‘I’d tell you that I’ve felt worse things, but I dare say you wouldn’t believe me,’ she said. ‘Now, where would I find Gorrius, and Nasharian the slaver?’
‘You’re mad,’ the man whispered.
Calcis let the glaive fall from her hand and leaned forward to thrust her head close to the thief’s before she reached up and lifted her mask to show him her face.
He screamed at what he saw, heels scrabbling helplessly against the rotting boards beneath his feet as he struggled to pull away from her horrifying countenance. There was a sudden, sharp smell of urine as he lost control of his bladder.
‘Answer me,’ Calcis said. ‘Or kiss my oh-so pretty face.’
‘The House of Silver Bells!’ the man almost wept, eyes wide with sheer terror and revulsion yet seemingly unable to look away from the appalling ravage of her face. ‘It’s a gambling den, down by the barter pits. They… they meet there to play Torments and do business. Don’t come no closer, please!’
Calcis laughed again, and she slowly closed her left hand until the man’s throat ruptured and his blood sprayed hot into her ruined face.
She ran her long tongue delicately over the shreds of flesh where her lips had once been, and lowered her mask back into place.
‘The House of Silver Bells,’ she whispered. ‘My thanks.’
She tossed the corpse aside hard enough to propel it into a wall ten feet away, and stooped to retrieve her blade.
‘Mirrorblades, come,’ she said. ‘Mother wants a game of Torments.’
Vignus smiled upon her through the mind-bond, and told her that she had done well.
In the firelit darkness of the forge, Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia smiled at Calcis’ determination. The compound she had consumed would take a hard toll on her body when it wore off, he knew, but her suffering would be worth it. He looked up from the bubbling alembic on the bench in front of him and pointed his fan at the nearest mindbound.
‘You, beast,’ he said, speaking slowly to the simple-minded slave. ‘Go to Mirrorblade Calcis at the House of Silver Bells. Tell her High Master wants slaver Nasharian brought to him alive. Tell Mirrorblade Calcis to kill the others, but not slaver Nasharian. Hurry!’
The mindbound trembled with awe at being directly addressed by the High Master, its jaw clenching with the pain of adoration it caused. It bowed low and fled into the night.
Calcis and her disciples were just two streets away from the House of Silver Bells when a mindbound came sprinting towards them, looking ready to collapse from exhaustion.
‘Mirrorblade,’ it wheezed. Calcis stopped as she recognised the thrall. It was doubled over and vomiting black slime onto its boots through its mask, and Calcis knew at once that it came at the High Master’s bidding. Only the Word of the Thrallmaster could induce one of the near-mindless slaves to run itself to the point of death to carry an urgent message.
‘Speak, thrall,’ she said.
The mindbound shuddered and hacked up another string of bloody drool, then straightened as best it was able.
‘The High Master wants the slaver Nasharian alive,’ it choked. ‘He says to kill the others, but not Nasharian. You’re to bring Nasharian to the High Master.’
Calcis nodded shortly and turned away with her two disciples in her wake. Behind her, the mindbound keeled over and hit the ground with a wet thump. Perhaps it would rise again and perhaps it would not, but Calcis gave it no more thought. Thralls were cheap.
Despite its grand name, the House of Silver Bells was as dilapidated as every other building in the flesh district of Carngrad, if somewhat larger. Calcis paused to examine it for a moment, taking in the entrances and exits. The ground floor was windowless, but light flickered behind shutters above and she could hear the sound of drunken merrymaking wafting out into the street. She spoke wordlessly, giving commands in rapid hand-sign that directed Relak to the front entrance and Darrath around the back to the courtyard where the privy stood rotting behind the door. She made the sign for the small alchemical bombs that each mirrorblade carried in his pouch, to tell them what to do once they were in position.
Her disciples bowed their masked heads in obedience and went forth to poison the air of the gaming house and drive those on the ground floor mad with hallucinations. Calcis herself stepped lightly up onto an upturned barrel and jumped, her hands catching the ledge of an upper-storey window.
She pulled herself up with lithe grace and placed an eye to the gap between the ill-fitting shutters. She could see into the main common room of the gaming house, where various base characters played their gambling games with razor-edged ivory cards on splintery tables that were already sticky with blood. Torments was not a game for the weak, but these rough men of Carngrad were drinking in raucous camaraderie even as they flayed each other’s fingers for forfeits in the game. Her quarry would not be there amongst that low rabble, she knew.
So she must hunt, and a mirrorblade hunts best in the shadows.
The window to her right was lit as well, but to her left there was only darkness behind the closed shutters. Calcis lowered herself down from the window frame until she was dangling at the full length of her arms, then kicked her legs back and then forward to build up a swinging momentum. She launched herself up and to the left, her hands reaching out for purchase as she flew through the air.
Her left hand caught the windowsill but the rotten wood tore away in her grip and for a moment she was weightless before gravity took her. Her right slapped up and grabbed the very end of the ledge as she started to fall. She grunted as a stray nail tore through the palm of her hand, hooking her there.
She drew in a breath and let it hiss slowly out between her teeth as she pulled herself up one-handed, the nail ripping all the way through the back of her blood-slick hand as she put her entire weight on the wound.
Just like training, she thought as she remembered the ways in which the High Master had raised her in her youth, and the training, the endless tortures of mind and body that had made her the perfect killer she was now. Training makes me stronger, High Master. Pain is power, High Master. Pain is strength, and strength is pain. Under the wisdom of your Word, High Master, I grow ever stronger.
She heaved with her back and twisted her hips, and a moment later her foot hooked the ledge and her other hand was on the shutters, prying them open to give access to a darkened room. She swung up and into it, wincing as her right hand twisted on the nail. Only then did she reach out and pluck the rusty length of iron straight through her hand like a thorn to free herself.
She lifted the nail and raised her mask just enough to lick it clean of her blood, then slipped it into her pouch for a keepsake. She treasured the memories of pain.
Of victory.
That done, Calcis closed the shutters behind her and dipped the fingers of her unwounded hand back into her pouch, searching in the darkness amongst the things it contained until she found the small jar of salve. She placed a finger into the reeking ointment and smeared a little of it over her injury. The pain was sharp and immediate, as it had been when she had healed her forearm before leaving the tavern, and once again she smelled the acrid tang of burning blood as the wound closed and sealed itself. The High Master’s alchemical magic always hurt, but it always worked too, and what was one more scar to her? What was one more hurt, on a lifetime of hurts?
She flexed her hand, feeling the iron strength returning to it, and nodded in satisfaction as she closed the jar of salve and slipped it back into her pouch. She reached in there once more and found the dropper of Nighteye. Tipping her head back, she pushed up her mask and allowed one drop of the oily liquid to fall into each of her lidless eyes. It coated her pupils with a thin, stinging film, and her surroundings began to present themselves to her as the alchemically induced night vision took hold.
It was a small storeroom, piled with crates and barrels and broken furniture. Bright points o
f light stood out against the walls on three sides, and Calcis realised it was coming through tiny spyholes drilled through the wood to enable anyone in the room to look into those adjacent whilst remaining unobserved. She put her eye to the first to see what lay beyond. It was the gaming room she had seen into earlier through the shutters, and there seemed now to be a fight in progress. The fumes from Darrath’s and Relak’s alchemical bombs had already made their way up the stairs from the ground floor, it seemed. That was of no interest to her, she thought as she watched a man swing a chair into another’s face and shatter his jaw, but with luck the noise would help to cover the sound of her own actions. The second spyhole showed into an empty bedroom that was hung with mouldy red silks and velvets, but its owner obviously wasn’t working that night and Calcis turned away once more.
The third looked out into a small, private gaming room where two men sat across a Torments board from each other, although neither seemed to be actually playing.
‘I’m sorry, Gorrius,’ the one with his back to her was saying, ‘but your petty street war is your own problem. I’m not intervening on your behalf, and you’ve lost your mind if you think the Court of Talons cares one way or another who rules the roofs of the flesh district. Defend your own territory or sink into the abyss of the gutter with all the other failures. This is Carngrad, after all, and that is how things are done here.’
‘A fine friend you are,’ the other snarled. ‘After what I pay you…’
He was one-eyed and unshaven, somewhere in his early fifties but tough-looking with it, his exposed, muscular forearms dark with old, crude tattoos. He was also, Calcis realised, about to stab the other man. That would not do. The man with his back to her had to be the slaver Nasharian, and she was to bring Nasharian alive before her High Master. So it had been decreed, and so would it be done.
Calcis’ glaive tore through the damp, rotting wooden wall as if it were parchment, and she kicked the shattered boards aside and strode into the room, where the two men were staring at her in open astonishment. Nasharian started to rise but she slammed him back down into his chair with her left hand even as Gorrius kicked the table over and leapt forward with a stabsword plunging towards her belly.
She turned into the blow, spinning like a dancer, and the edge of the blade merely scored a slim line along the leather of her belt as she slammed her left elbow into Gorrius’ throat. He stumbled back a step and Calcis completed her turn, her glaive sweeping out to take his hand off at the wrist.
The stabsword spun away and clattered to the floor with the severed hand still clutching it, before Calcis whirled once again and took the head from his shoulders before he even had time to scream. Blood jetted across the walls and low ceiling as he fell, unmourned, behind her.
She turned and regarded Nasharian with a pitiless stare that still burned bright with Nighteye.
‘Come hither,’ she said. ‘You are called unto service. My High Master has asked of you.’
The ceiling exploded above her and something plummeted into the room, smashing Calcis to the floor. It shrieked like a raptor diving on its prey, and a great hooked blade whistled down and ripped into Calcis’ shoulder. She rolled with the blow, feeling her flesh tear open as the blade came free. Her left arm ran slick with her own blood as she whipped her body to hurl herself back onto her feet, her glaive already licking out one-handed.
The Corvus spire stalker parried with his hook-sword and slashed at her with the wicked iron claws lashed to his left hand, opening three long cuts across her thigh. The wounds were shallow but burned like fire where the filthy talons had sliced her open.
Calcis spat and cursed, already beginning to tremble as the stimulant she had ingested earlier started to wear off.
Not now! she mentally screamed.
She had intended to be back at the forge long before the awful after-effects of the drug took hold of her, but now this delay had made that impossible. A violent convulsion shook her body, and her guts cramped with sudden nausea.
The spire stalker laughed behind his hideous mask.
‘Is this a mirrorblade of the Cypher Lords?’ he sneered at her. ‘Shaking husk of drug abuse. Addict. Pathetic!’
He dashed Calcis to the floor with the back of his armoured hand and stood over her, laughing as her body began to spasm. The Cabalite clearly intended to humiliate her before he took her life.
That was his mistake.
He reached down with his clawed hand to rip the mask from Calcis’ face, as a trophy or offering to his foul God she could only assume, when a cry went up in the corridor outside.
‘Mother, where are you? This is taking too long!’
Calcis’ mouth had filled with foam and vomit when the fit took hold of her and she was unable to cry out, but she managed to slam an iron-shod foot into the slaver Nasharian’s ankle hard enough to make him shout in pain.
The door slammed open with a crash and the spire stalker spun to find Relak and Darrath charging him with drawn glaives flashing bright in their hands.
‘Die!’ Relak bellowed.
Darrath threw himself at the Corvus warrior, his glaive coming down in a glittering arc. The foe parried with ease and raked his claws across Darrath’s chest as he whirled away in a flurry of long, black feathers. Relak vaulted the table and hacked the man’s left arm off at the elbow with a vicious two-handed swing of his glaive.
The Corvus screamed and staggered, blood spurting from the stump of his severed arm. Even so he counter-attacked, the tip of his hook-sword ripping Darrath’s mask from his head and scoring a long cut across his cheek that missed taking his eye out by barely a straw’s width.
Ashamed at his unmasking, Darrath attacked in a furious storm of blows that drove the spire stalker backwards into Relak’s reach, and between them they hacked the blasphemous abomination to bloody rags.
‘Mother,’ Relak whispered when it was done, dropping to his knees beside Calcis where she thrashed helplessly on the floor. He turned from her to look at the terrified Nasharian, and nodded. ‘So it was decreed, so has it been done.’
‘Were there any other survivors?’ Vignus asked when Calcis forced the slaver down onto his knees in front of him in the forge.
‘No, High Master,’ she said.
Once she had recovered somewhat from her fit and removed Nasharian from the building, she had ordered her two mirrorblades to slaughter every living thing in the gambling house. Vignus approved of her decision.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m sure everyone in that establishment had enemies beyond counting. This way no one will know who did this thing, and for now that suits my purpose. I do not want more trouble with the foul Corvus scum at this time. You have done well, Calcis.’
‘Yes, High Master,’ she said.
‘Now, secure him and then see to your wounds. I must work.’
‘Yes, High Master.’
He left Calcis to make the slaver fast to a chair, and considered the man. They were much alike in build, and if Vignus was slightly taller and somewhat leaner then he could compensate for that with a slight stoop and perhaps just a little padding. The face was the important thing. It always was.
Apparently Nasharian was widely regarded as a very handsome man, so Vignus’ spies had told him, at least as such things were reckoned in Carngrad. This mostly seemed to mean that he still had both of his eyes, most of his teeth, and his nose. He had swept-back grey hair that was still thick despite his sixty or so years. The face was deeply lined, yes, but in the craggy way that Vignus had always felt added dignity, perhaps even gravitas, to a man’s countenance. It would suit him, he thought.
He turned a valve on one of his alchemical vessels and put a glass beaker under a spigot to catch the colourless, slightly cloudy liquid that spilled out. He allowed perhaps an inch of the fluid to fall into the vessel, then shut off the valve and held the beaker up to the light to
examine it. Faint motes danced in the swirling distillate, wriggling as though they were alive.
Which, of course, they were.
He placed the beaker back on the workbench and pricked his finger with one of the spines of his fan, allowing a single drop of his blood to fall into the alchemical fluid. It darkened at once, the blood swirling out like skeins of silk in the viscous liquid. The dancing motes went berserk, thrashing into a frenzy until the stain of the blood was completely gone.
Vignus nodded his head in satisfaction and approached the now helpless slaver.
‘You must be thirsty,’ he said.
Nasharian, who had been watching the operation with clearly mounting horror, shook his head violently.
‘Oh, come now,’ Vignus said. ‘You are not a foolish man, you know how this will end. I can make you scream in torment like you have never heard a living thing scream before. Why don’t you save us both a lot of time and yourself a great deal of agony and just step forward to the part where you drink this?’
‘Why poison me?’ Nasharian whispered. ‘If you want me dead, just have your pet assassin knife me.’
‘I don’t want you dead,’ Vignus said. ‘Great Lords of Chaos, that would never do. Calcis walked through a wall and battled a terrible foe to ensure that Gorrius and the Corvus Cabal did not kill you, in fact. You probably remember that.’
Nasharian swallowed and looked sideways at Calcis in obvious fear, and said nothing.
‘Besides,’ Vignus went on, ‘did I say that this was poison? Just drink it, Nasharian, and then we can talk.’
After a moment the slaver’s shoulders slumped in defeat and he dutifully opened his mouth. Vignus reached out and grasped the man’s temples, pushing his head back until he could pour the contents of the beaker into his mouth. Nasharian swallowed on reflex, his eyes bulging in his head as the taste of the stuff coated his tongue with the flavour of rotting offal. He gagged for a moment, then gulped. Sweat stood out on his brow in bright pinpricks.
‘What… what was that?’
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