It was nothing. Yet, as the urgency and fervour fled his veins and left him cold and trembling, Nugdrinn could not shake the feeling that there had been something out in the gulf.
But the bell tolled on and no horn was heard on the rough black waters.
‘Douse the lamps,’ Nugdrinn said again, retreating back to the deck and wondering what they had missed.
Blood magic was never predictable. It was a roiling mass of archaic forces drawn together through murder and slaughter, a hound brought to the leash but never fully at heel. Dhar, the Dark Wind, was capricious but the deeds that could be wrought through its manipulation were great and terrible. Drutheira knew her art well, however, and had practised much. She knew, as all sorcerers must, that dark magic always required sacrifice. The dead druchii warrior with her throat cut, spilling arterial crimson all over the deck, was testament to that.
Most of the blood from the corpse had been wasted, but there was enough to fill a ritual bowl in the middle of the deck. From it tendrils of ruddy smoke quested like the tentacles of some abyssal horror. They enveloped the raiding ship, occluded it from sight. Thus clouded could the dark elves pass by the watchtowers of the dwarfs and gain passage through the Black Gulf into the rivers of the Old World proper.
Two other witches, Malchior and Ashniel, completed the coven. Lesser sorcerers both than Drutheira, they channelled their mastery into her and she became a conduit that articulated the power of the whole. Sweat dappled her brow, intense concentration written upon her face as she maintained the casting all the way through the gate markers that led them north. As one the triumvirate muttered their incantations through taut, bloodless lips as the other warriors looked to the sea wall and hoped the enchantment would hold long enough for them to pass by.
At the stern of the raider ship, a dark elf stood ready behind the vessel’s reaper. The single bolt thrower would find itself quickly outmatched by the battalion of ballistae arrayed against it, so too the twenty or so warriors armed with spear and shield at the ship’s flanks. Their fate was in the hands of Drutheira and her witches.
Slowly, agonisingly so, the sea wall faded from sight and the dark elves left the Sea Hold behind them with the dwarfs unaware of them ever having been present in their waters.
Drutheira let out a pained breath, the evidence of her body’s trauma revealed in the dark flecks on the hand that she used to cover her mouth.
The others sagged, visibly drained. Ashniel wiped a trickle of crimson from her mouth, whilst Malchior staunched his bleeding left nostril with a black cloth he then secreted back into his robes.
‘Dhar is a hard mistress,’ he remarked, coughing into his hand. When he wiped it away quickly with his sleeve there was blood on his palm.
‘Does the sight of blood on your own skin upset you, Malchior?’ Ashniel was young and impetuous, but possessed rare magical talent. She also delighted in taunting Malchior.
‘I am perfectly sanguine, my little dear,’ he replied in a sibilant voice, a savage and murderous glint in his eyes. ‘But I would much rather it was your blood.’
Bristling at the obvious threat, she spoke through a dagger-
curved grin. ‘I could flay the flesh from your bones, here in this very ship.’
Malchior did his best to appear unmoved. ‘Ah, the boldness of youth. Such overconfidence for a whelp…’
‘Whore-killing dog!’ she hissed, summoning a nimbus of dark magic and shaping it in her talon-like fingers.
‘Cease your bickering,’ snapped Drutheira, dispelling the casting with a curt slash of her hand, ‘and know that I am a harder mistress than the Wind of Dhar.’ Her wrath faded as quickly as it had appeared, and she narrowed her eyes like a predator to its unwitting prey. ‘Save your strength. Both of you. We are not finished, not yet.’
That revelation brought a sneer to Ashniel’s blade-thin lips. Malchior tried to hide his dismay behind a viper’s charm but failed.
‘Whatever our mistress requires,’ he purred with a small bow.
Ashniel showed her acquiescence by turning the sneer into a mirthless smile. Drutheira had seen harpies with more humour and resolved to kill the little witch once this was done.
She glanced down at the brass bowl around which the coven was sitting. Together they formed a triangle with Drutheira at its apex. Crimson steam rolled off the sloped interior of the bowl and once it cleared only a residue of the vital fluid remained.
‘Vaulkhar,’ she called, as if summoning something as mundane as wine or meat, ‘I need more.’
The vaulkhar nodded and gestured to two of his crew. A third, who paled when the captain’s cold gaze fell upon him, drew his sword but was subdued before he could put up much of a fight. Disarmed, forced to kneel over the bowl, he screamed as Drutheira drew her ritual knife and cut his throat.
Blood, hot and fresh, spilled into the sacrificial vessel.
‘Communion…’ uttered Drutheira, her voice laced with power, and the three began to chant.
Bubbles rose on the surface of the dark pool as if it were boiling, but no heat emanated from within. Instead an image began to resolve as the fluid thickened. Scarred as if by fire and contorted into a rictus of pure agony, a face appeared in the morass. It had been noble once, now it was ravaged and hellish. Opening its mouth in a silent scream, the face arched back and was consumed.
The bubbling subsided, replaced by ripples, slight at first but growing with intensity as the seconds passed. A pair of tiny nubs, like the peaks of two mountains surrounded by a lake, protruded from the pool. Nubs became horns and the horns crested an ornate helm of jagged edges and bladed ornamentation. It was a barbed piece of armour, sharp and cold. Dripping with blood, its entire surface drowned in viscous
