The wind, cold and parched, blowing from the deep, glimmering sea visible to the south, blew particles of sand past the white, block-like houses of Ruhigicir, into the Ruhig oasis, and through the stands of green-leaved palm trees, sprouting like weeds from a pavement, that characterised this part of Farhight. Ankh, his back to a palm, his armour gone, his square face leaning back, eyes closed in relaxation.
“Ankh! Ankh, sir!”
Ankh opened his eyes.
For a week, they had travelled east, despite the distance between Salkir and Ruhigicir being two days' camel ride. Sandstorms, sloth, numbers, and general bad organisation had contributed to their lack of progress. Half of their two hundred paighans, the peasant levies which the Farhighter Empire insisted on calling soldiers, had had their sandals fall apart halfway through the march, their being made out of wicker, like the paighans' shields and armour. Ankh suspected a well-aimed slice of cake stood little chance of piercing the paighans' armour, but anything else would shear through it. In addition, the two elephants they had brought from the plains around Ur-Qadesh, to the north of Salkir, had been violently sick on the third day; the ten chariots, fearsomely equipped with scythes that jutted out, razor-sharp, in every direction, had broken down, and three of their drivers had cut themselves trying to fix them; and the twenty Lanciars that Duke Scalax had sent from Akar had had to take off their heavy chain armour because of the fierce heat. There were no seasons on Elleria, because there was no tilt in the planet's axis; instead, the weather was ruled entirely by pressure systems. A fierce high pressure had blown north across the ocean from Tydon on the fourth day, bringing with it boiling sun and hardship.
And now Ankh was going to have to face it again.
“What is it?” he asked the paighan who had disturbed him, in Salkiri. A brown, skinny man with a drawn-on moustache, he looked nervous – as everyone in Farhight seemingly did when confronted with the western barbarians.
“Sir,” he answered – in Salkiri, very fast; Ankh had to concentrate to work out what he was saying - “we have found, ah, Blue Dragons, we think. Jurian Pasha said to tell you.”
“Blue Dragons? Where?”
Ankh dressed into his armour – scorching hot, despite the fact that he had left it in the shade – and shouted for the Lanciars he had been given as escort as the paighan told him. Apparently, a group of twenty men had been seen in a nearby village, all bearing wooden shields with a crude blue dragon painted on them, standing in the middle of the village around a man who had been shouting, partly about the communist ideals of the Blue Dragons but – oddly – mostly about some new religion the Blue Dragons were supposedly espousing. The Lanciars, all fiddling their armour into place, gathered around Ankh; his was the only white Pontifex's brush in evidence. The Farhighters had provided three mages, sorry enslaved creatures bent to Jurian Pasha's will by magical leashes, and Ankh suspected that they knew what he was, namely a wizard; but officially, the Pontifexes were only priests. If there was spellslinging to be done, let the Farhighters do it.
“Lanciar Ankh!” a heavily-accented voice shouted, accompanied by the clopping of hooves. Ankh turned, realised his helmet was incorrectly positioned, and banged it. It fell into place, the eyeholes appearing in front of his eyes to reveal a tall, handsome man in bronze scale armour on top of a mare. Behind him clustered the only worthwhile soldiers in the entire detachment: the world-famous Farhighter heavy cavalry archers.
“Jurian Pasha.” Ankh nodded, humourlessly. “You say we have found Blue Dragons.”
“Yes, yes we have.” Jurian Pasha smiled: his teeth were blindingly white, his beard oiled into an improbable Pharaonic-looking style that probably hadn't been in vogue for two thousand years. The spare child, a third son or so of Arkaryan El'satharios Jubal Dacoval naTazihim, the governor of the nome – or province – of Ruhig Oasis, Jurian Pasha naTazihim was, Ankh recalled, and young enough not to have earned any of the ridiculous train of names his father dragged around. He was handsome, brave and dashing, arrogant, headstrong and overconfident, but a good man overall, and many worse choices could have been made for pasha of the little army. Like all the nobility of the current dynasty, Jurian and his clan were descended from the Farh nomads who had descended on what had then been called Kemet. Mounted archers, the lower echelons of the Farh clans had retained their nomadic existence, serving as exclusive mercenaries to the nobility of the then-newly-created state of Farhight. Elite soldiers, they were the only equiv-tech soldiers that Ankh would have bet on against Lanciars.
“I look forward to smashing these peasant buffoons.” Jurian stated, smiling arrogantly. Those paighans present, being peasants themselves, gave him an irritated look. “I assume I can count on your aid, Lanciar Ankh.”
“I'm in the middle of the Farhighter desert, at least a day away from the nearest civilisation, with twenty Lanciars and all their equipment. It's not exactly like I'm doing anything else.”
“So... yes?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent.” Jurian swung down from his saddle, barely avoiding getting his foot tangled. “Now, these Blue Dragons are being suspiciously obvious.”
“Obviously.”
“So that means...” Jurian preened visibly, evidently pleased with his powers of deduction, “...this could be a trap!”
“Oh – well, yes it could.” Ankh kept a completely flat face: Jurian had surprised him. He had been expecting the average noble's-spoiled-brat approach of simply charging in with everything, but obviously Jurian was smarter than that.
“You Lanciars shall charge in, supported by my heavy cavalry. The paighans will take up position on either side of the town, in the surrounding trees; should there be a problem, they will charge in. Any questions? No? Let's go.”
* * *
Vellarion the Demented was, as his name suggested, quite, quite mad. He was also fully aware of the fact, which wasn't really supposed to happen, and of the great charisma that it gave him. It came from staring into the face of the deepest, darkest corners of the earth and walking away, though with a new set of priorities.
One of those priorites was spreading his new religion.
“I have seen the darkness!” he cried, spittle flying from his withered chops, the runes painted onto his shaven, pink-gleaming skull glittering darkly in the scorching Farhighter sun. His robes, long and coloured like dried blood, rippled in the breeze; his fingers crooked into an arthritic cage in front of his face. “There is no point in denying it! The dark gods, the gods the Soulforger locked away at the dawn of days, have chosen now to make their return, and have made the Eks Amenur their puppets. Their puppets are the Blue Dragons, and their Amenurite faith. I hear you say: you wish to be no-one's puppet! Well, I tell you, it is better to be the right hand of the devil than in his path and, I tell you true, the devil is coming, as sure as night follows day!”
“What are you blathering about?” An irate voice cut through his hyperbole. The would-be prophet wheeled around from his audience of entranced villagers from the makeshift podium he had erected, over the heads of his bodyguard, to glare angrily at Ankh, who had spoken. The Lanciar stood, arms folded, at the head of his retinue of twenty Lanciars; Jurian Pasha and his heavy cavalry stood off to one side, looking fierce.
“A Lanciar. What are you doing in the middle of the Farhighter desert?” Vellarion snapped.
“Well, I'm not really sure, but that's beside the point. You – whatever your name is - ”
“Vellarion the Demented.”
“Thank you.” Ankh answered drily, but humourlessly. “Very well, Mr. the Demented, you are under arrest for denial of the true gods of the Church of Benet - ”
“You fool!” Vellarion burst into fanatical rhetoric again. “Can't you see your feeble protectors are as nothing compared to the might of - ”
“Benet and the Soulforger are the indestructible shields of humanity, the true divinities - ” Ankh roared in defense of his faith.
“Has no-one considered the Dead God of the Desert - ” Jurian Pasha interjected.
“The Dead God of the Desert is DEAD!” Ankh and Vellarion bellowed at the samed time. Ankh continued.
“I was born a Farhighter! For fifteen years, all through the Pontifexial training, I believed he would show me the way and illumine this false bloody faith the Lanciars were pressing on me! Every day, I prayed to the Dead Bloody God of the Bloody Desert and NOTHING HAPPENED! He didn't reward my faith, he rewarded it with NOTHING!”
An awkward silence settled over the village.
“I apologise. I realise I may have revealed more than I intended to of my personal life.” Ankh said. “Nevertheless! Vellarion the Demented, I place you under arrest.”
“I think not. Blue Dragons! Prove to me your loyalty!”
The village erupted. The Blue Dragon bodyguard jumped forward, wicker dragon-painted shields ahead, rusty swords overhead. Ankh pulled out his own sword, a metre of shining Akarean steel, felt his Lanciars charge in behind him and Jurian Pasha's heavy cavalry thundering. A Blue Dragon, an uncommonly pale, mucky weed of a man with a blue dragon tattooed on his face, charged into Ankh, screaming something in some incomprehensible Farhighter dialect. Ankh took his sword on his own: the blades sparked off each other, Ankh's polished sword biting a nick into the other man's rusty battered steel. They stood like that for a moment, mailed Lanciar against wicker-armoured fanatic, swords straining against each other, before Ankh bulled forward behind his shield and slammed into the man. He careened backwards, still shouting but this time with an overtone of terror. Ankh finished him almost without thinking about it and turned to find another enemy.
Suddenly, his vision went black, stars in front his eyes, a stunning pain in the back of his head. He reeled forward, the world having gone surreal and blue in front of his eyes as the blood rushed away from his brain. He staggered around, bending just enough to take another slash on the shoulder. This man's sword, less rusty than the others, chopped through the mail, grazing Ankh's shoulder. Ankh got his shield up, took another blow on it as he got his bearings. This man was a bad swordsman, just flurrying blows wildly and leaving himself undefended, not using his shield at all. Ankh took another blow on his shield, swung his sword towards the man's legs. A scream: he was legless. Ankh put him out of his misery.
He felt a whoosh, behind him, as of another sword coming – and whipped around, not being caught on the hop this time. But this man was strong, very strong indeed. Ankh was knocked backwards, thudding heavily into the ground. He banged his head – stars flew again – he looked up. A shadow. It must be his enemy. Quickly, he closed his eyes, focused in that indescribable way that magicians must to access their power. Ancient glyphs in the Spelltongue, the archaic language the long-dead Mistocren people invented a thousand years ago to control magic with, flickered in front of his closed vision, circular serrated shapes imbued with concentric layers of meaning. A sentence in the Spelltongue, written on the surface of Ankh's consciousness: into his mind. The shadow stumbled, Ankh saw inside his head, started rearranging stuff, fiddling around, removing the Blue Dragon-ness -
Something else.
A shining beacon, or rather, a shining beacon's reverse: an all-consuming darkness, but outside Ankh's victim's mind, rather in the centre of the village. Ankh crushed the Blue Dragon's mind absent-mindedly, letting the now-infantile creature go limp, and opened his eyes to the real world.
What he saw was not reassuring.
Vellarion the Demented, scab-red robes flapping around his bony frame, the glyphs inked on his head glowing with a chaotic pinkish radiance, was floating spreadeagled in the air, as if the atmosphere had curled a windy fist about him and picked him up. Around him whipped a soot-black tempest, tendrils of blackness curling out and whipping about like a set of dragon's wings, leaving floating black particles in his wake. Central to it was a tiny sun of darkness, swallowing and billowing around the sorcerer. Incongruously, the real sun shone, white and bright, right behind it.
It was the single most evil thing Ankh had ever seen.
“No, no, no,” he found himself shouting, struggling forward – damn armour! It was so heavy - “stop him, stop him, stop him, STOP THE DAMN RITUAL, YOU FOOLS! Come on, come on, COME ON - ”
“Feast your eyes on the Beholder!” Vellarion screeched, a thin reedy pathetic noise whipped away by the intensity of the storm he had conjured. In the heart of the vortex, the world twisted and ripped, the very fabric of the universe itself splitting open in a way that really shouldn't have been possible.
Something came through.
A tentacle, pink and worm-like, tipped with a prehensile pad, quested through. Ankh rushed towards it, tripping over his armour, still screaming to stop the ritual, sword out, cutting his way through screaming Blue Dragons who tried to block him. He had to stop it, otherwise -
Oh no.
An eye, big as a man's head, blue-irised and bloodshot, above a fang-filled mouth, gaping and cruel, roped with slaver. The thing's head, on which the lone, baleful eye and mouth were, looked for all the world like a living human brain, pink and laced with barely-visibly-pulsing capillaries, red and branching. From below its mouth, a spray of tentacles, long and pink and tipped with the same pads that had come through the portal, hung like some kind of amphibian beard. The whole contraption, stretching eight feet into the air, defying every single convention of logicality that ever there was, raked the battlefield with its gaze.
The Lanciars – trained from birth, battle-hardened, brave, brainwashed, Spartan, and legendary – turned and ran. Jurian Pasha's horses shied and bucked, throwing men who ran after the horses shouting. From the trees above the village there came a rustling as the hundreds of paighans hidden there fled, smashing into the trees and shaking their leaves in their haste to get away.
Only Ankh stood, broad dark face impassive, eyes narrowed, standing with his legs braced, shield with the symbol of Akar, the crossed scythe, crook, hammer and sword, in front of him, his hand wrapped tightly about his longsword's hilt. The corpses of the Blue Dragons stacked around his feet, staining his mail with their blood.
“And what do you think you're going to do?” Vellarion smiled, squatting down relaxedly in the shadow of the hideous creature he had summoned.
“We'll see.” Ankh answered.
“Oh, give it a rest, you idiot. Beholder! Kill!”
The eye turned, looked at Ankh. Its pupil narrowed.
Ankh shifted his grip on his sword, watching the creature. Curiously, it extended a tentacle towards him, the fleshy tentacle snaking wavily through the air.
Ankh's sword flashed. The creature yanked its tentacle back, hissing, the rubbery end half-severed.
The single baleful eye narrowed.
The tentacles, three of them at once now, darted towards Ankh from different directions. He lashed out with his sword at one, caught another on his shield, felt another snake around his legs, looking for a way to trip him up – but his mail gown prevented it. He stepped on the tentacle, blocked another tentacle, slashed at another -
And could only watch as what must by now be the seventh tentacle wrapped itself around his chest, coiling and coiling and coiling and dragging him right up to the foul creature. He lashed out with his sword, struggling futilely, but more tentacles wrapped around his arms and legs, and one wrapped itself around his head, a slimy pink worm circling his helmet and blocking his eye-holes with greasy ropes of flesh. Ankh noticed – bizarrely – that the tentacles were adorned with thousands and thousands of tiny bristles. What were they for?
The single eye jerked wide open, the single pupil fixated on Ankh.
Ankh thrashed, hundreds of volts of bioelectricity coursing through his body. As he slowly came back online, he noticed the thing's smell: coppery like burnt blood, but with a chemical overtone to it and more than a hint of dung. He slumped, a few last crackles of lightning lancing between the little bristles and his mail. So that's what the bristles are for, he thought inanely. He felt himself being shifted and he opened his eyes, saw through a gap in the tentacles the beholder -
No! He would not die like this!
But what could he do?
Stupid question with an obvious answer: magic.
Ankh closed his eyes. The circular symbols of the Spelltongue flickered across his mind again, tapping into the fifth force of the universe. He pushed, reaching across into the soggy mass of flesh that was the Beholder's head and initiating a mind war.
The eye closed.
It pushed back.
Ankh swore, in his own mind. The Beholder could use magic! He thought again, diverting a tiny portion of his concentration from the mind war – damn! It was gaining on him! - to initiate a distraction, something bright and annoying. Another sequence of glyphs, and a flare went off in front of the Beholder's eye.
Nothing. He put all his concentration into beating the Beholder, put it was too strong, it was pushing him back inside the confines of his own skull and he was going to die -
Suddenly, the Beholder's concentration vanished. Suspiciously, Ankh probed forward – no traps, no nothing. What was going on?
Equally suddenly, the tentacles holding Ankh up went slack and he thudded to the ground, breaking – no, attenuating; Ankh just managed to keep his concentration – the mind war. He pushed forward – the Beholder was diverting some of its concentration again! He had to work fast – and -
He reached into the utterly alienness of the Beholder's mind. Indescribable images of hellish places flickered in front of his eyes, smells and sounds and horrible things -
He imagined a mailed Lanciar's fist around the Beholder's mind, and snapped it shut. The creature's thoughts squelched into infantile, dysfunctional nothingness, its intelligence reduced to a vegetable state, its usefulness nil. He opened his eyes, saw the creature swaying in front of him, its tentacles drifting. He ran forward, took a running jump – as much as he could in his armour – and rammed his sword through the Beholder's eye.
From behind the thing's settling bulk, Jurian Pasha stepped, without his horse.
“I thought you could use the assistance,” he smiled, wiping blood off his blade, “but my horse disagreed.”
Vellarion the Demented cursed in a language older than life and turned. The rift through which he had summoned the beholder was still open. If he ran, which he did, bony legs flailing out desperately, he might reach it -
A hand grabbed his shoulder and a sword tucked itself under his chin.
“You aren't going anywhere.” Ankh whispered.
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