by David Hair
‘Gurvon,’ he breathed, ‘we’ve got a fucking big problem.’
*
Madeline Parlow was hungry, or more exactly, she had a particular craving: for rose lokum. So after peering in on Timori Nesti, who was sprawled in blissful innocence across his bed, toy soldiers scattered on the floor, she went to the kitchen.
Lokum was a Jhafi delicacy, a delicately flavoured sugary gel, the most luscious sweet Maddy had ever tasted. Rose was her favourite, but cherry or apple or mint were also divine. She had come across it last year, when she’d first arrived in Brochena. One day she’d gone to the market with Serjant Rhinus, a food lover like her, and an expert on the various native delicacies. There might not be much particularly eye-catching about Rhinus, a bluff mercenary, but he shared her tastes, and that was a joy.
The rose lokum had sealed the deal: with one small cube, her taste buds had gone into ecstasy and she would happily have surrendered whatever virtue she had left for just the promise of more. But Rhinus hadn’t been so crass as to take advantage of her exuberant reaction; he’d let her choose the moment and she adored him for that too. Too many of her spontaneous lovers had become regretted indiscretions, but Rhinus was a treasure.
Maddy was a quarter-blood mage, a decent catch. A little dumpy these days, perhaps, and she couldn’t run twenty yards without losing her breath, but she wasn’t as soft as her mousy looks and mild face might suggest. She’d seen combat, and killed. She was a clairvoyant and a farseer; Gurvon had always said she was vital to his Grey Foxes, that she was ‘the grease on the axle’ keeping the wheels turning, an image that made her giggle.
She was well aware that not all of Gurvon’s associates were nice people. If they weren’t hard like Rutt or Mara, they were vicious like the unlamented Samir and Vedya. Sometimes they were both, like Elena. She was also aware that most of what Gurvon did was illegal, but she didn’t care about any of that. Her humble family had been bypassed on the road to riches and if she wanted to enjoy the best things in life – the sweets and wines and cheeses, the loveliest perfumes and art and jewellery – then she had to earn them somehow. She wasn’t pretty enough to marry well, and wedding one of Benoit’s merchants would see her completely disinherited. For a time she’d thought to be a nun of Kore, but they ate muck. Gurvon provided what she needed; that was more than enough justification for her.
Over the past year in Brochena, an understanding had grown between her and Rhinus. Though she would eventually marry another mage, to preserve her bloodline undiluted; she and Rhinus would share their lives somehow. He joked about being butler of Parlow Manor, a mythic estate they built in their imaginations.
Parlow Manor came crashing down at midnight.
She entered the kitchen, calling merrily, ‘Rhinus darling, I was just wondering if we had any more of that rose lokum?’ She was already savouring the sweetmeat.
Rhinus looked up, a smile lighting his crooked face. Beside him, Jacquo rolled his eyes, opened his mouth to tease the two of them: the Epicures, he called them. He was a sweetie, Jacquo, if you looked past the one eye and the scars. Not many could, sadly.
Young Tholum was outside, she presumed. But there was an unexpected third person in the kitchen. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Gurvon sent me,’ Symone replied.
Maddy didn’t like Symone. There was something not right about him, something that made her skin crawl. It wasn’t that he was quite obviously a male frocio – a ‘mooner’, as the rankers called them. It was the way that he didn’t seem to fit his own skin, like an irritable snake trying to rub a layer of dead scales away.
‘Gurvon said nothing,’ she replied worriedly.
Symone primped in that feminine way he had. ‘He’s worried Elena is about.’
‘Elena?’ Maddy looked worriedly at Rhinus, just as the sixth bell began to chime: midnight. Each hour had its own key and sound-pattern, so that you always knew by the second chime what hour it was. They all paused, because the church was close and the sound drowned any chance of conversation.
Symone laid a hand on Rhinus’ shoulder. ‘Elena could be anywhere,’ he said, not very reassuringly.
For a heartbeat, they were all perfectly still.
Then Symone’s hand sprouted talons and he ripped sideways through flesh and gristle. Blood sprayed, Rhinus’ smile fading as his eyes went wide, the gaping slash below his chin opening as air gushed horribly, then he fell sideways.
Maddy heard a shrill scream fill the room as Jacquo’s hand went for his dagger and something hammered into the back door. The scream was hers. She was vaguely aware that she should be doing something, but all of her mind went to drinking in her last sight of dear Rhinus’ face as he fell in slow motion to the floor.
A cloaked shape burst through the back door, levelled a crossbow and fired. Jacquo crashed over backwards, the bolt jutting from his right breast. Maddy tried to react, but all she could feel was her dream future disintegrating.
Symone flowed across the space towards her, ripping through her shields contemptuously. The last thing she saw, lying shredded on the floor in a pool of spreading numbness, was Rhinus’ empty face.
You’ve gone on ahead, my darling … to Parlow Manor.
She rushed to join him.
*
The royal palace of Brochena, even after the sealing of the secret passages, was a hive of corridors, halls, ante-rooms and twisty little stairs. Someone unaccustomed to them could get lost in seconds, but Cera, drawn all her life to secrets and hidden passages, knew exactly where to go.
As the sixth bell chimed, she lit her candle and slid through the door to the Blood-tower. The half dozen others on blood-purdah in the lower rooms, women of bureaucratic families whose cycle coincided with hers, muttered and dreamed as she crept down the stairs and out into the labyrinthine ways that the servants used to access and clean the tower while remaining out of sight of the well-to-do. Spiralling down the backstairs, she followed the narrow passage past the bowri where she and Portia had first made love. She moved unseen through the men’s quarters, where the castle labourers snored, and down the tiny wooden steps to the storeroom Tarita had described.
It looked like she had arrived first. The food store was dark and silent, the shadows jumping as the candle she held trembled. The darkest recesses remained steadily unlit, and the room stank of blood and raw meat. There were rows of butchered carcases stretching on into the dark. The tunnel was in the cupboard at the far end, Tarita had told her.
She lingered a little at the front of the room, waiting for the sound of Tarita’s footsteps.
Thank heavens for her courage and wit, especially after Portia went north. I couldn’t have done this alone.
Then she stopped as boots sounded behind her, too heavy to be feminine.
‘Stop right there.’ Gurvon Gyle’s voice cut across the space coldly. ‘Not another step.’
*
What is a man? It was a question that had occupied the greatest minds of the empire, and before them the philosophers of Lantris and Rym, for millennia. One thing he’s not is a bug lodged in someone’s brain. But that was what Rutt Sordell now was. It was far from ideal, but he liked it better than being dead.
Lessons had been learned from his time spent in the body of Elena Anborn. As Guy Lassaigne, he spent every second he could adapting to the body and practising his use of the gnosis. The other Dorobon magi had complained; ‘Guy, you’ve changed!’ they said, oblivious to just how much. He’d never been a good actor, so he compensated by slowly changing Lassaigne’s persona to his own.
There were issues, of course: controlling the body from within a Revenant-scarab was awkward, but he was fully nested there now, and well-attuned to the central cortex through his gnostic links. His physical responses might still be a little lacking, but he had never been a warrior; it was the mental responses that mattered, and they were now almost perfect.
He floated above the squalid lanes of Brochena, borne by Air-
gnosis and kinesis, as around him the night came to life. Someone had been blocking all his attempts to warn Maddy Parlow, and that required proximity to the subject. Gurvon doubted Coin was acting alone, and Sordell concurred. This was confirmed as he approached the safe-house. His inner eye began to make out human auras in the shadows: Jhafi thugs with drawn weapons, and no one had raised the alarm.
In his left hand he conjured gnostic light, purple-hued, from his favoured necromantic links, while with his right he gripped a sword. Gurvon had stayed to reel in Cera Nesti, thinking that Coin would be with the escaping queen, but it was now clear that the shifter had other prey in mind. As Sordell swooped into spell-reach, the shadows erupted and men began to pound into the alley and smash in the door of the safe-house.
He darted through the air, selected the man giving orders and blasted necromantic light at him. Violet light engulfed the Jhafi; his clothing crumbled to dust and so did half his chest. His death cry was a ghostly wail. Those around him looked up, saw Sordell and raised crossbows. Missiles began to fly.
A bolt slammed into his shields and bent them almost to his chest, punching him backwards even as the missile disintegrated. Sordell retaliated furiously, sending a stab of light into the darkness, and the man shrieked and clattered to the stones. Another bolt sang, glancing off his shields, and he blasted again, thin shafts of light that were faster to fire. Already half the Jhafi were running away. He soared to the wide-open door of the safe-house and conjured up an eidolon-spirit. He sent it inside, where it tore the souls from three men before a silver blade sent it wailing to oblivion. He gasped as the gnostic bond through which he controlled it snapped, but recovered swiftly, rejoicing at his acquired pure-blood energy. Necromantic sight showed him wispy shapes rising from the men he’d slain and he snared them and held them as he readied his next spell, seeking his prey.
Then a window shattered outwards and Symone – Coin – burst out. The hermaphrodite had a frightened young boy – Timori Nesti – thrashing in his blood-smeared hands. Coin saw Sordell and froze.
‘Give up the boy,’ Sordell rasped. Around them, Coin’s Jhafi helpers were scattering, terrified by the open use of gnosis. The bells were clanging from a nearby Dorobon watch-house and Rondian voices could be heard, drawing closer.
Coin responded by raising one hand; the mage-fire she kindled with pure-blood gnosis was bright as a little sun. Sordell responded, but his greater fear was that Coin would take to the air. Shapeshifting – morphic-gnosis, as they’d called it in college – was a study based upon Hermetic- and Air-gnosis; most Morphic-magi could fly.
‘Come on,’ Sordell drawled. ‘You don’t give a shit about the boy. You’re only doing this for Cera, and we already have her.’ He sneered and added provocatively, ‘Gurvon’s probably fucking her up the arse as we speak.’
‘You’re lying,’ Coin replied, her voice thin and scared.
‘Nice try, traitor, but your little plan has failed.’
Coin’s eyes burned a little brighter. ‘Not all of it,’ he – she – it – responded. ‘Have you visited Francis Dorobon’s room tonight?’
Sordell paused. He certainly had. Seeing a man’s genitals ripped from his groin and stuffed down his own throat wasn’t something he’d forget quickly, even jaded as he was.
She did that to a pure-blood! Though he supposed that when Francis had lost his genitals, he’d been so traumatised that fighting back was impossible. ‘Live by the cock, die by the cock,’ he retorted, pleased at the drollness of his response. ‘We’ve got your little Noorie queen, Yvette. That’s who you’re doing this for, isn’t it?’
‘No …’ Coin began shaking her head, scanning the darkness, limbs poised.
Here we go.
With a scream, the shapeshifter erupted into the air, the boy-king clutched in one hand, while molten energy blazed towards Sordell.
He was ready, of course, and as the shapeshifter shot skywards, so did he.
Try to take anyone you find alive, Gurvon had told him.
Rutt shouted aloud, summoning the spirits he’d spent the past minute binding, and Coin’s head twisted from side to side as the violet-limned ghosts of the freshly dead flashed out of the darkness. The hermaphrodite blazed gnostic fire about her as she shifted about, the boy in her arms thrown about like an oversized rag doll. The nebulous forms shrieked and wailed as they were carved apart, but that was fine: they’d achieved their aim: distracting Coin while Sordell got closer. He alighted on a rooftop thirty yards from his target, gripped his periapt tight and struck.
Knowing one’s enemy was a tremendous advantage in gnostic combat. Coin was a specialist, ultra-strong, but in a narrow field. Getting close could see him ripped apart, and trading mage-bolts risked the boy-king. His foe’s weakness lay in non-tangible attacks, and that was where he now focused.
He tore open a glowing hole in the air, and from it slithered a summoned spirit, what the ignorant might call a daemon. Unlike the recent dead, Coin’s gnostic fire barely touched this conjured spirit. A skilled wizard like Sordell could summon such a being and hold it in the aether, just out of reach until needed. Now, with a pure-blood’s body, he could summon spirits of far greater power. As it materialised, he felt dust and dirt, filth and muck from the streets, water from a stagnant pond and all manner of loose debris flow into it, giving it substance. Coin sprayed it with mage-bolts, but it had sufficient native tenacity to endure as it swarmed through the air towards the shapeshifter.
A skilled wizard would have banished the spirit, but Coin had no such affinity. The summoning flowed through Coin’s attacks in a flash, and then tentacles sprouted, latching onto the shifter’s face and covering mouth and nose. Coin’s shriek was muffled and in a desperate attempt to fling it off, she lost her grip of Timori. The young king fell to the ground, landing in a heap, and was sensible or scared enough to freeze in place.
Coin finally succeeded in blasting the summoning away and it splattered against a stone wall. It tried to reform, then fell apart, but by then Sordell had locked onto Coin’s mind with a mesmeric grip. For a few seconds they fought silently, and Sordell got flashes of a life spent in confused and abject misery: an irresolute, needy being with no core identity, desperate to be wanted, and a collection of lurid fantasies about making love to Cera Nesti. But before that it was Gurvon Gyle, and before that Solinde Nesti, and before her a stream of others, each ending in crushing rejection. It was a simple matter to summon those scenes, one after the other, right back to Lucia Fasterius telling her deformed child that she’d been fortunate not to have been drowned at birth.
Coin collapsed, eyes emptying as the worst moments of her life knocked her into a stupor. Sordell caught the falling mage and wrapped her in gnostic bindings, then he turned to Timori Nesti and extended his hand.
‘Come with me, boy. Your sister wants to see you.’
*
For Cera, the following days were a numbness, as if she had been drugged and never quite thrown off the sluggishness. Locked in a dungeon, all she could feel was the axe, slowly descending. She had prayed they would kill her immediately, but instead they left her in a bare cell, with just a blanket and a bucket for slops. There was no sign of anyone, not Tarita or Coin or Timori, not even a guard.
The blanket was too thick to knot and hang herself with, and there was nothing to hang from anyway. Trying to strangle herself didn’t work: she managed to pass out but not fatally, and then they took the blanket away. She tried starving herself, but Mara Secordin force-fed her, her dead eyes pitiless.
Finally, they came for her, led by Sir Roland Heale. ‘Get up,’ he said gruffly, his deep-set piggy eyes glinting in his jowly face. Someone threw cold water over her and she was wrenched to her feet.
They took her, still dripping, to the bureaucratic chambers adjoining the palace, a court room for dispensing justice in capital cases. Gurvon Gyle sat in the senior seat, presiding. Three men sat with him on the judicial bench, two of whom she knew: Josip Yannos, t
he head of the Sollan Church in Javon, and Acmed al-Istan, the senior Godspeaker of the Amteh, had been part of her Regency Council. The third was the Kirkegarde Grandmaster, Etain Tullesque, clad sumptuously in black, white and gold. She wondered where the king was and if he knew what was being done to her.
The Kore Grandmaster spoke first. ‘Cera Nesti, you are accused of murdering your husband, the king. How do you plead? And before you respond, know this: you were seen entering his chambers prior to his body being discovered.’
Her jaw dropped. ‘But … No! He was alive when he left me! I never left the Blood-tower, except to …’ Her eyes went to Gyle’s face. ‘Tell them! Tell them!
His grey eyes were cold and remote. ‘You are also charged with having unnatural relations with your maidservant, Tarita. You will also answer that charge.’
‘No! No! You know that’s not true!’
Even as she spoke her denial, she knew that whatever she said didn’t matter.
I was seen leaving Francis’ rooms, and he’s dead. That must already be widely known, too credible to be denied. Francis is dead: the streets must be in uproar! I’d be seen as a heroine … so they need to break my reputation … With so many clergy locked up, deals could be cut around the one thing they can all agree on: that I need to die horribly, with my reputation destroyed.
Josip Yannos leaned forward. ‘How do you plead, child?’ His voice held just a trace of sympathy, as if he suspected this might be some ruse of Gyle’s. But he was still obviously intent on self-preservation, and likely to do whatever Gyle had told him to.
Godspeaker Acmed just stared at her, a look of pure loathing on his face. He’d been a hard man to deal with at the council table, pricklish at being forced to deal with a woman, but she’d thought she had won him round – but it was his clergy Gyle was locking up, because of her Beggars’ Court. If he was convinced she was safian, then any respect he might once have had for her would be gone, even without her apparent murder of Francis.