Salo’s hand trembles as he lets Tuk pull him up to his feet. “My staff. I need my staff.”
“I’ll get it for you,” Ilapara says but stops before she goes too far. “Looks like Mukuni’s already bringing it.”
Indeed, the large cat pads over with the witchwood staff caught between his jaws. Salo could swear the cat’s getting more autonomous by the day.
“Maybe you want to get behind us, Salo.” Tuk’s eyes are now pitch black as they settle on something in the mists. Salo sees it, too, a formless shadow drifting over the waters.
While he accepts his staff from Mukuni and moves as Tuk commanded, Ilapara grips her spear with both hands, stretching her neck muscles. “Any idea what we’re facing here?”
“Not really,” Salo says. “But I think we have to survive it until the second sunrise.”
“You think, or you know?”
“It must be the test he needs to pass to prove himself worthy,” Tuk says while he tracks the moving shadow. He clicks his tongue in a typically Yerezi expression of frustration. “I can’t believe I missed your communion.”
“They’re here!” Salo shouts.
The first one appears on the aft deck. It coalesces from the white mists behind the vessel, nebulous at first but becoming more and more solid as it seeps onto the deck. Its skin is colorless, drawn taut over stringy limbs that mildly adhere to human proportions. Any pretense of humanity is further marred by the waterweeds mushrooming out of its bloated stomach and out of its head, as well as the fine gauze of white mist wafting around its form.
Salo has never seen such a creature before, but the fire that ignites in its empty eye sockets, bright as the white sun, is chillingly familiar. And there’s no denying the Black magic emanating from it.
A tikoloshe, he realizes. Different in appearance from the ones that attacked his kraal—a creature of the water, not of the earth—but the power they draw from is the same.
Thoughtless panic makes him edge backward so he can put Tuk, Ilapara, and Mukuni between himself and the tikoloshe. The others stand their ground, their muscles tense and ready for anything.
“My goodness,” Tuk breathes, watching the wraith with wide eyes. “Did you say there were more of these?”
The wraith springs forward with a limping gait that shouldn’t be fast, and yet it closes the distance in a few strides, staggering toward them in a blur of mist and stringy limbs. Its growl is like a thousand bones breaking at once, its mouth a black horror of sharp, rotted teeth.
“Get behind me!” Ilapara is the first to move. She steps forward to meet the wraith with the cutting edge of her pole arm, swinging it in a wide arc.
The tikoloshe ducks, showing surprising speed, and Salo’s heart stops beating for a terrifying moment. But Ilapara isn’t cowed; she presses her advantage, seeking the creature’s skull with her spearpoint. It lurches backward, but only to evade, because the next instant it’s lunging at her with a clawed hand. Salo doesn’t know how she does it, how she manages to move fast enough to sidestep such a lightning-quick blow, or how evasion quickly becomes counterattack, but somehow she’s spinning on her feet to cut the thing down in a wide diagonal slash. Bones snap at the blow and explode into white mist, then dissipate into nothingness.
More shadows begin to coalesce all around the vessel, and a host of unnatural eyes starts to flicker in the mists like fireflies. Two wraiths lunge from the port side with open talons; Tuk barely has time to duck before they fly over him, landing on the deck just behind him.
“Tuk!” Salo shouts. “Watch out!”
Tuk’s response is instant: the golden rings on his fingers flash like moonlight, and he pulls two blades straight out of thin air. They materialize in his hands in a brilliant shimmer, two finely crafted swords of a radiant golden metal, each with a single sharp edge. Salo recalls seeing such a blade in Seresa, though it was longer than either of these.
The delicate engravings on each flash with red lightning just as he ducks a swipe destined for his head. He leaves twin echoes of red light in the air as he retaliates, hacking into one of the tikoloshe with well-timed blows to the neck and head. His victim is still crumbling to white mist when he neatly dodges a sweeping attack from the second wraith; he swings his blade in a mesmerizing arc to decapitate this new enemy—even while the point of the other blade streaks toward a third tikoloshe’s rib cage.
To Salo’s horror, more and more of the things have made it onto the deck. They keep coming from the aft sections of the vessel, where the rigging and netting aren’t dense enough to prove an obstacle to boarding.
Like the coward he knows he is, Salo backs farther and farther toward the bow, selfishly keeping Mukuni’s growling form in front of him while Tuk and Ilapara fight for their lives.
And by Ama, fight they do.
Tuk’s swift and relentless movements remind Salo of a three-eyed suricate of the southern savannas: small but quick, tenacious, and stupidly brave. The water wraiths slash at him like angry vipers, but he weaves his form among them with deft footwork, answering their lunges with quick one-twos, cutting through skulls, femurs, ribs, and backbones with his arcane swords.
Next to him Ilapara is like a dancer with her spear, and it baffles Salo that she can move as fast as she does when she carries no blessing in her bones. A ray of the risen sun pierces through the mists and glances off her silvery breastplate as she pivots to chop down a tikoloshe from skull to rib cage. It bursts into a cloud of mist, but more wraiths press toward her.
Salo holds on to his staff with a trembling hand, shamed by the bravery of his companions. Get a grip! They can’t keep fighting like this. You heard what the Lightning Bird said: use the gift he gave you to save yourself and everyone else.
He slaps his face several times to wake himself up from his paralysis. Tuk and Ilapara are here because of him; they deserve better than a coward who won’t even try to defend them.
The staff in his hands is like a lens; he directs his scattered thoughts into it, and they come out more focused. Only then does he probe his mammoth new spell. Nothing at all like his other spell of Storm craft, which he can cast instinctively, without prior calibration. This spell requires that he understand the exact nature of the lightning barrier he wishes to summon: how much space to bend, what shape to bend it into, how much lightning—a thousand other such parameters. In fact, it isn’t so much a spell as a framework for designing spells; once he knows the parameters of the barrier he wishes to conjure, he could cast it at will just like any other spell.
But he’s never reached into the Void before, and right now he feels like a child dipping his toes into a vast ocean. Surely he isn’t expected to figure out how to use it to conjure space-bending barriers in the heat of battle? And surely he isn’t expected to then electrify said barriers with lightning, is he? It would take him hours at least to come up with anything even remotely practical.
By Ama, we’re going to die here.
Tuk spins away to evade the swipe of a claw even as he cuts into the clavicle of another wraith, his blade shattering bone and cutting through flesh across the chest. His other blade is already coming up to part yet another wraith from its head even before the first has crumbled to mist. Ilapara’s red veil swells with the wind as she swivels yet again, the point of her weapon arcing through the air like a sliver of light. Two tikoloshe lose their heads in a single strike, only for more to take their place.