by Nathan Long
Evgena broke off her incantation and tried to grab her. ‘Idiot girl! What are you doing?’
Stefan did the same. ‘Ulrika, wait!’
Ulrika writhed away from them both. ‘They’re taking her voice!’
She charged out of the shadows, launching herself straight at the crooked sorcerer. The man looked up, letting go of the singer and falling back as the rest of the cultists cried out and started to their feet. He threw up his arms as Ulrika slashed at his face, and her rapier stopped in mid-air as if it had struck a wall. He smiled cruelly, and began to twist his hands in arcane gestures, but a bolt of sizzling black energy shot from Evgena’s hiding place and tore through him. He crashed to the floor, twitching and shrieking as crackling arcs danced over his skin.
Ulrika stepped forwards to finish him, but the cultists surged in at her, pulling knives from their robes. She turned to face them and found Stefan at her shoulder, his teeth bared.
‘That was one way to do it,’ he growled.
Together they stabbed and kicked at the howling mob, puncturing throats and guts and groins while trying to reach the cultists who held the singer, but before they could get close, a glint of silver flickered in the corner of Ulrika’s eye and she ducked aside, an inch ahead of a long knife that slashed for her face.
She spun, on guard. It was Jodis, naked again, and lunging with her second knife. Ulrika skipped back, ending back to back with Stefan as four of Jodis’s hulking marauders elbowed through the robed cultists to surround them.
‘You keep running from us, corpses,’ the Norsewoman said with both her mouths, then turned and barked at the cultists and the men who led the blind singer. ‘You, leave these and kill the witch! You two, get her up! Him too! Out of reach!’
Ulrika lunged, trying to kill the Norsewoman while her attention was divided, but the marauders inervened, hacking at her and Stefan from all sides while the cultists backed away and crept warily towards Evgena.
Within the marauders’ circle of slashing steel, Ulrika could only watch helplessly while the two men heaved the blind singer onto the platform next to the cultist who held the Fieromonte, then waved at the men inside the wheel.
‘Up!’ cried one. ‘Up!’
The wheelmen began to walk forwards, turning the spool from within, and with a creaking of ropes and timbers, the platform rose. The singer lay unmoving upon it, still singing, her soul being torn from her mouth by the violin, word by word and note by note.
‘A voice to pierce the heart of all who hear it, eh?’ sneered Jodis as she flicked her blades at Ulrika’s legs. ‘And deliver to them our lord’s sweet venom like a snake’s hollow fang.’
Ulrika drove the Norsewoman back toward the platform in a flurry of steel, and Stefan moved with her, protecting her back and flanks, but they weren’t moving fast enough. The platform was almost to the roof.
‘Mistress!’ Ulrika cried. ‘Stop them! Stop the wheel!’
Evgena had her hands full holding back the throng of cultists that with a wall of shimmering red, but she did her best, shooting a blast of crackling energy towards the wheelmen. But before the bolt reached them, a violet mist formed around them, absorbing it. Ulrika looked past Jodis and saw the crooked sorcerer lurching unsteadily to his feet, violet energy dancing around his hands.
‘You will not spoil our surprise,’ he hissed, and sent an eruption of purple snakes towards Evgena.
Above the battle, the old folk song came to an end, and the blind singer’s voice trailed off in a hideous rattle as the applause of the crowd echoed through the stage floor. Ulrika glanced up and saw a last breath of white vapour leave her mouth to be sucked into the violin, then the cultist that held the instrument kicked her off the platform.
Ulrika jumped back, pulling Stefan out of the way, and the singer’s falling body flattened the marauder to their left, then slid to the floor. The look of uncomprehending horror on her beautiful face made Ulrika want to tear Jodis apart with her bare hands. She sprang at the Norsewoman, her rapier and dagger blurring.
As Jodis blocked and parried, Padurowski’s voice rang out from above.
‘And now, lords and ladies,’ he cried, ‘a special treat for you all! A solo performance by the pride of the Academy, the most talented musician of his age, playing a song that hasn’t been performed in Praag for two hundred years!’
Ulrika glanced up from her fight as the cultist on the platform whipped off his robes and threw them aside. It was Valtarin! He flipped back his mop of hair, tucked the Fieromonte under his chin and began to play a wild melody as a trap in the stage opened and the platform lifted him through it. The Opera House burst into spontaneous applause at his ascension, and began to clap along to the lilting tune.
Ulrika knew the song. She had been hearing it on the wind since she came to Praag. She cursed as all became clear. How could she have been so blind? How could she not have seen that Valtarin and Padurowski were cultists? They had played her like a fool!
Jodis laughed from both her mouths and jumped back, spreading her arms in triumph. ‘You see, corpse? You’ve failed. Already they dance to Slaanesh’s–’
Ulrika lunged, and impaled the Norsewoman through the heart with her rapier. Jodis stared at the wound, then crumpled to the floor, the mouth that grew from her goitre shrieking while her true mouth gurgled and spewed blood.
‘You talk too much, corpse,’ said Ulrika, then whipped her blade from her ribs and backed to Stefan, who was still fighting the other marauders. ‘We have to get to the stage.’
‘Aye,’ he said, and together they drove them back towards the door to the stairs.
‘Brothers! Stop them!’ rasped the crooked man.
He was locked in his duel with Evgena, and could not move. Nor could Evgena. Tentacles of purple energy emanating from Crook-back’s hooded forehead writhed around her, trying to penetrate the shimmering red-tinged sphere she had formed around herself.
Obeying the sorcerer, the cultists turned from the boyarina to block Ulrika and Stefan’s escape.. Frantic, Ulrika impaled one marauder with her rapier, then stabbed the last in the neck with her dagger while he was engaged with Stefan, and they ran for the door with the cultists hot at their heels.
‘Go on,’ said Stefan, pushing her forwards and turning in the doorway to face the mob. ‘I’ll hold them here.’
Ulrika staggered into the stairs, blinking back at him. ‘But–’
‘There’s no time to fight them every step of the way,’ he snapped as the first wave reached him. ‘Go. This was your war from the beginning. It should be you who ends it!’
Ulrika hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then ran up the steps. She would much rather have had Stefan at her side, but he was right. There was no time. She raced through the maze of corridors, putting on her mask of tragedy again as she went. It wouldn’t do for her cousin the duke to recognise her in her stage debut.
The scene before her as she burst into the wings appeared so normal she almost questioned her senses. What could be threatening about a soloist playing a violin while a kindly-looking conductor led an orchestra in accompaniment and the audience swayed and clapped along? But a closer look at the crowd revealed the truth. Their eyes were glazed and wild, like merry drunkards in the last giddy stage before collapse, and they clapped and sang along like automatons, all in precisely the same time.
Some, Ulrika saw, were struggling against it – sweat beading on their foreheads as they tried to resist the call of the melody. An old general clenched his teeth and balled his fists as his head bobbed. A priest of Dazh murmured furiously under his breath but could not keep his hands from moving. They knew something was wrong, but they had been caught in the insidious spell before they could summon the will to resist.
Ulrika too, found it hard to fight the pull of the song. As she ran towards the stage, the rhythm was so insistent it tripped her, and the melody, though jaunty and mischievous, had a poignant melancholy that nearly brought her to tears. That must be the b
lind girl. The voice of her soul, mixed with the soaring shimmer of the violin, was doing just what Jodis had said it would, opening a passage to the hearts of the audience and allowing the poisoned song to enter and corrupt them.
A blistering rage welled up in Ulrika and weakened the grip the music had on her. To use something so pure to do something so foul was despicable. She charged onto the stage, raising her rapier.
The audience gasped and Padurowski turned, then cried to Valtarin, but neither could stop performing, or the spell would be broken. Hope surged in Ulrika as she rushed closer. All she had to do was cut the violinist and the song would stop, but with only five strides between them, he turned, glaring, and played an improvised jig over Padurowski’s accompaniment, practically flinging the notes at her. Ulrika staggered as the full force of the violin’s power struck her, then began to dance, jerking and capering like a marionette on a string, all control ripped from her.
The audience roared with laughter and clapped all the louder. They thought she was part of the show. And why shouldn’t they? Ulrika must look a comic figure with her mask of tragedy and her foolish dancing. She tried to fight it, but she could not make her legs stop skipping and kicking. The harder she tried, the more the violin’s will bore down on her, making her jerk and flail.
But what if she gave in?
She let the music take her, surrendered to the rhythm and danced towards Valtarin, slashing gracefully in time to the music. His eyes widened in alarm and he stepped back. She grinned. It was working, like tacking into the wind instead of sailing directly into it. She pirouetted again, and came within a foot of him with her blade.
But as she jigged closer, Padurowski leapt in front of her, his lilac coat flapping, and went on guard with his conductor’s baton, grinning and mugging to the audience.
‘You see, my lords!’ he cried. ‘How music and culture are the best weapons against savagery and barbarism?’
The audience cheered its approval at this as Ulrika thrust at him. If he wanted to die to protect Valtarin, so be it. His death might shock the crowd from their poisoned euphoria.
But as her blade shot towards Padurowski’s heart, he parried with his baton, and the strength of the block nearly shivered the sword from her hand. Ulrika gaped. How could it be? She should have chopped the slim wand in half.
Padurowski laughed. ‘Lord Slaanesh has been generous with his gifts,’ he whispered. ‘The vigour of youth, and a weapon of power with which to do his will.’
He lunged with the baton, and Ulrika, still stunned and dancing to Valtarin’s tune, did not move in time. It struck her on the thigh, only a glancing blow, but it cut through cloth and muscle.
She cried out in pain and stumbled in her jig as the crowd roared. The world flickered around her, and for a brief second, she saw a different Padurowski in the place of the old man she thought she faced. He was still lanky and white-haired, but his face was unseamed and beautiful, and his frame strong and true – and in his hand was not a conductor’s baton, but a dagger like a needle – a long stiletto blade that shimmered with unearthly power.
‘Play on, Valtarin!’ cried this different Padurowski. ‘I shall take her measure as we tread the measure.’
Then the vision was gone and the world snapped back around her. Padurowski giggled and flicked the baton at her neck, but she had seen its true form now, and parried it as she would a sword. There was a clash of steel, and her rapier was knocked back, a gouge in its edge, but she had turned the thing.
Padurowski cursed and came in again, his cheerful expression slipping, but again she countered, for he was no fencer.
‘It is a shame your lord did not gift you with the skill to match your weapon,’ she sneered.
‘It will be enough, parasite,’ he growled, and slashed furiously.
Ulrika looked to the audience as she danced and circled with him, hoping someone had noticed that they fought now in earnest, but the faces she saw were more lost than before, their glee now bestial, their eyes glittering as much with hate as with cheer.
‘Kill her! Kill her!’ they chanted in time to Valtarin’s playing, and rose from their seats to sway and dance.
Ulrika groaned. If she didn’t stop it soon, the song would consume them completely, but she could still not turn towards the violinist, could still not stop herself from her mad capering. Then it came to her. She must do as she had before. She must go with the current.
She backed from Padurowski, turning so she retreated towards Valtarin.
The conductor’s eyes gleamed, his grin returning. ‘You see? You weaken, while I grow only stronger!’
He lunged in, thrusting towards her heart with the fell dagger. Ulrika staggered back towards Valtarin, flailing behind her with her rapier as if for balance, then smashed it down across the bridge of the Fieromonte.
The result was catastrophic. As her blade snapped its catgut strings and cracked its wooden body, the violin shrieked like a hundred hurricanes and exploded in a ball of purple-white light, hurling Valtarin and Ulrika and Padurowski through the air and knocking the musicians of the orchestra from their chairs. The audience, so recently laughing and dancing, now screamed and shielded their eyes.
Ulrika stared from where she had crashed at the left side of the stage as, from out of the white light, rose a towering, translucent figure more beautiful than any being she had ever seen – no matter that it seemed to have no single shape or face, but shifted constantly from one to another. It howled in the soaring voice of the violin, then turned its golden, ever-changing eyes towards Valtarin and Padurowski.
‘Where are the fools that promised us the souls of an entire city?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
UNMASKED
Ulrika’s mind rebelled at the sight of the daemon, and the urge to join the people in the audience who were shrieking and trampling each other as they tried to escape its presence was almost overwhelming. But at the same time as it filled her mind with terror, the ever-changing being rooted her to the spot with its beauty and charisma. She could feel her skin tingling in its aura as if she were bathing in acid, and felt powerful forces pulling at her flesh, as if trying to warp her in their own image.
Fortunately, something within her, perhaps the dark power that animated her dead body, seemed to fight against this transformative imperative. Others were not so lucky. All around her, the musicians of Padurowski’s orchestra were writhing and mutating before her eyes. A horn player’s head sprouted a dozen fleshy, gaping stoma that blared like trumpets, while a cellist had become one with his instrument, his body melting into the wooden shape of the cello, and his hands curling up like scrollwork tuning heads. Others simply exploded into shapeless masses of tentacles and mouths, flopping about on the boards like drowning fish.
Many in the audience were similarly affected. The whole of the first three rows were splitting out of their fancy clothes as tentacles and new limbs and screeching heads sprouted from their bodies. Many more, though apparently untouched by mutation, had their sanity ripped away by the advent of the daemon, and gibbered and clawed at themselves in their horror, gouging out their own eyes, savaging their companions and leaping from the private boxes to die broken on the seat backs below.
In the midst of this madness, Valtarin abased himself before the beautiful daemon, pressing his face against the boards. ‘Forgive us, lord!’ he said. ‘We… we… we…’
The daemon pounced upon him, and Ulrika expected to see the violinist torn limb from limb, but instead the being’s insubstantial body sank into him like a ghost slipping back into its grave, and the boy began to scream and glow.
Ulrika crabbed back as Valtarin rose, reforming before her eyes, growing taller and stronger and more beautiful, like a lascivious saint carved from white marble. Gleaming trumpet mouths grew from his spine like a dragon’s ridge of plates, and wings made of fanned organ pipes hung in the air above his shoulders.
Padurowski shuffled towards the daemon on his knees, arms wi
de. ‘Lord, please! The souls of the city are still yours! You have only to sing and they will beg you to take them!’
The daemon stretched out an alabaster hand and a swarm of piano wires sprouted from it and stretched towards the maestro, wrapping around his limbs and neck and torso like the creepers of a vine, to lift him off the stage. ‘And we will start with you,’ chorussed the daemon, ‘who thought to use us and lock us away again.’
Padurowski’s eyes went wide as he squirmed in mid-air, dropping his dagger. ‘No, lord! Never!’
‘Will you lie to one who knows your darkest desires?’ The daemon’s laugh sounded like a drunken orchestra. ‘Your soul is as open to us as a wound.’
And with that, Padurowski flew apart as the piano wires constricted and diced him into a rain of blood and bone shards and red gobbets that spattered Ulrika and the stage in all directions. Only a shrivelled wisp of white vapour remained, glowing within a cage of dripping red wire.
The daemon raised the cage to its face, drawing the vapour to it, then closed its eyes and inhaled it.
With the beautiful horror distracted, Ulrika at last found the will to stand, and backed away, hoping to escape while it was distracted. She had never been more afraid in life or death. The daemon was more powerful than anything she had ever faced, and she knew she could do nothing to it.
But before she got halfway to the side of the stage, its eyes snapped open and it looked directly at her, freezing her in her tracks.
‘Our rescuer,’ it purred, ‘who freed us both from the tower and the vile, four-stringed prison that held us for too long. We are greatly obliged to you and would reward you.’ It smiled. ‘Yes, for this service, we shall keep you with us. We have never had an immortal lover before, one who could heal from any caress. There are so many things we have wanted to try.’
Ulrika stumbled back as it stepped towards her, its organ-pipe wings fanning majestically, then saw Padurowski’s dagger lying on the stage behind it. She dived under the daemon’s grasp and came up with the dagger, then spun and stabbed it in the back. It was like stabbing a lightning bolt. She flew back, thrown by the shock, and crashed to the stage, her hand smoking where it clutched the dagger. The blade had transformed into a long wet tongue that curled around her wrist, licking her.