Your friendly author tent warning: This grim's about to get dark, friends! If death, gore, blood, and torture are not your thing, skip this chapter, and I'll see you on the one!e

  ed, bleeding, reeling from a blow to the head, Araam was dragged out of the dirter’s craft and into the shallows. His ears still rang with the screams of the dying and the crash of burning ship’s timbers breaking up. He smelled his own reeking sweat, felt the gritty yer of ash on his skin.

  White-capped waves lit by the approag dawn thundered into Araam, pitg him backward into the surf and dragging down with him the armor-cd dirter holding his s. Another soldier helped the first to stagger to his feet, then together they hauled Araam out of the water’s embrace.

  Hundreds more armored soldiers dotted the waves, disembarking from their clumsy crafts and floundering toward the beach.

  The dirters had burst from that wall of bck smoke onto the Raen ships like dolphins leaping from the sea; how was it that they could not simply return to the nd in the same fashion? If they could not travel through the smoke with their catch, then why bring the st of the survivors at all? After that sughter aboard ship, why leave any O Rovers alive?

  Araam’s exhausted mind could not grasp the meaning in any of it.

  Only two dozen Raen warriors had survived the battle. The approach of the cursed earth brought even the most dazed raedrs back from the brink of unsciousness. Araam’s eyes wouldn’t focus on any one man, but he heard their reruggling. Fighting to die before they were dragged onto that looming shore.

  An O Rover who set foot on dry nd was cursed. No longer part of any tribe, he could never return to Cryst’holm, never see his family again. He would be separated forever from the God Who Owhe Waves on a Thousand Seas.

  The maggot-white dirter monsters hacked operuggling raedrs’ throats and fed on the red that poured from within. What lifeblood missed the blood drinker’s mouths turhe surf pink. The emptied bodies were abao bump against the sand and the rocks until the sgers and sharks found them.

  Some bone-deep instinct told Araam that this was the better way to die—still pure, still a Raen, still in the graces of the God of the Waves—but he felt no sudden surge of panic. As the s hauled him closer to the rocky dirt, he did not look to the right or left.

  Ahead, his father, Oan, Bane of the Dirters, Chief of the Raen, First Tribe of the O Rovers was dragged ashore by a pair of the monsters. His legs dangled lifelessly, blood oozing from the injury to his back.

  Araam’s bare foot scraped unfamiliar dry sand. He stumbled ao his knees in the dirt.

  This was not the silt in the depths of the o nor the soft, grainy wash on the stantly shifting floor of an ihis felt wrong. Static. Dead.

  A jerk on the s encirg his wrists yanked him out ft on his stomad elbows. Filth stuck to his wet skin and caked his clothing.

  To his right, Ceolr roared—an awful, wounded sound—ahe dead sand. “Bachae! Bachae, my pearl! My sons and my daughters, my wife, I am sorry!”

  Araam had thought he was numb, but the raedr’s cries sent a hot spike of humiliation through him. Ceolr was a man among men; how could he disgrace himself by dispying his pain and his loss in full view of his enemies?

  A series of sharp, meaty hacks ended Coelr’s wailing. The thud of a head hitting sand, followed a moment ter by his body.

  Dirty boots ched across the shio Araam.

  “On your feet, pirate, or you’re .” The kick made an already broken rib in Araam’s side crackle as it stove in.

  The sound was so close to the crackle of Haelbringr burning. His gut ed with the same sinking siess as when he’d put the torch to her. Better she sleep in peace at the bottom of the o tha dirters defile her.

  Dragged ahead, Oan the Cursed, Chief of No Tribe, intoned his death poem as if he were standing amidship with high seas crashing around his hull.

  “My soul. The wind and the brine and the God of the Waves from whe came. I return all to thee.”

  They would die here, then. Though Araam could dis no reason for the blood drio have dragged the few of them ashore alive, his father must know now that they would die on this dirt. Around him, the crewmen and raedrs took strength from their former chief’s posure and called upon the God Who Owhe Waves on a Thousao hear them one final time.

  Araam had posed his death poem the first time he had go on a raid. Here on the dirt, he could not recall a word of it.

  “Yell louder,” a blood drinker s the praying raedrs. “Your pathetie-god might be sleeping.”

  “Maybe he sailed away.”

  “Maybe the sharks got him.”

  “If you’d had more thahe others could have saved you.”

  The dirter holding Araam’s s yahem again. “On your feet. Now.”

  The links dug into Araam’s wrists and hauled him forward. He spat sand from his mouth and staggered up to standing. He may be covered in the filth of dry nd, but he would not die on his belly.

  The king of the blood drinkers, the monster who had led the attack, stood scrutinizing the st vestiges of the prisoners his men had taken. Cold eyes the color of rotting mud fell upon Araam.

  “That ohe monster waved a dead-fish pale hand.

  The grouh Araam’s feet held discertingly still as he ulled forward. He pitched and listed with the immobility of the nd, but he did not fall again.

  That proud warrior Oan was tossed onto the sand at the foot of the blood drinker’s king, s g. He y there, crumpled on his side, uo raise himself from the dirt.

  “Son of my strength,” the former chief said, his voice steadfast and ued by shamiions. “Five me for my failure, my son, as your mother fave me.”

  Araam shook his head, uo speak without revealing the storm within. His father had fought to the moment he could move no more, had sent his mother on to paradise before the monsters could touch her, had done everything a man should do. Araam was still standing—God of the Waves, still walking! It was he who should be begging for his father’s fiveness. Even after Mehet… To have been blindsided by a dirter on his own ship… He was the one who had failed.

  Another blood drinker joihe king, holding an ugly, pale, dirter-fed sword in hand. He flicked his wrist, slinging O Rover blood from the bde.

  “Shall I open this one up, Your Majesty?” The sword-bearer looked from his leader to Araam.

  The dirter king gave a ive shake of his head. “Not this oo kill him would spurn the augury the strong gods favored us with. This boy is the son of their chief, the only sort of royalty their crude minds grasp. He will be the emblem of their defeat.”

  The sword-bearer sheathed his bde. “Bloodsve, then?”

  Araam spat at his feet. “I will bail my blood onto this cursed filth where you stand before I serve dirters.”

  Oan’s eyes shoh pained pride.

  The king of monsters smiled. “Even a bloodsve could one day break free. It takes a different sort of sce to beat the obstinacy from these savages. Above all, they value their legad their manhood. Kill the old man ahe boy.”

  ***

  The strong gods smiled upon the body-strewn beach as the ander of Hazerial’s forces chopped at the stubborn neck of the leathery old pirate. Blood gushed and puddled on the sand.

  Hazerial watched the old man’s son struggle to hide his pain and disgust as the head finally tore free of its st strings of gristle. The cold dawn rang with the babbled prayers of the few remaining pirates, but the boy was silent.

  The god-goddess Teikru would be excited by sutense passions, and the warriod Josean approved of any means that ended in victory. But it was Eketra who had always favored Hazerial, and she whom he ultimately sought to please. That ing goddess led him betweewisted pitfalls of this world and gifted him with the means to trol his enemies.

  Hazerial could see her hand now, holding out the gory puppet strings.

  With the old pirate dead, Hazerial’s men turo the boy. Bdes of sunlight pierced the horizon as they wrestled, first only two, then four more piling on. Blood-soaked sand ed.

  Children of Night were weaker in the daylight, but it should not have taken so many soldiers to hold the pirate boy. A savage like that would be a powerful asset.

  A drop of o in a sea of blood. A sce of Thorns, grafted forever to serve.

  Finally, the boy inned and the cutting began. Blood flowed, but not enough to kill him, as he must hope.

  The king raised a hand. The gelding stopped, half finished.

  In the sudden stillness, the boy’s retg was the only sound. The few pirates still alive watched with ashen faces.

  Hazerial took the mutited testicle from his ander and held it before the boy’s eyes. When reition dawned in all its beautiful horror, the king spoke.

  “You are half ruined, boy. Halfway to your line being cut off from this world forever. Halfway to being a useless old woman.”

  The boy shivered despite the sweat matting his hair and dripping from his face. Beh sun-browned skin and caked, bloody sand, he allor.

  “But I am a merciful ruler,” Hazerial said. “I offer you a choice: Submit to me, and I let you keep what’s left of your manhood. Resist, and my men finish the job.”

  The boy’s chest heaved. He stared at the headless corpse of his father. To the heretical savage mind, death held reward, not threat. After a lifetime of attag one another and the o-going vessels of higher civilization, the pirates greeted Death like an old friend.

  But h was offered here.

  Time passed in drips of blood and sweat on the ed sand. The boy aralyzed. Emascution was a terror he’d never fronted before.

  Hazerial brought the dismembered lump of meat closer. The boy’s wide, bloodshot eyes followed its motion, his pupils juddering with shock.

  “You will serve me as a gelding or you will serve me as half a man—but either way, you will serve me. Take my Mark upon you aain what manhood you have left.”

  All resistance went out of the boy. He fell limp in the soldier’s grasp, head and shoulders sagging i.

  A thrill rang through Hazerial. The Blood of the Strong Gods surged with victory.

  When he sshed open his wrist and shoved it into the boy’s mouth, there was only nominal resistahe savage was broken.

  Fingers of magit back essences of shattered strength and ruined pride. Hooks of are power twisted into the boy’s veins, leaving Hazerial’s Mark upon his innermost being, but stopped short of turning him into a mihrall. A bloodsve would feel no torment, experieniliation. Hazerial—like his beloved goddess—preferred those he quered to feel the weight of the iron yoke around their neck.

  Hazerial turo the remaining pirates ed on the sand. Their faces were torted in revulsion and dismay.

  “Today, you are witnesses. Return to your people ahem how the son of their great chief bowed to me. Tell them how he now serves Hazerial of the Kingdom of Night.”

  Soldiers loaded the ed pirates into one of the crafts. The savages called out to their leader’s disgraced son, but the boy ighem, head hanging, eyes cmped shut as if he could not stand to look at them.

  With a nod from Hazerial, the soldiers shoved the craft into the waves. The tide carried the pirates out to sea.

  In a few hours’ time, the pgue Hazerial had impnted in the messengers’ blood would take hold. Whether any of them were alive or sensate by the time their fellow savages found them did not matter. Their bodies were the message and the on.

  The os beloo the Kingdom of Night.