Chained, 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 layer of ash on his skin.

White-capped waves lit by the approaching dawn thundered into Araam, pitching him backward into the surf and dragging down with him the armor-clad dirter holding his chains. 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 black smoke onto the Raen ships like dolphins leaping from the sea; how was it that they could not simply return to the land in the same fashion? If they could not travel through the smoke with their catch, then why bring the last of the survivors at all? After that slaughter aboard ship, why leave any Ocean 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 unconsciousness. Araam’s eyes wouldn’t focus on any one man, but he heard their renewed struggling. Fighting to die before they were dragged onto that looming shore.

An Ocean Rover who set foot on dry land 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 Owned the Waves on a Thousand Seas.

The maggot-white dirter monsters hacked open the struggling raedrs’ throats and fed on the red that poured from within. What lifeblood missed the blood drinker’s mouths turned the surf pink. The emptied bodies were abandoned to bump against the sand and the rocks until the scavengers 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 chains hauled him closer to the rocky dirt, he did not look to the right or left.

Ahead, his father, Olaan, Bane of the Dirters, Chief of the Raen, First Tribe of the Ocean 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 and fell to his knees in the dirt.

This was not the silt in the depths of the ocean nor the soft, grainy wash on the constantly shifting floor of an inlet. This felt wrong. Static. Dead.

A jerk on the chains encircling his wrists yanked him out flat on his stomach and elbows. Filth stuck to his wet skin and caked his clothing.

To his right, Ceolr roared—an awful, wounded sound—and beat the dead sand. “Bachaela! Bachaela, 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 displaying 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 later by his body.

Dirty boots crunched across the shingle to Araam.

“On your feet, pirate, or you’re next.” 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 churned with the same sinking sickness as when he’d put the torch to her. Better she sleep in peace at the bottom of the ocean than let dirters defile her.

Dragged ahead, Olaan 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 whence it came. I return all to thee.”

They would die here, then. Though Araam could discern no reason for the blood drinkers to 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 composure and called upon the God Who Owned the Waves on a Thousand Seas to hear them one final time.

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

“Yell louder,” a blood drinker sneered at the praying raedrs. “Your pathetic one-god might be sleeping.”

“Maybe he sailed away.”

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“Maybe the sharks got him.”

“If you’d had more than one, the others could have saved you.”

The dirter holding Araam’s chains yanked them 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 land, but he would not die on his belly.

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

“That one.” The monster waved a dead-fish pale hand.

The ground beneath Araam’s feet held disconcertingly still as he was pulled forward. He pitched and listed with the immobility of the land, but he did not fall again.

That proud warrior Olaan was tossed onto the sand at the foot of the blood drinker’s king, chains clanking. He lay there, crumpled on his side, unable to raise himself from the dirt.

“Son of my strength,” the former chief said, his voice steadfast and unaffected by shaming emotions. “Forgive me for my failure, my son, as your mother forgave me.”

Araam shook his head, unable to 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 forgiveness. Even after Mehet… To have been blindsided by a dirter on his own ship… He was the one who had failed.

Another blood drinker joined the king, holding an ugly, pale, dirter-forged sword in hand. He flicked his wrist, slinging Ocean Rover blood from the blade.

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

The dirter king gave a negative shake of his head. “Not this one. To 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 can grasp. He will be the emblem of their defeat.”

The sword-bearer sheathed his blade. “Bloodslave, then?”

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

Olaan’s eyes shone with pained pride.

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

***

The strong gods smiled upon the body-strewn beach as the commander 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 last 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 such intense passions, and the warrior god 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 cunning goddess led him between the twisted pitfalls of this world and gifted him with the means to control his enemies.

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

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

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 ocean in a sea of blood. A scourge of Thorns, grafted forever to serve.

Finally, the boy was pinned 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 retching was the only sound. The few pirates still alive watched with ashen faces.

Hazerial took the mutilated testicle from his commander and held it before the boy’s eyes. When recognition 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. Beneath sun-browned skin and caked, bloody sand, he was all pallor.

“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 attacking one another and the ocean-going vessels of higher civilization, the pirates greeted Death like an old friend.

But no death was offered here.

Time passed in drips of blood and sweat on the churned sand. The boy was paralyzed. Emasculation was a terror he’d never confronted 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 and retain what manhood you have left.”

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

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

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

Fingers of magic sent back essences of shattered strength and ruined pride. Hooks of arcane power twisted into the boy’s veins, leaving Hazerial’s Mark upon his innermost being, but stopped short of turning him into a mindless thrall. A bloodslave would feel no torment, experience no humiliation. Hazerial—like his beloved goddess—preferred those he conquered to feel the weight of the iron yoke around their neck.

Hazerial turned to the remaining pirates chained on the sand. Their faces were contorted in revulsion and dismay.

“Today, you are witnesses. Return to your people and tell them 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 chained pirates into one of the crafts. The savages called out to their leader’s disgraced son, but the boy ignored them, head hanging, eyes clamped 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 plague Hazerial had implanted 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 weapon.

The oceans belonged to the Kingdom of Night.