by Ben Counter
‘A passing fancy,’ said the lady with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘The lord once doted on them. Now they are left to their own devices. They keep out the low-blooded and weak. You, then, are neither.’
Skanis looked her up and down. Her limbs and neck were overlong and her torso had a serpentine curve to it. He guessed her body had been elongated and altered, perhaps to give her greater height and presence, perhaps to fulfil some base desire of her lord. Beneath the silver mask, he could see the sutures around her jaw and hairline where her face had been removed and replaced.
‘I do not intend to stay,’ he said.
‘Lord Fithrichol would wish to speak with you,’ she said. ‘It is not wise to deny him such a simple courtesy.’
Though the tone of her voice did not change, one of the wych dancers pirouetted close enough for Skanis to see the array of blades concealed in his close-fitting body harness. By the standards of the courtly machinations of Commorragh, it was not a subtle threat.
Skanis followed the lady across the grand hall towards the throne. Every courtier watched him, some with a smirk of mockery, some with open curiosity or even desire. Skanis tasted bile as he felt their eyes on him. This was the world of lies he hated even more than the brutal politics of the kabals. At least there was an honesty to the stabbed backs and slit throats that were a kabalite’s world.
A narcotic fug surrounded Lord Fithrichol’s throne. The pupil of the lord’s one visible eye dilated as pistons in his back forced another massive dose into his system. ‘Who is this you have brought us, Lady Chagrine?’ he said in a voice well-oiled by courtly manners.
‘Just a traveller,’ said Skanis. ‘I am passing through your realm.’
‘To the spire pinnacle, I take it?’ said Fithrichol. ‘Those new appendages of yours will do you little good down here. You need to get above the smog of the city. But why the hurry? In our desire to reach our goals, we so often forget to wait and while and experience what this wondrous city has to offer.’
Skanis looked from one face to the next. The courtiers near the throne were a mixture of wyches, nobles and lesser servants, their features slack with sedate oblivion. The ones still in possession of their senses were either there to wait on Fithrichol’s needs, or had been selected for their beauty to act as living ornaments for the court. The drukhari who made up Fithrichol’s throne sweated and creaked as he shifted his abnormal bulk.
‘I must refuse you,’ said Skanis. ‘I cannot wait here. The sky calls to me.’
‘Perhaps you have made an error,’ said Fithrichol. ‘Perfectly understandable. You are an outsider. You are new to the ways of my court. Let those errors be dispelled. I am Lord Fithrichol of Kaledari Spire. This is my kingdom. Everything in it is mine. When you walked over the threshold, you voluntarily entered my service unto death. This is the way it has always been. So you see the wondrous new life the fates have granted you. Service to me, in return for the deepest wonders of the mind, the sacred oblivion where the only freedom lies. You are a keen and deadly warrior, that much is clear to me. I value such individuals greatly. There will be much pleasure in return for your service.’
Skanis recoiled inwardly and hoped his new body was under enough control to hide it. If he stayed here too long, someone in the court would find his guard down. A needle would prick his skin and he would fall into the stupor with which Fithrichol controlled the lackeys of his court. With so many eyes on him, there was no immediate way to escape without every able-bodied soul in the court giving chase.
‘I see you doubt my hospitality,’ said Fithrichol. ‘Again, understandable. You have not yet learned. Take a token of my good will.’ He waved a sagging-fleshed hand at the handmaidens attending Lady Chagrine. ‘Choose one. Choose two or three. Do with them what you will. Ravegar here is a fleshcrafter, purely as a hobby, but he has some skill.’ Fithrichol indicated a slender, sharp-faced attendant wearing simple black. ‘Purely an amateur, but he can make of your prizes whatever you desire.’
‘It would be my greatest honour to serve the Lord of Kaledari Spire,’ said Skanis.
There was a truth about this place, concealed beneath the surface by a web of lies so thick only an outsider could see it. It was in the fawning curtsey Lady Chagrine gave to her lord as she beckoned Skanis to join her and her handmaidens. It was in the way the wyches gyrated and pranced to the rise and fall of the corpse-orchestra’s rhythm. Skanis could just glimpse it beneath the veneer, something buried deep, something dangerous.
Something Lord Fithrichol was terrified of.
‘Choose,’ said Lady Chagrine. Skanis looked from one handmaiden to the next. They were all dressed in less lavish versions of their mistress’ ivory-white garb, all with the same slender, brittle beauty. Skanis chose one at random. She had pure black hair and eyes.
‘Her,’ he said.
‘Varithrya,’ said Lady Chagrine. ‘Honour your master.’
Varithrya gave Skanis a coquettish smile and curtseyed before him. Skanis leaned in close to her. His senses were full of her perfume.
‘Give me the chance and I’ll kill him,’ he whispered to her.
Though her face did not change, he could sense her body go rigid with anticipation. The tiny talons of the razorwing chick pricked the skin of his shoulder, feeling the tension alongside him.
‘I just need a moment. It’ll be me doing the killing. No one need suspect you. Just give me the opportunity and I shall end him.’
Varithyra paused just a moment too long before she beamed at Skanis. ‘Will my master not present me to his lord?’ she said.
‘Of course,’ replied Skanis. ‘I must show off my prize.’
He led her by the hand back to the throne. He could feel her pulse quickening.
This was the truth, Skanis realised. The buried horror. The dread that occupied Fithrichol’s every thought. It wasn’t even a secret, not in the truest sense, because everyone in the court knew it. They just didn’t know that everyone else knew it too.
They hated Fithrichol. Every single one of them. They despised the way he manipulated them into slavery and kept them balanced against one another in a constant game of allegiance and servitude, reward and threat, patronage and abandonment. The whole court despised everything Lord Fithrichol was, but none of them dared act upon that hatred because each one thought they were alone.
‘A fine choice,’ said Fithrichol as Skanis presented Varithrya before the throne. ‘I had an eye on her myself.’
Varithrya bowed low with an expansive sweep of the arm. Her hand brushed against one of the many valves and switches controlling the narcotic-dosing apparatus mounted on the lord’s back.
Fithrichol sat back on his living throne. His one visible pupil dilated and he sighed out a long breath as a sudden spike of narcotics flooded his system.
In the half-second that gave him, Skanis’ dagger was in his hand. As Fithrichol’s focus returned, Skanis was aiming the dagger at his throat. By the time the tip of the blade touched his skin, Fithrichol was fully aware once more.
But it was too late.
Skanis felt bloated, sagging flesh parting under the blade, then gristle and bone. He rammed the blade all the way through Fithrichol’s throat and gave it a twist, opening up a ruby-red void in the lord’s neck. Hot, dark blood spurted down the front of Fithrichol’s clothing. Skanis angled the blade upwards and thrust it home again, punching it through Fithrichol’s palate and into the base of his brain.
The razorwing chick squawked as Fithrichol gurgled out a mouthful of gore.
The court merely watched. The music continued, for the corpse-orchestra had no understanding of what had just happened. But the wych-dancers were still and the courtiers stopped their scheming and fawning.
No one moved.
Skanis gripped Fithrichol’s body by the collar and threw it to the floor in front of the throne. The remaining
air rattled out of the lord’s lungs.
‘Who wants it?’ demanded Skanis to the court, indicating the empty throne of twisted bodies. ‘Take it! Take it!’
It was Varithrya who reacted first. She grabbed a knife from Fithrichol’s body, an ornamental weapon with an ornate hilt and gilded blade. She leapt up onto the throne, brandishing the knife in all directions.
‘You treacherous whelp,’ screeched Lady Chagrine. ‘Tear her down!’ she shouted to her handmaidens. ‘Remove her from my throne!’
But the handmaidens did not obey. They surrounded their mistress, and the hate in their eyes was finally given form.
The wyches drew their knives. Those courtiers who were not lolling insensible grabbed whatever weapons they could find. In a few moments, the court was transformed from a place of fawning hierarchy to a melee where each individual turned against whoever was closest, and blood spattered onto the tiled floor as a scrum erupted in front of the throne.
No one noticed as Skanis took his leave of the scene of bedlam the audience chamber had become. He skulked away as raised voices and screaming echoed around the place. Varithrya was fighting off Ravegar, the amateur fleshcrafter. As the handmaiden rammed her gilded dagger into the courtier’s eye, Skanis ducked through a side passageway.
Past the audience chamber was a grand staircase. It wound around a statue of a much younger and less artificial Lady Chagrine, sculpted frolicking in a fountain. Skanis ran past it and up the steps.
The screams of the dead and dying took a long time to fade as Skanis forged upwards. And even when they had fallen silent, the music of the corpse-orchestra remained.
It was after a long and punishing climb, through ruined floors and abandoned finery, that Skanis came to a realm of chains and cages.
The air was thrumming with the rumble of bestial breaths and heartbeats. In the near-total darkness, beasts paced or slept in their cages. Other gibbets and cells were suspended from the high ceiling that had once been part of a grand cathedral to a past lord or lady of the spire. The altar, where the lord had once accepted prayers and sacrifices, was surrounded by smaller cages with jewelled lizards and vicious rat-like predators kept captive.
The air was thick with the smell of dung and blood.
Skanis backed against a wall, keeping it between him and an enormous shaggy creature that slept chained to a pillar. He recognised the massive, powerful limbs and many-eyed crimson face of a Clawed Fiend, and knew it was a fine specimen worth a fortune in the city’s fighting pits and execution arenas. Other cages nearby held khymerae, skinless quadrupeds with exposed skulls for faces, or fungus-based predators that accompanied orkoid war fleets and were little more than odious round bodies and teeth.
The razorwing clung more tightly to his shoulder. Everything here was new and uncertain to the creature, and truth be told, it was to Skanis as well. He had never been this close to the beasts of the arena and battlefield before. His old archon had kept a gorewyrm, a vicious tube of muscle with teeth at one end that sprayed acidic bile. It had been a child’s pet compared to some of the creatures here.
Skanis crept through the menageries trying not to wake or disturb any of its thousands of inmates. Above him, a thing like a massive lizard crossed with a bat roosted in chains. A sslyth, with its fangs pulled out and fresh drill wounds in the side of its cranium, sat and drooled. A hive of insects mauled one another silently with their pincer-like mouthparts, encased in a glass maze.
‘It is not often I have a guest who walks on two feet,’ came a voice from the shadows.
Skanis tensed and cursed himself. The low susurration of sleeping animals had masked the sound of the other’s footsteps, and the clutter of cages and cells had cut off his vision. Even before he had been given new senses by the haemonculus, he had never been surprised like that. If he had, he would be dead.
From between two cages walked a muscular female figure in a close-fitting armoured bodysuit. On a loop at her waist hung the coiled whip of a beastmaster. Strapped to her back was a staff that ended in a two-pronged globe and her armour was covered in vials of poisons and sedatives. Her face was broad and sharp, and her shaven head was disfigured by three scars across her scalp deep enough to expose the bone. ‘Are you, by any chance, responsible for the delightful commotion from below?’ she asked.
‘What does it matter to you if I am?’
The beastmaster shrugged. ‘I prefer their screaming to their music,’ she said. ‘Fithrichol was a bad customer anyway. He always butchered my beasts and served them up to his followers.’
‘Fithrichol is dead, and half his court with him.’
The beastmaster smiled. ‘And none shall mourn them,’ she said. ‘But you’re different. I haven’t come across one of your kind before.’
‘I am just passing through.’
‘Did Urviel make you? Another customer I would not be sorry to lose.’ The beastmaster took a few more steps closer to Skanis, who felt his muscles tense automatically. The beastmaster’s eyes ran up and down him, as if she were assessing the pedigree of a valuable pit-beast. ‘Good haunches,’ she said. ‘I wonder where he got them from. Talons from a ripperspine, grafted in with khymera skin. Did he give you the nerve-bundles from a barbed scuttler? Very good for the reactions. It’s a signature of his. Tell me, do you have any idea where half of you is even from?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Skanis. ‘I will soar above Commorragh. I will ride the winds over its spiretops. I don’t care what beasts had to die to make it possible.’
‘But you’re so close to a beast yourself,’ said the beastmaster, with a smile that made something recoil inside Skanis. ‘You have shed what makes you drukhari and replaced it with something else. You are as enamoured with these creatures as I am.’ She turned and indicated her caged menagerie with a sweep of her hand. ‘I put them in cages. I train them. I buy and sell them. They exist at my pleasure. But you want to be one of them.’
The kabalite pride, the hot fury, wouldn’t let Skanis walk away. ‘If you are so far superior, beastmaster, then why do you lurk here in this filthy place? You are a slave to the lords and archons like every other vermin of Commorragh. What is it about this existence we find so alluring? This misery. This desperation. This servitude. Why does every single drukhari not strive to leave it behind?’
‘Because one day,’ said the beastmaster, face to face with Skanis now, ‘I will loose my beasts on the courts of the great and cruel, and I will become a lord of Commorragh. Then I will have everything I ever desire.’ She ran a hand along Skanis’ arm. The nerve endings flared up at her touch. ‘And I desire a lot.’
Skanis pulled his arm away. ‘Everything I desire,’ he said, ‘lies far above here.’
‘Wait,’ said the beastmaster as Skanis turned to walk away. ‘That plumage. Steel and the rust of old blood. I have sold thousands of razorwings but never one in those colours.’
Skanis glanced at the razorwing chick out of the corner of his eye. It still clung to his shoulder, shivering in discomfort with the presence of so many strange creatures. ‘It is not for sale.’
‘Everything is for sale. What is your price?’
‘To leave here,’ said Skanis
‘Oh, my dear,’ said the beastmaster, leaning close against Skanis. He could smell the spice and leather on her. ‘That is the only thing I can’t give you.’
Skanis spun out of her grip. In response, she drew the whip from her waist. He threw himself backwards as she lashed it at him and felt it draw a line of pain down one shin with a tremendous crack.
The noise woke the sleeping beasts. A rising cacophony erupted from everywhere at once as Skanis rolled past a cage of squawking flightless birds and into the cover of a pillar.
‘Give me the razorwing and you live,’ called the beastmaster over the din. ‘The best deal you will ever make!’
Skanis drew his pisto
l and fired in the direction of her voice. He heard the shards bursting harmlessly against stone.
The beastmaster struck again, the whip extending into a barbed length that wrapped around the pillar and scored a dozen deep furrows against Skanis’ ribs. He roared in frustration as the weapon was withdrawn. He fired again, glimpsing the beastmaster with her lash in one hand and the pronged spear in the other.
Skanis swapped a new shard cylinder into the pistol. He lost sight of her and knew he was outclassed. The beastmaster had the range on him and this was her territory. Only a lucky hit from the pistol would win this for him. That wasn’t a good enough chance. If she caught him well with the barbs, if she approached from an unexpected direction and pinned him in place with her spear, he would be dead before he could pull the trigger again.
He broke from the cover of the pillar. The crack of the whip and the swish of air past his ear told him the beastmaster had almost caught him around the neck. He skidded into the cover of a bank of khymerae cages, and flinched as the feline horrors snapped and snarled on the other side of the bars.
‘I have a cage just for you,’ snarled the beastmaster.
Skanis saw what he sought through the gloom – not the beastmaster, but the Clawed Fiend. It had woken up with the commotion and was growling and pacing, stretching the chain that tied it to the pillar.
He might only get one shot. He sighted down the pistol, expecting the barbed whip to take his hand clean off. He squeezed the trigger slowly but firmly, as he had learned in the bleeding halls of his kabal a lifetime ago.
The shards sheared through the chain holding the Clawed Fiend. The creature flicked its head and the chain thrashed around it, clattering off the stone of the pillar.
Skanis broke and ran as the Clawed Fiend burst into the menagerie. Its huge, shaggy bulk threw cages to the floor, and where they broke open, other creatures were set free. Shin-high predatory lizards hopped and shrieked. A muscular worm-like creature bunched and sprang, leaving a spray of purplish mucus in its wake. One of the khymerae was loose and it pounced on the smaller creatures suddenly scurrying around its feet. Its jaws closed in a flash of red and it threw a writhing furry body aside.