Egil grunted. 'A fair point.'
'We are those kind of men, Egil. But, uh, let's just not tell anybody.'
'Aye.'
They crested the rise. The surf lapped the shore, the sunset splashing the sea in color. Rocks stuck out of the shallow water here and there. Sea birds stood on one leg on the rocks, raced the incoming surf along the shore, and picked at mollusks in the pools.
Nix took a lead bullet from a pouch on his belt and, with it, loaded the sling. He swung the leather strap loosely as he picked his target.
'Could've used a crossbow and fowling quarrel from the supplies,' Egil said.
'Could've,' Nix acknowledged, and picked his target. 'But I've been shooting rocks at birds since I was a boy.'
He wheeled the sling over his head and the humming sound it made caused the nearby birds to take wing. He picked one, thought of his days scrounging the Heap, and let fly. Feathers flew and a black-winged gull spiraled to the shore. It hit the shallow water, fluttered. The surf washed it toward the beach.
Egil and Nix sprinted toward it, the priest easily outrunning Nix. Egil waded into the ankle-deep water and took the still-struggling bird in his huge hands.
'Still alive!' he called, and waded out of the surf.
The priest cupped the bird in his hands and the creature went still. Nix met Egil at the shore, the teak wand in hand.
'So, what? You touch the wand to the bird and…?'
'And it shapes the magic of the transmutation. Then I use it to change us.'
Egil stared down at the bird. 'I don't understand how magic works.'
'In truth, neither do I,' Nix admitted, and pronounced a word in the Mages' Tongue before Egil could object. He felt the wand warm in his hand and touched it to the bird. The gold cap on the end of the wand shimmered, the magic powered and shaped. He and Egil shared a glance, the priest released the bird and held out his hand, palm up. Nix touched the wand to him, then did the same to himself.
'Feels odd,' Egil said, his speech slurred and indistinct.
Nix watched with horror and wonder as the priest's facial features ran like melted wax, his body, clothing, and weapons dripping in lazy runnels until the core of him collapsed in a viscous heap at Nix's feet.
'Egil,' Nix tried to say, but the word came out garbled. His body tingled, then burned. He held his hand before his face and looked with horror on the streams of flesh falling from his fingers. His vision went blurry as his body began to collapse, pooling in a mass on the shore. The burning continued somehow, and even in shapelessness he seemed destined to retain thought and feeling. He perceived a flash, or a popping, and tried to scream but all that emerged was a caw.
A caw.
He stood a few hand spans in height. The water temperature registered only distantly through the skin of his thin legs. His feet, however, felt almost every grain of sand and pebble under them. He twisted his head nearly all the way around to view his body — sleek, feathered, winged. He let out an exultant squawk.
He looked at Egil, who had also transformed into a gull. Together, the two squawked, called, and cawed at one another for a few moments of collective, uncommunicative idiocy before leaving off.
Trying to familiarize himself with the new form, Nix extended his wings and walked a few steps along the beach. When he felt comfortable, he beat his wings and jumped into the air. The bird form seemed to know what to do, or perhaps the transmutational magic conveyed some facility to use the new form, but Nix cried with delight as the ground fell away beneath him. He swooped and dove, reveling in the feel of the air under his wings, the wind in his face.
Looking to his right, he saw Egil — or the bird he assumed to be Egil — doing exactly the same. Nix flew to Egil's side, called sharply, and wheeled westward.
Take me back to the prison, Rakon had commanded the sylph. Back to the prison.
Nix knew where they were going, where they had to be going. He should've seen it the first time. Rakon had been looking for looking for Abrak-Thyss's prison in the sea of glass. He needed the Horn of Alyyk to open it and free the devil.
And then the devil would violate Rusilla and Merelda.
They soared upward on a warm column of air, and the rolling, tan ocean of Afirion's sands stretched out below. Behind them, many leagues in the distance, his sharp eyes saw a shoreside town, two dozen wood and stacked stone buildings, a few small boats. Jyme would make his way there. Nix hoped he saw the hiresword again someday.
Ahead, the brown outcroppings of the Demon Wastes extended into the desert sands like stone fingers. The outcroppings gave way to the tumble of hills that marked the true border of the Wastes. They flew high over hills, the wind in their faces and under their wings, joyous in flight despite the somber nature of their task.
As soon as they crossed over the hills, the acridity in the air over the Wastes put a scratch in the back of Nix's throat. Waves of heat rose from the surface, as if the world were feverish. The thermals made it easy to soar at speed. He glanced down and the jumbled, ruined terrain reminded him of the skin of a pox patient soon to die — dry, discolored, lined with jagged cracks and bulbous pustules. He tried not to think too much about it.
Using the setting sun as his guide, they flew west until Nix saw below them the enspelled road they'd followed. It stretched through the scarred terrain in a clean, straight line. Height provided perspective and in the distance Nix saw the other roads that joined it, the angles at which they met, the arcs the outer lines described. At first he did not believe what he saw. But it made sense. Four roads had come together at the cardinal points at the sea of glass.
He angled higher to get a better view, scanned the terrain with his sharp eyes, and it only confirmed his initial thought. He cursed in amazement but it came out only as a squawk.
The roads formed a shape, a shape he knew. He could not see the entirety of it, of course, but he could see leagues of it, and it was enough. The implication was clear. The roads were not roads at all. They were the lines of a binding cross, a circle divided into quadrants by perpendicular lines, a tool used to summon, contain, and constrain horrors.
He squawked and cawed at Egil but the priest just made a confused squawk in response. Egil couldn't see it. Nix could see it, but he could hardly believe it.
Almost the entirety of the Demon Wastes was circumscribed by a magic circle, an arcane symbol carved into the face of the world, a circle that delimited an area leagues in diameter.
He tried to imagine the time and power it would have taken to scribe such a symbol, but could not wrap his thoughts around it. He struggled in vain to come up with a compelling reason to scribe it in the first place.
His mind worried at the problem. Was it connected to Rakon's plan somehow? Could the circle be designed to contain the Vwynn? Or perhaps to hold some other horrors that slept under the broken land?
Had the civilization that once ruled the lands have inadvertently awakened something under the earth, scribing the circle as a way to hold it, perhaps while they fled the region? Or had the civilization been trying to draw something toward Ellerth? Perhaps to use as a weapon?
He looked skyward, in his mind's eye seeing magical energy reaching up from the circle and into the vault of night, into neighboring planes and dimensions, drawing and pulling creatures and magical esoterica from all over the vault of night. He imagined flaming objects shrieking toward Ellerth, drawn by the power of the symbol carved into the face of the world. He imagined balls of stone and metal and flesh and scales slamming into the surface, leaving the once-fertile plain a ruined waste inhabited by degenerate devils. He imagined slits in reality forming in the air, saw spirits and demons and devils slipping through, summoned by the symbol.
He thought the idea fanciful, but then… he'd seen much. Anything was possible.
He pushed it from his mind and gave it no more thought. He didn't need to know the purposes of the people who'd once ruled here. He knew Rakon's purpose, and that was purpose enough.
They flew on in dour silence, chasing the sun, chasing the sisters, heading to the center of the binding cross, to the glass sea, where sat the prison of Abrak-Thyss.
Nix stayed as high as he was able, hoping thereby to avoid the swarms of fiendish, bat-like creatures that patrolled the night skies of the Wastes.
They eyed the air ahead, looking for the sylph and its cargo, their speed westward stretching the day's
