A great shiver coursed his body and Sha-Kaan’s heart leapt. The vibration, a siren for disaster, clamoured in his skull. He came to his feet, great wings unfurling for flight, a cry forming in his mouth. He called to the Brood and led them from the Choul, charging towards the light, drawn to the great boiling in the sky where a new battle was just beginning.

Chapter 1

It would be a glorious victory. Lord Senedai of the Heystron Tribes stood on a raised platform watching the smoke billowing over Julatsa as building after building was put to flame. The acrid smell of the smoke was beautiful in his nostrils and through the fog it created, he could see the white and black fire his Shamen wielded through linkage with the Wytch Lords, tearing what was left of the city’s heart to shreds. And there was nothing the Julatsans could do to stop them.

Ripping from their fingers and gnawing at the stone and woodwork of the once proud College city, the white fire issued from the fingertips of a hundred Shamen, demolishing building, fence and barricade. And where men and women ran in terror, the black fire picked the flesh from their bones and gouged the eyes from their skulls while they fell screaming to die in agony.

Senedai felt no sympathy. He leapt from the platform and yelled his Lieutenants to him. All that held up his progress to the College itself were the mages who still shielded great swathes of the city borders and the enemy soldiers who protected the mages from the swords of his warriors. It was time to put a stop to this irritating resistance.

As he ran towards the battle, issuing orders and watching the standards and banners sway as tribes ran to do his bidding, a wall of flame erupted ahead, the spell detonation rippling through the ground as the targets, all Shamen, were engulfed and died without a sound of their own.

‘Press! Press!’ he yelled. But this close the noise, muted to a roar only a hundred yards away, was as deafening as it was distinct. He could hear individual sword clashes, the cries of panic, fear and pain. He could hear bellowed orders, desperate and confident, and he could hear the thud of metal on leather, the tumbling of stone and the cracking of timber.

Beside him, his warrior guard ran a crescent of protection while he kept himself just out of bow range as did all but his most foolhardy of Shamen. The line of Julatsans was thin to the point of collapse and Senedai knew that once pierced, there would be a route straight through to the walls of the College itself.

Horns blew and his warriors surged again. Behind the enemy lines, mages were torn to shreds by the black fire, even as they spoke their spells of protection. He could taste the anguish of his foe and his Wesmen axes rose and fell, showering blood into the smoke-muddied sky.

‘I want those mages to the right destroyed!’ he shouted at a lieutenant. ‘See it is signalled immediately.’ The ground heaved with Julatsan magic, cold air blasted through the warmth of the day and the sky rained drops of fire, his tribesmen paying dearly for every pace they took.

A detachment of Shamen broke and ran right, arrows peppering the ground where they moved. One fell, a shaft buried deep in his thigh. He was left to writhe. Senedai watched them go, felt a thrill when their hands and mouths moved, summoning the fire from deep within the black souls of the Wytch Lords to project its hideous power on helpless victims.

But as he watched, he felt a change. The fire pulsing from outstretched fingers guttered, strengthened briefly, flickered and died. A ripple spread across the tribes. From every part of the battle ground, shouts were raised and Shamen stared at their hands and each other, incomprehension and fear on bleak faces.

From the enemy, a cheer, gaining in intensity, swept along the defensive line. Immediately, the barrage of spells increased and the defenders pushed into the confusion that gripped his warriors. They fell back.

‘My Lord?’ ventured a Captain. Senedai turned to the man, whose face held anxiety not fit for a Wesmen warrior, and found a rage boiling inside him. His gaze swept back across his failing attack, taking in the magic that blasted his men and the swords of the exhausted defence that fell with renewed energy and determination. He pushed the Captain aside and ran forwards, heedless of the risk.

‘By all the Spirits, are we not warriors?’ he bellowed into the roar of battle. ‘Horns, sound the attack! All fronts. Magic be damned, we fight with steel. Attack, you bastards, attack!’ He crashed into the battle, his axe ploughing through the shoulder of a defending Julatsan. The man collapsed and Senedai trod on the corpse, ripping the axe clear to bat it side-on into the face of the next enemy. Around him, the tribesmen responded, picking up songs of battle as they surged again.

Horns sounded new orders, wavering standards straightened in the hands of their bearers and moved forward again. The Wesmen poured back into the battle for Julatsa, ignoring the spells that handed out death and maiming injury indiscriminately, and seeing the defenders begin to wilt at the ferocity of the onslaught.

Lord Senedai dared a look either way along the lines and smiled. Many warriors would die without the Wytch Lords’ fire but the day, he determined, would still belong to the Wesmen. Noting the positions of the knots of offensive casting mages, he slapped aside a clumsy thrust and forged back into the fray.

The Raven stood in silence in Parve’s central square. The battle was won. Dawnthief had been cast, the Wytch Lords destroyed and their city once more a place of the dead. Above them, the after-effect of Dawnthief hung in the sky, brown and modulating, an alien and malevolent stain suspended like some predatory beast above the land of Balaia. It was the dimensional rip to nowhere.

Away across the square, Darrick and the remnants of the four-College cavalry had destroyed any remaining resistance and now piled bodies onto makeshift pyres; Wytch Lord acolytes, Wesmen and Guardians in one area, their own fallen in another, and the reverence with which dead cavalrymen were handled was in stark contrast to the dragging and throwing of enemy corpses. Styliann and the Protectors were in the blasted pyramid, searching the rubble for anything that might gives clues to the ancients’ brief but cataclysmic return to power.

The silence in the square was palpable. None of Darrick’s men spoke as they went about their sombre task; the sky under the rip was bereft of birds and the breeze that gusted across the open space seemed muted to a whisper as it coiled around Parve’s buildings.

And for The Raven, victory was once again tarnished by loss.

Denser leaned heavily on Hirad, Erienne at his other side, her arm about his waist. Ilkar stood by the barbarian. Opposite them, across the grave, Will, Thraun and The Unknown Warrior. All of them gazed down at the shrouded form of Jandyr. The elf’s bow lay the length of his body, his sword from chin to knees.

Sadness echoed its quiet around The Raven. At the moment of triumph, life had been taken from Jandyr. After everything he had survived, his was an unkind fate.

For Ilkar, the loss was keen. Elves were not numerous in Balaia, preferring as a rule the heat of the Southern Lands. Few now travelled to the Northern Continent excepting those called by magic and even their numbers were dwindling. They could ill-afford to lose elves like Jandyr. But the grief was felt most personally by Will and Thraun. Their long-time friend had died in the service of Balaia and The Raven. What had begun as a simple rescue had finished on the steps of the Wytch Lords’ tomb at the end of a desperate chase to find and cast the only spell that could save Balaia from the ancient evil. Yet Jandyr had died not knowing the outcome of the casting of Dawnthief. Life could be cruel. Mistimed death more so.