One of them slips past her and lurches toward the bow. Black leeches cling to its pallid skin, and the weeds boiling out of its stomach are almost long enough to touch its knees. The deck trembles as Mukuni roars and pounces, batting the wraith into the ship’s netting with a fierce metal paw. But then another comes at him, and then another, and another. He tears them down with his teeth and paws and sweeps them away with his powerful tail. And still they keep coming.
Something moves behind Salo, and he looks. A tikoloshe with white fire in its eyes has slipped through the opening in the netting above the bowsprit. Salo’s nostrils catch the unholy fetor wafting away from it, and he almost gags.
Tuk shouts his name in the background, but he barely hears the call. Without thinking, he fills his shards with essence and unleashes Storm craft into his surroundings, commanding the winds to obey him. But the magic curves away from the wraith, and the winds blow harmlessly around it, like it’s cocooned in a bubble of space where the laws of nature will not obey Salo. Its white-hot gaze glows brighter as it moves closer, and Salo could swear the thing smiles at him.
He’s not sure what comes over him—maybe he suddenly remembers that he has trained with spears and sticks before—but when the wraith gets close enough, he grips his witchwood staff with both hands and thrusts its bottom end with all his strength. He feels resistance, but the staff breaks into an eye socket and punches through something soft. The next thing he knows, he’s standing in front of a haze of white mist.
“Salo!” Tuk shouts somewhere behind him. “Salo, are you all right?”
Wide eyed and terrified, Salo turns around in time to see Tuk pay for his moment of lapsed concentration. The young man cries out in pain as a tikoloshe catches him in the right arm with a claw, ripping a long gash that instantly pearls blood. He retaliates with a decapitating move and lets out a string of curses.
“We’re not going to last much longer!” Ilapara shouts next to him. “There are too many of these damned things!”
Salo knows she’s right. He can see a myriad of torch-like eyes drifting in the mists, slowly closing in on the vessel. But how the devil is he supposed to use his new spell to fend them off? The most useful barrier he can design at a moment’s notice is nothing but a small and simple wafer-thin geometric shape, and that wouldn’t even work as a protective shield unless . . .
Unless . . .
“I’ve got an idea!” he shouts as inspiration hits him like a lightning bolt. “Hold on just a while longer!”
Neither Tuk nor Ilapara has enough breath to reply, occupied as they are with stemming the tide of tikoloshe. Salo sinks his mind into his staff and lenses himself into focus. His thoughts accelerate. He awakens his talisman, closing his eyes to better interface telepathically with its high-speed core. Then he begins to string ciphers together faster than he has ever done in his life.
35: Ilapara
Lake Zivatuanu
Ilapara had heard that facing a Primeval Spirit entailed an element of danger. She’d heard that many a mystic who set forth to commune with one never returned.
But she did not know that it would be this dangerous.
Her aerosteel spear is a streak of silver in the air around her. The speed in her bones is a reserve she has nearly depleted, and yet she keeps pushing herself, diverting all her body’s resources until the world closes in around her and all she can see and hear are the tikoloshe.
Tuksaad is a swiftly moving blur somewhere nearby. They have never fought together, but their bodies move in sync; he seems to know where she will strike, and she is able to read his cues even without looking at him. Tikoloshe fall to their blades one after the other.
But there is just no end to them.
She casts a fleeting glance at Salo and sees him standing in the dwindling pocket of safety they have carved for him, one hand wrapped tightly around his staff, the other raised. Magic is swirling away from the raised arm in a luminous grid, and the look on his face is pure concentration. Whatever you’re doing, Ilapara prays, do it quick.
She begins to tire. Her spear grows heavy in her hands. Its charm of Storm craft has all but expended itself, and the red sparks that sputter along the blade are now largely harmless. She mistimes a swing, loses her footing, and rights herself in time to see a claw slashing toward her face. Her reflexes give her enough speed to dodge, but she puts too much into it and winds up falling on her back, hitting her head hard on the deck.
“Ilapara!”
While the skies spin above her, a group of wraiths gathers to look down at her, like they know she’s finished. Her spear has rattled somewhere out of reach, so she is helpless as one of them raises its talons.
“Ilapara!”
I have given my all, she tells herself, bracing for what’s coming.
A storm of feathers erupts onto the deck from somewhere above, sending a score of tikoloshe flying off in a shock wave. It should blast her away, too, but all she feels is a light prickling all over her skin. Magic.
When she lifts her head to look into the heart of the feathers—ravens, she realizes—she glimpses the faint outline of a young woman wielding knives that pulse visibly with shadows. As she watches, one of those knives whirls away from the stranger’s hand and impales a tikoloshe across the deck right between its eye sockets. Another blade materializes in that same hand not a heartbeat later, and the stranger pivots to hew a second wraith’s skull in half. Pale beads and red steel glitter in the maelstrom as she spins from one tikoloshe to another almost faster than Ilapara can track her, leaving only a trail of dissipating mist.
An Asazi.
For a moment, Ilapara isn’t sure whether to be relieved or concerned. But she doesn’t let that paralyze her for too long; the Asazi has given them some breathing room, and that’s all that matters.
Drawing from a new fount of energy, Ilapara picks herself up from the deck and finds her spear before rejoining the battle with renewed zeal. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Tuk decapitating a wraith with his left blade. He looks pale now, and his right side is drenched in blood from a frightful wound, but he’s still fighting with the viciousness of a red mamba. The deck shudders as the totem roars behind him, his metal claws slicing left and right with enough force to snap tree trunks. She thrusts her spear into a grinning skull and is satisfied to see it crumble into mist. They fight and fight and fight some more, until Ilapara starts to feel like her limbs are coming out of their sockets.
Only as the tide of tikoloshe starts to ebb does she notice the change in her surroundings: a barrier has slowly taken shape around the waterbird, visible only because of the arcs of crimson lightning that briefly and repeatedly spread along sections of its surface in tessellated hexagons. Like the barrier was built one invisible hexagon at a time, upward from the bottom of the hull, bulging outward to encompass the wing structures, and then curving inward high above the deck. The hexagons are all about a foot in width and are visible only when currents of electricity throb down their edges.
By Ama, he’s casting a ward the size of a building.
She looks up just as the structure closes above them into a protective dome encompassing the entire vessel. It pulses regularly with currents that shimmer across its surface. A wraith caught outside claws at the ward and is instantly electrocuted, bursting into mist. More wraiths perish to the ward, sending off sparks of lightning every time they strike it.