Sam Sykes - Black Halo

‘Let’s be calm here, shall we?’ Asper held her hands up for peace. ‘Shouldn’t we be thinking of ways to keep the sea from murdering us first?’

‘I can help!’ Dreadaeleon appeared to be ready to leap to his feet, but with a mindful cough, thought better of it. ‘That is, I can stop the leak. Just … just give me a bit.’

He flipped through his book diligently, past the rows of arcane, incomprehensible sigils, to a series of blank, bone-white pages. With a wince that suggested it hurt him more than the book to do so, he ripped one of them from the heavy tome. Swiftly shutting it and reattaching it to the chain that hung from his belt, he crawled over to the gash.

All eyes stared with curiosity as the boy knelt over the gash and brought his thumb to his teeth. With a slightly less than heroic yelp, he pressed the bleeding digit against the paper and hastily scrawled out some intricate crimson sign.

‘Oh, now you’ll do something magical?’ Lenk threw his hands up.

Dreadaeleon, his brow furrowed and ears shut to whatever else his companion might have said, placed the square of paper against the ship’s wound. Muttering words that hurt to listen to, he ran his unbloodied fingers over the page. In response, its stark white hue took on a dull azure glow before shifting to a dark brown. There was the sound of drying, snapping, creaking, and when it was over, a patch of fresh wood lay where the hole had been.

‘How come you never did that before?’ Kataria asked, scratching her head.

‘Possibly because this isn’t ordinary paper and I don’t have much of it,’ the boy replied, running his hands down the page. ‘Possibly because it’s needlessly taxing for such a trivial chore. Or, possibly, because I feared the years it took me to understand the properties of it would be reduced to performing menial carpentry chores for nitwits.’ He looked up, sneered. ‘Pick one.’

‘You did that … with paper?’ Asper did not conceal her amazement. ‘Incredible.’

‘Well, not paper, no.’ Dreadaeleon looked up, beaming like a puppy pissing on the grass. ‘Merroscrit.’

‘What?’ Denaos asked, face screwing up.

‘Merroscrit. Wizard paper, essentially.’

‘Like the paper wizards use?’

‘No. Well, yes, we use it. But it’s also made out of wizards.’ His smile got bigger, not noticing Asper’s amazement slowly turning to horror. ‘See, when a wizard dies, his body is collected by the Venarium, who then slice him up and harvest him. His bones are carefully dried, sliced off bit by bit, and sewn together as merroscrit. The latent Venarie in his corpse allows it to conduct magic, mostly mutative magic, like I just did. It requires a catalyst, though, in this case’ — he held up his thumb — ‘blood! See, it’s really … um … it’s …’

Asper’s frown had grown large enough to weigh her face down considerably, its size rivalled only by that of her shock-wide eyes. Dreadaeleon’s smile vanished, and he looked down bashfully.

‘It’s … it’s neat,’ he finished sheepishly. ‘We usually get them after the Decay.’

‘The what?’

‘The Decay. Magical disease that breaks down the barriers between Venarie and the body. It claims most wizards and leaves their bodies brimming with magic to be made into merroscrit and wraithcloaks and the like. We waste nothing.’

‘I see.’ Asper twitched, as though suddenly aware of her own expression. ‘Well … do all wizards get this … posthumous honour? Don’t some of them want the Gods honoured at their funeral?’

‘Well, not really,’ Dreadaeleon replied, scratching the back of his neck. ‘I mean, there are no gods.’ He paused, stuttered. ‘I–I mean, for wizards … We don’t … we don’t believe in them. I mean, they aren’t there, anyway, but we don’t believe in them, so … ah …’

Asper’s face went blank at the boy’s sheepishness. She seemed to no longer stare at him, but through him, through the wood of the ship and the waves of the sea. Her voice was as distant as her gaze when she whispered.

‘I see.’

And she remained that way, taking no notice of Dreadaeleon’s stammering attempts to save face, nor of Denaos’ curious raise of his brow. The rogue’s own stare contrasted hers with a scrutinizing, uncomfortable closeness.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked.

‘What?’ She turned on him, indignant. ‘Nothing!’

‘Had I said anything remotely similar to the blasphemies that just dribbled out his craw, you’d have sixty sermons ready to crack my skull open with and forty lectures to offer my leaking brains.’

His gaze grew intense as she turned away from him. In the instant their eyes met as his advanced and hers retreated, something flashed behind both their gazes.

‘Asper,’ he whispered, ‘what happened to you in Irontide?’

She met his eyes, stared at him with the same distance she had stared through the boat.

‘Nothing.’

‘Liar.’

‘You would know, wouldn’t you.’

‘Well, then.’ Lenk interrupted rogue, priestess and wizard in one clearing of his throat. ‘If we’re spared the threat of drowning, perhaps we can figure out how to move on from here before we’re left adrift and empty-handed tomorrow morning.’

‘To do that, we’d need to know which direction we were heading.’ She turned and stared hard at Denaos, a private, unspoken warning carried in her eyes. ‘And it wasn’t my job to do that.’

‘One might wonder what your job is if you’ve given up preaching,’ the rogue muttered. He unfolded the chart and glanced over it with a passing interest. ‘Huh … it’s easier than I was making it seem. We are currently …’ He let his finger wander over the chart, then stabbed at a point. ‘Here, in Westsea.

‘So, if we know that Teji is northwest, then we simply go north from Westsea.’ He scratched his chin with an air of pondering. ‘Yes … it’s simple, see. In another hour, we should see Reefshore on our left; then we’ll pass close to Silverrock, and cross over the mouth of Ripmaw.’ He folded up the map and smiled. ‘We’ll be there by daylight.’

‘What?’ Lenk furrowed his brow. ‘That can’t be right.’

‘Who’s the navigator here?’

‘You’re not navigating. Those aren’t even real places. You’re just throwing two words together.’

‘Am not,’ Denaos snapped. ‘Just take my word for it, if you ever want to see Teji.’

‘I’d rather take the map’s word for it,’ Asper interjected.

Her hand was swifter than her voice, and she snatched the parchment from the rogue’s fingers. Angling herself to hold him off with one hand while she unfurled the other, she ignored his protests and held the map up to her face.

When it came down, she was a twisted knot of red ire.

The map fluttered to the ground, exposing to all curious eyes a crude drawing of what appeared to be a woman clad in robes with breasts and mouth both far bigger than her head. The words spewing from its mouth: ‘ Blargh, blargh, Talanas, blargh, blargh, Denaos stop having fun ,’ left little wonder who it was intended to portray.

Denaos, for his part, merely shrugged.

‘This is what you’ve been doing this whole time?’ Asper demanded, giving him a harsh shove. ‘Doodling garbage while you’re supposed to be plotting a course?’

‘Who among us actually expected a course to be plotted? Look around you!’ The rogue waved his hands. ‘Nothing but water as far as the eye can see! How the hell am I supposed to know where anything is without a landmark?’

‘You said -’

‘I said I could read charts , not plot courses.’

‘I suppose we should have known you would do something like this.’ She snarled, hands clenching into fists. ‘When was the last time you offered to help anyone and not either had some ulterior motive or failed completely at it?’