Dead Man's Steel

by Luke Scull

  Krazka grinned at the sorry sight. A sudden gust of wind set the prison to creaking and he raised his voice to be heard above the noise. ‘Enjoying the new view? I reckon you’ll do well to survive until Carn’s men get here. The winter ain’t getting any warmer. ’Course, your old man managed a whole year in one of these things, but then I figure he was made of stronger stuff than his son.’

  ‘Why?’ The voice was rasping, broken. ‘What... did I do to you?’

  Krazka stared out across the vast expanse of the King’s Reaching. Just outside the walls, feline shapes patrolled the snowy ground. Occasionally one would disappear and then materialize twenty yards away. The blink demons were few in number but even the Brethren had been unable to cope with their strange abilities. Further distant, lines of squat figures stood unmoving, waiting for the enemy to arrive. Demonkin were the weakest of demons, but the fear they inspired could cause a seasoned warrior to shit his breeches as surely as that of any other fiend.

  ‘You, personally?’ Krazka said eventually, when he was satisfied all was in order. ‘You ain’t done anything to me, save take what was rightfully mine.’ Krazka drew his abyssium sword and examined the edge in the light of the nearby torch. ‘It should’ve been me that was made king after Jagar’s heart finally gave out. Your dad’s favour with the Shaman meant you got the crown instead. Now, your pa might’ve been my match with a sword or he might not –guess we’ll never know, what with him long gone. But he never knew his head from his arse when it came to tactics on the field of battle. It was me that saved the day at Red Valley. Didn’t get any thanks for it either.’

  From up in the cage there was a harsh sound that might have been choked laughter. ‘You’re jealous? You did all... this because you wanted to be king?’

  Krazka’s eye narrowed and the world seemed to flicker red. Before he knew it he was pointing the barrel of his deadly weapon up at the cage. He checked himself at the last moment and instead spun the weapon three times before replacing it on his belt. ‘Ain’t so much jealousy as disgruntlement,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of privilege. Bastards getting something they don’t deserve because they was born in the right place or their face fits the image of the man other men want them to be. Take the Sword of the North, your old pa. Got a nice story, I’ll admit: sole survivor of a demon attack that massacred his village, goes on to become some great Warden over in the Borderland. Don’t hurt that he looks the part, what with those blue eyes. Men need their legends and I guess he fit the Shaman’s bill. Still, the thing about legends is that legends cast shadows. I got caught up in his. Krazka One-Eye, the man who crawled up out of a cesspit and fought his way to the top of the pile to become chieftain of the largest of the Reachings. Kayne got to be the hero. I got to be the butcher.’

  ‘You... wanted to be a hero?’

  ‘Naw. I want to be a legend. Heroes got a nasty habit of dying before their time. I want to get old and die happy with my name carved into history – a name bigger than any before me. I want the High Fangs, and the Lowlands, and the lands across the great ocean the Herald sometimes whispers of. You got to keep reaching, see. If you’re not climbing you’re falling and there’s only ever death waiting for you at the bottom.’

  ‘But... demons...’ The voice was growing fainter, the effort of uttering so many words having already exhausted the prisoner.

  ‘You work with what you got. I ain’t no great Magelord or Lowland prince. The gods are dead and the darkness of infinity waits for us all in the end. No point living a life with limits. Sentiment’s worth nothing. Look what it got your dad. A year spent caged and hounded till the ends of the earth because he let family get in the way of business.’

  A weary voice called out, ‘For a man who prides himself on action, you talk a lot. The boy’s dying. Let him be.’ Orgrim Foehammer, chieftain of the East Reaching and second-in-command of Heartstone’s army, joined them on the battlement above the west gate. His face was haggard above his beard, his eyes midnight-dark from lack of sleep. Rana trailed a little behind Orgrim. The thin-faced sorceress seemed uncomfortable in her new role as leader of the town’s circle.

  ‘You two make for a sorry sight,’ Krazka said jovially. ‘And you’re late, woman. I said the crack of dawn, not the crack of whenever-the-fuck-you-feel-like.’

  ‘Forgive me, my king,’ Rana said, her voice trembling slightly. ‘My nephew disappeared last night. I’ve been searching for him, to no avail.’

  ‘Ah.’ Krazka studied the woman’s features for the first time. The nose surely bore a resemblance. Hadn’t the lad he brought back to his chambers last night mentioned his aunt was a sorceress? He gave her a big grin. ‘Let’s hope he turns up safe and sound. Right now we got other things demanding our attention.’ Krazka reached under his cloak and withdrew the steel tube Wulgreth had brought back with him from the North Reaching. At least that was the story the strange warrior had told Krazka: a lot of things about Wulgreth failed to add up.

  The Butcher King raised the looking tube, brought the narrow end up to his good eye. He watched the world dramatically shift in size, bringing into sharp focus pine trees armoured in frost and frozen streams glistening in the maiden light of a new day. And cutting across a sheet of blinding white snow, the dark line of an army on the march.

  ‘They’re on the move,’ he growled.

  Orgrim frowned. ‘You said reinforcements would be here by now. If Mace’s forces arrive before Hrothgar’s men, we’re screwed. And the army of the Green Reaching inches closer by the day.’

  ‘Brandwyn’s men are more familiar with the wrong end of a sheep than the right end of a sword.’ Krazka’s voice was thick with contempt. ‘I slaughtered all the true warriors of the Green Reaching during their rebellion four years back. Just ask our boy there.’ He nodded up at the wicker cage, where Magnar Kayne was as silent as a ghost. Then he drew his long-barrelled projectile weapon with his left hand and his sword with his right and spread his arms towards the approaching army as if preparing to embrace his enemies. ‘Let them come,’ he snarled. ‘I’ll build a mountain out of their corpses. Tall enough to storm the heavens a second time.’

  Despite his show of bravado, inside he felt the tiny seed of doubt beginning to grow. He didn’t like uncertainty, except when it was him inflicting it on others. He closed his eye and focused his thoughts, reaching out for the demon lord whose mind had been linked to his these last thirteen years.

  When? he demanded silently, not confident he would receive a response. The Herald had been awful quiet of late. I’ve sacrificed as you asked. I need backup. Now.

  Soon, replied the Herald’s voice in his skull. It was a strange sensation, akin to a dozen different voices all whispering at once. The ruined side of his face throbbed wildly, as if something were trying to crawl through his skin. An old foe has returned and the attention of the Nameless is required elsewhere. The disapproval in the demon lord’s next telepathic sending instilled utter fear in Krazka’s heart before the red rage that lived inside him – his own inner demon, that had seen him climb from a cesspit to the throne – flared and burned it to ash. That hand-cannon you hold... you were told to rid yourself of it.

  Krazka stared at the weapon in his hand – the weapon with which he’d brought down a Magelord. A ‘hand-cannon’, the Herald had just called it.

  I answer to no one and nothing! He sent his thoughts with a rage to match that of any demon lord’s. Not you and not this Nameless you serve. Best you remember that. I doubt even your scaly hide could withstand this weapon if it came to it. Utter silence greeted his outburst, and he wondered if he might have gone too far.

  A harsh sound snapped his attention back to the here and now and he realized he was grinding his teeth together. Orgrim and Rana were watching him as if he’d gone mad.

  ‘Well?’ he barked. ‘The fuck you two doing just standing there? Go organize the town’s defences. Hell’s about to come to Heartstone.’

  Beyond Redemption

  ✥
>
  EREMUL THE HALFMAGE stared at the wreckage of the depository and tried not to choke on the bitterness that welled up inside him.

  His life’s work was reduced to ash. Thousands of carefully catalogued tomes and scrolls had been burned to cinders. The building was a blackened and charred ruin of collapsed kindling and shattered stone, levelled beyond any hope of repair. The impact of the blasts from the First Fleet’s artillery had produced a crack that divided the street itself, a fissure from which smoke still occasionally drifted. This wasn’t a temporary inconvenience like in the aftermath of Salazar’s destruction of Shadowport, when the waters of Deadman’s Channel had risen and flooded the harbour; this was utter annihilation.

  No matter how pitiful that which is lost, the pain is never less than devastating when it is everything you have.

  Once more his tired eyes scanned the rubble for signs of Tyro. The dog was gone. He knew that. Nothing could have survived the onslaught when the devastating cannons opened fire from the warships. The Halfmage had thought a Magelord’s power obscene; the realization that every single one of the invaders carried a weapon similar to those cannons in reduced form, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and capable of enacting instant murder from a hundred yards, made him feel more impotent than he had even sitting opposite Salazar in the Grand Council Chamber.

  ‘We had some good times here, as I recall.’ Isaac’s melodic voice drifted up from behind him and the fehd officer appeared beside Eremul’s chair. Like the rest of his people he stood a head taller than all but the tallest of men, his slender limbs more graceful than those of the nimblest human dancer. The smooth, silver armour Isaac wore covered every inch of him up to his neck. Though it appeared as thin and as flexible as cloth, folding with his movements, the Halfmage had witnessed it turn aside a sword thrust on the night of the First Fleet’s arrival. Isaac stared down at the wreckage with eyes like mirrors of purest obsidian, so ancient that, even now, weeks into the invasion, Eremul felt awed and terrified to behold their splendour.

  The Adjudicator held up the end of his blue cloak with one hand to avoid getting it smeared with filth. With the other he scooped up a handful of ash. ‘I spent many a day sweeping the depository clean. I fear that even with my lifespan, that task would be beyond me now.’

  Eremul frowned at the Fade officer, or ‘fehd’, as he had learned the ancient race more accurately referred to themselves. Isaac had used his strange powers to masquerade as the Halfmage’s manservant for years, all the while performing reconnaissance for his people and making preparations for their invasion. Even with the occupation well under way, Isaac still found time to humour his erstwhile master.

  ‘There will be no need for books when your kind is done here,’ Eremul said grimly. ‘You told me yourself: no exceptions can be made in your crusade.’

  Isaac’s angular features shifted marginally into what might have been a frown. He fished around the wreckage some more and withdrew a human thighbone. It looked as though it had been gnawed on – an odd detail that made little sense to Eremul. The Adjudicator tossed the bone away and then stared south towards the harbour, where the most gigantic vessel the Halfmage had ever laid eyes upon was sailing into port. ‘Saverian arrives,’ Isaac announced.

  ‘This general of yours, I assume,’ Eremul said bitterly. His heart sank. He knew what this latest development meant. Now the assault on Thelassa would begin in earnest. Once the City of Towers had fallen, as it surely would, the fehd would have no further need of Dorminia as a base from which to launch their invasion of the continent. The Grey City would become expendable, and all within would perish.

  ‘The general,’ Isaac agreed, but the music in his voice seemed off-key, strained. ‘You shall escort me to the harbour. I want you to witness something. The reason, in the end, why I decided humanity must be expunged from this continent.’

  ‘You sister Melissan already clarified that matter. Right before she blew Timerus’s brains out and your other sister relieved Marshal Bracka and Spymaster Remy of both their positions and, perhaps even more regrettably for them, their heads. Poison, I believe she called us. A poison that must be purged.’

  ‘She is fond of that particular expression.’ The pain in Isaac’s voice brought involuntary tears to Eremul’s eyes. ‘The crimes committed by the Magelord Marius hurt my sister more than any other among us. In her grief she blames herself for the deaths of Aduana and Feryan.’

  The Halfmage wiped one of the sleeves of his robe irritably across his face. ‘Must you do that?’ he said exclaimed angrily. ‘Keep your emotions to yourself.’

  ‘Empathetic projection can be difficult to control,’ Isaac replied. ‘Besides, there is no shame in mourning such a tragedy.’

  Eremul’s thin lips curled. ‘I barely shed a tear when my legs were taken from me. Neither did I cry when your ships destroyed my home and business.’ His next words came out as a rasp, and the renewed dampness in his eyes almost turned them into a lie. ‘Why, I couldn’t even muster a single, solitary tear for the woman I loved.’

  He hadn’t seen or heard from Monique since the day Timerus had had him falsely arrested for treason. The Grand Regent had promised that Monique was alive and being held somewhere safe, and in return for the Halfmage accepting his execution she was to be released and all charges against her dropped. Whether Timerus had intended to keep his word Eremul would never know, as all hell had broken loose when Isaac’s sisters unleashed an army of concealed thralls upon the gathered crowd. Timerus had been among the first to die – and with him the knowledge of Monique’s fate.

  That Ishari snake lied to me. He had her killed. Either that or she fell victim to the riots. My one true chance of happiness, torn away. Like my legs. Like my dignity. Like damn near everything.

  Isaac was watching him strangely. The slight twist in his angular features could have been mistaken for sympathy, if the idea were not so preposterous.

  They feel nothing for humanity. We are but a plague to be exterminated.

  ‘We should proceed to the harbour,’ the Adjudicator said. He hesitated before adding, ‘I can assist you with your chair. It will be like old times.’

  ‘I can manage,’ Eremul snapped back. ‘I made it this far by myself.’ That wasn’t strictly true; Isaac had shadowed him all the way south from the Refuge, the block of warehouses near the Hook where Dorminia’s homeless sought shelter. A merchant from the Grey City Cartel had taken it upon himself to arrange the sporadic delivery of food parcels to the most needy. The bread was stale and the soup tasted like something scooped out of a latrine, but it was nonetheless a surprising display of civic-mindedness. Unfortunately, whatever generosity the people of Dorminia could muster in these desperate times did not extend to him. Eremul was now a pariah. Accused of aiding and abetting the city’s invaders due to his misguided association with Melissan, he had been attacked on three separate occasions, escaping thanks only to some quick thinking and a judicious display of magic. Without Isaac to guarantee his safety, there was a good chance he would have been set upon by an angry mob on the way to the docks. Yet another injustice to add to the many that had been heaped upon him.

  If the gods weren’t long dead, I might accuse them of lining up to take a shit on me. It was he who had come closest to uncovering the fehd plot. He who had uncovered the true nature of the mind-controlling mechanical spiders implanted in the thralls. No one on the Council had believed him. Now most of the magistrates were dead, their estates seized by their inhuman invaders. Only the fehd and their thralls were allowed within the Noble Quarter: the foolish few who had attempted to infiltrate the enclave, possibly with delusions of heroism in mind, had been immediately slain. Their occupiers had no interest in torture or grand gestures of intimidation, it seemed. Not when ruthless efficiency worked just as well.

  As he and Isaac made their way down to the harbour, Eremul watched the conquered citizens of Dorminia go about their daily lives as best they could. It was a sorry facsimile of nor
malcy. As he trundled over the crumbling cobblestones and the stench of the wharfs assaulted his nostrils he was reminded of a dead fish he had espied once, its body still flapping in the fisherman’s net even after its head had been removed.

  It is the nature of living things to cling to familiarity until the bitter end. The corpse of Dorminia and its people would continue to twitch in predictable patterns until that end came. ‘The Reckoning,’ Isaac had called it. Whatever that may involve, I suspect it does not include a nice cup of tea and a slice of cake.

  The ships of the First Fleet had arranged themselves in a crescent moon formation within the harbour. As the Second Fleet drew into port, the vessels of both fleets formed a great circle around the gigantic flagship that brought up the rear. A hissing noise erupted and the great iron turret that towered almost to the height of the masts at the centre of the ship shook and belched forth a great cloud of steam.

  ‘In the Time Before, ships such as these were considered long obsolete,’ Isaac said. ‘Almost all of the knowledge of our ancestors has been lost. We are but a pale shadow of what we once were.’

  ‘Obsolete,’ Eremul echoed, remembering the pant-shitting terror he had felt the night the First Fleet’s artillery opened fire. ‘If this is what you consider “obsolete” then I hope you never stumble across this lost knowledge. What do you mean by the “Time Before”? Before what, exactly?’

  The Adjudicator held up a hand to silence Eremul. ‘I have said too much already.’

  The circle of ships eventually parted to allow the great warship to dock. The flag hoisted from the towering mainmast nearest the prow displayed a blue sphere stained with green patterns and surrounded by an unbroken band of gold. Eremul glanced at Isaac, thinking to ask about the flag’s significance, but the fehd officer shook his head, forestalling further questions. He appeared troubled.

  A bridge was lowered from the main deck to the dock platform. Soon those aboard began the task of disembarking. There were dozens of the immortals, males and females in equal number, marching in single file with their silver armour glinting and their grey cloaks flapping, revealing the crystalline swords and deadly hand-cannons at their hips. Eremul was surprised to see that not all the fehd were pale of skin and golden-haired: some were as dark as ebony with hair to match, others a lighter shade of brown or with hair as red as a sunset. All were taller than most men and possessed the perfect complexions and too-angular features of their kind.