The feel of the knife in his hands brought a second expression to his youthful, unscarred features.
He smiled.
They could never catch him, no matter how they tried. The boy was a blur of black clothes, cut from the shadows on street corners. His ragged boots barely touched the ground as he ran.
Gunfire chased him, bestial and barking in the night. The bullets were insects, buzzing by his ears. He grinned harder, running faster. Around a corner. Into an alley. He jumped over the filthy rainwater puddles, spinning into a crouch between two large residential waste containers. The boy covered his white hands in his pockets, lowered his head so his dirty black hair veiled his face, and held his breath.
There he waited, a shadow like any other, all movement suspended.
His pursuers came in a breathless pack, their wheezing gasps scented of poisoned water and their skin smelling of other people’s blood. Some went left, some went right, but all of them ran through the puddles that turned the alley into a concrete marsh.
The boy had to try not to smile; their bootprints on the pavement would make tracking them the easiest thing in the world.
One of them stayed in the alley. From his ragged breaths and racing heart, the boy knew without looking that the man’s corpulence prevented him from keeping up with his miserable packmates. The boy opened his eyes, rose to his feet, and left the shadows. He let the knife in his hand catch the reflection of a nearby streetlight.
The man turned, looking right into the skinny boy’s smiling, snarling face.
His scream drew his friends back. The fastest of them took less than twenty seconds to reach the alley mouth again. When they arrived, there was no sign of the boy, and the fat man who belonged to their pack lay on his back in a rainwater puddle clouding with hot blood, with every finger severed and his skinned face bare to the bone.
He was hungry.
He knew he could rob the dead, take their coins and papers to buy food. He also knew he could simply steal food from the street traders, taking their fruit and warm bread, for he was quick enough to escape without ever being caught.
The boy’s stomach knotted, coiling in on itself, groaning with need. He’d tried drinking his own blood the last time he felt this hungry. It helped take the edge off the pain, but left him just as weak as before.
Rats were no longer enough. He needed more. He’d caught one two hours ago, but he needed it to bait his trap. It took all his strength not to surrender to the torment in his stomach and just eat the starved vermin, little crackling bones and all.
Finally, a pack of three wild dogs, each one more ratty and bedraggled than the last, growled and snarled at the mouth of the alleyway, fighting over the dead rat the boy had left in the open.
His tongue tingling, thickened by the hot rush of saliva, the boy reached for his knife and started running.
He watched the city below, crouched on the edge of the rooftop, hunched over in mimicry of the monstrous gargoyle next to him. His clothes were rags with no hope of keeping out the cold. He grew too fast, needing to steal something new almost every week. In truth, he was no longer even a boy. He was already as tall as the people he cut, and carved, and killed.
The territory below belonged to the men and women with red tears tattooed on their faces. The boy usually avoided their domain, but tonight the screaming beckoned him closer. He’d warned them before, more than once. He’d warned them that they’d pay a price in blood every time they came into his part of the city.
And yet they came anyway. They’d come in packs, killing men from the neighbouring district, and dragging women back for sport.
No. No more. The pale man slipped from the roof, lowering himself with nothing more than handholds on the stone walls. His boots graced the alley below with a spectre’s tread, and clad in a beggar’s rags, he went to see why his warnings weren’t being heeded.
They’d left sentries in the row of abandoned factories that marked the edge of their domain. He came across the first one – a man with a mangy hound – by dropping down from a hole in the ruined ceiling.
The sentry turned, raising his gun, but the pale man broke his arm at the elbow and rammed a dagger of glass into his dirty neck. The dog growled, backing away, teeth bared but unwilling to fight. The pale man stared back at it, his eyes narrowed, his own white teeth on show.
The dog ran away, yelping and whining.
Before the pale man left, he sawed through the dead sentry’s throat and left the severed head on an iron fence railing. Perhaps placing the warnings inside the gang’s territory would work better. He’d leave a dozen, perhaps twenty this time.
If that failed, the next time he’d leave forty.
Weeping was music to him. Gunfire was laughter. Sorrow and panic were the verse and chorus to his entire life. Not because he enjoyed them, but because in this city, they were all he heard. They were the sounds that nourished him in infancy, in absence of a mother’s milk. With the cries of urban decay in his ears, he grew to manhood – and then into something beyond it.
They were writing about him. He couldn’t read, but he still gleaned insight and understanding from looking at the script on a scrap of newspaper, or the scroll of text across a monitor. He learned the local tongue without trying, without even knowing how. The understanding simply came, and it felt right that it should do so.
An avenging soul, they called him. A murderous echo from the Age of Unwanted Law, stalking the city. A ghost from Old Earth haunting the streets at night. First they gave him a name, to put a face on their fears. Soon enough, the name became a curse.
The Night Haunter.
He ghosted through the cathedral, through this great house to a false god, crawling across the arched ceiling without a sound, lost above where the lights could reach. The queen-priest of this monumental building stole from her people. She bled them of money, of freedom, and of blood. She took their children. She controlled their lives. All for the dubious honour of her protection – protection from other street-kings and alley-queens, who would only do the same things she did.
It saddened the pale man to see how weak people were. Sometimes, they seemed no different from the dogs they used to guard their homes. They took the same beatings, and wore collars just as binding, if not quite as physical. Many of them were skin-inked by their masters, pressed into legal slavery, or simply ran the streets in wild packs, taking whatever they wished by threat or force.
Most of them – those that didn’t serve as indentured slaves in the urban cityscape – were foundry workers, toiling in the stinking factories whose breath choked the skies and blocked out the weakling sun.
He walked on the edge of a society with no fear of punishment, and therefore no concept of justice. These people, on the basest level, had no need – no compunction – to obey anything but the rule of might making right. And even that rule was divided, broken down between hundreds and hundreds of petty pack leaders and warlords of the street.
Barely people at all. Closer to animals. Creatures in a hive.
But he’d watched them, and he’d learned. It was only instinct that kept them this way. Instinct could be controlled. Predators could be tamed. Prey could be herded.
The pale man knew he’d have to appear before many of them tonight – the cards had revealed that much to him. The thousands gathered into this place of sleazy sanctuary would see him for the first time. A necessary indulgence, nothing more. He’d learned from them. Now they would learn from him.
He crawled closer, closer, preparing to let go of the ceiling.
The fall would kill one of them, but the pale man had come to terms with being a breed apart. He released his grip, twisting in the air, his ragged clothing spreading out in wounded wings.
The gasps of the crowd were louder than his landing. Their minister, their owner in her fine clothes that stank of gun oil and innocent b
lood, quivered and pissed herself. She was dead before she even started to fall, life’s fluid gushing from the hole in her chest. The pale man burst the minister’s heart in his hand, in a rustling squeeze of abused meat.
‘The Night Haunter…’ someone said, a lone voice among the stunned crowd. And suddenly they were all saying it, whispering it, shouting it. Some ran, others pointed, others reached for weapons of their own.
He saw the truth in that moment – a truth he’d sensed, but never faced. They hated him as much as their masters did. He was a daemon to them, just as he was to their owners. No one was safe from him.
The pale man turned and fled from their staring eyes, laughing all the while.
The key to change was to show the herd that their sins carried the threat of punishment. They had to see how justice would be done, because it was the only way they would learn.
Fear was the weapon, pure above all others. Fear would keep them compliant, since they’d proven so clearly they couldn’t be trusted to keep to the most basic ideals themselves.
The Night Haunter knew all of this from watching and learning, melting his perceptions into the instinctive feeling of how the world should work. Without an education, he cared nothing for ideals of civilisation and culture; their depravity struck him as wrong on a much lower, more primal level. Their violence against each other ran counter to the very drive of herd animals, be they sentient or otherwise. A people divided would never rise, never achieve, never progress. They lacked even the unity required to prosper through hatred of a mutual enemy. Even that would offer some degree of progress and cohesion, yet even that was beyond them. Their lives were governed by the selfish need to steal from each other, and kill their neighbours.
The Night Haunter reflected on this as he gripped the struggling man by the throat. Tonight was a night like any other, with sinners to bleed.
‘Please…’ the man muttered. He was an old man, and that made it worse. The Night Haunter couldn’t help but wonder how many years he’d been leeching coin and blood and life from the people of the city. He existed at the very apex of sin. His foulness tainted all below him.
‘Please…’ he said again. ‘Please.’
Please. How often did the Night Haunter hear that word stammered in his presence? Did they truly expect him to pay heed to their begging?
‘I’ll give you whatever you want,’ the old man said. ‘Anything. Anything you want.’
The Night Haunter’s growl was a wet, burbling thing at the back of his throat. He loathed begging, principally because he didn’t understand it. They knew they were guilty, and justice had come for them. They deserved this. Their actions made it necessary. So why beg? Why seek to flee from the consequences of their own actions? Why sin at all if the price was too high to pay?
He growled again as the man kept begging.
‘You earned this,’ the Night Haunter replied, his voice curiously soft. ‘Do not beg. Do not blame me. This is the end of the path you chose to walk.’
‘Please…’
The Night Haunter shivered in revulsion. Please. There was that word again. The first word he’d ever learned, from hearing it leave the quivering lips of countless cowards.
‘I have a family…’
‘No, you don’t.’ The Night Haunter stared through a veil of filthy hair, scanning the empty warehouse. ‘Your wife and daughter are already dead. Your home burned to the ground an hour ago.’
‘You’re lying… You’re lying…’
The Night Haunter let go of the old man’s throat, letting him lie on the ground, unable to move with his arms and legs broken at the elbows and knees. With a knife made from a shard of broken glass, the Night Haunter crouched above his captive. The dagger-tip pressed into the soft skin below the old man’s right eye.
‘Everyone who shares a blood-tie with you is dead, for the crime of sharing in your many sins. This glass is from your bedroom window. I took it after I skinned your wife while she still drew breath.’
He slid the blade forwards, sinking it into the old man’s open eye. That was when the screaming really began.
Three hours later, the old man was found crucified on the spire of an abandoned city militia building. Hollow eye sockets stared out at the people passing, as the rain lashed his flayed muscles. The skinned man took almost twenty minutes to die, all the while shrieking as best he could without a tongue.
The summer and the war both came from nowhere. No summer in memory had ever burned so hot and so long, turning the clouds above Nostramo Quintus sour with pressure storms. The city’s blighted landscape was no stranger to acidic rain as the inevitable result of its foundries’ exhalations, but that season’s downpours were corrosive enough to strip paint from steel, and leave lesions on unprotected skin.
The war was ostensibly fought in the shadows, but on a world without sunlight, that turned the entire city into a battleground. The Night Haunter knew they were hunting him. He knew, and he encouraged it. It meant the hierarchy leashing the populace was starting to feel threatened. Better yet, they were starting to feel fear. They wanted him dead before he could come for any more of them. The people of the city had hated him for years already, back from when his name had been a whispered invocation of urban myth, and his deeds were no grander than the mutilation and murder of lowlife scum.
But now those in power were joining the game. They feared him, too. Change was slowly taking hold.
The last of the city’s lords to fall at his hands had been a land baron, overseeing investments in the adamantium refineries to the south of the city.
‘People are animals,’ the Night Haunter had said to the cowering noble. ‘Without fear of punishment, things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.’
‘Please…’
That word again.
‘You had all the power, all the opportunity, yet failed to learn the easiest truth of the human condition. You had your chance. Now your death will teach the truth to others.’
The Night Haunter had left his headless body hanging from a power spire by the ankles. The corpse was naked but for the savage decoration of three hundred and nine separate slices across the skin; one for each life lost in a recent foundry fire.
He didn’t fear the fact that those in power hunted him now. Let them try. Every day saw him slumber in a different lair – on the days he decided he needed sleep at all. The Night Haunter cast aside the sloughed skin of a dull-witted thug he’d caught assaulting a woman on a rooftop. The flayed wretch had died before the skinning was complete. The woman had fled as soon as she’d been saved, screaming and never once looking back.
The Night Haunter washed his face in the blood of the dead rapist, staining his skin with sin, before running into the city’s eternal night.
The bandage on his forearm was stained dark by sweat and dirty rain, but at least the wound had stopped bleeding. The Night Haunter tested his arm, rotating the wrist, working the elbow joint and flexing his fingers.
Sore, nothing more. The bullet would leave a scar, but then, didn’t they all? He’d not looked at himself in a mirror for some time, but running his calloused fingertips across his chest and back offered more than a slight pebbling of scar tissue from bullet holes. He couldn’t dodge everything, no matter how much faster he was than the humans that hunted him.
He was still cold, each evening. Still wretched. But that, too, would soon change. He had an idea. A dream, amidst a life of nightmare.
The Night Haunter watched a cluster of beggar children, orphans of the streets not yet taken into gangs, stripping the jewellery and money from a dead body he’d left in the gutter. He could have killed them – the temptation to do so rose in his throat – but the sight of their scavenging made him laugh.
When the children turned with wide, frightened eyes at the sound, he was already gone.
Entire nights passed when he no longer
smelled blood. They kept to their houses and habitats now, rarely taking to the streets once the foundries closed for the evening. No longer did the roads of the city echo with gunfire and the shrieking of the wounded, the abused and the dying.
Still, the Night Haunter watched his city, his people. The sins were quieter, the crimes were hidden, but the city wasn’t free from their corruptive influence. Their fear was all he desired from them, and all he received. Fear brought obedience. Fear forced them to rise above their sickening, animal instincts, and live as humans.
The hunt for his life still dragged on, but there were few within the hierarchy in a position to sustain their grievance. Thugs and hired guns were becoming notorious for refusing to hunt him at all, and the small-minded, cowardly men and women who desired him dead would never take to the streets to do it themselves.
The Night Haunter broke the bone in his teeth, with the last of the meat licked clean. The sour pork taste no longer made him cringe. Years of necessity stole all such reluctance and hesitation.
He tossed the human tibia away, and licked his teeth clean. There were some nights when he almost missed the taste of dog.
‘Ladies,’ he said. ‘Gentlemen.’
The gathered nobles tensed at the words. Their bodyguards reached for concealed weapons. The moment rested on a knife edge.
He crouched atop a minister’s throne, his immense, strangely slender bulk darkened by the rags he wore over his pale, scarred skin, and the filthy curtain of dark hair covering patches of his face.
‘We must speak,’ he said to them. His voice was a ghost’s breath, all sibilance and subtlety. In the half-light, his eye sockets were sunken pools in a wraith’s face. His smile was a slit between lips the colour of milk.
The bodyguards, armoured only in suits of expensive tailoring, were aiming their weapons at him now. Pistols. Slugthrowers. He bore a host of scars from such weapons. To see twenty of them aiming directly at him now did nothing more than rack his mirthless smile higher.
‘You can’t kill me,’ his voice seethed. ‘Do not even try. This is not how it ends.’
Shadows of Treachery Page 27