The Laughter of Dark Gods

by David Pringle - (ebook by Undead)

  The words were coming from the portrait. Another spell. But the face was expressionless, the voice flat, as if the effort of animation was now too great for it.

  “All the gods damn you, wizard,” she said again, hating him, and reached for the portrait.

  Dust rose from the thick, patterned carpet to sting her face and arms. She screwed her eyes shut and brushed at it furiously. Something drifted down onto her head and shoulders from the ceiling. Her eyes flicked open again. A spider’s web. It settled on her and began to tighten. She put both hands up to it to pull it away. Its silken strands had the strength of steel. They tightened further, biting into her flesh. She couldn’t breathe!

  An image of the assassin’s masked face came into her mind, the mesh that had killed him tight around it. Choking, she pulled again at the web, this time in desperation. One of its strands parted, with a sharp twang. Then, one by one, others followed. Katarina sucked in air through her mouth and, a moment later, she ripped the thing from her face and flung it onto the carpet. It writhed there for a time, like some dying grey insect, the dust drifting back down to the ground around it.

  Katarina massaged her face and neck for a moment knowing that if Anton’s power had not almost completely drained from his spell, if only a little more of his strength had remained in it, she would be dead now.

  Stepping up to the portrait, she took it carefully in both hands. “Beware…” the wizard’s voice intoned as she lifted it away from the wall. Behind it was a small round hatch, bearing Anton’s rainbow wheel symbol.

  “Intruder,” the portrait was droning at her. She smashed it against the wall, heard the frame splinter, the canvas rip. She broke off a piece of the frame, letting the rest drop onto the floor, and began trying to prize the hatch open. At the same time, she called out spell-words, commanding it to unseal. When it wouldn’t move, she beat at it with the wood, hitting it again and again, as hard as she could, imagining it was Anton she was striking.

  Abruptly, the hatch flew open with the same groan of despair that the door to the laboratory had made. Inside, an arm’s length away, was a book. It was bound in leather and embossed with the rainbow-wheel: the grimoire.

  Transferring the piece of the frame to her left hand, she reached into the vault with her right. Her fingers found the book.

  The vault grew teeth along its rim, then closed on her arm with a snap. She screamed. As the vault gnashed at her, her vision blurred and she felt as if she would pass out from the pain. A shard of canvas was whispering from the carpet, “Beware. Come no further.”

  She beat at the vault with the bar of wood in her hand, then stabbed at it with the splintered end. Finally, when she felt as if she had no more strength left, the vault opened fractionally and, with an agonized cry, she managed to wrench her arm free.

  As she stared at the blood, expecting to find her limb half-severed, she saw with surprise that the cuts the teeth had made were only superficial. Then that spell, too, had been almost exhausted.

  But, most of all, she was amazed to find that in her hand she held the grimoire of Anton Freiwald.

  The book was hers, and so was its knowledge. Nothing would stop her now. Laughing, feeling much as she did when Anton had made her drink too much wine, she clutched the grimoire to her as if she had already mastered its many secrets, had already become a wizard of the highest level.

  The canvas fragment on the carpet whispered: “Beware.” Again she laughed, but her eyes moved to the ring of skulls.

  Stories had been whispered of Anton Freiwald in the taverns and the market-place, stories she had shut her mind to. Now they came back to her. Stories of him moving from city to city across the Old World, through the years. How many cities? How many years? And darker rumours of a death in each of those places: Anton’s death.

  The skulls swung around in their stately decaying orbit, their jaws moving in unison, as if they were telling her the answers to her questions in a language she could not understand. The skulls—there were five of them.

  As Katarina watched, the ring of skulls began to spin faster and faster, its light brightening. A silken shivering went up and down her spine. Slowly, drawn by a fear that she could not have put a name to, her eyes dropped to Anton’s body.

  It was still lying in the same position, the knife buried in its chest. But it was shrivelled, fleshless. The skin was intact, but now it was only a parchment-thin covering hanging loosely over the wizard’s bones, like the abandoned skin of a snake. The familiar was gone from beside the body.

  At that moment, a pale hand appeared from the other side of the oaken desk and clutched at its edge. It flexed there a moment, trying to secure its grip. Then, a second hand followed. After a moment, a head came into view, and then the rest of the body was rising on the other side of the desk, swaying unsteadily. It was the familiar—Katarina knew it by the chalky complexion of the skin, the coarse features of the face—but its body was now man-size.

  Its flesh was moving, rippling and twitching, as if still trying to settle itself into its new shape. The mouth opened but no sound came out. The grey eyes glistened, not quite focused.

  As she stared at it, the face began to change, moulding itself into a new image. The lips thinned, the cheekbones came into prominence, eyebrows bristled into view.

  Katarina took a step backwards, towards the tunnel, and her booted foot brushed against the husk of Anton’s body. Bones scraped together, but she did not look down.

  The creature’s eyes were shifting, searching for the source of the noise. They slid past her, then swung back to focus on her.

  “Katarina,” the half-formed thing said, in a slow, slurred whisper. “What are you doing here?” The eyes regarded her with vague surprise at first. Then, as they moved to the book in her hand, understanding came into them, understanding and a cold anger. “So.”

  The creature reached out with one pale hand. “My grimoire. Give it to me.”

  Staring into those grey eyes, Katarina found herself starting to obey out of sheer force of habit. Then the hate for the wizard that she had discovered inside herself returned with almost sickening force. She shook her head. “No, Morr damn you.”

  The creature’s jaw slid down in surprise. “My slave spell. You’ve broken it!” The protean features shifted; the expression was unrecognizable. Then, an almost affectionate malevolence came into its eyes: they were wholly Anton’s now. “But it will only take me a moment to replace it.”

  The creature gestured at her. A nimbus of rainbow light left its fingertips and drifted through the air towards her. Her eyes followed it, hypnotized, unable to pull away. The light blossomed as it neared her, its colours opening out like the petals of some iridescent flower: gold, jade, blue, grey, amethyst, crimson, amber, white. The eight colours of magic.

  They splashed onto her eyeballs, soaked softly through them and into her mind. They shimmered and sparkled there, and then began to crystallize into a familiar pattern: an eight-spoked wheel.

  “No!” She remembered it now, had lived with it inside her head. “Not again!”

  Her reaction was instinctive. As the wheel began to spin within her, to grip her mind in its familiar embrace, she visualized her hands clenched inside her own mind, and hit out at it with all her strength.

  The colours pulsed.

  Sigmar give me strength, she thought, and struck again. This time a crack appeared. Another blow. More cracks. She hit the wheel again and again, until there was a webwork of fractures patterning the rainbow form. She smashed at it a final time, imagining the hammer of Sigmar in her hands. The wheel shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “Katarina!” the creature said in surprise. “My little Katarina. But so strong now. It’s hard to believe. To break my slave spell a second time.” The voice dropped. “That’s dangerous.”

  It stumbled forward, its movements still not fully coordinated. Before she could draw back, it reached out with surprising speed and grasped her right wrist.

&n
bsp; The contact sent a wave of disgust through her body; its skin was clammy, the smell that came off it not quite human. She tried to wrench her arm free, but the grip was too strong.

  With its free hand it reached out for the spell-book. Half-turning, she flung the book behind her. The creature made a barely articulate cry of rage and struck her in the face. Then, wrapping its free arm around her, it used its strength and weight to force her to the ground. As she went down onto the carpet, she felt her head bump against the wizard’s skin-draped skeleton.

  The man-thing put its rubbery lips to her ear. “Pain, Katarina,” it commanded. “Pain.” The words sank into her mind as if they had been arrows. Her nerves were suddenly alight. Every part of her body had been put to the torch. She screamed.

  “A sample, Katarina, of what I could teach you if only we had a little time to ourselves again.” The voice in her ear was a hoarse murmur, unmistakably Anton’s. “All the magic you could ever wish to learn about.”

  In desperation, the pain threatening to wipe out all rational thought, her eyes rolled upwards, towards the city above.

  “No,” the creature whispered as it shifted on top of her. “There’s no help there. My Kislevites will fight on until they die.”

  It reached for something behind her, tugged at it, grunting with the effort, until it came free, then brought it forward so that she could see it. It was the skull from Anton’s body.

  The creature’s head came back into her field of vision; its eyes were glossy. “Death.” It shuddered. Then, slowly, its features contorted into a caricature of a smile. “The graf and those Guild bumpkins thought that it would stop me. Instead, it has given me one more component to add to my ring of power.”

  The skull rose from the creature’s hand, beginning to glow as it did so, and floated across the room towards the ghostly chandelier of skulls, its jaw already moving in the same soundless chant.

  Through the agony that was burning its way through her body she heard the creature continue. “With six skulls I can charge it to a new level of strength, an order of magnitude greater than was possible before.”

  Surely, Katarina thought in desperation, this new addition would disturb the delicate balance of the structure. If it would only distract Anton, for as much as a second, then she might have a chance.

  The skull joined the ring, the others shifting smoothly to make a place for it. At once the glow from the eye-sockets sharpened, and the jaws began to move with even greater vigour.

  “Not Chaos, Katarina,” the creature whispered. “That is a snare—the fool’s road to destruction. No, my path is slower, spread across many lifetimes. My magic is merely a little darker-hued than most.” It leaned closer again, whispered confidentially into her ear. “The skulls will come with me, of course. To a new city, a new life. I wish I could take you too, Katarina. But your talent makes that too dangerous. No, I’ll have to kill you. But quickly. I promise you that. First, though—my grimoire.”

  The creature reached out for the book. As its attention left her, the pain diminished fractionally. Her right hand was trapped, still held in the creature’s grasp. With her left, she fumbled for something, anything, to strike at it with.

  Her fingers found the body behind her head and felt along the soft fabric of the wizard’s robe; the outline of the skeleton stood out plainly beneath it. Then they touched something sharp-edged: the assassin’s blade.

  Her hand reached for the hilt. Too far. She stretched her arm as much as she could. Still could not grasp it.

  As the creature’s pale hand closed on the book, Katarina closed her eyes, murmured the words of a fetch spell. The knife slid free with a scrape of steel against bone, rose into the air, spun slowly around. Then drifted towards her extended hand.

  The creature had the grimoire now, was grunting in satisfaction.

  Katarina’s hand closed around the hilt. She brought the knife up above the man-thing on top of her and, jerking her right hand free with a sudden effort, clasped the knife in both hands.

  As the creature swivelled its head back towards her, she brought the blade down with all her strength, driving it into the creature’s back.

  “No!” the man-thing called out, furious, as the blade pierced it. Its eyes glittered, brimming with anger but empty of pain, as if the half-formed body still lacked the capacity to feel any. It swung the grimoire at her like a club, and its empty hand came around to fend off the knife. The lips moved again, chanting the pain spell.

  Katarina shut her mind to the pain. It was not real, she would not allow herself to feel it. Nothing was real to her but her rage and her hate. Those feelings—and the knife she held in her hand.

  Katarina wrenched it free, raised it, brought it down again, sensing it sink into the body above her. Then another time, and another, repeating the cycle over and over, ignoring the pain burning at the edges of her personal universe, the hands clutching at her arms.

  “No.” Suddenly there was fear in the voice. And Katarina knew why: this time there was no homunculus prepared and waiting to take up the wizard’s life. This time there would be no resurrection.

  “Die, Sigmar damn you! Die!” Again and again she struck, until she had lost count of the number of times she had driven the blade into the creature’s body, until her hands were sticky with its blood. Its arms thrashed feebly; the mouth opened and closed, but no further sound came out.

  Finally, long after the creature had stopped moving, Katarina pushed its body off her and got to her feet. The ring of skulls was slowing once again, its light dwindling. Breathing hard, her tunic ripped, and streaked with blood and dust, she stared down at the body on the floor.

  It was quite dead. And this death, she thought with grim satisfaction, was the wizard’s final one.

  With the grimoire in one hand and the dagger in the other, Katarina Kraeber ran towards the tunnel that led upwards to freedom.

  CRY OF THE BEAST

  by Ralph Castle

  Tomas woke suddenly, with his senses alert and his heart pounding. For a moment there was nothing but the hiss and roar of the surf on the beach outside his bedroom window. But then, once again, he heard the noise that had roused him. It was a high-pitched wail—an inhuman cry rising and falling on the wind.

  He slid silently off the straw mattress, struggled into his boots, breeches and leather jerkin, and crept to the window. He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the tiny panes of hand-blown glass. It was still night outside, but the foam on the waves glowed white, catching the first faint light of dawn.

  Again, the strange cry echoed around the bay. Tomas’ skin tingled. He shivered.

  He crept across the rough-hewn boards and opened the door into the other room of the little cabin. He paused and listened. Brodie was lying quietly on his cot beside the hearth. The fire in the grate still smouldered and the room smelled of wood smoke. In one corner were shelves of dishes and pots and pans above a simple wooden table. In another corner was a washtub. Everything was neat and clean and stowed in its place.

  Tomas crept across the room. Carefully, silently, he lifted the stout oak bar that secured the front door.

  “Tom?” There was a rustle of blankets as Brodie sat up. “What are you doing, there?”

  “I was just—going for a walk.”

  “A walk?” Brodie’s voice rose in disbelief.

  Tomas hesitated. “It’s almost dawn.”

  “But not quite.” Brodie lit the oil lamp and struggled out of bed. He was a halfling, a tubby figure less than four feet tall, with a round, friendly face and a tousled head of hair bleached white by the sun.

  Muttering to himself, he set about dressing in his usual clothes—a faded blue sailor’s jacket, leather breeches and boots that looked one size too large. A red silk handkerchief was stuffed into his breast pocket, a rusty sword was sheathed at his hip and an ornamental flint knife hung on a thong around his neck.

  He ambled over to Tomas. “What’s your hurry? After b
reakfast, it’ll be light enough to venture out.”

  Reluctantly, Tomas let go of the wooden bar. Having just passed his eighteenth birthday, he didn’t like being told what to do. “I heard something,” he said.

  Brodie put fresh wood on the fire and used leather bellows to fan the flames. He broke eggs into a cast-iron pan, set the pan over the fire, then picked up an old cutlass and sliced a fresh loaf of heavy, dark bread. “I know what you heard.” His voice sounded gruff. “I heard it too.” He put the bread on a plate, then pointed at Tomas with the cutlass. “I’ll wager you don’t have the slightest notion what kind of creature would make a sound like that.”

  Tomas shrugged. “That’s why I wanted to find out.” He sat down at the table. “Do you know what it was?”

  Brodie shook his head. “I’d rather not talk about it.” He glanced toward the window, then looked quickly away. He slid the eggs out of the frying pan, onto a plate. “Eat your breakfast.”

  * * *

  When Tomas stepped out of the cabin half an hour later, the sun had risen into a clear, pale blue sky. A breeze from the west was raising spray from the white caps of the waves. It was a brisk, bright spring morning.

  Brodie’s cabin stood on a wide ledge of rock just twenty feet above high tide, beneath chalk cliffs that formed a shadowy white wall around the bay. The cabin had been built before Tomas was born, using planks salvaged from a shipwreck. He had shared this tiny refuge with Brodie for as long as he could remember.

  Brodie’s fishing boat was anchored out in the bay, and a small rowing boat lay on the sand.

  Tomas started picking his way down the familiar path from the cabin to the beach. It was his job, on most mornings, to take the tarpaulin off the rowing boat and push it out into the surf. Together, he and Brodie would row to the fishing boat, tether the smaller boat to the bigger one, then set sail for the open sea.