Grim Company 02 - Sword Of The North (37 page)

Cole bent down and wrenched Magebane free from Shank’s skull. The curved blade came free with a soft pop and a spatter of blood. Despite the wizard’s warning not to ask questions, Cole couldn’t stop himself. ‘You said I fed on Shank’s soul. I was dying, but now I feel stronger than ever. What’s happening to me?’

‘The stolen divinity Salazar possessed. It would seem your dagger can absorb more than just magic.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The two of you shared a link through Magebane. When he died, the dagger transferred a part of his soul to you. Like Salazar, you are now god-touched – a custodian of the Reaver’s divine essence. Death itself resides in you. Feed it and you will grow stronger. Resist… and it will feed on
you
.’

‘God-touched,’ Cole whispered. He stared down at his hands.

‘Do nothing to draw attention to your powers! And keep away from the glow-globes that illuminate the town. The magic mined from the Black Lord’s corpse is tainted. The Blight itself spreads madness, but the glow-globes exacerbate its effects.’

That brought a dozen new questions to Cole’s lips, but before he could speak Thanates raised a gloved hand and his next words caused them to die in his throat. ‘The White Lady will soon have this town razed and all within massacred. We have but one chance to avert disaster. Listen carefully and I will tell you what must be done...’

Sasha leaned over the rail again and heaved. She hated sea travel. The motion of a ship beneath her feet made her feel nauseous at the best of times, and standing on the deck of
The Lady’s Luck
, staring down at the mass of bloated corpses rotting in the waters of Dusk Bay, was decidedly not the best of times.

The ship had departed Thelassa’s harbour yesterday afternoon. A monstrous crowd had gathered to watch them leave. The White Lady herself, the city’s beloved ruler, was to lead a rescue mission to the flooded remains of Shadowport, searching for survivors. Which would have been a noble gesture – three months ago.

Sasha wiped sour vomit from her chin and tried not to let her cynicism show on her face. She recalled the dead bodies that had washed up in Dorminia’s harbour in the weeks following Salazar’s greatest crime. There’d been little chance of anyone surviving a billion tons of water dropped on the city. No chance at all they could have clung on this long, even if they’d somehow survived the initial catastrophic magical assault.

Ambryl’s voice drifted over her shoulder. ‘Something troubling you, sister? Perhaps you should seek refuge below deck if the sight of death unsettles you so.’

‘It’s not the sight of death that unsettles me, it’s this endless rocking.’

And the moon dust I snorted this morning
, she thought, but she didn’t add that last part. She still felt guilty about the jewellery she’d stolen from the Siren. Willard had been passed out drunk in the common room and the opportunity was too good to resist. The silver necklace and bracelet had fetched a good handful of gold between them and hunting down a dealer had been laughably easy. It seemed that in Thelassa, narcotics changed hands as readily as coin.

There was still no sign of Willard’s wife Lyressa, who had been taken the night of the festival. Sasha felt awful about taking advantage of the woman’s absence, but that taste of
hashka
during the Seeding had awoken all her old needs. She was a mess.

Ambryl was watching the approaching coastline with pursed lips. ‘I begin to see how foolish I was,’ she said bitterly. ‘Salazar was no god. He was a
tyrant
. And like all men when they do not get what they want, he lashed out. How many bodies churn beneath the waters here, sister? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Innocent victims of one man’s greed and wounded pride.’

Behind Ambryl, the all-female crew busied themselves as they neared land. The White Lady’s handmaidens were motionless statues, while the Magelord herself stood near the prow, staring at the ruins of the city up ahead. If the watery graveyard they were passing through bothered her, it didn’t show in her enchanting purple eyes.

‘What did you talk about at the palace?’ Sasha asked her sister. The adulation on Ambryl’s face as she gazed at the White Lady troubled her. Just like the crowd that gathered to cheer them on their way, Ambryl seemed to worship the immortal wizard. Almost as if she were a goddess.

From would-be assassin to devoted follower in the space of a week.
The turnaround in Ambryl’s attitude was frightening.

‘We spoke of many things, sister. Of the injustices we both have suffered. Before the fall of the gods, the Mistress was the high priestess of the Mother.’

‘So it’s “the Mistress” now?’

Ambryl shot her a look. ‘It was a
man
that made her turn her back on the church and the Congregation and join the Alliance. She was the greatest wizard of her age and might have reconciled the church with the mageocracy. But he poisoned her heart. It was he we must thank for leading us to this Age of Ruin.’

Sasha crossed her arms and stared out over the railing. Not so long ago Dusk Bay would have been heaving with trading vessels and fishing boats. Only a year past a fleet of warships had sailed forth from Shadowport to engage in a naval war with Dorminia over the Celestial Isles.

Now the bay was a desolate wasteland. She hadn’t spotted even a single fish amongst the wreckage of the city. As far as Sasha could see, it was only a matter of time before the cartographers scribbled out Dusk Bay and replaced it with Dead Bay.

‘Lyressa still hasn’t returned,’ she whispered so that only Ambryl could hear. ‘According to Willard, the White Lady’s handmaidens took her. He won’t say why.’

Ambryl shrugged and took a bite out of an apple she had rustled up from somewhere. ‘We won’t need to put up with his moping around for much longer. I serve the White Lady now, sister. Soon I will be part of the governing council.’

Sasha stared at Ambryl in shock. ‘We agreed we were going back to Dorminia after we delivered the Halfmage’s message!’

‘Pah. Dorminia holds nothing for us now.’

‘It’s our home.’

‘No, it
was
our home. A different “us”. Where men break, women bend and adapt. This is my chance to show the sole remaining Magelord in the Trine that I can serve her as I once served Salazar.’

Sasha was about to argue when the captain of
The Lady’s Luck
cried out a warning. There was a horrible grinding noise from below, followed by the sound of cracking wood. The ship heeled perilously to port before righting itself with a gigantic splash that soaked the sisters to the bone.

The White Lady glided over to the helm of the ship and placed her perfect hands on her slender waist. ‘Captain, what is the meaning of this?’ she demanded. Her voice was like birdsong on a warm spring morning, but there was an undercurrent of menace, a storm gathering on the horizon.

‘We hit some ruins,’ said the ship’s captain. She was a proud woman of middling years, but in the face of the White Lady’s displeasure she sagged with shame, like an ageing hound whose bowels had betrayed it at an inopportune moment and exposed its frailty to its master.

‘Are we in any imminent danger of capsizing?’ the Magelord asked softly.

‘No, mistress. The harbour is just ahead. We will dock there and I will assess the damage.’

‘Very well.’ The White Lady glided over to Ambryl and Sasha, who swallowed drily, suddenly afraid. For all her otherworldly beauty, there was something deeply unsettling about this woman.

‘The two of you will join the party that will accompany me to shore. I am curious what secrets these ruins may yet reveal about the ruler of this city. Marius was ever an enigma to me. I wish to see with my own eyes whether the warning you delivered has merit.’

‘Warning?’ Ambryl echoed, clearly surprised her mistress would bring up the topic. ‘You refer to the Halfmage’s message?’

The White Lady nodded. Her platinum hair fell perfectly around her exquisite face, but there was a flicker of…
concern?
… in her extraordinary violet eyes. ‘My sources in Dorminia support your view that this “Halfmage” is a paranoid man given to unlikely claims. Still, prior to its destruction there were certain aspects of Shadowport’s recent successes that troubled me. As does one other matter.’

‘Mistress?’

‘The first of the ships sent to the Celestial Isles were due back last week. They have yet to return.’

If Dusk Bay brought with it gruesome yet predictable sights, the deluged streets of Shadowport were a nightmare of smaller details that drove home the true extent of the horrors inflicted on the city.

Sasha stepped gingerly around a murky pool in the middle of the street and stared at the dead couple floating in the water. The two of them were entwined, a tangle of rotting limbs and soft grey flesh sloughing off bone. From the looks of it, they’d spent their last few seconds locked in each other’s arms.

One of the man’s legs poked out of the water at an odd angle, an old break that hadn’t healed properly. Nearby, an iron pan floated among the detritus of devastated houses. Flattened buildings stretched out as far as the eye could see, an endless patchwork of levelled walls surrounded by rubble and sprawling pools of stinking saltwater that had yet to dry in the months following the colossal wave which had torn through Shadowport. What was once the largest and most prosperous city in the Trine was now a watery graveyard. The ghosts of the fifty thousand who had perished would remain forever ignorant of what had befallen them.

The White Lady halted as they passed the dead couple, forcing the rest of the group to stop. The chosen crew members of
The Lady’s Luck
looked around in confusion. The rest of the crew were back repairing the ship. The damage to the hull was less severe than feared, and the captain had seemed confident the ship could be made seaworthy within a few hours. However, the White Lady had ‘suggested’ the iron-haired captain accompany the expedition and leave the supervision of the work to her first mate. The woman had paled at that, and it seemed to Sasha that something unspoken had passed between the Magelord and the skipper. A threat, maybe. Or perhaps a verdict.

‘Great magic was worked here,’ the White Lady said as she examined the street. ‘Not Salazar’s cataclysmic evocation, but magic of a different nature. A binding spell.’

‘Another wizard present in the city at the time of the disaster, perhaps,’ said a handmaiden in a deadpan voice. ‘Shadowport welcomed those with the gift.’

The White Lady’s eyes narrowed. ‘A spell such as the one worked here is beyond most. Even Brianna could not achieve such a feat.’

Sasha remembered Brianna’s last stand outside the gates of Dorminia, blood running from her eyes as she was torn apart by the sheer force of Salazar’s magical assault. She had liked and admired Brianna.

The urge to pull out the
hashka
stashed inside her cloak suddenly threatened to overwhelm her. Her palms began to sweat, the blackness that was always lurking inside her skull threatening to swallow her up.

‘Sister,’ said Ambryl beside her. ‘Do not let it master you. You’ve done well to stick to your promise.’

The hint of something like warmth in her sister’s tone shocked her enough to jolt her back from the precipice.
I broke my promise
, she wanted to yell.
I always break my promises.

The expeditionary group continued through the drowned streets of Shadowport. As evening began to fall a cloud of insects rose from the ruins, a buzzing horde that covered the sisters and the crew of
The Lady’s Luck
in red bites but left not a single mark on the White Lady or her handmaidens. It was as if they were invisible to the swarming bugs. Sasha glimpsed corpses crawling with black beetles. At one point she watched as a huge centipede scuttled from the nose of a teenage boy, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.

They followed the wide avenue leading from the harbour for another hour before finally they reached the remains of the Palace of a Thousand Pleasures. The residence of the Magelord Marius had once been surrounded by a great garden, a botanical wonder hosting trees and flowers gathered from every corner of the continent. Now it was a swamp of decomposing vegetation swarming with insects.

‘And so we come to the heart of the pestilence that infests this city,’ the White Lady announced. She whispered a few words and suddenly the air shimmered. Moments later a raging windstorm sprang up around the group, a shielding sphere that moved as they moved, as if they were at the very eye of the storm. The wind generated by the sphere buffeted Sasha, sending her hair dancing around her head and keeping the biting insects at bay. ‘Stay close to me,’ the White Lady commanded.

They picked their way over fallen masonry towards the palace building. The White Lady’s handmaidens hopped from stone to stone with terrifying agility, avoiding the swampy ground. Their mistress floated a foot above the dirty water, as serene as a goddess, utterly unfazed by the mire Sasha and the others were forced to wade through. They were soaked and covered in filth, but the Magelord refused to slow and they had to hurry to avoid falling outside her magical protection. Once they passed the gardens, the White Lady waved a desultory hand and the sphere dissipated.

Soon they reached the wreckage of the interior. Even with the destruction wrought by Salazar’s magic, it was easy to observe the former splendour of the Palace of a Thousand Pleasures. Golden statuary lay upended. Delicately constructed furniture was shattered beyond repair. Fabulously expensive carpets had been utterly ruined by seawater. A few rooms had survived and were structurally sound, though the contents were invariably spoiled. Sasha was fortunate enough to have grown up in Garrett’s estate in Dorminia, but even the trappings her foster father had enjoyed were a peasant’s lot in comparison with the luxuries she witnessed in those chambers.