Only when the man was dead on the floor with his head shattered like a dropped egg did High Courtier Claudius Malleficus sag back into his throne and wave for a fresh goblet of firewine. He drank a great draught of it, then peered down at the company assembled on the floor of his audience chamber as though unsure of what had just happened.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, his voice sounding suddenly like that of a frightened child. ‘Why are you here? What do you want? Make them go away!’
‘They bring you a gift, your majestic excellency,’ Apolonia said, as though that gift had not been purchased for the price of a war-trained bull cygor. ‘Finest firewine, your favourite.’
‘Firewine! This is marvellous news! A toast!’ Malleficus shouted, and drained his goblet.
There was blood seeping through the crotch of his britches, Vignus noticed with satisfaction.
‘A toast indeed,’ Vignus said. ‘It is my honour to bring such joy to one so exalted as yourself, your majestic excellency, and to all those here gathered.’
He smirked behind his mask as he used the ridiculously overblown title, watching black drool trickle unheeded from the corner of the High Courtier’s lips. A man had seldom looked less majestic, in Vignus’ recollection, and again he shuddered inwardly to think how close he himself had come to that very fate.
Still, he smiled as a slave refilled his master’s goblet and the High Courtier drank again. His servants tapped the cask that Vignus had brought with him and poured goblets of the savagely poisoned liquor for all those there present.
Malleficus thumped his goblet down then and fixed the Thrallmaster with a furious glare.
‘Your gift is given,’ he snapped, then turned towards the non-existent woman he supposed sat at his left hand. ‘What does he want, my dear? Why… oh, the blood! The suffering! Oh my sweet, putrid love…’
The High Courtier began to sob, and Vignus knew that he had won. Now it was time to set his plan into motion.
He opened his Seeing Eye and envisioned the apparition that High Courtier Claudius Malleficus saw beside him, the maggots writhing in her empty eye sockets and the blood that poured like honeyed wine from her lush lips to spill down the front of a white silk shroud that was crusted stiff with dried vomit. He plunged his will into the apparition and felt the courtier’s carefully engineered madness facing him like a living thing. He grasped that madness with the psychic claws of his sorcerous mind, and he squeezed.
‘Hear his words,’ he said in the voice of the rotting woman, a voice that only Malleficus could hear. ‘He speaks with the voice of the Great Lord.’
‘Speak!’ Malleficus shrieked, his eyes bulging in their sockets like boiled karnsnake eggs as he turned the full, burning fury of his insane gaze on Vignus. ‘What say you, emissary of the Great Lord?’
Vignus cleared his throat and regarded the assembled benches of various advisors, soldiers, fixers and hangers-on. He spoke, as His Majestic Excellency Claudius Malleficus had bade him.
‘Your will is mighty, O majestic excellency, and your benign power rules Carngrad as one of the Seven Talons of the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse,’ he began. ‘But know you this, exalted lord – there are heretical interlopers right here in the heart of the great Reaver City. Even under the all-seeing gaze of the Court of the Seven Talons, sedition and treason has been allowed to fester and grow upon these noble streets!’
He paused to allow the hubbub from the benches to subside, his eyes fixed firmly on the gibbering form of the High Courtier. The man reached out with his left hand, clutching as though for reassurance at the hand of a woman who wasn’t there.
‘Who?’ Malleficus barked at last, and had to pause to pluck a rope of particularly thick phlegm from his chin. He flicked it away to slap wetly against the cheek of his nearest advisor, and swallowed a great gulp of firewine before continuing. ‘Who would dare?’
‘They are out-realmers, O revered lord, foul heretics and unbelievers from beyond the Eightpoints,’ Vignus continued. ‘They call themselves the Corvus Cabal, and they worship a false abomination. And thinkest thou, my assembled lords and ladies, thinkest thou, my arch lord courtier, that the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse has truck with this carrion false god they call the Gatherer? He does not! ’Tis nothing but base heresy! And here, upon your very streets, they did sacrifice a man of mine, a loyal man, wise and true, and they did defile his flesh with foul sigils. I say to you, my lords and ladies, I say to you, it is enough! Such insult cannot be borne, not to the pure and wise doctrine of the Lord Archaon, and yet neither to the righteousness of your own rule over these streets. They do us grievous insult, and shall we stand for it? I say that we shall not!’
‘Never!’ shouted someone in the audience.
‘Abomination!’ called another, raising his cup of firewine high. Already the first purple flush of the poison was spreading around his lips, so strong now was the mix in that barrel. ‘Destroy them in the name of the Rotting Lady!’
‘The Rotting Lady!’ someone else howled. ‘All hail!’
They blaspheme, and they do not even know it, Vignus thought with delight.
He had tailored the dose in the barrel to the High Courtier’s already greatly raised tolerance levels, of course. Those advisors present who had never tasted the poisoned brew before were overdosing before his very eyes, some going into spasms while others began to screech and howl and tear at each other in their ecstasy of madness. He felt Calcis stiffen beside him, her hand going protectively to the hilt of her glaive, but Vignus touched her arm with his fan to still her.
Their madness was a collective thing, a shared thing, and it all fed from the High Courtier’s own delusions. Vignus reached out once more with his Seeing Eye and found the horror they called the Rotting Lady, the totem of their collective insanity, and he wore her like a psychic puppet.
She tottered to her feet beside the High Courtier’s throne and put a three-fingered hand on his shoulder, gangrenous pus oozing from the stump of the missing digit. When she spoke her voice was like a fell wind blowing from an open tomb, and all those affected by the poisoned brew heard her clearly as Vignus manipulated the shape of their madness with his twisted power.
‘Kill them,’ the Rotting Lady rasped. ‘You have the power, O great men and women of Carngrad. This Corvus Cabal offends mine maggot-filled eyes. Eradicate them. Feed them to the rendering pits in the name of Archaon himself, in answer to their insult. This man Vignus serves the Great Lord. Pass unto him the Staff of the General, and he will do this work in your names. Kill them, and revel and bathe in their blood, and we shall all dine on firewine as the unbelievers burn for our pleasure on the great pyre in the Square of Judgement.’
‘Kill!’ someone shouted, and then the chant went up.
Firewine and poison and madness sang in their veins, and they smashed their goblets together until they shattered and blood sprang bright from the gashes in their hands. Above them all the Majestic High Courtier Claudius Malleficus laughed and wept and soiled himself with reeking joy.
‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ they shouted.
‘Call out the troops!’ someone howled. ‘Give him the staff!’
Vignus smiled as a heavily armoured warrior handed him a long staff, topped with a great spike carved with arcane runes.
‘Lead our troops in this matter, O emissary of the Great Lord,’ the warrior snarled. ‘Kill!’
‘Slaughter, in the name of the Rotting Lady!’
A cheer, at that.
‘Slaughter!’
It was pandemonium in the court of the beasts.
‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’
Vignus turned to look about himself, with Calcis and Palania at his side, and he knew his work there was done.
The entire audience chamber of the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus might have been reduced to gibbering, hallucinating wrecks of humanity by the
time Vignus left their presence, but by then it no longer mattered. By then he had the totemic Staff of the General in his hands and the entire military might of one of the Seven Talons at his disposal.
He and Calcis and Palania led the massed ranks of heavily armoured warriors through the streets from the Court of the Seven Talons to the Square of Howling, where the Corvus Cabal had made their stronghold in the flesh-butchers at the corner of Gorewind Alley.
While they were still half a mile distant Vignus paused under the Aqueduct of Pain to open his Seeing Eye, and he gazed out through the Eyes of Noschseed that Calcis and Darrath had planted around the square. He saw the Corvus scum about their business, some fifty of them in all if he gauged it correctly.
He had three hundred heavily armoured men at his back. They marched on until they reached the Square of Howling, the tramp of their hobnailed boots echoing from the close-packed houses that lined the streets.
Vignus and Palania stood back with Calcis and Darrath as a bodyguard, and he raised the Staff of the General and used it to point at the building ahead of them.
‘Destroy it,’ he told the massed forces of the High Courtier. ‘Kill everything within.’
A thin smile stretched his lips behind his mask as they charged forward to do his bidding, and at his side Palania gurgled with laughter.
‘Your Word is mighty, High Master,’ Calcis said beside him as battle was joined in the stinking street. ‘Your enemy kills your enemy, and we stand back and watch, and smile, and need do nothing.’
‘Such is the way of the Cypher Lords,’ Vignus said. ‘Let the Lords of Chaos rule.’
The Lords of Chaos surely ruled in Carngrad that night, as the army of the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus surged across the Square of Howling and into the flesh-butcher’s place, putting all there to fire and the sword. The Corvus Cabal fought hard but they were stalkers and assassins not so different to the Cypher Lords themselves, and they were not prepared or equipped for a pitched battle against three hundred heavy shock troops.
Vignus watched until the cobbles of the Square of Howling were streaming red with the blood that poured from that killing place, and then he turned away.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have one more task to complete this night.’
Calcis followed the High Master back the way they had come, just her and Darrath and Palania with him now. The threat of the rival warband had been eliminated in the way of the Cypher Lords, and they had no need of mindbound to protect them from the common scum of the Reaver City.
All the same, she could tell that the High Master still had something on his mind.
He led the three of them to the foot of Water Hill, and they began to climb the narrow, slippery stone steps that wound around it until they reached the summit. Here was a high, stinking place, a place of cisterns and pipes that gurgled and bubbled into the ground under their feet. Here was where the Aqueduct of Pain let into the city from the great catch-basin out on the Bloodwind Spoil and fed the flesh district’s blood-tainted supply of drinking water. It was one of many such aqueducts that were the only things that made a settlement as large as Carngrad viable out on that blasted plain.
The High Master strode forward, and only then opened his robe to reveal the heavy flask that he wore at his belt.
Calcis knew little of alchemy but she had watched her master at his work often enough to understand something of the principles. Over the preceding few days she had seen him prepare his potent brew for the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus. She had watched him taint the first barrel with two drops of his merciless concoction, the second with four, and the final one they had brought to the Court of the Seven Talons that night, the barrel which had driven a room full of men almost instantly insane, with eight.
By her reckoning, the flask at her master’s belt held perhaps a hundred thousand drops.
If not more.
Beneath her mask, Calcis licked her naked teeth with the tip of her tongue.
‘They will all want more of it, High Master,’ she said. ‘Even those who tonight had their first taste. The dose was so strong… they will need it, won’t they, High Master?’
She shuddered involuntarily at the thought, at the thought of her own carefully crafted addictions. She of all people understood what it was to need. There were many types of alchemical slavery, and even now she literally could not live without the foul concoction that her High Master brewed for her once every month.
Somewhere in the buried depths of memory behind her ravaged face, Calcis wept for the child she had once been, and for the memory of Relak.
‘They will be frantic for it, Calcis. They will howl and shriek and wage war for it,’ the High Master said. Then he stepped up onto the stone rim of the great water cistern and upended the flask of terrifyingly strong poison into it. ‘And they shall not have it.’
Palania gurgled her tongueless mirth in the darkness beside him.
‘Master!’ Calcis gasped. ‘The whole flesh district…!’
Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia turned his masked face towards her, and he laughed as he recited the ancient rhyme:
‘Heed the wisdom of the Fool,
Let the Lords of Chaos Rule.
Blissful screams and madman’s drool,
Let the Lords of Chaos Rule!’
THE DEVOURER’S DEMAND
Ben Counter
I
The air was so hot and dry that every breath was like swallowing sand. Thornwinder liked it that way. In the depths of summer, in the land of his birth, the scorching exhalation of the earth would rip across the Jagged Savannah and strip the slow-witted to the bone. With a carved jawbone in his hand, the punishing heat hammering down against him, and the warpaint drying on his face, this patch of the Bloodwind Spoil felt like the place he had been born.
Fifty Untamed Beasts lay on the reverse of the slope. Each had the bone armour and dark green tattoos of the Venom Fang tribe. Every one of them had more blood on their hands than Thornwinder. He was young. A whelp. To most of the coursers and braves, he was barely alive.
He had walked through the portal to the Eightpoints knowing, whatever happened, he would not return. He would die in this cruel, mad land. He had not looked back yet.
Elder Speartongue walked up and down the line of waiting Untamed Beasts. His skin was pierced by hundreds of sabre-teeth from hunter-predators. The lines of his face, so deep they could have been old knife scars, spoke of an age rarely attained in the Eightpoints.
‘The Devourer demands the towers shall fall!’ he called. ‘The walls shall crumble! The crowns shall go unworn!’
‘Tear it down!’ chanted the Untamed Beasts in response. Stone axes and bone clubs hammered against hide shields. Bone charms jangled. ‘Tear it down!’
‘The Unmade replace their flesh with unnatural steel,’ continued Speartongue, ‘as if this will make them more than men, and not less. They would raise their prison walls across the whole Eightpoints, to turn every patch of earth into a torture chamber. But the Devourer wills it not! It spat out all the scratchings of civilisation from the Jagged Savannah! So it shall be on the Bloodwind Spoil, for we are Its hand, and we are Its jaws! We shall see the empires fall before they can stand! We shall tear them down!’
Thornwinder’s knuckles were white around the haft of his jawbone axe. He had killed the beast himself, ripped the bone from its still-snarling face. He was blooded. He was the equal of any man or woman in the tribe.
Elder Speartongue gestured towards the crest of the ridge with his staff of fused vertebrae. The Untamed Beasts leapt to their feet as one and charged up the slope. Thornwinder was carried along on the tide of their fury such that he could not have turned back even if he had wanted to.
But he did not want to turn back.
His heart rushed. He could feel the blood in his ears. Taste it in his mouth.
&
nbsp; Heart-eater Riphide led them, his mountainous form a head higher than anyone else in the Venom Fang, swinging the massive stone-headed axe. Preytaker Flaywrithe kept pace with him, blood spattering from the raw and unscraped hides she wore around her shoulders. With a roar, the Untamed Beasts crested the ridge. Thornwinder scrambled in the wake of the braves ahead of him, and saw the enemy for the first time.
The Unmade were ready for them. The slope ahead was studded with spiked barriers defended by the enemy. Remains of the Unmade’s victims covered the barricades, from dried-out bodies weeks old to the freshly dead still bleeding from the marks of mutilation. Already the Unmade had tried to inflict permanency on the land. It would all crumble, for that was the Devourer’s demand.
Almost a hundred Unmade held the desert slope. They wore tarnished, bloodstained armour of steel and bronze, with chainmail protecting the joints. They favoured weight and impact over speed for their weaponry – warhammers, flanged maces and morning stars, executioner’s axes. But what marked them out were their faces.
Each Unmade’s face was a mess of scar tissue, forming inhuman ridges and pits around the vestiges of their features. They wore the face they’d torn from their skull on the belt of their armour or mounted on their shield, a commemoration and a rejection of the human they had once been. Instead, they had ripped those faces away, and become Unmade.
The Unmade let out their own war cry as the Venom Fang tribe rushed towards them. Raw throats opened up to yell the praises of their Gods.
Heart-eater Riphide slammed into the first barricade, crunching through it with his weight and fury. The stone edge of his axe, as jagged and keen as broken glass, hacked down through an Unmade’s shoulder guard. The first blood went to the tribe’s Heart-eater, as it should.
Thornwinder felt the heat and the power of the blood that sprayed. It soaked the parched earth, and the earth reached up to drink it down. It shuddered beneath his feet. The grey sky tinged scarlet.
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