by Nathan Long
‘Foolish girl,’ said the daemon, drifting towards her. ‘Would we give a servant anything that could harm us?’ It stretched out its hand and piano wires again burst from it and wrapped her in an imprisoning embrace. ‘Still,’ it said, lifting her, ‘you must be punished for the attempt. What are the limits of your regeneration, we wonder?’
Ulrika screamed as she felt the wires slowly sinking deeper into her flesh. She writhed in mid-air, but there was nothing to gain purchase upon. The pain increased. Blood welled up as the wires sawed into her neck and wrists. She held out her hands to plead for mercy she knew would never come, but before she could speak, a beam of golden light lanced across the auditorium and struck the daemon in the chest, followed by a howling, unnatural wind that blasted it with daggers of ice, pushing it back through the chairs and the mutated musicians as the proscenium’s velvet curtains whipped and snapped around it.
The alabaster being stumbled and bellowed under the dual assault, and Ulrika thudded to the stage, gasping in relief, as the piano wires whipped away from her. She looked up. The daemon, cringing within the shrieking sphere of light and whirling ice, was turning towards the seats, roaring like a thousand trumpets, and searching for its attackers. Then a second beam of light, brighter than the first, struck it from another angle, knocking it sideways.
Ulrika shielded her eyes and looked out from the stage. Through the glare of the attacks, she could half-see a priest of Dazh standing in the duke’s private box, invoking his god, while coruscating streams of ice and gold poured from another box at the daemon.
The daemon’s angry roaring turned into a song, baroque and discordant and painful to the ear. It sang a violet aura into existence and it blazed around its body, throbbing in time to the melody and pushing back the ice and the golden light. It trilled like a soprano and purple tendrils of power snaked back along the bolts that struck at it, dampening them and reaching for the casters.
One touched the priest of Dazh, and he shrivelled like a raisin and died. His light died with him, and the daemon’s tendrils grew stronger, but before they could touch its other tormentors, more magical and priestly attacks began to strike it from all over the Opera House, and it fell back again, its outlines wavering.
It had been Padurowski’s intention to use the violin to destroy the minds of every magister, witch and priest in Praag, and consequently, they were here, and now that the violin’s spell had been broken, they were angry, and fighting back with all the power at their disposal.
Ulrika tried to crawl away from the great seething nexus of energy that battered the daemon and threw around the chairs and instruments and bodies of the poor, distorted musicians like they were in the centre of a whirlwind, but she couldn’t move. It was all she could do to dig her claws into the stage and hold on.
Finally, the daemon could take no more. It staggered back, its organ-pipe wings falling apart and its song becoming a mere howl again. Its purple aura flickered and faded and its questing tendrils withered.
‘We will return,’ it moaned, glaring out at its persecutors. ‘And all Praag will sing their souls to us.’
And with a thunderclap of scintillating violet light, it crumpled to the stage, shrinking and curling in on itself until it was just Valtarin who lay there, shivering and staring with eyes turned purple and gold and opaque.
Ulrika looked up and blinked around, dizzy and nauseous and pins-and-needles from head to toe. She felt as if she had been trapped inside a giant bell while ogres rang it, but seemed otherwise whole. She was one of the lucky ones. The aftermath of the battle was horrible to behold. The bodies of the mad and mutated were strewn all over the stage and the seats, and the wailing of the survivors curdled the air. Even the stage itself had been changed. The gilded figures that climbed both sides of the proscenium had become twisted, tentacled parodies of themselves, with gleaming purple gems for eyes. It would take many priests many months to purify the Opera House and make it fit to be used again.
After a long moment where she could do nothing but stare at the devastation, Ulrika recovered enough to push herself to her feet and stumble for the wings, desperate to get away before the guards regrouped and stormed the stage.
Valtarin looked up as she shuffled past him, but stared beyond her, unfocused. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, holding out his hands. ‘Oh, gods, I can’t see. I can’t see. How can I play if I can’t see?’
‘Ask the girl you killed,’ Ulrika snarled, and stumbled on. She could have killed him, but it seemed more fitting to leave him to his life. She wished him joy of it.
She had almost reached the curtains when a voice called to her from the back of the theatre. ‘Stay, friend!’ it said. ‘I would speak with you.’
Ulrika looked up. Duke Enrik was stepping to the front of his private box as the rest of his guests cowered warily behind him.
‘Praag owes you a great debt tonight, sir,’ said Enrik. ‘And I would know your name.’
‘Yes,’ said another voice. ‘Show us your face, friend, that we may thank you.’
Ulrika turned and saw a magister in rich saffron robes looking down at her from another box. A jolt of shock ran up her spine as she saw that it was Max Schreiber. She was suddenly certain it had been him that had first attacked the daemon, blasting it with his purifying golden light. She stepped back, unsteady. The meeting she had both longed for and dreaded had finally come to pass. A wild impulse to do as he asked struck her with irresistible force. His expression when he saw her face would be worth all the trouble that was sure to follow.
She raised her hand to her mask, grinning beneath it, but before she could lift it off, a beautiful woman in ice blue and white stepped out from behind Max and joined him at the balustrade – the ice witch, his lover.
Ulrika’s mad glee died. She supposed she owed the witch her life, for she and Max had jolted the daemon into dropping her with their combined attack, but she still hated her.
Ulrika let go of the mask and instead saluted the duke, then turned and jabbed two fingers up in Max’s direction before staggering quickly into the wings, laughing at the look of shock and confusion on the magister’s solemn face.
Ulrika limped down the stairs into the understage and looked around, tugging her mask to her neck again. The place was loud with muffled hubbub from the stage above – it sounded as if the duke’s entire personal guard was trooping around upon it, and orders were flying back and forth – but all was quiet below, and but for the dead and dying, empty. She ran forwards and saw the bodies of Jodis and the crook-backed sorcerer lying near the platform, but no sign of Stefan or Evgena. Panic gripped her.
‘Stefan?’ she called, searching the bodies. ‘Boyarina?’
A noise from the hole in the floor made her turn. Evgena was climbing from it with Stefan following behind.
‘What happened?’ Ulrika asked as they came forwards.
‘They tried to flee,’ said Evgena, smiling and brushing the dirt from her dresses. ‘None escaped.’
‘And Valtarin and Padurowski?’ asked Stefan, pulling off his short cloak and wrapping it around his hand. ‘They are dead?’
Ulrika nodded. ‘Dead and worse than dead, and the violin and the daemon within it destroyed. The cult is finished.’
Evgena let out a sigh of relief.
Stefan did too. ‘At last. Then I am finally free to finish my work.’
And before they could ask him what he meant, he picked up one of Jodis’s silvered long-knives with the hand he had wrapped in his cloak, and plunged it between Evgena’s shoulder-blades.
Ulrika stared, frozen with shock, as the boyarina screamed and clawed at her back and the veins in her neck began to turn black beneath her pale skin.
‘What… what are you doing?’ cried Ulrika. ‘I don’t understand!’
‘Only my duty,’ said Stefan, and carefully picked up the second silver knife. ‘Killing Boyarina Evgena Boradin and her brood.’
Evgena turned on him, reaching out a shaking
hand and opening her mouth, but before she could do more than gargle, Stefan hacked off her head with the second knife and she dropped to the floor. Her head rolled to Ulrika’s feet. There was no blood. The edge of the terrible silver-struck wound was as black as burnt wood.
Ulrika looked from Evgena’s lifeless stare to Stefan’s glittering eyes. ‘Y-you are Kiraly!’ she said. ‘You did come here for vengeance!’
He dropped the silver knife with a hiss of distaste. ‘Not vengeance,’ he said. ‘Duty. And Kiraly is two hundred years dead. I only used his name to try to lure out the boyarina.’
Ulrika shook her head, trying to stop it churning. Nothing made sense. ‘This can’t be! You spared her! That is why I trusted you. You had a chance to kill her when we fled her mansion and you did not!’
‘Aye,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘A difficult decision. When I led the cultists to the house, I expected Evgena to destroy them, freeing me to kill her, but slaying Raiza was a mistake I shouldn’t have made. I realised immediately the fight would go the other way, and I could not allow that. Praag is to be mine. I am to claim it in my master’s name. I could not let these dupes of Chaos steal it out from under me.’ He looked down at Evgena’s head. ‘I was forced to let the Lahmians live until they helped me defeat the cult. Now they have.’
Ulrika went on guard at last. ‘And now you mean to kill me.’
Stefan’s face fell. ‘No, beloved. Not at all. I meant what I said. We will rule Praag together. We will live here forever.’
‘What?’ cried Ulrika. ‘You expect me to believe that? The moment I turn my back, I will die like all the others.’
Stefan’s eyes flashed. ‘I have lied in many things,’ he said. ‘But not in that. We have shared blood. We have a bond.’
‘And you broke it, here, with this!’ said Ulrika, pointing at Evgena’s corpse. ‘Blood of eagles! You think I could love you now?’
‘I don’t understand you!’ Stefan snapped. ‘You despised her! You said before you didn’t care if I killed her!’
‘I – it doesn’t matter if I despised her,’ said Ulrika. ‘You said you weren’t here to kill her. You lied to me. You–’
She cut off as memories came back to her – a hundred little things Stefan had said, seemingly insignificant at the time, but now so clear. It had been his comment about gossiping women that had turned her mind to asking the Lahmians about the cult, thereby drawing Raiza out where he could attack her. It had been he who had put the idea of a meeting on neutral ground into her mind. Ha! If Evgena had agreed to it, she and Raiza and Galiana would have been dead that very night!
‘You used me to get to them!’ she said. ‘You used what I felt for you! Ursun’s teeth! I handed them to you!’ She raised her blade and advanced on him. ‘I had no love for Evgena, but I am no one’s cat’s-paw. I will die before I allow you to succeed through me.’
Stefan’s grey eyes grew cold, and he knelt to pick up the silvered knife again with his wrapped hand. ‘Your answer was yes,’ he said in a voice like ice. ‘Do you not remember? You said you would be with me, no matter what happened. You have broken your word.’
Ulrika sprang, trying to run him through before he grabbed the knife, but he turned her blade with his rapier and scooped it up, then rolled and came up slashing with it.
She snarled and scrambled back from the shining edge. ‘I said those things to a man I trusted,’ she said. ‘You are not he.’
Stefan lunged, gashing her arm with his rapier as she parried the knife. She fell back and crashed into a crate full of prop swords and shields.
‘Perhaps you should fight with those,’ said Stefan, sneering. ‘They are false as well.’
Footsteps clicked on the stairs, and Galiana’s voice whispered into the room.
‘Sister? Ulrika?’
Stefan turned his head, alarmed, and Ulrika hacked at his wrapped left hand. The silvered knife bounced across the floor as her blade cut him to the bone. He staggered back, cursing. She thrust for his neck, but he ducked under her blade and stumbled past her to fall amongst the wooden swords.
‘Galiana! Here!’ called Ulrika, lunging again. He knocked the thrust aside with his rapier, then grabbed a prop sword from the pile and stabbed wildly. Ulrika’s block was too late, and the dull wooden point punched through her abdomen and ripped upwards to wedge between the ribs of her back.
She froze, transfixed with agony. It hurt like no sword cut she had ever taken. It was more like the pain of falling in the river – like the wood had impaled not just her body, but her essence. Now she knew why the stake was the preferred weapon of the vampire hunter. It was poison to her kind.
‘I… I’m sorry,’ said Stefan, stepping back.
She toppled to the side, unable to move a muscle. Had the sword pierced her heart? She could not tell. Her whole body screamed. There was no distinguishing one part from the other.
From across the room came a gasp of surprise. Through her dimming eyes, Ulrika saw Galiana staring from the doorway.
‘What have you done?’ she cried, then saw Evgena’s headless corpse. ‘Mistress!’ she shrieked, and ran to her, falling to her knees.
Stefan picked up the silvered knife Ulrika had knocked from his hand, then started cautiously towards Galiana, cupping it. ‘Ulrika killed her,’ he said. ‘I tried to stop her, but was not in time. She was a Sylvanian assassin, sent to destroy your sisterhood from within.’
Galiana looked up from staring at Evgena, seeming to hear him for the first time. ‘She was the assassin?’ she asked. ‘Not you?’
‘I swear it, mistress,’ he said, edging closer. ‘She meant to kill you all and rule in your place.’
Galiana stood, backing away from him warily and extending her claws. ‘Is that so? But then who killed Sister Raiza?’
‘She had an accomplice,’ said Stefan smoothly, still advancing. ‘And he remains at large. But worry not, I will protect you. We will rule Praag together.’
Footsteps and the rattle of scabbards came from the stairway.
‘Down there, you four,’ barked a voice. ‘We’ll search further on.’
Stefan froze, but Galiana’s eyes lit up.
‘Gentles!’ she cried, running for the stairs. ‘Gentles, help me! This way! There are cultists!’
Stefan tensed like he meant to spring after her, but boots were thundering down the steps. He would not reach her in time. ‘Lahmian cow!’ he rasped. ‘You will not live to see another sunset!’
He glanced back at Ulrika, raising the silvered dagger, but men were pouring into the room. With a curse he leapt to the hole in the floor and vanished from sight.
Ulrika’s head sagged to her chest as Galiana fell into the arms of the first man through the door, a soldier in the uniform of the duke’s private guard. ‘Praise Ursun you arrived, sirs!’ she sobbed. ‘I fear they meant to sacrifice me! Quick! They have fled through that hole!’
The last thing Ulrika saw as her vision faded entirely, was the soldiers looking around with wide eyes at the bodies of Evgena and the dead and dying cultists as they ran for the hole, and her last thought before her consciousness faded was that Stefan’s threat had not been idle. He could walk by day, and he knew where Evgena’s safe house was.
He was going to kill the last Lahmian of Praag in her sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
GIRDED AGAINST THE DAY
Ulrika jolted awake as something wet splashed her in the face. At first she thought it was water, but then it burned her eyes and made her gag. She coughed, then gasped in pain, for it felt as if she had been run through the guts. The agony was indescribable. She forced her eyes open, blinking away the burning liquid, then grunted as she looked down at herself. She had been run through the guts. A wooden sword stuck from her belly, and the liquid, it smelled like lamp oil. Why would anyone throw lamp oil on her?
She turned her eyes left and right, then froze in horror. She lay among robed and hooded and mutated bodies – some still moaning – which
were piled upon a mound of timber, and soldiers were walking around and around, soaking the whole assemblage with oil while a crowd of richly clad onlookers watched. It seemed the authorities were preparing to burn the cultists of Slaanesh and the victims of the daemon, and she was on the pyre.
In a paroxysm of panic, she tried to thrash her way off the mound, but her limbs would not answer her. They did nothing more than twitch. She stared down at the silly wooden sword that impaled her. It might not have pierced her heart, but it had somehow paralysed her. She could not move. Not an inch.
She looked around again. She was in the centre of Windlass Square, with the duke’s palace ablaze with light off to the south, and soldiers still bringing bodies out of the Opera House and throwing them on the pile. She had a little time, then, but what did time matter if she couldn’t move? It would only give her leisure to anticipate her burning. She shivered in fear. She could imagine no worse death.
A pair of soldiers was coming her way, dragging a cultist by the legs. She licked her lips. A chance! She would use her Lahmian wiles on them. She would trick them into removing the sword.
The men threw the cultist down beside her, then turned away as he groaned and mumbled incoherently.
‘Sirs,’ she whispered, then tried again, louder. ‘Sirs! I beg you! A small mercy!’
The soldiers looked around, scowling. They did not look the merciful sort. She smiled, trying to look sultry.
‘Sirs, please,’ she murmured as they slouched closer. ‘I would not burn alive. Pull out the sword, so I may bleed to death before the flames find me.’
The soldiers looked at each other and laughed. The first kicked her in the face. The second spat on her.