There was a settlement so small it hardly deserved the name village. Five low buildings that had seen better centuries, a hard packed road running between them, a small fenced in area behind one where a single swaybacked donkey stood dozing in the shade cast by the building. A few chickens pecked industriously at the barren earth. There seemed to be no people. The door to one building stood open, swinging idly on its hinges. Perhaps the human folk had fled, having heard tales of the horror that seeped up the river towards them. Wise people.
He dismounted and led his horse to the small well. They'd poisoned the water when they'd left. He sensed that even before he'd drawn the bucket all the way to the surface. He could feel the taint in it.
He leeched the poison away with a murmured spell and drank long from the luke warm liquid. He tipped the rest of it over his head, reveling in the momentary wetness, then drew up a second bucket for the horse. Then as an afterthought drew up a third and filled the small trough in the paddock for the old donkey.
He was tired. He'd evaded pursuit all the night long with subtle spells of invisibility, both physical and magical. The heat exhausted him by far more than any mental effort he was putting forth. The flight did. He went inside the buildings looking for foodstuff, but doubting seriously anything edible had been left behind. There was dried grass for the horse in the paddock, and he gave it a portion to much on while he sat in the shade of a building and tried to ignore the heat and the utter dryness of the air.
He hadn't had the time to concoct a healing spell on himself, or the patience. Healing was his weak point. Healing one's self was harder by far than performing the same act upon another. His inherent magics might reflexively repair critical, life-threatening damage, but they were blissfully ignorant about minor things. Like bruises and abrasions that agitated him to no ends, that were made more annoying by the heat and the sand that insinuated itself inside of robes. Like the sore spots from an attack that he had been attempting not to think about, but kept creeping back into his mind anyway.
He put a hand over his eyes in an attempt to block out unwelcome images. His head hurt from the heat. His head had been hurting for quite some time now. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like not to have a stabbing pain behind his eyes. He shut them, and between his hand and the thin veil of his eyelids, some of the harsh sunlight was averted.
The sound of the horse rustling in the dry grasses lulled him into a sort of semi-doze. He didn't come out of it fully until the rattling of distant tack seeped through his lethargic senses. He slowly lifted his head, tenting his palm over his eyes to squint into the sun. Not to distant was a group of riders, stirring up dust in their wake. Men on horseback and a good number of them. He felt the tell tale trace of magic in their midst. The insidious scent of a tracking spell. He'd let his guard down when he'd dozed. For a disoriented moment his mind wondered, debating how long he'd sat there asleep. It could not have been that long. Yet his moment of weakness had allowed this band of mortal men and their mortal shaman to track him down. Shameful. He was getting sloppy. He continued to sit there, contemplating the motives of this band that pursued him. Wondering if they meant to simply kill him or take him back to Ramlah. If they were following Ramlah's orders then it surely must be the latter. Even if Ramlah decided to take his life, the master of the March would most certainly wish that pleasure for himself.
Which meant, of course, than men were going to die here today. Truth be told, he rather relished the thought. Truth be told, his frame of mind was ripe for a little butchery.
He rose, dusting off his hands carefully, straightening his robes as if he were about to make some formal appearance. For mere mortals he needn't even waste that much power. The shaman in their midst was a minor annoyance.
He let them almost reach the border of the scant little village. Stood there quietly in the shadow of his building while his horse and the donkey raised their heads in curiosity of the newly arrived creatures. Very slowly, he smiled and whispered a word between his curving lips.
The first line of men fairly exploded in their saddles. Blood gysered as one, then the next, then the next imploded. A simple offensive magic. They had no defense against it. The survivors screamed and brandished swords, then died writhing in pain as their insides froze between one breath and the next. When the desert offered no water to fuel his ice magics, then he had to suffice with what a man's body offered.
The shaman cast a spell at him and he brushed it aside like it was a sluggish fly. The man's shields were nothing and Kall-Su ripped them apart with ease and finished him much the same way he'd finished the others. Blood soaked the ground. He felt giddy with the shedding of it. Rational was a foreign, unwelcome thing.
And then something sparked in the distance. Something more powerful than the magic of the shaman who he had just destroyed. Something drawn by the scent of his magic. Something that came with all the speed that the desert could lend it.
The March.
Reason came back like a slap in the face. He shifted and moved out of the shade, treading on blood soaked dirt, pushing his way past spooked horses, to better see the cloud of sand that rolled towards him.
A great deal of power. But not an unbelievable amount. Not Ramlah. But certainly Ramlah's subordinates. Certainly one or more of the Black March.
He felt the heady pull of their earth magics and shivered, knowing that simple magics were not going to win the day against them. Knowing that the only magics he possessed that would give him an advantage over them were his ice based ones and the ice based elementals at his command.
He'd ridden far enough away from the river and fresh water in abundance that he doubted any of them would willingly come at his summons. Which meant he would have to force the issue. Which meant that not only would he have to battle the March, he'd have to match wills with an angry, reluctant elemental as well. The elemental would have reason to be reluctant, any but the most powerful would probably whither and die in the arid heat. He might very well waste useful tools in this endeavor. It was better than the alternative by far.
Schneider stood at the river's edge, in the midst of following the swaying walk of a young, barefoot girl as she carried the morning's purchases from the scant market back to whatever cubby hole she'd acquired for herself in the teaming collection of survivors this town had become. She drew his attention from the harbor and the bobbing vessels moored there. The largest one was the seasnake's ship. Amir was somewhere along the dock, haggling over supplies, doing what merchants and pirates were best at; getting the best deal possible for his merchandise.
Schneider still wasn't certain he didn't want to melt the man's bones. The idea of an alliance didn't sit well. The brother of the sea was talking as if such a pact were already written in blood.
He'd sent Abu to find him some decent wine. He missed the djinni in that respect, more than any other. The food she created had been of the highest quality. It was just as well though, he supposed. Yoko would have never let him keep her.
"My lord, look what I found." Abu cut in-between Schneider's view of the young girl. He had two skins hanging over one shoulder and a burlap sack of something else over the other. "I found a wonderful bargain, my lord, in the market --"
Schneider was not interested in the haggling of merchants and thieves. He opened his mouth to inform Abu of this when something tingled in the back of his mind. Chill bumps rose on the backs of his hands in response to the faint flavor of strong magics being used. Up river to the west was where the feeling originated. He waved a sharp hand at the little guide to shut him up and the little man stood there with his mouth open while Schneider stared sightlessly northwest.
It was no small magic he sensed. It was a goodly distance away and it still managed to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. It smacked of familiarity and he narrowed his eyes in sudden, focused concentration. He lifted an arm and pointed in the direction whence it came.
"What lies that way?"
"That way? Why, nothing. Nothing of consequence at any rate. Not for many hundreds of miles at least. Why?"
Schneider didn't bother to answer. Even if he were wrong about the source, the magic itself was intriguing enough to warrant his attention.
To the utter dismay of the people around him on the docks, he called the winds and rose into the air.
There was a rent in the ground wide enough to swallow a horse that led a jagged course from the small well out into the drylands where the March had come. There were three of them. Faceless and imposing in their great helms and their dark armor.
One of them was down, shattered by the dying efforts of a not inconsiderable ice elemental that had reluctantly come at Kall-Su's insistence. It had rent the air with its passing, and for a brief moment in time, this small section of desert had turned frigid and cold, and frost had covered the sand like a fine dusting of diamonds. Then the desert had overwhelmed it and it had melted away as if it had never been there. It had taken a member of the march with it though. One enemy in exchange for a valued elemental servant. Kall was not impressed, nor pleased with the bargain. He'd summoned every bit of his own ice based magic to draw upon the water feeding the deep well and use it for his own purposes. It had split the earth asunder when it froze, an unexpected side effect that nonetheless had thrown his foes off their balance. They had hardly expected the chasm to open under the hooves of their horses. One of them had gone done into it even as spears of ice had knifed upwards, piercing his body. He'd obviously not been shielding against physical attacks. It still didn't kill him. He was still active enough to send a devastating rush of impact magic against Kall-Su. The buildings behind him shattered, broken into rubble by the force of the spell. Kall's shields barely withstood it. He staggered under it, holding out both hands to reinforce his protection. The earth erupted under him as the other one, the one that had escaped the chasm cast an earth based magic at him.
Kall launched himself into the air to escape it, but the concussions seeped past his shield and vibrated into his body. Something shattered in his leg. The sudden, intense pain shocked him into a moment of incoherency. All he could do for a handful of heartbeats was stare down at bone protruding from flesh and cloth and blood spurting like it was frantic to escape his body. He wasn't quite certain what had hit him.
They hit him again with the same spell, encouraged that it had breached his shields. He screamed this time and went down, loosing all control of his flight spell, loosing control of reason as his right arm shattered and ribs splintered. He tasted blood this time. A great deal of blood from a no doubt pierced lung.
Panic took over and he gathered power he was hardly aware of and threw a simple concussive spell. It was backed by enough raw and desperate power to widen the chasm where it hit by twenty body lengths and finally break the magical shields of the one he'd injured with the ice spears. That one shattered more wholly in body than both their spells had done to Kall. There were pieces of armor and flesh scattered with the rocky debris. He was rather surprised, through the throb of his own agony, that he'd managed that much power. He hadn't thrown a spell with that much backing since before the Prophet had gotten to him and mucked about with the internal channels of his magic. Interesting that sheer desperation for his own life had brought it out. But then again, his most powerful magics always had come of their own accord, when he was beyond the capacity of summoning them on his own behalf.
There was one left and Kall-Su sprawled in the uneven earth wondering if he had it in him to call up one more burst of power like the last one. He did not think he had the concentration left him, what with the pain screaming through his body, to force an elemental here against its will.
"Others will follow, Sahir bil-Jaleed. Perhaps even our dread lord will be among them. You will die slowly for what you have done." The helmed warrior reined in his dancing mount, twenty yards away, shields so thick Kall could feel them where he sat. He said nothing, hardly in the mood for banter with his enemy. He was shaking. His body falling into shock. His arm was a useless thing at his side. His leg curved unnaturally under him. The pain was becoming curiously distant. He wiped a trail of blood off his lips and smiled.
"No." He disagreed. "I think I will not." He drew power in with every breath, calling upon the last of his own internal source of it, demanding it from the very air around him. One last spell that would wreck carnage blindly. It would surely rend him as well as his enemy, but that hardly mattered now, with others of the march on the way and himself injured beyond his ability to repair.
The helmed warrior hissed a word and the sand flared up around him, obscuring his body and the body of his horse. Kall blinked into the maelstrom, blinded as the air became thick with sand and dirt. He let his shields drop, needing that power as well to fuel his spell, and huddled, covering his head with his arm to keep the sand from his eyes and nose. It scoured exposed skin. Blood began to flow copiously. He screamed, mouthing the words of the spell, summoning a dark power that was not exactly elemental and not exactly not from a resting place that he'd always considered in the past best well enough alone.
Something dark sputtered to life and surged out of the void. Something evil and hungry that searched for the tiniest spark of life. The animals went first, weak and defenseless against it, and Kall had a moment's regret for the valiant animal that had brought him tirelessly across the desert in his flight. The helmed warrior's beast crumpled under him and he cried out in indignation, but scrambled to his feet, fighting off the grasp of the thing Kall had summoned. It swirled around him then retreated, as if the taste of his life was not acceptable to its palate. Kall cried out in frustration as it came for him, sensing his rich life and craving it.
Bad enough to die by a thing he'd summoned, but intolerable not to have his enemy consumed by it as well.
He saw it in the swirling sand before him. A hovering, all consuming darkness that vaguely formed the shape of a man. It reached out trailing fingers towards him and he hissed in annoyance and tried to turn its course back to the not to distant figure of his enemy.
You can't deny me, oh lord and master. The singsong vibrated in his head. It made his ears ring. I crave your sweet life. It bleeds into the earth anyway, so why not give it to me. It touched him and he flinched, going deathly cold at the brief contact.
"No. Take him first, then you can have me. My word."
He tastes of dry death warmed over. I'd rather have you.
"Do as I command. Ahkranal." He used its name, for names held power that no spell could match. It shuddered and hesitated.
No. You don't have the power left to command me. It finally said and descended.
And rather suddenly it wailed. Just wailed and cringed and withered in upon itself. It took Kall-Su a moment to separate the surge of power assaulting it from the other myriad magics swirling about with the sand and dust. It fled back into the place it had come with its incorporeal tail between its incorporeal legs. For a moment he thought the helmed warrior had done it, for that one was striding towards him with his long curved blade naked in his gauntleted hand. But that assumption proved to be wrong when the creature was quite thoroughly consumed by a ball of crackling energy that ate through its lowered shields and ate the armor off its body before dissolving the flesh from bones and leaving a rather untidy pile of char and melted metal in its wake.
Kall stared through watering eyes.
"Why do you insist on summoning things when you can't control them?"
He blinked past the tears and the grit, confused. He'd rather thought he hadn't died. Now he wasn't so certain.
"Did it kill me?" he murmured into his forearm, not quite feeling up to pushing himself up to turn and face what was most certainly a spirit come to guide him into the realm of the dead.
"Does it hurt?" The crunch of boots on the rubble and a sudden shade. He looked up at Schneider crouching over him.
"Yes.'
"Then you're not dead, idiot."
"Oh." He felt giddy, lightheaded. "But you are."
There was a pained sigh. A hand reached down and wiped a smear of blood from his temple. "Not this time. Look at this mess. You know I'm going to stop telling people I trained you if you can't make a better showing than this. Sloppy."
"Oh. You're alive?" he couldn't fathom it.
"What was that thing? That demon. It was damned hard to chase away."
"Ahkranal." Kall murmured, too dazed to withhold the name from Schneider. One never, ever shared the control of conquered demons or elementals with rival wizards.
"Well, he was a pain in the ass. Nasty too. Look at all the dead horses, you should be ashamed."
Kall blinked and shifted to see.
"I'm sorry." He murmured, utterly, truly contrite. "I wasn't thinking about the horses."
Schneider sighed again. "I wasn't serious."
"Oh. Are you really here?" he was only half convinced it wasn't an hallucination or a death dream.
"Tell you what. Don't worry about it, right now. Go to sleep."
Schneider waved a finger and Kall did. Immediately, deeply, completely.
Kall-Su was messed up in a major way. Schneider wasn't ready to deal with it here. Not in the aftermath of a rather loud, rather nasty magical conflict. If it had drawn him, it would draw others. He didn't want to hang around for the Black March to come and see what had happened. As much as the thought rankled, he wasn't ready to face Ramlah just yet. Especially not with a newly acquired Kall-Su in such dreadful condition.
It pissed him off to no ends. He looked around for a trace of enemy life to take the irritation out on, and found none. Kall had taken quite a few of them out. There were parts of bodies scattered all over. There was nothing left to do but retreat. He picked up Kall-Su and took the both of them into the air, shielding as he did, obliterating any trace of his power signature and Kall's from spying eyes.
It had taken him half an hour to get here, flying full out. He sped back at a little less that pace, his concentration on the shields slowing him a bit. Kall was bleeding quite lot, which was soaking Schneider's robes. He'd have to deal with that soon.
He sat down on Amir's ship, rather than the teaming harbor town. The sailors scattered, recognizing him and giving him ample room. He knew where he was heading. Down under the deck to the cabin with the nicest bunk on the ship. The captain's. The second mate made an effort to stop him and got battered aside like a puppet.
"Go complain to Amir." Schneider suggested and slammed the door in the man's bruised face. He laid Kall-Su down on Amir's neatly made bunk. Lifted aside bloody layers of robes to get to naked skin. More blood. More abrasions, more broken things. Bones, muscle, organs. He sifted through them, one by one, careful in his work. A thousand me might be destroyed with a quick flash of raging power, but it took concentration and deliberation to repair a single one's torn and shattered body. He was good at it. Quite amazingly good at the giving of life, considering how adept he was at the taking of it. He mended bones and flesh and organs and then searched for more minor afflictions. And found things that made him draw his brows in speculation, made him tighten his lips in growing wrath. Rather recently done things that had not been perpetrated in the heat of battle. Marks and hurts that were more personal in nature than a good, impersonal battle. He lifted cloth aside to see the fading traces of some of the outer ones. Burn marks on perfectly smooth skin here and there the trailing residue of a skillfully utilized blade; the imprint of teeth. The type of marks that gave pleasure to a certain sort of giver and pain and degradation to the receiver.
"Someone really needs to die." He murmured, chin in palm, jaw twitching in anger.
"You found him." The door opened unbidden and Amir stepped in, wise enough not to condemn Schneider's appropriation of his cabin.
"Yes." He agreed.
"And the Black March?"
He shrugged. "Short a few members, I think."
"His doing or yours?"
"Both. What do you want?"
"Are they close? Should we abandon this place?"
Another shrug. "Do what you wish. I would imagine it might be the wise choice."
Amir nodded. "I'll tell the folk in the town."
"Do that." Schneider merely wanted him gone. He had vengeance's to contemplate and he always did that best in solitude.
Kall-Su came awake bewildered and slightly nauseous. The sickness came from the swaying of his world, the disorientation from the fact that he woke at all, and the unfamiliarity of the place he found himself in.
"God." He murmured softly and pushed himself up. His body was whole. His skin bare when the light sheet slid off his shoulders.
He looked about and saw a small room with a small round window. The bunk was bolted against the wall, draped by curtains tied back to hooks in the wall. It was night beyond the window and the smell of water was strong. On a ship then. One of his least favorite places to be.
Shadow shifted at the head of the bed, movement half hidden by the fold of one of the bed curtains. He spun that way, defensively and saw a shimmer of pale hair in the shadows.
"Schneider?" his voice came out hoarse. Disbelieving. "Is it --you?"
"Hummm. Where you expecting someone else, Kall?"
"I felt you die. I felt you --- and then you were gone."
"No. You were wrong."
He couldn't think. He couldn't catch a proper breath. His throat wanted to constrict and cut off all intake of air. "What -- happened?" he hated the choked sound of his own voice when Schneider sounded so calm and so cold. As if he were perturbed at him.
Schneider moved, shifted out of his chair to sit on the edge of the bed. "It hardly matters. Are you happy to see me alive and well."
Kall-Su stared, at a loss, floundering and losing the battle to keep his wits about him. He nodded mutely, beyond words to express just how happy. Just how much hurt the notion of Schneider's death had dealt him. How much hopelessness that death had plunged him into.
Schneider opened his arms. An invitation. A peace offering of sorts, like he'd used to do when Kall was very young and they'd had a spat. Kall had always come out on the loosing end of such arguments. Had always been hurt by them and more times than not Schneider had been oblivious to that hurt. But sometimes, he'd offered that scrap of affection that had always been just enough to keep Kall begging for more.
He felt fifteen now. And hurt and bruised and lost. He flung himself into that embrace, pressing his face into the cloth at Schneider's shoulder, into that cloud soft hair that smelled of native spices and incense. The arms came around him, a firm embrace. A hand stroked his hair, his back. It was comfort that he'd dared not hope for and he fought to hold back unbidden tears. He could not express the words for what he felt. He hardly knew what it was even without the benefit of words. Relief, gratitude, adoration, worship -- love. They'd all applied at one time or another.
"He touched you." Schneider's soft voice in his ear. Not a question.
Kall stiffened and the arms holding him tightened, refusing to let him go. Refusing to give him distance.
"What?"
"Ramlah. His mark is on you. The stench of his power clings to you. It was inside you. He was."
He shuddered, vision tunneling in his panic. "It was a spell. A binding. A blood oath." He babbled. He didn't want to go into the other.
"I know. I erased what was left of it. You gave him your oath?"
"My choices were extremely limited" he said in defense, uneasy at the tone in Schneider's voice and the underlying buzz of violent power that seethed around him. "I thought you were dead."
"So you gave oath to my killer?"
Kall pushed for release, wanting to see what expression Schneider wore. Wary now and uncertain of his standing. The things that offended Schneider were not always reasonable things. Schneider let him go and he shifted backwards, pulling the sheet with him. He was quite unclothed without it.
"It seemed the thing to do. I had more than my own life to think about."
"Ah. The girl."
"Yes." He agreed.
"I suppose you thought her a good enough reason to abandon me."
Kall blinked, appalled at the accusation. "No!" he denied it. "And no again! Are you deaf? I said I thought you dead. I felt you die as surely as I've ever felt a thing cease to be."
"I didn't cease to be -- you put things so tactfully -- I was swallowed up by the damn djinni's bottle. And I sat in that bottle for god knows how long waiting for someone to let me out and in the end it was your traitorous little guide who did it."
"Well, let me assure you," Kall hissed, irritated now himself. "That I would have gladly changed places with you."
"Hummm. I imagine you would. What did he do to you?"
Back to that again. It swallowed Kall-Su's agitation and replaced it with dread. "Nothing. He did nothing."
"Really? There are marks on you." Schneider leaned forward, his hand snaking out and trailing across Kall-Su's hip, pushing the sheet away from his flank enough to bare the skin. "He rather had a taste for you, from the mark of teeth."
God. He looked down to where Schneider's fingers rested, hardly knowing what to expect. He'd hardly had the time or inclination to inspect the range of his injuries when he'd woken in Ramlah's tent. Hardly thought of anything but escape at the time.
"I erased them. All of them. Shall I show you all the places?"
"No." he whispered, stricken.
"Was it willing?"
"No." Numbly. "It never is."
Schneider lifted a brow.
"He said -- he said he would find Lily. He said -- various other things and in the end -- I don't think I really cared what he might do -- as long as it did not involve me. So I broke my oath to him and my vow to protect her and ran."
"You broke no vow to her. At least none she won't forgive you for."
"If she's even alive."
"If." Schneider agreed. He lifted a hand to stroke Kall-Su's hair. There was something predatory and dangerous in his eyes. But it wasn't towards him. "Tell me what happened. From the start. Everything."
Kall shook his head. "There's no need ---"
"There is a need. I need to know. I need fuel for the fire, no? Supply it for me, Kall."