The Maleficent Seven

by Cameron Johnston

  Penny looked back to the moustachioed militiaman accompanying her. Nicholas’s hat was carelessly askew and his face scoured to get off every trace of blood and grime. “Don’t think any of us will be having a good time for a while,” she said.

  Tiarnach sighed, deep and slow. He couldn’t remember when or where or even against who, but the feeling of his own first battle had stuck with him all these years: the bowel-loosening terror, the mad panic, the pounding of his heart and the thrill of victory, of survival…

  “You both did well,” he said, then took a deep swallow of ale.

  Penny downed her drink. “I think I killed four men.”

  “I stabbed one in the eye,” Nicholas added. “It came out stuck to my spear.” He shuddered and his eyes glazed over as he stared down into his ale.

  “They’d have done the same to you,” Tiarnach said. “And they’d be boasting of it right now instead of sitting here shaking, so don’t feel sorry for those pricks.”

  “How do you do it?” Penny asked, staring up into his eyes, searching.

  “Do what?” He slurped more ale.

  “Atop the wall. You charged right in, killing and kicking in faces. You showed no fear at all.”

  He choked and thumped his chest to loosen it up – he’d been shitting himself for most of it. He was disgustingly mortal these days.

  Penny leaned closer. “Is it because you are a war god?”

  Nicholas stirred and his gaze sharpened as he listened for the reply. Some of the others in the deathly quiet ale house paused their drinking and turned to look.

  Tiarnach almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. He’d been terrified, but he couldn’t break their morale by saying so. He was a waste of skin now, but he still remembered being a leader.

  “Nah, nothing to do with that,” he said. “I was too furious to be afraid. Those bastards killed my people and I’ll be damned if I’ll let them do the same to yours.” He drew his belt knife and stabbed it into a table top. “They are just men, not gods. How dare the bastards come to your home an’ kill your people. Fuck no! Get bloody angry, not scared. Do what old Tiarnach does an’ gut those murdering pricks with cold steel.”

  Heads nodded and cups were raised.

  “Fuck them,” somebody said, breaking the silence from the other drinkers. “They killed my brother.”

  “Aye, I’ll fuck them – with my spear up their arses!” somebody else added.

  Soon the ale house was rowdy and buzzing with noise, filled with people roused from despair and emboldened into anger. Many looked towards Tiarnach, talking about the fight on the wall and the enemy’s fire having no effect, and of him kicking the Lucent inquisitor off it to land on his arse in the mud, right where the murdering bastard belonged.

  Tiarnach sat blinking in confusion as men and women called him brave and slapped him on the shoulder as they passed. Penny and Nicholas stood by his side, their black moods blown away by the call to action.

  “Is this the power of a war god?” Nicholas asked, his eyes wide. “Granting courage?”

  “Oh, aye, that it is.” He took a big gulp of ale and felt more than just alcohol warming his belly. Faith was a funny old thing, and after all these years of decrepitude, the burn of their belief going down felt damned good.

  You fucking fraud… But if it enabled him to kill the Falcon Prince then he’d happily milk this cow for all it was worth. He’d be sick outside later, crippled by fear and hypocrisy, but here and now, this was a moment for them, not him.

  North of the bustling town of Tarnbrooke was a literal ghost town. Not a living soul moved among the broken outbuildings, fragments of wall, and the shuffling silent corpses and drifting shades trailing mist and mournful whispers.

  Lorimer made his way through the blasted, rotting and lifeless landscape. He knew Maeven was there of course, but he didn’t count that soulless, vile creature.

  Through a thick fog of buzzing flies, he caught sight of her. She was defiling more corpses, up to her elbows in guts, stitching two or three together to make something resembling a whole human form. On her face was a sick smile of satisfaction, and Lorimer thought she had far more in common with Jerak Hyden than she would ever admit. A gore-caked man in the buckled plate harness of a Lucent knight stood beside her, his eyes haunted and his heart stopped. The vampire could smell the rot inside despite the acrid stench of necromantic magic worming through him.

  The corpse-knight stepped out to block Lorimer’s path, limbs jerking against its will like a puppet on strings. The vampire cuffed it aside into a pile of the dead.

  Maeven didn’t look up as his shadow fell over her work. “Please don’t destroy that one. He was the leader of their army and I intend on having him lead this one for me.”

  Lorimer reached down, grasped her by the neck and lifted her kicking into the air. “Are you insane?” he yelled. “I knew you were selfish and cruel but now you have enraged Amogg Hadakk!”

  Filthy fingers scrabbled at his hand. He squeezed until her face began to purple. Her feet drummed a futile beat against his chest and groin. He loosened his grip, just a little.

  “Whatever do you mean?” she wheezed.

  Instead of heeding the impulse to crush her neck to pulp, he let go. She sprawled in the muck, rubbing her bruised throat. “I have misled Amogg for you,” he hissed. “What did you do to the other orc?”

  The smile returned to the necromancer’s face, scar and tattoo twisting. “What’s the problem? She was old, wounded, and entirely expendable. I promised you that I would aid your quest to retake your home from the mortal filth that infest it, and that was a necessary step along the path.”

  He ground his teeth, hand flexing, nails lengthening into claws. “You disgust me,” he said slowly. “But my people must be free.”

  Her armoured slave helped her stand and brushed mud and bits of bone off her grey cloak. “Do you have more posturing to do?” she asked. “Or can I get on with my work? You do want an army of the dead to march sometime soon, yes?”

  Shuffling corpses began to crowd around them, silent stinking soulless forms staring at Lorimer with witch-fire eyes. That one corpse-knight still had his own mind and soul though, there was no mistaking the man’s horrified gaze. No doubt the necromancer had some reason to shackle the man’s soul to his rotting corpse. “Who were you?” Lorimer asked him.

  The man’s voice was dry and croaking: “Laurant Daryn, once the Landgrave of Allstane and all its people.”

  “Another fanatic knight,” the vampire replied, smirking. “How it must pain you to fight your own god.”

  “I…” his face twisted in confusion, “am not a believer.”

  Lorimer blinked. “What pathetic ruse is this? I saw your face during the battle and heard your shouted prayers.”

  The corpse shook his head. “I do not deny it. However, I am… was, a noble of the old queen’s court at Brightwater. I was no fanatic until I met the Falcon Prince and felt the touch of his goddess burning inside me, changing me. I became younger, stronger, and was forced to carry out her will. When I died her divine presence departed.”

  Daryn surveyed the corpse-strewn battlefield and the ranks of risen dead. “My own mind and will were returned to me. That usurper enslaved my mind and my people.”

  “Interesting,” Lorimer said. “That power would explain the virulent spread of their goddess’s creed and the suicidal fanaticism of her inquisitors. And what of your people all around us now, serving at the whims of this wicked necromancer?”

  “I confess that I feel little at all about the matter,” the corpse-knight replied. “I recognise the horror but do not feel it.”

  “Death has many benefits,” Maeven answered. “The flesh is to blame for many extremes of emotion and desire. As I am sure you know, Lorimer.”

  “What can you tell us of their goddess and their forces?” Lorimer asked.

  The corpse-knight’s steel-clad fists clenched. “I am not sure there even is a true goddess
– everything seemed to be by the Falcon Prince’s will alone and serves to further his personal goals. The power burning inside me did not feel of independent will. The approaching army is ten thousand strong, with at least a dozen holy knights, five hundred cavalry and two dozen siege engines. Two more such armies are mustering in the north. You will not survive this.”

  “Enough prattle,” Maeven demanded. “Lorimer, do let me get on with raising an army of my own. The work might be tedious but it must be done correctly if you don’t want them wandering off to devour the townsfolk instead of the enemy.”

  “Be cautious, necromancer,” he snapped. “It would be a terrible shame if Amogg learned the truth of your murderous ways and stamped your skull to paste.”

  He left her to her grisly work and pondered going off to find a kind woman and a warm bed for the night. As a vampire lord, sex was exquisite for all involved, but sometimes pleasant and wholesome company was what he truly craved, especially after enduring Maeven’s corrupting presence.

  Others thought him a monster, but he still had a basic human need for companionship and he could not always use his loyal servant Estevan as a crutch – the man was far too busy helping to organise the town and its defences to bother with Lorimer’s petty personal issues. Gods knew he wouldn’t get anything other than a headache from associating with Black Herran and her other captains.

  He found a newly widowed young woman on the palisade, her husband’s old hunting spear clutched in her bloodstained hands. He could smell the grief on her, sharp and raw. She was too deep in despair to fear him, making her unique in this place. He would work his charms on her. There would be no sex tonight, but both could offer a measure of comfort simply by sharing a warm bed for a single night. On the eve of battle, both yearned to feel human, for a time, before they mercilessly butchered men.

  Tomorrow, Lorimer Felle would again embrace the monster in his blood. He feared that one day he would lose himself to it.

  CHAPTER 32

  Jerak Hyden oohed and ahhed as he applied the hot poker to the vampire spawn’s belly again, studying the blistering, crawling inhuman flesh with feverish interest. The limbless torso on the table bucked against its chains, and its fanged, de-tongued mouth snapped as close to the alchemist as it could get.

  He straightened up and pushed his spectacles back up his nose. “Note: increased resistance to heat confirmed. Healing rate is vastly decreased when compared to blunt trauma or… ah…”

  The scroll and quill and ink lay unattended on his workbench. He’d forgotten his latest assistant had run away hours earlier during one or other of his procedures – probably the removal of the subject’s tongue with tongs and a hot knife had been too much for them. He’d had another assistant as well, but he wasn’t entirely sure if that plodding creature had died while making the quicklime. What had happened to the glass blower with the good fingers? He couldn’t quite recall. He was far too busy to monitor the movements of other people, who invariably proved inept or unreliable.

  He sighed, dropped the hot poker onto the anvil to cool down and wiped grimy hands on his apron. “The youth of today have no curiosity.” One day he hoped to replace human assistants with mechanical golems boasting the manual dexterity required for alchemic experimentation. Sadly, his original experiments in that field had run amok and his workshop had been burned to the ground by a mob of idiot villagers. He had only abducted and used two of their farmers which was, to his mind, a small price to pay for advancements in knowledge. The families of the farmers evidently lacked any appreciation of the alchemic arts.

  He surveyed the workshop and catalogued his preparations for the coming war. Given the meagre forces defending Tarnbrooke the numbers came up wanting. He had created jars of quicklime to blind and burn, exploding iron spheres, acids, vomiting gas, and a particular old favourite: the seeing gas that gave subjects visions of other worlds and drove them mad. All were heavily weather and wind dependant, and nature was a fickle thing that managed to defy his best predictions half the time. Those creations were all somewhat uninspired, which proved irksome to a genius like himself. He had enjoyed the explosive pigs but that had created an acute shortage of the beasts, and he was loathe to repeat an experiment knowing the result would be identical. It was drudgery best duplicated by lesser minds. He pursed his lips at the canvas-covered figure in the corner, cloth draped over sharp metal edges. It would be a cruel surprise for anybody that decided to menace him, be they Lucent soldier, filthy farmer or dim-witted brute of a colleague.

  For a moment he considered abandoning the whole idea of killing the Lucent army and embracing the gift of vampirism that lay upon his table. Age would prove the ultimate enemy to his vast intellect, and he was well aware of the possibility of fading faculties as his mortal body aged. His eyesight was already an issue, though nothing that glass lenses and decent lanterns could not counteract. For now. The only problem was that the spawn of Lorimer Felle had all proven to be feral beasts. He would need to do more research on the matter before making an irrevocable choice. The entire world would weep to lose a mind like his.

  He glimpsed the white-haired form of Black Herran watching him from the doorway of his workshop, and given his immensely deep and important thoughts, she had perhaps been observing him for quite some time.

  “How are you getting on?” she asked, gazing dispassionately at the dismembered torso of the vampire.

  He studied her for a second, noting the sagging skin, dark circles beneath the eyes, the furrowed brow and lips tight from pain. Magic took its toll on the user, he thought. Perhaps that was because they were mere users whereas he was learning the intricate inner workings of the world and applying that beautiful knowledge. They were powerful, granted, but they lacked true understanding of the forces they claimed to control.

  She cleared her throat.

  He blinked and dragged his attention outward instead of in. “Adequately,” he replied, “given the time and material available. I have prepared alchemic substances in those jars at the far wall, but it will not prove sufficient to stop a concerted attack by superior forces of the size you are expecting.”

  “Every little helps,” she said. “And I am sure your contribution will prove far from little. What do you have under that canvas?”

  “A work in progress,” he said, and offered no further detail. He certainly wasn’t about to divulge information on the lovely little death machine he intended to use to escape this backwater. Nobody truly understood his genius. They called him mad when in truth he was an enlightened being. His medical research alone would usher in a new age of treatments and procedures for three hundred and eighty-nine ailments once he organised it into set texts and had scribes produce copies. Not that he cared about human life – it was the knowledge that was important, and it offended him that even the so-called scholars of Essoran knew so little about their own bodies. He would show them all how limited their thinking was, and perhaps one or two might recognise his genius and follow his example to lift themselves from the morass of morons.

  Black Herran took his obfuscation in her stride. “What else can you produce over the next few days?”

  He retrieved a square of soft white cloth from his pocket and proceeded to give his spectacle lenses a thorough clean. “That would depend entirely on how squeamish you have become. I can create wonders if you are willing to pay the price. Or, should I say, if you are willing to have others pay that price to achieve your goals. My work with the hivers might have involved interminable drudgery but in the fields of chemical and mineral research it proved most illuminating. I could create a most useful potion for you.”

  Black Herran closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “And just what price must the people of Tarnbrooke pay?”

  He replaced the spectacles on his nose. “Using a high dosage, those who survive may experience a range of permanent side effects including joint and muscle degradation, intestinal erosion, difficulty breathing, insanity and death.”


  “What if you gave them less of this substance of yours?”

  He pouted. “Utilising a lower dosage would merely grant fever and loose bowels. A high dose will grant them increased strength, speed and ferocity, which is what you need, I think.”

  She opened her eyes again. “I will ask for volunteers.”

  He frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “I have no doubt there are some who will take your trade, those who have already lost loved ones to the initial Lucent attack with no great and abiding desire to endure the future without them.”

  Jerak Hyden thought back to the many, many times he had forced his procedures and experiments upon unwilling subjects on her behalf. Not a one of them had appreciated his pursuit of knowledge, and lacking that, to him it had indeed seemed illogical for any living being to willingly throw away their lives and health without being forced. It occurred to him that in his dismissal of humanity’s base nature he had overlooked other, less onerous methods of acquiring subjects: such as offering gold to starving families, or enabling revenge. It was a stunning, game-changing revelation.

  “I thank you for your insight,” he replied earnestly.

  “I will spread the word,” she said. “Prepare your potions.”

  At that moment a tiny winged creature with horns dived through the doorway and fluttered around her head.

  “Shoo,” the alchemist said, flapping his hands at the thing. “Away, you vile creature! You will not befoul my work with your droppings.”

  It settled on Black Herran’s shoulder and its beady eyes glared hatred at the man. “Piss off,” it said. Then it leaned in close to her ear and whispered.

  Her face became stony. “It would seem that the Falcon Prince is on his way. Not on foot but by ship. A whole fleet of them.”

  “So?” he asked.

  “It means that we have badly underestimated how many ships they built. An entire Lucent army might soon be landing to our nigh-undefended rear. Verena Awildan has few ways to counter inquisitors, never mind that bloody-handed Falcon Prince himself.”