Vile

by Keith Crawford

  He didn’t look up. He grabbed Massen by the waist and swung his sword like a hammer. The edge bit heavily into cloth and flesh, and the guard screamed. Massen shouted. All three fell together. Anton scrambled forward then swung his sword again as he rolled around the wrestling men. He took an elbow in the face, probably Massen’s, then in a flash of red saw Massen put his sword through the guard. Anton couldn’t remember the guard’s name.

  The world tilted upwards and for the first time he saw the courtyard. It looked like a star had landed on the smithy. Its empty walls were eggshells whose innards had burst free and sprayed themselves in blazing chunks about the interior of the castle. Most of the guardhouse had fallen, and the roof had caved into a slope to bow before the invading force. Behind it, flames from the burning stables licked the sky.

  Anton’s fighters overwhelmed the handful of surviving guards. The defenders broke and ran. The mercenaries gave chase; whooping and hollering they leapt and sprang over the ruins of the smithy.

  They were running the wrong way.

  Anton tried to grab Massen’s arm, but the Lieutenant was off after his troops. He turned to face the Manor door.

  “What have you done?” Arbalest Vile rasped.

  Anton’s father stood on a great slide of rubble, the Manor house setting alight behind him as he descended to face his son. Dust and grime covered him, his long white hair hung loose at his shoulders, and he held his greatsword out to his side. There was no sign that the destruction of the wall had injured him. He moved his head from side to side like a champion boxer entering the ring.

  “For hundreds of years, the walls of Shadowgate have been the Kingdom’s only defence against the Kindred.”

  Stall him. Think. Think!

  “What use are high walls if you hang your own people within them?

  The explosion should have killed him. Even if he had survived, this should have been the execution of a broken man. Arbalest Vile hopped over the body of a dead guard and raised his sword with the strength of someone half his age. No time to wonder at the impossibility. When Anton had fought Persephone’s greatsword, he had used the terrain, laid traps, ganged up on her. Out here in the open, Arbalest’s Demonslayer would cut people down like wheat. If Anton didn’t do something quickly, his father would simply charge.

  Anton charged.

  A greatsword takes time to build into a swing. Anton flung himself forward without care for balance or self-preservation. His twisted limbs still slowed him. He got in under before Arbalest could gather momentum, yet barely caught his father’s counterattack on the inside of his own sword. He tried to grab Arbalest by the throat, to slam himself against his chest and drag them both into the rubble together, but somehow the old man was moving again. Parrying a second blow knocked Anton off his feet.

  “Pathetic,” Arbalest said. “What good are you without your toys?”

  “Did you forge that sword yourself?” Anton scanned the terrain, the ruins, the courtyard, looking for an advantage. There. Of course. Toys. “Or do you only know how to make corpses?”

  Arbalest’s nostrils flared. Anton kept his eyes on the blurring greatsword. With a heft, he kicked the nearest rock at his father. Arbalest blocked the rock, Demonslayer swept in a wide arc. Anton stepped back from the first swing, but his feet were too slow, and he had to parry the second, the shock through his wrist like a thousand hammers through a thousand forges. This was a pain he was used to. His retreat had drawn Arbalest forward.

  From behind, Dale charged. Anton shouted as loud as he could, tried to keep his father’s eyes on him, tried to expel his rage and fear through his lips and lungs. It wasn’t enough. Arbalest didn’t even look behind him. He struck. Dale fell. A spurt of blood sprayed towards the red sky. Arbalest blocked Anton’s counter on the return swing, then came at him, stepping easily through the wreckage.

  “Is this the best you can do?”

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  Massen’s horn sounded like a prisoner given freedom. Arbalest paused mid-strike. Anton grabbed his father by the arm. The old warrior would have thrown him off, but Dale, bleeding, prone, grabbed his leg. One good strike, Anton prayed. Just give me one solid blow before I die. Too close to swing, he smashed the pommel of his sword into the old man’s face. The cheekbone gave way. In the crunch of bone, Anton felt something poisonous released from his chest. Arbalest fell back. He moved to kill Dale, who was still prone on the floor, but Anton struck again. He managed one good cut, his sword biting deep into the flesh of Arbalest’s sword hand; then the old man skipped backwards, towards the Manor, his sneer turned into a grimace.

  There, Arbalest stopped. Anton stood, panting, trying to control the need to retch, trying to resist the desire to check that Dale was still alive. From behind him came the mercenaries, summoned by Massen’s horn, the Lieutenant ready to lead the charge.

  “Come after me then, boy,” Arbalest said. “If you dare.”

  He slammed the Manor door open and stepped through as if the timber were not on fire. A burst of flame shot out of the windows and wrapped around the outside of the building, caressing the wood, a gourmand licking his lips.

  “Anton!” Massen called.

  Anton strode towards the steps. For the first time in years, he heard the song of the fire.

  “Lord Vile!”

  He stopped

  “Lord Vile?” Anton said.

  Massen took his arm.

  “When a madman invites you into a burning building, it’s not bad manners to refuse.”

  Anton put his hand on Massen’s and took it from his arm.

  “Make sure Dale survives,” Anton said, and walked into the fire.

  Chapter 79

  Elianor lunged at Rees. Fire illuminated the sky. The roar of the explosion lifted her and propelled her forward. Only reflexes saved Rees from having his head cut in two. The blow from her broken sword severed the skin along his scalp. He stumbled back past the other guards as blood flooded from the cut. He shouted something, but all sound was eliminated by the roar of falling rock. They stumbled together as the earth heaved beneath their feet.

  She continued to swing, which pitched her round and back to face the guardhouse. The outer wall of the prison rippled like a sheet in the wind. From across the castle came secondary explosions, the physical beat of a great drum. Elianor’s leg gave way. Her ears popped. There was a wave of hot air. The guardhouse collapsed in a tide of fallen stone.

  Elianor used the broken sword to clamber to her feet. The guards ran ahead of her. She saw Rees struck by a rock; then there was dust and splinter and she had her hand up over her face as she ran. At the far side of the courtyard, Elianor and the guards stopped together, unified in awe and fear. The kitchens trembled but stood; was it safer inside than out, above or beneath?

  “Gods,” murmured the closest of the guards.

  Elianor stabbed him with her broken sword. As he crumpled, she released her blade and neatly took his longsword from his dead hand. A second rush of dust swept across the courtyard as the guardhouse fell into the stables. Fire sprang up on the rooftops of the kitchens, ran along the Manor house, and danced between tower windows. One of the surviving guards pointed back towards the main gate. He shouted something. Elianor could only hear the ringing in her ears. She caught her tumbling victim by the scruff of the neck and used him like a shield as she turned on Rees.

  Rees smashed her attack to the floor with his sword. His face was half covered in blood, a man in a scarlet half-mask. She threw the corpse at him. He baulked, blocked, and she ran towards the outside stairs up the side of the kitchens. Her wounded leg almost failed her on the first step. At the second storey she threw her sword up onto the roof and jumped, heaving herself up just in time for Rees to swing and miss from below. Her leg dragged on the gutter as she got up onto the tiling above the kitchens.

  “Get back here, bitch!” Rees shouted from the first-storey walkway.

  “Come and get me!”


  Had Nathaniel been on the roof when the guardhouse fell? Elianor scooped back up her stolen longsword and looked around. Where the main gate had been there was now nothing but dust and a great gap, like someone had punched out Shadowgate’s front teeth. Figures moved in the smoke.

  “Taran, shoot her!” Rees said.

  Elianor threw herself over the bridge of the rooftop just as a crossbow bolt sailed past her ear, then slid a painful, juddering journey down the tiles on the other side until she smacked into a wall. The sounds of battle came from the courtyard. Rees grunted and snarled as he dragged himself up onto the far side of the roof. She wasn’t sure where she was, but there was a ladder that led onto a walkway. Halfway up, the pain stopped her. The bleeding had ceased. The wound was knitting right before her eyes. Not fast enough. She was still too slow to escape Rees. Elianor limped along the walkway. She was above the Manor, on a series of stacked high buildings woven into the wall and around the great tower. She stopped at the edge, the side on the opposite end of the Manor from the main courtyard. A dark shape moved in the smoke on the far side.

  Elianor looked down the long drop and saw the Dead Garden, where Arbalest Vile had once warned her of the dangers of revolution. The withered fronds of the vines reached up like the fingers of the desiccated drowned, clawing their way up ten metres to the rooftops, past the windows of empty rooms and abandoned apartments. Behind her advanced the silhouette of Rees against the red sky. He waved his sword like a conductor insulting his orchestra. She had nowhere to run. The wall was on fire, there was a long gap between here and the next building crossing a long fall to the Dead Garden, and Rees was coming from the only way back.

  Elianor threw her sword across the gap and jumped after it.

  If she called on the Shaper, could she grow wings and fly?

  Smoke and ash lifted her. There, suspended on the air, suspended in time, in that long moment when she rose, she thought she would make it. Then she fell. She clawed for the far side, but her hands only brushed against the roofing before she smashed face first into a narrow window. The glass broke. Somehow, she hung from the sill by one arm. The wrenching pain almost made her let go. She held on. The glass cascaded in shards.

  “Do me a favour and lose your grip!” Rees shouted from up above.

  Elianor pulled herself over the broken glass and in through the window. It was a small bedchamber, bed unmade, wardrobe open and emptied. There was one of Anton’s plumbed privies where flame still guttered from burst pipes. Elianor brushed broken glass from her jacket and limped over to the main door. The handle was hot, almost enough to burn her hand. She opened it anyway. Flame rushed from the corridor. She slammed the door shut, expelling every curse she knew as she snatched away her fingers. Smoke curdled from around the frame. There wasn’t another door out of the room.

  She limped to the bathroom. There was a small square skylight with a latch that allowed dim light through the thick glass. She could stand on the rim of the bathtub to reach it, but she could barely get her fingertips around the frame. Smoke spread into the bathroom. Elianor climbed up onto the bath and teetered on the rim, strained, reached, got her fingers on the skylight latch, winced as the wound in her side re-opened, pulled, and pulled again. She grasped the latch and snapped open the window. With a grunt, she jumped up, grabbed the frame, and tried to pull herself out onto the roof.

  She couldn’t.

  She tried again, hung by her arms with her legs crooked. The plethora of injuries, her face, her arm, her ribs, her side, her leg, all pulled back. Her arms wouldn’t obey, and her core wouldn’t contract. She dropped to the floor and fell to one knee with a shriek of frustration, a shriek that was consumed by coughs in the thickening smoke. The window looked down, too small for most to squeeze through, too high for her to reach.

  She dragged the chair from the bedroom into the bathroom, unstrapped her pistol and spare shortsword and tossed them ahead of her out onto the roof. The smoke was in her eyes. She got up on the chair and shimmied through the gap like she was struggling into a shirt. There was almost as much smoke outside as within, black filth pouring up from the Manor. She heaved, her chest up over the edge, aching muscles screaming at her to give up, to stop fighting, to drop into the smoke. She couldn’t get any higher. Her hips were stuck.

  “Having trouble there, Magistrate?”

  Rees walked up over the rooftops. He was still a good distance away, having taken some other route around the Dead Garden, calling from across a series of slats on the inside of the fractured castle wall. She could make out his bared yellow teeth through his black beard. Elianor struggled, but the gap was too tight; she didn’t have the strength, and the pistol had fallen just out of reach. Fire crackled beneath her feet.

  “Do you see all this burning and death? None of this had to happen.” Rees ran his hand across his face, smearing blood from cheek to chin as he advanced across the last section of the rooftop. “This is all your fault.”

  Elianor screamed, pulled as hard as she could, harder, willed every muscle and sinew to break her free. The strap of her satchel snapped. The book of evidence tumbled back into the room. Elianor was thrown forward, scrabbling and clawing with her hands on the slate until she got a knee on the surface. Rees started to run, leaping from one rooftop to another, his sword out. She got up onto her knees. The pistol was close, but she would have to load it, check it, prime it, and fire. Her sword had fallen onto a lower section of the roof. She had no other weapons. No, not quite. She had one more. The shape in the dark.

  “I saw what you did, Rees,” she said. “I saw you give Begw to the Kindred.”

  The growl rumbled out from the smoke. Close, but maybe not close enough. She put her hands on her thighs and got to her feet. No peasant would kill her. No peasant could.

  “Daniel. This man hurt your family. Kill him.”

  The Black Dog leapt past her before Rees could attack. Elianor fell back onto her knees, coughing up tar from the smoke. She didn’t watch. But she listened to the screams, to the tearing of flesh. She opened her eyes in time to see Rees fall. Then she replaced her pistol in the holster and grabbed her sword from where it had fallen. A plume of smoke marked her passage.

  “Stay here,” she said to Daniel. “I have to go back inside and get something.”

  Chapter 80

  Tannyr Brek had never been inside a whorehouse. It was a point of principle, he would say. Not cowardice. Not the feeling the women were laughing at him. No, he’d hung around outside the brothels as a youth, when his friends laughed and joked and went inside, because he knew he would never need to pay for it. That was the truth. Principle. Confidence. He took another sip of confiscated moonshine and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He felt ready.

  The door to Nana Haf’s had been smashed inwards. There were chunks of wood missing from the frame. The bodies were gone from the street. There were bloodstains in the dirt and the stink of gunpowder in the air. Blair and the three other lads Tannyr had brought climbed up onto the porch, surveying the wreckage like miscreant children afraid they would be caught. This was where Persephone Vile had failed him. He wanted to tell Blair to go first, but how would that look? They would have to follow him. Besides, there was nobody here to fear, not anymore.

  The ground floor of the bordello was one big open space, illuminated through the great bay windows along the back wall, all but one chair stacked with the tables in the corner. Haf Garn sat on the last chair. She had her hands in her lap, the material of one of her famous red dresses crumpled up in her fingers, and looked through the back window, across the empty room and out along the fields away from Shadowgate, as if waiting for someone who wasn’t coming back. Tannyr belched. No need for a fight here. Not a fight he wasn’t sure he could win, anyway.

  “Blair, take the boys and wait out the front. Don’t let anybody in.”

  Blair laughed, and the others followed him out. They knew what was about to happen. Maybe the boss would be in a better mood a
fter.

  “Gwyion will come,” Haf said, still looking out the window. “Gwyion always comes.”

  “You’re damaged goods, Haf. Not worth the price he paid for you.”

  “Maybe. But he always comes.”

  Haf smiled, a strange, faraway smile. Tannyr started taking off his belt. She has gone insane, he thought. I’ve burned her world and she’s blathering like I’m here to take tea.

  “I was thinking about something Gwyion said, yesterday,” Haf continued. “Uwen didn’t really look very much like you. He didn’t look very much like Gwyion, either. But he did look like Alban the Giant. Alban Garn. Gwyion’s father.”

  Tannyr’s stomach contracted. He tightened the end of the belt around his fist and smacked it across her face, a broad strike that should have knocked her down. She barely seemed to notice. A thick red welt rose across her cheek and blood sprang up from the cut beneath her eye.

  “I knew Gwyion had lovers before me. And Ifanna was ever so pretty, before you got hold of her. Tell me, Tannyr, what is it like to be everybody’s second choice?”

  He grabbed her by the arm and lifted her bodily out of the chair. The little straw and wood contraption span away from them. Someone upstairs shrieked. For a moment Tannyr thought he was home on the farm, so familiar was the sound. It was the scream of a frightened baby.

  “Your daughter’s upstairs,” Tannyr said. “Your daughter and her bastard.”

  They stood there, Haf in his hand and his belt held high in the air.

  “Was this your best plan?” Tannyr said. “Make up some crazy story about my son? My son you helped kill?”

  “I didn’t help kill him. I put a bullet in his head, then made it look like he shot Lord Vile.”

  Tannyr let her go. She dropped to her heels then fell forward to her knees.

  “Why did Olwen stay, Haf?”

  “I killed him. Me. And he wasn’t even your son,” she said, although she didn’t get up off her knees. Upstairs, Olwen desperately shushed her baby. Let Haf tell all lies she liked. He glanced through the door she guarded, and what he saw there made him grin even harder.