15
The sand serpent was easily seventy feet long, its scales the dusky purple of the sands. It roared, its mouth spread five feet wide, four sets of fangs dripping venom while its secondary maw began rotating with a hundred razor teeth. It was eyeless and depended on the wide frill that spread ten feet beyond its head to detect vibrations in the air and sand to seek prey. It rattled its frill with a screech that rivaled any Valine had ever heard, the spasmodic wavering of it spraying sand wide. It pushed up on its two wiry arms, its three claws dragging furrows in the earth, and began encroaching.
Valine scrambled to her feet, meeting the terrified gazes of her company. She’d never wanted to be wrong so badly in her life. “What the fuck are you doing? RUN!” she screamed.
The six guards wasted no time taking off, with fearful yells and screams of terror, they kicked their horses into a race for their lives. Olivander had unearthed the flute from his pack and was producing sharp and unmelodic notes that pierced the ears. Sarim, the bold and brave idiot, raced towards the serpent. Towards her. The look on his face was pure conviction, his honey eyes determined, his jaw set.
“Give me your hand!” he yelled, reaching down.
Valine did, and in the most impressive maneuver she’d ever witnessed, Sarim grasped her roughly by the forearm and hauled her up onto his horse, landing astride his lap and facing him as he whipped the three of them in an arc and shot after the other riders. Pain shot through her arm, but she ignored it—the adrenaline surge blinding her. She gripped Sarim about the middle, trembling in utter terror, the pommel digging into her rear.
She couldn’t believe he’d risked his life for her.
Looking back behind them, Valine watched as the sand serpent shrieked and dove across the sand, propelling itself along with its two scythe-like limbs, tearing into the dark sand beneath it. Towards them.
“Fuck, Sarim! It’s coming!”
“I know! Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m so sorry, Valine, you were right.”
“This is not the time for ‘I told you so’. We just need to get out alive. Do not travel in a straight line. You need to zig-zag and confuse it. I know it’ll take longer, but please trust me.”
“I will never doubt you again.”
Sarim listened to her and began zig-zagging across the desert, their soldiers so far ahead of them, Valine didn’t dare tell him that they were clearly the first prey. She just held her breath and stared behind them as the nightmare that came true launched itself across the sands in leaping arcs and sinuous propulsions. As the beast drew closer, her heart hitched higher. Their horse was fast but the serpent was faster. And it was ravenous.
“I don’t think we’re—”
“Don’t fucking say it!” Sarim commanded.
Valine felt helpless. With human monsters, she had her necromancy to aid her. She was an assassin and a death mage. She was the monster in human eyes. But on animals, her magic was useless. She could no more part a horse’s spirit from its form than she could fly. It wasn’t possible, the magic did not work on pure and natural beings. She couldn’t kill a plant, and she couldn’t kill the serpent.
They were fucked.
Ahead of them, Valine heard the sounds of screams and an abrupt squeal from the flute. She whipped her head to the side. Their zig-zagging journey had taken them perpendicular to their company, and there, in the middle of the men and horses, was another sand serpent. Four of the horses reared and threw their riders. In another purple burst, a third serpent emerged. Three enormous sand serpents surrounded them.
Now they were absolutely fucked.
“Fucking saints!” Sarim shouted, urging their racing horse faster, a steady lather working itself on the horse’s beautiful champagne coat. “Valine, please, if you have any saints-damned magic, please try it. Otherwise, we are absolutely going to die.”
Valine watched in horror as the second sand serpent lunged and took a rider from its steed, blood spraying from its maw as the rotating teeth shredded and pulped blood and bone and flesh and sinew. The third beast whipped its thick tail, and the other mounted rider was flung to the sand, his face crushed and destroyed, his chest crumpled and inverted. His horse fared little better. There was hardly any time to process the quick deaths before one of the serpents slithered across the sand and reared up. It lunged forward, catching Olivander in its fore-jaws, and succinctly snapped him in half. Olivander’s lower body fell aside, intestines and organs spilling across the Twilight Sands, staining the violet scarlet. The serpent crunched Olivander’s upper half, blood spurting from its maw and erupting into a crimson mist—the useless flute with it. The beast then lunged for Olivander’s horse.
Feeling her stomach roil and vomit surge in her throat, Valine grounded herself by clutching onto Sarim tighter. His muscles flexed beneath her hands, and sweat from their bodies dampened their clothes. Her spine was arched painfully from the saddle, and her thighs burned from trying to stay astride.
The serpent chasing them wavered between the contingency and them, uncertain where the most bountiful prey lay.
“Please, if there’s anything you can do,” Sarim prayed.
She was helpless and vulnerable. They continued to zig and zag. The other two nameless soldiers were dead in quick succession of the other, one caught beneath the vicious claws, and the other pulped in that horrible rotating maw. It was just Athan, Sarim, and Valine left.
With a last desperate hope, Valine tightened her hooks on Sarim and separated them from the rest, tying them to herself. With one arm wrapped around his torso, she lifted her hand high. Drawing from the depths of her necromancy, she screamed through the pain in her shoulder and the pain in her soul as she pulled from the dregs of her magic. Black smoke wreathed her, coiling up her arm and twining between her fingers. She gathered the tendrils, wrapping them into a globe of onyx. When the sphere was the size of a man, she reared her hand back and shot it forward with a throwing motion, spreading her fingers wide. The compressed ball exploded out of her and expanded into a massive haze of smoke, wrapping around their pursuing serpent. The necromancy clung to the sand serpent—coiling, restraining, tightening.
Valine’s eyes widened in shock, but she spared no hesitation as she twisted her fingers one by one in a rotation and pulled. The magic roped around the serpent’s throat, just behind its frill like a lasso. It tightened, and as she snapped her fingers closed into a fist, the black smoke severed the titanic sand serpent’s head. It landed with a momentous crash, the earth quaking beneath it. Scarlet flooded the sand like a river, washing through a dam. The head laid several paces from its body, the rotating maw slowing as the final nerves and synapses ceased.
“Holy fucking saints,” Valine managed, vertigo trickling through her.
Sarim glanced behind them and gasped. “Fucking Mrithun and Bela, what did you do?”
She looked up at him, her hopeful dark eyes meeting his amber ones. “You asked what I am.” She wrapped the magic around her fist again, and gathered it into another sphere, pulling more necromancy from the death surrounding them. “I’m a necromancer.” And she shot the magic at one of the remaining serpents.
Before the beast could snap at Athan’s fleeing form, Valine scythed her magic down, and like a blow from a broadsword, it cut the serpent in half. It thumped to the ground, and blood steadily pumped from the sand serpent’s sinuous body, spouting like a faucet turned on full.
The scent of blood was thick in the air, cloying in her lungs. The Twilight Sands were turning red with a wash of violence. For a moment, the sands were a crimson plain, littered with serpent corpses and human viscera and offal.
Fatigue began to fringe on Valine’s consciousness, spots of black dotting her vision. She leaned into Sarim for more support as they rode on, pushing for the final survivor of their entourage. For a final time, Valine evoked the power within herself, drawing from the deceased serpents around them to fuel her magic. She twisted the sphere of smoke in her hand, working it quickly as the final sand serpent began striking at Athan.
The violet-scaled beast shrieked at Athan, pushing up on its clawed legs, and lashed its long tail. Athan miraculously managed to leap over the sweeping tail, and the enraged roar that erupted from the beast sent terror skittering down her spine.
With a haze across her vision, Valine shot her magic at the sand serpent, funneling the necromancy into a spiked pillar. With a twist of her wrist and closing of her fingers, she drove her hand and magic down, the black smoke piercing through the serpent’s skull just as a fang tore through Athan’s midsection. It fell, crushing his horse, with Athan in its jaws. The final survivor of their guards passed the veil as the venom lanced through his blood.
She was too late to even consider saving him. Sand serpent venom was virtually instantaneous, as the seizing of his limbs proved and the foam at his mouth identified. Had she been quicker, she still would have failed. She already had her protective hooks in Sarim, and she was tired—so, so tired.
Valine wavered; her necromancy never exhausted her like this. Her magic drew from death, from the decay of the forest floor and the fallen in battle. It was charged by bones and blood and fragments of death. But in destroying these beasts, she had to draw from herself, as well as the dead. She had to pull from the dregs of her soul to kill those daemon-damned—
Daemons.
Sand serpents were created by the saints and daemons. Was that why she could kill them at such a cost? She could not harm animals because they were pure and untouched by the saints and daemons. But the beasts, they were created by them. Humans, meanwhile, were not pure and virtuous. Even the most devout of individuals had some sort of wickedness about them. Even so, every human in some way was touched by the saints and daemons.
She’d never understood why she had the limitations in her necromancy that she did, and even still, it was mostly theory. It had always plagued her why pyromancers could set a sheep’s wool alight, but she could not use her magic for a merciful death. Or how hydromancers could drown a bird midflight, but she could not quiet its gurgles and invoke her necromancy. Even how aethermancers could steal the air from the lungs of a mountain cat, but Valine could not end its gasping breaths with her ebony smoke. Her only understanding was that the elements were already present, and they only focused on them. The animals were directly affected by their indirect actions. Valine’s magic, however, was always direct, and that was the difference.
“You’re a fucking necromancer and an assassin?” Sarim exclaimed, casting his gaze around the destruction around them. “And Malik knew this?”
Valine wobbled, the scent of copper—of blood—potent in her nostrils. “I only just told him.” Her voice was breathy and thin.
Sarim stopped their horse, and gazed down at Valine, clutching her cheeks in both of his hands, lifting her face to his. She felt a tickle in her nose and wetness spilled down her lips, past her chin. Blood. “Did you know your magic worked on the serpents?”
She shook her head weakly. “It’s not supposed to work on animals. It’s why I didn’t try until I thought we were going to die.”
“Does this normally happen when you use necromancy?”
Again, Valine shook her head.
“Shit,” Sarim muttered and began readjusting her. “We need to get you on this saddle properly and get the fuck out of here.”
Sarim’s strong and capable hands had her seated before him on the saddle, her hips bracketed by his thighs, her body caged by his arms, her head lolled against his chest. She was fighting tooth and nail to stay conscious, but the fog across her mind was potent.
“Valine, I need you to stay awake. If there’s another one, you have to get rid of it or we’re definitely not making it through. Do you understand?”
This time, Valine nodded.
With that, Sarim kicked off, and they sped across the Twilight Sands, leaving desolation and Valine’s failure behind them.