Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) by Juliet E. McKenna

in your hair and skin.’
    ‘Who do you mean?’ Hosh demanded.
    ‘Corrain.’ The mage stepped closer and the light brightened to fill the room with soft radiance.
    Hosh recoiled. Not from the flame but from the stranger’s breath. The man’s mouth reeked worse than a hound’s that had been eating deer shit.
    ‘Why did he leave you here?’ The mage folded scrawny arms across his chest. He wore a sleeveless white silk tunic adorned at hem and neck with gold beading and stained down the front with reddish sauce. His blue cotton trews had been cut for a much taller man so he had rolled the cuffs up into ungainly bulges.
    I could take him in a fight, Hosh though, incredulous. He had been so used to being the skinniest among the Halferan guards that it was a wonder to face a man half a head shorter than he was and surely a generation older, his face was so deeply lined.
    Perhaps I could take him in a fight if he wasn’t a wizard, Hosh reminded himself.
    ‘Corrain didn’t leave me.’ He swallowed hard. ‘We were supposed to flee together, only there was a fight and then I had to run—’
    Because his nerve had failed him so utterly amid the chaos engulfing the seaside market. So he’d fled back to the dubious sanctuary of the anchored Reef Eagle , and Nifai the overseer had stepped in to save his neck from the furious vengeance of the Khusro warlord’s swordsmen. Hosh had paid a heavy price for that boon. The Archipelagans might know nothing of coin but they knew the price of every traded service or bartered good.
    ‘He said nothing of you when he and I came here together,’ the mage said silkily.
    ‘Corrain came—?’ Hosh floundered.
    ‘Once we had killed all of these vermin we found in your homeland,’ the mage explained comfortably.
    ‘He must think that I’m dead,’ Hosh realised, desolate.
    ‘What is your name?’ The mage angled his head, dark eyes glinting in the eerie light.
    ‘Hosh.’
    ‘You are from—’ the skinny mage paused before speaking carefully ‘—Hal-far-ain.’
    ‘Halferan. Yes.’
    ‘I am Anskal.’ The mage struck his bony chest with an oddly flamboyant gesture. ‘Once I was of Mandarkin but I now rule this island!’
    Hosh nodded warily. Mandarkin. He’d never heard tell of the place before Kusint the Soluran had arrived here to be chained with them as one of the Reef Eagle’s oar slaves. After he’d told them of his own distant homeland, the red-headed man had explained that the realm of Mandarkin lay still further north. A cruel and barren land ruled by still crueller men, their tyranny upheld by magic, sworn enemy to Solura and its kings.
    By all that was sacred and profane, what had Corrain done?
    ‘But I do not rule this island’s people?’ Anskal looked at Hosh, clearly waiting for an answer.
    ‘No,’ Hosh ventured.
    ‘They fear me.’ Anskal nodded with evident satisfaction. ‘But you do not. Good.’ He reached for the jar of soused fish. ‘Let us eat and talk as friends.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    Politeness costs nothing, so the priests at the village shrine would say. Hosh’s mum always said that forgetting it could cost the common folk everything.
    The skinny wizard plucked a long fillet from the pot and ate it from his fingers. He offered the jar to Hosh but he couldn’t bring himself to take anything which the Mandarkin had touched, not given the unwashed stink of him. It was hard to think of a greater contrast with Master Minelas, so elegant in his dress and so meticulously groomed.
    But not eating might be an insult far away in the north. Hosh hastily scooped up a handful of pickled leaves. Then he all but choked on a sudden realisation.
    If this wizard had killed whatever corsairs infested Halferan, then Master Minelas must be dead. Corrain would never have come here unless he’d left the treacherous wizard’s head on the spike of Halferan’s gibbet.
    ‘They have no chairs.’ Anskal the Mandarkin looked curiously around the