The spellbook ofElemental Magic

Ylva had no spear, and the wild boar blocking the trail through the Borean Forest had no patience. She cupped her hands, muttered the old words, and out of her own throat came the deep, wet cough of a brown bear, so perfect that the hair rose on her arms. The boar froze, snorted and crashed away through the bracken. For a few minutes more the Cimmerian witch kept it up, a bear's grumbling roaming the pines, until every jay in the valley had fled. She could not say a word to the boar. She only sounded like the thing it feared.

The Tharshi trader swore the little bronze sickle had been blessed at Stonehenge itself. Nesta, a druidess of Havar, leaned so far across his stall in the Tartessos market that her braid brushed the merchandise; the spell reached no farther than a long stride, and it would only hold for a minute. The sickle stayed dull and ordinary in her sight. Two tables down, though, a dirty clay whistle glowed like a coal among the junk. She paid for the whistle, left the sickle, and let the trader think her a fool.

The Manuan war canoe was still thirty yards off the reef when Tavita, a warlock of Orongo, stood up in the surf and flung a streak of green-gold fire at the paddler in the prow. The man twisted aside and took only a glancing burn across the shoulder, but his cape of dry grass went up like kindling. He tore it off, howling, and pitched into the lagoon. His companions backed water hard. On Orongo, where every child knows a little of the old elemental craft, nobody lands uninvited twice.

The Pict warband came over the heather at a run, blue-painted and screaming, and Aine the druid simply breathed out. A bank of white fog rose from the burn and rolled uphill to meet them, as tall as a watchtower and wide enough to swallow the glen. Inside it the raiders could barely see their own hands. The ones who kept charging went sprawling over boulders and into each other; the careful ones crept at a walk. Behind the fog, Aine's villagers were already driving their cattle toward the hidden fold above Uallach.

The keepers of the Acheron Zoo had lost two beasts in one night, and they paid a hedge-witch named Takhat to find them before the Pharaoh heard. She stood on the zoo wall, eyes closed, and reached out for the Khitan snow leopard. Nothing. No leopard of that kind had ever walked the Qaddani sands, and the spell could not find it. She tried again for the striped hyaena, a beast of the desert's own, and felt it at once, a warm prickle to the southwest: skulking behind the statues in the Park of Monuments.

The hind had dragged herself into the bracken with a Tharshi arrow still in her flank. Ewan, a druid of the Starr, who follow the red deer and would not eat one, cut the shaft free and pressed both palms against the torn hide. Warmth passed from his hands into the animal. The bleeding slowed, the ragged edges drew together, and the hind's breathing eased from a pant to something like calm. She would limp for a while yet. But when he stepped back she stood, stared at him, and trotted off after the herd.

Night fell over the Ngani Swamp like a lid. Oya, a witch from Gondwana, looked up at her companion, a Qaddani archer perched forty feet up in a leaning mangrove, and whispered the charm toward him. Achmed blinked. The black water below turned gray and sharp, every root and ripple plain as noon, and he saw what the darkness had been hiding: three hunched ghouls wading toward the campfire, bellies low in the mud. He nocked an arrow. The spell would give him an hour and a little more. He meant to use all of it.

The jarl wanted to sail at dawn. Old Sigrun, the Haloga clan's witch, sat on the jetty with her eyes shut and her hands in the fjord water while the longship crews stamped their feet. Tomorrow, she said at last, clear and cold. The day after, a north wind rising. The third day, sleet and a blow that would pile ships on the skerries. Beyond that her sight ran out. The jarl scowled; he had hoped for four days of calm. He sailed anyway, and was home again, soaked and furious, by the third afternoon.

Someone had stolen a jeweled comb from a senator's daughter in Calypso Park, and the sentries were baffled. A druid from the Plain of Gwyddneu, visiting the capital against her better judgement, crouched beside a strutting peacock and asked it. The peacock, it turned out, had seen everything and wished to discuss it at length: a boy in a green tunic, very rude, who had not admired anyone's tail. The ducks in the fountain would not answer at all; the spell spoke only to peacocks. Within the half hour, the sentries had their thief.

The goblins of the Black Forest hunted by smell as much as sight, and the druid Brenna knew it. She stood with her back to a mossy beech and let the forest take her, bark and shadow folding over her until there was nothing to see. The lead goblin padded past, close enough that she could count the rings in its ears. It stopped and sniffed. Her left calf had begun to cramp, badly. Moving now might tear the spell apart, even odds, so she bit her lip and held still until the whole pack had gone.

From the ridge above the Eridanus, Lenna, druid of the Otesi, watched the dust on the far side of the valley sharpen into riders. A mile away, and yet she could count them: nineteen Scythians on shaggy ponies, fresh scalps swinging from their bridles, one with a split lip, one favoring his left arm. She could even read the painted marks on their shields. The spell would last a while longer, long enough to see which ford they chose. Then she ran down the slope to tell the family groups to scatter into the woods.

The harbor guard of Promeus chased the warlock down the quay, spears leveled, past the racks of drying cod. Ivar did not bother running any faster. He turned, swept one hand along the planks, and a glittering skin of rime raced across the planks around him. The first two guards went down in a clatter of spears and fish. The sergeant kept his feet, arms windmilling, and edged forward inch by inch; the next step put him flat on his back as well. For ten minutes nobody on that quay did anything but fall.

The alchemist from Goldar had paid well and complained constantly. Nessa, a witch who knew the Weeping Forest better than any honest traveler should, sat among the drooping willows and let her mind spread through the undergrowth, calling for one pale herb that grew only there. Within the mile of her searching, she found three clumps: one by the hazy blue river, one under a wolf's den, and one right behind the alchemist's tent. She pointed to the last and said nothing about the wolves. He could find those himself.

Three days into the Wilderness of Zin, the caravan's waterskins were flat and the camels had begun to groan. The druid Hadad knelt on the baked stones and let the spell pull at him like a hand on his sleeve. Southeast, it said, less than a mile. The whole train turned and followed him to a cleft in the rocks, where the water lay green, still and crawling with flies. The camel drivers cursed him. Then they boiled it, strained it through their headcloths, and drank every drop.

The Mestean shepherds had lost six sheep and a dog in the night. Bedwyr, the druid they had sent for, knelt in the trampled mud by the broken fold and did nothing at all for a long, patient minute, while the shepherds shifted and muttered. Then he stood. Three ogres, he said, and no more than that. The prints were made before midnight, perhaps five hours ago, and they led toward the gorge. He did not add that the prints were twice the size of his own boots. The shepherds could see that for themselves.

Six runaways from the copper mines of Tara stumbled north across Iber, their bare feet printing the wet ground plain as ink. Behind them walked Fionn, a druid from Uallach, murmuring as he went, and behind him the heather straightened, the mud smoothed and every trace of their passing melted away along a path ten paces wide. He could not hide the whole journey; his power stretched only so far with each casting. So when his reach ran out, he led them into the stream and made them walk in the water for a mile.

The Tharshi timber outpost on Saturnia kept its archers on the palisade day and night. The druid who had come to speak for the nymphs of the valley did not argue with them. She pointed at the nearest bowman's quiver and whispered, and twenty straight ash shafts bent into twenty wooden corkscrews. The man drew one, stared at it, and drew another. The next casting took the arrows of the archer beside him. By the time she walked away, the whole watch was examining its ammunition in silence.

Among the moss-covered rock pinnacles in the Straits of Ayr, the Triton druid Maelan held out a webbed hand to a fisher-girl from the Alban shore and her little brother. They had come to see the seal-nursery beneath the kelp. He touched each of them, spoke the old words, and they slid down into the green water together. The girl panicked on her first breath, then laughed, a burst of silver bubbles, when the sea filled her lungs as gently as air. They could stay below until the spell ran out, and Maelan meant to have them back on the rocks well before then.

The Avakuli raiders crept up the riverbank toward the Okwilu camp at dawn. Obasi, the camp's druid, masked in woven straw and standing on a termite mound, raised his arms toward the baboon troop feeding in the fig trees. The troop went silent, then furious. Screaming, bounding, snapping, they hurled themselves at the painted raiders and chased them back toward the Okawala. One grizzled old male ignored the whole affair and went on eating figs. Obasi let him be. The rest would hound the Avakuli across half a mile of jungle before the hour was out.

The boy had stepped on a cobra at the edge of the rice paddy, and by the time the Dravidian druid reached him his leg was swelling black to the knee. She knelt in the mud, set her palm flat over the two small punctures, and spoke to the venom as if to an unruly animal. It stopped. The swelling crept no higher; the gray tinge stayed exactly where it was. The boy still wept, still burned with fever from what had already been done. But he would live to wail about it.

Four goblins had slipped past the border of Broceliande and were cutting across a bramble thicket toward the tree houses. Ithilwen, an elven druidess, laid her palm on the nearest thorn stem. The whole thicket clenched like a fist. Brambles whipped around ankles, wrists and throats and hauled the goblins down among the thorns, where they thrashed and swore and could not tear loose. Ithilwen sat on a root to wait for the wardens. A troll might have wrenched itself free in time. Goblins never would.

A sea-nomad boy of the Munark had been stranded on the far side of Oguamana when the volcano woke, and the only way to him was across a slope of hissing ash and steaming rock. Tauri the witch chose heat, spoke the charm, and walked out onto ground that blistered the soles of the men who tried to follow her. She felt it as nothing more than a warm afternoon. She found the boy crouched in a lava cave, wrapped him in her cloak and carried him back, while the rest of the raft-clan watched with their hands over their mouths.

The child had been missing since morning, and Hwarrum's elders had searched every hollow. Old Bryn, a druid of Havar, went to the great oak at the edge of the settlement, put his forehead against its bark and waited while the tree's slow thoughts came to him: light, rain, the weight of crows, a small warm thing climbing, climbing. The oak did not understand children, but it remembered where the warm thing had stopped. Bryn looked up. The boy was fast asleep in a fork forty feet above his head.

Their raft had broken apart on a sandbar in Tamarack Sound, and the Kawanna witch Ahanu was not going to let her three companions drown within sight of shore. She sang out over the water. Within two minutes the sea bulged and two dolphins surfaced beside the wreckage, clicking. On her word each let a swimmer grip its fin, then towed them in long easy surges to the beach, and went back for the other two. Ahanu waded ashore last, holding the dorsal fin of the bigger dolphin as if it were an old friend.

Sleet was driving across the moors of Skara, and three ewes had dropped their lambs at once in the lee of a dry-stone wall. Gwen the shepherd-witch knelt among them, drew the circle tight, and breathed out slowly. Within the space of a few strides around her the air softened, the sleet turning to rain and the rain to mist, until it was as mild as a spring noon in her little circle while the moor howled around it. The lambs steamed and struggled to their feet. She had an hour; it would be enough.

The Massawan herders wanted to water their cattle at the Lake of Dragons, and nobody wanted to be the first to walk down to the shore. Their druid, a tall woman named Makeda, climbed the ridge above the reeds and stood with her face to the wind. It carried frogs, birds and lowing cattle, and she let all of it pass, listening for one kind of creature only. At last she caught it, faint beneath everything: a long, slow breathing like a bellows in a cave. A dragon lay somewhere within the mile. She came down the ridge and turned the herd away.

The war elephants of Rangpur came across the paddy in a gray wall, and Devika, the witch who had sold her service to the hill villages, reached into the minds of the four leading beasts. They trumpeted, swung around, and plowed back into their own infantry, scattering spearmen like chaff. She held them there for the best part of an hour, turning them wherever she pointed. She was no druid, though, and the elephants would not thank her for it. Before the hour ran out she was already running for the hills.

Makara sea-devils had been shadowing the Eudean trader since Valum Chivum, and now the wind was pushing the ship straight onto the reefs where they waited. The ship's druid, a gray-bearded Eudean named Cadmus, climbed onto the stern rail, raised both arms, and turned the wind like a man turning a horse. The sails slammed, filled from the opposite quarter, and the ship heeled away from the reef and out toward open water. The scaly heads in the surf sank from sight. The crew stopped praying and started cheering.

The Tharshi overseer at Taranta had flogged one slave too many. From the hill above the vineyards the witch called up a cloud of locusts the size of a temple and walked it slowly downhill, eating every leaf and grape in its path. The guards caught inside it screamed as the insects bit, and half of them bolted blindly through the vines. The overseer alone kept his head. He snatched up a smoking torch from the pruning fires and stood in its haze, untouched, watching his profits vanish row by row.

The Okawala marshes hummed with mosquitoes so thick they looked like smoke, and one of the pilgrims had turned an ankle in the reeds. The druid Kesi made them all crowd close around the injured man and spoke a word. The swarm drew back as though it had struck glass, hanging in a whining curtain a few paces off on every side. Nothing crossed that line. Splint it quickly, she told them. It took them nine of the ten minutes, and when the curtain collapsed they were already limping and slapping their way toward dry ground.

The Scythians had lit their torches and were riding for the thatched roofs of the Ku fishing village. The druid Varka called the rain down on them from the dunes behind the boats. It fell like a dropped lake. Every torch died in a hiss of steam, the riders' own war fires went out in their pots, and the sandy track under their horses turned to sucking mud. Blind in the downpour, unable to see more than a few yards, the raiders floundered at a walk. By the time the rain stopped, the fishermen were ready for them.

The werewolves came out of the Borean pines at moonrise, and Halvard the druid knew his wounded companion could not run. He struck his staff on the ground. A ring of flame roared up around them both, taller than a man and burning bright in a wide circle. The wolves paced its edge, snarling. One gathered itself and leapt straight through; it landed inside with its fur alight and ran howling back out the way it had come. The rest settled down to wait. The fire would burn for an hour, and dawn was closer than that.

The rock trolls had followed the witch Astrid down from the Rhiphaen heights, and now there were six of them and one of her. She planted her feet and the air cracked: a wall of blue ice leapt up in a ring around her, twice the height of a man and thick as a doorway. The trolls began to chop at it with their stone axes, shards flying. One troll alone would need twenty minutes to hack through; six working together would need barely four, if they ever thought to cooperate. They squabbled instead. One tried climbing, made it halfway up on the third attempt, and slid all the way down.

The Fomorian longship grounded on the beach at Havar and the giants came over the side with chains in their hands. The druid Iolo waited until four of them were wading ashore together, then hurled a bolt of lightning down among them. It crackled across the wet sand; a clap of thunder shook the cliffs. Two giants dropped, smoking. A third staggered, half-burned but standing, and simply stood there dazed, unable to move, while his chain slipped from his fingers. The fourth, with the luck of pirates, charged on up the beach alone.

The expedition from the Atlantis Historical Society had found a sealed chamber in one of the half-drowned pyramids of Domanu, and it was full of seawater to the ceiling. Their hired druid, a Diaprepean woman named Nala, laid her hand on the stone lip and spoke. The water shuddered and began to sink away into the stone, seeping out through every crack and seam until it simply was not there. When it was gone the scholars stared at a mosaic floor, a toppled throne, and the bones of someone who had not escaped in time.

In the heart of the Sea of Baku the water burns, fed by oil and gas welling up from the seabed. The witch Zarina rowed straight into it. Flames licked over the gunwales, the air shimmered, and the pitch in the boat's seams began to bubble, but the fire slid off her skin like rain off oiled leather. It was only fire, after all, natural as sunlight, and her spell turned it aside for an hour. On a blackened islet at the center she found the herb she had come for, and rowed out before the boat itself caught.

Wyverns had been raiding the Zephyr eyries on the Curracurrang cliffs for a month. When the next four came gliding in over the sea, the druid Mira was waiting on a ledge below. She raised her staff and the air above the wyverns turned to hammering ice, a squall that battered them from every side. Three went down beneath the weight of it, wings crusted white, and tumbled into the surf. The fourth fought its way to a clean glide and landed safely on the rocks, shredded and furious, where the Zephyr archers were waiting.

The witch hunters had followed Mab to her cottage at the edge of the Black Forest, and they were almost at the door when the ground turned black and moving. A tide of spiders poured out of the leaf litter and swarmed over them. Two hunters went down under it, slapping and screaming. A third fought loose after a few minutes of agony and ran. The fourth had been lagging behind the others, outside the swarm, and he was a clever man: he had seen that the spiders would not cross water. He dived into the stream and stayed there, up to his neck, until the plague moved on.

Night on the Nubian savannah, and the lions had found the druid Zuri and the boy she was guiding home. She drew her circle in the dust and spoke the words, and the big cats padded up to its edge and could come no farther, pacing and grumbling a few strides away. The boy began to relax. Then something larger came out of the grass: a lion's body, a man's face, a tail heavy with spikes. It walked straight past the lions and stepped across the line as if it were not there. Zuri reached for her spear.

In the Sarakan Jungle, a rival druid had summoned creepers of the crawling kind. They came slithering across the clearing toward the witch Liana and her two companions, thick as pythons and quick as whips. She spoke the charm and a circle of safety opened around the three of them; the creepers reached the edge of it and recoiled, curling back as if burned. Nothing green could cross. They had ten minutes. Liana's companions began hacking at the vines along the only path out, and she counted the minutes aloud.

The Suti came down the stony slope at the caravan in a howling line of camels, and the druid Suhail did not reach for a weapon. He spread his hands toward the hillside. Rock sagged, softened and ran, and the whole slope beneath the raiders turned to a brown, oozing mire. Camels floundered chest-deep, bellowing, crawling forward at a quarter of their pace while the caravan guards picked their shots. The Suti who survived never came that way again. Neither did anyone else: the pass in the Wilderness of Zin is a bog to this day.

The castaways had eaten nothing but crabs for a week on the empty islet off Temuah. Hina, a witch of the Temuah fisher-folk who had come looking for them, knelt on the sand and sang to the ground. For two minutes nothing happened. Then the earth heaved and split in three places, and there stood a breadfruit tree, heavy with fruit, and two banana plants bowed under green bunches, rooted just above the tide line where she had pointed. The castaways stared. Hina picked a breadfruit and handed it to the youngest.

The firedrake had been driven off, but the Mestean village it had visited was burning from end to end, thatch roaring, sparks leaping from roof to roof. Owain, the druid of the nearby woods, walked into the lane with his staff raised and spoke to the fire as an old master speaks to a hound. It lay down. Along the lane and in every house around him the flames sank, shrank and went out together, leaving only smoke and blackened beams and a sudden, ringing silence. The villagers crept out of the ditches, coughing, to count what they had saved.

Elassippeans will not say the name of Helioselen. Ffion, a druid from the western hills, went into the ruins anyway and sat on the cracked flagstones of what had been a market square, palms pressed to the ground. She had three questions and she chose them carefully. What broke this city? The answer rose through her hands minutes later, slow and grinding: the earth itself, shrugging. Did anyone survive? A long wait. A few, fleeing west. Where does the king lie? The last answer took so long she thought it would never come.

The Neptus Tritons had asked for a druid to look at their sickening kelp gardens, and Nerys, who could not breathe water, meant to go anyway. She cast the spell on herself and on Dorian, her Atlantean bodyguard, and they walked hand in hand off the end of the jetty. The sea closed over them. Nerys felt her body turn fluid and easy; she breathed the green water like air and kicked downward like a seal. Dorian, less graceful, swam like a startled fish, but he swam. They had hours below, and the Tritons were waiting.

In a clearing deep in the Yallock, the Naga priestess raised her silver idol of Tiamat over the bound captives. The druid Talia stood up in the ferns at the clearing's edge and pointed. The altar vanished in a roaring cube of fire. The priestess threw herself out of it, scorched and shrieking, and the cloth hangings and wooden stakes around the altar burned to ash in moments. When the flames died after a minute, the silver idol had slumped into a shapeless lump of metal. The captives, bound well clear of the altar, were only singed.

The Pict warband had surrounded the sacred grove, and the old druid within it had had enough. He sent out a cloud of wasps, hornets and bees that darkened the sky over the glade. It swept across the warriors at a run. Men screamed as the stings came, and most of them broke and fled in every direction, crashing through gorse and over each other, and did not stop running until the swarm itself had gone. Only the warchief held. He had snatched a burning brand from the fire and stood cursing inside its smoke.

The Sidhe of Arden tolerate few humans, but they had let the druid Tegwen walk their forest, and now she was fleeing a goblin pack along its edge. She ran straight at a great oak and into it, bark closing over her like water. Inside was a green, slow darkness that smelled of sap. She counted her breaths and moved through the heartwood, down into the roots, and stepped out of a gnarled root on the far side of the trunk, behind the goblins. She had to be out before the spell ran out, or die in the heartwood.

The Jotun and his ogre servant were stalking down the valley toward the Aesir longhouses on Gava when the ground beneath them turned to porridge. The witch Hrefna had laid a mire across their path, and both sank at once. The ogre thrashed, heaved itself half free, and then lost its footing and went under; after a few minutes the bubbles stopped. The Jotun sank only to his chest and stuck fast, roaring, stone-gray mud to his ribs. He was much too tall to drown in it. He would simply stay there for an hour.

A flooded shaft had cost the dwarves of the Citadel of Namtu two months of digging. Their human ally, the druid Gareth, spent half an hour chalking a circle on the gallery floor beside the black water, stepped inside it and called. Within minutes the surface of the shaft rose into a shape like a woman made of glass, streaming and graceful: an undine. Gareth greeted her as a friend. Druids and elementals understand one another, and the bargain was quickly struck. By morning the undine had led the water down into the deep rock.

The druid of Palasgea needed eyes over the whole valley, and she needed them before the Tharshi slave-takers reached the goat pastures. She stood in the olive grove and called. Before three minutes had passed, four sprites came zipping down out of the leaves like dragonflies, giggling, their wings flashing in the sun. Find the men with chains, she told them, and tell me where they walk. Off they went in four directions. Within the hour she had every raider mapped. Then the sprites, their service done, simply vanished back into the grove.

The slave pens of the Tharshi copper mine on Achamantis were built of mortared stone with a single iron gate. The druid Godric did not bother with the gate. He laid his hand against the outer wall, and a whole section of it slumped, crumbled and ran away like wet sand, leaving a gap wide enough to drive a cart through. The prisoners stared at the sudden opening and the night beyond it. A guard came running around the corner and stopped dead. Then the first slave was through, and the rest poured after.

The yam fields of Salawati had cracked open in a drought that had lasted all summer, and the elders begged the druid for rain. Pua gave them a monsoon. It rolled in off the sea that evening and did not stop: warm, gray, drenching rain that filled every ditch, floated the pig pens and slowed every errand on the island to a wet slog. It would last well over a week. The farmers danced in it the first night. By the fifth day they were grumbling. By the ninth they were asking the druid, very politely, whether she could please make it stop.

Makara sea-devils rose around the Munark raft-fleet at dusk, scaly heads breaking the swell on every side. Nohea, the fleet's witch, stood on the lead raft and called the sky down on the water. A storm of lightning raked the sea around the rafts, forking again and again into the waves, spreading wide across the conducting water. Makara jerked and floated belly-up. A few, quicker than the rest, dived and escaped with only scorched scales. After a minute the sky went quiet and the Munark began pulling their spears from the drifting bodies.

The high priests of Heru had condemned the druid Sefu to die at dawn in the Public Square of Acheron. He had other plans. In the dark of his cell below the Halls of Justice he pressed his hands to the wall and stepped into it, as easily as stepping into a pool. The stone took him in. He walked through solid rock, under the prison wall and up into the cellar of the tannery beyond it, counting under his breath all the while. Anyone caught inside the stone when the magic ends stays there forever.

In the coastal desert of Okalo called the Land of the Basilisks, the druid Njeri found the Ophirean trader exactly where his partner had said: a gray statue on the sand, one arm flung up across its eyes. She spoke the incantation backward. Color seeped into the stone, starting at the fingertips. The arm dropped; the chest heaved; the trader collapsed onto his knees, gasping, and began to scream about eyes. Njeri let him scream. Then she made him walk behind her, blindfolded, all the way out of the basilisk country.

The rock troll's club had crushed Brokk's chest in the Rhiphaen tunnels, and his dwarven kin carried him back to the witch Solveig, who had wintered among them for years. She knelt by the body, set her hands on the ruined ribs and called him back. For a long moment nothing happened; the dwarves held their breath. Then Brokk's chest rose. His eyes opened, clear and sharp, and his wounds were gone as if they had never been. He looked at the ring of weeping faces and asked, gruffly, who had let the troll live.

The four pyramid shrines of the Elementals stand in the city of Atlantis, and the witches of an old order still use them. On the night of the new moon, the witch Ione drew her circle on the floor of the fire shrine, lit the offering and began to call. The air grew hotter with every word. When the thing arrived, it did not step out of the flames; it simply stood there, a pillar of living fire that filled the shrine and scorched the ceiling black. The witches knelt. Ione stood up to bargain.

Ska longships had anchored in the bay below the Starr camps, ready to raid at dawn, and the peaceful Starr would not fight. Cerys, a druid of Havar who had wintered with them, climbed to the headland at midnight and called up the storm. It fell on the bay like a fist: the ships snapped their anchor cables and went over one by one, and the raiders' wooden shelters on the beach burst into kindling. Their campfires went black. Horses stampeded into the dark. Anyone in the open was flayed by flying sand and splinters. The few pirates who crawled into a sea cave lived to see an empty morning.