Warcry: The Anthology

by Various Authors

  He had spies spread throughout the Bloodwind Spoil, of course, as did anyone of noble consequence in Noschseed, but Vignus had had the foresight to plant his infiltrators in the Reaver City, from where the lifeblood of commerce flowed towards the Varanspire itself. Through those spies he had learned of the Court of the Seven Talons, the loose alliance of warlords who ruled the city of Carngrad between them. Each one was like a king or queen in their own right, ruling their urban fiefdoms and the lands they controlled with an iron claw.

  Vignus had a plan to infiltrate their world of hedonism and chaotic rule, and the means to do that were contained within the hold of his war palanquin in a warehouse three streets away.

  The High Courtier Claudius Malleficus of the Seven Talons was, so Vignus’ spies told him, a man of great and decadent refinement, with an all-consuming taste for the physical pleasures of life and death in all their many and various forms, and intoxication above all ­others. Vignus had, accordingly, brought with him to Carngrad a great quantity of Noschseedian firewine, a ferocious liquor that was highly prized across the Mortal Realms and almost impossible to obtain in the Eightpoints. That, he thought, would be to the great delight of Claudius Malleficus, and delighting one of the Seven Talons would give him a way to meet with the High Courtier, and there put his full plan into play. That plan, Vignus was sure, would gain him the notor­iety and influence in Carngrad that would bring him to the attention of the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse himself.

  Or so he very much hoped.

  ‘Send a mindbound to the warehouse,’ Vignus said to Calcis, ‘and have it tell Darrath and his half a ten-band to bring my equipment and the barrels of firewine here. The palanquin is expendable, its cargo is not.’

  ‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis said, and went to do her lord’s bidding.

  It was a short space of time until the barrels of firewine were rolled into the forge by the six sweating mindbound, while Darrath the mirrorblade watched over them with a hand ready on the hilt of his glaive. The gorestorm had let up by then and the skies above Carngrad were clear, but still the cobbled streets ran red with blood that smeared the barrels as they rolled and caused them to leave sticky red tracks in their wake.

  Vignus smiled behind his alabaster mask as he oversaw the delivery of the barrels, and of the other things even more so. Alchemy was his lifeblood, and he had travelled with his most precious equipment as he always did. He had alembics and retorts and tubes and vessels of cunningly wrought glass, things to condense fluids and things to distil them. Oh, praise the power of the Lords of Chaos that was contained within the subtle mysteries of alchemy!

  It was alchemy that bound his thralls to him, and it was alchemy and addiction and subtle torture that had first broken Calcis’ mind and slaved her soul and blade to his Word. Alchemy was the ­ultimate ­mystery of the Mortal Realms, the key that could unlock the great truths of life and death and power.

  ‘Now we shall see,’ Vignus murmured to himself as he set up his equipment in the ruddy glow of the forge fire. ‘What does it take to break the mind of a High Courtier?’

  His smile widened behind his mask as he opened the chests of rare, precious ingredients that it had taken him half a year and more to gather. Any ordinary man could be broken easily enough, but of course those powerful enough to raise themselves to the Court of the Seven Talons would be far tougher nuts to crack. Vignus and the Hands of Darkness had journeyed far and wide across the ­Mortal Realms before ever he ventured to the Eightpoints, ­bartering, ­bribing and killing for the most noxious and potent ingredients known to mortal minds.

  He laughed as he began to mix a concoction of the most sublime madness.

  Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia stood on the front step of the forge he had commandeered and looked out upon the streets of Carngrad. The sky was clear in the morning light, burning bright with sunlight and fell promise. Vignus smiled up at it, defiant in the face of the light. He had his own path to follow, and light had little enough to do with it.

  ‘Let the Lords of Chaos rule,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘My High Master,’ Calcis said from behind him as she stepped out of the protective glow of the forge to join her lord on the threshold. ‘What is your will?’

  ‘Go forth into the city, and upon its roofs,’ Vignus said, without looking at her. ‘Find the rest of these vermin, and exterminate them. Grind them into dust in my name.’

  ‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis said, and she bowed before her lord. ‘So shall it be done.’

  ‘Oh, and Calcis?’

  ‘High Master?’

  ‘Take Palania with you. Make examples of them, for all the city to see.’

  ‘Yes, High Master.’

  The days passed, and in those cycles of light and dark Vignus carefully selected from amongst his precious cache of hard-won ingredients and brewed his special poisons, while out in the city Calcis and Palania fought a street war in his name.

  Oh, how they fought! The two-pronged fork of his power, sublime violence and insane illusion, were both unleashed together. The flesh district didn’t know what had hit it.

  Vignus watched through the Eyes of Noschseed that Calcis and her two disciple mirrorblades had begun to place throughout the flesh district, and with his Seeing Eye he looked also through her own eyes. He grew accustomed to the sight of the mirror-bright glaive slicing through human flesh, to the spray of blood and the wet sound of severed limbs hitting the cobbled streets.

  It was Palania, though, who caused the greatest terror amongst the common street murderers of Carngrad. Where the mute luminate walked and spread her subtle illusions, men and women ran mad in the streets and rent their faces with their broken nails, howling as their minds boiled in their skulls. The luminate disseminated fear and madness, dropping alchemical poisons into this man’s ale, that woman’s stew, until all those around her saw horrors beyond imagining stalking them through the reeking alleys and foetid slave pits where they plied their various fell trades.

  He watched the luminate enter a flesh market barter pit where the severed wings of Chaos furies were traded against the bile sacs of venom wyrms. He saw her blow a handful of rancid purple powder into the air, and heard her gurgle softly to herself with amusement as she did it. Within moments all those there present were convinced that those self-same furies and wyrms were risen from their dripping constituent parts, clawing their way out of the reeking flesh vats to attack them. In the ensuing madness of Palania’s illusion, fully thirty of the murderers of Carngrad slew each other in their panic while the luminate watched and laughed in her High Master’s name.

  Meanwhile Calcis and her mirrorblades took heads and nailed them to walls and above tavern signs or set them on posts, grim totems to proclaim the ever-expanding boundaries of the Hands of Darkness’ streets.

  Make examples, he had said, and between them Calcis and Palania certainly did that. They both were ruthless in their carrying out of his orders, each in her own way and according to her own particular skills.

  He had them plant more Eyes of Noschseed as his territory expanded, more of the small spheres of silver and gold that allowed him to watch over his growing domain. On the second day, Calcis burned the barter pits nearest to Fleshripper’s Gate, and took fifteen heads. Palania unleashed a hallucinogenic poison into the heating ducts of a public pleasure house. She gurgled to herself as the customers and workers tore each other to bloody shreds in one of the greatest orgies of pain and bloodletting that the flesh district had seen for months.

  On the third day she opened a slave pen and gave the freed wretches inside knives and a few drops each of an alchemical compound that gave them a superhuman, if self-destructive, strength. She turned them loose on their masters in a rampage of torture and savagery that became the talk of the city for weeks to come. On that same day Calcis, Relak and Darrath slew twenty-five warriors between them and strung their heads from
a rope above the slave pits, knotting their filthy hair to the hemp to hold them aloft for all to see. By the end of the fourth day in Carngrad half the flesh district was his, but that was inconsequential. Vignus was no petty street gangster, to care about such base things.

  On the fifth day, they finally made some progress that actually mattered.

  Calcis and her mirrorblades with half a ten-band of mindbound behind them had cornered a group of roof-runners in a filthy, reeking tavern. Vignus used his Seeing Eye to watch through Calcis’ eyes as they fought across a room that was thick with the greasy smoke of tallow candles rendered from human fat. The street scum were nothing before the three elite warriors, and for a moment it looked as though this battle would be as easy as the ones that had preceded it.

  For a moment, anyway.

  Nothing worth taking is ever so easily won, Vignus reflected as something dark swept down out of the shadows of the ceiling and took the head from one of his mindbound with a vicious swing of its great hooked blade, sending a spray of blood jetting into the air. The newcomer wore a beaked bone-and-iron mask that looked like the skull of some terrible avian creature, and long black feathers adorned the shoulders of his leather torso harness.

  He landed on the ball of one foot and spun into the turn of his cut, leaping back into the air with a killing screech as the hooked blade flashed out once more in a murderous arc and slew another of the mindbound where it stood.

  The terrible weapon lifted again, and Relak’s glaive met it with a ring of steel on steel that brought a grim smile to the Thrallmaster’s hidden lips. He knew the foe his mirrorblades now faced, and hatred drew his attention to it like iron filings to a lodestone.

  Corvus Cabal.

  That the vile, blasphemous Cabal should also be active in Carngrad alongside his own warband was no great surprise, he supposed, but for one of them to be in the same room of the same tavern in a city this size?

  No.

  No, that was no accident.

  The Cabalite swept Relak’s glaive aside and lunged for the mirrorblade’s flank with a short, wicked dagger held in his off-hand. Relak twisted away at the last moment and only took a long scratch along his ribs even though he stumbled to the boards in his haste. The Cabalite screeched and raised his hooked blade in killing triumph.

  ‘Child,’ Calcis said, her icy tone cutting through the frenzied air.

  The Cabalite turned and glared at her, his eyes blazing behind his hideous bone mask.

  ‘Cypher witch!’ he spat at her.

  Calcis laughed and spun her glaive in one hand as she met the Cabalite’s baleful stare.

  ‘Would you truly attempt to prey on the chicks in their nest, while the mother eagle circles above you with her talons extended?’

  ‘What do you know of the mountain raptors?’ the Cabalite spat at her. ‘Nothing!’

  Relak was hauling himself to his feet now, one hand clutched to his wounded side but his glaive held tight in the other, and Darrath had finished his own man with a straight thrust to the throat. Both her disciples were poised and ready to fight, but Calcis raised her free hand to stay them. She looked the Cabal­ite slowly up and down and twirled her glaive once more.

  ‘Stand back, my sons,’ she said, although her disciples were no spawn of her own barren flesh. ‘Mother is working.’

  ‘Mother, is it?’ the Cabalite sneered. ‘Come and face me if you dare, witch.’

  ‘Keep the others from fleeing,’ Calcis told her disciples, and they moved to stand over the remaining roof-runners where they cowered as she took a slow step towards the Corvus Cabal warrior. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Your arrogance is filthy!’ the feathered creature spat at her. ‘You are the sort of blasphemer who would sell your skills for coin!’

  Vignus knew the zealot creature meant that as the foulest insult, but Calcis just laughed behind her mask.

  ‘My skills belong to my High Master, heart and soul,’ she whispered, and far away across the flesh district Vignus smiled to himself.

  Kill it, Calcis, he sent down the mind-bond that bound her to his Word. Make it suffer, and make an example of it.

  ‘Yes, High Master,’ she said aloud.

  ‘What?’ the Cabalite snapped. ‘You speak to one who is not there. Madness! It is true, then – all the Cypher Lords are insane, poisoned by their own alchemy!’

  ‘Come and see, child,’ Calcis said, and snapped her glaive up into a two-handed guard before her.

  The Cabalite shrieked like a swooping bird of prey and leapt into the air, his dagger flashing down to block the mirrorblade’s glaive even as his hooked blade swept up and over in a killing blow. Calcis turned into the swing and pirouetted on one foot, her other flashing out to catch the Cabalite in mid leap and slam her iron-shod heel into his exposed side. He grunted and crashed into a table, overturning it and shattering the glasses it had held against the rough stones of the hearth.

  ‘Child,’ Calcis repeated, her mocking laughter echoing around the room.

  The Cabalite spun faster than the eye could follow, jamming an elbow against Calcis’ lead hand and smashing her glaive aside with his long blade. His dagger flashed down across the back of her forearm, drawing a thick line of blood from her pale skin.

  The Cabalite was a skilled warrior, there was no doubt about that, but Calcis was an elite mirrorblade and the Voice of a Thrallmaster. She whirled sideways and evaded the downward sweep of the hooked blade that followed the initial strike, and slammed a knee diagonally upwards into the Cabalite’s midriff. She whip-cracked her body back the other way and brought her descending elbow down on his temple, the alchemically enhanced strength of her blow shattering his bone mask. The follow-up cut from her glaive swept through empty space where the Cabalite’s head had been but a moment before.

  ‘Oh, you’re good,’ she had to admit.

  Kill it! Vignus screamed at her through the mind-bond.

  She was tiring now, whereas the Corvus warrior turned an effortless backflip to avoid the return slash of her glaive. He tumbled across the blood-slick floor and came up with his blades in his hands, now some ten strides away from her.

  Vignus could feel the first edge of fear touch his mirrorblade, fear not of death but of the possibility that she might be about to fail him.

  Calcis took the moment to dip a hand into her pouch and grasp one of the specially prepared compounds that her High Master had prepared for her on the long journey to Carngrad. She pushed her hand up under her mask and thrust the bitter pill into her mouth, biting down hard and grinding the foul-tasting powder against her gums with her tongue.

  The world began to sing. A shudder ran through Calcis’ limbs as the savagely strong stimulant took hold of her. Watching through her eyes, Vignus smiled with satisfaction to see how time seemed to slow down for her. The Cabalite moved like a man underwater, to Calcis’ eyes, his blades swinging almost lazily as he ran towards her.

  ‘Witch!’ he spat at her, but he was moving so slowly now while Calcis was just working up to her full killing frenzy.

  Calcis snarled, and turned a lightning-fast somersault clean over the savage cut of the Cabalite’s blade.

  She landed behind the Corvus warrior, back to back with him, reversed her glaive in her left hand and rammed it backwards under her own armpit to impale her adversary through the spine before he even had time to register that she had moved. Her bright blade burst out of his sternum in a great spray of blood, and he sagged to his knees with a dying groan.

  ‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis whispered. ‘So shall it be done.’

  She shook the body of the dead Cabalite off her glaive and turned to regard her disciples, who both bowed their masked heads to her in gestures of utmost respect.

  ‘Kill those,’ she ordered. ‘Give me their leader.’

  Relak and Darrath and the remaining three mindbo
und did as she bade them, their glaives and short blades making fast work of the last handful of roof-runners. They left the leader untouched, and Calcis stalked towards him. She slammed him backwards against a damp wooden wall and tightened her hand around his throat.

  Behind her, the rest of them lay dead on the floor in a lake of blood.

  ‘My High Master and I are getting bored now,’ she said. ‘Five days of slaughtering you pointless scum has become tiresome in the extreme. Where is your leader? Where is Gorrius?’

  ‘Hah!’ the roof-runner spat. ‘You can’t touch Gorrius. He’s connected.’

  Calcis tipped her head to one side, her eyes curious behind her mask.

  ‘To the Corvus Cabal?’

  ‘Mind your business, you stupid out-realmer.’

  Calcis’ grip tightened on the man’s throat, her unnaturally strong fingers close to bursting the sides of his neck.

  ‘Some respect would be wise,’ she whispered, her hand shaking with the force of the stimulant that still burned in her veins.

  ‘Oh, plague touch you, I know I’m dead anyway,’ the man snarled. ‘I ain’t stupid, but you are if you think you can take down Gorrius. He’s tight with Nasharian the slaver and his feathered out-realm friends, and he’s in with the plaguing Court of Talons! You touch Gorrius and you’ll be flayed alive in the Square of Torment, you mark my words!’

  Calcis laughed, a sudden, brittle sound in the blood-soaked silence of the tavern.