Lord of Slaughter

by M. D. Lachlan

  He had steeled himself to meet her because his whole upbringing and education had taught him to regard her as a temptress and a whore. It was her fault Loys had abandoned his vows, her fault an assassin had been sent to kill him. But he could not bring himself to blame her.

  Neither could he look at her for long, she conjured such odd emotions in him. It was not lust, nor anything like it. She was beautiful but beauty was a snare he had learned to avoid. This was a deeper longing. He saw all the possibilities that had been denied to him as a monk: home, hearth, children. The longing went beyond the comforts a wife would have brought. He could not name the feeling, nor fully summon it to the front of his mind. He just knew when he looked at her he thought of those empty hills that rose above his monastery, of the wide featureless blue ocean on which he had travelled to Constantinople, of the call of the wolf in the night. Loneliness? Perhaps. Or something like it.

  ‘You came a long way to suffer so,’ said Beatrice.

  Azémar lay back, dizzy. He’d caught the suspicion in her voice.

  ‘I came to warn you,’ he said. ‘Your father has dispatched assassins. He intends to kill Loys and bring you home.’

  ‘How does he know we are here?’

  ‘Your sister.’

  ‘She betrayed me?’

  ‘Your father was going to burn the monastery unless someone told him where you had gone.’

  ‘She could have lied.’

  ‘She’s a young girl,’ said Azémar. ‘She thinks it a sin to lie.’

  ‘We have enough problems here without worrying about that,’ said Loys. ‘Anyway the palace is well defended. He’ll send one of his clottish northerners.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘The duke looks to the future in many things, but when it comes to war, he likes the men of the old country, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Beatrice. She squeezed his hand. ‘Do you know how many come for us?’

  Azémar took another sip of water. The sensation of it made him remember its lack in the Numera. Memories spumed – the thing that had tried to kill him, the pale figure who had stood beside him, comforting and caressing him, the meat, the meat he had eaten in a place even God didn’t see. He shuddered and said, ‘No.’ He didn’t want to have to explain how he had come to Constantinople to Loys. A flush came over him, like he’d drunk too much the night before. The lie seemed to dry Azémar’s mouth and he drank some more.

  ‘So you came alone?’

  ‘I sailed as soon as I heard your father was looking for you.’

  Azémar put down the bowl and leaned back on the bed. Why had he lied? This was the opportunity he had waited for, to alert his friend. He could have given Mauger’s name, described him, put the palace guards on alert, but he had not. Why?

  Because the man had very likely been captured and put in the Numera or even killed. Such a warrior would not be taken without a fight, and perhaps the only way to subdue him was to kill him. He didn’t want to alarm his friend or raise pointless questions.

  Beatrice came to the side of the bed.

  ‘Were you ever at the duke’s court?’ she said.

  ‘Never, lady. I have spent most of my life in the monastery and its fields.’

  Azémar spoke the truth, though his thoughts terrified him. He knew her. Yes, he knew her, but not from the world – from his dreams and from the nightmares of the Numera.

  ‘I’m sure I know you,’ she said.

  ‘I have seen you riding by,’ he said, ‘but from a distance. You would not recognise my face.’ He couldn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘Do you recognise me?’

  ‘I know you only from afar.’

  Loys put his hand on Beatrice’s arm. ‘Let’s not trouble Azémar too much. He’s come a long way and suffered a lot for us.’

  Azémar closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see the girl any more. He knew who she was - the one from his dreams who had told him she loved him, had always loved him. She was the girl in the fields, the one who had haunted his sleep in his monk’s cell, the one he remembered, though not like any other memory. It was a memory he had been born with, something he had carried with him all his life.

  He needed to wait until his thoughts cleared, until he worked out what had happened to him in the Numera. He had killed, he had eaten things no Christian man should eat and now he had a wildfire in his head.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘The quaestor is engaged in the service of the chamberlain,’ said the servant, giving the official reply to indicate visitors were not welcome.

  The door opened anyway. It was a captain of the messenger service, with three men.

  Loys’ fingers closed on the little knife on the plate of cold meats.

  ‘Quaestor,’ said the officer, ‘you need to come now.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Sorcery in the most holy place. A demon has come to the Church of Holy Wisdom.’

  ‘What sort of demon?’

  ‘The sort that leaves five hundred dead,’ said the officer. ‘It seems your mission to protect the people of this city has had the opposite of its intended effect. You have some explaining to do, Quaestor, so I’d get yourself down to the church now if I was you.’

  ‘Look after Azémar,’ said Loys to Beatrice. ‘You have the eunuch as your chaperone.’ He picked up the little knife with his back turned to the messengers and put it into his belt. Then he took up his cloak and strode from the room.

  33 Awakening

  Snake in the Eye opened his eyes and wondered where he was. He was in a room with five other beds in it – two of them occupied. One contained a fat man who lay motionless with a cloth across his forehead, the other a youth of around sixteen with a splinted leg propped up by cushions. The youth wrote on some parchment which rested on a small table he’d positioned over his thighs. On it was a candle, the only light in the room.

  The young man smiled at him. ‘You’re awake at last. Thank goodness, I could do with the company.’

  Snake in the Eye felt for the pebble at his neck. Only the cross. The strange sensations he’d experienced in the church were quieter now but their resonance was still in his mind.

  Memories came back to him. He’d been in a garden with a girl. There had been lights and then the lights had gone out. What had happened? He was alive. Was he a hero? He had killed many people – yes now he recalled it – and that meant he really was a hero.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘In the hospital of the Church of Holy Wisdom. You are the only survivor of the evil that happened tonight. Well, the only well-dressed survivor, anyway. They wouldn’t want to risk picking up someone who couldn’t pay.’

  A story ran through Snake in the Eye’s mind. It was the one the traveller who had visited him in his camp had asked for – and given a fine pelt for. He couldn’t remember all of it now, only the end.

  He was giggling as if drunk. ‘The old gods, those ancient savages will die.’ The story began again inside his head: There are three women – the Norns …

  He tried to stop the pitter-patter of the words, to concentrate on finding out where he was and what he was doing there, but the words blustered through his mind loud as rain tearing against a tent. And – whoa! – there were the runes, forming of candlelight, symbols that rattled like carts, that blew like the wind and shone like the sun, bellowed like bulls and sprouted like seeds.

  ‘Where is my sword?’

  ‘I don’t know. I should have thought you’d have had enough of—’

  ‘I want my sword!’

  ‘Well, really. I don’t know. I suggest you ask the nurses. Please speak to me no more as you’re obviously well below my rank.’

  ‘Please be quiet,’ said the man with the cloth over his forehead. ‘I am dying of a nervous fever brought on by these strange skies and I must not be frightened or alarmed.’

  Snake in the Eye smirked and grinned as the runes shimmered and chimed. They led him to the wa
ll in the dark crevices of his mind. The men’s lives seemed like little flickering candles. He almost saw them, so strongly did he picture them. He let them take his attention, their cosy little flames filling up his thoughts. And then he no longer wished them to burn. He wanted them to go out. They did and the men spoke no more.

  The gods in their schemes … There was more of the story to tell, scraping away in his head like a trapped rat.

  He got up, light-headed, though he wasn’t hungry. He looked at his clothes. He was in a long tunic in plain brown cloth, in the Byzantine style. His boots were at the side of the bed. He put them on and walked out of the room, leaving the corpses behind him.

  He came into a larger space beneath a dome where people lay all around on beds and matressess. These were of a lower station to the men he had just left in the room.

  At his feet was a mosaic – a depiction of a woman drawing a bow, a crescent moon above her head.

  He offers the sacrifice to the fates.

  A doctor – a short man with a Greek beard – came wandering towards him. He wore a robe similar to Snake in the Eye’s but in dark blue.

  ‘You’re awake.’

  ‘Where is my sword?’

  ‘We have good care of it.’

  ‘I’d like it now.’

  ‘I think you need to rest a little. How long have you been awake?’

  ‘Where is my sword?’

  Snake in the Eye grabbed a hank of the man’s tunic at the chest.

  ‘You’re not in a fit state to leave,’ said the doctor.

  Eternally reborn, eternally sacrificed.

  ‘I am a warrior of the north, no soft southern man am I. Get me my sword.’

  His tone was insistent enough for the doctor to give in. ‘Follow me.’

  Snake in the Eye was led through a series of arches, through ranks of sick people. The place seemed ready to overflow. Few bore signs of injury but many sat weeping on the floor, some calling out that the final day was upon them and Christ was returning to his kingdom.

  ‘You’ll excuse the crush,’ said the doctor. ‘The sky has convinced men they are sick.’

  Snake in the Eye followed him to a door.

  ‘Wait.’

  The doctor went inside and after a few minutes returned with Snake in the Eye’s purse and sword. Snake in the Eye snatched them up.

  ‘We’ve deducted your bill from your purse,’ said the doctor but Snake in the Eye was already on his way outside.

  He emerged onto a high hill overlooking the city. Was it night or day? He couldn’t tell. The sky was dark but with a strange metalled glow, not night or day but something between. Below him like a huge pale serpent was the long arched bridge, the water road. To his left was the massive dome of the great church.

  The gods in their schemes …

  The tale seemed like a fly buzzing through his head, and to sit and tell it seemed to be the best way of getting it out. He would wander the streets and find an audience for his story. Perhaps he would kill the audience when he’d finished it. It would be a fine tale to hear as your last. If only he could recall it. The story was annoyingly incomplete in his mind, the words he remembered like the top of a mountain glimpsed through mist. In moments the mist would clear, revealing glimpses of the bulk beneath.

  ‘And Loki loved her, and knew death in one lifetime was a small price to pay …’

  Death in one lifetime. Such a small price. Behind him he heard someone wailing, calling on God to take them and spare them such misery. He looked back at the hospital. If he let his thoughts drift, the building became insubstantial, unreal. More solid by far seemed the runes, bright like floating light, that turned in the air around him. He could feel them, one like an ice wind, another like a bristle of thorns, a third like a drowning current enticing him to unseen depths. They had always been in him, he knew, and the curse had kept them from him. He put out his hand as if to touch them and he saw the garden by the riverbank, the wall full of candles.

  He thought to blow them out. But not everyone who asked for the gift of death would receive it. He would not kill cowards, only brave and worthy opponents like the faith-strong worshippers in the church. Yes, he wanted more like that. He took out his sword. First he would test himself in the old way. He longed to feel his enemy’s life blood spurting over his sword hand, to look closely into the man’s face as he died. There would be time enough to blow out candles. He needed a more feeling murder first, a death of blood, of hot, expiring breath, of terrified eyes and grasping hands. After that he would begin to get even with the Roman soldiers – Greeks as they truly were. He’d seen the look the Hetaereian guard had given him when he’d left the emperor’s tent. The man would pay for his scorn, him and all his friends. He would leave them dead in piles.

  Snake in the Eye walked down the hill towards the city. He sensed the lives of its inhabitants spread out before him like twenty thousand fireflies flickering in the dark, the wavering lights of their mortal existence as real to him as those of home and hearth.

  34 House of the Dead

  Loys entered the great church. The night was dark and candles had been lit, intensifying the gold of the altar, turning the air to umber and the pillars to the shining trunks of magical trees.

  A carpet of dead – men, women and even some children – sprawled on the floor. Monks moved among them, intoning prayers.

  ‘Any alive?’ he called.

  ‘None,’ said a monk.

  Loys drew in a breath and touched the hand of a merchant who lay facing the altar, gaudy in his yellow silks. Freezing. Loys sat down on a bench. His mind was utterly blank before this scene of devastation.

  ‘Your explanation?’

  It was the messenger service captain, a thin man with the face of an angry rat.

  ‘You’re the security service; let’s have yours.’ He responded by reflex rather than thought, his long inquisition having made aggression a habit when dealing with Byzantine officials.

  ‘You are charged with the protection of the empire from magical attack. Doesn’t look like you’re doing a very good job from where I’m standing.’

  ‘You’re charged with the protection of the empire from everything. Don’t make this my fault.’

  Loys was ashamed to be squabbling in such a way in front of so many dead but he wasn’t going to let this bastard stick the blame on him. His mind was full of strategies about how he could claim to have warned this might happen. He crossed himself. What was he becoming? Think of the dead, Loys, and how this happened, not of watching your own back.

  His hand felt the outline of someting inside the little bag he wore at his neck. He realised he hadn’t discarded that pagan stone.

  ‘Well, it’s your job to have an idea,’ said the captain. ‘The chamberlain will be on his way in a minute so I’d start thinking of something if I were you, because I think he’s going to want to hear it. Personally, I’d also like to know what you were doing at the Varangian camp last week.’

  ‘I will consider all possibilities,’ said Loys, giving the man a hard look that implied he might be the first to be investigated, ‘but first let’s attend to the matter in hand.’

  Styliane’s accusations, what he had heard on the hill, even the chamberlain’s own words when he had commissioned him, telling him his mission was to safeguard ‘great men’, all pointed in one dizzying direction. Some sort of sorcery had taken place and the chamberlain – or someone very close to him – had lost control of it.

  Loys walked through the bodies. So many gone at a stroke. Could it be some natural phenomenon? It had happened in God’s house so the worshippers must have provoked his wrath. No diabolic power could hold sway here.

  Dead faces stared back at him, like an accusing mob. He had failed to find out what was happening, failed even to make an inroad, and this was the price. Loys felt entirely inadequate to the task. Surely there were greater powers at work here than could be faced down with questions and study. He had to try to explai
n this, but how?

  Trumpets sounded, a drum beat and a voice cried out, ‘Stand back in the name of the emperor for the chamberlain Karas.’

  Loys crossed himself and instinctively knelt to pray. ‘God deliver me. God deliver me an answer. Deliver Beatrice and deliver the people of the city.’

  Three files of soldiers dressed in the chamberlain’s blue cloaks marched into the great church, fanning out before the corpses, followed by the huge eunuchs he had seen on his first day with their golden whips. Finally the chamberlain appeared, dressed in his ceremonial array of breastplate, short blue cloak, skirt of leather straps and sapphire diadem on his head. At his belt he wore a fine sword and in his hand he carried a black cane inlaid with ivory. The message to the people was clear. A threat was in the city and the authorities were responding.

  Loys prostrated himself, his eyes fixed on the flagstones. He heard the reedy voice questioning the messenger captain.

  ‘When?’

  ‘We were alerted an hour ago, Parakoimememos.’

  ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘We think perhaps two hours ago.’

  ‘Any survivors?’

  ‘One. He has been taken to the hospital.’

  ‘Do you not think you should be interviewing him?’

  ‘He is still unconscious, lord.’

  ‘Tell the doctors to wake him. If they can’t they’ll answer to me.’

  Loys was aware he was shaking.

  ‘Scholar.’

  Loys looked up. The chamberlain gestured towards him with his cane.

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘Stand up.’

  Loys did as he was told. The chamberlain was thinner than he recalled, and his face was white with powder. The ranks of soldiers stood at attention. These were disciplined troops but they fidgeted and shifted on their feet, fear and bewilderment in their eyes.

  ‘Your verdict on this?’

  Loys didn’t know what to say. He had no idea. He couldn’t accuse the second most powerful man in the empire to his face, but he had to give the chamberlain something.