The demon had spun to its left instead of continuing its attack, launching itself into a run, wheeling round the unit it had just torn through, placing them between itself and the sorcery now bursting loose in a refulgent tumult from the ground in front of the mages.
Leaning far forward, the demon’s speed was astonishing as it fled.
Bivatt heard the ritual sputter and die and she twisted on her saddle. ‘Damn you! Hit it!’
‘Your soldiers!’
‘You took too long!’ She spied a Preda from the Harridict unit. ‘Draw all the reserves behind the mages! North, you fool-sound the order! Cadre, keep that damned magic at the ready!’
‘We are, Atri-Preda!’
Chilled despite the burgeoning heat, Bivatt swung her horse round once more and rode hard back towards the valley. I am outwitted. Flinching on every side, recoiling, reacting-Redmask, this one is yours.
But I will have you in the end. I swear it.
Ahead, she could see her troops appearing on the rise, withdrawing in order, in what was clearly an uncontested retreat. Redmask, it seemed, was satisfied-he would not be drawn out from the valley, even with his demonic allies-
The camp. She needed to get her soldiers back to that damned camp-pray the Edur beat off the attack. Pray Brohl Handar has not forgotten how to think like a soldier.
Pray he fared better than I did this day.
The shore is blind to the sea. Might as well say the moon has for ever fled the night sky. Chilled, exhausted, Yan Tovis rode with her three soldiers down the level, narrow road. Thick stands of trees on either side, the leaves black where the moon’s light did not reach, the banks high and steep evincing the antiquity of this trail to the shore, roots reaching down witch-braided, gnarled and dripping in the clammy darkness. Stones snapping beneath hooves, the gusts of breath from the horses, the muted crackle of shifting armour. Dawn was still two bells away.
Blind to the sea. The sea’s thirst was ceaseless. The truth of that could be seen in its endless gnawing of the shore, could be heard in its hungry voice, could be found in the bitter poison of its taste. The Shake knew that in the beginning the world had been nothing but sea, and that in the end it would be the same. The water rising, devouring all, and this was an inexorable fate to which the Shake were helpless witness.
The shore’s battle had ever been the battle of her people. The Isle, which had once been sacred, had been desecrated, made a fetid prison by the Letherii. Yet now it is freed once again. Too late. Generations past there had been land bridges linking the many islands south of the Reach. Now gone. The Isle itself rose from the sea with high cliffs, everywhere but the single harbour now. Such was the dying world.
Often among the Shake there had been born demon-kissed children. Some would be chosen by the coven and taught the Old Ways; the rest would be flung from those cliffs, down into the thirsty sea. Gift of mortal blood; momentary, pathetic easing of its need.
She had run, years ago, for a reason. The noble blood within her had burned like poison, the barbaric legacy of her people overwhelmed her with shame and guilt. With the raw vigour of youth she had refused to accept the barbaric brutality of her ancestors, refused to wallow in the cloying, suffocating nihilism of a self-inflicted crime.
All of the defiance within her was obliterated when she had seen for herself the birth of a demon-kissed monstrosity-the taloned hands and feet, the scaled, elongated face, the blunt tail twitching like a headless worm, the eyes of lurid green. If naught but the taloned hands and feet had marked the demon’s seed, the coven would have chosen this newborn, for there was true power in demonic blood when no more than a single drop trickled in the child’s veins. More than that, and the creation was an abomination.
Grotesque babes crawling in the muck of the sea’s floor, claws gouging furrows in the dark, the sea’s legion, the army awaiting us all.
The seeds thrived in the foaming waves where they met the land, generation upon generation. Flung high onto the shore, they sank into the ground. Dwelling within living creatures, prey and predator; bound inside plants; adhering to the very blades of grass, the leaves of the trees-these seeds could not be escaped: another bitter truth among the Shake. When they found a woman’s womb where a child was already growing, the seed stole its fate. Seeking… something, yet yielding naught but a shape that warred with that of the human.
The demons had been pure, once. Birthing their own kind, a world of mothers and offspring. The seeds had dwelt in the sea found in demonic wombs. Until the war that saw the bellies of those mothers slit open, spilling what belonged inside out into this world-the seeds even the sea sought to reject. A war of slaughter-yet the demons had found a way to survive, to this very day. In the swirling spume of tidal pools, in the rush of tumbling, crashing waves. Lost, yet not defeated. Gone, yet poised to return.