[Darkblade 03] - Reaper of Souls

by Dan Abnett

  He lay draped on his stomach across a hard, rolling surface. When he opened his eyes he saw nothing but a blur of white. Malus felt his guts heave and he vomited noisily.

  There was a creak of saddle leather. Somewhere above him, a disgusted voice, thick with a rustic northern accent, said, “Damn it, there he goes again. Next time we stop, someone else gets to carry him.”

  Hissing laughter echoed around him. Malus screwed his eyes shut against the terrible whiteness and lost consciousness once more.

  He was shivering, lying naked on the icy ground. Strong hands closed on his ankles and his wrists.

  Malus smelled smoke. When his eyes fluttered open he could see a black sky shot through with countless stars. The hands holding him tightened; a circle of silhouetted heads crowded his vision.

  Someone grunted. “A bad time to wake up,” a voice said. “This should be fun.”

  Just then a tall figure appeared, outlined against the sky. There was a flare of orange light as the figure held the glowing end of a red-hot dagger over Malus. In the reflected light he recognised the man as the knight who’d kicked him.

  “Don’t kill me with the dagger,” he heard himself say. “Anything else, but not the dagger.”

  “Shut up,” the knight said, crouching beside his men and pressing the glowing steel against Malus’ leg.

  He was still screaming and cursing every foul oath he knew when the man pulled the knife free and then put it to the wound in Malus’ arm. The smell of burned flesh hung heavy and sweet in the air. The highborn soiled himself. Someone let out a curse of his own and cuffed Malus in the side of the head.

  The knight pulled the dagger away and paused to inspect his work. Apparently satisfied, he rose to his feet, his pale face seeming to recede all the way into the night sky.

  “You’re going to a lot of trouble for nothing,” someone said. “Look at his veins, my lord, they’re black with corruption. He won’t last beyond a couple more days, if that.”

  “He just has to make it to the auctioneer’s block tomorrow,” the knight growled. “After that the Outer Darkness can take the bastard.”

  Malus was already sinking back into darkness when the full import of the man’s words sent a jolt of pure terror coursing up his spine. They meant to sell him in the slave market!

  He thrashed violently, managing to pull an arm and a leg free before the warriors surrounding him regained their hold and pinned him to the frozen earth. One of the men bent close and took his jaw in one calloused hand. Iron-hard fingers squeezed, prying open his mouth like he was a new-born calf.

  “Give him another taste of the hushalta,” the druchii holding his jaw said gruffly. The warrior was handed an open bottle of milky fluid as he studied the highborn critically. “Who’d pay good coin for this lout?” he muttered. “I wouldn’t cut him up and feed him to my nauglir.” Appreciative laughter hissed in the darkness as the man poured the bitter liquid down Malus’ throat. When he was done, the druchii handed the bottle back and bent to peer closely into the highborn’s eyes.

  “Of course, there’s no lack of fools in this world,” the warrior said as darkness swallowed Malus’ sight. “This one here is living proof of that.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THE BLACK ARK

  “Awaken Darkblade,” a scornful voice echoed in his head. “Awaken, or spend the rest of your brief life in chains!” The words reverberated through the darkness like a tolling bell. Malus stirred slightly, touching off waves of fiery pain from the burns in his leg and arm. The agony banished the lingering effects of the hushalta and within moments he was awake. He was lying on his stomach, draped once again across the back of a moving nauglir and his hands and feet were bound with rope. The highborn’s stomach felt like a clutched fist, hard and empty and the burnt copper aftertaste of the hushalta left him with a raging thirst. A sudden gust of wind raked icy claws along his back and neck, leaving him shivering but also grateful with the realisation that his fever had finally broken. The crude cauterisations performed by the druchii lord had managed to burn away the infections festering in his wounds.

  Malus heard a dry chuckle some distance behind him. “I just saw him shiver, Hathair,” an amused voice said. “Looks like he’s lived long enough to reach the ark after all. That’s a bottle of Vinan you owe me, if memory serves.”

  The highborn heard a creak of saddle leather close to his ear. A gloved fist grabbed a handful of Malus’ hair and yanked his head painfully back. The movement took Malus by surprise. On instinct he fought to keep his body relaxed and limp.

  “Those are death throes,” a gruff voice said, close enough that Malus could smell the druchii’s foul breath. “It’s a long climb up the southern stair. He’ll be cold and stiff by the time we reach the top.”

  Malus heard the first knight laugh and the fist abruptly let go. The highborn’s cheek slapped back against the nauglir’s scaly hide and another wave of fierce pain reverberated across his chest and arm. Again, he steeled himself to show no reaction. The two knights lapsed back into silence and after a few moments the highborn could discern the rhythmic slap of nauglir feet on paved stones. Somewhere ahead came other faint noises: the creak of wagon wheels and the sounds of livestock and the murmur of rustic druchii voices. Slowly, carefully, the highborn opened his gummy eyes a hair’s width and tried to see where he was.

  They were on a road, that was clear enough—Malus saw ice-rimed black paving stones, laid wide enough for at least two riders to travel abreast. The cold ones were travelling up a long, gentle slope towards what looked like a steep cliff of rock and ice rising several hundred feet in the air. The highborn opened his eyes a bit more and followed the cliffs rough face to its summit. There, sure enough, he saw black, forbidding fortress walls and a profusion of circular towers interspersed with the splintered remnants of giant oak masts, like the kind found on a sailing ship. The cliff was the side of an enormous shard of rock, topped by nothing less than a small city dominated by an overlord’s fortress. It was the infamous ice-locked ark: the Black Ark of Naggor, seat of the self-styled Witch Lord Balneth Bale.

  Ahead of the advancing column Malus saw a commotion as tradesmen and lesser highborns tried to calm their skittish mounts and move to the side of the road to allow the knights to pass. Some distance further on the highborn saw an arch of dark grey stone at the base of the ark, guarded by a company of spearmen. Traffic came and went through this arch like the gates in any other druchii city, but this one led into the tunnels honeycombing the ark itself.

  Much of the city was hidden deep within the rock, Malus knew, hollowed out by druchii hands—and later refined by dwarf slaves—after the ark came to rest in the far north. Only the wealthiest and most influential citizens of the ark had the privilege of living in the ancient towers, while the rest lived like cold ones in the warrens below.

  It was the first time Malus had ever seen one of the famous arks up close—it was shards of stone such as these that had saved the druchii when Nagarythe had been lost beneath the waves, thousands of years ago. The shard was in fact a piece of lost Nagarythe itself—when the great cataclysm struck the northern part of Ulthuan there were a number of cities and fortresses protected by such powerful sorceries that they survived the onslaught of the waves when the rest of the land around them was washed away. They floated on the angry waves like unmoored islands, holding all that remained of the elves of the north. The arks themselves transformed the people of Nagarythe into the druchii, or so the legends said.

  Faced with the loss of everything they’d known, the people on the arks were faced with a choice: abandon their drifting havens and throw themselves on the mercy of the rest of Ulthuan, or harden their hearts and survive on their own. The druchii chose the path of defiance, raising tremendous masts and bending their sorceries to transform the shards into ocean-going fortresses and the black arks were born.

  When the druchii reached Naggaroth many of the arks were beached along the eastern coast, becomi
ng outposts for conquering the mainland. Of the remainder, most remained at sea as mobile fiefdoms, terrorising the Old World with small fleets of corsairs. Not so the Black Ark of Naggor. When the druchii reached their new home, Malekith wished to make a display of power that illustrated his dominance of the new land—and the druchii people as a whole. So it was said that he turned to the sorcerers of Naggor, once a famous centre of arcane knowledge in Nagarythe and commanded them to create a spell that would transport his own ark onto the mainland and create a literal and symbolic seat of power he could rule from.

  The sorcerers of Naggor complied and at enormous cost they moved Malekith’s ark hundreds of leagues inland, creating the foundation for the great fortress-city of Naggorond. But the sorcerers were not done yet. Not long afterwards they moved their own ark, sending it even farther northward than Malekith’s seat of power. Some legends claimed that the sorcerers simply wished to be able to continue their studies in private, removed from the petty intrigues of the kingdom, while other, more cynical tales suggested that the Naggorites meant to send a message to Malekith, reminding the Witch King that their power had helped cement his pre-eminence.

  Not long afterwards Malekith outlawed the male practice of sorcery, sending the Naggorites a message of his own.

  The column walked its mounts up the road towards the gate until Malus heard an officious-sounding voice command the knights to halt. “Who goes there?” called the commander of the guard company.

  “Lord Tennucyr and his warband, with a prisoner and a nauglir for the flesh market,” one of the warriors replied, making no effort to disguise his annoyance. Malus thought of Hauclir and his brazen attempts at extortion back when he was a guard captain at Hag Graef and wondered if such things were common at fortress gates all across the Land of Chill.

  If so, Lord Tennucyr was in no mood for games. “Stand aside, you worm!” he bellowed, drowning out both his retainer and the guard captain. There was the hurried shuffle of feet and the column jerked back into motion. Within moments Malus saw the arch of the great gate and its huge, iron-banded doors slide past and then the knights were plunged into the riotous, stinking gloom of the inner part of the city.

  Just past the great gate there was a low-ceilinged cavern full of noise and bustle, much like any small market square anywhere in Naggaroth. Servants, soldiers, slaves and citizens mingled with one another as they went about their daily business. Huge witchlight lamps burned from stone pillars set at intervals across the square; the cold light did little to banish the darkness in the huge space, wreathing the city dwellers and the market stalls in eerie shadows.

  Pale faces moved past Malus like disembodied ghosts, studying him and the knights with emotionless faces. The press of the bustling crowd seemed to press against the highborn with invisible hands, squeezing him in their grasp. It was like living in a tomb, he thought, suddenly eager for a breath of fresh wind and the gleam of faint northern sunlight.

  The riders turned left in the square and worked their way through the crowds until they reached a broad ramp that wound upwards into shadow. Another group of guardsmen stood at the base of the ramp, taking coin from druchii moving both up and down the curving lane. Servants and highborn on foot paid a toll to the guardsmen to use the tunnel road, which Malus suspected was another tool to keep the masses in their place throughout the city. The soldiers took one look at Lord Tennucyr and his men and quickly shoved the toll lines out of the way, allowing the column to pass unhindered.

  Riding along the curving road was not unlike climbing the spiral stair of a druchii spire, only each level took nearly half an hour to reach. Malus counted each level. He made it as far as six before the riders suddenly halted and a set of commands was passed back down the line from Tennucyr. The highborn heard the knight in the saddle beside him grunt an acknowledgement, then nudge his mount out of the column.

  Malus watched through slitted eyes as they rode across a small, deserted square and then into a dimly-lit side passage that ran deeper into the rock. Broad feet slapped along the stone in their wake, accompanied by the rhythmic jingle of a heavy chain. Malus risked a quick look backwards and saw Spite being led along in the knight’s wake. The nauglir had been stripped of saddle, tack and bags and for the first time the highborn realised with a shock that Tennucyr had not only his sword and armour, but also the three relics he’d fought so hard to obtain. He fought down a surge of panic. I know who has them, he told himself. And I’ll get them back, preferably over Tennucyr’s dead body.

  The passage was flat and smooth as a road and smelled of horse and nauglir. Narrow, inset doorways and shuttered windows slid past at regular intervals; to Malus, it wasn’t unlike travelling down a narrow city street late at night. Familiar sounds carried through the air: the crack of whips and the rustle of chains, screams and angry shouts and the brassy clash of cages slamming closed. He was in the Slavers’ Quarter of the ice-bound ark, where tradesmen bought and sold living goods for highborn towers and flesh houses alike.

  They rode on for several minutes and as they went deeper into the quarter Malus noted that the individual “buildings’ were separated by narrow, filth-strewn alleys and the structures themselves took on the shape of blocky, thick-walled forts. These were the compounds of the most successful slave dealers in the city, built to hold hundreds of slaves as well as provide training grounds for those meant for the fighting pits of the city’s flesh houses. The nauglir strode past three of these imposing structures before lurching to a halt in front of a fourth. Malus noted that the facade of the slave traders’ compound was worked with bas reliefs of pit fighting scenes, presumably advertising famous pit warriors that came from the owner’s stock.

  There was a sudden lurch backwards as the nauglir settled onto its haunches; with a rattle of chains Spite did the same. There was a creak of saddle leather as the knight dismounted, then Malus felt the man grab the back of his kheitan and drag him off the back of the cold one like a bag of grain. He hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. Try as he might he couldn’t help curling into a ball on the road and groaning for breath.

  The retainer cursed softly at Malus’ weak signs of life. “That’s a bottle of good wine you’ve cost me,” he said, aiming a kick at the highborn’s back. The man approached the compound’s double doors and banged against them with the pommel of his sword.

  It was several long minutes before a spy-hole in one of the doors slid open. “Master Noros isn’t here,” a man’s voice said. “Come back later.”

  “Open the door,” the knight growled. “I’ve got a prisoner and a nauglir to sell, compliments of Lord Tennucyr.”

  “The Witch Lord’s cousin?”

  “The very same.”

  There was a loud clack as the spy door slid shut, then a rattle of bolts being drawn back. One of the large doors swung noisily open and a slight, stooped druchii stepped tentatively outside. He wore stained robes and a faded brown kheitan and carried a cudgel and a coiled whip at his belt. The servant sketched a cursory bow to the retainer and stared down his long, crooked nose at Malus. “Him? He looks half dead.”

  The retainer turned his head and spat. “Bastard ought to be entirely dead, but he’s either too mean or too stupid to know it. He’s tough for a city-born.”

  “That’s not saying much,” the servant said, crouching on his heels and prying back one of Malus’ eyelids. “He ought to be lying on a bier somewhere,” he muttered disdainfully. “What about this nauglir, then?”

  “It’s right over there, fool.”

  “That runt? What do you take me for? If Master Noros were here he’d be threatening a blood feud over this. It’s an insult!”

  “Do I look like a baker’s apprentice to you, dung worm? I’m not here to haggle with you. Lord Tennucyr said to take this lot to the House of Noros and sell them, so here I am.”

  “All right, all right. No need for all the shouting,” the servant said querulously. The man shuffled back to the doorway a
nd let out a sharp whistle. “Cut him loose,” he said to the retainer.

  “Why?”

  “I want to see if he’s strong enough to stand. If he can’t, he’s not good for anything but nauglir fodder.”

  Malus lay perfectly still as the retainer drew his knife and bent to cut the ropes binding the highborn’s wrists and ankles. For a moment he thought his opportunity had arrived, but by the time his bonds had been cut away two large, muscular human slaves had emerged from the compound. They took him by the arms and set him on his feet as though he were a doll. Malus gave them a weak groan and let the two slaves bear much of his weight while the servant studied him critically.

  Master Noros’ man was clearly not impressed, but after a moment he sighed. “All right,” he said, “but only as a favour to your lord. Come inside and we’ll settle on a figure.” He turned to the slaves and jerked his head at the doorway. Take him in and have him branded, then throw him in with the rest of the runts.”

  The humans grunted a response and dragged Malus through the doorway into the slaver’s compound. He was taken through a large room furnished with gleaming marble pillars, each one fitted with polished silver steel manacles for displaying the owner’s wares. Malus was surprised to note that the pillars themselves were entirely decorative; in fact, there wasn’t even a ceiling for them to support. Looking up, he saw that the walls of the chamber were uncommonly high, but beyond them there was nothing but shadows and a dim hint of a cavern roof some fifteen feet above.

  Beyond the display room was a long, narrow gallery that offered views of a series of training rooms. Each room displayed one or more pairs of slaves being taught the various techniques of pit fighting by scowling druchii instructors. As they passed one of the rooms Malus heard a wretched scream; one of the instructors was demonstrating the different ways to cripple an opponent by cutting the tendons of an emaciated human slave. That’s what they do with their runts, Malus thought grimly.