Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) by Juliet E. McKenna Read Free Book Online

fled, abandoning both the pavilions which their galley and trireme masters had claimed and their rough-hewn settlement of huts built from driftwood, sailcloth and crudely shaped branches.
    Hosh looked at his tally marks again. It was seventeen days now since he’d seen any of the raiders or their slaves. At first they had retreated to the trees, watching fearfully as the glow of magic showed them this unknown wizard searching their abandoned dwellings.
    Some had tried to summon up the courage to attack that magical barrier. Such daring had rapidly failed for lack of encouraging omens. Some had waited, tense, for the wizard to send some word.
    Nifai, Hosh’s former overseer at his slave oar aboard the Reef Eagle, and Ducah, the sword-wielding brute who backed him, had stayed close to Hosh at first. The wizard must be a mainlander, Nifai had reasoned, and so they would need a mainlander to act as their go-between. Whatever else he might be, Nifai was no fool.
    But no summons had come and some portent or other had deterred Nifai from sending Hosh to open negotiations. So one morning, the overseer and the swordsman had simply been gone.
    Slowly at first, and then more and more of them day by day, the Archipelagans had crept away. Because for all their wisdom in mathematics and alchemy and so many other skills, the Aldabreshi were as terrified of magic as some infant crying for fear of the dark.
    At least Hosh knew better than that. Granted, wizards were frightening and certainly not to be trusted. He had learned that lesson in the hardest fashion imaginable from his one encounter with that treacherous bastard, Minelas, the renegade mage who’d so vilely betrayed Lord Halferan.
    But he’d heard enough barrack hall tales before that to know that the mages were men and women much the same as any other. Except for their uncanny talents with air, earth, fire or water. Was that blessing or curse? Hosh had never really considered the question with the wizard isle so comfortably remote. There hadn’t been anyone mageborn in Halferan village in his lifetime.
    But he certainly didn’t share the Archipelagan conviction that even a wizard’s presence irrevocably contaminated and corrupted the natural order and thus all the portents, from the flights of birds to the rhythms of the sea, that so wholly governed their lives.
    That said, Hosh had to admit that the view down the long anchorage offered intimidating evidence of wizardly might. First there was the ravaged heap of stones that had once been the corsair leader’s pavilion. The terrace, the walls, the shutters and doors of oiled wood, the tiled roof, everything had been reduced to splinters and flinders by a single strike of magical lightning. The seething cloud of dust that followed had reached out with tendrils crackling with wizardry to murder any survivors trying to flee.
    Then there was the impossible wave rearing up between the distant headlands of the anchorage’s entrance. Hosh had had no notion that a wizard could do such an astonishing thing. Taller than the baronial tower back in Halferan Manor, that curve of green water was topped by an ever-changing flurry of foam but the wave itself had remained constant for the past twenty-seven days.
    It confined every ship within the anchorage; every raiding galley rowed by chained and lashed slaves, as Hosh had once been, and every fighting trireme with its oars manned by those eager to prove themselves worthy to join the ranks of the corsair swordsman and share in their plunder, as Hosh had sworn he never would.
    Surely the incredible sight of that wave was proof that Captain Corrain had truly found his way back to the mainland? More than that, it showed that the captain had somehow secured a wizard’s aid even if the Archmage of Hadrumal was too callous or too cowardly to defend innocent Caladhrians.
    Only wizardry could hold that watery barrier firm and no Aldabreshi could ever have woven such spells. Archipelagan