Solomon Kane (2 page)

The hands were dreadful enough. Their fingers were abominably long, and grey as death. Their gnarled segments were so prominent that they resembled insect legs more than anything remotely human. Their cruelly pointed tips scraped over the inside of the mirror, and a face loomed into view between them, searching blindly for its prey. It was bald as a worm and almost as featureless, except for a round voracious mouth low down on the long head. In a moment the shape found its way out of the mirror.

The glass did not shatter. It bulged like an egg composed of some material softer than shell, and two elongated fleshless arms sprang forth. As the claws fastened on Daniel’s shoulders, the circular mouth gaped as though the absence of a face had been designed to let it stretch unnaturally wide. It seized like a leech on Daniel’s head. He barely had the chance to scream as he was snatched into the mirror, which closed over him like a pool too deep for light to penetrate.

A second man was dragged off his feet and vanished struggling. A third had no time to cry out before a mirror engulfed him and the shape that had clutched him in a demonic embrace. The remaining men glared about, lifting their swords as they backed away from the mirrors, forgetful of the mirrors at their backs. To Martin the swords looked powerless, no longer weapons but simply talismans his companions were brandishing in a vain attempt to ward off unimaginable evil. He raised his own in a desperate gesture of defence as he stumbled to Kane’s side. “Captain,” he begged and heard his voice shake.

Kane’s eyes blazed beneath a scowl like the onset of a storm. “Hold steady,” he growled and put out a hand to take Martin by the shoulder.

Martin disengaged himself and stepped back out of reach. “Stay close to Captain Kane” – but the advice that every man heard before they fought alongside him seemed to have no power in this place. “There’s deviltry,” Martin said louder and turned to flee. “Let the devil take my share.”

“I said hold steady,” Kane told him in a voice as chill as steel, but Martin was already running between the mirrors. He saw some of his fellows think of imitating him, and then their faces betrayed a different kind of fear. Before Martin had a chance to draw another breath he was thumped with great force on the back.

For the briefest instant he thought a denizen of one of the mirrors had tried and failed to capture him, and then the impact exploded through him. It felt as though his heart had been punched from behind. As he heard the shot, his ribs splintered and his chest burst outwards. He was thrown to the floor, which was splashed with blood – his own. “I am the only devil here,” he heard Kane shout. Then he heard and felt nothing, but a final thought accompanied him into the dark: his captain was wrong. There was worse in this place than Kane.

“C
aptain...”

Kane heard the fear in Martin’s voice and saw it flicker in his eyes. The other men had only murmured their disquiet for fear of Kane himself, but now it was daring to speak up. It could be the first sign of mutiny, and Kane gripped Martin by the shoulder hard enough to bruise him – to drag him back from wherever his panic had sent him. “Hold steady,” Kane said through his teeth.

Martin pulled free of his grasp. “There’s deviltry,” he protested and whirled around to face his companions. “Let the devil take my share.”

“I said hold steady,” Kane snarled, but the fury in his voice fell short of halting Martin. The man bolted down the avenue of mirrors, jerking up his sword to repel whatever he saw in the glass. Did he fear his own reflection? Not so Kane, who had looked into the depths of himself and made that darkness part of him. Before the fellow could infect his comrades with cowardice Kane brought him down with a single shot. “I am the only devil here,” Kane declared.

He had faced many devils in his life, and the common name of all of them was fear. He had learned not to fear to kill any more than he feared death. Fear was the greatest demon, because it could possess a man and steal his spirit, just as it had done to Martin. Kane had cast it
out of the man, and the fear he could see in the eyes of the survivors was of him and his authority. “Now,” he said, though he hardly needed to voice the command, “follow me.”

As if the words had more power than he knew – as if he had uttered a magical formula – he heard a massive groan of wood and metal at his back. Beyond the antechamber a pair of doors twice his height had swung inwards far enough to admit a man. In the tremulous darkness beyond them Kane thought he saw a glint of precious metal. Without hesitation he strode up a broad flight of amber steps into the throne room.

It was circular, and so vast that the light from torches held by colossal figures carved out of the dark stone of the walls barely reached the domed ceiling. The flames clothed the figures with restless shadows, so that Kane could not judge whether they were meant for gods or some form of guardian. Otherwise the room was illuminated only by circular windows patterned in blue and purple stained glass, tints rendered just visible by the approaching dawn. On the far side of the room a throne had been hewn from a single monumental block of swarthy stone. Sprawled before it, as if the weight of all his finery had proved too much for his thin frame, was the corpse of a king with a withered face. His fallen crown resembled an overturned goblet, for a dark stain glistened beside it on the amber marble around his head. Kane spared none of this more than a glance, because the middle of the room was heaped with gold. “I’ve found it,” he shouted. “Here it is, boys.”

Once again his words seemed to conjure a response, but none he would have wished for. The great hinges groaned again, and the doors shut behind him with a slam like a clap of thunder. It muffled other noises – the screams of
men, a clash of blades, a solitary gunshot. He thought he was hearing the start of another skirmish until, in the silence that swiftly followed the clamour, he realised that the clatter of metal he had mistaken for a swordfight was the sound of swords falling to the floor. He strode to the doors and pounded on them, shouting to his men, but there was no answer, only a hush like a giant’s held breath. The unyielding doors kept whatever secret lay beyond them, but he knew he was alone. If a man could not go back he must go on, and he turned to cross the throne room.

The torchlight flickered on the mound of gold, which was broader than his arms could stretch. As he made for it he seemed to hear an exhalation like a chorus of stealthy breaths, but glaring about showed him no adversary, just the colossal obsidian torch-bearers. It must have been a wind in the crevices of the fortress, Kane decided, and its significance dwindled as he gazed upon the mass of wealth.

Midas might have laid his aurifying hands on every item. Golden swords lay among shields and armour of the same substance. Heavy necklaces were draped over plates of gold and aureate masks that seemed to frown at their own abduction. What ancient ceremonies might they have seen? Countless doubloons added to the riches, and Kane thought they alone could have ransomed a royal dynasty. He stooped to gather handfuls, and as he let the coins slip through his fingers he felt as if the fortune had transformed him into a colossus, able to play with golden coins as a child plays with grains of sand. The last doubloon fell with a delicate chink on the hilt of a sword decorated with a circular face that seemed immersed in its own mystery, and as Kane made to sift the wealth afresh he heard another sound.

It might have been an echo of the tinkling of coins. It was thin and chill, little more than an inhuman whisper. It was somewhere beyond the treasure, closer to the throne. Was it among the fallen king’s regalia? As Kane peered towards the corpse, wondering if a rat was feasting on the dead flesh, he saw the prone form begin to shift as though it was preparing to crawl to reclaim its wealth. This was simply a trick of the treacherous light, but in a moment Kane saw what he was hearing: the formation of crystals. The stain beside the head and the crown was no longer red. It was white.

A shiver passed through Kane. Some change had overtaken the room, sucking out all the stagnant heat of the African night. He raised one hand to breathe into the palm. Not only did he see his breath, but for an instant his fingertips glimmered white, outlining every whorl. The gelid clutch of the air felt too similar to fear, and Kane glared about the room in search of some more substantial adversary to challenge than shadows and ice. As though in answer to his unvoiced wish, something came at him.

It resembled breath turned black. It streamed from the mouths of the stone colossi and whirled in ebon skeins around him. With it came a Babel of shrieks and shrill whispers. Kane felt surrounded by a whirlwind that spoke, though in no words that he could comprehend. He spun about, slashing at the ropy darkness, but his swords could discover no substance. As he staggered to a halt the blackness rushed away from him.

It raced in two tattered streams over the fallen king, whose robes were furred with frost now, and converged on his throne. Kane saw a shadow seated there, drawing its shape from the blackness. The thin shrieks and the insidious whispers and whatever remnants of humanity had emitted them were engulfed by the presence, as if
they were assuaging some inhuman hunger. The last scraps of the unnatural darkness vanished like wisps of mist in sunlight, but it was not the sun that turned the throne room pale as death. It was ice.

The presence seated on the throne was flanked by bodies that might have been unholy tributes – almost a dozen crucified men. They had been flayed as well, and stalactites of blood dangled from the exposed flesh. Their faces were distorted by grimaces of agony and terror, so that even in the sourceless icy light that had overwhelmed the flickering of torches, Kane did not immediately recognise the corpses of his men. Rage blazed through him as he turned his gaze on the figure enthroned between them.

It was abnormally tall, and robed from head to foot in black. If it had a face, that was concealed in the depths of a hood. Just the hands were visible, their long pallid fingers tipped with claws as cruel as any predator’s. Was it bone that glimmered within the hood, and was there a glint of pitiless eyes? Kane was not to be daunted. He took a step forward, lifting his rapier to point at any heart his adversary had. “What are you?” he demanded.

The figure reared up like a wave of blackness. It threw out one splayed hand, which resembled bone imperfectly transformed into flesh, and then it spoke. The roar that emerged from the depths of the cowl contained no words. The onslaught of sound was so thunderous that although Kane saw the mound of gold quake with it, he could not hear the movement for the aching of his eardrums. The roar grew louder and less bearable as its breath reached him. It smelled as though an ancient sepulchre had been opened – it smelled of things so long dead that they ought to have been dust. It was so frigid that the air in front of Kane visibly shuddered like thin ice. The breath
threatened to render his bones as brittle as shell, and it leached all the power from his muscles, which trembled like the air. As he collapsed to the floor Kane barely avoided falling prone by supporting himself with both hands on the hilt of the rapier.

He crouched like a beast at bay and glared his hatred at his assailant. At last the lethal breath relented as the figure towering before the throne gave Kane his answer. “I am the Devil’s reaper,” it pronounced in a voice that resonated like the tolling of a great bell. “I am here to claim you, Solomon Kane,” it said, and other voices whispered its words as though souls trapped in the hooded darkness were compelled to imitate their master. “Your deal is done.”

“What deal?” At least Kane was capable of speech, even if his limbs were no more use to him than an infant’s. “I made no deal,” he snarled.

“There was a deal.” The edges of the cowl fluttered as if whatever face lurked within was about to appear from its lair. “And your soul is the price,” the voice decreed. “It was signed away in the blood of the first man you killed.”

For a terrible instant Kane remembered who that had been. The voice and its words seemed to resonate deep in his guts as it proclaimed “Your life of murder and greed is over.”

The imminence brought Kane back from his memory, and he struggled to lever himself to his feet. “You cannot take my soul,” he said in outraged disbelief.

“Bow your head before me!” Once more the figure thrust out its hand, and a freezing gale assaulted Kane, shivering through every limb. “The Devil will have his due,” the figure vowed, and the enslaved voices whispered confirmation.

Kane had been forced to lower his head, which felt
weighed down by ice. He fought to lift it as he saw an elongated flame reflected dimly by the amber stone on which he knelt. He sensed heat as fierce as the cold had been. His head wavered erect, and he saw what confronted him. It was worse than fire. The hooded figure held a sword that might have been withdrawn that very moment from a furnace.

The blade was molten, yet it retained its shape. As it dripped gouts that flared on the stone floor it constantly renewed its substance. It could have been forged only in Hell, and perhaps it had been designed as a hint of the eternal torments it presaged. Kane felt the infernal heat settle on him before the cowled figure raised the blade high to cleave Kane’s skull.