‘Master,’ bubbled out amongst them.

‘Sheraptus,’ Togu said, silent as the figure descended the stairs and regarded him.

The three red lights swung back and forth, tiny fires in a halo of black wrapped around a long, purple brow. His sigh crept out of a pair of thin, purple lips. Long, silky white hair rested on thin, drooping shoulders. Seas were silent, skies were still; the world held its breath, for fear that it had angered him.

‘And all that greets me,’ he whispered on a voice long and dark, ‘is death.

‘I have seen death before.’ He tilted his head up towards the distant forest. ‘But in my land, Togu, I have never seen green. I have seen no rivers and blue skies, no birds and insects, no rain clouds …’ He shook his head. ‘And you meet me in the dark, on a clear night, on a beach laden with death. Death, I have seen before.’

A pair of eyes opened. Bright. Crimson. Fiery.

‘I will see more of it.’

The voice was languid, liquid, the threat inherent in it ebbing away as soon as it passed his lips, wasted. Or rather, Lenk thought, unnecessary. There was something inherently threatening about the man, something that went beyond the black robes, the glowing red jewels and the black crown about his brow.

‘Power …’ Dreadaeleon whispered, his voice pained. ‘He’s leakingit.’

Magic, perhaps, Lenk thought; that wasn’t hard to believe, given that the characteristic crimson pyres that lit up a wizard’s eyes were perpetually burning in his stare. But what Lenk sensed was not magic. It was the unseen, unmoving breeze about him, the unscented stench about him.

The taint all too plain to both Lenk and the creature inside his head.

‘ Sense it,’ the voice muttered. ‘ He’s killed many. Demon, mortal … child, mother … he’s watched them suffer; he’s drunk their pain.’ It shifted, becoming hard and rigid. ‘ He will again if we do not do our duty.’

‘Who …?’ he asked. ‘Whose pain?’

Cold sigh. Warm sigh. Two answers.

‘ You know.’

‘Where is it?’

Another voice, neither warm nor hot, brimming with boredom and hatred. Him again. Sheraptus.

Togu did not bother defiance against his question, did not bother to interpret it as anything other than the demand that it was. He glanced over his shoulder, spoke a word in his native tongue. From around a standing skull, a quartet of Owauku approached, bearing a wooden palanquin upon their shoulders with Bagagame, head heavy and eyes thick, at their head.

They passed Lenk, keeping their gazes low. He paid them no mind, watching instead the objects heaped upon the wooden platform: all of them his or his companions’. He spotted Denaos’ knives, Asper’s pendant, Kataria’s bow. His sword was up there, too; he supposed that should have galled him. The fact that his pants were right next to it should have enraged him.

Neither of those was the reason for the sudden flash of icy heat that seared through his head on a pair of voices.

‘ NO!’

‘What?’ he asked, wincing.

‘ He cannot be allowed to have it! It does not belong to him! It belongs to … no one … no, to YOU! TO NO ONE!’ His head pounded, seared with fever, frozen with cold before the voice finally howled in twisting cacophony. ‘ HE CANNOT HAVE THE TOME.’

Sheraptus glanced over to the boat, raised a white eyebrow. The netherlings followed his gaze, reverence shifting to scorn the moment their gaze left his face. The male seemed to take no notice, though, as he glanced to the bound companions.

‘This is them?’ he asked.

The shape that rose up from his vessel was instantly recognisable. The skin, white even in darkness, and the crown of emerald-coloured hair were extraneous detail. The palpable aura of treachery denoted the siren’s presence long before she showed her gills.

‘That is … most of them, yes,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘There was another with them … a beast on two legs with red skin.’

‘Dead,’ Denaos muttered. ‘Thankfully.’

‘If that is the case, then they are all here and-’

‘You three,’ Sheraptus said, pointing to a trio of netherlings, ‘search the island for signs of this thing. If this is the same red thing that netherlings could not kill, I doubt he was slain by anything else.’ He ignored Greenhair’s stammered protests as the trio grunted and set off down the coast, instead turning his gaze to the palanquin. ‘Now, then … where is it?’

‘That is it,’ Greenhair replied, arriving beside Sheraptus and pointing a finger at the palanquin. ‘It is in there.’

He swept his burning gaze back to the objects. His hands rose, the air quivering between them as he gently separated his palms, an invisible force parting the clothes and weapons to expose a pair of books resting gingerly upon the wood. The first one was musty, old, well-worn pages trembling in the breeze, as if taking the cue to quiver before the man’s eyes. The other …

Too clean, too black, too shiny, too still and smug and noticeable while the rest of the world darkened for fear of being seen by a pair of bright red eyes. The tome met the man’s gaze fearlessly, sparing only enough time to look at Lenk with papery eyes and wink. Or so it seemed to, at any rate.

Surely, Sheraptus must have seen it, too. What could escape that stare? What sense did it make for him to reach down and pluck the musty, frightened book up first?

‘ It does not call to him,’ a voice, he wasn’t sure which, answered. ‘ He cannot hear it. His ears are cloyed with pride, arrogance. He will never hear it. Will never hear us before we take his head.’ He glanced to Greenhair, biting her lip, not daring to say anything as he plucked up the wrong book. ‘ She … betrayed us. Those who betray … die.’

Warmth, then cold. Agreement.

If Sheraptus saw the intent in Lenk’s stare, he made no comment. Instead, he thumbed through the pages of the musty tome, heedless of Dreadaeleon’s whimper. Ah, right, Lenk realised. His spellbook. He hadn’t seen it ever unattached to the boy’s hip. He guessed that watching another man thumb through something that had been attached so long would be unsettling, at the least.

‘Humans use nethra,’ he hummed thoughtfully. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it.’ Idly, he flipped page by page, his frown deepening. ‘They scrawl their words on parchment, learn to burn, to scorch.’ He glanced up. ‘How many trees were rent asunder by such? How much green turned black?’

His eyes narrowed as he thumbed towards the end of the book. ‘Possessed of everything, you ruin it all. Spill more blood over imaginary things, like gods and ideologies, never once deigning to fight over the bounties surrounding you.’ He looked up, thoughtful. ‘You’re so concerned with these false notions of higher powers that you never once realise it’s all within your grasp.’

‘Merroskrit,’ Dreadaeleon whispered, ‘merroskrit … that’s another wizard he’s touching, another person and he’s just … he’s going to …’

He took a thin, white page and rubbed it gingerly between two fingers. The flinch of his lips, the ripping of the paper was short, bitter. Dreadaeleon’s scream was longer, louder. And at that sound, the longface’s lips twisted into a wry smirk.

‘But that’s part of your charm, isn’t it?’

‘Sheraptus …’ Greenhair spoke, then immediately stammered out: ‘M-Master … that is just a book of lore, nothing important. The true object is-’

‘Not moving, for the moment.’ He reached down and took a severed head from the palanquin, staring at its closed eyes, golden locks and frowning. ‘And they even carry death around with them … fascinating.’

The head, Lenk recognised. The Deepshriek’s head. The lizards kept it.

‘ They know nothing of its importance. It will be ours again soon. Patience.’

‘There is a word for this sort of thing …’ Sheraptus hummed, tossing the head away. ‘It is either “macabre” or “deranged”, but it’s unimportant. I came for something else. Where is it?’