‘But–’
‘Did I say that it was not poison?’
The slaver let out a bitter laugh and bowed his head in defeat.
‘How long until it kills me?’
‘It won’t kill you,’ Vignus said. ‘It will… loosen you.’
‘What does that mean?’
You’ll see, Vignus thought, but he only smiled behind his mask and said nothing.
By the dawn, Nasharian was howling. He thrashed in the ropes that held him to the heavy chair, drool hanging in thick strings from his mouth and his eyes wide with shrieking madness. He was almost ready, Vignus thought.
‘Calcis, my instruments,’ he said.
The mirrorblade went to her master’s equipment chest and removed a roll of oiled leather which she spread out on the flat top of the smith’s anvil. The things inside glittered bright silver in the ruddy light of the forge fire.
Vignus selected a pair of sharp-tipped forceps and a tiny blade, and stood over the ruin of Nasharian with one in each hand. Leaning over him, he began to work carefully around his hairline and under his jaw. His potion, aside from breaking the slaver’s mind, had indeed loosened him. His face and scalp hung slack from his skull, connected now only by thin strings of skin around the edges. It was the feel of their face gradually sliding off their skull as it became looser and looser over the space of eight or nine hours that drove them insane, Vignus was sure. The wriggling, burning presence of the tiny alchemical creatures that chewed it free from the inside probably didn’t help, either.
It is of no consequence, he thought. A man without a face doesn’t need a mind, and a man without a mind doesn’t need a face.
He worked until the whole thing came free, a still-living mask of flesh and hair that hung screaming from his bloodied hands. That done, Vignus nodded to Calcis and she reached out with reverential hands and lifted her master’s mask free from his head. He raised Nasharian’s face and set it carefully into place, the inside warm and slick against his own countenance. He smeared an alchemical ointment around the edges to blend and bond it to his skull, and blinked as new eyelids settled into place over his own.
He took a small silvered looking glass from his roll of instruments and lifted it to regard himself. Nasharian looked back at him from the reflection, and he smiled.
‘Your Word is mighty, High Master,’ Calcis praised him.
Vignus walked over to look down at the hapless Nasharian, still shrieking in his chair with thin smears of blood on the crown of his naked skull. He looked up and saw Vignus wearing his face, and if there was anything left of his mind, it went then. He slumped in the chair with a feeble sob, his lidless eyes glazing as the horror overcame him.
Vignus looked down into the whimpering, bubbling countenance of the now faceless man, and his new lips twisted into a sneer of disdain.
‘Your mewling bores me, Nasharian,’ he said to the slaver. ‘In the many and varied Names of Darkness, can there be a greater crime in all the Mortal Realms than to be boring?’
He snapped his fan open with a casual flick of his wrist, and the razor-tipped iron spines took Nasharian’s throat out with all the efficiency of a scalpel.
It was full daylight by then, and Vignus went forth into Carngrad with half a ten-band of unmasked mindbound as an escort. To go unmasked was anathema to a Cypher Lord, but mere mindbound didn’t rank highly enough for him to be concerned for their feelings on the matter. They would do as their High Master commanded, in this as in everything else in their miserable lives. He would have preferred to have had Calcis at his side, naturally, but her mask was too distinctive, and without it… no, that would not have done. No one could bear to look upon Calcis’ true face for long, and those who caught so much as a glimpse of her terrible countenance never forgot it. Instead he had dressed his mindbound thralls in old, spare clothes that he presumed had belonged to the dead smith, and he himself wore Nasharian’s garb. Nasharian the slaver was abroad with five rough bodyguards, that was all anyone would have seen, and Vignus was pleased enough with that.
Wearing the slaver’s stolen face he led the five across Carngrad, and no one dared to offer them violence or insult even in the most base parts of the Quarter of Suffering. Nasharian was widely known indeed, and greatly feared it seemed, and that was well.
They passed under the shadow of the great Aqueduct of Pain that brought water into that part of the city, and below the high hill where the aqueduct terminated and the water was collected in huge cisterns and channelled into the decaying lead pipes that fed hand pumps throughout the flesh district. Rotting bodies swung from the length of the huge stone aqueduct, an endless line of gallows stretching out beyond the city walls and into the Bloodwind Spoil beyond.
Once past Water Hill they turned west, and the vast edifice of the Court of the Seven Talons rose before them above the rooftops. It was domed in black volcanic glass and bedecked with spires and spikes beyond counting, and on every spike a severed head. This was the true seat of power in Carngrad, and now Vignus wore the face of a man who could gain entry to its heavily guarded halls.
It was time to set the game in motion.
Nasharian was known even at the black iron gates of the Court of the Seven Talons, as Vignus had hoped, and there the heavily armoured guards admitted him and his retinue without question. He was shown through the outer curtain wall, and there a nervous slave led him across a courtyard where flesh-flecked bones sat reeking in gibbets while plague crows cawed and pecked savagely at what was left. The sight of the birds put Vignus in mind of the Corvus Cabal, and his jaw tightened with anger. He paused for a moment and looked up at the rearing walls of the great citadel before him, and an idea began to form in his mind.
The slave bade his guards wait in the courtyard, but ushered Vignus through a pair of high double doors and into the dark, looming Hall of the Supplicant. Vignus made himself appear humble and obsequious before the blind clerk of supplication as he begged an audience with a representative of High Courtier Claudius Malleficus.
After an insultingly long wait, during which Vignus managed to subtly secrete an Eye of Noschseed within the oppressive darkness of the hall, an ancient robed man came to speak to him.
‘You remember me?’ the man said, his voice dry as ground bones. ‘I am Bravuk, the third under-domo to the major-domo of the High Courtier. You’re that slaver, the pretty one. I remember you. What do you want?’
Vignus forced a smile onto Nasharian’s face, holding down his anger at the insult that so lowly an underservant had been sent to treat with him, and apparently a simple-minded one at that.
Not with me, with Nasharian, he had to remind himself, before the urge to open his fan overcame him. This is an insult to his person, not to mine.
‘I bring news that, it is my greatest hope, may please the illustrious High Courtier,’ Vignus said. ‘Within the flesh district I have made contact with an out-realmer merchant, a nobleman of distant Noschseed who trades in Noschseedian firewine. It is known how hard it is to come by such a delicacy in the Eightpoints, and well known also is the High Courtier’s love of sensation and finery. I had but a thought to finesse an introduction between your major-domo and this trader, and so better serve the whim of the High Courtier. What say you, Bravuk?’
‘I say your speech has become a good deal more flowery than it was the last time we spoke, Nasharian,’ the under-domo sneered. ‘Airs and graces won’t do you any favours here. It’s results the master wants, not pretty words.’
‘Results, yes, of course,’ Vignus said, inwardly picturing the wizened old man roasting on a spit, ‘although I’ll wager he’d want firewine as well, if he knew it was to be had. You would perhaps be unwise to keep that news from him.’
‘Aye, I’ll grant you that.’ The servant sniffed and wiped his over-large nose on the already crusty sleeve of his robe. ‘That, but no more. You think the High Courtier accepts gi
fts from just anyone? Who’s to say this stuff isn’t poisoned?’
‘I say so,’ Vignus said, putting all of Nasharian’s pompous gravitas into the words. ‘I have tasted the drink myself, and found it most pleasing.’
‘Have you now?’ Bravuk mused. ‘Oh very well, if the great Nasharian says so. Send your trader here and have him ask for Apolonia, but don’t feel no need to come yourself. The usual fee will apply, of course, but you make my nose run.’
Vignus simply bowed, for all that the man’s closing words made no sense to him. What did his nose have to do with anything? The ways of the infinite Lords of Chaos could be strange indeed, and they afflicted each of the faithful in different ways. One man’s madness was another’s conversation, he supposed, although this fellow was quite clearly not of entirely sound mind.
That aside, the news was good. For him to have attended the meeting as both Nasharian and himself at the same time would have been problematic, although not completely impossible. This way was better.
‘As you say,’ he said. ‘The usual fee, then. Expect the noble trader at sundown.’
‘What’s his name, this trader of yours, so I can let the gate guards know to expect him?’
‘Vignus Daneggia,’ Vignus said with Nasharian’s lips.
That done, he left the Court of the Seven Talons and not before time. He had been kept waiting overly long, and already he could feel that Nasharian’s face was beginning to die. What had felt like his own flesh and blood not two hours before now felt like a strange, flexible mask that was ill-fitting and beginning to chafe. By the time they were in the vicinity of the central barter pits under the aqueduct the left ear had fallen off. Vignus was making haste to return to the forge and rid himself of the thing when his eye alighted on an unwelcome sight.
The House of Silver Bells was on the left of the square he was crossing with his disguised mindbound around him, and opposite it stood a gaunt razortree. Such were common throughout the Bloodwind Spoil and grew here and there even in Carngrad, and were nothing in themselves to be remarked upon other than their inherent danger. This one was, though.
This one had a mirrorblade hanging from it, torn into shreds by the tree’s predations. For a brief moment Vignus feared that it was Calcis he was looking at, until he spotted the intricate blue-and-green tattoo on the inside of the corpse’s left bicep where the tree had eaten away its light armour. No, not Calcis then. This was Relak, her disciple who had been with her in the attack the previous night. His glaive and chakram had been neatly placed at his feet like an offering.
The man was very, very dead, and there was a sigil carved into the taut flesh of his stomach. Vignus halted his mindbound and crossed the square to investigate, being careful to keep out of the tree’s reach. It slashed at him with a wickedly thorned branch anyway, already craving fresh blood, but it failed to touch him. Vignus looked up at Relak’s swinging body, discerning from the pattern of wounds that he had been stabbed through the side of the neck with a thin blade before he had been given to the tree. That was precise work, he reflected, but it was the sigil carved into his mirrorblade’s flesh that most enraged him.
It was the sign of the Corvus Cabal.
The High Master returned at noon, in as black a mood as Calcis could remember. The slaver’s face was rotting in place over his own, lending him a ghastly aspect that made the drug-induced hallucinations of her childhood stir deep within her memories where she had buried them.
‘High Master?’ Calcis ventured, and she realised that she was afraid for the first time in a very, very long while.
‘Where is Relak?’ the High Master demanded.
‘Scouting in the city,’ Calcis said at once. ‘With my shoulder still healing, I sent him out to–’
‘To die!’ Vignus bellowed at her. ‘He is hanging from the razortree in the Square of Silver Bells, and he has been cut with the sigil of the thrice-damned Corvus Cabal! It cannot be borne, Calcis!’
The High Master’s words were like a hammer-blow to Calcis’ guts. Her disciple was slain, and she felt the loss as keenly as a mother receiving word that her son had fallen in battle.
‘No, High Master,’ she whispered.
‘Two battles with those scum were not enough to dissuade them, it seems,’ he raged. ‘They have taken revenge, Calcis! On me! How dare they?’
She remembered his rare rages from her distant youth, and the searing agonies that had resulted from them, and for a moment she was young again and terrified of him once more. She forced down the panic that threatened to rise in her throat. She was a mirrorblade now, even the Voice of a Thrallmaster, and far beyond such childish things as fear. She steadied herself and thought on what the High Master had said.
It was ill news indeed. The Corvus Cabal and the Cypher Lords were long-standing enemies, both masters of stealth and assassination and both seeking the attention of the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse through the same methods. That they were abroad in the city as well was no secret by then, but to lose a valued mirrorblade had quite understandably driven her master into a towering rage. For herself, Calcis felt only grief and the furious need for revenge. Her disciples Relak and Darrath were as sons to her, and now Relak was slain. Had she still had the ability to weep, she would have done so then.
‘They were clearly after Nasharian too, as the battle at the gambling house would attest,’ Vignus growled as he ripped the dead slaver’s face free from his own and hurled it into the fire.
Calcis lowered her eyes, not having the rank to be permitted to gaze into her master’s true face, and deferentially handed him his mask. He turned his back to put it on, and when he rounded on her again the look in his half-hidden eyes was bloody murder.
‘Find them, Calcis,’ he ordered her. ‘Find them, but do not attack until we have gauged their strength. I have the inkling of a plan for dealing with these wretches once and for all, but it will take time to bear fruit. Plant Eyes around their hiding place, that we may watch and learn how best to defeat them.’
‘Yes, High Master,’ she said.
It was plain that the High Master meant now, so Calcis summoned her remaining disciple and half a ten-band of mindbound and led them out into the city.
Let the hunt begin, she thought. Relak will be avenged.
All that afternoon they worked their way across the flesh district and on into the Quarter of Discipline, where the whipping posts stood in long ranks and bones rotted in gibbets on the street corners. There a hooded man spied them from an alley and hurried out into the light, making a discreet hand-sign as he came. Calcis read the sign and knew she had chanced upon one of the High Master’s spies, who had no doubt been watching and waiting for her.
She guided the man around a corner and down the steps of a disused flaying pit, out of sight of the street. Old skins hung from rusty hooks on the wall, some of them completely intact. It took great skill to remove a skin in one piece, Calcis thought with admiration, and wondered who the flayer had been. Torture was not her way, but she felt that one expert owed their respect to another, whatever their field might be. She admired the drying skins for a moment while Darrath and her mindbound took up guard behind her to ensure their privacy.
The spy cleared his throat, and Calcis turned from the skins to regard him. He was a plain man, lightly built and nondescript. She supposed that the best spies were the sort of people one would be disinclined to notice in a crowd, or to remember.
‘Voice of the High Master,’ the spy said, bowing his head respectfully to her. ‘I bring dire news. There are Corvus Cabal abroad in the city.’
‘I know that,’ Calcis snapped, and again she thought of Relak. ‘Where?’
The spy looked up at her in surprise. ‘Have they already struck?’
‘Twice I have fought and bested their warriors, although in truth only narrowly,’ Calcis said. ‘They took one of my disciples this morn
ing, in retribution. Relak walks the Path of Shadows now.’
The spy folded his hands in respect and made the sign for mourning.
‘May he walk in glory,’ he murmured.
‘He’s rotting on a razortree,’ Calcis said curtly. ‘Where are the Cabal?’
‘They have taken over a flesh-butcher’s factory and made it a shrine to their false Gatherer God,’ the spy said. ‘It stands at the corner of Gorewind Alley and the Square of Howling.’
Calcis blinked in surprise. The Corvus Cabal were renowned for their stealth, and in truth she had expected no answer to her question.
‘How do you come by this truth?’
‘They have been hunting my men for weeks,’ the spy admitted. ‘Only through chance was I able to conceal myself in a dung cart and have the driver follow them one night as they crept back to their roost.’
Calcis nodded.
‘You have done well,’ she said, and turned away.
‘Mistress?’ the spy ventured.
‘Speak,’ she said, without looking back at him.
‘They have many men in their warband. Very many.’
‘I understand,’ Calcis said, and returned to Darrath and the mindbound.
Too many for you to fight, the spy had meant, for all that he hadn’t dared tell her so to her face, but that was well enough. Calcis was a battle dancer, a ferocious and all-but-superhuman warrior, but even she understood that open warfare was not the chosen way of the Cypher Lords any more than it was that of their foes, and that they had always been unlikely to be able to match a rival warband in terms of sheer numbers. She made her peace with that, and sent Darrath out across the rooftops to plant Eyes around Gorewind Alley and the Square of Howling, to watch over the Corvus Cabal’s stronghold and report back what they saw there to her High Master’s Seeing Eye.
The High Master will find a way to triumph without battle and still avenge Relak, she told herself. He already has the beginnings of a plan. He always does.
The sun was setting when the Noschseedian trader Vignus Daneggia announced himself at the gates of the Court of the Seven Talons. He was masked, in the way of the high-ranked of Noschseed, but he carried no weapons. He allowed the gate guards to inspect his retinue of five unremarkable, somewhat slow-witted men while he patiently fanned himself and waited. The men had a small hand-barrow with them, and in it was a short barrel.
Warcry Page 9