Midnight tides

He sat huddled in his exhaustion, gaze focused on the distant breakers of the reef, the rolling white ribbon that came again and again in heartbeat rhythm, and from all sides rushed in waves of meaning. In the grey, heavy sky. In the clarion cries of the gulls. In the misty rain carried by the moaning wind. The uncertain sands trickling away beneath his soaked moccasins. Endings and beginnings, the edge of the knowable world.

She’d run from the House of the Dead. The young woman at whose feet he’d tossed his heart. In the hope that she might glance at it – Errant take him, even pick it up and devour it like some grinning beast. Anything, anything but… running away.

He had fallen unconscious in the House of the Dead – ah, is there meaning in that? – and had been carried out, presumably, back to the cot in the Sengar longhouse. He had awoken later – how long he did not know, for he’d found himself alone. Not even a single slave present in the building. No food had been prepared, no dishes or other signs of a meal left behind. The hearth was a mound of white ash covering a few lingering embers. Outside, beyond the faint voice of the wind and the nearer dripping of rainwater, was silence.

Head filled with fog, his movements slow and awkward, he’d rebuilt the fire. Found a rain cape, and had then walked outside. Seeing no-one nearby, he had made his way down to the shoreline. To stare at the empty, filled sea, and the empty, filled sky. Battered by the silence and its roar of wind and gull screams and spitting rain. Alone on the beach in the midst of this clamouring legion.

The dead warrior who was alive.

The Letherii priestess who had fled in the face of a request for help, to give solace and to comfort a fellow Letherii.

In the citadel of the Warlock King, Udinaas suspected, the Edur were gathered. Wills locked in a dreadful war, and, like an island around which the storm raged in endless cycles, the monstrous form of Rhulad Sengar, who had risen from the House of the Dead. Armoured in gold, clothed in wax, probably unable to walk beneath all that weight – until, of course, those coins were removed.

The art of Udinaas… undone.

There would be pain in that. Excruciating pain, but it had to be done, and quickly. Before the flesh and skin grew to embrace those coins.

Rhulad was not a corpse, nor was he undead, for an undead would not scream. He lived once more. His nerves awake, his mind afire. Trapped in a prison of gold.

As was I, once. As every Letherii is trapped. Oh, he is poetry animate, is Rhulad Sengar, but his words are for the Letherii, not for the Edur.

Just one meaning culled from that dire legion, and one that would not leave him alone. Rhulad was going to go mad. There was no doubt about that in the mind of Udinaas. Dying, only to return to a body that was no longer his, a body that belonged to the forest and the leaves and barrow earth. What kind of journey had that been? Who had opened the path, and why?

It’s the sword. It has to be. The sword that would not release his hands. Because it was not finished with Rhulad Sengar. Death means nothing to it. It’s not finished.

A gift meant, it seemed, for Hannan Mosag. Offered by whom?

But Hannan Mosag will not have that sword. It has claimed Rhulad instead. And that sword with its power now hangs over the Warlock King.

This could tear the confederacy apart. Could topple Hannan Mosag and his K’risnan. Unless, of course, Rhulad Sengar submitted to the Warlock King’s authority.

A less problematic issue had it been Fear, or Trull. Perhaps even Binadas. But no, the sword had chosen Rhulad, the unblooded who had been eager for war, a youth with secret eyes and rebellion in his soul. It might be that he was broken, but Udinaas suspected otherwise. I was able to bring him back, to quell those screams. A respite from the madness, in which he could gather himself and recall all that he had been.

It occurred to Udinaas that he might have made a mistake. A greater mercy might have been to not impede that swift plummet into madness.

And now he would have me as his slave.

Foam swirled around his ankles. The tide was coming in.

‘We might as well be in a village abandoned to the ghosts,’ Buruk the Pale said, using the toe of one boot to edge a log closer to the fire, grimacing at the steam that rose from its sodden bark.