Black Halo

‘I’m going to stomp you into the ground, stomp your bones into jelly, stomp the jelly into pulp and stomp the pulp until there’s nothing left. I’m going to spill you out on the earth and splash in your entrails.’

He stared up at her, grinned.

‘I scarred you.’

She shrieked, raised her foot, the spikes glistening in the moonlight.

And nothing more came of it.

Something happened: a shift in the night breeze, a calm of the waves, a collective twitch through a dozen purple faces. Suddenly, milky white eyes turned upwards; the fury that fuelled each of them leaked out of their mouths as they opened and turned out towards the ocean. A strange placidity settled over them, a pack of purple hounds scenting meat, stilling their barking maws and wagging tongues in anticipation.

‘Coming,’ the voice whispered.

‘Them?’

‘He.’

‘He always comes like this,’ Togu whispered from his perch. ‘The world knows when he arrives. The sea knows it first. The sky knows it next because the sea is quiet. We know it last, because the night is too dark and the world is quiet. It doesn’t want him to see. Nothing good wants him to see.’

He hopped off his perch, glanced at Lenk with eyes too narrow for anything but fear.

‘Don’t look into his eyes, cousins. You don’t want him to see, either.’

The netherlings cleared a space at the beach, parting as though bidden by a wind unfelt and hauling Denaos with them. That same wind seemed to continue to blow through, cut across his flesh and chill him.

‘I can feel it, Lenk,’ the boy said on weakening breath, ‘a power … constant … wrong. It doesn’t stop. It should stop. It needs to stop.’ He grimaced, in pain. ‘Hot, cold, cold, hot. Why won’t it stop?’

Lenk, too, felt it; not the wind, but the leaves it picked up, the scent of smoke on it, the humidity it carried. A taint, one he was familiar with.

‘A demon?’

‘Their servant.’

‘Ulbecetonth?’

‘Her enemy.’

‘Our friend?’

He knew the answer as soon as he saw the shadow upon the water.

A ship, he recognised, pulling itself through the water, towards the shore, with no oars, no sails, no source of motion. At the prow, a pillar of gloom. A man, tall and black, crowned by three pinpricks of red light, fire upon shadow upon shadow.

Him.

It came to a perfect halt, barely grazing the sand. The figure waved a hand, dismissed everything, demanded everything. Everything complied.

The netherlings backed away. The earth quivered; the sand drew itself together, smoothed itself out and made itself presentable to him. It rose to meet him in a perfect staircase. His foot hit the step with no sound, and the netherlings took not a breath, dared to utter the word.

‘Master,’ bubbled out amongst them.

‘Sheraptus,’ Togu said, silent as the figure descended the stairs and regarded him.

The three red lights swung back and forth, tiny fires in a halo of black wrapped around a long, purple brow. His sigh crept out of a pair of thin, purple lips. Long, silky white hair rested on thin, drooping shoulders. Seas were silent, skies were still; the world held its breath, for fear that it had angered him.

‘And all that greets me,’ he whispered on a voice long and dark, ‘is death.

‘I have seen death before.’ He tilted his head up towards the distant forest. ‘But in my land, Togu, I have never seen green. I have seen no rivers and blue skies, no birds and insects, no rain clouds …’ He shook his head. ‘And you meet me in the dark, on a clear night, on a beach laden with death. Death, I have seen before.’

A pair of eyes opened. Bright. Crimson. Fiery.

‘I will see more of it.’

The voice was languid, liquid, the threat inherent in it ebbing away as soon as it passed his lips, wasted. Or rather, Lenk thought, unnecessary. There was something inherently threatening about the man, something that went beyond the black robes, the glowing red jewels and the black crown about his brow.

‘Power …’ Dreadaeleon whispered, his voice pained. ‘He’s leaking it.’

Magic, perhaps, Lenk thought; that wasn’t hard to believe, given that the characteristic crimson pyres that lit up a wizard’s eyes were perpetually burning in his stare. But what Lenk sensed was not magic. It was the unseen, unmoving breeze about him, the unscented stench about him.

The taint all too plain to both Lenk and the creature inside his head.

‘Sense it,’ the voice muttered. ‘He’s killed many. Demon, mortal … child, mother … he’s watched them suffer; he’s drunk their pain.’ It shifted, becoming hard and rigid. ‘He will again if we do not do our duty.’

‘Who …?’ he asked. ‘Whose pain?’

Cold sigh. Warm sigh. Two answers.

‘You know.’

‘Where is it?’

Another voice, neither warm nor hot, brimming with boredom and hatred. Him again. Sheraptus.

Togu did not bother defiance against his question, did not bother to interpret it as anything other than the demand that it was. He glanced over his shoulder, spoke a word in his native tongue. From around a standing skull, a quartet of Owauku approached, bearing a wooden palanquin upon their shoulders with Bagagame, head heavy and eyes thick, at their head.

They passed Lenk, keeping their gazes low. He paid them no mind, watching instead the objects heaped upon the wooden platform: all of them his or his companions’. He spotted Denaos’ knives, Asper’s pendant, Kataria’s bow. His sword was up there, too; he supposed that should have galled him. The fact that his pants were right next to it should have enraged him.

Neither of those was the reason for the sudden flash of icy heat that seared through his head on a pair of voices.

‘NO!’

‘What?’ he asked, wincing.

‘He cannot be allowed to have it! It does not belong to him! It belongs to … no one … no, to YOU! TO NO ONE!’ His head pounded, seared with fever, frozen with cold before the voice finally howled in twisting cacophony. ‘HE CANNOT HAVE THE TOME.’

Sheraptus glanced over to the boat, raised a white eyebrow. The netherlings followed his gaze, reverence shifting to scorn the moment their gaze left his face. The male seemed to take no notice, though, as he glanced to the bound companions.

‘This is them?’ he asked.

The shape that rose up from his vessel was instantly recognisable. The skin, white even in darkness, and the crown of emerald-coloured hair were extraneous detail. The palpable aura of treachery denoted the siren’s presence long before she showed her gills.

‘That is … most of them, yes,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘There was another with them … a beast on two legs with red skin.’

‘Dead,’ Denaos muttered. ‘Thankfully.’

‘If that is the case, then they are all here and-’

‘You three,’ Sheraptus said, pointing to a trio of netherlings, ‘search the island for signs of this thing. If this is the same red thing that netherlings could not kill, I doubt he was slain by anything else.’ He ignored Greenhair’s stammered protests as the trio grunted and set off down the coast, instead turning his gaze to the palanquin. ‘Now, then … where is it?’

‘That is it,’ Greenhair replied, arriving beside Sheraptus and pointing a finger at the palanquin. ‘It is in there.’