The Brush of Black Wings Read online

  “Saruum Buidu.” Acseh stumbled on the words.

  Martise stared at the spot where her nemesis had stood only a moment earlier. “Abomination.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  If the king was the sword and the sword the king as the lich’s books stated, then Silhara had exactly what he needed to grab a demon king by the bollocks and twist.

  The blade hung at his hip, hidden by the folds of his cloak. A light sword, well-balanced and designed for speed-draw, it dragged at his belt, made cumbersome by the weight of dark magic infused in the metal and his own wards that protected him from its touch. His skin crawled any place the scabbard knocked against his leg. He’d drop the thing into the nearest blacksmith’s forge and toast its destruction with a cup of Dragon Piss were it not useful for his own purposes. Given half the chance, he’d toss Megiddo Anastas in there with it and toast a second time.

  The magic he used to iron-crow his way into the demon’s prison had depleted some of his strength. The success of his endeavor lay before him, a barren wasteland in all directions. The only points of interest were a jagged line of mountains on a far horizon and the sky above him, wreathed in flashing images of people, places and events. They careened across the celestial road in an ever-changing panorama—lives lived across time and kingdoms, revealed yet unreachable.

  His wife was trapped somewhere in this gods-forsaken place, captive of an entity with the desire to break free of its cage and a certainty she was the means to do so. Silhara snarled and promptly gagged.

  “Bursin’s armpit!” he said into his sleeve as he covered his nose with his forearm. The reek of this world overrode the copper smell of his own blood drying in his nostrils. His eyes watered with true tears instead of blood, and his stomach bounced under his ribs in warning. The taint of the demon’s mark on Martise’s clothing had made his nose twitch but was only a ghost of the odor saturating this air. It was as if an entire world had dumped the rotting corpses of its dead here. The bodies had turned to dust, but the smell remained.

  He breathed cautiously through his mouth and pivoted to better survey the landscape. The barrenness wasn’t as strange as the lack of noise. Even the fetid wind was silent as it whipped his cloak around his legs and his hair into his eyes. In some ways, it reminded him of Corruption’s plane of existence with its lifeless ocean and a beach made of burnt bone. That plane caged an exiled god, this one an exiled king.

  A spike of warning prickles shot down Silhara’s back. This world might be mute and rank, but it wasn’t blind. Something watched him, and the previously quiet sword began to whisper and rattle in the scabbard.

  He smiled grimly. “Sense your master nearby, do you?” The hush deepened, reminding him of the stillness just before a thunderstorm broke over Neith. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he taunted in a soft voice.

  He leapt back as the ground in front of him erupted into a howling geyser of dirt. Soil and rock spewed upward to coalesce into a floating miasma. It hovered there only a moment before shifting shape into a javelin and hurtling toward him. Silhara flung a spell back at the makeshift weapon where it disintegrated into a harmless shower of dust.

  He laughed aloud, his mirth devoid of any true humor. “King Megiddo. Demon handler and dirt-mover. Hardly worthy of the title ‘saruum.’”

  The first attack had been a test, one to gauge not only his fear or lack of it, but also his power. Silhara had offered a hint but couldn’t do much else until his adversary chose to confront him for a prolonged period. Mockery worked wonders in making men react; demons were no exception.

  A shrieking black whirlwind spiraled across the empty plain towards him. The cacophony bludgeoned Silhara’s bleeding ears. Screams of the dying, of the tortured and the mutilated. He had witnessed plenty of suffering in his lifetime. He was far less sensitive to it than Martise, but everything inside him recoiled at the sounds emanating from the whirlwind.

  He held his ground as the monstrous vortex spun ever closer, revealing the outlines of racked limbs and shadowy faces distorted in horror. The force of the wind lifted him off his feet, and nebulous hands extended from the cloud to clutch at his clothing, yank his hair and rake claws down his arms and legs.

  The spell he bellowed into the whirlwind halted its spin abruptly. It collapsed like a spinning top flattened by an impatient hand. Silhara dropped from his midair tumble and landed on his feet with a quick stagger. He shoved his wind-tangled hair away from his face and frowned.

  This isn’t what he expected—minor spells of wind and movement easily defeated or deflected by counter sorcery mastered by a third-year Conclave student. Silhara had prepared to engage in full-on warfare. So far, he hadn’t even broken a sweat. He stayed on his guard. Demons were known to play with their food.

  He braced himself for a third confrontation when the same black whirlwind gathered itself once more. Instead of aiming for him in a straight line, it zigzagged over the terrain, pausing at odd intervals to stir up dust in various spots. He pivoted slowly, tracking its movements, curious. He rolled his eyes once he realized what the vortex was doing.

  Barrier circles made for handy self protection. Silhara had used them on various occasions when he worked dangerous magic. They made terrible cages for a mage with any reasonable skill and power. He left the barrier alone for the moment, puzzled as to why his adversary chose to construct it, especially when its power barely registered to his senses. No more than a fly’s buzz and even less annoying.

  The whirlwind spun tighter and faster, shrinking until it was no more than a thin black line that suddenly blossomed into voluminous robes made of the same shadowy, agonized faces and twisted limbs. The being who wore it possessed the visage of a man, but a man who had lost his humanity to the darkest forces and walked soulless among the living.

  Silhara inclined his head in mock salute. “Megiddo Anastas.”

  “Who are you?”

  The question surprised Silhara. He had expected more guttural utterances, demonic gibberish and possibly a lot of spitting. Instead, the Wraith King spoke a dialect of Glimming and watched him with strange eyes—steely and reflective like his sword’s blade, with the same blue lightning crackling in their depths. His voice didn’t echo in this muffled world, but Silhara sensed a vast abyss in the words, akin to Corruption’s lifeless seas.

  “It doesn’t matter who I am,” he replied in the same tongue. “You’ve taken something of mine. I want it back.”

  Megiddo cocked his head, his steel-plate eyes narrowed. “You have something of mine as well. You used it to open the gate.”

  Hardly, but the demon king didn’t need to know that. Silhara smirked. “Shall we bargain?”

  Diplomacy had never been his strongest virtue but he was a decent negotiator. He never imagined the skills he employed to sell his produce at Easter Prime’s markets would serve him here, where he’d bargain with a Wraith King for his wife’s safe return.

  “Give me the sword and open the gate. I’ll give you the kashaptu.” Megiddo’s grotesque robes writhed around his body, their fluid faces snapping fanged teeth at Silhara. The sword at Silhara’s hip tugged on his belt, straining toward its master. Yearning.

  Silhara snorted. He avoided using Martise’s name and suspected the demon didn’t know it—yet. “Give me the woman, and I’ll return the sword.”

  As much as his gut clenched at the thought of the sacrifice involved, there was no possible way he’d reopen the portal into his world and let this loathsome thing through to wreak havoc.

  Megiddo’s features drew into even gaunter lines. “Open it or I kill the woman,” he almost snarled.

  Silhara snapped his fingers outward in a wide palm stretch. Sparks sizzled off his fingertips. A dull clap of thunder followed, and the barrier circle around him flashed twice before crumbling. The sigils drawn in the dust by the whirlwind scattered. “I’m no cull to fear threats from the rejected refuse of a respectable midden. Kill her, and I’ll destroy the blade.” He sl
apped the squirming blade at his hip, as much to subdue it as to make his point.

  Megiddo’s glance darted to where the sword hung, hidden by Silhara’s cloak. “Unlike the kashaptu, I won’t die.”

  “But you will wither and spend eternity here the shade of a shade.”

  The words struck home. Megiddo’s eyes lightened from polished steel to white-hot metal, blazing in his equally pale face. Silhara watched, waited and pounced at the demon’s first twitch of his shoulder.

  “Hold!” he commanded, his hand wrapped around the scabbard. Fire coursed through his arm, the cold, unclean fire of both necromantic and goetic sorcery.

  Megiddo froze, wrenched to a shocked standstill. His wide eyes lost their blaze, and the robes writhed back on themselves, twisting and convulsing until they cocooned the king in a tightly wrapped shroud. His body flickered and wavered, like the illusionary waves on a near horizon that tricked a thirsty traveler on a hot day. The demon opened his mouth to speak.

  Silhara slammed another spell into the sheathed sword, smiling grimly as it screeched a thin protest. “Be still, dog,” he commanded the bound Megiddo. “Be silent.” He’d swear to any who asked that he heard the demon’s back teeth snap together in an unwilling clench.

  He strolled to where the Wraith King rocked unsteadily on his feet. The robes squirmed, reaching for him. Silhara’s lip curled. “Thought you’d nip off for a little murder to force my hand, did you?” The mute demon’s wrathful gaze promised retribution far more unpleasant than mere murder.

  Silhara kicked the side of Megiddo’s knee, sending him toppling into the dirt with a muffled thump. “Stay,” he ordered.

  He walked away from the prone king and turned in a slow circle, allowing his senses to expand in the flat, muted plane. The power he’d bled off from the spells protecting Neith’s environs surged through him to swell his throat and fill his mouth.

  “Apprentice,” he said in a low voice, and the gray world vibrated beneath his feet with the word’s resonance. It swelled, spilling across the featureless plain in invisible waves, carried to the distant fanged mountain peaks on a sorcerous tide.

  He listened, breath held in hopeful anticipation, and closed his eyes on a sigh when a thin cry carried back to him on the soundless wind. “Master.”

  The spell he used to cast his voice captured hers, spinning a delicate thread that bound her to him. He grasped the line, recited another spell and left the Wraith King recumbent in the dirt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The spell known as Half-Death had earned its name in more ways than one. Conclave considered it an outlawed incantation, its use punishable by imprisonment as well as various painful incentives designed to convince the offending mage not to try it again.

  A spell which could transport its user from one place to another in an instant exacted its own heavy toll. Silhara nearly killed himself employing it as a way for him and Martise to escape a lich. Three rapid-fire transports of two people together and he’d been reduced to a senseless bloodied heap.

  This time he suffered no damage from the spell. The gray plane in which he traveled didn’t resist his manipulations as hard or drain his power as much as the living world did. The most he suffered was a popping in his ears and the welcome impact of his wife’s body as she threw herself at him with a glad cry.

  “Sil...Master!”

  Martise’s arms wrapped around his neck, nearly strangling him in her enthusiasm. He lifted her off her feet, trying to not shake with relief at having her in his arms once more, safe and sound. He pressed his face into the spot where her shoulder curved into her neck and breathed. The putrid reek permeated everything in this gods forsaken place, but Silhara fancied he still smelled the hint of orange flower on her skin and the soap she and Gurn used to launder the blankets.

  He wanted to hold her like this for hours, an indulgence that would have to wait until after they escaped. Martise must have thought the same thing because she ended their embrace and stepped back to stare at him with a critical eye.

  “Blood all over you. You faced Megiddo.”

  “I did, but this is from spellwork getting here. I’ve leashed your king for a moment, but it won’t last.”

  She winced and caressed his arm with her fingertips. Her hair was a tangled mess, and fatigue painted lavender shadows under her eyes. She’d obviously dressed under enchantment and without benefit of a light. Her skirts were inside out, and she had donned one of his shirts instead of hers. It fell almost to her knees, and the sleeves were rolled to her elbows. No woman ever born was more beautiful.

  So focused on tracking his wife through incantation and so relieved at finding her, he barely registered the structure at his back, incongruous as it squatted on the featureless landscape beneath the ever-changing sky. The cottage door hung open, and he tensed at the sight of a hazy shape hovering just inside the doorway. It stepped onto the threshold, revealing a wide-eyed woman of regal bearing, garbed in fine clothing.

  “Who the hell are you?” he practically snarled at her and smirked when she jumped and retreated into the cottage.

  “Peace, Acseh. He’s a friend,” Martise called to her in Glimming. Silhara scowled at her. “My friend,” she corrected. “There’s no need to hide.”

  He refused to second that notion. Nothing and no one here was safe from him except the wife he’d cracked open a demon’s cage to retrieve. He watched, narrow-eyed, as the woman Martise called Acseh ventured out of the cottage, keeping a wide distance between herself and him as she came to stand to one side of Martise.

  “Why is there a house in the middle of a demon’s world?” he asked in the language he and Martise shared in their world.

  She answered him in the same tongue with a faint smile. “That’s a story in itself and one we don’t have time for now. Acseh is human, a prisoner here. From Megiddo’s age I think.” Her voice softened so only he could hear. “He calls her Damkiana. It’s Makkadian for ‘mistress of earth and heaven.’ It’s the name of a Makkadian goddess, sacred to witches.”

  Silhara’s eyebrows rose as he stared at Acseh who stared back for a moment before her gaze slid away from his. “Is that so?” Martise’s nod and intent expression revealed her thoughts matched his. Demons using affectionate terms—this place grew stranger every second.

  Martise continued. “She doesn’t know the meaning of the name. The king won’t tell her, and neither have I as of yet.”

  Silhara scrutinized Acseh before crooking a finger at her. “Come closer.” He rolled his eyes when she shook her head and took two steps back. “Fine,” he said. “I can do this as easily with you standing there.”

  Both women gasped when he hurled a walnut-sized ball of red light at Acseh. She tried to leap away but was held fast by Silhara’s sorcery. The small light swelled to enclose her in a crimson cocoon that pulsed and hummed.

  Acseh’s eyes were the size of saucers, and she swatted at the light, arms flailing as she sought to brush it off her skirts.

  He half expected a protest from Martise, but she stood quietly next to him. Sympathy clouded her expression, but she said nothing, allowing the spell that sought out demonic possession do its work.

  The light faded and disappeared, leaving Acseh shaking and teary-eyed. Martise didn’t approach her, but she offered an apology in Glimming. “I’m sorry, Acseh,” she said. “I want to believe you are as much an unlucky human as I am, but I don’t know you. That spell verifies you’re no demon or host to one.”

  “It doesn’t mean you can trust her,” Silhara said. He wasn’t in the least apologetic for using the spell on an unwilling target.

  Martise sighed. “I know.” She glanced down, and it was her turn to startle. “The books were right. You found the sword.” She stretched out a hand, not quite touching the scabbard where it rested at Silhara hip, partially hidden by his cloak. “It feels...”

  “Foul,” he finished for her. He’d grown more used to the skin-crawling sensation that danced up and d
own his leg, but if he didn’t need the blade to control the demon while they lingered here, he’d gladly unhook it from his belt, snap the thing in half and toss the pieces in the dirt.

  Martise didn’t withdraw her hand, and her brow furrowed. “It is foul, but something else as well.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’s bought us a little time. Not much though. Are you ready?”

  She nodded. “Since I got here. What’s your tether to our world? What’s mine?”

  “I splattered enough blood on the temple steps to harness a team of horses.” He traced the deepening lines in her forehead with his fingertip. “You know the price of difficult rituals, apprentice.”

  Her frown became a full scowl. “I don’t have to like it. You’ve shed so much of your own blood for your magic, it’s a wonder you aren’t bled dry by now.”

  He didn’t argue her point. He’d bled plenty during invocations and considered the price worth it. He was blessed with an extraordinarily powerful Gift and the skills to use it to his maximum benefit. If it meant spilling some of his own blood to exercise that power, so be it.

  He was much more reluctant to spill Martise’s. “Your spirit necklace is hidden beneath a pile of stones near the temple. If that and my magic don’t anchor you to our world, nothing will.”

  “Please. Don’t leave me here.”

  Silhara and Martise both turned at Acseh’s plea. His brows snapped together. “You speak our language?” His question, in Glimming, was a whip’s kiss, and Acseh flinched.

  She shook her head. “I don’t need to. You talk with your faces and bodies as well. It’s easy enough to know of what you speak.”