Vile

by Keith Crawford

  “Is it an ambush, Captain?” Wyn said, nudging her horse closer to Persephone with some difficulty.

  “Let’s find out,” Persephone said.

  She shouted to get the crowd moving. The few remaining armed and capable fighters were spread amongst the rabble. Persephone pushed onwards, around the corner, to a long street up to the church. The thatched houses stood guard on either side. Welcome to the centre of the town, they said; just because we are empty does not mean we are abandoned.

  The church was three storeys tall, pockmarked with small arched windows and a larger one on the second storey west-side. Persephone remembered that window. It had led to a classroom when she was a child, during the last years of the Republic, a school for those who could be schooled. The steeple bell had, for a time, ceased pealing King, Gods, and Church to glower in grim silence for the lessons of the revolution. Now that teaching had returned to the kitchen table, the church just stood, waiting, uncertain if it had become a house of the Gods again or not. Persephone thought she recalled her parents’ generation having also been schooled in that same old building, although she couldn’t see how that could possibly be.

  She squinted up at the darkened windows. The second-floor window was open, otherwise, nothing. The crowd of farmers slinked around the outside of the square. Her horse shuffled. Rees shrugged. After a while, Tannyr came up alongside her. He, too, stared at the open window on the second floor.

  “Where is Anton?” He said.

  Nana Haf’s. The embodiment of the Garn family’s victory over Shadowgate, of the profit and growth Anton had promised with his schemes. A brothel. A whorehouse. Men and women selling themselves to people who should use their money to climb out of the pit that Anton had built. Not that there hadn’t always been whores. Persephone couldn’t explain why it was worse in the open, respectable, flaunted to the world. But it was worse.

  “Where’s your boy, Dale?” Persephone said.

  Tannyr straightened his cravat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

  “I sent him to the Mayor’s office.”

  “The Post Office? Why?” Persephone said.

  “There are important things there. To secure.”

  Tannyr licked his lips. He couldn’t take his eyes off the large window on the second floor of the church.

  “I’ll take some of the boys,” Tannyr said. “Have a look around.”

  “He’s not in the church,” Persephone said.

  “Will the gilt still be on the altar when you’re done?” Sergeant Rees muttered.

  They left Tannyr to it. His wife and a good portion of the remaining men and women went to search other parts of the town. What does it matter? I am the only one who can face Anton. Everyone else is in my way. Persephone took the remainder towards Nana Haf’s.

  The third abandonment was on their way out of town.

  The south side was nothing like the north. Squat functionality replaced thatched roofs and white walls. There was a shelf on the first-floor window of the last of the old town houses, on which a potted plant had died in the cold and been left to display the mercilessness of its owner. Beyond, the rooftops turned black. These houses were pockmarks on the hillside, starving children at the back door of their betters. They were the homes of the labourers, mechanics and surveyors, the driller and the driller’s assistants, the crusher operator, samplers, grinders and flotation experts, the cooks and cooks’ helpers, warehouse workers, janitors, and everyone else it took to keep the wheels of the mine turning.

  Tannyr Brek called these new buildings a cancer, devouring the way of life that had sustained Shadowgate for centuries. To Persephone, they had always been just new homes for poor people alongside the old homes for poor people. But now that she looked, they seemed to twitch and shudder. One day they would rise and swarm over the cottages of her childhood, to feast on stone and straw as their dirty little residents grabbed everything they could, brought everything to ruins, and left nothing but wasteland between Nana Haf’s on the hill and Shadowgate on the mountain. The smell of urine was so strong Persephone had to put her hand over her nose.

  A scrawny child stared at them from an alleyway. It was the first of the townsfolk Persephone had seen since they arrived. He startled and scarpered away. They turned the last corner, to where a small stone coal shed sat alone by a pile of burnt weeds. Persephone took her hand from her nose. The road rose. This far down the mountain there was more grass than snow, more brush than boulder, and more places to hide on the western slope than she would have liked.

  By now, there were no more than two dozen people following her.

  She turned to look back at the town. There was a funnel of smoke rising from behind the church. A second, farther away, she guessed from the Post Office.

  “Captain?” Rees said. “Something’s burning.”

  What was Tannyr thinking? Did he hate the townsfolk that much? Or had the looting already got out of hand?

  “Sergeant, take half of whoever’s left and go find out what the problem is.”

  “Even if Anton is sulking at Nana Haf’s, he won’t be sulking alone,” Rees said. “I should come with you.”

  Anton had lain in bed for weeks after they’d brought him back from the war. He wouldn’t talk to anybody. Not anybody in the family, anyway. He talked to the ghosts, to whomever he shrieked at in the watches of the night. As layer after layer of bandage and dressing became unnecessary, as the flesh underneath healed as much as it would, new lines were revealed in the skin and new divots in the bone. One leg was twisted and crooked, the other stiff and scarred. One half of his face puckered around a permanently staring eye. He still wouldn’t talk to her. One day, when Lena had gone for the evening, Persephone slid her hand under the sheet, followed the curve of his leg, the groove of burned flesh, and took his penis in her hand.

  He stiffened, but he was still too sick to move, too weak to stop her. She squeezed, gently, moving along the shaft, firm, soft, implacable.

  “Seph?” he had said.

  She lifted the sheet and moved her head beneath.

  The next day Anton got out of bed.

  “It won’t be enough to stop me,” she snarled at Rees. “Go put out the fires, knock whatever heads you need to and then meet me at Nana Haf’s for the clean-up.”

  “Very well,” he said. With a jerk of his hand, he signalled four others to follow him

  “Wyn, stick close to me,” Persephone said. “Don’t fall off your horse.”

  ◆◆◆

  The last turn of the road brought them onto the long straight stretch to Nana Haf’s. The land to her left opened out eastwards, green fields speckled with sheep that huddled together by the dry-stone walls. To the west was the sharp rise to the high road. The roads ran parallel in the last few miles until they joined before the mines. It was possible to pass directly from one to the other, but the slope was so steep that anyone determined enough to climb would have to use the shrubs and scattered trees as handholds. From the high road, you could see down. From the low road, you could not see up. The bank leered at her. Let it be a trap. Come and fight me. I will break you.

  But nothing came.

  Nana Haf’s brothel sat legs splayed at the side of the road. The Garns had made it a hybrid of what they could afford and what fancy Lutensian designs they could mimic. Persephone did not understand. Why would anyone dream of owning a brothel? If you wanted things like in the capital, why not go to the capital? And yet, here it stood, an exotic invitation to the men and women walking home from the mines with wages burning holes in their pockets. It was a monument to circularism, monies passed from employer to employee and back to employer again. Grotesque motifs mounted on the wooden walls re-enacted the mockery: here a nymph fellating a goat, there a pair of cherubs wrapped in incestuous embrace.

  Anton sat on the porch. He had a sword across his lap and a sandwich in his hand.

  “Hello, Seph. I thought you would get here sooner.”

  Chapter 51
>
  “What are we doing, Ton Ton?”

  Persephone hadn’t called him that since she’d been a girl. One he’d carried on his shoulder, when his shoulders were broader than hers.

  Anton sat on a stool next to an engraving of two children poking a sheep with a stick. Similar epigrams punctuated the woodwork around the veranda. They played along the fascia above the third floor and reached down to dark windows along the porch roof. There were faces in the windows—she couldn’t see them, but she knew they must be there. It wouldn’t be Anton without traps. The trick, Persephone reflected, was to barge headlong through them.

  “Dinner?” he said, finishing his sandwich and brushing the crumbs off on his trousers. “At the Manor, tonight?”

  He didn’t stand. Anton had taken off his apron and his tunic was stained black. Dust and dirt covered him head to toe. Sweat poured through the stubble on his shaved head, and he tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sword. She had to look twice to see what she was seeing. Anton carrying a sword.

  “Okay,” she said. “Dinner. Sure. Come back with me. Now.”

  There was a great thump, followed by a crash from the direction of town. A huge cloud of smoke rose to join the plumes. Dust flooded out into the air around the church. She strained to see but couldn’t tell which building had collapsed. Scattered sounds of fighting rose like ghostly whispers from another room.

  “I won’t let you start a war, Anton. You’re too important to waste on Shadowgate Town.”

  He laughed.

  She flexed her fingers, by her side, against the flank of her horse.

  “Are you going to hit me with that big sword?” he said.

  “Are you going to stick me with that little one?”

  “You could come inside and talk.”

  She slipped off the horse and rolled her shoulders, so the straps that tied her sword to her back settled wider.

  “No. No more talking. You’re coming home.”

  Taking the reins, she led the horse in an arc until it stood between her and the hillside.

  “You should have taken the high road,” Anton said. “I planned for that, of course, but I was sure you’d charge in without thinking. You make it too easy.”

  “Plan? How long have you planned to betray me?”

  He raised his hand, not at her, but to signal someone behind her. “If you really want to know, since around mid-morning.”

  At Anton’s signal, dirty black-coated miners shuffled into view at the top of the rise to the high road. Each of them pointed a long rifle at Persephone and her half-dozen guards. Rifles were illegal, restricted to specialist units in the army, certain government officers, and the Magistry. How did the miners have rifles?

  “Tannyr was bound to try something sooner or later, Seph. I’ve had time to prepare. Plus, it’s been a long time since you showed me your colours.”

  What could he mean by that? A hundred yards was well within range. Her breastplate would stop a shot. Maybe her helmet as well. Trained army units could fire in volleys, with much greater destructive force, but, even from here, she could see and recognise the faces of the miners. They were peasants in dirtier shirts. If she drew her sword and shouted, they would probably run away. And if they were going to shoot, they shouldn’t have shown themselves. It was a bluff. Anton was bluffing. She stared long enough that they could make out her sneer. Anton talked. He was always talking.

  “Warfare in towns differs from warfare in mountains, Seph. But you’ve never been in a real battle, have you?”

  Someone stood behind him, through the open door into the brothel. She couldn’t see who it was. Persephone took another step forward, daring Anton to stand, daring his riflemen to fire. Her six guards stayed stock still.

  “You’re wasting your time baiting me,” Persephone said. “Stop this madness. Come home and do your duty.”

  She let go of the reins of the horse, knowing it would stand where she left it, a barrier between her and the riflemen on the hill.

  “Fuck duty, and fuck your idea of what my duty means,” Anton said. “If I’m so important: change sides.”

  It was Olwen in the doorway. The Garn’s adult daughter, who came to the castle from time to time but never spoke to Persephone and avoided the guards. The Magistrate’s words came back like a bell on the morning of the worst hangover of your life. Anton had a son with the Haf girl. A blue-eyed son. A son that wasn’t Persephone’s.

  “Father is insane, Seph, and Tannyr is a fool. It’s got to stop.”

  “No. This is insane. We have to stand side by side, brother and sister.”

  “Is that what we are?”

  The bile rushed up her throat so hard she thought it was blood. She grabbed at her sword, too fast; it snagged as she pulled it from the straps on her back. From behind her, she heard the thundering of hooves.

  “Captain!” Sergeant Rees shouted. Sweat lathered his horse, and he beat its hindquarter with his sword as it galloped towards Persephone. “The mercenaries are in the town!”

  “Fire!” Anton shouted.

  Chapter 52

  Elianor stood on the snowy ridge and strained her eyes to see what parts of Shadowgate Town were on fire. Below her, Nathaniel waited on his horse between the corpses of Mabyn’s lost patrol.

  “What has Anton done?” she hissed.

  She waved to Nathaniel, indicating she was going back to her horse. Something was wrong. Nathaniel was still on horseback, his shoulders shrugged and his helmet off. Nothing was moving. But something was wrong.

  One body was missing.

  Elianor didn’t look. She rolled forward with her rifle tucked beneath her. Something sharp and vicious whistled through the air where her head had been. There was blue, then white, then black. Snow went up her nose. Gasping, struggling for breath, she drove herself back up onto her knees, strove to clear her rifle and her face at the same time. She opened her eyes.

  A dead guard stood over her with its sword raised to attack.

  “Kindred!” Nathaniel shouted.

  Elianor fell backwards trying to get to her feet and slid down the slope. The dead guard looked human, but it moved wrong. It jerked, its joints slipped and cracked, its form shimmered like a rainbow from hot tar. It strode after her as if the snow were nothing but a pool of clear water. A streaming claw, a hand shifting shape into chitin before her eyes, flowed towards her face as it dropped the unnecessary sword. Elianor only just got her rifle up to block the blow. The shock almost knocked it from her hands.

  Tentacles sprang from the dead guard’s chest and shoulders; multiplying eyes fixed their stares on Elianor. Nathaniel shouted, but she had no time to look. She rolled again, dodged another blow as she got her foot out from under her, and thrust into a crouching position. Her rifle was no good this close. The Kindred took another step towards her, but just as it was about to flail its tentacles at Elianor, her horse charged, in billowing clouds of smoke, kicking the Kindred in what remained of its head.

  What did I do to earn your loyalty, oversized animal?

  Elianor turned her back on both Kindred and horse to look along the length of her rifle.

  Nathaniel was still on horseback, corpses rising all around him. He chopped at the closest. A second had a hold of his saddle. Elianor could feel the Kindred overcoming the frenzied horse behind her, tentacles whipping through the air, the air shifting against her exposed nape where her jacket had pulled low. She brushed the snow from the sight of the rifle. The Kindred at Nathaniel’s saddle reached up, long, sharp spikes stretching from its spine. Nathaniel’s horse reared. She fired the rifle. The Kindred collapsed and Nathaniel broke free.

  “Elianor, look out!”

  She threw herself forward. A thickening tentacle caught her across the head. Her momentum saved her, the attack glanced aside as she fell, but it rattled her skull so hard her brain hummed. Snow sprayed from beneath the hooves of a panicked horse. Elianor couldn’t catch her balance, couldn’t roll again for fear she would tu
mble headfirst and leave herself completely exposed. She staggered to her feet. The creature came after her. Clawed tentacles, still spreading, shifting, growing, changing, looped around her, not touching her, not yet.

  “Abomination,” the Kindred hissed in her ear. “Traitor.”

  The killing blow did not come. The Kindred stiffened, gurgled, and spat a gamut of black liquid across her chest. Its tentacles twitched, spasmed, and shivered, like vines in the Dead Garden. It shoved against her, and the thick blade of her shortsword burst through its gut, curdled black blood running down the blade.

  “Freak,” Elianor said.

  Elianor turned on her heel and threw the Kindred. It collapsed on one knee as it landed. The monster continued to change. Its face and shock-swollen eyes absorbed into its grotesquely shifted torso, where a run of tiny hands sprouted from its belly. The Kindred’s pupils shuddered as it tried to focus on the shaft of steel poking from the wound in its chest. A long, lolling tongue rolled from its mouth to taste the steel. Elianor’s strike was not enough to kill it. It mostly looked curious.

  Elianor drove her right foot back as counterbalance and swung her rifle with all her strength. The Kindred didn’t seem to notice. Shouting in frustration, she dropped the rifle and drew her second sword. She barely had time to parry as the Kindred struck with its tentacles. Four, eight, twelve, a barrage of new-born limbs.

  Fuck this, Elianor thought, and turned her shortsword edge wards.

  Now her parries were strikes. Chunks of Kindred flesh rained in black blood as she responded to violence with sharp snares, driven back but counter attacking, letting its strength force its own wounds. It wasn’t working. Every piece she carved out was replaced by another shifting, swelling, growing thing. She could no longer see its face. She could no longer feel anything but the burning in her arms and chest.

  “Get down!”

  Nathaniel crashed his horse into the Kindred. The mount and the monster collapsed together, a mass of hoof and claw. Elianor flung herself away, severing a tentacle with a final swing of her short sword. She threw herself as far as she could, down the rise, into the snowdrift. There she lay, ice in her ears and eyes and running down her back. The awful screams could have been Kindred or horse or both.