Hood came striding out of the waves, the reaper of carved-out souls. He'd waited long enough, his amusement at their suffering losing its flavour. Time had come for the Gates.
Feeling bleached and withered as the dead driftwood around her, Felisin sat facing the straits. Clouds flickered over the water, lightning danced to the rumbling beat of thunder. Spume rose fierce along the line of the reef, launching blue-white explosions into the darkness.
An hour earlier Heboric and Baudin had come back from their walk up the beach, dragging between them the prow of a shattered boat. It was old, but they'd talked about building a raft. The discussion had the sound of pointless musing – no-one had the strength for such a task. They would start dying by dawn, and they all knew it.
Felisin realized that Baudin would be the last to die. Unless Heboric's god returned to scoop up his wayward child. Felisin finally began to believe she would be the first. No vengeance achieved. Not Baudin, not sister Tavore, not the entire Hood-warped Malazan Empire.
A strange wave of lightning leapt up beyond the breakers hammering the reef. It played out tumbling and pitching as if wrapped around an invisible log leagues long and thirty paces thick. The crackling spears struck the sheets of spume with a searing hiss. Thunder slapped the beach hard enough to shiver the sand. The lightning rolled on, straight towards them.
Heboric was suddenly at her side, his froglike face split wide in a grimace of fear. 'That's sorcery, lass! Run!'
Her laugh was a harsh bark. She made no move. 'It'll be quick, old man!'
Wind howled.
Heboric spun to face the approaching wave. He snarled a curse that was flung away by the growing roar, then interposed himself between Felisin and the sorcery. Baudin crouched down beside her, his face lit in a blue glow that intensified as the lightning reached the shore, then rolled up to them.
It shattered around Heboric as if he was a spire of rock. The old man staggered, his tattoos a tracery of fire that flared bright, then vanished.
The sorcery was gone. For all its threat, it swiftly died up and down the beach.
Heboric sagged, settling on his knees in the sand. 'Not me,' he said in the sudden silence. 'Otataral. Of course. Nothing to fear. Nothing at all.'
'There!' Baudin shouted.
A boat had somehow cleared the reef and now raced towards them, its lone sail aflame. Sorcery stabbed at the craft from all sides like vipers, then fell away as the boat neared shore. A moment later it scraped bottom and slid to a halt, canting to one side as it settled. Two figures were at the ratlines in an instant, cutting away the burning sail. The cloth swept down like a wing of flame, instantly doused as it struck the water. Two other men leapt down and waded onto shore.
'Which one's Duiker?' Felisin asked.
Heboric shook his head. 'Neither, but the one on the left is a mage.'
'How can you tell?'
He made no reply.
The two men swiftly approached, both staggering in exhaustion. The mage, a small, red-faced man wearing a singed cape, was the first to speak – in Malazan. 'Thank the gods! We need your help.'
Somewhere beyond the reef waited an unknown mage – a man unconnected to the rebellion, a stranger trapped within his own nightmare. As the vortex of a savage storm, he had risen from the deep on the second day out. Kulp had never before felt such unrestrained power. Its very wildness was all that saved them, as the madness that gripped the sorcerer tore and flayed his warren. There was no control, the warren's wounds gushed, the winds howled with the mage's own shrieks.
The Ripath was flung about like a piece of bark in a cascading mountain stream. At first Kulp countered with illusions – believing he and his companions were the object of the mage's wrath – but it quickly became apparent that the insane wielder was oblivious to them, fighting an altogether different war. Kulp contracted his own warren into a protective shell around Ripath, then, as Gesler and his crewmen struggled to keep the craft upright, he crouched down to withstand the onslaught.
The unleashed sorcery instinctively hunted them and no illusion could deceive something so thoroughly mindless. They became its lodestone, the attacks endless and wildly fluctuating in strength, battering Kulp relentlessly for two days and nights.
They were driven westward, towards the Otataral shores. The mage's power assailed that coastline, with little effect, and Kulp finally began to make sense of it – the mage's mind must have been destroyed by Otataral. Likely an escaped miner, a prisoner of war who had scaled the walls only to find he took his prison with him. Losing control of his warren, it had then taken control of him. It surged with power far beyond anything the mage himself had ever wielded.
