Schneider hovered over the dusk shadowed desert, shielded heavily with a casual expenditure of power, watching the movement of tiny figures on the ground. A good many tiny figures that scurried about the sprawling camp of the army that followed the Black March. Thousands. Ramlah's followers had blossomed -- the devoted nomads of the desert, the fanatics that dwelled on the outskirts of this arid, dry civilization. He'd recruited some by force, according to Kall-Su. Others had flocked to his banner like he was a god come to earth.
Fools. There were no gods on earth. The gods didn't care enough about pitiful mortal lives to waste their time. He wasn't quite certain just what Ramlah and his elite were.
Demons. Perhaps. Once mortal men granted immortal power by some entity beyond Schneider's experience. More likely. A bit of both. Most certainly. Whatever they were, they would fall. One way or another, they would fall. And Ramlah himself - - he would fall by Schneider's hand.
He cast an ear out for Kall-Su. Could hardly find him at all, the buzz of energy from the camp below was so strong - - but there, in the distance he could sense the familiar humm of Kall-Su's unique power. Building. Slowly building as energy was gathered and crafted and skillfully put to use. Kall had always been the craftsman in his magical workings. Subtle and intricate and so damned brilliant that he could take a body by surprise without a body ever knowing he'd begun to work at it. Lethal when he wanted to be. He damn well hoped he'd healed enough to pull this off. Kall seemed to think so and Kall was so very seldom rash in his estimations. Except when it came to that damnable girl. Schneider sniffed in disdain, narrowing eyes gone indigo with anticipation.
Beneath him to be jealous over a twit of a mortal girl that he'd barely exchanged words with. Beneath him to hate a creature that had perhaps thirty - forty mortal years left her before age ate her up and stole her from eternally young Kall-Su. But then again, Schneider had never been particularly noble. He'd never striven to hold to the unspoken laws of gallantry. If he could have struck the girl down without Kall or Yoko finding out, he would have without hesitation. He rather hoped she'd already been a victim of the March. Wouldn't that be sweet to blame Ramlah for her demise and have Kall seek solace in him as a balm for his grief.
Those thoughts sustained him for a while, took his mind off the movements below. The world growing darker, the sun disappearing over a distant horizon and taking the last of the orange light of its demise with it. That time between sunset and moonrise threw the desert under a blanket of gloom. He waited patiently for his signal. For that elusive tickle at his mind that would be Kall-Su telling him that all at his end was in order and ready to be released.
There. That delicate, cool touch at the edges of his mind. He smiled and descended.
They came in droves, near the fertile lands of the tributary. The larger one's he summoned came trailed by smaller, wild elementals, curious of this place and the power that had snared their stronger brethren. He hovered over the tributary, closer to the widening mouth of it that emptied into the sea than the Nile which fed it, eyes closed in concentration, thoughts flying out in a dozen directions, like the conductor of some large and varied orchestra.
Deep. Deep. He needed them to find the deep water first. The underground river that snaked beneath the one on the surface. Needed them to infest the liquid with their cold. To turn it gleefully turn it solid all down the long length of its path. It was not so noisy a task at first, the mere freezing of water. The elementals were silent in their work and diligent under his command. The underground river froze, yard by yard by yard without Kall-Su expanding anything more than the will to control the elementals. It wasn't until the earth began to protest at the expansion of ice that he signaled Schneider and began to test the limits of his own magics.
"Ramlah!!! I know you're hiding here abouts - - come out and face me like a man, instead of the sniveling sand rat I know you are!"
Oh, they didn't like that at all. He'd sat down in the midst of the tents, and began strolling through their camp like it was one of his own, bellowing out his demands for the lot of them to hear. A brown faced desert dog came screaming at him in outrage of his sacrilege, curved sword raised, a half dozen of his brothers at his back. Schneider didn't even glance his way. Merely waved a finger and cut the lot of them down, showering the sand with blood and boiling chunks of flesh. A great cry of rage went up then, but they still cleared a path for him to walk, even though one or two of them still stupidly tried his patience until more worthy opponents hustled out to attend him.
Two of the March, he was certain. Hastily donned armor, ridiculous ominous helmets. They had up shields and were buzzing with power.
He smiled at them, not armored at all save for a particularly interesting set of silver bracers that the little guide, Abu had found him, and a curved sword that Amir had in the treasure room of his ship. Other than that he was comfortable in loose black silk robes, his head bare of anything but the fluttering veil of his hair.
"Do you really want to die, right now?" he asked. "I can accommodate. It's no problem. Now or later makes no difference to me. It can be later if you take me to Ramlah. Or I can send you back to whatever dark pit you crawled out of now and find him myself." He thought himself particularly kind, offering the choice. He really was getting soft, to be so tactful. All Yoko's fault.
There was a crowd gathering, a great swelling mass of bristling nomad warriors, the majority of which were mere mortal flesh, the occasional one being of a more magic nature and a handful of the undead minions of the Black March. If he called down one of his more nasty spells now, he could take out a good deal of Ramlah's accumulated army. It would take considerably less effort than a good Sartor spell.
A shifting in the crowd. A sudden, overwhelming presence of - - power. It made the sand under his boots almost crawl in response. Definitely, definitely a man in touch with the desert. Or was it all earth magics? Earth magic and air, to create the storms he did.
And there he was. The enemy. Like Schneider, he'd not bothered with armor. He seemed all too human, dark skinned and dark haired with his trim little beard and his gold earrings.
"You are supposed to be dead." A curious observation.
"Humm. You laid hands to something that belongs to me."
"Did I, foreign devil?"
"As a matter of honor, I'd avenge the trespass. If you possess any, that is?"
A murmur of anger at the insult. It wouldn't have bothered him in the least. His enemies had never accused him of being particularly honorable. One could only hope Ramlah was, or this would turn out to be a difficult fight.
"You are bold, to come alone into the depths of my power."
Schneider shrugged. "You pissed me off."
"And is this - thing - of yours I trespassed against, intact?"
Schneider tilted his head. "What difference does it make to you?"
"Because, when you are dead, I would take out my vengeance upon he who broke vows to me."
"When I'm dead? You're presumptuous, aren't you?"
"You waste my breath. Once already, I've defeated you."
"No." Schneider pulled his lips back in a humorless smile, irritated at the reminder. "Not by yourself. You had help. You're not man enough to have done it by yourself."
Ramlah's jaw twitched. His black eyes were like chips of onyx. Not a creature used to such insult. There were swords drawn all about, the sound of metal clearing leather a sinuous rustle on the wind.
"Think you can do it by yourself, or are you too much of a coward to try?"
That was it. The air crackled with power, the sand shifted underfoot, making mortal men cry out and scramble backwards. Ramlah cried out something unintelligible and the desert reared up, spilling men and tents alike in its efforts to smite Schneider.
Schneider shielded. Took the air. Turned silica sand to molten glass with a handy little Venom spell he'd been toying with during the initial attempt at conversation. Ramlah disappeared. The majority of the March did in the resulting swirl of sand and dust and chaotic power. Mere human men died.
A lightening-like energy materialized out of the storm and hit his shields, dissipating around the edges. A few strands of his hair began to fly up from the electricity that had leaked past the barrier of his shields. He laughed and dove into the storm, searching out his enemy.
The tributary was a frozen trail through the rocky land it traversed. It was a dim glimmer of glass in the last dregs of light. Kall-Su felt the earth shiver and groan in protest. Felt the disruption through the link he held with the elementals under his control; through the magics he was subtly beginning to employ to widen the gap. Found all those jagged fractures and followed them, searching out the weakest ones, the most integral ones.
In the distance he was vaguely aware of conflict. Of great brewing power that bled into the eather like blood from a wound. If he'd concentrated, he could have picked out the individual strikes - - the differences between the powers that engaged in that monumental battle. The earth shook once and it was due to no fault of his. One could only imagine the extent of magics being utilized.
Gods. Gods. He hadn't much time. How long Schneider could keep up this most worthy distraction, he did not know. But not long if the whole of the March rose up against him.
Kall-Su found a great winding fissure. An ancient one that ran deep in the bedrock and was only now beginning to feel the strain of the torn earth. Only now beginning to stretch and part as the elementals worked their way upon the narrow stream of water that ran its width and breadth.
It creaked and Kall-Su gathered power to lend to its rending. Chanted the spell of his devising that would create forces to rip it asunder and backed it with all the power at his command. It was more power than he'd channeled in a very long time. Not since before Angelo had crippled him. It hurt, doing very much the same thing to the pathways that routed his magics as he was doing to the age old fissures networking through the bedrock below. It built up inside his head like a fist pounding from the inside, trying to bash its way out.
The first release of power made the earth shake. He could hear the bone deep rumble as stone shattered and the earth ripped. It wasn't enough though. It needed repeating until the thin fabric of land that held the ocean at bay was decimated.
Past the burning pain in his head he began to regather energies for one last concerted effort.
He didn't even see it coming out of the swirling mass of sand. A fist of incapacitating power that smashed him into the desert, shields and all, drove him down into the earth and pressed him there with suffocating strength. His shields faltered against the tremendous outpouring of energy and for a moment he exerted power to keep them up, involuntarily cringing against being buried once again in the endless sand. Then he got his wits about him, snarled at himself for that flickering moment of panic and let the shields go.
Just let them go and took the brunt of the grinding impact against his own body for the scant seconds it took for him to summon the reserves for a spell. Sand and earth and rock exploded outwards in a great, deafening boom. The force of the expulsion cleared the air for a moment of the sand storm Ramlah had summoned. It clearly showed a desert riddled with the signs of high combat. Craters and blackened pits decorated the ground. The sky was black with smoke, the air rife with that indelible scent of spent magics.
Schneider healed himself with a thought, wiped sand dusted hair from his eyes and searched the area for his enemy.
"Where are you at?" he cried, levitating out of the crater. "Not going so well when its just between you and me, is it? Not that I thought any differently, me being who I am and you being a dusty bag of resurrected bones."
The sand flared up at him like a fist and in its midst was a human form. Ramlah hit him, hurtling the both of them into the sand, Ramlah's fists unstoppable harpoons that drove into his flesh. Schneider cursed, driven into the desert again, the incredible pain of hands and nails tearing through his sides making him loose concentration. He felt the invasiveness of the spell. Felt Ramlah trying to turn his organs into sand, to shrivel him like some dried corpse ravaged by the desert. It hurt like hell.
"Get the - - fuck - - off - - " he roared, spitting blood and Ramlah laughed, plunging his hands deeper, until his elbows were red with Schneider's blood.
Schneider screamed and called the lightening down to himself. The desert shook with the strikes, bolt after bolt that pelted their bodies, until Ramlah's cry joined his and the master of the black march shoved himself away, almost glowing with the storm energy, his clothes blacked, his eyes steaming from the heat.
Schneider took skyward, momentarily on the defensive, hands over the gaping wounds in his sides, blood tears streaking his cheeks. He screamed again, this time in fury, taking only the briefest time to heal the worst of it before mouthing the words of the most destructive spell in his arsenal.
When it hit the earth the air turned black. The sandstorm was swept away and all the small craters were dwarfed by the destruction. Those of Ramlah's army that had not long fled the area were eaten up by the unforgiving energies.
When it settled there was silence. Not even the swirling hollow whistle of the wind. He hovered two hundred feet in the air, hard breathing - - bleeding - - rather thinking they didn't need Kall-Su's rush of ocean after all. Rather thinking he should have known all along that he was all that was needed to finish the job. Whatever demon of insecurity that had possessed him was dwindling fast. He was contemplating going after the rest of the March when the desert began to quake.
He lifted one dark brow and squinted into the rising cloud of sand and dust.
Kall-Su felt the ancient lattice work of rock under the mouth of the tributary feeding out into the Red Sea give way. It crumbled like so much brittle ash under his battering magics and the ocean, held back no more rushed in, filling the rocky channel he had prepared for it.
His head was liken to split from the exertion, but he had one more damn to break. One more fragile fault line that lay deep under the surface to rupture that would shift the way the river lay, that would open up a wider pathway and let the water rush in not like the tides slow approach, but like a tidal wave of destruction.
It was quite literally more than he had to give, that shattering of a isthmus. But he gave it and sacrificed the existence's of a dozen elementals in the working of it. The invasion of the sea - - was impressive. It caught him up in its advance and battered weakened shields as if it had a personal score to settle. Of course it did. The sea and himself had ever been at odds and it resented his attempt to control it. There was no dry ground anymore. The sea ate away at the natural sides of the tributary, tumbling shores and rocky canyons. The rush of it was overwhelming. It pulled at him, wanting him lost within its churning mass. He hadn't the power anymore to deny it. He'd used it all up, breaking through scar tissue in his efforts, so that his mind bled from miss-use.
But from somewhere he felt an influence more in tune with the nature of the ocean insinuate itself. Felt himself withdrawn from the melee, from the wash of cold water and crushing natural power. In the haze of red pain behind his eyes, he realized it was the brother of the sea working his own magic. He'd almost forgotten in his efforts. Almost forgotten Schneider who was playing distraction miles away and who would find himself in the path of the devastation that Kall-Su had unleashed.
At first he thought it was an elemental, risen from the desert - - created out of the desert - - then he caught the familiar scent of its essence and came to the more chilling realization that it was Ramlah himself at the core of the thing. Ramlah himself who was the heart and the mind of the monstrosity that rose up out of the sands like some oversized desert golom.
The sand in the air cleaved to it, making it larger and larger as the storm was consumed. Vaguely man shaped torso that towered some two hundred feet into the air. Arms that were almost half that in length, a lower body that looked like nothing so much as the solid funnel of a sand based twister that ate up everything in its path. Far below the scattered bulk of Ramlah's army scattered and those that did not flee fast enough were swept up into the magnetic pull of the monster of Ramlah's creation, their flesh and blood adding to its power.
He'd have thought such a thing would be sluggish and inept. Anything the size of one of the ancient's skyscrapers should reasonably be. Of course it wasn't. His luck wasn't running that good of late. The arm that slashed out, trailing sand and dust in its wake was fast as a striking snake. It smashed into him, hovering in the air just above its head, like the avenging fist of some irate god. He plummeted into the hard packed earth, creating yet another respectable furrow. Barely had the time to shake off the moment of disorientation before the churning foot of Ramlah's incarnation came for him. He cursed and sent twin bolts of explosive energy at it, which did exactly nothing save scatter sand that immediately surged back to merge with the whole.
"Fuck!!" he screamed in frustration and shot backwards, gaining altitude as he went, trying to keep out of the reach of those damned annoying fists. He wove a zig zag course around it, calling down various spells as he did, striking this part of it and that in his efforts to glean a weak point. Enough high voltage lightening strikes hit the head of it to make the pits where its eyes ought to be glow red. But not to slow it down. Which meant the torso held the weak point, but the torso was damned thick and every time he hit it with a spell, the wound he created refilled.
It caught him once when he had to pause to gather energy for a particularly lethal energy magic. Just snatched him out of the air in its giant, sand paper rough fist and tried to crush the life out of him. Bones broke and skin grated raw before he had the concentration to spare for a shield, but by that time his spell had been cast and he blew the arm off up to the shoulder. He healed even as it did. But he knew that chipping away at the outside of the thing was a loosing battle. He'd exhaust every spell he had in his arsenal and the monster would still have the desert to fuel it. It was a matter of getting to the heart of the thing.
So he did just that. Drove past the grasping fingers and into the churning mass of its chest. It was an unexpected tactic. He found the source that fed the fiend unprepared for his appearance. He paid Ramlah back for his earlier insult and drove his sand abrased fingers into the sockets of his closed eyes.
Outside the monster roared. Even miles away it sounded like the wailing of the most devastating of desert storms. The sand fell away and two human forms plummeted to the earth; Schneider stunned and raw from the harsh caress of the sand, Ramlah blind and clutching at the bloody wounds on his face.
"Not so easy by yourself - - is it?" Schneider gasped, rolling to his side. God, but he hurt. He actually hurt despite the healing power that came so reflexively to him. He was wasted mentally. Wrung almost dry. One could only hope Ramlah was in similar straits. One refused to imagine that he wasn't.
Perhaps so from the sounds he made. Angry or pitiful - - hard to tell with the howling of the wind. He didn't immediately jump up and he didn't immediately heal. Not as quickly as Schneider could have at any rate. But then again, Schneider wasn't bouncing back as smoothly as usual. He wasn't quite leaping up to finish this battle.
A moment. He thought, gathering stamina. Give me a moment and I will.
They didn't grant him that of course. He felt the stigma of their presence before he saw their shadows at the edge of the crater he and Ramlah lay within. The Black March, helmed and armored upon their immortal steeds. A gathering of power that was very soon to be unleashed upon him. He wiped blood out of his eyes and glared up, wondering if he could gather the energy to get one last killing strike in at Ramlah before they attacked him.
He never got the chance to find out. The earth rumbled. It might have been rumbling for a while now, but no one had had the attention to spare it. With it came a great, breaking wind that did not smell of sand and dust. At the high point of the great valley where the jagged horizon met the sky and hid the lusher valley of the Nile a great wave of darkness crested and washed over, crashing through earth and rock in its passage, creating a wider and wider gap for it to invade the lowland upon which Ramlah's followers were camped.
The sea had come calling and the Black March had no defense against the powers of the ocean.