The Black Knife

by Christopher Nuttall

  He watched the conflict of emotions as they played over her face. On one hand, it was a remarkable opportunity, a chance to develop a real power base of her own. On the other hand, it risked her becoming entangled in Academy politics and irritating the Grandmaster, who might suspect that necromancy had returned to the world. Herod had no idea how much the Grandmaster knew – if he knew anything – but with a loyalist on the Council of Thirteen, he could keep the Grandmaster trapped in procedure and debate indefinitely.

  “I understand your motives, I believe,” Lady Asma said, finally. “And what if I refuse?”

  “I will merely find the next candidate and make them the same offer,” Herod said. There were a handful of other candidates who could be trusted, although Reginald – the best choice from a loyalty perspective – would not have been welcome back at the Academy. “I believe, however, that you wanted a chance to shape magical policy...”

  He watched her face as he dangled that particular fish in front of her. Lady Asma was the strongest advocate of banning commoners from the Academy, perhaps even murdering magical children who had been born to commoners before they came into their magic. The chance to tighten the requirements, to keep the common-born magicians from learning the tricks of their trade, was tempting. He knew that she could barely resist such a thought.

  “In that case, I accept,” Lady Asma said, briskly. “I will have to take a couple of days to make arrangements with my deputies back at Yolanda, but after that I will be able to make my way to the Academy for my investment.”

  Herod smiled inwardly at how she’d taken on the role for herself. “Of course,” he said, seriously. “I will also be expecting some of your soldiers to join the army.”

  Lady Asma lifted a single elegant eyebrow. “You seem to be planning a war,” she remarked, acidly. “Should we be worried at how many soldiers you are gathering under your banner?”

  “Not all the Lords have declared for us,” Herod pointed out. Enough had declared for him – or had been infected by parts of his soul – to make any form of concentrated action very difficult, but the rebel Lords would get themselves organised as a unit if he gave them time. “Quite a few of them need to be brought to heel.”

  “Of course,” Lady Asma agreed. She sounded faintly mocking, but Herod refused to rise to the bait. “It would be appalling if they stole the authority that we stole from the Emperor.”

  Herod scowled. The former Emperor had had the power of tradition on his side...and even he had had problems governing the Empire. The Lords often pushed against his limits and dared him to slap them down, knowing that if he concentrated on one of them, the others would take the opportunity to stab him in the back. Herod didn't even have tradition on his side, although he did have an extremely large army and hundreds of sorcerers backing him up. The General had been assembling a force that consisted of Herod’s own troops, troops from loyalist Lords and thousands of mercenaries who had been attracted by the high pay and the promise of a chance to loot, once the fighting was over. Combined with the sorcerers and zombies – although he had to keep those out of sight, at least until his grip on power was secure – it was an almost-irresistible force.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Good luck with your new post.”

  Lady Asma stood up, bowed – exposing more of her body to his gaze – and departed, holding her head up high. Herod watched her go, smiling inwardly at her childish attempt to manipulate him. He had never cared much for sex, even as a young man, for power was so much more rewarding. Lady Asma would, in time, discover just how little he cared for her blatant attempts to seduce him...

  He shook his head and stood up, feeling the power coursing through him. The headaches had faded into the background now, aided by a series of healing trances he entered at least once a day, focusing on controlling and storing his power within his wards. The Oracle’s prediction that he would burn himself up had come close to fulfilment, but he had survived. The thought made him grin to himself. He had never placed much stock in visions.

  Slowly, he stepped out of his quarters and marched along the corridor, enjoying the expressions on the faces of some of his loyal allies. Many of them were prepared to hitch themselves to his coattails until he fell, at which point they would switch sides and loudly swear that they hadn't meant a word of the oaths they’d sworn to him. They were going to be in for a nasty shock in the future, he reminded himself, and left them behind, ignoring their demands for attention. Once his grip on power was sealed, he intended to use them as power for greater and greater spells, even though they were of noble blood. They could join the thousands of others he intended to sacrifice for the greater glory of himself.

  He tested the wards as he entered the more restricted areas of the Golden Palace and was pleased to find that they were still in place. The Royal Wing had once – according to the histories of the Golden Palace, which a captured Servant had explained to him while pleading for his life – served as the home of the Emperor’s daughters. Now, it held Princess Eleanor and the Oracle, an Oracle who was clearly sickening because she didn’t dare speak her visions out loud. Herod didn't care. She might not be sharing her visions with him, but she wasn't sharing them with anyone else either.

  The wards around Eleanor’s rooms had been programmed to allow him and a handful of slaves to enter at will, without dismantling the wards. He had no intention of risking his guards deciding to have a go at the two girls, even with the promise of dire punishments in the morning afterwards. Harming an Oracle could have disastrous consequences, while Eleanor was a Princess of the Emperor’s Bloodline. The other aristocrats would never have stood for her being mistreated by common-born scrum. It might give the masses ideas.

  He stepped through the wards and came face to face with Eleanor, who threw a book at his head. It thumped into his wards, bounced off and fell to the ground. He hoped that Eleanor appreciated the irony of throwing a new book at him; after his grip on power was secure, he intended to ensure that the printing press was banned and all who knew how to make it were executed before they could spread their knowledge any further.

  “Well Met, Your Highness,” he said, wondering if she would try to attack him again. Power surged through his mind and out into his wards, but Eleanor had clearly learned her lesson from the last time she’d tried to fight him. She was powerful, and determined, yet without training she was hardly able to take on someone like Herod, even without necromancy. “I trust that you are well?”

  “No thanks to you, you wretched usurper,” Eleanor said, and followed up with a series of words that Herod was rather surprised she knew. She sounded more like a kitchen maid, or perhaps a prostitute, than a Princess of the Blood. “Has my brother come to kill you yet?”

  “I’m afraid that I have bad news,” Herod said, mildly. “Your brother lies buried under thousands of tons of snow.”

  “You’re lying,” Eleanor shouted. Her voice was high enough to damage a person’s ears. “You’re lying!”

  “I do not have to lie,” Herod said, truthfully enough. “Eric and his wife” – he gave no thought to those who had helped them – “were trapped by a falling stream of snow and crushed under its weight. They could not have survived such an experience.”

  Eleanor looked at him, unwilling to believe him. She probably wouldn't believe him for several months, if that. “I believe that the Oracle might have seen something about it,” Herod pressed. “Do you think we should ask? Oracle...what have you seen?”

  A tiny head, alarmingly pale, emerged from the blankets. “I will not tell you what I have seen,” Kuralla said. The Oracle sounded as if she no longer believed her own words. “I will not tell you what I have seen. I will not...”

  Herod interrupted her dispassionately. “But you have seen Eric,” he pressed. “You know that he was buried under the snow.”

  Kuralla dug back under the blankets, shaking. Herod grew impatient suddenly and reached out towards her, brushing Eleanor aside with a wave of magic when she g
ot in his way. He clamped a hand around Kuralla’s wrist, making to pull her out of bed and...

  ...He was standing at the head of an army, marching through a burning city. Massive creatures flew high overhead, casting shadows down upon the land below. He saw a woman running from her burning house, only to be caught by his sorcerers and frozen, left to die in the fire...

  ...He saw Eric standing in front of him, raising a sword and preparing to fight...

  ...He saw a dark-skinned woman holding up a sword made of shadow, her laugh mocking him as she sliced at him with the sword. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn't see it clearly, as if he was looking at something far greater than a mere sword...

  ...He looked down into the water, staring for something – he knew not what. A moment passed and the water cleared, revealing a skeleton staring back at him. It opened its mouth and started to laugh at him...

  ...Hundreds of visions blurred together, sending him reeling backwards as he saw himself victorious and defeated, master and slave...

  ...He was standing over a baby’s cradle, looking down at the innocent face of a young child. Hind stood against the wall, one hand raised to cast a spell; the other clutching a black knife, ready to swing. He reached for the baby and recoiled – it was not his hand reaching for the child. He opened his mouth to scream and Hind threw her spell...

  Herod found himself staggering backwards, barely aware of Eleanor’s screams. It took several minutes to get the visions under control and, all the time, he was aware of the Oracle staring up at him, as if she was relieved. She had to be relieved, he realised; she had been holding all the visions inside her and they’d all come bursting out, perhaps even saving her life.

  “You monster,” Eleanor said. She beat at his wards with her fists. “Do what you like to me, but leave her alone!”

  “Be quiet,” Herod said. He turned to look at her, noting the defiance in her pose and wanting only to break it. A hundred spells – any one of which could have torn the Princess apart, or reduced her to something lower than an animal – flickered through his mind, but he pushed them away. “I have come to a decision about your future. One month from today, we will be married, in order that the Emperor’s Bloodline remains strong.”

  He turned and strode out of the room, smiling inwardly at the expression on her face. She had known that she would face an arranged marriage eventually, but the thought of being married to the man who had killed her father...it would be unbearable.

  Behind him, the tantrum started.

  Herod smiled.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was cold, so cold.

  Eric felt as if he was suspended between life and death, hanging somewhere in the realms beyond the world of mortals. The different gods had different versions of the afterlife, but some part of his mind whispered that none of them matched where he was now. The cold seemed to be holding him in suspension, yet there was a nagging thought at the back of his mind that something was very wrong. He tried to focus, to concentrate his mind, but every time he thought a thought, it slipped away into eternity. Nothing mattered any longer, but the cold. He wasn't even sure how he had come to this end.

  And then there was a voice in his head. You are trapped in a snowdrift, it said, with such certainty that Eric believed it absolutely. You are slowly freezing to death. You must move now or die, and the Empire will die with you.

  He tried to call out, but his mouth wouldn't move. He couldn't tell – his body was so numb – if he couldn't move his mouth because of the snow, or if something had happened to his mouth. Perhaps it had frozen solid. He recalled Eleanor once threatening to use magic to seal his lips when he had kept talking at her birthday party and the thought, oddly, drove him on. He started to press against his prison, only to discover that it was solid. His body could move and twitch slightly, but he couldn’t hope to dig himself out. And yet, he told himself, he had no other choice. He started pressing his gloved fingers against the snow, trying to clear some space for himself, but they were clumsy. He seriously considered trying to remove his gloves before realising that doing that would only expose him to frostbite. If it hadn’t been for the charms in the fur coat Bran had given him, he would be dead by now.

  Hind, he thought. The thought of his wife should have driven him forward, but he could still barely move. The last thing he had seen of her was a rock slamming into her skull, sending her flying backwards into a pile of snow. She could have bled out to death by now...the thought galvanised him and he resumed his struggles, yet it was hard to get any traction at all, let alone dig his way out of the snowdrift.

  You’re going about this the wrong way, the voice said. There was a hint of exasperated patience somewhere within the strange voice. Reach out to your left and take hold of the sword.

  Eric felt out with his fingers – he was so cold that it took him several minutes, which felt like hours, to remember which side was his left – and felt the hilt of the Great Sword from where it had fallen. One of their many powers, he recalled suddenly, was that they remained loyal to their masters until their masters fell in battle, whereupon they would transfer their loyalty to a new master. The sword felt warm against his hand, yet Eric had the idea that it could do something more. He clutched it in his hand and concentrated...

  There was a flash of heat, so hot that he was suddenly aware of the many layers of clothing he was wearing, and then he fell to the ground. The sword had produced a wave of heat that had melted the snow for several meters around, leaving a cloud of steam rising up into the air. The shock had destabilised the remainder of the snow, sending dangerous tremors rumbling in the distance...it dawned on Eric that another avalanche was a distant possibility. The slush below his feet was already freezing solid as the heat faded away, suggesting that he might find himself trapped in ice. Holding Morningstar in one hand – and he now knew why the Great Sword had that name – he found himself slipping and sliding towards the snow. It might have been cold, but it was safer than remaining in the crater.

  He stumbled and almost fell. Eric caught himself and stared down at what he’d nearly tripped over. Bran’s body lay on the ground, staining the slush with dark red blood. Eric pressed his fingers against the man’s neck, but it didn’t take more than a touch to confirm that the man was dead. He turned him over and shook his head, staring down at the man who’d risked – and lost – everything, even his life, to help out a pair of strangers. Eric had promised himself that if he were ever crowned Emperor, he would knight Bran and to hell with anyone who questioned his right to the title. He would never be able to keep that promise now.

  “I’m sorry, Bran,” he said, and meant it. The general custom on Touched was to cremate bodies as soon as possible, but burning Bran’s body in such weather would be impossible. He’d remain stuck on the mountainside, frozen forever until someone dug him out and burned the body. After an incident where zombies from the necromantic wars had been dug out of an ice field – which had kept them perfectly preserved and undead – no one took any chances with ancient bodies. “You deserved better.”

  It dawned on him suddenly that Hind’s body might be around somewhere and he looked around, but he only saw one other body. Bran’s wife had joined her husband in death. There was an oddly peaceful expression on her face that contrasted sharply with the wounds on her body, suggesting that a stream of rocks had come down right on top of her. Eric reached down and closed her eyes, knowing that her body too would never be recovered...and then looked around for the others. There was no sign of either Hind or Branet.

  The ice suddenly started to freeze around his feet and he swore. It was possible that either or both of them had fallen outside the crater the Great Sword had produced, but there was no longer any time to look around. He picked himself up and ran for the snow, drawing on all of his reserves to leap up and land on the packed snow. His footing was unstable and unsure, but at least it was safer than remaining in the crater. Behind him, the ice formed terrifyingly quickly, trap
ping the two dead bodies permanently. Eric paused for a moment, long enough to offer the ghosts of the dead a moment of silence in respect, and then turned to leave the crater behind. It would be dangerous to remain there.

  He walked several metres away from the bodies before it occurred to him that he wasn't panicking. Hind – his wife, his lover, his one and only – was gone, yet he wasn't despondent or even dismayed. He slapped the side of his head in irritation as he realised what that meant and then took the risk of tearing off his glove and inspecting the ring on his finger. It was still warm. His father had warned him that if – when – one of the partners died, the other’s ring would go cold. He found himself laughing aloud. Hind’s magic had protected her from the cold! She was alive!

  A second later, he realised that that couldn't be the case. She’d been drained of magic simply by holding up the wards against their hunters and their bombardment. Her wards had collapsed, burying Eric under the snow and killing Bran and his wife – and perhaps his daughter. Her magic couldn't have saved her; she’d had no magic left to spend. And if that were the case, where was she?