Teclis saw Tyrion brace himself for impact. Lady Malene gestured and the waters parted in front of her, sloughing off over the afterdeck, leaving Tyrion standing a little bemused at being hit only by spray.

No sooner had she completed weaving that spell than she began another, summoning sentient vortices, forming the wind into air elementals, calming their anger and directing them about the ship as if they were a second crew. The sails billowed outwards but did not rip or tear or drive the ship down. Some of the elementals ran before the ship, shielding it from the worst buffeting of the storm; others gathered the fury of the wind and harnessed it, sending the vessel scudding along like a cloud over the angry sea.

Teclis was no longer frightened. He no longer worried that the ship would go down. He understood that Malene was completely the mistress of the situation and as long as she remained so, the Eagle of Lothern was safe.

Here was something he understood, could do. This woman was capable of teaching him it. Chance or fate, whatever anyone might choose to call it, had placed her in his path and he was determined to make the most of the opportunity. For long hours he watched fascinated, as she as much as the captain and crew brought the ship through the worst of the storm.

As suddenly as it had come upon them, the storm passed, leaving the sea calming in its wake as it raced off inland towards the mountains where it could continue to wreak havoc. The ship continued to sail its course, moving on steadily towards its goal, the only sign it had ever been captured in the storm’s embrace the pools of water left puddling on the deck.

Lady Malene looked a little tired but also triumphant. Perhaps the oddest thing and certainly the one that impressed itself most on Teclis in that moment was that, though everyone around her was soaked to the skin, she was absolutely dry. Neither the sea nor the storm seemed to have touched her.

‘That was the worst storm I have seen in a long, long time,’ said Captain Joyelle.

‘Yes,’ Malene said. ‘And there was dark magic in it. I fear that it may serve some fell purpose before it is done.’

The captain nodded and was silent, unwilling to discuss the matter further.

Lady Malene turned and looked at Teclis knowingly. ‘You saw all of that, didn’t you?’

He nodded. ‘It was very impressive.’ The words were an understatement but they were all he could think to say. ‘I have read about such things but I never thought to witness them.’

‘You will witness far more impressive things before you are done, unless I miss my guess,’ she said. ‘Work them too.’

‘I hope so,’ he said. She smiled at him again and walked off the deck and down the stairs below. The looks of the captain told him that now she was gone, he and Tyrion were no longer welcome on the command deck either. He did not really care. He went below himself and for the first time in a long time, he did not feel sick.

The storm blew in from the east. It toppled trees and blew off roofs and hurled the seas around Ulthuan forwards in great churning waves. Enormous winds drove brutal, black thunderclouds before it. Savage rains poured down as if intending to drown the world.

The storm roared through the mountains of Ulthuan, passing over a carved stone so ancient it was crumbling. The runes on its face, despite their magical protections, were all but obscured by the millennia-long erosion of the elements.

As if tossed by the hand of a wicked god, a bolt of lightning surged down and struck the ancient waystone. Sparks flew and the stench of ozone and something else filled the air. Thunder roared and then died away and for a moment there was eerie silence. Then it seemed as if the thunder’s growl was answered from deep within the earth.

The tip of the mountain shook. The ancient stone danced and then toppled. As it fell ancient spells became undone and things erupted outwards onto the mountain top, winged things that beat up into the stormy night, laughing and cackling.

A moment later a massive claw emerged, and then an arm, then a deformed bestial head and finally a monstrous androgynous body. Two additional arms pushed it from the ground.

N’Kari looked down from the mountain top for a long moment. He breathed air as he had not breathed it in six thousand years. He looked down the slopes of a great mountain illuminated by the hellish flicker of lightning. Overhead winged things soared and cackled on the storm winds. He raised one clenched fist in a gesture of triumph and defiance.

With his escape from the Vortex full cognisance of what he was and who he had been came crashing in on him. In the Vortex, he had been a pallid ghostly thing, his mind and memories dull, his passions shadowy, his desires weak and suppressed. Now that he had regained physical form once more, his emotions were stronger, as if they needed glands and hearts and blood and bone and organs to give them their full strength.

He remembered a great deal he had forgotten and felt once again the titanic towering passions that were his birthright.

He smiled, showing his fangs, and then with an impulse of his will changed his shape to something more resembling an elf, albeit one horned and fanged whose long nails were talons and whose eyes glowed like bloody fire.

In this world his will was constrained by foolish rules and the magic he worked would have to be done in accordance with them. So be it. The knowledge of what was necessary was instinctive to him. He could feel the constraints that hemmed him in in the way a man would feel walls surrounding him or the tug of gravity on his body. It took him mere moments to work out what was needed and then he inscribed a circle in the ground with his claw.

Now, he thought, I will take vengeance. It was time to locate his prey. He reached out with his mind and formed a vision of Aenarion as he had been at the height of his power.

He could recall the slightest detail of his foe and recollect him on a scale that was unimaginable to the weak minds of mortals. He remembered the exact pattern of Aenarion’s spirit and the genetic markers that had flowed in his blood and which would flow in the blood of all of those descended from him.

As the lightning blasted the ground about him, he pricked the flesh of his hand with one of his talons. A drop of his magical blood flowed forth. He flipped it into the air and ignited it with a word. It became a mote of energy, a pulse of magic that he could shape to his will.

He imprinted the genetic rune that he remembered upon it and then summoned more magical energy. As he did so the original mote divided and replicated like an amoeba, again and again and again as more power flowed into it. Soon N’Kari was surrounded by clouds of tiny motes of light, swarming around him like fireflies. With another gesture he sent them racing away from him to seek out the ones he was looking for.

The motes flew across Ulthuan fast as sunbeams, seeking the few remaining possessors of the marks that N’Kari sought. They flashed around them invisibly and then hurtled back across the vast distances to their master.

As they returned, they swirled around him once more, each of them bearing an image of the being they had found. Visions of faces and places danced in his mind. He saw young women waiting to be married, wizards in their laboratories, princes in their palaces, a pair of twins little more than children riding aboard a ship. All of them bore the unmistakeable imprint of Aenarion’s blood.

Now, N’Kari knew the locations of his prey and his tiny pets, following an invisible magical scent, would always be able to find them again.

He smiled to himself revealing very sharp fangs. One of those he was looking for dwelled not too far from here. It would not take him long to begin his revenge. Within the passing of a moon, he swore he would have wiped all of the line of Aenarion from the face of Ulthuan. He would make this world pay for all of the long millennia of his incarceration. He roared with the ecstasy of it.

He began work on another spell, one that would reach out to all those whose dreams he had touched and who were vulnerable to his influence. It would draw those he needed to him and it would let him sense their presence.

He would need followers, an army of them if he was to achieve his goal and he would need other things, daemons to follow him and slay his enemies on his command. He would need worship to nourish him and souls on which to feed.

His great bellow echoed for scores of leagues and those who heard his voice above the crack of thunder shuddered.