Tide of looming darkness,
Smoke and oil and blood,
Surging forth, engulfing,
Comes the lethal flood.
The bastion loomed high on the culmination of a world. Three great mountain ranges, jagged ridgelines that dominated their realm of shadow and chill, encircled the fortress like walls on a cosmic scale.
Great plains that had once teemed with ghost armies were still now, the hordes long ago marched off to war. Cliffs loomed silent and forbidding, while ramparts and towers stood empty and dark. Even the stony gargoyle, the bestial giant poised atop one of the loftiest crests, guardian of the great citadel itself, seemed as lifeless as a statue, a mere image carved from rock.
Deep harbors, sheltered by wall and tower, guarded by lofty fortress and shallow boom, had once contained the hulls of countless warships. Those ships were gone, formed into a fleet that had sortied more than fifty years earlier, embarked on the invasion of an entirely different world.
But though the warriors were gone, their ruler Karlath-Fayd, called the Deathlord, remained. He sat in his great throne, the stone blasted from the very bedrock of his great mountain, and he remained as immobile as that stone.
His very self was invisible, his flesh a transparent veil. Only his eyes were there, glowing like embers, burning from the deep fire within.
Those mighty eyes remained open, the pupils fixed and staring from their perch at the far end of the cosmos. There were those upon the Fourth Circle, druids with their Tapestry and sages with their scrying globes and other magic, who looked upon the Deathlord, studied him for signs of movement and burgeoning danger. Those eyes, hellishly bright, were all that they could see. But still, they feared him.
For the Deathlord was waiting, and all knew that his patience was beyond measure.
T HEY spread across the Worldsea in a legion of darkness, black ranks of sails and masts covering the ocean’s surface to the far limits of the horizon. Shadows shifted and danced across the decks of the death ships, ghosts of past violence seething impatiently, anxious to reach the shore, to draw warmth and sustenance from a living, fertile world.
The cold hulls sliced the waters of the vast ocean, and wakes trailed behind each transom. These were not the frothy whitecaps that chased every normal ship, however. Instead, the track of a death ship was marked by a spreading V of toxic black, smeared like oil over the surface of the sea. Fish died in great numbers and floated to the surface, forming rafts of rotting, scaly flesh. Seabirds were emboldened by the plenty, but as they dipped and slashed at the wasting meat, they convulsed and fell from the sky, adding their own feathered carcasses to the vast swath of decay.
The ships seemed without number, viewed from the sky like blades of grass in a meadow. The vanguard was ten miles wide, a hundred ships with lofty sails and smoky pennants of shrouded black. Behind them came rank upon rank upon rank of additional fleets, each wider than the last, sweeping across the horizon in a seemingly endless progression.
They were watched from the sky by a pair of observers, one sitting astride and borne by the other. The mount was massive, scaly, and serpentine: a monstrous dragon with a wingspan long enough to encompass a playing field. The rider was a man perched at the base of the great wyrm’s neck, his long black hair bound into a tail, his bronze skin smooth and stern. He wore a leather shirt and gloves, with a slender sword at his waist. Together they soared above the vast armada, looking at the long lines of ships, wondering at the assemblage of black-hulled vessels.
The dragon flew with relaxed grace, riding the sea winds with little effort of his mighty wings. The pair had made this reconnaissance countless times over the last five decades. At least once every interval, Natac and Regillix Avatar had flown forth to watch the ships of the armada in their seemingly endless progression around the world of Nayve. Their target seemed to be that realm at the center of the Worldsea, the nexus of all the Seven Circles, of everything, but for such a long time the ships had made no move toward shore.
So the watchers watched, and they waited. Long ago Natac had given up trying to count the ships. The pattern of lines was deceptively irregular, and even in the early years he had never been certain if his count was accurate. As time passed, and more and more black ships sailed from the Deathland to join the armada, he formed an impression only of numberless vastness. He carried this impression back to the Fourth Circle when his draconic steed, after a week or ten days of constant flight, was forced to return to land.
“As always, it seems there are more of them than ever before,” said Regillix Avatar, turning his crocodilian head to regard his rider with one slitted, yellow green eye.
“Many more,” Natac agreed. “Their numbers are swelling with fresh blood… Miradel told me that twenty thousand men were slain in the first day of yet another great battle in the Seventh Circle.”
“Surely they have enough strength to attack,” the dragon snorted in exasperation. “Do they expect to bore us to death? Fifty-one years of waiting for a war!”
“I have a feeling we don’t have much longer to wait,” replied the man. “In fact, I’ve seen enough here. What do you say we get back and make our report?”
“I was going to suggest the same,” said the dragon. “The course of the vanguard is still circular, but I detect a shift, as if they are moving toward shore.”
Natac had noticed it, too, as if the fleet was preparing for a great change of course, the lines of the armada dressing themselves in preparation for a turn toward the coast of Nayve. They had waited for this maneuver for decades, but he knew that, when the death ships turned, the attack would follow swiftly.
“Let’s go, then.”
The dragon banked steeply, the man resting without fear in the deep niche between two of the serpent’s neck plates. Long wing strokes bore them through the sky. Soon the air felt brighter, cleaner, as they passed beyond the fringe of the dark armada. A thin line of green marked landfall before them, and with a look at the sky, where the sun was just beginning to ascend toward Darken, they knew that they would reach the shoreline by full night.
Before them, the world of Nayve awaited.
T WO figures slipped through the night, gliding past rocks that jutted like sentries from the mountainside. Steep, craggy summits rose on all sides, a fanged horizon clearly visible against the starlit sky. One of the shadowy forms dashed from a gully to crouch beside a looming boulder while the other remained still, watching and waiting. Fifty feet down the steep slope a stream washed through a rock-walled draw, silky and shimmering in the faint light.
Waiting for Juliay to join him, Jubal paused to watch a constellation move like a formation of geese, curling through the cosmos in the direction that was neither metal nor wood. The stars danced and hovered, then dropped from view behind the shoulder of a huge, pyramid-shaped mountain.
Even now, after five decades in the Fourth Circle, Jubal allowed himself to be surprised when he saw the stars moving around. More of the twinkling lights popped into view, a cluster rising in an equilateral triangle before speeding apart, evenly dispersed into the three directions. He was reminded of the fireworks that he had watched every Fourth of July when he was growing up in Virginia.
The memory was jarring and anachronistic. That world was gone… had been gone even before Jubal had fallen, pierced by Yankee bayonets above the banks of Appomattox Creek. Now, as a man who had spent sixty years in Nayve, time had passed with no failure of his joints, none of the withering of strength that inevitably accompanied mortal aging. He couldn’t imagine what the world of short-lived humankind had come to.
Unlike Natac, who regularly examined every aspect of Earth’s ongoing history and had been doing so for more than four hundred years, Jubal made little effort to remain familiar with the world of his birth. Of course, Juliay and the other druids saw the Seventh Circle with the Wool of Time, and they had told him of the great war that now raged, threatening to consume all of Europe. It irritated him that mankind seemed to have learned nothing from the monstrously destructive American war that had claimed Jubal’s life-his first life, in any event-some fifty years ago.
