She glanced at Jordi, watching the slaughter with cool professional detachment. He turned to speak to two of the junior officers behind him. They galloped away to the flanks of the army.
“Not long now, Glory,” he said, nodding courteously at her. The Queen bowed her masked head slightly in return. Inside the metal shell she made a face and wished him dead.
Brazen trumpets squealed, and the ground under her chariot trembled to the advance of cavalry. First her frontiersmen on light ponies: mounted archers and javelin-men drawn from the wild borders of Calisse. These were followed by the cream of her army, the warrior nobles of Calisse, their bodies covered in elaborate gilded armour and crested helms, armed with heavy lances and mounted on enormous war-horses.
The Queen almost cried out with joy at the sight of these warriors, many of them her kinsmen, rumbling into battle. At last this brutal, chaotic affair had acquired a tinge of romance. She spotted one of her cousins, the Lord Supreme, splendid in his gleaming silver and gold armour and winged helm.
The Frontiersmen galloped around the edges of the fighting, hurling their javelins into the packed mass of fighting men. Meanwhile the squadrons of heavy horse curved around the flanks until they met and re-formed directly behind the rear ranks of the Confederacy. Their lances swung down into rest, and the steel riders slowly trotted forward, an inexorable moving wall of metal and horseflesh, gradually picking up speed as their ponderous mounts shifted from a trot into a full-blooded gallop.
The Grey Queen watched, transfixed, as the handful of rebel horse turned to meet the charging nobles with suicidal valour. They vanished under a cloud of dust and flailing hoofs, ridden over and mangled underfoot.
The nobles thundered into the rear of the rebel host and smashed their tattered ranks all to pieces. Hundreds of brave men died, skewered on noble lances, slaughtered with axe, mace and longsword. The few survivors fled or sold their lives dearly, forming up into little groups and fighting back-to-back until the last of them was slain.
“Victory,” said Jordi, raising his voice above the cheers. “May I be the first to congratulate Your Glory. All is done.”
Jordi spoke too soon. All was not done. The Bear still lived. He was indestructible, truly more god than man, careless of the blows that rained down on him from all sides. His helmet was gone, and his buckler, but some vital, elemental force drove him forward. His companions fell, pulled down and butchered. Nothing could stop the Bear.
One man could not possibly cut a path through the dense ranks of infantry, or the three lines of spearmen that stood behind him, and behind them the unbreakable phalanx of the Crimson Guard. Yet this was what the Bear tried to do. He would reach the hated Grey Queen, smashing aside all who stood in his path, or die.
The Bear didn’t know it, but he owed his impossible survival to the Queen herself. Time and again, she used her will to pluck him out of danger, stilling the hands of her soldiers before they could strike a death-blow, warding off the blades that stabbed and hacked at his ruined body.
Perhaps, she thought with quiet amusement, I should have myself accused of treason.
At last he was the only rebel left standing. He burst through the third line of spears, scattering men like chaff, and staggered towards the Crimson Guard. Four broken spears protruded from his massive back, three fingers were sheared from his left hand, and blood flowed down his chest and thighs.
The tall, red-cloaked troopers of the Guard, their faces hidden behind the bars of their visors, advanced to block his path.
Now the Grey Queen flowed to her feet. She was tall for a woman, over six feet, and an imposing figure in her long, silken grey robes and polished steel mask.
“Let him pass!”
She combined the way and the will to cast her words like thunder across the lowering skies. Her command was sacred to the Guard, who obediently shouldered arms and parted ranks to allow the Bear through.
Jordi looked at her in alarm. “Glory, what is this?” he exclaimed. “That man is a dangerous animal. He must be put down.”
The Queen ignored him. Her heart melted with pity as the dying hero limped through the path made for him. His breath came in shuddering gasps. His strength failed before he could reach her chariot. He dropped his axe and collapsed onto all fours.
Jordi slid from his horse and advanced on the fallen man, sword drawn to finish him off.
“Leave him be.” The Queen’s voice cracked like a whip. Gaping in confusion, Jordi stepped back.
The Bear crawled towards her. Blood dripped from his bruised lips. Bloody tears coursed down his raddled cheeks. He was making such an end as would be fit for a song. The Queen appreciated this, and played on it.
She remembered the advice of her predecessor:
“You must give the people something to remember. Live your life, and shape events around you, as though they were part of a ballad. Fill the people with awe, and they will love you, no matter what else you do. Glorify your enemies, if they deserve it, because in defeating them you gain respect and admiration.”
A strong wind swept across the field. The Queen had deliberately harnessed it. Her robes flapped about her as the Bear crawled the last few painful inches to her chariot and reached out to grasp the hem of her skirt.
Aware of Jordi hovering anxiously, she knelt and placed a finger under the Bear’s chin, tilting his face up to look at her. Sparks of hatred flared in his eyes.
“They will sing songs of you, Titos the Bear,” she whispered. “I will make sure of that. Now you shall have mercy.”
The middle finger of her left hand was adorned with a silver ring, studded with a blue gemstone. The stone was attached to the ring via a hinge. Her will flicked it open to reveal a cache of white powder inside.
She gently blew the poison into his face. Death was instant and painless.
* * * *
The Grey Queen returned to the Necropolis in triumph. Her entrance was preceded by files of grey-robed monks, chanting her praises.
With the final defeat and destruction of the Confederacy, the realm of Calisse stretched unbroken for over four thousand miles east to west, from the shores of the Girdle Sea to the mountainous western frontier. Beyond the frontier lay nothing (so far as anyone knew) but a wasteland of barren, uninhabited steppe and desert, stretching to the edges of the world.
The Necropolis was a city of ritual. Sombre church bells called the citizens to prayer seven times between dawn and dusk. They worshipped no god save the Grey Queen. For seven hundred years it had been so, ever since the Necropolis was founded by the first Queen, Matasuna.
Matasuna had started life as a humble tradesman’s daughter in the Old Kingdom, the youngest of fifteen children. Unable to afford another mouth to feed, her parents gave her to the church. From childhood she was ambitious and hungry for power. As a young acolyte she fell to studying the forbidden arts, and was flogged and driven out of her order. Outlawed and proclaimed a heretic, she was finally obliged to quit the Old Kingdom for using her dark powers to murder one of the king’s kinsmen.
Accompanied by a handful of followers, fanatics and dreamers who regarded her as a prophet, Matasuna fled across the Girdle Sea and made her way to the darkest, most inaccessible reaches of the Red Dawn Mountains. Here she could practice her follies and commune with evil spirits in peace.
After some years she fell sick from a disease that slowly ate away at her innards. No sorcery could rescue her from this sickness. Embittered and driven out of her wits by pain, Matasuna resolved to build a mighty tomb in the heart of the mountains, a permanent monument to her glory.
“Fetch me captives,” she ordered her followers, “at least a dozen strong men.”
Her lightest word was law, and so they rode out and fell upon a mining village. The mountains were rich in seams of basalt, marble and iron ore. Apart from a few hill farmers who scraped a living from the poor, blackish soil, the only inhabitants were scattered families of miners.
Her followers sei
zed the villagers and brought them in chains to their dying mistress.
By then, Matasuna’s youthful beauty had been burned away by disease and the malice of her character. The villagers cried out in horror at the sight of this shrivelled, lank-haired, toothless ghoul that stood before them, leaning heavily on a staff forged of black iron.
“You will be my nourishment,” she informed them, wiping away the bloody foam that bubbled to her lips as she spoke, “the rock upon which my tomb shall rest.”
Her words meant nothing to these helpless innocents. They struggled in vain as she ordered them to be taken to a flat outcrop of marble overlooking a valley cut into the mountains, as though some god had plunged a knife into the living rock.
There, on that desolate spot, with the wind screaming about her, full of the babbling whispers of spirits that waited to fight over her soul, Matasuna sacrificed her captives. She plunged an obsidian knife into their chests as they were strapped down onto the rock, sliced out their living hearts and gorged on their hot blood.
Their liquid essence poured oil on the guttering flames of her power. For a brief time she was restored, and the disease held at bay. New fire burned and fizzed through her veins. She raised her withered hands to the heavens, laughing at the ragged purplish clouds that whipped and tore across the sky, and spoke in words of thunder.
The world erupted. Entire mountains burst and crumbled into hollow heaps of shattered rock. Vast reserves of basalt, marble and granite were ripped from the black roots of the earth and flung high into the air, a whirling maelstrom of stone, held aloft by the sheer power of sorcery.
Matasuna concentrated her will into shaping the stone and blasting the valley out of existence. Age-old barriers were levelled and melted away in an instant, leaving a flat and shining plateau, over four miles square.
The plateau formed the base of her tomb, a massive circular mausoleum, made of blocks of stone carefully piled on top of each other. No human craftsman chipped them into shape, or sanded and polished them to angular, glistening perfection. No mortar held those vast bricks together. All was done by the obscene reserves of forbidden power Matasuna had summoned via the blackest of black arts.
Thus was created the Necropolis, built and sustained through the ages by the undying afterglow of sorcery. As soon as the last block was in place, Matasuna fell dead to the ground. Her heart had burst, unable to cope with the strain of containing so much power in one frail body. Her followers slaughtered the remaining captives, scattering their blood over the ground as a tribute to her, and carried Matasuna’s body, with great mourning and weeping, into the Necropolis.
There she was laid to rest, inside a black marble tomb in the lowest vault of the grand palace of death she had built. And there they stayed; the handful of fanatics and outcasts who had followed their insane mistress to the ends of the world. Matasuna’s tomb was her final gift to them, an endless warren of shadows and whispers, staircases leading to airy halls suspended impossibly high above the clouds, pillared and colonnaded galleries and walkways, networks of subterranean catacombs gouged into the bowels of the suffering earth.
“This shall be our home,” said their chief, a handsome dark-eyed young man named Haresh who had thrice escaped the gallows for murder, “a place where life and death meet and intertwine.”
Only the mad could exist in such a place, but they were mad, and begot mad children. They erected statues to Matasuna, carved out of the shining black rock, and engraved frescoes onto the walls and pillars, reflecting the corrupted depths of their minds: grinning skulls and prancing skeletons, demonic heads crowned with delicate chaplets of bones, bestial images of the worst crimes man could commit, both obscene and foolish, foul in their intent, tedious in their relentless banality.
If they were mad, the people of the Necropolis were also vigorous. In the following centuries they bred and multiplied until Matasuna’s tomb was indeed a city, its vast spaces echoing to the voices of the living as well as the groans and whispers of the dead. A kind of civilisation sprang up, and a complex hierarchy ensued.
Matasuna had left a daughter, fathered by Haresh before madness and disease stole her beauty. The infant girl was raised on a shield and hailed as the first of the Grey Queens. Her name was Calisse, and under her the people of the Necropolis started to multiply and dream of empire.
In the following centuries they forced the people of the mountains to swear allegiance to them, to interbreed, until the Necropolis became the heart of a rapidly expanding realm. The nameless patchwork of independent states that lay beyond the mountains were gradually assimilated, or consumed by fire and blood, until the entire continent west of the Girdle Sea acquired the name of the first Grey Queen. All the queens since had been named Calisse, though it was forbidden for anyone save kin of the first degree to address her by anything other than her titles.
Now the Eighteenth Queen’s carriage rumbled along the True Path, a great paved avenue of smooth marble flagstones, wide enough for thirty men to ride abreast, that led to the Black Gates of the Necropolis.
The avenue was lined with thousands of citizens gathered to welcome the Queen and her conquering army home. They fell to their knees as her carriage clattered past, their hands clasped in adoration.
She sat like an effigy on a massive throne made of twisted iron, mute and still and untouchable. A double file of mounted Crimson Guards flanked the carriage, threatening any of the citizens who came too close with whips.
The Queen had been trained from infancy to appear aloof and godlike in public. None save close kin and advisors were permitted to see her face, hence the polished steel mask. None save her physicians, and the nobleman who would eventually be picked to lie with her and beget a daughter, were permitted to touch her.
The black gates yawned open, six pairs of steel doors operated by teams of slaves, and beyond them six portcullises. These elaborate defences were just for show. No enemy host had ever dared to attack the Necropolis.
Beyond lay a vast arena big enough to house an entire brigade of cavalry, dominated by the Barbican, a squat square tower of black marble. The gateway of the Barbican served as the main entrance to the Necropolis, and was reached via a wide stair.
The Senators were gathered at the top of the stair. Forty men and women, all direct descendants of Matasuna’s followers, served as the Grey Queen’s council and ruled the Necropolis in her absence.
The Chief Speaker of the Senate, named Haresh after his ancestor, limped down the steps to greet his mistress. He was loaded down with years, and had been born with a twisted foot and a deformed shoulder. This was the inevitable result of centuries of inbreeding, for the bloodline of the Senators was kept pure by the deliberate intermarrying of siblings and cousins. There was no shame in this. They carried their deformities with a great sense of pride, physical proof of their noble descent.
“Your Glory,” wheezed Haresh, bowing with difficulty as the Queen’s carriage rattled to a halt, “a thousand welcomes. The news of your victory reached us this morning. I have ordered the sacrifice of fifty white bulls in celebration.”
The Queen paused as she descended the folding steps and sniffed the air. Even inside her mask, she caught the powerful, greasy stench of roasting meat and incense.
“A waste of bulls,” she replied, stripping off her gloves and holding out her pale right hand to be kissed. “The battle was no battle at all, but a massacre. We were most disappointed.”
Haresh nuzzled her hand. She had to steel herself to endure the touch of his damp, withered lips. “All victories are to be welcomed, Glory,” he mumbled, “especially if they are easily won. The Confederacy is crushed at last. Your Glory rules supreme.”
“Perhaps,” she replied. “We have brought with us the body of Titos, known as The Bear to his followers. He was a valiant enemy. The corpse will be burned as a tribute to his courage.”
Haresh wiped his filmy eyes. “There was a time, Glory, when your illustrious forebears would have suppe
d on his blood and ate of his flesh. The essence of a brave man would restore Your Glory’s powers.”
She ignored this. The hated practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism had been abandoned during the reign of the Seventh Queen, after three failed uprisings against her rule. Since then the line of queens had diminished as sorcerers. Knowledge and training in the black arts was not enough to gain access to the full range of powers enjoyed by Matasuna. Only the consumption of human flesh and blood could unlock them. The mere thought had always made the Eighteenth Queen shudder.
Now she cast her sight through the Barbican, into the complex network of halls and audience chambers. “We have visitors,” she murmured. “Five envoys from the Old Kingdom wait to receive us in the Upper Gallery.”
“Yes, Glory,” said Haresh. “They arrived three days ago. The Dragon sent them.”
“We see that. They wear their master’s absurd sigil. Why does Vazul wish to treat with us?”
His response filled her with cold rage.
9.
Tamburlin drew his heavy shawl closer around him and adjusted his fur-lined hood. It was raining in The Circle, the kind of soft, drizzly rain that goes on for days and seeps through an old man’s layers of clothes, his papery flesh and brittle bones, into his lungs.
His effort at speech turned into a cough. The cough went on for some time, a dry hacking noise that shook his emaciated frame from head to toe. His knees buckled. Two attendants sprang forward to catch his arms before he fell.
“Let go, damn you,” he rasped, shaking them off. “I can stand without aid.”
I must, he thought fearfully, else my time on the Council is done.
The rest of the City Fathers were watching him. Abbot Mankind wore an expression of pity, no less hateful for being genuine. Benito and Vulyan looked like a couple of fat vultures, not even bothering to veil the glitter of naked ambition in their eyes. Tamburlin found them tedious. They both craved his job, but neither was fit to lace up his boots.
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