Grim Company 02 - Sword Of The North (23 page)

Kayne leaped to his feet, reaching for his greatsword.

‘Your steel is useless,’ the necromancer said coldly. ‘No earthly metal has been able to harm me for over two hundred years. The ironguard spell cost me the lives of several cousins.’ He gestured at the skeletons positioned around the chamber.

‘These skeletons were your
family
?’ Kayne said in horror.

‘Blood magic demands that a wizard gives up everything they hold dear. We sacrificed them all over the years. Our cousins. Our aunts and uncles. Eventually even our children. The corpse that guided you to this tower was once my grandson. He was a favourite of mine. But I required his sacrifice to heal myself after Shara’s attempt on my life, and so I killed him. I grieved for many years.’

‘You’re not having the boy!’ Kayne snarled.

‘Why doom yourself for the sake of a bandit’s whelp?’ Nazala asked. ‘He is nothing to you. And what of your own son? You told me he was in danger. Would you abandon him to an uncertain fate while you throw your life away here? I have no quarrel with you, Sword of the North. I will infuse your horses with magic to speed your passage and you and your friend can go home. Back to your family.’

Brick’s face had gone white with terror. ‘Don’t leave me!’

Kayne closed his eyes. What was the life of a bandit’s offspring against everything he still held dear? Against the son and wife who were waiting for him in the north?

‘You and your uncle tried to murder us, lad.’

‘But… we had a deal…’ Brick’s voice cracked.

‘Kayne.’ It was Jerek. The Wolf was out of his chair. He bent down and tugged his boots back on his feet. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

‘Listen to your friend. He understands the value of pragmatism.’ Nazala placed a slender finger on Brick’s forehead. ‘Calm, child,’ he whispered. ‘The agony will be intense, I fear, but it will not last so long.’

Kayne’s fists clenched.
What was the life of a bandit’s offspring against everything he still held dear?

It was everything.

He reached for his sword again, but just then Jerek met his gaze, face a grim mask, and shook his head. The Wolf rose slowly and brought his fists up from his sides.

He clutched a dagger in each hand; the daggers he kept hidden in his boots. They were glowing red-hot.

Jerek flung them at the necromancer, first the left dagger and then the right, a blur of motion. The steel blades sank deep into Nazala’s flesh. But they drew no blood, and for a second or two seemed to cause him no distress. The wizard merely stared at them in amusement. He hadn’t been lying about his immunity to steel.

The heat, though, was a different matter entirely.

Nazala suddenly screamed and scrabbled wildly at the hilts protruding from his chest as the stench of burning flesh filled Kayne’s nostrils. He searched for a weapon that might possibly be of use against the necromancer. There was nothing, not unless he wanted to bludgeon the wizard to death with a chair.

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.

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 were 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.