“You didn’t want to leave behind Derec’s body, and Olwen stayed because you wouldn’t go.”
He liked it, there, with her kneeling in front of him, but it wasn’t enough. He dropped his belt and lifted her up by the throat. She spat in his face.
“This time you’ll watch,” he said.
Dragging her up the stair was harder than he thought it would be. By the time he got to the mezzanine, he was struggling to breathe, and without his belt, his trousers fell. He had to drag them up with her struggling and kicking all the while. Worse yet, he realised, Olwen was all the way up top, in one of the attic bedrooms on the fourth floor. He punched Haf in the head a couple more times, for good measure, then dragged her to her feet and walked her up the stairs as if they were a pair of old comrades on their way home after a few too many drinks.
At the door to the bedroom, she tried to make a break for it, but something was wrecked inside her and a swift kick to her midriff put her to the floor. He took her by the hair and pulled her bleeding face up to his. One of her eyes had swollen shut. Somehow, she managed to sneer.
“You still think Gwyion is coming, don’t you?” Tannyr shouted. “You think he’ll come riding in here to save you?”
He bashed the door, but it didn’t open. He had to turn the handle and push. Haf was crawling away. He grabbed her by the leg.
“Gwyion isn’t coming. I’m the biggest, and the biggest always wins.”
He shoved her into the bedroom. She slid across the wooden boards, coming to rest against the red-clothed bed. It was a large room, with a free-standing wardrobe, a dresser, and a mirror with a lady’s toiletries arranged before it. The window streamed afternoon light around the silhouetted figure of Olwen Garn, rocking baby Zach against her hip with her hand across his mouth and her eyes wide with fear.
“And now she gets it as well,” Tannyr said. “Because you refused to leave your precious brothel. Whatever I do to her is your fault.”
Haf tried to pull herself up on the bed, but one of her latest tumbles had broken her arm.
“Mayor Brek,” Olwen said. “Anton will be back. And he won’t forgive you, not if you do this.”
“Arbalest Vile is Lord of the Mountain.”
“And Lord Vile has always upheld the law. He will hang you.”
Did they know something he did not? Were Gwyion and Anton about to ride in on golden steeds, ready to clap him in chains and drag him off? Nonsense. They were afraid. And not afraid enough.
“All your talking and talking and talking. You think you’re so clever. But I am Shadowgate. I am the earth and the land. I’m going to fuck you all.”
He pulled open his trousers and took his cock in his hand.
“First I’m going to do your mother. Then I’m going to do you. Then, when I’m finished, I’m going to smash your bastard’s skull in with my fist. And you will stand there and watch.”
Flopping his penis back and forth in his hand, he dragged Haf to her knees. She didn’t resist, her eyes clouded, bloody spittle dribbling from her chin as she grinned maniacally through broken teeth.
“Who do you think you’re fooling, Brek?” she gurgled. “You can’t get it up once, never mind twice.”
“Shut up,” Tannyr shouted. He drove his fist into her head, again and again until the wet crunching sound could have been coming from her face or his fingers. The blood swam up to his elbow and his penis finally hardened. Olwen stepped away until the windowsill pressed against her thighs. She flicked her eyes back and forth between her mother and the door.
“There’s no way out,” Tannyr said, his hand on Haf’s broken face. “Even if you get past me, Blair will catch you. Maybe he’ll share you with the rest of the boys. He prefers little ones, anyway.”
Olwen put her hand over Zach’s face.
“Close your eyes,” she said, and tipped backwards out of the window.
Chapter 81
“My lady. Captain. We can’t let you in.”
Persephone had walked the low road out of town, ready to ask Haf the questions she should have asked years ago. But she hadn’t been sure she wanted to enter until the men on the porch of Nana Haf’s tried to stop her. They were farmers’ boys, part of the rabble she had marched on Shadowgate Town yesterday morning, the same who had run at the first sign of trouble. Under the afternoon sun, they looked like they smelled.
“You can’t stop me,” she said.
She paused at the bottom step and put her hand over her shoulder, as if stretching, merely resting her hand on the hilt of her greatsword. This was where Anton had beaten her. The splintered wreck of woodwork, the shredded frame of the door—it might fall apart at any time. But these boys weren’t Anton.
“We should tell Tannyr you’re coming,” the first said.
“No need,” Persephone said. Come on. Give me a reason.
“He asked to be left alone,” said the second. “He’s with Mrs Garn.”
Persephone tapped her fingers, one at a time, on the hilt. “Then I shall assist his interrogation.”
“He’s just fine,” said the curly-haired man at the back. “He’s giving the bitch what she deserves.”
She stepped up onto the porch.
“Blair, your sister Fianna would be ashamed of you.” She bent to look right in his face. “Get in my way. Please.”
They got out of her way.
There was nobody on the ground floor of Nana Haf’s. There was a smashed chair by the window, and a huddled shape outside in the garden. Probably another corpse, but she couldn’t make it out. She climbed the stairs. From one of the bedrooms at the top of the building came a steady grunting, like a pig at feed. She drew her sword.
The door was ajar and framed the open window behind it. On the floor lay Tannyr Brek, his trousers around his ankles and his bare arse thrusting at Haf Garn, so engaged in what he was doing he hadn’t noticed Persephone arrive. Haf’s legs were open and her head tilted back. It was plain from the angle of her neck she was dead. Her corpse slid back and forth in a long slip of blood as Tannyr tried to gain purchase against the bed.
“I’m the biggest, I’m the biggest,” he grunted.
Persephone swung, a butcher with a meat cleaver, a low arc to avoid the high ceiling. Tannyr let out one last wheeze as the sword went through his spine, through Haf, turned flesh into sliced meat then chopped a good inch into the floorboards beneath. Persephone let go of the hilt, stepped past the blade, and crouched next to the carcasses. With her right hand, she wrenched back Tannyr’s head. The upper part of his spinal column separated where she had severed his torso. She put her lips to the dead man’s ear.
“I’m the biggest.”
She tossed the remains to the floor. After a moment, she wiped her hands on her trousers and went to pull her sword out of the wood. But she stopped before she touched the hilt, suddenly tired at the thought of carrying so much weight about. When she yawned, her mouth tasted of cotton.
Persephone stuck her head out through the window, trying to get away from the smell. The floor was slippery with blood and fluids. She leaned against the windowsill. Her face was wet. The window faced towards the foothills, towards Durançon and then Lutense, the capital of Trist, far away amongst all the other places she had never seen. She lowered her head.
Four storeys down in the garden was Olwen Garn, a broken puppet, her brains smashed out but her eyes still open. This was the corpse Persephone had seen earlier, presumably another one of Tannyr’s victims. Sitting on the corpse was a child, hardly more than a baby, sobbing, rocking back and forth and pulling at his mother’s shoulder. Her body had cushioned his fall; a last gamble by a desperate mother or an unintended aftermath of a suicide, it didn’t matter. This was the Garn boy with the blue eyes. Zachary. Anton’s son. An heir to the house of Vile.
Persephone ran down the stairs. She plucked out the sword as she ran past it. Blood and viscera trailed behind her. She burst into the open air and stopped. Zach looked up at her and shrieked
so hard his face turned red. Persephone held up her sword. Zach screamed harder. She thought his chest might burst. She wiped her sword and slid it back into the sheath.
When she picked him up, he strained to reach his mother, screaming and squirming with all his might against Persephone’s grip. She held him like a wriggling fish, not bothering with soothing words. What could she say? Was he even old enough to understand if she spoke to him? The corpse of Olwen gaped up at her. Was this what Anton wanted from a woman? Something in a dress who would scream and throw herself out of a window when things got tough? Not that it mattered.
She held up Zach in front of her.
“You can do better than this.” She lifted him up onto her shoulders. “Don’t let the blood bother you. We will wash if off later.”
She skirted around the outside of Nana Haf’s, taking care to avoid the men out front on her way up to the high road. Eventually, Zach stopped screaming and slumped, exhausted, across her head. How old was he? Old enough he would remember his mother? The afternoon gave way to sunset, and the mountainside seemed more open than ever before. She could see the full panorama, from the fires at the mines to the south, to the ruins of The Last Chance in the north and on up to the castle itself. Her mind whirled with questions she had never asked. Was her father waiting for her to return? Or Anton? Was she expected to slot back into the lives of whichever side won the battle? Go back to playing soldier and being Princess Piggy? What did a child Zach’s age eat? Straight plumes of smoke still rose from Shadowgate Town. She walked onwards, along the high road towards The Last Chance. It seemed just about the same as turning back.
A horse stood by the roadside.
It was lathered with sweat, a saddle slung across its back, but riderless. She didn’t recognise the horse, which meant it hadn’t come from the castle. The miners, as a rule, didn’t have many horses—asides from the great carthorses who stayed stabled by the steam pump. One of the mercenaries, perhaps, a slain cavalryman? She shifted the child onto her hip and took the lost horse by the reins.
She found the rider a hundred metres on, fallen in the middle of the road. It was a man, dressed in civilian clothes, crumpled like a rag doll slung from the crib of an angry child. Just another body half covered in snow made pink by blood. As she got closer, she had to pause and check that the little boy in her arms was still asleep. It was, after all, Zach’s grandfather that lay dead on the road.
Gwyion Garn had either been thrown or simply fallen from his horse. What was left was a mess. The binding on his leg had worked loose to show bone poking from beneath the skin, and blood from his wounds was caked up his side. Had he died with the fall or had he lain here, strength gone, somehow knowing he had failed, less than a mile from where his wife was being raped and murdered?
“I suppose I killed him,” Persephone said to herself.
Once Gwyion’s corpse was far behind them, just another bump in the road, she carefully mounted the horse. It was difficult with the baby, but she imagined she would get used to it. The horse was docile, exhausted from its early struggles. Zach woke up and started crying again, confused and startled, but too tired to resist much.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Zach as she settled him in the saddle before her. “You’re a Vile. You don’t have to care about them anymore.”
Far up the mountain, a sudden jet of flame burst up towards the sky. It was Shadowgate Castle. Even from here Persephone could see lumps of flame-propelled stone launch from the devastated castle wall. The sounds came soon after, a muffled thud strangely detached from the destruction. The horse kicked and took a couple of steps back. Persephone gripped Zach with one hand and the reins with the other, waiting for the steed to stop panicking as she watched the signs of the war spread up the mountain. Anton had finally taken the battle to his father.
“Fuck him,” she said, and turned her horse away. They would be long gone by the time anyone thought to look for her.
Chapter 82
The antechamber of Shadowgate Manor was scorched black. The heat made it hard for Anton to breathe. Stairs up into the wall had collapsed, crushing the guard desk, and he could tell by the groan of the timbers that the rest of the Manor would soon follow. He thought he had seen someone on the rooftops on his way in, but that was impossible; nobody sane would run across a burning building. Anton drove onwards through the second door and into the audience chamber
The great hall was on fire. Tapestries guttered, shields and swords mounted on the walls reflected the low light of the burning banners, even the firepit had rediscovered its purpose and spat gouts of flame that strove to envelop the long dining table. At the far end of the hall the painting of Anton’s mother blistered and dribbled oil like makeup under tears.
“Such a disappointment.”
At the far end, beyond the long table, Arbalest Vile squatted on his throne. With his right hand, he balanced Demonslayer across his knee. In his left hand, he sloshed black fluid in an uncorked bottle from side to side.
“How have I failed you this time, Father?”
Another long groan from the Manor timbers. In the courtyard, Arbalest Vile had seemed invincible, as if Anton’s attacks had not hurt him. Now Anton could see that his father’s left eye had swollen shut, his cheekbone was clearly broken, and the right hand that stroked the hilt of Demonslayer was a mess of fragmented bone and blood. Anton counted moves. Arbalest would have to wield his sword with one hand, and that hand on his blind side. If they fought on the stage, behind the throne, it would limit the range of Demonslayer’s swing. Swords would become an encumbrance, worse than useless. Anton went to the wall by the firepit and pulled free a shield. The metal was hot. He dropped his sword and took the hammer from his toolbelt.
“My eldest children: a woman and a cripple,” Arbalest snorted.
The dais door moved. There was a hand in the darkness, a hand Anton recognised immediately but that his father had not yet seen. If he could just keep the old man talking. Sweat ran from his forehead.
“What about Nathaniel?” Anton said. He got to his feet and put up the shield. The fire ran in a sheet across the centre of the table. It would take too long to run the length. Arbalest would be on his feet and in position before he could make the jump. “You still have Nathaniel.”
Arbalest gestured with his sword.
“Unstable. Worse than you. And a pederast. I’ll kill him too, when he gets back.”
“He’s not coming back.” Nathaniel stepped out of the shadows and onto the dais. “And you don’t even know what pederast means, you ignorant old troll.”
Anton’s brother looked like he could barely stand. His coat was filthy and torn, and his hair was matted up one side by brown muck that might well have been blood. Anton had never seen him like this. Normally he was so strong, so vibrant. Now he looked as though he didn’t know how to stay still in his own body, overwhelmed by so many thoughts that his limbs wouldn’t stop shaking. And damn his trembling hands: Nathaniel had blown their chance of a surprise attack.
“You,” Arbalest said, somehow mixing incredulity, disdain, and disappointment into one flat tone.
This was as good a chance as he would get. Anton ran towards the fire.
Arbalest snapped his eyes away from Nathaniel as if the man were no more than a petulant child. He drank the black fluid and tossed the bottle away. Anton jumped through the flames. They lapped around his raised shield but did not touch him. He landed, heavily; his leg gave way and he almost slipped off the table. Arbalest took his sword in both hands. Exposed bone showed as Arbalest’s right fist twitched, shifted, gripped, directed, and drove the blade onwards. It shouldn’t have been possible. Too late to stop. He stumbled onwards, tried to get purchase to leap from the table to the dais. Arbalest jumped up from his throne. Shards from the shattered bottle caught the red of the flames as the long trusses that held up the ceiling caught fire.
Anton leapt across the gap between table and dais.
He was struck from
the air. He angled his shield, but the blow from Demonslayer drove him crashing to the stage. He scrambled back away from the throne, trying to get his shield back into position. The old man stood over him. Black lines spread across his face, and when he smiled, his teeth had sharpened. Anton was as frozen by horror as by the breath that had been knocked out of him.
“Get back up on your feet.”
The skeletal fingers turned on the hilt of Demonslayer and Arbalest struck again. Anton slid sideways, on his backside, the ring of steel on steel as his shield bent beneath the blow. He smacked it at the blade and threw himself forward, hammer raised. If he could just get close enough, he could still win. His father caught his forearm. Anton strained with every muscle, but he was lifted by the wrist, as if he were still a child.
“A pity. I thought there might be a Vile here.”
The death blow never came. Arbalest’s cheeks puffed, his eyebrows twitching independently of one another, Anton still held dangling in the air. From the old man’s chest burst the point of a rapier. Behind him, Nathaniel twisted his wrist and drove the sword deeper. A ribbon of blood spurted from their father’s mouth. The point of the sword brushed Anton’s sternum.
“Anton,” Nathaniel said. “Now would be a good time.”
Anton stamped on his father’s thigh. Father and son fell. He smacked his hammer into the side of Arbalest’s knee. The knee broke. The old man writhed like a fish on a hook. Nathaniel staggered forward; his rapier was still stuck in Arbalest’s chest. In one great motion Arbalest reached behind him, grabbed Nathaniel by the throat, and hurled him across the dais where he flew into a tapestry. It collapsed in a wave of sparks. Anton choked back the bile in his mouth and attacked again. This time his blow shattered his father’s elbow. The right arm bent the wrong way, an irretrievable injury. Arbalest roared. Somehow, the hand at the end of the shattered arm still gripped Demonslayer.
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