Stalking Darkness

came disembodied moans that echoed softly on all sides.
    Seregil recognized those ghostly voices, remembered standing over the crown as his blood fell into ice and crystal while they whispered around him. Crouched with the others now behind a fallen tree near the waterline, he saw shifting, half-formed shapes gathering out of the gloom beyond the torches, mingling restlessly with the vaporous exhalations of the pool. The black water began to swirl as if stirred with a dyer’s paddle. The spirit voices grew louder, sighing and shrieking. Wraiths buffeted them, plucking at their clothing and weapons, twitching strands of hair. The air thickened perceptibly, muting what little light remained. Nysander sketched a quick sigil on the air and the wraiths retreated.
    Working their way into the woods without being seen by the sentries, they followed the road to the head of the cove.
    “Be ready,” the wizard whispered. “It is nearly time.”
    Something slipped coldly across Alec’s back beneath his tunic. The weird disturbances in the air were worse now, tenuous but too insistent to be denied. Spectral forms, half-seen from the corner of the eye, brushed light as cobweb against his face, only to flit out of sight when he tried to look at them directly.
    The soldiers’ torches flared green and spit off fragments of flame that skittered like rats around the edge of the pool before being sucked up into the column of ghostly mist that was forming over the roiling pool. Up and up it rose, thrusting a twisting grey pillar flecked with tongues of fire into the burnt sky. It stood over the pool for a long moment, spirit forms darting around andthrough it, then a single blue-white bolt of lightning forked down through its center with an apocalyptic roar, blasting the pool into an explosion of steam and rock fragments.
    Soldiers fell to their knees, covering their faces in terror. The ravens rose in a screaming cloud, adding their raw voices to the din. From the direction of the road came the frenzied screams of the horses tethered there, and the clatter of carts being dragged off as the panicked beasts bolted. The mist slowly rolled back, revealing a shattered, steaming hole where the pool had been.
    With a shout of triumph, Irtuk Beshar climbed down into it and retrieved something from the water and rubble. Straightening again, she raised a helmet in both hands with a screech of sheer triumph.
    The bulging, peaked top and nasal of the helm were fashioned of dull iron but it was circled at the brow with a wide circlet of ruddy gold. This band was set around with eight dull blue stones and surmounted by a bristling crown formed from eight twisted black horns. A curtain of black mail hung down from the back of the Helm and skeletal, long-taloned hands served as the cheek guards.
    Climbing out, she held it up before Mardus and launched into an invocation of some kind. Although Alec did not understand her language, he recognized two words: “Seriamaius” and “Vatharna.”
    Alec drew the bowstring to his ear.
    Before he could loose the shaft, however, shouting broke out in the forest to the south. All eyes turned to see the bright glow of fire above the tops of the trees in the direction of the camp.
    Mardus drew his sword and shouted an order, sending half the guards off in the direction of the disturbance. Still clutching the helm, Irtuk Beshar gabbled urgently at him.
    Time slowed to dreamlike unreality as Alec rose to his feet and took aim again at the dyrmagnos. Ghostly forms imposed themselves between him and his target, swirling around him to buffet and natter but he ignored them, concentrating on his shot.
    Shoot true, talí
.
    “Aura Elustri málreil,”
he whispered.
    The black bow quivered like a live thing under his hand as he drew it, calling on every ounce of power the Radly possessed. When the nock was level with his ear he released it. The fletchingnicked his cheek as it flew, carrying a drop of his blood away with it.
    The arrow sped straight and true as any shaft he’d ever loosed, and made a sound like a sudden crack of summer thunder when it struck Irtuk Beshar in the chest just below her throat. The impact spun her like a broken doll. The Helm fell from her hands, tumbling back into the blasted pool.
    “And now you, you bastard!” Alec yelled, taking aim at the startled Mardus.
    But an arrow buzzed by his head, spoiling the shot. Another whined past and he dropped for cover as pandemonium broke out