After she had climbed for some time, the staircase ended at an open door. Gravskein passed through the threshold and began to cross an iron bridge suspended in the centre of a tall chamber. The roar here was deafening. Gravskein looked down. She saw another river. It churned past, just underneath the bridge. It was not silver. It did not have its own glow. It merely reflected the torchlight as it foamed through the chamber. Gravskein knelt and ducked her head into the river. The water she drank was pure and clean.
Two rivers flowed through the Tower of Revels. But only the poison reached the lands outside.
Gravskein rose, pondering, and crossed the rest of the bridge. An archway on the other side took her to another staircase heading up. There was still no sign of guards, no noise of alarm inside the tower.
They think we are dead. They do not believe anyone could have survived falling into the river.
Now, as she climbed, she began to hear still another great sound. It was a slow, creaking grind. It was the complaint of some huge mechanism. She took the stairs faster, eager for battle and revelation.
At the next doorway, she found both.
Gravskein was at the bottom of a cavernous space. It occupied the entire width of the tower and most of its height. An iron column rose from the centre of the floor to the ceiling. It held an immense gear, almost as wide as the chamber, and they rotated slowly together. The gear turned against other, vertical ones, suspended from posts projecting at irregular intervals from the walls. As these gears turned, they activated the pistons of a pump, twice the thickness of the central column. It rose and fell in the quarter of the chamber to Gravskein’s left. To her right, an equally huge pump remained still. Two others, also inert, stood in the other quadrants of the chamber. A tangle of mechanism, dark and heavy, connected all the pieces of the great machine. It was dizzyingly complex. To Gravskein’s eyes, it was sorcery turned into iron, its full meaning and function beyond comprehension. A latticework of walkways and ladders surrounded the gears, and a short distance below the main gear was a circular platform, into which a cluster of levers converged, each as long and thick as a tree trunk.
A wide moat surrounded the base of the main column, with canals running from it to the other columns. In it, the river of poison swirled, its current fast, raging, hateful. With each descent of the pump, a jet of poison shot up from the canal like a jugular spray and then fell, roaring, to rush into the moat.
The crimson light of the Bloodwind Spoil’s sky filled the space. Above the central gear, the roof of the Tower of Revels was open.
Gravskein counted five warriors of the Splintered Fang moving about the chamber, small as insects as they clambered about the web surrounding the ancient machine. Two of them stayed on the platform, and the others always returned to it before heading off to inspect another corner of the mechanism. Gravskein eyed the network of ladders. She could not climb them, but there was an iron staircase that wound around the chamber, with a thin bridge linking it to the platform. The stairs kept going, rising up the column of the chamber, past the great gear and towards the roof. That would be her route. The steps were narrow, wide enough only for a single person. Even if they managed to circle behind her, she would not be fighting more than one or two at a time. Reinforcements from the roof would not change matters.
With a joyful roar of challenge, she ran from the doorway, streaking to the right. As she made for the staircase, she passed by the unused pump near the column. Though it was motionless, its metal body vibrated as if some terrible strength were barely contained. From beneath its dry canal, there came a low thunder, powerful enough to send tremors through her bones.
She thought of the second river, and knew what she must do.
She took the stairs two at a time, iron clanging against iron. She did not fear to put a blade wrong and trap herself by plunging a leg between the steps. She was rising to the call to bring pain, and this dance was hers.
Shouts greeted her challenge. The two guardians of the platform remained where they were, but the other three scrambled over the metal latticework to stop her. Two reached the staircase well above her and ran down. The third approached from below.
It was as she had expected. It was as if the Splintered Fang were slaves to her destiny, caught in the steps of her dance.
They had been doomed from the moment she entered the chamber. From the moment the arrows had failed to stop her from leaping into the river. Now that she was in the Tower of Revels, in the gift the Flayed King had intended for the Unmade, doubt was impossible.
She had crossed the wastelands of despair and emerged unbowed. Now the only possible end was victory. She was the Harrower, the reaper of pain, and her enemies fell beneath her scythe.
The Splintered Fang had their dance, too. They had their lethal skill. Their dance might have mattered during the ambush in the bowl. It did not here. They lunged at her, slashed at her flesh with their blades, then pulled back. But after the poison that she had withstood, she laughed at the feeble pain their venom-tipped weapons inflicted. She called on it to do more, but it could not. She rocked back and forth, up two steps, leaping down three, then up again, driving blades straight and hooked through the bodies of her foe.
The battle was quick, but the deaths were not. Gravskein left the fallen Splintered Fang with a lesson. She severed their limbs and she gutted them. She inflicted mortal wounds, and they lay prone, sliding gradually down the stairs in the slick of their own blood. But they were not dead, not yet. They were dying. They were screaming in the great discovery of true pain. With their venomous art, they killed too quickly, cutting short the gifts they bestowed. They paid for their betrayal of pain now.
Gravskein climbed the rest of the way towards the platform, a rushing, exulting spirit of slaughter. When she flew across the bridge, one of the two guards tried to charge her to throw her off, but she bowed low, cut his legs in two at the ankles in mid-step, and it was he who dropped, howling, to land in the vortex of the moat.
The last of the guards fought hard, shouting all the while for his comrades on the roof. There were answering calls, and the sounds of running feet from above. Gravskein wasted no time with this foe. She waded into his attack, letting him strike, too close and fast for him to retreat; she snarled in glee at the new burst of pain even as she spilled his intestines to the floor of the platform.
Now an attack in force was coming. She had only a short time alone on the platform. Mere moments to try to purify what had been corrupted.
In the centre of the platform was a sphere. It appeared to be a single, shimmering, translucent stone, like a smooth diamond ten feet across. Shifting, multicoloured light coiled within, changing from violet to red to green to silver to black and beyond. There were four holes pierced through the equator of the sphere. A rod that seemed to be a coil of iron and diamond, and that shone with a slick, silver light, linked the active pump to one of the openings in the sphere.
Gravskein looked at the opening in the sphere that faced the unused pump she had run past. The colours licked at the edge of the hole like hungry flames. They called, and she answered. Another rod hung in the air a few feet from her. It too was iron and diamond, but it was dark. No sorcerous energies coursed through it. Not yet. Gravskein hooked her blades around it. Their serrations caught on the runes that marked every inch of the rod. She pulled it forward and slammed it home into its berth.
The colours of the sphere flared brilliantly, the rod burned the violet of pain, and the gears connected to the pump ground to life. The huge machine rumbled into motion and with its first great movement, it unleashed the power below. The other river blasted out as if furious at its long imprisonment. Pure water met poisoned water, and the reaction was colossal. The two rivers erupted into a silvery-white cloud of steam that howled upward, filling the chamber. It scalded Gravskein’s entire body. She felt the attack of the river of venom again, but it was diluted now.
The poison was transformed. She had corrected its mission. It did not kill any longer. It only brought wracking injury. She raised her arms in worship to the pain, and she unleashed the scream she had held back far below in the reservoir.
The cloud rose past her, reaching all of the tower, billowing out over the roof, and catching the enemy warband in its passage. At length, the cloud dissipated, though as the pumps brought the rivers continuously together, and their currents wound in rage around the moat, a scouring mist stayed in the air.
The tower was truly a place of revels now, and she could hear the screams of the celebration. The Splintered Fang had been overcome. The warriors all lay broken, writhing, shrieking. Gravskein made sure their joy would be long-lasting. She mounted the stairs, inflicting such wounds as would ensure the warriors would not rise again, but being certain, too, that there would be no premature end to their bliss. Then she headed back to find Bulsurrus.
He was still alive when she returned to him, though his skin had turned dark grey, splotched with rotting black.
‘Is it done?’ He was barely able to whisper.
‘It is. The tower is ours.’
‘I must witness it,’ he begged.
‘You shall.’
There was little point in sparing him injury now. He did not have much time. She skewered his shoulders with her hooks, lifted his failing body, and carried him up all the flights of stairs, round and around, until they reached the roof. They were united again, comrades as they had been before her ascension, made one in the solemnity of this hour of victory. They arrived on the parapet, and together, for the first time, the Harrower and her Companion gazed from the heights at the land governed by the Tower of Revels.
Where there had been a single river, now there were several, rushing anew through their beds towards other regions of the Bloodwind Spoil.
Gravskein put Bulsurrus down, leaning against a crenellation, looking out at the water flowing down the pass between the two monster hills. ‘See,’ she said. ‘This is what we have wrought. This is what the tower means, now that it has been put right. These are not rivers of death. They are rivers of pain. We are bringing the pain to leagues upon leagues of this land.’ She could almost believe that she could hear the screams of the newly poisoned.
So could Bulsurrus. ‘I hear them,’ he whispered. ‘In my soul, I hear their agony.’ His voice shook with piercing gratitude.
The joy of the triumph sustained the Joyous One. He held on to life and pain a little longer. Gravskein stayed with him, and two days passed, two days in which they savoured the bliss of fulfilled destiny.
On the third day, they heard battle horns. In the distance, banners appeared. Gravskein could not make out their details from this distance, but they were not those of the Splintered Fang. This was another warband entirely that was coming.
Bulsurrus turned to look at Gravskein. He tried to speak, but his voice was gone, choked by thickening blood. Despair filled his gaze, and he died staring at her.
Gravskein turned from his body, watching the new enemy come. The truth of what she had seen in the chamber of the machine, the truth she had been struggling to deny, rose before her, and she could not fight it. It was the truth of the other, inactive portions of the eldritch engine. The Tower of Revels was not a gift solely for the Unmade any more than it had been for the Splintered Fang. It was a thing of many curses, a thing to be fought over eternally.
Her triumph was to be so brief, it was meaningless.
Everything she had done was futile.
So be it. She would embrace that pain, too. She would take in all pain, and fight to the end, dauntless.
But she had come to the tower. Let all who would take it from her know this, and tremble.
She hooked the slug-horn on a blade, lifted it to her flayed lips and blew.
The cry of challenge in despair blasted over the land.
THE METHOD OF MADNESS
Peter McLean
‘There’s a gorestorm blowing in, High Master,’ the guide said, his heavily sutured face twisting into a frown as he stared into the reddening sky above the war palanquin’s armoured canopy. ‘Best make haste now.’
Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia snapped open his fan and cracked its iron spines twice against the mouth of the communication tube, not deigning to speak. Hearing the command, the ten-band of mindbound below who drew the travelling throne threw themselves into their draught harnesses, and the conveyance picked up speed.
Bloodfall began to come down outside the mail curtains of the palanquin, hot gore splattering on the canopy overhead. The mindbound would soon be running wet with it, Vignus knew, and the thought made him smile behind his alabaster mask. Ahead, the spiked walls of Carngrad were coming into view through the crimson downpour, the severed heads that topped them glistening, slick with black rot and the falling blood.
Such storms were common across the vast expanse of the Bloodwind Spoil, but Vignus thought this one looked to be heavy even by the standards of that ever-changing land. The thought pleased him.
‘Fleshripper’s Gate up ahead, High Master,’ the guide announced. ‘I brought you here, m’lord, how I said I would. There was talk of a reward, sir, when I’d done that.’
Vignus looked down from his travelling throne into the vile face of this base character who persisted in daring to speak to him. That was repellent enough, but to have the temerity to expect a reward simply because one had been promised? Behind his mask, Vignus’ thin lips twisted into a cruel smile. A reward it would be, then.
‘So there was,’ he said.
He spoke softly, his cultured voice barely carrying over the hammering bloodfall, but still the guide quailed before him as though realising the lack of wisdom in his request.
Vignus took something from his robe, a small glass orb, and casually let it fall into the servant’s well to the left side of his throne where the guide crouched.
The orb hit the iron floor and smashed, and an oily black vapour rose around the guide’s sutured face. He screamed.
His howls of torment served to herald the coming of the war palanquin of Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia to Carngrad.
The guards on Fleshripper’s Gate looked up as they heard the siren call of agony and madness, and then Vignus’ second ten-band of mindbound were up and throwing. Their alchemical bombs landed amongst the gate sentries and detonated, the noise of them swallowed by the howling fury of the gorestorm.
‘Get them off me!’ one of the guards shrieked, over and over as he scrabbled frantically at his armour as though it were covered in fang-leeches. ‘Get them off me!’
Another drew his thick-bladed stabsword and laid about himself with it in a maddened frenzy, gutting three of his comrades before they could react. That one fell as another split his head with a great spiked axe, then their last surviving member hurled himself at the axeman and tore out his throat with a rusty dagger.
‘Please, please, get them off me!’ he shrieked, flailing at hallucinatory terrors before finally plunging his blade into his own heart to end his torment.
So it was that Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia of the Hands of Darkness warband entered Carngrad unopposed.
The Cypher Lords will not be denied, he thought as his palanquin ground over the corpses in the worsening bloodfall. I am here. Fear me.
‘Let the Lords of Chaos rule,’ he whispered.
The palanquin passed into the warren of narrow, twisting streets that marked the outskirts of the Reaver City. Shanty buildings loomed above them, their upper storeys leaning precariously out over the streets and looking ready to collapse at a moment’s notice. The twin stenches of blood and dung warred for mastery in the thick, foetid air. One of the mindbound pulled the guide’s bubbling, dying body from the servant’s well and dumped it unceremoniously into the gutter where it would not offend the High Master’s eye.
; Vignus wafted his fan lazily in front of his alabaster mask and sat back in his travelling throne with a smile of contentment on his unseen lips, ignoring the unprompted action.
‘The ways ahead are too narrow, High Master,’ a voice said.
Vignus looked to his right, where his chief mirrorblade stood in the other servant’s well. Mirrorblade Semili Calcis looked up at him, her dark eyes unreadable through the slits in her own mask. The long hilt of her polished glaive protruded over her right shoulder like a war standard, the pommel carved to resemble a face of screaming madness.
‘Then widen them,’ Vignus said with a dismissive waft of his fan.
Calcis leaned over the parapet of the war palanquin and barked curt orders to the unharnessed mindbound below. A moment later six or seven of them were off and running into the shadows of the streets with rough leather satchels over their shoulders. Vignus turned away before the alchemical explosions started ripping through the close-packed buildings, tearing them out of his way like so much brushwood in a dry forest. Flames leapt into the rapidly darkening evening sky, but were swiftly quenched by the unceasing bloodfall. The palanquin ground forward into the widened thoroughfare as all around them families burned unmourned in their demolished hovels.
‘High Master, your Word is mighty and will never go opposed,’ Calcis said, ‘but we lack the explosives to so widen every thoroughfare of this city to make way for the greatness of your passing. The cargo takes up much room within the palanquin, and space for ordnance was thusly limited, as your eminence knows.’
Vignus knew it was as Calcis said, but he was a great believer in making a proper entrance when he first came to a new place. These worthless scum needed to understand who they were dealing with, after all. Still, he supposed, that would have to be enough for now; the cargo was very important to him, and if conveying it had meant sacrificing space more commonly used to hold his carefully brewed alchemical explosives then so be it.
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