by Simon Morden
“Look, then, and be satisfied.”
Heavyhammer was holding the box open. The velvet-lined interior contained a folded piece of parchment. Büber strode over and, taking the dwarf by surprise, dipped his incomplete fingers inside and scooped up the parchment.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll make sure Felix gets this. Keep the box: it looks valuable.”
Heavyhammer lunged forward, but Büber skipped away, spinning. As the dwarf repeatedly closed on him, trying to snatch at the letter, all Büber had to do was hold it up and keep twisting. In the few moments it took him to reach his saddlebag, the guards at the doors had hardly started their lumbering runs.
Büber whipped out his knife, caught Heavyhammer around the neck with the crook of his elbow, and stretched him against his own body.
The knife-point, so recently used to stick Teutons, tickled at Heavyhammer’s beard.
“And that’s far enough, friends.”
The guards stumbled to a halt, tense and bristling. The hall echoed to the sound of their breath, and the horse shook its head, making its harness jingle.
Büber realised that, unless Heavyhammer was particularly important to the Lord of Farduzes, the stand-off wouldn’t last long.
“Close the box,” he said. He felt the dwarf stiffen, and pressed the knife harder. “Do it.”
He was watching now, very carefully. Heavyhammer did something to the base of the box – held it in a special way as if he was pushing on part of it – and slowly, carefully, lowered the lid down. Only when it was safely shut did the dwarf change his grip.
The cavity inside the box was obviously only a small portion of the volume. There was something else there, something that was secret and lethal.
“Let’s try this.” Büber kept his knife at Heavyhammer’s throat, and snagged the box with his other hand, still grasping the now-crumpled letter. When he had proper hold of it, he swept the dwarf’s legs out from underneath him, then stamped on his descending back, pinning him to the stone floor.
The guards edged forward, but stopped again when he held up the box. “If I open this now, without using the hidden catches, what happens? Just how dangerous is it to everyone in this hall?”
He let the pressure off Heavyhammer’s spine sufficiently to let him speak. “Do it, human. We will die in agony, but your prince will never hear of this.”
What Büber really needed was a third hand. He needed the box, he wanted the letter, he had to get to his sword. Whatever trap the box held, he had no intention of falling victim to it himself: when it came down to the basics of life and death, he realised that agony wasn’t for him.
They were going to rush him. He knew it. They knew it. So be it.
He dropped everything: knife, box and letter, ground his heel down hard on Heavyhammer, and reached behind to the scabbard hung on his saddle. The interval between the dwarf’s scream and the song of his sword was an eye-blink’s worth of time, but Büber found that was all it took for the white heat to boil up inside him.
He swung his arm. The very tip of his sword slashed the face of the first guard to reach him. The bloom of his crimson blood made Büber mad. Now an axe heading in an arc towards his chest, and he could see it and use his momentum to sidestep it and bring the edge of his blade across the exposed nape of the second guard’s neck between helmet and mail coat.
The sword went straight through, and if there had been a spray of blood before, there was now a gout of it like rain.
The third and fourth guards had further to come but arrived at the same time. Büber wouldn’t retreat. It wasn’t in his nature any more. He thrust his sword through the open mouth of one and leapt at the other.
He was stronger, even without the berserker rage. His arms were longer and he was heavier too. His blunt fingers trapped the dwarf’s axe-hand and he smashed it repeatedly down against the floor until he’d forced him to let go, and then Büber’s hands were reaching for the sides of the helmet.
It took three blows against the stone pavement to roll the dwarf’s eyes up behind his lids. Büber reached for his sword-hilt and drew it out between bloodied frothing jaws, and struck out from where he crouched at the injured first guard, whose descending axe split Büber’s blade in two with a shock that should have numbed his whole arm.
He barely felt it. It was as if it were happening to someone else.
The cleaving blow had unbalanced the dwarf who’d made it. Now he was overstretched, axe scraping against the floor for support as he tried to lever himself upright again.
Büber reached past the head of the axe to the handle, and pulled. Since he refused to let go, the dwarf was pulled off his feet and came crashing down into the gore next to Büber. His wild-eyed struggle to free his weapon became weaker with every thrust of the shattered sword-stub.
When Büber felt the dwarf’s grip on his axe fail, he rose roaring from the ground. In front of him, Heavyhammer. In his hands, the box.
Büber threw the axe at him. Instinctive, primal, savage.
It sliced into the wooden box, bursting it apart, and buried itself in Heavyhammer’s chest. Springs and cogs and spinning blades sang out in a chaotic wash of noise, and, in an instant, the dwarf was cut to pieces. Hands, arms, legs, torso, face – all carved and sliced … and that was only part of the lethal armoury of the box. Steel glittered as it spun outwards. It passed to the left and right of Büber. Some travelled as far as the distant ceiling, some ricochetted off the floor in front of him and howled over his head.
What was left of Heavyhammer sank to its knees. Propped by the axe handle for a moment, it fell sideways and didn’t move.
Now it was over, Büber could taste blood: he’d bitten his tongue, or the inside of his mouth. He spat it out. Not that he could tell where it landed, as he was all but wading in the stuff.
His horse was at the far end of the hall, spiky and skittering and flecked with white foam, clattering its hooves and dancing against the closed outer doors. It was hardly surprisingly; Büber was soaked in blood, so no sane grass-eating animal would want to go near him.
The inner doors clattered, creaked, started to open: he scrabbled on the floor for his knife and the half-soaked parchment, pushing both into his belt. He had to run, and found he could barely walk. He started slowly, lumbering, then speeding up as shouts and curses chased after him. His legs were longer. He could win the race. And his horse, even when he charged at it full pelt, seemed to smell him behind the iron taint that covered him, and didn’t shy away as he threw himself at the lever embedded in one of the walls.
The outer doors swung apart and light flooded in. Büber squinted in the sudden brightness, barely able to see. His slippery, aching hands tightened around his horse’s neck and refused to let go, even when the doors parted another fraction and the horse burst out onto the mountainside. Heedless of the path, it was mere luck that it didn’t fall in the sharp rock shards or run off a precipice.
Büber held on, swinging his leg up and over and crouching low on the saddle. The cold air was like an ice bath, stinging and sudden after the heat of the fight, freezing the blood to his body and stiffening his clothes.
The horse would run and run until it was exhausted. He had no choice but to let it.
69
The key was heavy around Felix’s neck and cold on his skin, though its weight and temperature were more to do with what it represented than with what it was. Fear and dread, mainly, a constant nagging reminder that they lived in a world where magic was still possible and was still shaped by it. The contour of every hill, the lie of each forest, every straight or crooked road, the position of towns and villages and their populations: everything was a legacy, and it was going to take time to change.
Even though he was in his own fortress, he felt like he was sneaking around in it. He checked up and down the corridor before fishing inside his shirt for the key on its leather thong. Its shape was crude, and the lock difficult to turn. As he leant into it, he felt the ache in his
collar-bone, but he persisted and the lock gave.
He looked again along the corridor, then pushed the door open only just wide enough to ease his slight body through. He pulled the key back out and shouldered the heavy wood shut again.
Three windows pierced the wall high up on the south side of the room, giving little light to the space below. It was sufficient, though, to make out the long, still shapes of bodies laid out on the cold stone floor, arranged in rows and columns like beads on an abacus.
Some were partially dressed. Mostly, they were entirely naked. Some were without a mark, others had molten burns. Their grave-white forms lay exactly where they’d been placed. None appeared to be breathing. Their hearts were still. Yet their eyelids made an occasional traverse across their wide eyes.
This was magic. They were dead, but alive. It shouldn’t be so, but it was.
There were seventy-two of them. There had been more, of course, but some had been burnt to a cinder in the fire that Mistress Agana had poured down in front of the novices’ house, and more had been consumed in Eckhardt’s chambers when she’d burnt them and him. The aftermath of the rebellion had been chaotic, but seventy-two of these … people remained, sequestered in the fortress, and he didn’t know what to do with them.
They had families, most likely, who had first claim on them. How right would it be to send these still-living corpses back to wives or husbands, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters? There’d been no change in their unlife since Eckhardt had drained them – neither was there any prospect of them ever changing.
The door behind him opened again with the same care and quickness that he’d used. It closed, and he could hear her quick breaths and nervousness.
“My lord? Master Thaler said you wanted to see me.”
“Yes, Mistress. You seemed the best person to ask about … about these.”
She approached, her footsteps now slow and serious.
“This was Eckhardt’s doing?”
“These are the ones that are left.” Felix looked up at the black-cloaked woman. “I don’t know what to do with them.”
“I’m not …” Tuomanen said, then corrected herself. “I wasn’t an expert on necromancy. None of us were. It was an art that was strongly discouraged by the masters. And, by strongly, I mean painfully.”
She looked around the room, and at its inmates.
“Mistress, any help you can give.” Felix felt their eyes on him. “We’d be very grateful.”
“I don’t recognise any of them. Are they all townspeople?”
“I think most of them are. Others are from the surrounding farms and villages.”
“Have you considered that just killing them would be a kindness?” She crouched down to inspect a hollow-chested man, his ribs as obvious as they would have been on a skeleton. “What good is there in keeping them like this?”
Felix knelt on the floor next to her, aware of the black tattoos driven into her pale skin, the patterns they made and what they had formerly represented. But she wasn’t like Nikoleta Agana, and he shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that she was.
“Because there might be some way back.”
“From this?” She sucked air between her teeth. “Not now, not without magic. And even then.”
“You used to be able to do the impossible. What about all the stories?”
Tuomanen sighed. “My lord, you know why you were told those stories. They were true, yes, but that wasn’t the purpose of them. Our power has always been limited, but it has always been greater than anything the mundane world could do.”
“And now it’s not.”
The corner of her mouth lifted slightly. “Quite. Although, because the fortunes of Carinthia have been so closely tied to the Order, that’s little cause for celebration.”
“My father couldn’t have coped. He didn’t.” He reached out his hand and pressed his palm to the breastbone of the skeletal man. He could feel cold, dry skin, like paper. No rhythmic heartbeat. “I have to. I’ve seen what could happen. I saw it at Obernberg, just a taste of it, and I don’t want that to happen to the rest of Carinthia.”
“The young are often the most resilient of all,” she said. “If the Norns break you, it won’t be because you lack character.”
She bent low over the man’s body, and Felix drew back, giving her the space to work. She pressed and manipulated, but most of all she listened. She lay there, her ear pressed to the skin of the man’s concave stomach, stretched as taught as a drum, moving up to rest on his chest, then his throat and finally against his skull, as if she was trying to read his thoughts.
“There’s nothing,” she announced. “Some vestige of the spell Eckhardt used is keeping him alive, and that’s all. This man’s dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
“There’s no way to bring him back?” asked Felix.
She sat up. “If we still had Eckhardt’s spell book, there might be something in it that I could use. I understand it’s gone, and everything else he owned. In any event, you wouldn’t let me use it, would you?”
“We can’t …” Felix forced himself to look at the stricken man’s face, at his wet eyes. “We know where that leads.”
“The stories you were told were very different to the ones we used to tell ourselves. Armies of reanimated warriors, unkillable and never tiring; creatures made of flesh carved from the fallen and stitched together; skeletons held intact by nothing more than the hexmaster’s will; soul jars; revenants; ancient kings who refuse to die and keep themselves alive by sucking out the lives of their subjects.” As she spoke, the temperature seemed to drop, and Felix shivered. “We told such stories to each other in the freezing night while we were still burning from the day’s humiliations and beatings, using them to give ourselves the courage to face the next morning. We knew that one day we’d wield spells of that magnitude, and all our suffering would be worth it.”
“We were fools ever to trust you.”
Tuomanen bowed her head. “My lord speaks the truth. So, no: there’s nothing I can do for these people, even if I could. Have you tried feeding them?”
“One. Her lungs filled up with the broth we were trying to spoon into her.”
“Did she die?”
“No. We emptied her out, and didn’t try again.”
“Have you,” she said, “have you asked them what they want?”
Felix had. “They never reply,” he said, “They can’t move or speak, and I don’t think they can see or hear either. I tried to get them just to blink a yes or no answer, but there was no pattern.”
“Perhaps you’re not asking them in the right way.” She lifted the man’s hand and hooked her thumb around one of his pale, worm-like fingers. She leant forward, pushing the finger up to an ever more contorted angle.
“Stop.”
“My lord, pain is not just a good training aid, it’s also a very great incentive to talk.” She kept on pushing. “We don’t even want to get information from him; we just want to know he’s in there.”
“Mistress, don’t…”
“It’s in his own best interests. If he’s trapped inside this shell, he needs to find a way of breaking out. Mere discomfort won’t do it.” There was a popping sound, and she let go. The finger stuck out and away from the hand, clearly dislocated. “I can keep on until he does something.”
Felix swallowed down the acid taste in his mouth. “Put it back,” he said. “And don’t do that again.”
She shrugged, and gripped the finger hard, pulling it and pressing on the joint at the same time. When she let go, it was back in position. The victim showed nothing, not even a flicker of his eyelids.
“They’re as good as dead. They show no sign of being aware of anything. Nor do they respond to pain. If they are awake in there, then I imagine they’re all completely mad by now.” Tuomanen stood swiftly. “They may well be immortal since they don’t seem to be alive, and if that was me, I’d want to be burnt, then my bones ground into powder, jus
t to make sure.”
“There’s no hope at all?”
“My lord, forgive me, but you are so very young. Now is as good a time as any to realise that some problems have no good solutions; just ones that are less worse than the alternatives. You need to embrace doubt and fear certainty.” She smiled down at him. “I know that must sound strange coming from one of the Order, but there are no givens any more. We’re feeling our way in the dark, and if you hear a voice calling out ‘this way’, distrust it.”
“Oh.”
“That includes me, for the avoidance of doubt. I’m just as likely to give you bad advice as the next person.” She put her hands on her hips and gazed around at the not-dead bodies. “If you lack the stomach for it, I can deal with these poor wretches. I’ll even promise to follow your instructions.”
“I’m the Prince of Carinthia. I shouldn’t ask things of those who serve me that I’m not prepared to do myself.” Felix gathered his strength and dragged himself upright.
She laughed. It was a pleasant sound, but it had an edge to it. “Who told you that?”
“My father,” he said.
“Ah,” she said. “It’s a fine ideal, but it wasn’t done in Gerhard’s day any more than it was done in his father’s. The prince’s hands have to be kept clean.”
“Do they?”
“They thought so. Don’t feel any compulsion to follow in their hypocrisy. If you get your hands dirty, a few will look down on you for it, but far more will respect you.”
“I’ll see to this, then. These unfortunates, whatever else they may be, are still my people.” He mirrored her gaze, looking at each and every white-skinned form. It was going to be grim work telling their kin that their family members were still alive, and yet not; that there was nothing that could be done, and that every body needed to be burnt to free them from whatever trap Eckhardt had forced them into. Some would baulk at such an order; and he’d have to make sure it was done.