by Luke Scull
Bone clanked behind him. Kayne spun and caught the skeleton’s grasping arm an instant before it closed around his throat. He twisted viciously and felt the arm snap off in his hand. The broken end was jagged and sharp.
It would serve.
Without a second’s hesitation Brodar Kayne leaped across the table and plunged the makeshift dagger down. Down through Nazala’s neck, tearing through flesh and muscle. Blood immediately welled up around the horrific wound. The necromancer’s hands fell away from the dagger hilts in his chest and he reached up, flapping pathetically at the bone lodged in his throat.
Kayne stared down at the wizard, meeting the necromancer’s shocked expression with eyes the colour of a clear sky on a winter morning. He gave the bone a twist; Nazala slobbered fresh blood over his arm. ‘You don’t harm your own,’ he growled between clenched teeth. ‘And you don’t… hurt… children.’
The necromancer gasped one final time and then went limp. There was a cacophony of noise behind Kayne as Nazala’s servants fell apart in a shower of falling bone. A skull rolled across the floor and bumped into his foot. He kicked it away just as Jerek came to stand beside him. The Wolf was wearing gloves, but the sheer heat of the fire had burned through the leather while he was heating his daggers. His palms were red and blistered and would likely scar. Once more Kayne found himself overcome with guilt.
Brick rose unsteadily to his feet and stumbled over. He stared down at Nazala’s corpse, and somehow he went even paler. ‘What about Mhaira?’ he asked in a trembling voice.
‘What about her?’ Kayne asked.
‘You could have gone home to her. Instead you… you saved me.’
Kayne placed a hand on Brick’s shoulder. ‘There weren’t ever a choice involved. You’d know that if you’d met Mhaira. She’d never have forgiven me.’
Brick nodded. ‘Thank you. I—’ He stopped mid-sentence. Then he turned, bent over, and promptly vomited up the contents of his stomach.
Jerek heaved a weary sigh. ‘Fuck it,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m gonna round up a few of these bottles, take them back to the stables. At least that green bastard can hold his drink.’
They found Grunt fast asleep in a bed of hay, his muscular arms wrapped tightly around his mysterious sack. Jerek decided to wake him by pouring half a bottle of wine over his snout, which almost resulted in one of the horses getting injured as the greenskin flailed around in sudden surprise. The mute was a good deal more appreciative when he learned they’d brought wine back with them. He even showed Jerek how to make a salve from swamp mud and plant roots, which the Wolf applied to the burns on his hands.
A few hours later the companions left the swamp, heading north towards the Purple Hills.
Assimilating
The woman was barely recognizable. Both her legs had been caught in the fire, which had melted away the flesh and exposed blackened bone and sinew.
Eremul the Halfmage felt a brief of moment of empathy for the corpse before deciding his sympathies were better spent on the living.
Soon this morgue will be positively bursting with the emaciated remains of the starved. Assuming the city doesn’t burn down before then.
The latest victim of Melissan’s fanatics had been a clerk on her way home from the council building near the centre of the city – one of Lorganna’s employees. She had been crossing the street when a firebomb exploded right in front of her. It was the fourth such attack in the past two weeks. Another warehouse had burned down near the Hook; a shoemaker and his family had been cooked alive in the west end of the city when their home was set aflame; a tavern had gone down in a raging inferno, though most of the patrons were unharmed; and, most worrying of all from where Eremul was sitting, a firebomb had turned a ship floating in the harbour into a burned-out wreck. There seemed to be no pattern to the attacks, no sign of a clear strategy to support his theory that the Fade were somehow directing the rebels.
The Halfmage turned to the second body he’d requested be removed from the wooden boxes that filled the niches cut into the walls of the chamber. Each housed a corpse that would be taken to a private cemetery if the deceased had been a person of means, or to the great public graveyard off Crook Street if they had not.
The mutilated body that lay on the cold slab would not be granted the dignity of a burial. The Collectors would take the corpse to the furnace below the morgue, where it would be incinerated. Criminals weren’t afforded the privilege of taking up valuable space in the ground.
‘They weren’t kind to him,’ said the mortician, Marston, from where he was lurking behind the Halfmage. ‘I’ve rarely seen a corpse so badly mutilated. Though there was one young lady the Collectors brought in last week that seemed to be rotting from the inside out, if you can believe that. Made a hell of a stench, I can tell you.’
Eremul nodded absent-mindedly, not really paying attention. His gaze was fixed on the corpse before him. He knew a thing or two about torture: the time he’d spent in the Obelisk’s dungeons was a memory that still kept him awake at night. Even he was shocked at the abuse that had been heaped upon this man. The toes and fingers had been removed, one eye had been gouged out, and terrible scars covered the torso where a hot iron had been pressed against his flesh.
The Halfmage winced when he saw the jagged wound between the corpse’s legs. A bloodstained scrap of flesh was all that remained of the fanatic’s manhood. No one could accuse the Council of not utilizing every technique available to them in their efforts to extract information from the rebels, but so far none of the fanatics had surrendered information that might lead to Melissan’s capture.
He turned to Marston. ‘Would you be so kind as to turn him over, so that I may examine his back?’
The mortician ran a hand through the greying tufts of hair springing haphazardly from his balding pate. ‘You know you shouldn’t be here. You don’t have the authority.’
‘This is the last time. You have my word.’ Clearly news of his dismissal from the Council had got around. Timerus really did bear a grudge against him, the slimy Ishari bastard.
Marston puffed out his cheeks. ‘Only because it’s you, Halfmage. You understand I need to keep my nose clean. Especially after the, ahem, debacle with my assistant.’
Eremul raised an eyebrow. ‘Debacle?’
‘It’s probably best if you don’t ask.’
The mortician moved to the slab and placed his gloved hands on the corpse. He was a heavy-set man, strong despite his advancing years. Hefting corpses around was hard work, Eremul supposed. As a young man he’d never enjoyed physical labour and had avoided it where possible. That was something he had come to regret after his legs were taken from him. But in recent weeks he had observed his arms growing thicker and stronger from pushing his chair around the city: a development he found strangely pleasing.
The fanatic’s back was crisscrossed with lash wounds. The torturer had evidently taken a whip to him before moving onto subtler methods. Eremul scanned the cold flesh, looking for the tattoo, that peculiar script which all the other fanatics whose corpses he had examined displayed on some part of their body.
There it was: a tiny flourish of black ink just below the small of the back. Eremul traced it with a finger, following the shape. Something about it felt… odd.
‘Ahem.’ Marston cleared his throat nosily. ‘Did I mention the trouble I had with my assistant? You understand I’m not here to judge, but I feel I have to inform you of a certain moral responsibility—’
‘Be quiet.’
The Halfmage evoked a trickle of magic and held it at the tip of his index finger. Very slowly he brought it down towards the tattoo…
Which began to move, twisting beneath the skin, the strange black script writhing to get away from the probing digit. The Halfmage raised an eyebrow. Could it be that this tattoo was alive?
Eremul reached deeper, summoned forth more magic. He channelled it against the twisting ink until the skin began to ripple. It was as if the script itself w
ere an insect, desperate to burrow out of the corpse and escape—
He caught a glimpse of something tiny and black and spiderlike scuttling away. It disappeared into the shadows at the edges of the chamber and then was gone.
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
Lorganna,
I made a disturbing discovery while at the morgue earlier this afternoon. The tattoos on Melissan’s fanatics appear to be sentient beings – a kind of parasite that lives under the skin of the host and is inert until exposed directly to magic. Unfortunately, in the process of ascertaining this information, this particular subject escaped. It would be advantageous if you could arrange for me to have access to one of the rebels imprisoned in the Oblong dungeons, so that I may investigate further. As always, absolute discretion is apropos to our relationship.
E.
He set the quill down. A moment later he picked it back up and carefully blotted out ‘apropos’, replacing it with ‘essential’. The word hadn’t quite fitted and, besides, whilst he enjoyed the opportunity to practise his penmanship, one didn’t want to sound pretentious.
The Halfmage carefully rolled the parchment and sealed it with wax, then sat back in his chair. He winced at the various niggles that assaulted him. His arse throbbed, his lower back ached, and his writing hand had begun to cramp. He would have liked to take a short nap, but he needed to be at Artifice Street in a couple of hours. After careful consideration he had reluctantly concluded that it might be a good idea to wash away the stench of death before his soiree with Monique.
She is curious, that’s all. The woman has no romantic interest in you. Don’t make a fool of yourself.
He thought back to the romantic liaisons he had enjoyed during the course of his thirty-five years of life. There had been the stolen kiss with the neighbour’s daughter when he was a child – he’d been heartbroken when her family had moved away. Shortly after that, the Great Plague had claimed his parents and he’d been moved to the boy’s orphanage in Orchard Street. As was the case for most of the boys, his hand had been his only source of relief during his first few years at the institution.
He recalled with vague horror his fourteenth birthday. His friends had taken him to a brothel and paid for a whore for him. He had been halfway aroused before the sour stench of the woman’s breath robbed him of any desire to consummate the deed. After a long moment of awkwardness the hooker had settled on tugging him off, a decidedly unsatisfactory experience he had done his best to portray as a revelation akin to the Creator’s First Decree to his friends later that night.
A year later he had discovered his latent magical ability and the Obelisk had summoned him for trials. Somehow he had impressed enough to earn an apprenticeship. Most of his instruction in the wizardly arts had come from old Poskarus, who had little time for relationships and even less time for women, and so even his teenage years were decidedly lean when it came to the pleasures of the flesh.
After the city-wide mageocide known as the Culling and the loss of his legs, any lingering desire for intimacy he may have possessed withered and died. Hatred became the only companion he needed; vengeance the singular passion that stirred his bitter heart.
Eremul smiled ruefully. It felt strange, sliding into something approaching normality. Doing what other people did. Almost as if he were an imposter. He wasn’t sure this was what he wanted, and yet he was curiously reluctant to disappoint Monique. Despite the fact the trek to Artifice Street would be exhausting and he would rather spend the evening with a good book and Tyro on his lap.
Where are you, boy? He hadn’t seen the scruffy little mongrel in a while. He wheeled his chair around the depository and eventually found Tyro curled up in the corner, apparently asleep.
The Halfmage selected a clean robe and laid it out on his bed. Then he wheeled himself to the washroom. It was always a trial to bathe, a complicated process it had taken many attempts to get right. He crawled into the chair Isaac had designed for him, and then positioned himself above the drainage hole that fed directly into the sewers beneath the harbour. He yanked on a rope connected to a simple pulley system and the bucket suspended just above his head upended, showering him with cold water. Once he had finished scrubbing himself clean, he unhooked the bucket and placed it near the door to be refilled for the next time.
Eremul returned to his room and spent a couple of minutes pulling on the robes. He was worried they might appear ostentatious, but then he cursed himself for a fool.
Fussing over my appearance is akin to a leper worrying if his breath is fresh. Any woman that loves me will do so for my other qualities. Whatever they may be.
Now that he thought about it, perhaps this ‘date’ wasn’t such a good idea after all. Still, he had a letter that needed to be delivered. He’d be damned if he’d gone to the considerable effort of taking a bath only to hand a grubby urchin a piece of parchment.
He applied a dash of perfume, feeling like an utter cretin. Then he returned to his study to retrieve the letter, casting a quick glance to where Tyro lay to see if he was awake.
Blood-red orbs stared back at him, as sinister as infanticide.
He jolted back in his chair. ‘T-Tyro?’ he gasped, his heart hammering in his chest.
The dog padded over and sniffed around his robes, then looked up at him with adoring brown eyes. Eremul reached down a trembling hand. Tyro licked his fingers with his warm, wet tongue and made a whining sound, begging for food. Just as he always did.
‘Tyro… what’s happening to me, boy?’
I really ought to have had that sleep this afternoon.
Though he was certain the sinister vision was a result of tiredness and pre-date nerves and maybe a lingering paranoia from Isaac’s betrayal, the Halfmage still found himself shaking a little as he left the depository.
‘Deliver this to the Grand Council building. I want it to go directly to the Office of Civic Relations. If anyone asks, you never saw me.’
The boy nodded. He was wafer-thin, so underfed that a strong wind might blow him away, or so it seemed. ‘One silver sceptre,’ the orphan mumbled.
‘A whole silver?’ Eremul shook his head in mock outrage. ‘That’s daylight robbery! But it seems I have little choice. Be sure to give your friends some food as well, you understand me?’
He tossed the coin at the kid, who pocketed it and ran off. In truth, with prices rising at an alarming rate, a silver would not buy much beyond a couple of loaves of bread. With each passing day more of the city’s poor seemed to be begging on street corners or rooting through piles of refuse looking for something to eat. There was a sense of desperation in the air: an increasingly volatile mix of hopelessness and fury that threatened to ignite at any moment. Only the dubious promise of the Pioneer’s Deal was postponing a city-wide uprising.
And with the notable exception of Lorganna, it seemed no one on the Grand Council gave a rat’s ass.
The new Civic Relations Minister had contacted Eremul three days after he had been banished from the Council Chamber. In her letter she had expressed a desire to help his investigations into a possible connection between the rebels and the Fade. Though their correspondence did not strictly break any laws, the fact Eremul was persona non grata with Dorminia’s Grand Regent made the situation delicate. Eremul suspected it was only his hero status keeping him out of the Obelisk’s dungeons.
He pushed his chair through Artifice Street, noting the absence of customers in the more expensive shops. The new taxes the White Lady had imposed were sucking the city dry.
The faces change, but the fist stays the same. Always squeezing. Crushing the life from the poor. Grinding them down while their labour feeds the insatiable appetites of the lucky few.
Eremul realized he himself fell into the latter category, at least in a broader sense. He felt guilty at having agreed to meet Monique in one of the city’s more expensive taverns. The Rose and Sceptre was a large building situated between a jeweller’s and a locksmith. Monique was waiting for him wh
en he arrived. She was dressed as before in a long black skirt and tight top. Her glossy hair fell perfectly to the nape of her neck. Her lips and the base of her eyes were painted violet, accentuating her flawless skin.
The squeak of his chair’s wheels on the wooden floor drew the attention of just about everyone else sitting in the tavern, much to his annoyance. Monique smiled when she saw him, and that helped soothe his irritation.
‘You look dashing,’ she greeted him, her voice carrying the sensual quality that had kept both his imagination and his trusty right hand so busy over the past couple of weeks.
The Halfmage glanced down at his sweaty robes, at the bottom hem hanging limply over the stumps of his legs. ‘You may wish to get those glasses checked.’
Monique laughed. He tried to remember the last time he had made a woman laugh, but drew a blank.
‘The custom in Tarbonne is for the man to choose wine before dinner is ordered.’
‘I thought I recognized that accent,’ he said, eager to impress. ‘Tarbonne. Once the brightest jewel of the Nine Kingdoms – as they were once known.’
Monique adjusted her glasses. ‘Not so bright now, it is true. They are beset by war. Bands of mercenaries travel the Shattered Realms, fighting for any false lord with gold to spare. I fled north to escape it all.’
‘You fled here, of all places? I suppose the grass is always greener from afar. How long have you been in the city?’
‘Two years. Did you wish to order wine?’
Shit. Idiot. He’d forgotten about the wine. ‘You choose,’ he offered gallantly. ‘I’ll pay.’
‘You don’t think I can afford it?’
‘Er…’ Shit! I’ve done it now!
Monique smiled, a wry twist of the mouth that made him feel all kinds of things. ‘I’m just playing, silly!’
‘Ah.’ Eremul wiped the sweat from his brow and gurned a smile. ‘Sorry. It’s been a busy day and I haven’t been sleeping well recently.’
‘We all need our beauty sleep, yes?’
‘People like me don’t get beauty sleep.’