The Gathandrian Trilogy 01 - The Gifting

again.”
    With that, Johan flings the herbs out into the sea. The wind takes them and spins them off into the deep. He cries out, his voice cracked and wild.
    “Take this, my sister, a love offering of the best you have made given with the best of my heart. Take this and let the sea and the sand remember you as I do.”
    In the silence after, he turns away and whispers to himself, although he cannot be sure that Simon does not hear him.
    “Wherever you are, Isabella, my sister, my quiet one. Wherever you are.”

    Simon
    It was only when Johan fell silent that he heard the noise. Something rising through the wind, sometimes hiding within it, sometimes not. Half wail, half keening. More in his mind than physically present, Simon thought he must have been aware of it for a while without realising it didn’t fit with his surroundings.
    He gripped Johan’s arm and felt the Gathandrian’s anxiety and pain flood through him. He looked up and Simon turned to follow the direction of his gaze. Above them, the cliff was still in the shadows of night and for long moments he couldn’t see anything untoward. Only the wild keening continued, rising again in intensity and making the hairs on his arms stand on end. Then something moved on the cliff-top and he could see, even at this distance, that the shadows were not shadows at all, but the figures of men. But men of no kind he had seen before—tall, with elongated limbs and strange long hair that shimmered bright against the rock.
    “They don’t look friendly,” he said, taking a step back, his throat dry. “Whoever they are.”
    Next to him, Johan gasped. “The people of the desert. The enemy has raised them and brought them here. Such a thing has never been done. How has he found such power? It has never… Come .”
    At once he turned and began to push the boat down the pebbles towards the sea. A moment later, Simon joined him. Still, he couldn’t imagine how they would survive on the water in so fragile a vessel. There was no end to the sea’s vastness. But it would surely be better than whatever lay behind.
    Now the boat seemed heavier than when they had been pushing it away from the cave. Sweat broke out on Simon’s forehead and began to drip down his face. His muscles locked, and pain shot through him. One glance at Johan showed he felt the same.
    Behind the two men came the noise of rocks falling. And still the wailing rose. When Simon looked back, he could see that the strange, tall figures were falling down the sheer cliff-face, tumbling from one jutting rock to another, their limbs twisted into impossible shapes, hands and feet flying in all directions. The sound he’d heard had not been stone at all, but the bodies of their pursuers. Why would they die like that? What was the point of it? The first man hit the land beneath, only half a field length from where they stood. Simon expected him to lie still. He expected him to be dead. But a moment later, his body moved, rose upward and took one step towards them. In the slow dawn light, he could only see bones and teeth, not skin.
    Gods and stars.
    Don’t look, Simon. Concentrate. Push the boat out!
    Fighting down bile, he redoubled his efforts to move the boat. It began to slide more smoothly down to the sea, but as the noise of the desert men became louder, he knew they would not reach the ocean before being overtaken.
    We have to do something else, Johan. We’re not going to get there in time.
    But what?
    In his voice, Simon heard the solid pulse of despair, a quality he had never sensed in Johan before. The shock of it released him into action.
    “If the boat responds to thought,” he said, too on edge to focus purely on mind communication, “will a mind-link do it?”
    “Only on the sea.”
    “Damn it,” he panted. “Then we’ll have to think again.”
    Letting go of the boat and abandoning the hopeless task of pushing it out onto the water, Simon swung around, heart hammering. The desert men were almost upon them, bones clattering on the pebbles and their strange keening an unbearable screech in his ears.
    Only one choice, and he cursed the need to take it. Stars above, he was not made for this.
    As Johan yelled a warning, Simon ran the short distance to the nearest figure, grasped his hair which tingled like heat on the flesh, and pulled him sideways, off balance. Skeletal hands clutched at his feet, but he jumped to one side, avoiding the dead man’s fingers.
    “Don’t let him touch