“We saw them. From the sea cliffs they were hull-down on the horizon,” Elias Creed said, his face pale beneath the red peel of his sunburn. “Two Bionese cruisers, sailing sou’-sou’west. They must have sent boats in through the reef during the night.”
“We were a Mercanter ship,” young Mihal protested. “What were they thinking?”
“No pennant-it went in the storm,” Rol told him in an even voice. “They mistook us for the privateer’s consort, and sent in the marines without asking too many questions. They crucify pirates, and pirates is what they thought we were.” He looked at Creed and Gallico as he spoke, and then looked away again, ashamed of the meanness of his thinking.
“I do not blame you if you are bitter,” Gallico said. “The Adder brought this upon you, and for that I am heartily sorry.”
“Sorry!” Jude Mochran said, red-eyed. “My brother was on that ship. He made it through the storm when many another didn’t-and then they killed him like a common murderer!” Mochran was a small man, but he bunched his fists as though he meant to take on Gallico there and then.
“Enough,” Rol said sharply. “We’ve two shipmates to bury, and we must salvage what we can from the cutter.”
“We’re on the shore of a desert hundreds of miles away from anywhere,” Bartolomew Geygan, a young sailor from Corso, said, quiet but cold. “What in the world is the use?”
“You can sit here and cry into the Reach if you want,” Rol snapped, “but I intend to live through this. Now get on your feet, all of you.”
“You can’t command us,” Mochran said, “your commission went down with the ship. You’re nothing to us now.”
“Then go your own way, Jude,” Rol said calmly. “I won’t stop you.” He knelt in the sand and began to dig with his hands. At once, Gallico and Elias joined him, and after a few moments the other four Cormorants did so also. The tears ran down Mochran’s face as he hurled the sand aside, but he said no more.
Two years, Rol had been with the Cormorant, and many of those who had gone down nailed to her burning hull had been shipmates all that time. Prothero he had sailed with for three times as long. For some reason, as he knelt in the hot sand with the rising sun beating fierce and unpitying upon his back, he felt that his past had somehow caught up with him again. There was something to his life that would not let go of him, as unyielding and ineradicable as the mark on the palm of his hand. It had slept, these seven years, but now was waking again. So he dug deep in the sand, making a grave for things other than the two corpses. There were tasks to fulfill now, and the white fury of his rage would help him accomplish them.
The cutter had had planks chopped out of her hull and her thwarts were smashed into splinters. Even if they had possessed a full complement of carpenter’s tools, it was unlikely they could ever have got her to float again. Most of the casks had been stove in also, but one was whole, and this Gallico roped to his back, straightening under it as lightly as if it were a rolled blanket. They also salvaged a few sheaves of dried fish which all the boat lockers of the Cormorant held against emergencies. Thinking of the Gannet, Rol smiled grimly, and made a pack for them out of a swatch of canvas, slinging them across his shoulder. The sailors had their knives and cutlasses, Rol the master’s pistol as well as Fleam, and there were two full waterskins and some tinderboxes in the party, but aside from that they possessed only the rags they stood up in. When they had mounded up the sand over their murdered comrades they stood about the graves like men amazed, and then their heads came up and all but Gallico stared at Rol for inspiration.
“We make for Ordos, I suppose,” he said. “It’s three hundred miles as the crow flies.” But it did not feel right as he said it. Going to Ordos would not bring him quicker to any revenge.
“There may be somewhere closer,” Gallico rumbled. “Northward up the coast from here there is a place where I know we will be welcome. But once we go there, there can be no going back. You should all know that.”
“What is this place?” Creed asked, eyes bright.
“Men call it Ganesh Ka, the Pirate City. I have been there in the past. It’s a hard road, by land, but shorter than the way to Ordos.”
“Pirate City! It’s a tale told to children, and drunken landsmen in seafront taverns,” Mochran said.
“No. It exists, believe me. But when a man enters the city, he cannot go back-from that moment on he must become a privateer or perish, for no one is allowed to leave unless they take to one of the Black Ships.”
“So we must all turn pirate?” Sayed Rusaf said. The oldest of the remaining Cormorants, he was an experienced topman, and might find employment anywhere on the Twelve Seas with ease.
“It is the law of that place,” Gallico said. He was watching Rol closely.
“I’ll go,” Mihal said. He was young enough to perhaps find the idea exciting.
“And I,” Mochran agreed. “For my brother’s death.”
“I will not,” Rusaf cried. “The Bionari made a mistake, it’s true, and our shipmates paid for it, but we are still alive-no need to throw our lives away as well.”
The last of the four original Cormorants was Bartolomew, the hot-tempered youngster from Corso. “How do we know this thing is telling us the truth?” he asked, eyes flashing under a ragged mop of black hair. “It could be he’s leading us into some kind of ambush where a few of his mates are laid in wait somewhere.”
For the first time Gallico’s temper rose. “You stupid little fool-what in the world do you have that is worth stealing? I am offering you a way to find a new life. Trek across the mountains to Ordos alone if you will-the eagles will be feasting on your eyes ere a week is out.”
“What does the skipper say?” Rusaf asked. “Rol, what of you?”
Rol looked over them all, his eyes lingering a moment on Creed’s transfigured face.
“I believe Gallico. Unlike all of you, I have met him before. If there is a hidden city, he will lead us to it. There is nothing for me now in Ordos or anywhere else; the Cormorant was the only home I knew, and now it is gone. I want revenge. I will throw in my lot with the Black Ships.”
“We have no choice, then,” Bartolomew said bitterly. “We must all turn pirate or else die here out in the waste.”
“It is more of a choice than our shipmates had,” Rol told him. He looked sidelong at Gallico. “Perhaps something can be worked out when we get to Ganesh Ka, some deal struck. Do not give up hope-we are alive, after all, when so many are not.”
They gave in after that, and grudgingly agreed to follow Gallico’s lead. There had been no need to ask Elias his opinion; it had been clear to see in his eyes. The little group labored back off the beach and up the cliff to the plateau above once more. They were tired now, having walked through the night, but Gallico insisted they make some distance between themselves and the charred, sunken hulk of the Cormorant. “We’ll rest at noon,” he said, “in the hottest part of the day, and then continue after dark. First we must go back to the spring I dug up, and fill this cask. One cannot dig out water every time one needs it.”
So they trudged inland. Rol and Gallico took the lead, then Creed, and behind him Mihal and Mochran. Bringing up the rear were Rusaf and Bartolomew. They retraced their steps under the burning heat of the morning sun, their eyes screwed up against the glare of the light on the pale, naked earth. Rusaf, who had been born in Tukelar, plucked a dry leaf from a tree and held it between his teeth to prevent his lower lip from blistering. The others peeled off their ragged shirts and draped them over heads and shoulders against the blast of the sunlight.
The spring had turned to cracked mud, but Gallico dug it out once more and held the bunghole of the cask under the bubbling water. It was awkward going until they hit upon the solution of emptying their waterskins into the cask and refilling them. By the time the cask was full and their skins also, and they had all drunk as much as they could hold in their swollen bellies, the sun was halfway up the sky. Gallico shaded his eyes and peered north along the coast. The great plateau jutted out into the sea there for ten or fifteen leagues and then broke off suddenly in sheer sea cliffs. On the other side, clear to see even through the gathering shimmer of the heat haze, the Inner Reach bit into the land again in a wide blue firth.
“We are north of Golgos, which is good, because there is a Bionese garrison there,” Gallico said. “I’d wager those two cruisers are going to put in there also to refit; our stern chasers mauled them somewhat before they ran us on the rocks. This plain ahead is named the Gorthor Flats; fourteen leagues across, and there will be no water there, but it must be faced. Beyond it is the Firth of Ringill. We must follow its shores northwest, toward the mountains. Across the firth is Ganesh, the ancient land which legend holds was once a fief of the Goliad, but which is now a wilderness. We have a journey of some two weeks before us at least, for Ganesh Ka is much farther to the north.”
Rol looked at the desolation of the blasted land about them, a shimmering ochre waste where the only movement was that of wind-reared dust-clouds. “How in the world do armies fight in a place like this?”
“By losing as many men to the heat as to the enemy,” Gallico said. “The Goliad is the only real place to land an armament between Ordos and Urbonetto; everywhere else is too mountainous for a baggage or siege train. Plus, if one heads inland there are passes through the Myconians that lead to Myconn itself. Battles have been fought for possession of those passes for time out of mind, with armies of Oronthir and Cavaillon and Armidon and the Mamertine League all seeking to come at Bionar through its underbelly. All have failed. Even a century ago, the Goliad was not the place you see now; it was a rolling savannah, with herds of deer and bison and wild asses. But the grazing of countless army horses and the feet of passing soldiers have stripped the grass from the earth and the wind does the rest. In this part of the world rain comes fast and hard in the autumn of the year, and the rest of the seasons are dry. With no vegetation to protect it, the rain washed the good soil away, and now the wet season brings no life to the place because the life is not there to germinate.”
Rol eyed his companion with some wonder. “You seem tolerably well-informed for a pirate.”
Gallico grinned. “I like to read.”
They walked on in silence after that, their pace steady but slow. Gallico told them to breathe with their mouths closed to keep their tongues from drying out and when they drank he made sure it was a few gulps at a time, no more.
The land fell and then rose again, a long, hard slog in the rippling heat. At the height of the slope Rol looked down on the blinding glare of the Gorthor Flats and thought he saw black figures moving in the heat-shimmer. He pointed them out to Gallico, who nodded.
“Ur-men. They prowl the Flats in packs.”
The name brought forth a prickle of memory in Rol’s mind and no more. “What are they?”
“Creatures of the wastes, manlike in some respects, but not remotely human. Experiments gone awry, some contend. They are dangerous to one alone, or a small party unarmed, but so long as we keep a good watch out we should hold them at bay.”
The Flats began like a white sea lapping round the shores of the rockier hills. They glittered with salt in wide pans, and reflected the heat and light of the sun with pitiless ferocity.
“Rub the hollows of your eyes with dirt. It’ll help with the light,” Gallico told them, and they used some of their precious water to create a muddy paste which all save the halftroll smeared over their faces.
“There are ruins a few leagues out on the Flats,” he went on. “We will march to them and then lie up until dark. Only the Ur-men walk far upon the Flats in daylight; any man who tries will go blind in a few days.”
“Is there no way to go round them?” Creed asked.
“We could, but it would take us up into the foothills, fifty or sixty leagues out of our way. I’m hoping we can reach the firth in two marches. The land is kinder after that; we’ll have left the Goliad behind us, and there are woods and rivers; we may even be able to take down some game.”
The heat slammed into them like a wave as they ventured down onto the Flats. They screwed up their eyes against the harsh light and the mud in their faces cracked and flaked despite the sweat that was soaking into it. When Rol’s palm brushed against the lock of his pistol it burned like the handle of a skillet left over the flame.
The earth was fractured in a million angular cracks, as if the Flats were a shattered, burnt-out mirror the ages had covered in dust. “This was a lake, once,” Rol said, “or a lake-bed rather.”
“If it was, it was in a time before men were here to see it,” Gallico said. He was moving somewhat stiffly, and Rol could see the shine of new blood oozing out of his dressings. He wondered at the endurance of the halftroll.
“Are there many like you walking about in the world?” he asked.
“Not many. Small communities here and there who share similar deformities. I am not part of a different species-I am a man, but one whose frame has been skewed by the potency of the Blood. My parents were not like me, though they would not have been considered human either.” He glanced at Rol and seeing his eyes said: “I come from a village in the Myconians, on the Perilar side.”
“Hence your knowledge of the Goliad’s history.”
“It is said that one day the Goliad will be a garden again, and when that happens the Creator will come back to the forsaken earth and give every man a life beyond death. A pretty story, but stories are cheap. I like to find out the truth of things. I have spent days in the Turmian Library in Myconn itself, back in the days when my kind was welcome there. But they say that all the learning in the world is as nothing compared to the archives of Kull, the isle of the Mage-King.”
“Who is the Mage-King?”
“You might as well ask the Name of God, or how He made the world. For myself, I think he is a Were, the last of the Ancients. The last angel on earth, you might say.”
“Is he evil?”
“I don’t know, Rol-no one knows what it is he wants from the world. His agents come and go unseen amongst us. He has no armies, he fights no wars, and yet nations tremble at the mention of his name. I have heard an old man in the Myconians insist that he is merely waiting for some change to come upon the world, after which he will leave his island and walk amongst men again, but the old man was half crazed and half drunk. As I said, stories are cheap.”
“Why did you leave your village in the Myconians?”
“The Bionari burned it in one of their habitual forays into Perilar, slew everyone in it. They paid a dear price for their temerity, though; we Folk of the Blood know how to go down fighting, if nothing else. I think the Perilari were glad to see the back of us. As our numbers grow fewer, so men grow more afraid of us.” Gallico paused and looked over his shoulder at the remainder of the party. The low hum of aimless talk had ceased, and the Cormorants were eavesdropping without shame.
“The Bionari take a lot upon themselves,” Rol said darkly, oblivious.
“They have always been a quarrelsome lot, it’s true. But they’re in a fix of their own making now.”
“How so?”
“This civil war they’ve started. Arbion and Phidon have declared for the rebel queen, and huge battles are being waged across the Vale of Myconn itself. Last I heard, Bar Asfal had fled the capital to raise more troops in the north.”
Rol walked along mutely, his mind jarred into startled silence.
“She has a chamberlain who is also one of her generals, and he speaks Bionese with the accent of Gascar. He calls himself Canker, and they say he is an assassin. At any rate, several of Bar Asfal’s most talented commanders have been killed in odd circumstances.”
“What do you know of this rebel queen?”
“Rowen Bar Hethrun she is called, a great beauty, but cold as frost, and a wicked hand with a blade. She’s won over many of the nobles through a combination of fear and lust-rumor has it half of Bionar’s aristocracy has sampled her charms at one time or another in the past five years. It’s how she built up her support to begin with: in the bedchamber. But the strangest thing is that she has the Blood in her, or so it is rumored. Imagine-Bionar ruled by a monarch with Weren blood. God knows, it might be an improvement.”
“It might. It might not.” Rol felt sick at heart.
“There’s something ahead,” Creed said, the dust clicking in his throat. “Something out on the Flats.”
Gallico shaded his eyes and nodded. “The ruins, and not before time.”
Rearing up out of the haze were the crumbling remains of a large building. As they drew closer they could see that it had once been a high tower of some sort. Closer still, and Rol realized with a shock that it was familiar-the shape, or what remained of it, was a direct duplicate of Psellos’s Tower in Ascari. Here it had been built upon a plain, not set into the flank of a hill, and he could see the huge unmortared joints of the perfectly sculpted stone at its base. They seemed inviolate, unworn, but as the eye traveled upward their massive courses were disrupted and broken so that the tower looked as if it had been broken off halfway up by the hand of a giant, and all about it the tumbled blocks lay scattered and piled in mounds half buried in blowing dust and sand.
“This was a Weren place,” he said.
“Yes,” Gallico agreed. “ Turrin Ra, I have heard it named, which is merely an old way of saying the High Tower.”
They drew closer step by weary step, the men eyeing the ruins with a mixture of curiosity and distrust. The sweat had dried into white salted rings upon their clothing, and the light boots and shoes they wore were already flapping upon their feet; they had been made for the timber of a ship’s deck, not the raw grind of a trek across a desert.
As they entered the naked gateway of the tower the sun was cut off and they sighed with relief at the blessed shade. The stone of the ruin was cool to the touch despite the heat of the day, and they laid their hands upon it, forgetting their qualms. Gallico led them up a surviving stairway and they found that half of one upper floor had survived more or less intact. Here he bade them stretch out and rest. The company collapsed like a puppet show whose strings have been cut, too tired even to bicker amongst themselves. There were five or six hours until dark, and they fell asleep almost at once, sprawled on the stone, but Rol sat looking out of the perfect archway of one huge empty window, his gaze traveling across the sunblasted Flats to the blue heights of the mountains beyond, pale against an empty sky. Gallico sat with him, blotting the fresh blood from his wounds and studying his face.
“You should sleep. We’ll walk all night.”
“I’m all right.”
They shared a few swallows of tepid water from one of the skins and Rol helped the halftroll bind up his dressings again. The scraped skin was already closing beneath them, and the deep gashes made by the coastal rocks had closed like brown-lipped mouths.
“You heal quickly.”
“You and I both, and all who partake of the Blood.”
Irritated without knowing why, Rol slumped back down again. “ The Blood. I wish I had never heard of it. I was a fisherman once, living a small life on a small island.”
“Dennifrey. I hear a touch of it in your voice. But you were never going to be a fisherman, Rol; I sense that in you at least. You are here for a reason. It is why I suggested Ganesh Ka. Do you think I would lead these others to it, were it not for you?”
“It’s such a special place, then?”
“It is a haven, one of the last for folk such as you and I. My village was another such place, and they burned it. They will not be happy until we are consigned to legend, and the Lesser Men have the world to themselves. Man has always feared what he cannot understand. You can try to bury yourself among them, but you will never succeed.”
“I succeeded well enough, these last seven years.”
“Is it so long since we drank beer together in Ascari?”
Firelit good fellowship in a smoke-filled tavern. The laughter of men. “Yes. It seems like a whole lifetime.”
“You have seen something of the world since then.”
“I am-I was-a mariner, nothing more. That is all I wanted out of life.”
“But no longer? Well, who knows-you may find something else to occupy you in Ganesh Ka. It, too, is old, and there are folk there who know much of the world past and present.”
“A city of pirates and scholars, no less.”
“If you like. Now I’m for sleep if you are not. Wake me if you begin to nod-someone must stay alert.” And with that Gallico’s massive head sank forward on his breast. Within moments he was snoring gently.
The sound of the sleepers’ breathing was the only thing Rol could hear. The Flats were concave, though over miles it was hard to realize. The wind might be blowing somewhere up in the washed-out sky but here it was dead and still as the air in a cellar.
Rol wiped sweat from his face, fought the urge to drink more water, and cursed himself for not letting Gallico take the watch. He was exhausted-more than that, he was worn, so that the very workings of his mind seemed dulled and leaden. He occupied himself with cleaning the grit and dust out of Riparian’s pistol. Retrieving a coil of match from his pocket, he found that it was almost dry despite its submersion that morning. He loaded the weapon-he had but four lead rounds to his name-and, finding his tinder wet, spread the filaments of wool and bark out on the stone to dry. Then he drew Fleam and checked the lustrous blade. It was, had he known it, the exact same storm-shade as his eyes, and there was no speck of rust upon it. He ran his finger down the hollow of the blood channel with something like affection, and then leaned forward slightly and kissed the metal. It was refreshingly cold, and he felt that shiver in his loins as it met his lips, the sort a boy might feel upon glimpsing the nakedness of a beautiful woman for the first time.
“What are you?” he murmured, but the sword was silent, cold. He slid her back in her sheath and felt the hungry disappointment through the hilt.
Something in his brain left off working, however, and when he opened his eyes again it was fully dark. The air was chill and blue about him but the stone of the tower had retained the warmth it had absorbed during the day and was pleasant to the touch. Everyone else was still asleep. But something else was moving, somewhere.
Again-a tiny scrape on the stairs, like someone’s foot shifting. Rol rose to his feet with all the stealth he could muster from the rags of Psellos’s training, and padded noiselessly to the top of the stairway. It was pitch-black now, though if he looked out of the tall surviving window of the place he could see the paleness of the earth below and, raising his eyes, the hard glitter of the stars. A lighter patch on the world’s rim spoke of the rise of the moon to come; it would be a mere sliver, a new moon. There was no breath of air to stir the dust in his throat and when he swallowed it felt as though he had sand coating his tongue.
He looked down the stairway, his night vision soaking up the blackness and making sense of it. There was someone standing at the foot of the stairs. Even his preternatural sight could make out only that it was a man or manlike, short in the legs and long in the arms, the limbs very fine. A shapeless lump of a torso, and a head oddly sunk into the shoulders, almost domelike. No neck to speak of, or any feature where the face should be. But he knew it was watching him. He was not afraid; in fact, he felt the strangest sense of pity.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The thing disappeared so quickly he almost lost track of it. He drew Fleam, the moment of calm broken, and pelted down the stairs. Out of the ruined gateway he ran until the vast bright arch of the night sky was all above him, the welkin ablaze with more light than he had thought stars could make, mare’s tails and filigrees of diamond in the black. The Gorthor Flats ran out all around him in a featureless blank, and closer to, the broken fragments of the tower lay in skewed lines and mounds. There was no sign of the visitor and the night air was icy and still.
Gallico appeared at his shoulder, fast and quiet despite his size. “What was it?”
“I don’t know. An Ur-man perhaps. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The halftroll sniffed the air and it came out of his gaping nostrils again in two gray spumes. “Yes, they have been here. Time to go. They may be a while gathering yet.”
“Gallico, it was not threatening. And it ran from me.”
“To fetch its pack-brothers, you may be sure. They never hunt alone. Come-let’s get the others on their feet. The tower is no longer safe.”
The party set off across the Flats, cursing the brevity of their interrupted rest and shivering in the cold of the desert night. All but Rol and Gallico found themselves tripping and stubbing toes on the deep cracks of the Flats as they set a fearsome pace northward. It was bitterly cold, and hunger had begun to bite into their strength despite a hurried meal of dried fish, wolfed down on the move. They had a mouthful each of water, gulped down as they half jogged in Gallico’s wake.
“What’s the rush?” Bartolomew complained. “Is this some kind of race?”
“Yes,” Gallico said shortly. “Keep your wits awake and your weapons to hand.”
“Who’s to attack us out here?” Rusaf complained. “Lizards? Beetles?”
“There,” Rol said, pointing. Gallico followed his arm. The flicker of movement was so brief as to be dismissed as a trick of the eye, but he nodded.
“They’re coming up to larboard.”
“I’d rather stand and await them than have a running fight,” Rol said.
“That’s what they want, with a small group such as this. Stop for only a few minutes, and they’ll use that time to gather in their hundreds. No, they are like wolves. A stalled prey only emboldens them.”
“What in the world are you two talking about?” Rusaf hissed.
“The locals,” Rol told him with a thin smile. “They’re about to pay us a visit.”
Ten yards in front of them the cracked planes of dirt reared up like trapdoors in the ground, and out of them swarmed a mass of shadows, noiseless, swift as snakes. Rol had a split moment to take in their features before he had drawn Fleam and she was leaping forward in his grasp with the distinctive whistle that sounded like the laugh of a woman.
They had heads like moles, eyeless, with delicate snouts and snuffling nostrils set at the very tip. Below the heads were wet holes that might have been mouths. Aside from that they were featureless. Their thin arms ended in four digits, all tipped with long claws. Their bodies were gray, lighter on the belly and darker on the back. The backs and shoulders were covered with fine fur, like the stubble of an unshaven man’s chin.
They came in from all sides, thirty or forty strong. The Cormorants drew their cutlasses, faces white as bone in the darkness.
“Stand fast,” Gallico said. “Make a ring, and do not let them inside it.”
The Ur-men circled, uttering a high-pitched ululating warble that hurt the ears. More of their fellows were running and lurching and limping across the Flats now, dozens and scores.
“Should have stayed in the tower,” Gallico spat. “This is new to me, these numbers. I have never seen-”
The black ring closed in on them.
The party fought silently, murderously, beating away questing talons, stabbing out with the bright points of their blades. A nick here, a shallow stab there, the sharp, horrified intake of breath as Rusaf saw his forearm laid open from wrist to elbow. Rol edged his way left to close the circle. It was like fighting a gale-flapped thornbush. The Ur-men would move in, dart back, bob and duck and leap up and chance a swing with their claws, then scurry out of the ring to let another in. Rol stabbed out in growing desperation, to meet nothing but empty air. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gallico’s towering frame, fists barreling through the air. The water cask was sliced from his back and fell to the ground behind him. He turned for one moment and the creatures leaped on his back, howling. Others scampered through his legs and pummeled the cask itself, breaking in the timbers with a splash and a splinter. Creed impaled one on the ground, his cutlass bending in the thing’s spine.
Fleam sliced off one questing, clawed hand that had come seeking Rol’s face, and its owner shrieked, high and awful. It lifted its snout and spat out a gob of liquid, which spattered against Rol’s shoulder. He beheaded the creature with one long sweep of Fleam’s curved edge, fluid gouting up in two steaming jets from the thing’s severed shoulders. The acrid smell of burning made him pause. There was smoke writhing from the shoulder of his tunic. Even as he stared at it, astonished, the pain hit him as the ichor burned through his clothes and seared his skin. He cried out loud. It was as though a hot coal had been dropped inside his shirt.
The creatures were thick as a hedge all about them now, and the party was fighting desperately back to back, cutlasses flickering. Gallico was outside the ring with one of them still clinging to his back, stabbing its claws into his corded muscles again and again so that his blood ran down, and then putting its wet mouth to the wounds and sucking ecstatically. The halftroll twisted, agonized, smashing Ur-men to mangled wreckage right and left. Up and down his huge chest little crackling streams of smoke were writhing and he was bellowing with pain and rage as he fought.
Rol ducked below the swipe of another Ur-man’s claws and stabbed Fleam upward through the delicate snout. The steel emerged glistening from the thing’s head and he let it slide off the scimitar, booting it aside. The agony in his shoulder was overmastering him; it felt as though his flesh were being burned deeper and deeper, some fire there seeking his heart. He reversed Fleam in desperation and grasped the blade in his scarred hand, then dug the point into his own body, digging deep, seeking the hot mote that was tunneling there. Then he flicked the blade outward, tearing free a gobbet of smoking flesh. The pain was bearable again, that of a normal wound.
He lunged forward out of the ring of mariners, and flailed into the crowded enemy about Gallico. The scimitar sang joyously in his hand and seemed lighter than ever before. He hacked and sliced and slashed with his own blood soaking him from shoulder to thigh, and cried out as he saw Gallico fall to his knees, the halftroll tearing at his own flesh in his agony, ripping away ragged collops of burning meat from his body.
The ring of men fell apart. Rol saw Mihal yanked from his feet to disappear into a scrum of the enemy, legs kicking uselessly. Creed and Mochran were fighting grimly in a little war of their own, and Bartolomew was standing over Rusaf’s body with a bloody cutlass in each hand. Gallico was buried under a squirming mass of Ur-men, the ground puddled with his blood.
A light began to shine in the depths of Fleam’s blade and in Rol’s eyes. They flared white and seemed to smoke without heat. The black desert night was transformed into a capering chiaroscuro of leaping shadows as the radiance grew. Rol cried out, but the sound was strange, too deep for a human chest to hold. His eyes were two holes through which the sun of another world speared its unbearable brightness. The Ur-men hesitated, backed away. Rol’s cry grew until there was no vestige of humanity left within it. There was a terrible stink of burnt flesh. Fleam was a spike of pulsing argent that stood vertical one moment, flickering so that it no longer seemed bladelike at all but had the silhouette of something else that shrieked with the fevered laugh of a woman. It came down again in Rol’s fist and began to scythe through the Ur-men as though harvesting corn.
To Elias Creed and the others watching, cutlasses momentarily forgotten in their limp hands, it seemed as though Rol grew in stature and his very face changed. In his grip the scimitar steadied and coalesced again until it was a molten bar five feet long which he wielded two-handed, and he towered above them as it snicked and clicked through bone and meat and sinew, scattering body parts and black gore far and wide, dispersing his attackers. They saw a terrible, mirthless rictus on Rol’s face, and the light spilled out of his body until it seemed they were watching some towering creature with luminous wings that arced and beat with thunderous concussions high in the air above their heads. All but Creed cowered on the ground, hiding their eyes. The Ur-men gave a collective shriek, and those who could began running as fast as their wiry legs would take them, but the winged furious light followed them and slaughtered them left and right, hovering above the ground and hunting them down by the light of its terrible eyes.
Eighteen