William looked down at it. It was unremarkable, a carved wooden symbol on a cord. The symbol was of a primitive sun and a wing wrapped underneath it.
‘What is that?’ William asked, showing Thomas.
The Englishman shook his head. ‘It could be tribal.’
‘Tribal?’
‘Bedouin tribes of the deserts visit Rashid. They sell such things in bazaars. They are worthless.’
‘Bedouins?’
‘Arabs who live in the deserts,’ Thomas explained. ‘Nomads.’
William felt a sting of recognition: nomads; wanderers.
‘She says you can buy it from her,’ Thomas said and laughed.
‘I thought it was a keepsake. Something for luck,’ William replied.
‘To her it is worthless,’ Thomas said. ‘She cannot spend it.’
William turned the pendant over in his palm. ‘Three gold coins,’ he said and put up three fingers.
Malika put up four.
Controlling his temper, William agreed and gave her the coins. He took the pendant from her hands and left without another word, Thomas pausing only to look once more upon her beauty.
On the way out, Thomas laughed. ‘You’re the only man I know who has come to Malika’s, spent much money, yet has left as he came!’
William ignored him and trudged down the stairs, the pendant clutched in his fingers.
As they made their way to the entrance, a man came in, bent and with a withered demeanour, but his face was younger than his posture. William took him to be a servant of the brothel, yet he approached the English merchant directly, waving with some urgency.
Thomas Richmond frowned. ‘Hammid? What does the fool want now?’ he hissed, just loud enough for William to hear.
William was hardly interested as the stooped man spoke hurriedly, his eyes not once settling on the Englishman’s newfound friend.
‘My servant,’ Thomas grumbled to William, ‘and a foolish one. But he does have some uses. I’m afraid I must leave you now.’
‘Is there anything wrong?’ William asked.
Thomas glanced at Hammid, who moved away, more aloof than before. ‘It appears there is some trouble with my shipment. A merchant’s life is an exciting one!’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ William said, shaking Thomas’s hand. ‘I hope it is no great nuisance.’
Thomas seemed indifferent. ‘Rashid is a town of thieves, sir. Remember that. Do not trust any of them, or they’ll steal the clothes from your backs and the boots from your feet. Good night, sir.’
As Thomas Richmond left him, William felt glad to have met the kindly merchant. He had been an affable fellow, and perhaps they might have shared a conversation under different circumstances.
Yet the position was now clear: they had no further leads, and little prospect of finding the Hoard of Mhorrer.
CHAPTER NINE
Blood and Babel’s
I
Malika’s gold coins would be spent on lavish gowns and luxurious food. Not the clothes lent to her by her lecherous and repugnant master, Khayyam, nor the slop brought to her room every morning and evening. She would buy real food, fresh fruit and bread. And a robe that brought out the shape of her body and hid its sins. Studying herself in the hand mirror, Malika recognized she was no longer young like some of the other girls. There were lines under her eyes and her breasts sagged a little. She cupped them, wishing they were pert once more, as they had been in her prime.
‘Ah, perfection . . .’ came a murmur from the window and Malika leapt in fright, dropping the mirror, which shattered into tiny pieces.
‘Did I startle you?’ the voice came again, the echoing from the impenetrable shadows that lay between the window and the faint lights of the buildings across the street.
Malika rose from her bed and nodded slightly, her arms about her chest.
‘What a glorious beauty you are. Why so modest?’ the voice remarked and came closer. As it neared her it seemed to solidify, stretching from the shadows at the window across the room until it almost touched her feet. Then from the shadow emerged the flesh, wrapped in a long raven cloak. It seemed to extrude itself from the night until it was whole, clad head to toe in black, topped with a white face crowned with curled, red hair.
‘Please . . .’ Malika began and then started to sob.
‘No tears on my account, Malika,’ said the man before her. He gave a crooked leer, with teeth like the shattered glass on her floor. His white skin was like the surface of the moon and enhanced the crackling of his deep yellow eyes, alive with blue flecks of lightning that made them dance.
‘I told them nothing,’ Malika wept.
‘I know, Malika, I know,’ the stranger said as he seemed to float across the room to her bed. ‘But isn’t it what we do that tells the truth? Not what we say?’
Malika crawled onto her bed, scattering the abundance of silk pillows before her. She grabbed one, as though it might offer her some protection. The man with red hair halted at the bottom of her bed, and then seemed to bend impossibly forward, until he towered over the mattress, his face and hands not so far from her. She let out a whimper, looking for a place to escape. The curtain to the hubbub of the brothel outside was tempting, but the man was between her and it. And at the window grew more shadows, and from them came murmurs of excitement.
One of the shadows broke from the others and drifted over, a woman as tall as the man, with lank, black hair. Her skin was the colour of bone and her lips were a dark grey.
‘She lies to us, Baron,’ the woman said as she came to the man’s side.
‘It is the nature of every frightened animal to lie, Ileana,’ the man replied, and reached out to Malika, his finger stretching so that it touched her just under the chin, the same spot William had felt minutes before.
‘I have not lied!’ Malika protested, the pillow now pulled up to her jaw, forcing the man to retract his hand.
‘No?’ the man asked, and straightened up to run his spidery fingers through his flame-red hair. He threw his head back, folding his arms. ‘I asked only for two things, Malika .. . Dear Malika,’ the man said, his eyes crackling with light.
‘And I did both of them, my lord,’ Malika cried.
‘Yes, I suppose in some way you did,’ the man chuckled. ‘You introduced me to Charles Greynell, and you have not told a soul of what we both know.’
‘Then I have not lied?’ Malika asked hopefully.
‘Not with the tongue . . . but you have with your actions,’ the baron insisted. ‘What did you give to the man who was here?’
‘It was nothing . . .’ Malika cried. ‘. . . Something worthless.’
‘Worthless?’ the man with the red hair said. ‘Yet he paid you for it. He must have found it worthy.’
‘It was a necklace. A tribal necklace. It meant nothing!’ she sobbed.
The man stared down at her, trying to search her soul for more lies. ‘Worthless to you, maybe . . .’
The woman at the man’s side snarled and hissed something into his ear. The man flinched and scowled at her. ‘Do not forget your place, Ileana. This is my coven. Mine! Do you think I have not made plans?! Do you think . . .?!’ he ranted at the woman called Ileana. She shrank back into the shadows as another came to him. He was a bald man, also dressed in black, his skull tattooed with a giant crow’s wing that reached from the neck, over the crown towards his brow.
‘The men of the Church are still here, Baron,’ he said.
The man with the red hair gave him a cursory look. ‘Still?’
The bald man nodded.
‘Unfortunate . . .’ the man replied and gestured to Ileana.
‘Please,’ Malika began, ‘let me go. I have done all that you asked. I just want to be alone. Alone with Charlie.’
The man with the red hair grinned and looked down at her sadly. ‘You wish to join Charlie Boy?’
Malika nodded quickly. Charlie was her best customer, but he was also an accomplished lo
ver and a rich merchant. For months he had been her only chance to escape Babel’s and find a life outside the brothel. A life he had once promised during pillow talk, one that would dress her in finery amongst the gentry of Europe. Since childhood, she had lived in Babel’s, forced to submit to men who sickened her, or beaten by Khayyam. Charlie, sweet Charlie with his secrets and strange manner, had been her only chance. And had he not said he would reward her well if she gave the necklace to ‘the men in grey coats’ and not to the shadows that ‘scared her the most’?
She had not seen Charlie since he’d asked her to do that one thing, and she felt horribly guilty after Baron Horia forced her to tell him everything about her lover. She felt she was cheating on Charlie with another, betraying his trust. Yet the baron was threatening and charming in equal measure. She could not refuse him.
‘She wishes to join Charles Greynell, Ileana,’ the man called Baron Horia said.
Ileana smiled cruelly as she pulled out something from her gown. It was a small thing, the size of the woman’s palm and shaped like a pyramid. It seemed to sing with light, a soulful sound as cyan tendrils flickered along the surface of each side. It might have been made of black glass, yet for a moment it lost cohesion as something made it squirm like treacle.
Malika was hypnotized by it.
‘Do you know what this is, Malika dear?’ Baron Horia asked as he bent close to her, staring also at the object resting on Ileana’s palm.
Malika shook her head slowly and silently.
That music . . .
‘It is a Scarimadaen, Malika . . .’ he told her, whispering with a voice that seemed to echo in her skull, the words filling her head, almost drowning her. She grew drowsy, spellbound, her eyes flickering rapidly. ‘. . . It is the giving of power unimaginable. A power that spreads such sweet corruption that many would happily die for it. Your Charlie never experienced the power of the Scarimadaen, yet he would have stopped others from doing so. I found that quite selfish, don’t you?’
‘It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ Malika murmured sleepily.
‘Yes,’ the baron said as Malika crawled in a trance down the bed to be closer to the object.
‘May I . . . touch it? she asked.
Ileana looked positively rapturous with Malika’s response and the bald man by her side, called Racinet, was equally amused. ‘She is too pretty to destroy, Baron, he remarked.
‘Yes. Too pretty. But her looks will fade in time. She will wither and she will no longer be the pretty one’ the man with the red hair said distantly.
Malika hadn’t heard a word of their conversation, transfixed as she was by the pyramid’s disjointed song, like the low humming of an incongruous choir in mourning. No one else in the room seemed to hear it, or to care for it. To Malika it was the most beautiful song she had heard. Something to cherish. To covet. To . . .
The baron leaned close to her, his lips by her ears. ‘Do you wish to touch it?’ he whispered.
Malika nodded.
‘Then do so, and join Charlie . . ’ the baron growled and reached out with astonishing speed to her arms. He seized them both, causing Malika to yelp, and then bit down on her wrist, his sharp incisors splitting open her flawless skin. Blood spurted across the bed, over the baron’s white face and down his chin as Malika shrieked in agony and terror. He took the bleeding wrist and pressed it down hard on the surface of the Scarimadaen.
At once the song grew cacophonous and light spewed forth. The walls of the pyramid seemed to break open.
And then came the Fire. The Fury The Daemon . . .
. . . Burning Malika’s soul into oblivion.
II
A whore of diminutive size, making up for her petite proportions with boundless energy and enthusiasm, latched onto William’s arm and began caressing his thigh. He managed to pull her arms away, but like a limpet she only latched on to him more strongly, thinking him playful.
William drew a couple of coins from his pouch and hurled them to the floor, The sound of its landing catching her attention and alerting other whores, who scrabbled amongst the feet of customers. The patrons roared with laughter and pointed at the struggling women who fought over the coins. It was a pitiful sight.
The urge to escape the brothel grew. William found the heat and laughter stifling, suffocating. The sounds of merriment and carnalities increased until they were deafening. He was disorientated, troubled, and his temper grew. Leering, grinning faces were about him at every turn, and he might have lost patience as he forced himself away. But then something else happened that he did not expect.
Amongst the shrill hilarity and booming laughter it would have been easy to mishear a terrible scream above them. But William was attuned to such cries. He looked up to the balconies, hoping he was mistaken, the hairs standing up on his neck telling him he wasn’t.
Babel’s lay in ignorance, over a hundred men and women blissfully unaware of the danger so very close at hand. It was a carnal hall, and while sex and sodomy proceeded in the shadows, above them came a howl that was simply drowned out by the cacophony of copulation and sport.
Suddenly, with a shattering roar, the creature burst into view in an explosion of brick and dust. It tore away the narrow walls, and the red curtain plummeted over the edge of the balcony, carried by the weight of broken masonry. The customers below looked up in surprise or bemusement as they were pelted with shards of brick and choked in dust, still unaware of the danger.
The daemon was larger than a bear. Its arms were as long as its body and legs, its backbone so pronounced that it appeared driven through the black flesh. Its head was gigantic, out of all proportion to the rest of the body, so that its jaw hung down the full length of the torso, the gums riven by needle teeth. Around its head fizzled the remnants of hair, giving it a coronet of smoke, while the creature’s eyes burned brightly, suffused with black haze and sapphire light that blazed from the sockets in its deformed skull. It spread its arms, a winged monstrosity, and swooped from the landing. William gasped as it burst among the people below Two men were crushed by its falling weight. A merchant’s head was staved in. A woman in her black gown was caught by a stray blow of the creature’s paw that ripped her in two.
Three more men turned to flee, but the daemon tore them apart in mid-step, arterial sprays and offal jetting across the floor. The daemon threw back its enormous head, its jaws stretching impossibly, and howled in triumph, not just for the chaos and death it had wrought so far but for what promised to come.
III
Peruzo heard the roar of the daemon. Nico was too busy speaking to Leone to realize what had happened, but the lieutenant’s heart skipped with dread at the low noise rumbling from the window above them.
Peruzo drew his sword as the first of the customers fled Babel’s. Nico and Leone followed soon after and all three rushed towards the entrance of the brothel. The whores who loitered at the door appeared bewildered, while some patrons dared to look inside. They had spent their lives in pursuit of the wildest pleasures, and curiosity got the better of many jostling to find out what new chaos was erupting inside Babel’s.
Peruzo drove through the throng, the two brothers close behind.
A scene of utter carnage greeted them.
The daemon had made a butcher’s block of the centre of the room. Corpses lay everywhere, while wounded spilled towards the exit clutching half-severed limbs, with faces gouged to the bone and blood on their clothes, both their own and their companions’.
While many fled, others tried to fight back. A local man was ripped limb from limb as he tried to strike at it with his sword. Another customer swung a chair at the beast, but it only shattered against its hide. The daemon lost no time but flung its attacker clear across the room, straight into the plate-glass mirror that hung over the bar. It broke both bone and glass, and the lifeless body fell onto Khayyam, who wrapped his arms around his head as though it might save him.
William had been powerless to prevent
the first acts of slaughter. The room had surged with desperate fugitives, and at first he was buffeted away from the daemon on a wave of panic. It was only when most had escaped, leaving the dazed and the wounded behind, that William strode towards the centre of the room. He saw Peruzo leading Leone and Nico inside and waved them over.
‘Flank it! Flank it now!’ William cried out to the two brothers.
They nodded and ran towards the stairs, while William pointed Peruzo down the side of the bar.
A prostitute cowering in the shadows lost her nerve and broke into flight. William held up a hand, shouting, ‘No! Wait!’ . . . but already too late. The daemon swung itself around, its arm reached out, and the woman ran blindly into its clutch. The claws clenched and the talons on each finger skewered her, before her killer shook her like a rag doll and threw her across the room to land lifeless in the corner.
William drew his sabre from his long grey coat and looked for the creature’s vulnerable spot. Above the enormous head was a limp flap of burnt flesh between the armour of its back and the skull. This was their target. William gestured to the back of his own neck to Peruzo, who nodded with understanding. If one of them could only distract it, the other might decapitate the foul creature.
Deciding to act as bait, William waved his sabre in the air and hurled a discarded bottle at the daemon; the bottle merely shattered on its armour. The creature refused to be goaded, but held William with its incandescent stare, measuring him as a threat while it pawed the ground. When William stepped leftward, the daemon stepped right. When he paused and stepped back to the right, it mimicked his movements with a snort of sulphuric smoke that fouled the air around it. William halted, feeling trapped as he looked into the daemon’s glowering eyes and slavering mouth.
It would not move unless he did.
It would not attack . . . unless William turned and fled.
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