[Stefan Kumansky 02] - Taint of Evil

by Neil McIntosh - (ebook by Undead)

  “You do a lot of things for other people’s own good,” Stefan commented. “But I don’t hear many extolling the virtue of your good works outside the city. Take me back to the mines, or to your cells. If yours is the true path, then I will take the opposite way.”

  Anaise narrowed her gaze, and her expression hardened. The demure, almost diffident manner of a few moments before evaporated. In that instant she was again the ruthless warrior he had witnessed on the plains of Ostermark.

  “You will follow my way,” she snarled, then hastily added, “the way of Sigmarsgeist, the true path.” She nodded to the guards standing by. “You shall follow that path, willingly or not.” She hesitated, apparently lost in thought. Her voice softened once again and she lowered her heavy lids just enough to break the intensity in her eyes.

  “But I would that we could earn your will, and your heart.” She moved a step closer. “When you first came to us, I had you marked for our champion,” she confided. “With our great vision, and your strength of passion there is little that we could not have achieved.”

  She smiled, wistfully. “It could still be so, Stefan,” she said. “Just a word from you and all this could be changed.”

  “I thought that ‘all this’ was Konstantin’s doing,” Stefan reminded her. “And none of yours.”

  “Konstantin is wise, but he has his weaknesses,” Anaise murmured. She took another step towards him, her gaze unwavering, unblinking, upon Stefan. “With my counsel, he could be persuaded to see things another way.”

  Stefan raised his arm, barring her way. The urge to strike out at Anaise was strong, but he held it in check. “Spare me your favours,” he told her. “Save your counsel for someone else.”

  “Very well,” Anaise replied. “So be it.” She lifted her gaze from Stefan to look at the domed ceiling overhead. “In any case,” she said, “your time has come and passed. I have no need of you now.”

  She snapped her fingers and teams of guards at either end of the chamber began to haul back upon the ropes suspended from convex roof of the chamber. The room was filled with a low groaning, the sound of great slabs of stone moving one upon the other.

  Stefan looked up and saw the two sides of the domed roof moving apart like a set of mighty jaws unlocking, opening the chamber to the night sky. The huge sliding panels spread apart and fastened into place. A third set of ropes drew down a cantilevered series of steps from the facing wall of the chamber, near the rim of what was now an open parapet.

  Under the watchful eye of the Guide, Stefan was led towards the stairway to the stars.

  “Please, make your way up,” she suggested. “Don’t you have any curiosity?”

  “Does it matter whether I do or not?”

  She smiled again, more enigmatically this time. “I promise,” she said, “there are wonders awaiting you there.”

  With sharpened steel a hastening reminder at his back, Stefan began to climb. The ladders bowed and flexed beneath him, but they were sturdy enough to take him safely to the top. As he reached the top of the final section, guards waiting above lifted him clear of the ladders and onto the narrow walkway that ran around the parapet’s edge. Stefan looked back down into the chamber. Figures were following him up the ladders: two Red Guards then Anaise herself. Whatever fate now lay in store for him, it seemed he was to have company.

  Now he understood where he was. He had emerged on top of one of the cluster of four enormous domes that capped the palace of Sigmarsgeist, the highest point in all the citadel. Three identical structures stood facing him, the four domes forming the points of a square which framed a courtyard far below. Everything had a precise, somehow ominous symmetry. But it was not the domes themselves, nor the courtyard that lay below, that commanded Stefan’s attention. It was what lay between the domes, and above the courtyard.

  The exterior of the palace was barely recognisable as the building he had seen on his arrival in the citadel. It had been transformed, overlaid almost entirely with a labyrinthine maze of bridges and walkways superimposed upon the existing shell of the building, an alabaster exoskeleton that seemed to glow in the night air. There were walls that jutted out at angles from other walls; bridges that began or ended nowhere, arcing upwards only to stop abruptly in mid-air. There were steps and footpaths that led down into solid ground, and those that climbed up to end in thin air. And between the four domes, where before there would have been clear space, there was now a contorted lattice-work of paths and bridges, linking the domes together like binding weeds. To Stefan it looked like insanity given solid form.

  He heard Anaise’s voice, close behind him. “This is the power of Sigmarsgeist, Stefan,” she said. “A change is coming upon the world. All who will not be part of it will be swept away.”

  Stefan gazed upon the scene with stunned wonder, tempered by a growing unease at what the nightmare might yet portend. “So,” he said at last. “These are the wonders you were so intent on showing me?”

  Anaise’s laugh was high, almost girlish. “More than this.” Her eyes sparkled, expectantly. “There is something more wondrous yet.”

  There was a sound—like a footfall or a series of steps—heavy and deliberate upon the walkway, out in the darkness somewhere just out of sight. Stefan turned around quickly, trying to locate it.

  The face of the dome that lay directly opposite was splitting open like a shell, the two halves of the golden orb peeling back to reveal the open space below. A figure was climbing up out of the darkness, just as Stefan had done a few minutes before. As Stefan looked on, the hairs on the back of his neck rose up, and a chill dagger of anticipation stroked the length of his spine. The figure stood half in shadow, but Stefan already had no doubt of who it was.

  Amidst the storm of confusion that had swept through his inner world, the man that had been Alexei Zucharov was sure of one thing. His journey had reached a decisive point. He was at a crossroads, upon a threshold that, once crossed, could never be regained: a point at which he would leave his old life behind forever, and walk towards the strange land that had become his future.

  But he had not finally crossed that threshold, not yet. Some residue of that old life remained, tumbled fragments of memory that held on, worried and tugged upon a place deep inside him like a memory that would not be cast off. Faces of the men who had been his comrades flickered fitfully in his mind like the light fading from dying lamps. The voice inside of him told him these were no longer his comrades, rather his bitter enemies now. Still the faces persisted.

  Time and again he had removed from his pocket the scrap of folded paper, a letter, unfinished and never sent, once destined for a loved one now lost forever inside that other life. The name and place had long vanished, but the feeling had not. The feeling was love, a warmth and compassion that disturbed the new Zucharov. It was a last vestige of what he once had been, a reminder, perhaps, of what he could still be. A reminder that there was a war raging at the core of his being that was not yet finally over.

  There had been no need for Kyros to explain to him that Sigmarsgeist would be that fateful place, the gateway between his old world and the one that lay beyond. He had seen it from afar, as the bounty hunter Koenig had hauled him in chains towards the city. Sigmarsgeist, the city upon the plain, its spreading mass lit by a phosphor glow that came not from any natural source, but from the tide of elemental energy that raged like a boiling sea below. The sulphurous light would have been invisible to the mortal eye, but Zucharov knew he was not quite mortal any longer. If he was to surrender his soul, then there were things he would gain in return. Zucharov saw the world as no mortal man could, he saw the things that lay below. The engines of the gods, in all their terrible majesty, were laid bare before his gaze.

  He had seen his own body change, watched it sometimes with the dispassionate stare of the spectator at a game, sometimes with the dull horror of a man who knew he was losing his very soul. The malignancy of the tattoo would not be suppressed. It now covered his arm a
nd was spreading across his shoulder to his throat and chest. Soon, he knew, it would map his entire body. He knew it was the visible stain of Chaos, the taint of evil by which he was marked for damnation. Whilst he bore the tattoo there was nowhere he could go, nowhere he could hide. His very body now proclaimed him for what he was.

  For weeks, since that moment upon the battlefield in Erengrad, Zucharov had raged against Kyros and the dark master that had branded him so. The power over men that Chaos promised him was seductive; the livid mark of mutation was not. Kyros had gifted him the living tattoo. Now it was Kyros that whispered to Zucharov how he could, if he chose, be rid of it. The key, he had told Zucharov, was a place known in legend as Tal Dur. The fathomless waters of the lake held magical powers that would surpass any imagining, power enough to take the strength of a man such as Zucharov and multiply it tenfold. The power to erase all visible sign of the mark upon his body, and the power to wash away all sight of sin.

  That was the bargain that Kyros had offered his servant. If Zucharov could find Tal Dur, then, in return, he would be the first to taste its fruits. Thereafter, there would be surely nothing that was not within his reach.

  In the meantime, Zucharov had studied the images that danced upon his flesh. The tattoo had foretold his capture by the bounty hunter, and it had foretold that he would come here, to Sigmarsgeist.

  Now, as he stepped from out of the shadows, another history was unfolding in the lines melting and reforming upon his skin. A face from memory came into resolution. Zucharov recognised it, knew it was the face of a man he had once called friend. It was the face of the man who now stood no more than twenty yards away from him. He had waited long for this, their final meeting. A meeting that, for one of them, would end only at the gates of Morr, grim God of Death. Zucharov was certain it would not be he who was about to make that final journey.

  * * *

  Stefan had not seen Alexei Zucharov since the battle for Erengrad. Stefan barely knew it then, but, as that battle ended, another was about to begin. The beginnings were there in the first gleaming of madness that shone, faint but insistent, in Zucharov’s eyes. It was there in his sudden, violent flight from the city. And it was in the small mark, no more than a bruise, half-hidden beneath the gold band that he wore upon his wrist. Stefan knew that, if ever they met again, he would see a changed man in Zucharov. But nothing had prepared him for the extent of the change that had come upon his former comrade.

  Zucharov had grown: physically he had become bigger and stronger. The man that Stefan remembered had been tall and powerfully built, more than a match for all but a few of the bravest men on the field of war. But in the days and weeks since Erengrad, every muscle in his body had expanded, and his frame had stretched and opened as though struggling to contain the awesome physical might within. The creature that was now Zucharov looked less a man than a machine of war designed with one purpose only—to deal death and destruction to any that stood in its way, and deal it without pity or discrimination. Zucharov’s deep eyes stared out at Stefan, but there was no warmth, no recognition in the connection they made.

  “Is this wonder enough for you, Stefan?” Anaise asked him.

  Stefan did not take his eyes from Zucharov for a moment.

  “This is beyond your reckoning,” he warned Anaise. “This man is more dangerous than anything you have ever known. He will destroy you, and all of your works, and leave nothing but dust.”

  Anaise laughed, a hollow, mocking sound. “It’s not me he wants to destroy, Stefan.”

  Zucharov moved out of the shadows, onto the brittle web of marbled fibres that now meshed the four domes together. With his left hand he drew out his sword, and then Stefan saw the extent of the disfigurement, the dark blemish that reflected the torment that raged within. Tiny figures moved in a macabre dance across Zucharov’s flesh. Stefan looked on, mesmerised, horrified. Everything he saw told him that Alexei Zucharov was no longer human, that every fragment of the man that he had once known as a friend was gone. And yet, as he watched Zucharov step forward, sword in outstretched hand, all Stefan saw was a mirror of his own self: a being driven by an all-consuming, single-purpose. A fierce, unyielding purity of vision, and a will to prevail that would only be subdued by death itself.

  He could not believe—was not yet ready to believe—that this was a mirror that reflected only darkness. He called out to Zucharov, the sound of his voice echoing in the night sky high above Sigmarsgeist.

  “Alexei.” The word so familiar on his tongue. The prelude to countless shared combats, and many more mugs of beer in celebration of a battle won. The familiar was now the alien, and the battle that lay ahead would be between them, and it would be unto death.

  “Alexei! In the name of the gods, don’t you know who this is?”

  Zucharov paused, his weight balanced precariously on the delicate walkway created by the arch of stone across the space between the two domes. For a moment it seemed as though he did remember. His expression shifted momentarily, and a look akin to recognition flickered in his eyes. In that moment Stefan understood that Zucharov’s soul was in the balance. The realm of Chaos had not claimed him, not yet. He prayed to the merciful gods that it might yet not be too late, and called Zucharov’s name again, this time with greater urgency.

  Zucharov turned his head, scanning the open space until his eyes locked with those of his former friend. Stefan would never know what battles raged below those dark pools, what agonies his soul endured as it slowly fell into that chasm of eternal night. The gaze flickered, but when it finally settled upon him once again Stefan knew all would be lost. Alexei Zucharov was gone, and a monster looked out at him through his eyes.

  “Stefan.” The word was spoken without warmth. It was statement of fact, an identification rather than a greeting. “Stefan Kumansky.”

  Alexei Zucharov—or the shell of the being that had once borne his name—lifted up his sword and started to cross the newly formed bridge towards Stefan.

  Stefan was unarmed. He turned to Anaise, a murderous anger towards her and all the world burning in his heart.

  “Is this how you would have it end?” he demanded furiously “Am I to be butchered by a man who no longer knows his own mind?”

  Anaise simply smiled once again, and tilted her head on one side. Stefan saw something sparkle in the night sky as it spun towards him. He reached out, grabbing the hilt of the sword before it tumbled into the well of the courtyard.

  “Now you are evenly matched,” Anaise said to him. “Now we shall find out where the gods have invested their true power.” She looked from Stefan to Alexei Zucharov, and spread her arms wide. “Now, my glorious champions. Let the contest begin.”

  The lattice of tangled paths and bridges looked too frail to bear Zucharov’s weight. Stefan heard it groan and crack as the man who was now his adversary advanced across it towards him. He sized up his options. If it came to a trial of brute strength, then he did not doubt for a moment that Zucharov, with his greater height and bulk, would prevail. Stefan would have to make the most of the advantages that he possessed—agility and speed. The brittle structure spanning the gap between the domes looked precarious by any standards, but, in the circumstances, it might offer Stefan his best hope of equalising the terms of battle. He took a deep breath, and, balancing his sword in his hand, stepped off from the edge of the parapet, and out into the unknown.

  Immediately, he could feel it. It was nothing he could see or touch, but Stefan was immediately aware of its force. Something was leaking out of the depths of the ground, oozing from the very fabric of the buildings themselves. An invisible tide of energy, funnelling up into the space between the walls of the palace. He felt it in the shuddering pulse that ran, like a second heartbeat, through his entire body. And he felt it inside his head, an omniscient presence sitting in judgement on the struggle about to commence.

  As Stefan stepped forward the walkway shivered and flexed below his feet, rolling like a boat upon the water. H
e now guessed that the structure was not made from stone at all, but from a substance more like bone, a living, growing substance like the frame of a great skeleton spreading itself across the city. Just for a moment, Stefan held the thought of turning back, but he knew that this remained his best, perhaps his only chance. He was committed now.

  The two warriors made their way towards each other, across the skewed and twisting maze that was their battleground. Twice, three times, Stefan lost his footing as the walkway dropped away or twisted suddenly to one side. But step by fateful step, across cracks that widened without warning to yawning chasms, Stefan and his nemesis edged ever closer to their confrontation. At last, all that separated them was a single span of bridge, a brittle ivory spine no more than twelve feet across. Alexei Zucharov took two steps out upon it, and from the other side, Stefan matched him pace for pace. The two were now little more than a sword’s length apart.

  Stefan weighed the sword in his hand, calculating the angle and speed of his attack. Yet in his heart he was still not ready to believe his comrade had totally surrendered his soul to Chaos. He could not believe there was not still some flickering of humanity remaining somewhere inside Zucharov. He called Alexei’s name a second time, and a third, hoping against hope that somehow he could yet connect with the man he had once called his friend.

  Zucharov stopped, midway across, his sword frozen in mid-air. The fragile bridge rolled drunkenly under his weight, the whole structure poised between suspension and collapse. Zucharov shifted his balance, settling the bridge. His eyes fell upon Stefan, and recognition flickered, a last guttering flame of kinship between the two swordsmen, then he struck. The big man sprang forward, lithe and supple, quicker than Stefan could possibly have anticipated. Not only was he bigger and stronger than before, but he was also much faster. The one advantage Stefan had held over his former comrade had evaporated before he had cast a single blow.

  Stefan retreated under a torrent of strokes from Zucharov’s sword. Before he could attack, he had to defend. All his skill was being channelled into simply staying alive. Zucharov’s blade slashed through the night air, carving splinters from the shuddering bridge. In no time at all, Stefan had fallen back to the edge of the parapet.