Brawaith was not afraid of flames. He was bred for war and his ears pricked forward as Kall-Su reined him down into streets filled with smoke and blood and screams. A panicked ox stampeded past, an empty cart bouncing behind it. An old woman, clutching a crying child staggered out of the smoke. A man holding a profusely bleeding shoulder fell in the street behind her. Both their eyes were dazed.
Kall reined up next to the man, who was struggling to his feet and demanded. "What happened?"
He leaned down and grasped the man's good shoulder, pulling him up. "Marauders. They came out of the night. No warning."
He'd guessed as much. He had just needed to hear it confirmed. He headed towards the docks, and the place he had left Lily. It was not a large village. Perhaps a hundred folk had lived here. He passed the bodies of no few on the streets. Slaughtered men and animals. Houses put to the torch. The harbor was easy to find from the glow of burning boats. A man bodily carried a struggling child from the shattered door of a house. The screams of the child, calling desperately for its mother cut through the smoke and the crackle of flame. The swarthy skinned man held a knife dripping with blood in his free hand. No helpful neighbor saving an innocent, then. Kall hissed through his teeth, speaking the words of a blunt, simple ice spell.
The pirate's step faltered. His eyes widened a moment before they began to frost over, along with the skin of his face and the hair of his black beard. He toppled backwards, shattering and the child scrambled desperately free of the frigid remains. Kall didn't even slow Brawaith. The closer to the docks he got, the more dead. There was the occasional skirmish in the street. The occasional scream of a woman. A pair of men rutted like animals atop a shrieking young girl. They never noticed him coming.
He sliced the back of the one waiting his turn's head clean off, then when the other one looked up dumbly at the rider holding a blood smeared sword, sliced the man's throat. It was satisfying to give them their deaths at the edge of his sword. The girl feebly tried to pull her ripped clothing into place. There was little in the way of comprehension in her eyes.
"Don't sit there. Run." He snapped at her, fear beginning to eat at him. He could picture in his imagination Lily in the same position. He could picture worse things.
The row of taverns facing the piers were up in flames. He shouldered Brawaith past men that might have been fisherfolk, might have been pirates. He wasn't paying heed. He scrambled down from Brawaith at the place he thought they had been staying. The heat from the fire was intolerable. He held up a hand and thought to summon an ice elemental to quench it. A body on the street caught his attention. Blonde hair, rangy build. One of the minstrels. He ran over, flipped the body and recognized the harper Crayl under the blood leaking from a scalp wound. There was more blood on his tunic. Not dead though. The man moaned as he was moved and his eyelids fluttered.
Roughly, Kall shook at him, urging him back to awareness. When the bard's eyes opened weakly he demanded. "Where is she? Where's Lily?"
"I don't know. I --don't know. We were woken from sleep by the fire --- everything was confused. When I came out onto the street -- pandemonium. Someone stabbed me."
This last was said with an air of amazement. He laid Crayl back down, peering down the street for signs of other familiar forms
"I have to find her." He murmured, standing. Crayl made no reply, his eyes closed again. Down the dock he saw men forcing captives into a waiting longboat. There were other bound, huddled forms in the small craft. They were taking slaves, then. Through the smoke he could almost see the shape of a ship rocking in the choppy waters of the harbor, out beyond the burning fishing vessels.
He stalked through the smoke towards the dingy, eyes tearing from smoke, sword held loosely in one hand. A marauder saw him, cried out and rushed at him with curved sword held high. Kall spoke a brief incantation and something curled out of the thick haze bringing a chill with it that dampened even the heat from the flames surrounding them. An insubstantial cloud enveloped the pirate, pulling him into its pale core. The man had the chance to scream once before he was just gone. When the cloud moved on at Kall's bidding, there was a pile of brittle, frozen bones in its wake. He felt the strain of the spell though, but ignored it. He sent the ice fog towards the dingy, where the other waiting men looked up, attracted by the scream of their fellow and the movement of a lone swordsman towards them. There were whimpers and cries from the hostages at the bottom of the boat. Children and women mostly, but a few young men.
The ones that came at him died within the tendrils of his creation. The others made odd signs and uttered words in a language he did not know. They made to cast off, hoping to put water between him and them.
"No." He said simply. He sent his cloud of death to selectively envelope each of the pirates until there was nothing in the bobbing boat but the frightened forms of their captives. He peered down into it, looking for a familiar face.
"She's not there." A watery voice said from behind him. He whirled and faced the old man -- the master harper Selephio who was mainly responsible for the mending of his magic. The old man wavered in his step, his hand clutching his narrow stomach, darkness welling out from between his fingers. It trickled from the side of his mouth and down his chin. There was death in his eyes. But along with it, the stubborn pride that he had held in life.
"Where?" Kall choked the word out, dreading the answer.
"They took her. Took some of the boys, too. Bards are prized catches for the slavers, you know."
"Gods." Kall whispered, feeling sick, glancing out into the smoke obscured harbor. "Is she on that ship?"
"More than one ship, boy. If you sink them -- make certain you don't send our folk down with them -- will you?" The old man's knees gave out and he sank to the slick planking of the wharf. "I think -- you'll have to finish your healing on your own -- the girl will help -- when you find her. And don't forget the hall. Remember your promise." Then his eyes rolled back and he fell face forward onto the dock.
Kall stared at him a moment, then turned his attention towards the sea. Before he could even contemplate sinking a ship, he had to get to it. He hadn't attempted a Raven spell since he'd been crippled. It was elemental in nature, but not of the icy sort. He had everything to loose if he didn't try. He uttered the words, actually felt the power churning through the channels that directed magic, felt a little resistance, a little strain that started his head to aching. But the wind came and lifted him up. He was too intent on the ship, with its square black sails to relish the feeling. In the pale distance the shapes of two more ships, already a good ways out to sea could be seen.
If she were on one of them -- gods he hated the ocean. Men lined the shoreward rail of the closer vessel, peering through the dawn light for sign of their longboats returning with plunder. There were captives on the deck, and goods looted from the town. Gazing at the water they hardly saw him descend from the air. He called the cold fog from the shore, and met with resistance. The primal intelligence that dwelled at its core did not want to cross the water. It abhorred the salt. He hissed in irritation. It had been useful and biddable on land and no strain at all. With each spell he used he felt the effort. There were limits to be conscious of now that he had not had before.
But he wasn't at them yet. There was enough condensation in the air to pull all the fuel he needed for ice based devastation. He whispered the words of a creation spell even as he sat down on the lower deck where the prisoners were. The moist air swirled, coalescing into something solid. An ice beast stood splay legged on the deck, wolf-like in shape, but shoulder high and deathly silent in its movements. The pirates hardly noticed Kall-Su when the beast lunged towards the closest one. Kall-Su paid the tearing and ripping of flesh, the screams of fury and pain no attention at all, stalking among the prisoners, looking for Lily. He cut the bonds of a woman who held her wrists out pleadingly and asked if there were more prisoners below decks. She shook her head negatively. There were perhaps ten folk here. He told her to free the others and take to the waters, for he had every intention of crippling this ship.
The ship began to list from the added weight of ice coating its surfaces. The main mast snapped from the weight of sails gone rigid and ponderous with ice. As he called the wind again to lift him into the air, he heard a foreign voice scream out.
"Devil! The Brother of the Sea will avenge us."
He glanced down and saw a desperate brigand shaking a fist in the air at him, then the man jumped overboard with the fleeing prisoners to escape the attack of the ice beast.
It was a fair distance to the other ships. Their dark sails were full of wind and the morning tide drew them out into the depths of the sea. Kall could feel the insulation of the ocean the further out he got. It was a buffer between him and the solid land where he felt most comfortable. Even supported by the winds he could sense the ponderous roll of waves. It misplaced his equilibrium.
He crafted a spell as he went, something similar to the one he'd used to damage the first ship. If they went down, he needed them to sink slow enough to find Lily. The magic swirled around him. The wind began to pick up. It buffeted him, vying against the winds of the raven spell that kept him airborne. It was not a wind of his making. The seas began to get choppy, the skies to blacken. Where dawn had loomed pale on the horizon, dark clouds now gathered out of nowhere. He could barely see the ships, the clouds were so heavy and the sea so suddenly gray. He dropped lower to better spy them out, feeling as he did the brush of a strange power against him. He hadn't expected that, and hastily erected barriers.
Between him and the closest ship, perhaps a thousand yards of turbulent sea remained. In the midst of that, a great dark wall rose up. A monsoon wave that blocked out ships and sky and ocean with its raging blackness. He cursed, barely having time to strengthen the shields around him before it crashed down over him like the fist of a giant. He plummeted, smashed into the ocean, driven down, down and down into murky gloom. The water enclosed him, seeming to press against his shield, trying to destroy it -- to get to him safe within it.
He panicked, immersed in the water where the wind could not lift him up, bereft of the simple levitation spell he might have used to escape by the still healing channels in his head. He cried out the words to a powerful cleaving spell. The surge of raw power burned in his head, building and hurting like hell until he released it. A sudden, enormous onslaught of energy smashed through the waters surrounding him. The ocean split, water surging back as some great sword had slashed through it. It was still shallow enough at this point that silt from the bottom geysered up and littered the surface of the water. The ships in the distance rocked from the reverberations. In the brief seconds he was free of water he called the winds back and shot upwards, dizzy and disoriented from using more power than he reasonably should have.
The sea still raged against him. An ocean storm whipped wind and water in a maelstrom between him and the invisible ships. He thought another monsoon wave reared in the darkness before him. It crashed against him and this time he managed to make it break around him, but it weakened his shields. Water got past, and wind laced with hard pellets of hail. His storm against theirs, only theirs was fed by the sea, over which they all existed. The sea was a wild, furious force and it slapped at him, drawing him down. He thought if he went under again, he might not come back up. No choice but to flee back towards shore -- be driven there by the monsoon. He would do her no good if he were dead.
The wagon had hit a rut and the axle cracked. The three wagoneers had offloaded all of Yoko's precious carpets and other various and unknown items she had ordered to fix it. It was past dawn and they had yet to mend the damned thing. Schneider sat on the grass under a stooped and twisted tree, picking at his immaculate nails with the tip of a dagger. The wagoneers kept casting wary glances his way. They were either scared of him or they resented him for not offering a hand. He could have cared less either way. He did not wish to be here anyway. And very much like mending roofs, his talents lay in areas other than wagon repair.
His horse grazed nearby, not having an opinion either way as long as fodder was provided. Schneider stretched out his legs, resenting three nights spent out in out of the comfort of his villa, which was just becoming comfortable again. Three nights not spent in Yoko's arms. And a fourth almost past. And not a pirate in sight. A waste of a trip. She owed him for this. He deserved coddling when he got back, he decided. A great deal of coddling. He smiled, contemplating the various ways she could make it up to him.
He was in them midst of entertaining himself by picturing a particular act she had balked at in the past performed out of gratitude for his sacrifice when something tickled the back of his mind. An awareness that most powerful magic users had to detect great arcane doings in process. There were spells of a rather large nature being utilized. And not too distant. Some were of a distinctly foreign flavor, intriguing but not half so interesting as the recognition of a more familiar signature in the other spell.
"What have we here?" he asked of the air, perking up, canting his head as he tried to better ascertain just how far and in what direction the castings originated.
South. Maybe a hundred - two hundred miles away. I don't know what you're doing. He thought, sliding the dagger back in its sheath. But I'm glad you're able to do it.
He stood up, dusted off his pants and sauntered over to the wagoneers. They looked up at him with ill concealed aversion. "Tell the lady, when you get to Kelededra, that something came up. Tell her I'll be back in short order. And if by some odd chance you happen to loose her carpets on the way, run long and far, because if I catch hell, I guarantee you will regret it for the rest of your short lives." He smiled at them. A brilliantly white, sharp toothed smile that befitted a predator more than a man. They blanched a little. Satisfied, he went for his horse forgetting their existence entirely. There were more interesting things to draw his attention. Like why Kall-Su was casting high energy spells and who he was casting them against.
It took him three days to track down the source of the magic he'd felt. He didn't have as good a sense for Kall-Su as he did for Arshes Nei. Kall was more guarded mentally, more wary of being hurt than Arshes for all her terrible childhood memories, ever had been. He was damned hard to pinpoint, once he wasn't casting. All he could do was home in on the original sense of where the magic had come from. If Kall-Su had moved on, Schneider had wasted a trip.
The air still smelled of smoke when he came upon the remains of the fishing town. Even before he topped the rise on the trail leading along the shore to it, he smelled the tell tail signs of a village sacked and burned. He knew the odor well, having caused a good bit of just such destruction himself in years past.
Perhaps a quarter of the village was intact. From the vantage of the ridge he could see what houses still had roofs and which had crumbled in upon themselves, blackened by flame. There were people in the streets, trying to make something of what was left to them of their home. They watched sullen eyed and suspicious at his passing, holding children close to their sides, clutching tools in their soot blackened hands. There were not a great deal of folk. He supposed there were fresh dug graves somewhere in the bluffs above the sea side town. He didn't have to ask what had happened. It was clear enough.
In the center of town there was a communal freshwater well. He stopped there, because it seemed a gathering place where tired townsfolk clustered to refresh themselves after the depressing task of cleaning up the mess left by pirates.
"Water for your horse?" An old woman gestured towards the well. "They didn't poison it. They do sometimes."
"How many died?" he asked. She wiped a wrinkled hand across her eyes, others around the well shifted in misery, making small mourning sounds.
"Thirty-nine. They took twenty-three of our own for slaves. A few outsiders."
"You were lucky, then." He remarked and they were. There were places that no single soul the marauders did not take as booty survived their attack.
"If you call it that." A man said bitterly. "Sorcerer drove them off before they could finish."
"Ah. Interesting. And where might this sorcerer be?"
The lot of them exchanged wary glances. "He's not much for small talk." The old woman warned. "Right touchy, in fact."
Schneider lifted a brow expectantly. "Where?"
"Either the harbor, or the shore. Not quite right in the head, if you ask me."
"Really? Why do you say that?"
"Took his woman, they did. He couldn't get her back cause of the storm and all. We caught some of the pirates after their fellows took off. Nobody who saw what he did to them afterwards will ever sleep well again, let me tell you."
They told him other things, which made him lift his brows in surprise, then frown in displeasure. When he'd heard enough, he spurred his horse towards the pier. It was a wreckage of half sunken vessels, a sea of blackened masts sticking up from the greenish water like cattails from a bog. One ship remained floating. Not a fishing vessel but a sleek sea going ship of unusual design. It had a long curving bow, and two masts instead of one. The taller of the two had been toppled and a replacement was being hauled into position. There was nothing else on the docks of interest, so he went southward towards the beach beyond the village.
Not far from the outskirts of town he saw a figure pacing at the edge of the surf. Two small boys sat half in a clump of marsh grass where the trail split away from the beach watching.
"What are you doing?" Schneider reined up beside the two young observers. The dirty faces looked up at him.
"Just watching him. To see if he does anythin' unnatural again. He's a witch, y'know?"
"Sorcerer." Schneider corrected them. "We get cranky when people call us witches."
Their eyes widened. He gave them a theatrical glower. "Stop being nosy, it can get you in trouble. Go on home." He waved a hand at them and they scampered back towards the town.
He slipped off of his horse, leaving the reins dangling so it could pull at the tough grasses and walked down the slope onto the sandy beach. His boots dug into the soft sand, hardly making any noise at all. Kall-Su wouldn't have noticed if they had, his gaze focused with maniacal intensity towards the vast watery horizon. Every time the surf washed up, it churned around his boots.
Schneider stood for a moment, a few yards behind him, observing. "What exactly are you looking for?" he inquired finally.
Kall-Su whirled, glaring. Then his eyes widened and he gaped in surprise. "What are you ---?"
"Oh, just in the neighborhood. You got your magic back."
"I --" Large blue eyes blinked, still a little flabbergasted at Schneider's presence.
"You know --" Schneider stared down at Kall's soaked boots. "--You're standing in the water."
"DS --" he took a desperate step forward. "--They took her. I wasn't here and they attacked the village. By the time I got here it was all in flames and she was gone and there was somebody on the ships with some type of ocean based magic -- I didn't know there was such a thing -- I couldn't get past the storm. Not all my powers are working like they should yet -- and the old man is dead -- and he was fixing them ---"
Schneider stepped forward and firmly grasped Kall-Su's shoulders, giving him just a little bit of a shake to stop the babbling. Kall did not usually babble. Kall was usually considerably more composed than he was at this moment. The pupils of his eyes were dilated to the point that the black was almost more predominant than the crystal blue.
"Get a grip, Kall."
"You don't understand. They took Lily. Slavers took Lily. I won't let her be made a slave again. I promised. I promised!" He twisted out of Schneider's hands.
"I recall hearing something like that. I stopped by the docks before coming out here. I heard a curious thing. I heard you're making them repair that pirate ship."
"I'm going after her." Kall said bluntly.
Schneider folded his hands behind him and kicked aimlessly at the sand. "Ah. I see. You sail now?"
"There are sailors here who lost family that are eager to chase them down."
"Well, that's well and good. How the hell do you track a ship in the ocean, you moron?"
Kall lifted his chin and glared. "There were survivors among the pirates. They volunteered the information. Eventually. I left a few alive that will help track them down. All the way to their home port, if need be."
"And where did they suggest such a place might be?"
Kall's eyes flickered away, slight uncertainty crossing them. "They called it the Blood Coast. West of here."
"How far west?"
"I don't know." Kall snapped. "I don't care."
"Do you recall the last time you got on a ship? How long was it before you were puking up your guts over the rail? You suck at sailing, Kall. Royally suck. Its not even your fault. Even I don't do well once you get too far out from land. Its a magic -- deep water thing. They clash or something. If you'd stop and think for moment, you'd realize you'd probably get so sick that when your crew changes their minds about this stupid notion of chasing down pirates, they'll just toss you overboard and you won't be able to do a thing about it. Then I'll have to avenge you and its really boring killing a bunch of common sailors."
"Stop and think?" he hissed, eyes flashing dangerously. "Since when do know anything about stopping and thinking? Don't presume to tell me what I can and cannot do. I don't want or need your advice or your help, so go back to wherever you came from and leave me alone."
Schneider rolled his eyes at Kall-Su's uncharacteristic passion. "I don't see why you're getting all worked up about that little bit of fluff. She's not worth it."
Something cold and unforgiving slammed into him. He found himself sprawled in the sand, blinking stars out of his eyes. There was a little bit of blood trickling down his lip where he'd bitten his tongue at the impact.
"Go to hell." Kall's voice was as cold as his wintry north, then he stalked away.
Schneider fingered the blood on his mouth, looked at the crimson in amazement, then licked his finger clean and healed the wound. He ought to go and pay Kall back for that little surprise attack, but then, Kall was clearly not rational, and clearly intent on doing something foolish. Yoko, he thought, would be entirely proud of him for not flying off after Kall and force feeding reason into him. Instead he got up, dusted the sand off his trousers, and went to get his horse, for a more leisurely ride back to town.
The ship sitting at dock wasn't ready to go anywhere yet. He had more than enough time to pound sense into Kall's head. Whether Kall wanted to have it there or not.