Adarin stepped toward Gavin and repeated himself.

  “What have you done?” he hissed, his voice tight with barely contained rage.

  But Francesco extended a hand and stepped between the two of them.

  “Commander, the enemy is just messing with us. They are trying to get in your head. Do not let them win.”

  Adarin swallowed hard and pressed his avatar’s eyes shut. He recalled a certain conversation he’d had with the goblin in Oakridge. Turning his head to Francesco, he spoke, his voice heavy with grim anticipation.

  “I wish you were right. I hope…”

  He glared at Gavin, then took another deep breath and spoke his thoughts aloud.

  “They have clearly identified a new game. They want to draw us out.”

  Francesco nodded. “And they will keep terrorizing us until we do what they want in some fashion.”

  Adarin nodded grimly, judging the direction of the blood—the trail of torn meat.

  “They want us to go to the port.”

  He reached out. ‘Commodore Ashfield, report. What’s the situation at the port?’

  Ten long seconds passed, then the commodore responded, his voice cold and clipped.

  ‘No response from any of the four captains at the port. I’m sending a detachment. I’m currently at the first confluence. We will be there in ten—’

  ‘Negative.’ Adarin cut through the commodore’s speech. ‘I will lead a scouting expedition from the land side.’

  Commodore Ashfield cleared his throat. ‘Sir, four of my captains are—’

  But Adarin cut him off again. ‘If four of your captains have fallen into a trap, then I’m not willing to risk more ships, never mind you. This is not a fair battle.’ Might not even be a battle we can win. He barely prevented himself from sending that last thought. This is a display of power, and I am the intended audience.

  ‘Stay back and guard the Confluence.’

  Commodore Ashfield swallowed hard. ‘Yes, sir.’ Then he hesitated. ‘Permission to perform a scrying ritual?’

  Adarin nodded, then growled and sent the answer over the link. ‘Positive. Tell me what you see.’

  He looked around—Francesco openly gawking at the transformed soldiers, Devon and Gavin in a quietly hissed argument, Liora lost in the flow of tending to the wounded along with her cadre of healers.

  Adarin turned to Francesco. “Francesco, finish the warding schema. I want it done tonight. We need a safe place. Otherwise the settlers will break.”

  Francesco looked around, then swallowed and bowed before leaving with swift steps.

  Next he turned to Devon. “Devon, I want you to set up the cannons around the encampment. Firing arcs covering the perimeter, with some emplaced into the earth so they can target the sky. If the swarm returns, kill them. Keep firing as long as you have good targets.”

  The kobold ceased hissing at Gavin, turned around, and made a gesture. Cannoneer officers assembled around him. Adarin nodded to himself. Calm and competent. Just what I need.

  ‘Duchess, get the settlers involved in setting up the cannons and have them start digging trenches across the encampment.’ he ordered over the noospheric link.

  ‘What’s the point of trenches?’ responded the Duchess, confusion and fear lacing her voice.

  ‘The point,’ Adarin said with clipped curtness, ‘is to keep them digging holes instead of thinking about what is happening to them. Everyone who can move a shovel, a bucket, or whatever we have is moving one in the next ten minutes. Understood?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Duchess responded, with far too much relief in her voice.

  “See, it’s already working.” Adarin grumbled out loud, earning strange looks from his officers. Yeah, I’m talking to myself out loud. Not a good sign.

  Then he turned to Gavin, who was shifting from foot to foot.

  “And you are coming with me.”

  The goblin swallowed hard and shook his head. “No, I—my laboratory, here in the temple. I need to—yes, I—”

  One of Adarin’s manipulators extended like a snake and a root whip shot forward from it, wrapping around the goblin’s wrists. He tugged hard, and the green-skinned gremlin stumbled forward.

  “You are coming with me.” He emphasized each word like the judgment of a hammer.

  Finally, Adarin turned to Lieutenant Krislov. “Lieutenant, go inside. You have five minutes to assemble four full companies. We are going on a reconnaissance in force. I want a higher scout ratio than usual.”

  The hulking mage saluted, his grass-green eyes glittering in the descending darkness. “Yes, sir.” He spun and ran down the tunnel where his previous unit had been torn to pieces.

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  For a second Adarin considered the druids. Could we do something with the surrounding trees? Anything? No, not the time for experiments.

  After considering the issue for a few more seconds, he nearly slapped himself in the forehead.

  “Any druid who can walk, go to Francesco. Tell him of the locus and that we are within its influence. He will know—hopefully he will know—how to introduce that into the warding schema. Tell him that he has to talk to Devon if he doesn’t know how to do it. Do not let yourself be brushed off.”

  Enthusiastic smiles spread instantly. He looked at them sternly. “But do not leave the temple either.”

  Sharp salutes answered him and thirty half-human, half-wooden creatures—once soldiers and sailors—followed their lieutenant through the corridor.

  Adarin observed how his orders were executed while he waited: how civilians slowly left their cover and began digging, how cannon emplacements came to be and how munitions were laid out, how the last of the wounded were brought into hospital beds after Liora’s healers had stabilized them. Not all healing could be magical—much of it had to be done in the mundane way to prevent the healers from collapsing.

  On the minute, Major Lieutenant Krislov returned leading four companies. Adarin looked around at the assembled junior officers and the squirming goblin prisoner.

  “Gavin. Last chance. Tell us what you have done.”

  The goblin’s eyes suddenly flashed with anger, and he glared at Adarin. He stomped his feet on the ground and pouted.

  “No.”

  He looked away, as if trying to ignore Adarin would be of any use.

  For a second, Adarin considered interrogating the goblin properly. Then the swarm whispered again, and the sky darkened.

  “Already taken. Fifteen. Fifteen. They are dying. Dying. Dying.”

  A cackling laughter erupted from all the shadows in the forest.

  Adarin yanked hard on the goblin’s leash. “If your silence kills men, I will get creative with your punishment.”

  Gavin swallowed but remained silent.

  The companies formed a tight marching order, skeletal pikes interspersed with musketeers, and walked down the harbor road. The cackles kept intensifying, counting up numbers, describing horrific fates. Soon screams and gunshots could be heard in the distance from the port.

  Again and again the flying swarm dove for the formation, only to bank off at the last meters. The acrid tang of gunpowder from musketeers who had lost their nerves and fired into the descending swarm pinched the air as the unit made it down to the port.

  Nothing could be seen of the ships or the river. The black swarm was flying around blocking any line of sight. Adarin ordered a halt twenty meters from the barrier of flapping wings. As if on his command, the swarm retreated five meters and revealed a body lying on the dock—skin torn, eyes eaten out, the rags of a uniform barely enough to hold back the bleeding of dozens of wounds.

  Medics twitched, but Adarin raised a manipulator. “Wait,” he hissed.

  A familiar chuckle emerged from the swarm.

  “Well, let us dispense with slow dread, shall we? This seemed more fun when I was planning it.”

  The swarm dispersed in a sudden thunderous shriek, and Adarin took in the situation at once. Four ships—no movement, no sign of anyone alive on three of them. The two carracks anchored in the river, as well as one of the merchantmen.

  The third merchantman, however, was decorated with writhing, mutilated mariners and settlers who had been torn apart on the dock. Adarin found not a single eye among them, only bloody pits where they had been. Blood spilled forth from cut Achilles tendons and other muscles. This violence hadn’t been done by the swarm—it had been surgical. At least half a dozen people writhed in their blood, unable to move their legs.

  A man shrieked as he fell from the mast of the vessel, connected by a rope. The men around him, stunned by the horror, screamed. Musket shots went off as the rope brought the man, who was wearing a torn-up captain’s uniform, to a stop less than a meter above the deck.

  Two rapid popping noises could be heard alongside the rope’s sharp twang and the man began screaming, blood and spittle erupting from his mouth. Yet the scream was oddly truncated. Fucking hell, he doesn’t have a tongue anymore.

  Only now Adarin noticed that the rope hadn’t been bound to the man’s neck. No—this was a far more cruel game. The man’s wrists had been bound, and the fall had been precisely calculated to dislocate his shoulders with maximum force, to tear tendons, and to cripple the man’s use of his arms unless a major healer’s attention would be focused on him.

  He looked up, knowing that only one creature he had encountered so far would have the mind for this perfidious cruelty.

  Black silk clung to the pale body bathed in blood. The vampire, the Nosferati. His eyes were burning with an intense ruby redness. Veins and arteries formed an intricate pattern of purple and red on his blood-soaked skin. He stood on top of the mast and executed a mockingly formal bow.

  As Adarin noticed him the others did as well, Major Lieutenant Krislov had gone stiff next to him.

  “What—what is that?”

  Horrified murmurs rose among the soldiers and the creature gave a throaty laugh.

  He jumped forward—far too long a distance—and landed precisely on the end of the vessel’s yardarm, balancing on one foot. He spoke like an actor at the theatre.

  “O thou brave soldiers, do not grieve thy lives in worry, for none of your comrades have met the reaper’s scythe.”

  Again a throaty, wet chuckle erupted from the man.

  “I have merely crippled them all.”

  The chuckle grew more vicious.

  Adarin didn’t think, he just acted. Reaching out over the noospheric link, he gave a single command. ‘All mages, all musketeers—’

  But he was cut off. A splitting headache hit Adarin. His manipulators spasmed, driving him to his knees in the privacy of his combat mind-space. Then the attack slid off his magical cores—too smooth for the spell to dig in. The blessing of the beeches, Adarin realized. He steadied himself with three deep breaths, then reached out and screamed over the noospheric link.

  ‘Fire!’

  Somewhere in the distance, the cracking of spells and thunder of muskets erupted, but all he could hear was a mocking voice.

  ‘Miss. Miss. And one final miss. Your men really need to get better at this whole shooting thing.’

  “Well,” the voice whispered, as if it was standing right next to Adarin, “Your mind has grown more… resilient. If only you had taken the time to learn how to use that resistance instead of hiding behind passive defenses… I shall be taking my leave now.”

  Darkness flooded Adarin’s mind.

  He came to nursing a grinding headache. The first thing he noticed was Mage Lieutenant Krislov lying on top of him. Only the skeletons had remained standing. Mages and musketeers were all down, groaning, pressing hands to their skulls or still unconscious in the aftermath of the mental attack.

  The swarm was gone. So was its terrible master.

  Only one thing had changed: fresh words carved into the vessel’s hull.

  Enjoy my gifts.