‘It is understood,’ he said. ‘The palanquin must remain behind, it seems, although it must not go unguarded. Without the cargo there is no sense to my being here at all.’
‘So it is decreed, High Master,’ Calcis said, and she bowed her masked head deferentially. ‘So shall it be done.’
She swung down from the palanquin with the lithe grace of a hunting lioness, her voice cracking like a whip in the bloodfall as she barked orders at her two mirrorblade disciples and the two ten-bands of mindbound under her indirect command. She was the Thrallmaster’s Voice, chief among his most trusted warriors, but she was not close to being his equal and Vignus knew that she understood that.
Life in the hierarchy of the Cypher Lords was strictly stratified, as such things should be, and even the most trusted and exalted mirrorblade was not a Thrallmaster and never would be. For all that, Vignus reflected, Calcis was the most able and deadly servant he had ever had in all his long life. Only his luminate, the mute Palania who rode in the hold with the cargo, stood equal to her and answered directly to Vignus himself.
Vignus sat back in his travelling throne and regarded Carngrad through the blood-slick mail curtains of his war palanquin. The city writhed around him, a restless pit of human venom and spite. This was Carngrad’s flesh district, so his advance spies had told him, home to slave pits and flesh markets beyond counting. This was where the lowest detritus of the Bloodwind Spoil washed up, to be sold for labour or meat or still baser things.
The spies of Vignus’ Hands of Darkness warband had been in the city for a month or more already, planting in strategic places the sorcerous Eyes of Noschseed through which Vignus could watch and listen and command. He closed his physical eyes behind his mask and reached out for the nearest one that he could feel, his mind ranging across the swirling Paths of Chaos as he opened the sorcerous Seeing Eye of his mind. He found one of the small silver-and-gold stones stuck high to the chimney of a forge not three streets away. Through it, he could make out his war palanquin, glistening with gore and reflecting back the flames of destruction that were still guttering out around it in the pounding bloodfall. The forge itself looked promising, solidly built of stone and easily defensible, but regrettably not large enough to house the palanquin. He cast around with the Eye of Noschseed, searching the surrounding area until he spied what appeared to be a half-collapsed warehouse in the next street.
Vignus nodded to himself and opened his physical eyes behind his mask. He snapped his fan open and rang its iron spines against the side of his throne in summons.
Calcis was at his side a moment later.
‘I live to serve, High Master,’ she said.
‘The next street to the left,’ Vignus said. ‘There is a warehouse there. We shall secure the palanquin and its cargo within, then proceed on foot to a sturdy forge I have chosen as my temporary base of operations.’
‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis said, and slipped once more into the pounding bloodfall.
Three mindbound ran ahead to secure the warehouse, and barely minutes later the palanquin was moving once more. It bulled its way through streets too narrow for its passing, but there were no more explosions. Instead the mindbound simply chopped down obstructions with their axes, and any dwellers who emerged from their houses to protest the action received the same heavy-bladed treatment. They were all armed and ugly, base warriors to a man, but the mindbound were in the presence of their High Master and under his gaze they fought with an unstoppable ferocity in the close confines of the stinking street. Vignus wafted his fan in front of his masked face and ignored it all. He was a noble scion of Noschseed, and such disputes amongst animals were beneath his notice.
Soon the thralls pried open the great rotting wooden doors of the warehouse, and Vignus ordered that his palanquin be brought inside. Once the huge, armoured conveyance – almost the size of a Thunderscorn dragon ogor – was safely secured within and the mindbound freed from their draught harnesses, Vignus sat up in his travelling throne and stretched until his shoulder joints popped. Without needing to be told, Calcis ordered one of her pair of mirrorblade disciples, Darrath by name, and half a ten-band of the mindbound to remain and guard the conveyance and its precious cargo. They would do so with their lives if need be, Vignus had absolutely no doubt about that.
The alternative, of course – to face his wrath if they lost the cargo – would be so much worse.
That done, Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia climbed down from his palanquin and set his feet upon the ground of Carngrad at last. He immediately felt the pulse of the city through the hard-packed earthen floor beneath his iron-shod sandals, trembling with a delicious undercurrent of suffering. Carngrad was a place of misery and degradation, that pulse told him, of dying dreams and offal and pain.
The Cypher Lords’ dreams would not die in Carngrad, Vignus vowed. Misery was for the weak, and defeat for the unimaginative. Might was cheap upon the Bloodwind Spoil, but intelligence and cunning seemed to be in vanishingly short supply amongst the rival warbands who crossed that ever-changing land. Lumbering behemoths like the Iron Golems could shatter walls, perhaps, but could they out-think a foe? Of course they could not. There the Cypher Lords held the upper hand, and in the endless game of influence and power, brains beat simple brawn every single time.
Vignus Daneggia pulled his cowl up over his alabaster mask and motioned Calcis and her other mirrorblade disciple to his side. They had one and a half ten-bands of mindbound and Palania the luminate in their wake, and Carngrad held no terrors for the Thrallmaster that night.
‘The forge,’ Vignus said softly. ‘I want it.’
‘So it is decreed, High Master,’ Calcis said. ‘So shall it be done.’
She turned and waved Relak, her disciple, ahead, and they swept out of the warehouse into the pounding bloodfall with the mindbound behind them.
A moment later Vignus followed with Palania at his side, her sickle-topped war-staff in her hands.
His warband had gone barely a single street from the warehouse when the first mindbound fell with a crossbow bolt through its neck. It twisted and went down in a spray of blood that was almost lost in the pouring wrath of the gorestorm, and the mindless slave following in its wake tripped over its still-kicking corpse and pitched forward into the red mud as well.
‘Ambush!’ Calcis roared, her voice carrying like a war-horn in the echoing confines of the narrow street. ‘Relak, follow!’
She was off and running then as more bolts streaked from the rooftops and cut down three more mindbound. Calcis and her disciple moved like dancers in the shrieking bloodfall, pirouetting around falling bolts even as the crossbows thumped above them. She was the first to the wall, running three steps straight up it and kicking off to jump onto a stretched canvas awning above a closed shop. She used that to spring higher and grab a lamp bracket even as she reached over her shoulder and whipped her glaive free of its harness with one hand. She spun a somersault around the lamp bracket and jack-knifed her legs, propelling herself up onto the edge of the roof in a fluid motion that spoke of strength and reflexes heavily enhanced by drugs and alchemy. Her glaive flashed a whirlwind of silver in the gore-flecked twilight, and men died around her as her disciple emulated her feat and joined her on the rooftops.
Vignus opened his Seeing Eye for a moment and looked through Calcis’ own eyes, working the mind-bond that slaved her to his service. He felt her quicksilver grace and fluid strength as she danced between the crude blades of the lumpen, misshapen street warriors before her. Her glaive swept through humped torsos, twisted necks and crooked thighs as she whirled in an ecstasy of killing.
‘Take their leader alive,’ Vignus whispered, and he felt Calcis shiver with acknowledgement.
She was often hard to rein in when the killing blood was upon her, but she had been broken to his voice of command at barely six years of age and had grown up under the hammer of his Wor
d. He could feel through the bond that she would obey him now.
As Relak slaughtered the rest of their hopelessly outclassed foe, Calcis stalked towards a twisted man in a tattered black cloak, her glaive dripping red. She let the two-handed weapon fall slack in her right hand, and raised her left to point at him with slim, extended fingers.
‘You are called unto service,’ she said. ‘My High Master has asked of you.’
‘You what?’ the deformed brigand spat. ‘This is Carngrad – no one talks like that here outside the Court of Talons, and the likes of you and me ain’t welcome there.’
Oh, I think I will be, Vignus thought to himself, and allowed a cruel smile to play across his hidden lips.
Calcis ignored the twisted man’s words and took a step towards him, her glaive still hanging deceptively loose in her right hand.
‘Come hither,’ Vignus whispered with her voice as he took control of her through the mind-bond. ‘You are called to mine service.’
‘Stick it up yourself,’ the brigand said, raising his long, rusty blade in both hands.
Vignus gave Calcis her head, and she swept her glaive in a glittering one-handed arc that caught the brigand’s blade at exactly the right angle to rip it from his hands and send it spinning away over the rooftops. She stepped forward and grasped the hilt of her descending weapon with her off-hand, assuming a guard position that placed the tip of the glaive at the man’s throat. Barely a quarter of a second had passed since she had first moved.
‘Come hither,’ she said again, in her own voice now. The impression of her High Master’s mental voice rested over her own mind, letting her speak with his authority even though he had now released the channel of the mind-bond. ‘You are called unto service.’
The man teetered on the edge of the roof for a moment, obviously weighing his chances if he jumped. They were three storeys above the blood-slick cobbled street, and he was no mirrorblade to arrest his fall with somersaults and handsprings. After a moment he lowered his eyes.
‘Whose service?’ he asked, the defeat plain to hear in his voice.
‘My High Master’s,’ Calcis said. ‘Come, follow me.’
Behind her, Relak had finished butchering the rest of the roof-runner gang and was standing watching, his weapon bloodied. The younger mirrorblade was not even breathing hard. The gang leader bowed his head in submission and acknowledgement of Calcis and her disciple’s greater prowess. That was how it was done in Carngrad, each animal bowing before the superiority of the greater predator in the chain of survival.
And I am the apex predator come to this foul city, Vignus thought to himself as he watched the cowed roof-runner captain bow down through Calcis’ eyes. She to whom you submit is but my tool, a piece upon my game board. Oh, you vile peoples of Carngrad, know that I walk among you. You shall come to know my name, and learn to fear it.
The forge was strongly built, as Vignus had observed through his Seeing Eye, and it was warm and dry inside, providing shelter from the relentless bloodfall that still washed the streets outside its walls. Vignus listened to the splatter of the falling gore against the closed shutters as Calcis forced the gang leader’s head down onto the great anvil that stood before the open forge fire.
The smith himself was nailed to the back wall, over the wooden rack that held his hammers and tongs. He had been reluctant to allow Vignus and his warband into the forge, and there he had been shown the error of his ways. I want it, Vignus had said, and when a High Master of Noschseed wanted something, they got it.
Vignus cast an uncurious eye over the smith’s body, wondering only if the man had made the long iron nails that held him to the wall with his own hands.
There would be such a delightful poetry to it if he had, Vignus thought.
The man wasn’t dead, of course, merely crucified, but from the way the breath was bubbling in his throat Vignus doubted that he would last until the dawn. He gave the smith no more thought, and turned to Calcis and her captive.
‘Well,’ Vignus whispered. ‘What an interesting place Carngrad is proving to be. A battle, not an hour after entering the city, and all we did to provoke it was remove some vermin from our path. My dear Calcis, it is truly as though these pitiful street afterbirths don’t know who I am!’
‘I suspect they do not, High Master,’ Calcis said. ‘This is a low place, which word of your splendour has likely not yet reached.’
‘Oh, how terribly unfortunate for them,’ Vignus said. ‘Imagine living in such ignorance, Calcis.’
‘I cannot, High Master,’ she said.
‘Of course not,’ he agreed. ‘You have been mine since childhood, Calcis. This unfortunate, however, has only just begun his belated and undoubtedly very short service.’
‘M-master?’ the roof-runner whispered, causing blood to spill between his broken teeth and onto the anvil under his face.
Calcis had not been gentle with him in bringing him into the fold, Vignus had to allow, but then why would she be? Such worthless creatures as this deserved neither patience nor mercy, and Calcis was well known to possess little of the first and none whatsoever of the second.
‘You wish to speak?’ Vignus asked, feigning surprise. ‘Why, what a delight! Then speak.’
‘You haven’t asked me anything yet,’ the man whined. ‘I… I don’t know what you want to know.’
Calcis lifted one of the blacksmith’s hammers and twirled it lightly in her slender hand, for all that it must have weighed fifty grains or more. The regular cocktail of alchemical drugs and potions that Vignus had fed her since she had been a child had left her almost superhuman, he thought, with a degree of satisfaction. The hammer plummeted with a force that would have cracked granite, and arrested in Calcis’ hand barely a straw’s width from the roof-runner’s head.
‘Everything,’ Vignus whispered. ‘I want to know everything.’
‘I’m no one!’ the man sobbed. ‘I’m just a roof-rat. I don’t know anything, High Master!’
‘Oh, I’m sure you do,’ Vignus said. ‘Everyone knows more than they think they do, in their own city. Who do you work for?’
‘I’m my own man,’ the roof-rat said.
Calcis brought the hammer down onto his left ankle hard enough to split stone.
He shrieked as the bones shattered inside his cheap boot.
‘Try again,’ Vignus said.
‘Gorrius,’ the man sobbed, spit bubbling between his broken teeth as he fought the fire of agony in his ankle. ‘I work for Gorrius!’
‘And who is that?’
‘He’s boss of the roof-runners in the flesh district,’ the mewling man confessed, and just then he found some unwise well of courage and defiance somewhere inside him. ‘He’s the boss! He’ll have you lot burned at the stake, you just watch! You’re nothing, here in Carngrad!’
‘Am I not?’ Vignus asked, and paused as though musing over the question. ‘What say you, Calcis?’
‘You are a High Master of the Cypher Lords wherever you may be in the Mortal Realms, master,’ she said. ‘This one would do well to learn that.’
The hammer thundered into the man’s kneecap, pulverising it.
He howled.
‘As I thought,’ Vignus said, and he smiled behind his mask. ‘Tell me, you pathetic specimen of misplaced masculinity, where would I find this Gorrius of yours?’
‘I dunno,’ the thug whimpered, trying to free himself from the anvil that Calcis still held him pinned to. ‘He always has me brought to him when he wants me, and it’s always to somewhere different. A gambling house, usually, but there’s a lot of them in Carngrad. He likes to play Torments, Gorrius does.’
‘Mmmm,’ Vignus said, and opened his fan to waft it gently up and down before his expressionless alabaster mask. ‘This Gorrius has had the temerity to allow his rooftop scum to attack me. However pathetic and doomed to fai
lure that action may have been, that makes him my enemy. What else can you tell me?’
‘Nothing!’ the man almost screamed, wide-eyed with terror as Calcis raised the hammer once more. ‘I don’t know anything else!’
‘Well,’ Vignus said, ‘then you’re of no more use to me, are you?’
Calcis’ hammer slammed down onto the anvil and crushed the man’s head like an overripe fruit.
They spent the night in the forge, listening to the bloodfall outside the shutters and the wheezing of the smith’s death agonies.
By the morning the smith had finally died, as Vignus had expected, although he gave no orders to take the man’s body down from the wall. The crucified corpse served as a standard, in a way, a testament to the intent of the Cypher Lords in Carngrad. The smith had been part of the old order, as Vignus saw it, representative of how life in the flesh district of Carngrad had been before his arrival. He meant to change that order, and raise himself up in the hierarchy of the foul Reaver City. The people who mattered would come to know his name, and to fear it.
They had simply thrown the body of the roof-runner captain into the alley behind the forge and forgotten about it. One more dead body would be unremarked.
Let it rot there, Vignus thought, with a measure of distaste. That, or someone will take it away and eat it, and be grateful for the meat.
Such was the way Vignus conducted his business as a nobleman. Open battle was not the way of the Cypher Lords, although their mirrorblades could write red slaughter when it was called for. No, High Masters like Vignus Daneggia dealt in politics and subtlety, treachery and poisons long before they came to drawn blades. That, Vignus reflected, was the true mark of civilisation.
But was civilisation an advantage, in a place like Carngrad? Vignus had to admit, if only to himself, that he wasn’t yet completely sure. Out here on the Bloodwind Spoil it was a rare thing, that was a certainty, but Vignus regarded himself as a man of civilisation and refinement wherever he found himself. Whether the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse valued such things remained to be seen, he supposed, but in his long experience all high kings had need of spymasters and assassins. The Cypher Lords could be the very best of both of those things in Archaon’s divine service, if they could but gain his notice and win his favour. That was the sole reason why Vignus was in Carngrad in the first place.
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