Best Laid Plans (42 page)

But Nous was supposed to be a person. Isn’t that what Aristodeus had taught him from the start? A person of love? If that’s the case, why did he require the use of a sword? Why did the Ipsissimus need an army? If Nous was so loving, then—

***

A footfall startled Shader awake. His back and neck ached from being hunched over on a pew. Ain, he was tired; more tired than he could ever remember being. He looked up to see Lallia, blood-smeared and wild-looking, like one of the Furies from Aristodeus’s tales.

‘The Mater says the lad who died was going to join the priests.’ Lallia spoke almost whimsically, as if her mind were somewhere else. She sat herself beside him, frowning at the altar.

Shader’s muscles bunched under the onslaught of a molten stream. Whenever he tried to picture Gaston, he saw Rhiannon; saw what his protégé had done to her. His fingers clutched at the air as if it were Gaston’s throat, and at the same time his eyes blurred with tears.

‘Couldn’t have seen him making it.’ Lallia brushed against him, placed a hand on his back. ‘Didn’t look the sort to cower like the rest of them.’

Shader nodded vigorously, his body shaking with unnameable emotions. ‘He knew how to fight.’

‘I’d say. You know what really pisses me off?’ Lallia turned her face to look right into Shader’s eyes. He was beyond caring about the exposure of his grief. His gaze never wavered from her verdant stare. ‘The way those priests mourn for him as if he were a disappointment. You know, the Mater even kicked his sword like it was some kind of des…desec… What’s the bloody word?’

—Desecration.

‘They’d sooner he did nothing?’ Shader rasped through clenched teeth.

‘You’d think,’ Lallia said, looping her arm in his. ‘Some people are just so up their own…You know what I mean.’

Shader forced a smile. Lallia seemed to take some relief from it. Her lips parted, showing a flash of white teeth.

‘You knew him, right?’

‘I trained him,’ Shader said. ‘Made him what he was…’

‘But?’

‘It doesn’t matter. He should be judged by what he did with his last breath.’ —Not by what he did to Rhiannon.

‘Fair do,’ Lallia said. ‘Now, will you walk with me?’

‘Why?’ Shader was still half-dazed. Loss and grief had wedged themselves between the two sides of his nature, unweaving them, separating the strands into impossible allies.

—Mother and Father.

‘I need to feel the night air,’ Lallia said, ‘and take some little pleasure in being alive. It’s been hard, these past few days.’ Her look had turned to pleading, longing. ‘So much death.’

Shader nodded and stood. As they left the templum, he felt only its utter emptiness.

She rested her head on his shoulder as they strolled in the direction of the Forest Walk. They passed along broad avenues lit by the Ancients’ lanterns atop their towering posts. The chill was restorative, cleansing; the warmth of Lallia against his side like a benison.

Shader burned with questions, but kept them to himself lest they marred the momentary calm. Finally, as they entered the arboretum, he could contain it no longer.

‘Rhiannon,’ he stopped and turned to face Lallia. ‘Is she…?’

Lallia’s eyelids fluttered and she dropped her gaze. ‘I went with Elias.’ She shuddered with a suppressed sob. ‘We,’ she waved her hands by her head, ‘had this message or something. One of the old priestesses went weird, said Rhiannon was at Dead Man’s Torch.’

‘You told me Cadman had her? Why would he want Rhiannon?’

Lallia’s face lost some of its colour. ‘I wouldn’t want to guess. I used to work with that fat shogger; only he’s not fat—not really.’ She hugged herself and shuddered. ‘He’s this…thing. Like a skeleton.’

‘A liche,’ Shader said. ‘Feeding on human life to sustain his own.’

Only why Rhiannon? Why her specifically? Coincidence?

‘We tried to save her.’ Lallia was whimpering like a child. She seemed suddenly less than she was—her assuredness had vanished, leaving her vulnerable, bashful even. ‘We freed her from the tower, but then creatures came; dead things and worse. I-I-I ran. I-I-I left them. Oh, poor Elias,’ she wailed. ‘I think something terrible…’

Shader embraced her, held her face to his chest and let her tears soak into his surcoat. ‘I should go to her.’

Lallia pulled back and made him look at her tear-streaked face. ‘It’s too late,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m sorry. So, so sorry.’

Shader’s despair pooled in his gut. His knees buckled, but Lallia caught him. A groan left his lips of its own accord. Words too awful to utter sought to burst from his skin.

Lallia’s cheek pressed against his, their tears mingling. The hot wetness of her mouth found his lips. Her scent fired his senses, excoriated his grief. He tired to break away, but Lallia held his head firm, forcing her mouth against his, eating him. Ashamed by his stiffness against her leg, he whimpered and managed to prise his face from hers. Lallia continued to suck at his lips, lick his cheeks.

‘No—’ Shader said, but without any real conviction.

Her hand felt his hardness, forced its way inside his breeches. Shader gasped, fire coursing up his spine.
Rhiannon
. He closed his eyes, struggled to see her.
Rhian—

With a growl he tore at Lallia’s blouse, sending buttons pinging into the air. His fingers grasped the pliant warmth of a breast, kneaded it, thrilled at its wrongness.

Rhiannon had refused him. None of this would have happened if—

Lallia pulled his face to her breast and moaned as Shader’s tongue found the nipple.

—She’d listened to Huntsman over him.

Lallia ground herself against his groin, at the same time seeking an opening in his armour, clawing and probing, scratching at the steel.

—All at Aristodeus’s bidding. The philosopher had taken the choice from him. Always had.

With a snarl, he forced Lallia to arch away from him, her hair trailing towards the ground, her torso supported only by his hand on the small of her back. He ripped the remnants of her blouse aside and buried his face in her belly, sinking his teeth in then running his tongue back up between her breasts. She cried out as he grabbed her hair and forced her back further until she lay upon the ground. She found a way beneath his chainmail and raked his back with her nails. Shader put his weight upon her, driving her head into the earth with fierce thrusts of his tongue.

She bent her knee and rolled him over so that she was astride his hips. She freed him from the constriction of his breeches and poised herself above him. He felt her hot wetness touch him, felt himself urging for her entrance.

‘No!’ he screamed, twisting away and dumping her to one side. She hit the ground hard and let out a rush of air.

Shader hurried to his feet, tugging up his breeches and stumbling away.

‘What is it?’ Lallia cried, hoarse and throaty.

‘Keep back.’ Shader’s hand gripped the hilt of his gladius. ‘What are you doing?’

Lallia sat up, her hands covering her breasts. Her allure had left her. To Shader she now looked waxen and cold, like the Demiurgos frozen in ice at the heart of the Abyss.

‘Whore!’ Shader turned and ran through the trees back towards town.

‘Shog you!’ Lallia screamed after him. ‘You shogging hypocrite!’

Her words pierced his back like arrows. He raced on through the trees, snagging his surcoat on a low branch and cursing as he stopped to free it. His heart leapt to his mouth as something lurched from the shadows.

‘Nous be praised!’ Dave said, almost doubled up by the weight of the hump squatting like a malignancy on his back.

‘What? How—?’

‘Praise Nous! Praise Ain!’ Dave shuffled towards him, eyes shrouded with darkness, mouth set in a grimace of condemnation. ‘Another moment…’ The hunchback shook his head and let out a long hiss of air.

‘How did you get here?’ How had he covered the distance so quickly? Did he have another horse? Some other means of transport?

‘Faith, master. The faith that moves mountains.’ The words cut like an accusation. ‘Fear not,’ Dave said, taking hold of Shader’s hand and kissing it. ‘Nous is still with you. He will not let you fall. Not now. Not when there’s so much at stake.’

The gladius purred at Shader’s hip, trickled warmth into his fingers.

—Nous is not what he seems.

Dave stiffened and cocked his head, almost as if he’d read Shader’s thoughts.

‘Nous is not Nous,’ he muttered, then headed away from the trees as if he expected Shader to follow him.

‘What does that mean?’ Shader hurried alongside.

Dave paused momentarily and looked up at the sky. ‘Don’t rightly remember,’ he said before resuming his slow trudge towards the lamp-lit streets. ‘But I do know he needs fighters more than he needs those lily-livered friends of yours. Why’d you think you bear the Archon’s sword?’

‘How?’ Shader shook with emotion. ‘How can Nous want killing? He’s supposed to be a god of love.’

‘The
God,’ Dave hissed through his teeth.
‘The
God of love. But even a garden of love needs pruning. You are Nous’s gardener, Keeper of the Sword, and there are deep-rooted weeds that require your attention.’

‘Nous wants me to kill? To go on killing? In the name of love?’

‘There is a word for this kind of killing,’ Dave said, lifting his chin almost proudly. ‘It is a word from the oldest times; a word steeped in holy history. For where lies the harm in the slaying of evil? You would do well to remember it, master—’

But Shader was no longer listening. He already knew what the word was—he’d come across it often enough in the works of Berdini; heard it from the lips of Aristodeus.

Killing for Nous isn’t murder,
he used to say with a sardonic smirk.
Not homicide. When the sword of truth is used to root out corruption, the proper term is “malicide”.

‘Stop following me,’ Shader said to Dave in a voice lacking authority.

Dave twisted his head to look up at him, silver starlight glittering in his eyes. His mouth hung slack, edged with drool.

‘Just stop.’ Shader turned on his heel and ran for the templum.

‘I
t’s insulting,’ Albert muttered to himself in between puffs. His heart was bouncing about in his ribcage with such violence he half expected it to burst through his chest. His gut was jiggling like a bag of slops as his shoes pounded the earth in an effort to keep up with the other Sicarii. ‘What do they take me for? A bloody journeyman?’

It’s not as if he was dressed for it. Running about in the wilds in the middle of the night was hardly Albert’s thing, and he’d long-since abandoned the traditional cloak and dagger look for a smart dress suit he’d picked up during an overseas mission to Gallia. An assassin of his calibre didn’t need to exert himself or sneak around in a mask. He was a professional, the consummate killer; not a throat-slitting hack like the rest of them. He paused to catch his breath and glare at his lithe companions darting through the trees like shadows.
Ham-fisted goons.
Good for nothing but second-rate thuggery.

‘No slinking off this time, fatso,’ Master Frayn’s whisper cut him like a knife.

Albert’s heart almost exploded then, but he had the presence of mind not to show it. He even managed to act like he’d known Frayn was there all along.

‘My particular skills call for discretion, darling,’ Albert said, tucking his thumbs into his jacket pockets and surveying the area. Not that he could see much—it was black as the Void. ‘As opposed to blundering headlong into danger without a clue what we’re up against.’

Frayn slipped in front of Albert, his face shrouded by the hood of his cloak. ‘So you were slinking off, then.’ It was a statement tinged with threat. ‘Maybe you’ve got somewhere else to be.’ Frayn pressed closer.

Albert had a thousand places he’d rather be. He thought he’d left this sort of activity behind when he’d earned his stripes with the guild, so to speak. For goodness’ sake, had they already forgotten how the poisoning of half the council had saved them from being exposed and, in accordance with the written, if not the practised, law, executed? The fact that the contract had been paid for by the other half of the council was by the by.