by D. P. Prior
That was all the distraction Shadrak needed to creep away unheeded. He cast fleeting looks over his shoulder, but the mist seemed to have lost him. As they fell away from the tree, the individual tendrils retracted into the swirling smog already rolling away across the forest floor. He lost no time making a beeline for the town.
Wolfmalen was eerily silent as he entered the main street. Either the people had been told to remain indoors in the wake of the battle, or some other fate had befallen them.
Pink stained the snow piled up along the road, but there were no carrion birds, and no bodies. Given the sheer number of black-garbs they’d killed, Shadrak would have expected it to take days to clear them all away. It was as if the dead had simply dusted themselves down and walked off.
The stench from the forest of impaled victims carried to him on the rising breeze before he’d made it halfway up the slope on the other side of town. This time, he gave it a wide berth, angling toward the castle in the cover of snow drifts and outcroppings of rock. He pulled up his hood and drew his cloak tight, trusting he’d appear nothing more than a shadow in the perpetual gray that passed for daylight.
In the shelter of the curtain walls, he edged around the perimeter, pausing only to listen, then moving off again. All his senses strained for the merest glimpse of movement, whisper of noise, waft of smell. Once or twice, he thought he heard muffled screams from deep beneath the foundations of the castle.
The smell of blood and shit coming off the forest of spikes never left his nostrils, but here, it was absorbed into the general odor of decay. It was the same smell that had haunted Kadee’s bedroom in the months after her death. The same smell that had finally forced him to leave and find a new home.
For a moment, the recollection fired his anger, fueled his resentment that the Archon had used Kadee to get him on board. If it hadn’t been for that scut, and if it hadn’t been for Aristodeus and his plans for Nameless, none of them would have dreamed of setting foot in Verusia. It was almost enough to make him turn his back on Ludo, refuse to play other people’s games anymore. It wasn’t like he owed the idiot anything, and no one had made Ludo come to the castle by himself, like a lamb to the slaughter.
But the memory of Kadee still had hold of him. Images of her cancer-wracked frame gave way to the glimmer that had never left her eyes, up until her last breath. It seemed to Shadrak she pleaded with him from whatever shadowy jungle surrounded her specter like an infestation of darkness; pleaded with him to go on, not to lose out on what the Archon had promised: that he’d see her again; that in some way, she endured after death.
… where the innocent dead are trapped, the Archon had said all that time ago in the Anglesh Isles. Thanatos. But of course, the Archon wasn’t saying where that was. Not until this was all over and Shadrak had kept up his end of the contract.
He came to a low wall that jutted out from one of the buttresses. On the other side, it fell away into a pit. At the bottom, a tunnel mouth led like an open wound beneath the castle.
Shadrak dropped into the pit and pulled on his goggles, blinking as they whirred and clicked into focus. He peered into the tunnel, seeing its bricked cylindrical walls in stark green outline. He didn’t delay entering. The sewers beneath Sarum that led to the Maze had been his habitat for years; and he’d always favored the hidden ways in and out of any place. It beat climbing the walls, and he wasn’t stupid enough to walk up to the barbican and knock. Ludo, on the other hand, probably was.
The floor was packed with broken rock and strewn with dead rats that looked like they’d been throttled. Most had missing limbs.
So, there were animals in Verusia, after all; although apart from Bird’s impression of an owl, and the stone-eaters he’d unearthed, Shadrak still hadn’t clapped eyes on anything living.
The air was dank and musty. The walls sweated water and slime, and the rubble on the floor was slick with drenched moss.
Walking was so treacherous, he took to his hands and knees, until he came to a grille blocking the passage from floor to ceiling. A slender pick made short work of the rusted padlock holding it shut, and then he pushed the latticed iron open a crack and slipped through.
The floor was smooth on the other side: gray flags, neatly mortared and flanked with fluted pillars that were truncated by the low ceiling.
His footfalls here were hollow, muted, but their echo was unnaturally loud. When he moved more stealthily, the scuff and scrape of his boots sounded like a man shoveling snow.
He followed the corridor for long, tense minutes, until it opened onto a vaulted chamber. Three ribbed archways, left, right, and center, led from it to spiral staircases. Guttering torches were ensconced either side of the arches. They threw flickering shadows across a mosaic floor depicting the Nousian Monas.
Shadrak raised his goggles, the better to see now there was some light.
A plinth occupied the site of the Monas’s central eye, and chained to this, one leg clamped in a heavy iron band, was a living gargoyle. Its long face terminated in a snaggletoothed beak. Rough nubs atop its head were all that remained of horns. Wings like a bat’s—though cruelly lacerated—were furled upon its hunched and spiny back. The stub of a scorpion’s tail hung beneath them. The tip seemed to have been severed some time ago, and had healed over as a misshapen club of scar tissue.
Shadrak slid a pistol free and cocked it.
He’d seen this creature atop the Homestead, just before he’d put a bullet in Cadman’s—Sektis Gandaw’s—skull.
He edged closer, expecting the thing to pounce at any moment. It had enough slack in its chain to reach him.
That’s when Shadrak noticed it wasn’t a plinth it was secured to; it was a spool for yard upon yard of chain. On the top was some kind of ratcheting crank. With someone to turn the handle, the gargoyle had enough chain to get to the mouth of the tunnel, maybe even the pit. Probably, it was allowed there to feed on the limbs of rats from time to time. But why not the whole rat? Either rodents’ legs were its favorite delicacy, or it had the appetite of a sparrow.
The gargoyle tracked him with shark’s eyes: deader than a corpse’s. When Shadrak was a pace away, it curled in on itself and shuffled back. Strings of black blood clung to its beak, which remained clamped tightly shut.
“What are you?” Shadrak said. “Blightey’s guard dog?” He waved his pistol at the tattered wings, the tail, the horns. “Had one too many scrapes with intruders, or did he do this to you?”
The gargoyle let out a whimper and tucked its face into its chest. It brought the remnants of its wings overhead and hunkered beneath them.
“So, why are you still alive? Why’s he keep you chained up down here, and not outside the walls on a spike?”
It rocked back and forth but said nothing. Shadrak started to feel stupid for assuming it could speak.
He stepped in, lifted its beaked face with the end of his gun. He could almost hear Kadee telling him to take pity. But pity wasn’t going to do anything for the poor scut. It was a wonder the gargoyle was still alive, the state it was in. And pity wasn’t going to find Ludo, either.
“Don’t suppose you know if Blightey had a visitor in the night, do you?”
The wings fell aside, as if the gargoyle no longer had the strength to hold them in place. They appeared to drag it into a deeper stoop as they drooped to the floor like a cloak that was too long.
“Can you understand what I’m saying? Because if you can, I need some answers.” Shadrak prodded its beak with his pistol, tried to wedge it open.
The gargoyle pulled back, but Shadrak grabbed the stump of a horn and held it in place. He shoved the gun past a curled fang, levered it up and down.
With a squawk of pain, the gargoyle stopped resisting. Its beak split like a gash, and it vomited forth dark blood.
Shadrak snatched the gun away. Shrill cries interspersed with wheezing breaths squeezed their way past something that was blocking the gargoyle’s throat. Shadrak felt bile rise as he star
ed, transfixed. Lodged at the back of the gargoyle’s mouth was something vaguely pear-shaped; only the pear had petals—metal petals—that were open and flush against its palate and tongue. Protruding from the center of the pear was some kind of corkscrew with a wing nut at the end. The wing nut was moving, turning in response to—what? A change in resistance, now the gargoyle had opened its beak? A quarter turn, and the petals pushed deeper into the flesh of its mouth. Another, and the creature shrieked as its tongue ruptured in a fresh spray of blood. The shriek turned into staccato, sobbing moans as the petals forced its beak ever wider. Something snapped, and the lower part of the beak flopped to one side. Still the wing nut turned, and still the petals continued to open.
The gargoyle’s sobbing devolved into ragged gasps.
Shadrak stood spellbound by the black eyes staring at him. Imploring him.
And then he understood. There was no need for words.
He raised the pistol.
The gargoyle shook its head, sending a spray of gore to the flagstones. It angled a tortured look up at the ceiling.
Someone would hear. Blightey would hear.
The gargoyle started to spasm, and the skin of its face around the beak ripped open.
Kadee’s voice cried to Shadrak from unfathomable depths. It roared like Mount Sartis erupting, and burst from his lips in a violent curse that was more of a scream.
He whipped out a knife and slashed it across the gargoyle’s throat. The creature shook violently for a few seconds, then its head fell to one side, and it dropped to the floor.
Shadrak’s hands trembled. He felt empty, riven by his reaction.
And then he realized: if a gunshot could be heard, then so could a scream.
He wiped the knife on his cloak and returned it to his baldric, then, gun in hand, he headed for the central staircase.
Cobwebs thick with dust hung like drapes from the ceiling beyond the archway. The stairway hadn’t been used for years. Centuries, even. The same with the one on the right, but the left-hand staircase showed signs of recent use: a rent through the clog of webs, and footprints in the dust covering the steps, going up and down. The same footprints, by the looks of them, but more than one trip. No doubt the master descending to the dungeon to feed his dog. Either that, or to deliver fresh mutilations.
He followed the tracks upward, past niches set at intervals in the walls. They were veiled by curtains of web, but he could still make out statues within: a robed woman clutching a rose; a child riding a lamb; a man stretched out on a cross. What kind of sick art was that?
Shadrak cleared the cobwebs from in front of it with the barrel of his gun. The detail was graphic: lacerations from head to toe, like the victim had been flayed alive. Nails pierced his hands and feet, and a wreath of thorns had been wedged over his head. Shadrak had a thick skin for all kinds of torture, but even he wouldn’t have gone so far. At least he liked to think he wouldn’t. He didn’t know what was worse: the impalements on display outside, or this. There was no need for Kadee to tell him to hurry up and find Ludo. No one deserved this, not even a Nousian.
He continued up the winding stairwell until he reached a corridor at the top. It was paneled with dark wood and lit by the ghostly glow of oil lamps suspended from curling brackets. Gilt-framed canvases hung over the panels: portraits in oil, the dark pigments scraped and deeply layered, glaze crumbling from neglect. The subjects were dressed in all manner of styles: a chocolate habit and hooded white cloak; a black gown and a flat board for a hat; hats like Shader’s, buckled and broad-brimmed; hats like chimneys or round like a bowl; coronets and crowns; epaulettes, plumed helms; smocks and tunics; puffed sleeves and somber clothes; men with hair like women, flowing in ringlets over their shoulders; a man with a headband and dark spectacles, and a jacket and britches of the same blue fabric the bard of Broken Bridge had worn beneath his rabbit skin coat that night at the Griffin. They all blurred into an impression of the ages as Shadrak crept by on the balls of his feet until he reached an intersection.
Straight ahead, the floor was carpeted with cockroaches. Many of them were dead, but others scuttled among the desiccated corpses of their kin as if they were feeding on them. The cobwebs were thicker here, drawn like curtains.
The right-hand passage was similar, only its ceiling had sagged in places and was dark with water stains and black mold. It gave off the acrid stench of pepper mixed with stale piss.
Once more, the only signs of activity were to the left. But even here, the corridor was not clear of filth and infestation. It was just that the frayed and tattered carpet had a depression worn into its center from decades of use.
Shadrak lingered at the junction, fighting back the urge to turn and flee. He steadied his nerves with a few deep breaths, and shrugged himself further into his cloak.
Unseen.
He was Shadrak the Unseen. Blightey should be afraid of him, not the other way round.
But he didn’t like it. Didn’t like reacting to other people’s stupidity. To Ludo’s. Besides the rumors—Liche Lord, holy man, impaler—; besides the spikes, the tortured gargoyle, he knew less than shog-all about the foe, and that wasn’t the way he worked.
Still, Cadman had been a liche, and he’d not been so tough. But what was with the holy man reputation? How did Blightey go from being a shogging luminary to a monster who shoved spikes up people’s arses for pleasure?
Shadrak needed more time. Needed time to observe, work things out for himself; time to get to know his enemy, probe for weaknesses.
Even as he thought it, he suspected that was the last thing he needed. He’d already seen enough to haunt him for as long as he lived. Delve any deeper, and his memories would be a hive of stinging pestilence. And what if it changed him? What if there was no limit to the horror and the depravity? What if it was addictive, and he needed to see more?
He shook himself free of the trance that was settling over him. The castle seemed to hold a macabre fascination for him. At once, it both appalled and intrigued; cautioned him and urged him to press on, uncover all its terrible secrets.
He patted each of his belt pouches, touched the blades in his baldric, felt for the grip of his second pistol, reached behind to check the thundershot was still tucked into the back of his belt. He closed his eyes briefly to center himself on Kadee’s face, but she wasn’t there. There was no room for fond memories amid all the images of suffering that had imprinted themselves on his brain. Either that, or even ghosts were afraid of this place.
Creeping on the balls of his feet, he edged along the corridor toward the door at the end. The walls here were hung with animal heads and display cases filled with spiders and scorpions. One held a cross like he’d seen on the stairwell, only this had a preserved frog nailed to it. Beneath the frog’s feet, a scrap of paper bore writing in a child’s hand. From what Shadrak could make out, it was scrawled in Aeternam, but he didn’t have a clue what it said.
The door was of heavy oak, banded with iron. Some sort of glyph had been burned into the wood: an octagon surrounding an eight-pointed star. There were blocky letters along each of the sides, but they were in a script he didn’t recognize.
He pressed his ear to the door and listened. Nothing. He put an eye to the keyhole. It was dark inside. He tried the handle, but as he suspected, it was locked. He selected a slender pick from his tool pack and felt about inside the keyhole—just in case. There was a faint click, and a tiny needle dropped to the floor.
Oldest trick in the book. One of Albert’s favorites.
Switching to a snake rake, he slid it past the pins repeatedly, bouncing them until they reached the shear line and there was a resounding clunk.
He opened the door a hair’s breadth, waited exactly ten seconds, and then slipped inside, closing it behind him.
The room was black as the grave, silent and chill.
Goosebumps stood out on his forearms, and there was a prickling at the back of his neck. He tugged the goggles back down, illumin
ating the room in hues of green.
He was before a wide dais upon which stood a semicircle of outlines. They could have been pillars.
The dais formed an island in the middle of the sprawling checkerboard floor. There was a door opposite the one he’d come in by, but a massive statue had been placed in front of it. It resembled a man, perhaps ten feet tall, with full-bellied muscles shaped into the stone. The goggles revealed darker veins of green running through the surface. The face was broad, the jaw square and set in a grotesque leer.
Shadrak edged around the room. He kept flicking looks over his shoulder at the statue as he inspected the adjacent wall, tapping, prodding, listening, but finding nothing until he came to a freestanding rack bristling with weapons: a spear, a guisarme, a halberd, a bill-hook, and other polearms of exotic design. Then there was a jewel-studded scimitar; a curve-pronged sai; punch daggers; sword-breakers; a trident and a morning star. An immense greatsword hung from the wall behind the rack, its outsized blade serrated along one edge.
Turning back to the dais, Shadrak saw that what he’d taken for pillars were, in fact, statues of men and women in various styles of dress. He’d been mistaken due to one grisly oddity: they had no heads.
As he approached, he adjusted his goggles. The lenses whirred and clicked until they settled into a new mode. The rest of the chamber blurred out of focus as the red light of burning coals suffused the statues.
Not statues, Shadrak realized, reaching out to touch one, feeling the pliancy of flesh: bodies. Decapitated bodies. Still warm. Tremors ruffled their clothing, as if somehow, without heads, they continued to breathe.
There were twelve in total. The largest was that of a man over seven feet tall, encased in plate armor that glowed orange through the goggles.
A thud came from outside the door he’d entered by.
Shadrak ducked down behind the plinth and peeked around the edge of the platform. The goggles registered a reddish blur through the wood of the door. The handle shook violently, then clattered to the floor. There was a howl of wind, and the door flew open.