A Moment of Cruelty

by Phil Kelly

  ‘Quite the speech,’ said Xarantine.

  ‘He needs sleep, that much is pretty obvious,’ muttered Maltratt. ‘Murder is not within our purview, young man. Your mother would be appalled.’

  ‘I have to admit, the boy’s suggestion has some appeal,’ said Xarantine.

  ‘You serious?’ said Maltratt, her eyes wide. ‘I thought those days were over.’

  ‘Depends on the circumstances,’ shrugged the redhead. ‘And these, despite our man here being the most irritating waste of space I’ve ever met, are not usual circumstances.’

  ‘We live in Shyish,’ said Maltratt. ‘If people started killing one another at every night phantom or knocking-gheist there’d be no one left come winter.’

  ‘Whatever it is that’s stalking Alabastian is staking the place out. That’s different. And if it knows where we live, I’d rather see it put down hard.’

  ‘It’s a beggar, Kaitlin,’ said Maltratt. ‘A plague victim, or a warrior come out of the Old War in the wilds, before Pater Nagash took back what was owed him. I’m not going out there to stab someone I don’t know, even if the young master is certain of his guilt. My father didn’t bring me up like that.’

  Alabastian felt the wind sag out of his sails. When Maltratt set her mind to something, she would not be budged.

  ‘I’m going back to bed,’ he said, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

  ‘I’ll come up with you,’ said Maltratt. ‘Keep a vigil on the upper half of the place.’

  ‘I think I would prefer Xarantine on the top floor,’ said Alabastian, ‘and you as far away as possible.’ He pulled a sour expression before leaving the servants’ quarters, climbing the stairs to his bedroom with his footsteps as loud as he could make them. He yawned, slamming the door behind him and slumping into bed. His head felt full of broken glass, and his eyes were aching from stress. He burrowed under the silk sheets, feeling like death, and stewed in his own dark imaginings.

  It took an hour and a half of sour, petulant thoughts, but eventually he fell asleep.

  In the small hours, when the city was almost still, the night pushed tendrils of amethyst and grey across the landscape of Alabastian’s mind. He dreamed of vile, uncanny things, stilt-legged and scalpel-gloved with long masks protruding from their faces in the manner of a mosquito’s proboscis. They twitched and spasmed as they came closer. With the irrefutable logic of dreams, Alabastian knew their intent to operate no matter the cost.

  Suddenly he was surrounded by them, laid out on the slab under their staring lenses. It was not the dissection table of a hospice, rather one at the centre of Mhurghast’s great scholar-theatres. Scores of staring, pallid faces looked down upon him, each entirely devoid of life. The lecture was in session, and he was the subject.

  ‘His thread grows thin,’ said one of them, his voice tinny and distant. ‘We will have to cut deep.’

  ‘Deep indeed, to find the soul,’ nodded another. ‘If it has not already atrophied to nothing.’

  There was a hammering noise from high up in the amphitheatre’s shadowed eaves, rattling and urgent. Several of the strange surgeons looked up.

  ‘The Visitor is here,’ said the tallest of them.

  ‘So early,’ mused another.

  ‘We had best hasten,’ said a third. ‘Or the chance will be gone.’

  ‘Then bring forth the liquid of life.’

  As one, the scalpels cut into Alabastian’s hip, belly and throat, and he began to scream.

  ‘Sir, are you all right?’

  Maltratt had burst through the door like the first warrior through the breach of a lengthy siege. Her teeth were bared and her short sword drawn as she took in every detail of the room. Xarantine came in behind her, eyes scanning the corners of the chamber.

  ‘A nightmare,’ groaned Alabastian. ‘Just… just a nightmare, I think.’

  ‘I heard something,’ said Maltratt. ‘You knock something over, perhaps?’ She cast a meaningful glance at the broken Azyrite water clock, its fragments still scattered across the floor where Alabastian had left them the previous morning.

  ‘I did, yes. Though it was some time ago. What did you hear?’

  ‘Banging, rattling. Thought it was a storm at first, or at least high wind, but there’s been not so much as a drop of rain and Lassiter said it’s been calm all night.’ She shrugged, the leather of her armour groaning. ‘Probably you thrashing around, if you were in the teeth of a bad dream.’

  Alabastian felt his limbs grow heavy and cold. Propping himself up on his hip, he turned to the window and parted curtains of heavy velvet with a long index finger. Moonlight streamed through, or at least Mhurghast’s grudging semblance of it. He winced nonetheless, his head suddenly pounding, then forced himself to look again through hooded eyes until the pane itself sprang into focus.

  The large, arched window was smeared with dirt, weird fluids and streaks of blood.

  ‘Those are fingerprints,’ said Xarantine, leaning in close. ‘Look.’

  As Alabastian squinted closer, he saw the unmistakable marks of human fingers left on glass. Not enough for a whole hand, but prints nonetheless.

  Even in her paranoia, Mother had never fortified the upper windows with more than a sturdy lock. She had once told him that to shutter them altogether was to consign the topmost floors to perpetual gloom. The outer wall was sheer and well maintained, thirty feet from the forbidding barb-crowned perimeter of the garden, and a razor-sharp, glass-toothed overhang jutted out over six feet above it to see off the rope and grapnel of any truly determined thieves. It was a point of pride of the Valenth dynasty that their city mansion was a castle that had never been breached.

  And yet it was plain to see there had been something outside his window, in the small hours of the night.

  Something filthy, and hungry to get in.

  ‘Okay,’ said Maltratt. ‘Okay. First light-hour tomorrow, Xarantine and I go on the hunt.’

  So early in the morning, the Necrai Bridge was all but deserted. It was cold, colder than Maltratt had expected. The chill was seeping through her thick furs, and the morning mists were thick and clinging. Wisps trailed from Xarantine’s legs as she trod the cobbles just ahead.

  Not for the first time, Maltratt’s thoughts turned to childhood stories of the Illuminating Realm, where the sun always shone and the answers to every problem hung like ripe fruit on a low bough. Right now, she would brave a Realmgate to Hysh without a second thought. Even Aqshy, with its fierce people and burning-hot wastelands, would be preferable to the omnipresent gloom and chill of Shyish.

  ‘Why do you think the Valenths chose this benighted place as their settler-gains?’

  ‘Opportunism. Plenty of grave goods here for the taking, if you’ve the steel for it.’

  ‘If they had, it’s not carried down the generations. I’ll wager he’s hiding under his bed even now.’

  ‘Almost certainly. Why are we doing this again?’

  ‘Just so we can tell him we have. We don’t really know what this thing looks like, nor where it makes its lair. Very unlikely to be on a public thoroughfare with nowhere but the mist to hide.’

  They walked the length and breadth of the bridge in sullen silence from that point, finding nothing but the occasional black-headed gull startled from its roost. Wherever the beggar-creature was, it was not on the bridge, that much was becoming clear.

  As they were heading back towards the mansion, Maltratt heard a muttering in the fog ahead, a sing-song voice from a human throat.

  ‘Sally… Sally’s the word… Sally, out from the castle…’

  Someone shuffled in the morning light ahead, a muddled black shadow. Xarantine marched straight up towards her, halberd held diagonally before her so one downward sweep could decapitate in an instant. Maltratt came in close behind.

  ‘Sally from the castle�
�� Tell you a fine tale for a drop of aqua, my fine warriors.’

  ‘Tell us where the fingerless freak who haunts this bridge has gone,’ said Xarantine, ‘and you can have a whole phial.’

  The madwoman leered, her yellow teeth on display. ‘Fingerless… She means the Haunter, I reckon. The Visitor. Sally, sally.’

  ‘Talk in riddles and you’ll get the side of my halberd,’ said Xarantine. Maltratt shot her a look, but she was too intent on her prey to notice. ‘Just tell us where he is, street-scum. I’ll know if you’re lying to me.’

  ‘Oh, such a fierce one.’

  ‘She means it,’ said Maltratt, stepping in to add her impressive bulk to Xarantine’s fiery presence. ‘You’ll tell us where he is, or though I hate to say it, it’ll be into the Hisset with you, my girl.’

  ‘Sally!’ she hissed. ‘Sally out!’

  ‘Stop saying that,’ said Xarantine, her jaw clenching, ‘or we’ll stop your gabbling for good.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve faced far worse than you, heaven-child.’ She puckered up her lips, offering a false kiss before her expression turned nasty. ‘Sally from the castle,’ she said slowly, ‘and leave the gates unbarred.’

  Something clicked in Maltratt’s mind, a dusty lock opening a door to blackness beyond.

  ‘Nagash’s blood. Is Lassiter on duty this morning?’

  ‘Just Nimsk,’ said Xarantine. ‘And you know what he’s like. Still, the place is locked up tighter than a Chamonite’s hoardvault, isn’t it? He’ll be safe enough. He wouldn’t have dispatched us otherwise.’

  ‘That thing couldn’t get in the window, but it left enough evidence to get us out,’ said Maltratt. ‘To get us to sally from the castle, as it were. Could it already know how to break in, with the window smeared as a ruse?’

  The talespinner’s grin flashed in the gloom, defiant madness glimmering in her eyes.

  ‘She’s cleverer than she seems, this one.’

  Maltratt broke into a run back the way they had come, Xarantine close at her heels. The redhead soon overtook her, casting her halberd into a nearby gutter so she could make a proper sprint.

  By the next corner, Maltratt ran on alone.

  The hairs on Alabastian’s forearms had risen fast when he’d heard a thin creak and a flurry of muffled thumps come from the attic. Fear had driven him out of bed more than anger. More than that, it was the need to have an end to it, and sink into the blissful oblivion of proper sleep.

  ‘Nimsk!’ he called downstairs. ‘Nimsk, come up here this minute!’

  There was no answer. Stupid youth was probably still asleep.

  He told himself it was righteous fury that drove him onto the landing and to the base of the attic stairs, the noble indignation of the man of the house who finds another on his land without permission. In his heart, he knew it was injured pride, frustration and a sense that if he cowered so long that someone else went up in his stead, he would never rise to be the man of the house. Not truly.

  An idea struck him. Making his way to the craft room at the back of the second floor, he rustled around amongst the dust-covered bric-a-brac of Mother’s artisan supplies. It was nerve-twisting work, having his back to the door. Every moment he half expected the beggar-thing to jump on his back and sink its fingernails into his neck. His hands were shaking by the time he found what he was looking for: a large crystal phial of Aqshian printer’s vitriol, potent enough to etch metal.

  Face your terrors, little darling, or live forever in the shade.

  With a sigh of leather, Alabastian’s shortblade slid from its sheath. He made his way up to the attic. Only his bullseye lantern and thin shafts of moonlight illuminated his path.

  A ray of light gleamed from something wet on the third stair from the top. He stooped, looking closer at the bubble-dotted liquid. Phlegm, by the look of it, spattered on the threadbare carpet strip that was pinned to the centre of the mahogany stairs. It was cloudy and discoloured with black streaks.

  Alabastian was suddenly conscious of the sweat on the ribbed leather grip of his heirloom sword. He had a terrible feeling that the tighter he clutched it the more likely his hand would cramp at a critical moment. Teeth clenched hard, he made it up the last few steps, one of which gave a slight creak. The curve-topped door to the attic was closed.

  It was never closed.

  A bead of sweat tickled the nape of his neck despite the chill. The air smelt somehow danker than he remembered, as if the door to the earthy maze of the cellar below had been left open all night.

  He found himself longing for Xarantine, imagining her going up before him with the point of her halberd leading the way. He would have dearly loved to watch either of his armed retainers take down the freakish thing that had stalked him over the last few days, but by the time they got back, it could well be too late. After dispatching them to hunt the creature on the bridge, he either had to investigate the thumping noise himself, or cower under the covers like a craven child with Mother’s voice ringing in his ears.

  Are you a man at all, Bastian? Are you truly cut out to live in Shyish, to inherit our dynasty, if you are so petrified of gheists and phantom noises?

  His father would have put it more bluntly. Better to hunt than be hunted.

  ‘Sword out, strike first,’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Jab, then run.’

  He pushed open the door, a slight squeal from its hinges making him jump.

  The attic was lit by wan light coming through the shattered window over the square, broken glass glinting jagged as he placed his bullseye lantern carefully on the floor. It cast stark shadows across the sheet-covered boxes and statues of his father’s abandoned possessions. More than ever they seemed to him a horde of gheists frozen in time, eyeless faces craning to see who was foolish enough to trespass amongst their unquiet graves.

  ‘Come out, bastard!’ he shouted. His voice was a throttled yelp a full octave higher than he intended. He cleared his throat. ‘Come out, and get what’s coming to you!’

  A hiss, somewhere in the back of the attic. Then silence.

  The thing came at him with shocking speed. It was gangling and covered in sores. Alabastian screamed and jerked his arm, the contents of the phial of vitriol glittering in the light as he flung it. The creature grabbed a sheet from a covered mannequin and whirled it in front of itself, catching most of the etching vitriol and dashing it to one side. Droplets sizzled on ancient wood, the sharp scent of acid filling the air over a nauseating stink of rotten meat. Alabastian caught a glimpse of the thing, all sunken eyes and gaping mouth. He broke and ran for the stairs.

  His flight down to the landing below was clumsy, feet slamming flat down three steps at a time as his back and neck tingled with the hideous feeling that plague-crusted teeth or fingernails would rip into him at any moment. His sword wobbled before him, more a liability than a weapon. There was no way his panic would let him use it. He saw something coming up from the hall below, his heart leaping into his mouth before he recognised the shock of red hair. Thank Sigmar. It was Xarantine, sword drawn.

  ‘Kill it!’ he screeched. He barged past the guardswoman’s shoulder, making for his bedroom. It was like running into a wooden post. He was sent spinning in a half-turn, and despite himself, he looked back.

  Xarantine lunged at the creature as it scrabbled on all fours down the stairs. It darted left, sickeningly fast. She whipped her blade after it, the edge thunking into its shoulder. It twisted away – no blood, just a spatter of dark, silty fluid – and launched itself into her chest with such force it bowled both of them over.

  They went down the stairs in a jumble of limbs. Xarantine’s sword clattered to embed itself point first into the banister as she and the grotesque creature tumbled in a killing embrace. As one they landed heavily onto the mosaic floor in a sudden halo of blood.

  Xarantine’s neck was bent. Her tongue lolled. The creatu
re was folded over her, head buried in her neck.

  Then the beggar-thing looked straight up at him, one eye white, one black, and clacked its bloodstained teeth.

  ‘Please…’ it said, grinning. ‘Please…’

  It came fast up the stairs on all fours, more like a hound than a man. Gone was the shuffling, bent-backed slowness of the cripple he had seen on the bridge. Here was a predator clad in rags, many of its claws missing but its teeth and eyes shining bright. It rushed towards him, the staccato thumping of its feet setting his mind aflame.

  Alabastian staggered away, instinctively backing into his bedroom. His heart was pounding. Defend the door, he thought. Cut anything that comes through.

  He looked back. That awful face leered up over the last few stairs, gore dribbling down its chin.

  ‘Please…’ it hissed. ‘Please. Just a drop…’

  He stood en garde, as Mother had taught him. The tip of the blade was steady.

  The beast halted, eyeing the sword. Alabastian felt a fierce, killing elation. He stepped backwards to put some more room between them, then felt something pierce his foot. He howled, his off-hand clutching at the knife of Azyrite glass that protruded through the meat of his instep.

  In a flurry of black rags the creature was on him. He tried to twist away, but it bore him down. It pulled itself up onto his back as he scrabbled in the scattering of broken glass. Fear took him, and on instinct he sent a sharp elbow back into the thing’s jaw. It connected with a crack. He scrabbled for a shard of the water clock, pain slashing his nerves as his fingers were opened on the sharp, bluish glass. Reversing it, he whipped it back around and stabbed it into the creature’s ribs. He felt it sink in.

  Then a dozen needles sank into the back of his neck at the same time, a fiery ring of pain that pulsed so hard it was impossible to think. Black rags, encrusted with filth, draped over his face. A half-hand clasped itself down over his forehead. One of the missing fingers smeared lukewarm, peach-coloured fluids over his eyebrow, the awful substances trickling over his eyelid as he shook his head as violently as he could. Still the pulsing, throbbing agony spread from his neck. He pulled out his knife of glass, catching sight of it out of the corner of his eye before sinking it back into the creature’s ribs.