The Heretic Kings (27 page)

“Am I then to thank you for your humanity, your restraint, when the beast you ordered aboard was responsible for the foul deaths of my shipmates?” Bardolin was angry now, but Aruan answered him calmly.

“The exigencies of the situation allowed no other recourse—and besides, Ortelius was outside my control. I regret unnecessary death as much as the next man, but I had to safeguard what we have built here.”

“In that case, Aruan, you will have to make sure that none of the members of this current expedition ever leave this continent alive, won’t you?”

There was a small silence.

“Circumstances have changed.”

“In what way?”

“Perhaps we are no longer so concerned with secrecy. Perhaps other things occupy our minds.”

“And who are
we
? Creatures such as your were-ape Gosa? Why must you always choose shifters as your minions? Are there no decent, proper mages left to you here in the west?”

“Why Bardolin, you sound almost indignant. You surprise me, you of all people.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you earlier.”

“You’ve told me nothing, nothing of importance. What have you been doing here for all these centuries? Playing God to the primitives, indulging in petty power plays amongst yourselves?”

Aruan came close to the sparkling phantom that was Bardolin’s presence.

“Let me show you what we have been doing over these lost years, Brother Mage, what tricks we have been learning out here in the western wilderness.”

There was a change, as swift as breath misting a cold pane of glass. Aruan had disappeared, and in his place there loomed the hulking figure of a full-blooded shifter, a werewolf with lemon-bright eyes and a long muzzle glimmering with fangs. Bardolin’s imp whimpered and hid behind his master’s translucent simulacrum.

“It’s not possible,” Bardolin whispered.

“Did I not tell you, Bardolin, that we had found new and powerful wisdom among the inhabitants of this continent?” Aruan’s voice said, the beast’s muzzle contorting around the words, dripping ropes of saliva which glistened in the moonlight.

“It’s an illusion,” Bardolin said.

“Touch the illusion then, Brother Illusion.”

Of course—Bardolin at this moment was no more than an apparition himself, a copy of his true self, conjured up by the incredible power of this man, this beast before him.

“I am no simulacrum, I assure you,” Aruan’s voice said.

“It is impossible. Sufferers of the black disease cannot learn any of the other six disciplines. It is against the very nature of things. Shifters cannot also be mages.”

The Aruan shifter drew close. “They can here. We all are, friend Bardolin. We all partake of the beast in this country; and now so do you.”

Something in Bardolin quailed before the werewolf’s calm certainty.

“Not I.”

“But you do. You have looked into the very heart and mind of a shifter at the moment of its transformation. More, you have loved one of our kind. I can read this in you as though it were inked across the parchment of your very soul.” The beast laughed horribly.

“Griella.”

“Yes—that was the name. The memory of that moment is burned within you. There is a part of you, deep in the black spaces of your heart, which would gladly have joined her in her suffering, could she but have loved you in return…

“Your imp is a poor sort of buffer against probing, Bardolin. Where you yourself might hold out against me, he is a free conduit to the heart of your fears and emotions. You are a book lying open to be read any time I have a desire to read.”

“You monster!” Bardolin snarled, but fear was edging an icicle of dread into his flesh.

The werewolf came closer until the heat and stink of it were all around him and the great head blotted out the stars. They stood on the pyramid once more: Bardolin’s image could feel the stone of it under its soles.

“Do you know how we make shifters in this country, Bardolin?”

“Tell me,” Bardolin croaked. Unable to help himself, he retreated a step.

“For a person to be infected with the black disease, he must do two things. Firstly, he, or she, must have physical relations with a full-blooded shape-shifter. Secondly, he or she must eat a portion of that shifter’s kill. It’s that simple. We have not yet divined why certain people become certain beasts—that is a complex field which would reward more study. A question of personal style, perhaps. But the basic process is well known to us. We are a race of shape-shifters, Bardolin, and now you are one of us as you once secretly wished to be.”

“No,” Bardolin whispered, aghast. He remembered a kind of lovemaking, a sweating half-dreamt battle in the night. And he remembered Kersik offering him the rib of meat to bite into. “Oh, lord God, no!”

He felt a grip on his shoulder as he stood there with his hands covering his face, and Aruan the man was back again, the beast gone. His face was both kindly and triumphant.

“You belong to us, my friend. We are brothers in truth, bound together by the Dweomer and by the malady which lurks in our very flesh.”

“To hell with you!” Bardolin cried. “My soul is my own.”

“Not any more,” Aruan said implacably. “You are mine, as much a creature in my keeping as Gosa or Kersik are. You will do my bidding even when you are unaware that the will which rules you is not your own. I have hundreds like you across the entire reach of the Old World. But you are special, Bardolin. You are a man who might in a former time have been a friend. For that reason I will leave you be for a while. Think on this at our parting: the race whose blood runs in you and me, in the veins of the herbalists and the hedge-witches and the petty cantrimers—it came from here, in the west. We are an ancient people, the oldest race in the world, and yet for centuries we have bled and died to satisfy the prejudices of lesser men. That will change. We will meet again, you and I, and when we do you will know me as your lord, and as your friend.”

The wraith that was Bardolin began to fade. The imp screamed thinly and tried to run towards the spectre of its vanishing master, but Aruan caught it in his arms. It writhed there pitiably, but could not get free.

“You have no further need of your familiar, Brother Mage. He is a weakness you can do without, and I have already mapped the road from his mind to yours. Say goodbye.”

With a flick of his powerful arms, Aruan wrenched round the imp’s head on its slim neck. There was a sharp crack, and the little creature flopped lifelessly.

Bardolin shrieked in grief and agony, and it seemed to him as though the jungle night dissolved in a sun-brightness, a scalding holocaust which seared the interstices of his mind and soul. The world funnelled past him like a plummeting star, and he saw the city, the mountain, the black jungle of the Western Continent swoop away as though he were riding the molten halo of a blasted cannonball into the sky.

His shriek became the tail of the comet he had become. He fell to earth again, a raging meteor intent on burying itself at the heart of the world.

And struck, passing through a terrible burning and light into utter darkness.

SIXTEEN

T HERE was at once too much and too little to take in. Hawkwood was absurdly reminded of a festival he had attended once in southern Torunna, when the effigies of the old gods had been displayed to public ridicule: huge constructions of wicker and cloth and wood in every grotesque shape and form dancing madly with the teams of men who lurked inside their colourful carcasses, until it was impossible to tell one warped form from another and they had dissolved into a whirling confusion of monstrous faces and limbs.

Here, it was dark. There were no colours, simply a monochrome nightmare. Shadows with blazing eyes which seemed to shoot up out of the very ground, the heat from their raging darknesses a palpable thing even in the depths of the night. Forms rather than bodies. A picture here of an animal’s head set upon a bipedal frame, the warm splash of blood, the screaming. It passed with the vivid unreality of a dream. A dark mirage. But it was real.

The men at the rear screamed horribly, the chest they bore torn out of their hands. A crash, and then a shower of tinkling gold across the roadway. Shadows lifted the two men high in the air and then something happened too quickly to make out, and they were in pieces, their viscera ribboning out like flung streamers, their bodies become meat and shattered bone which were flung away.

As the shadows closed in, the men at the front fired their arquebuses, flashes and plumes of smoke. There were howls of pain, despairing wails from the approaching shapes.

The rest of the soldiers had dropped the other chest, and also their sick comrade, Gerrera. They bunched together and levelled their own weapons. Gerrera screamed as the shadows came upon him and he was engulfed, torn apart. A volley of arquebus fire, the iron bullets tearing into the ranks of the half-glimpsed foe and the night was clawed apart by their screams. Huge bodies could be seen decorating the roadway, immobile but at the same time subtly changing in bulk and shape.

The attackers drew off for a moment, and Murad’s soldiers reloaded their firearms feverishly.

“We must make a run for it,” the nobleman said, his narrow chest heaving and the sweat standing out on his face. “It’s not that far to the gorge: some of us might make it. We’ll all die here, else.”

“What about Bardolin?” Hawkwood asked.

“He’ll have to take his chances. We can’t carry him. Maybe the creatures will recognize him for one of their own sorcerous folk—who knows?”

“Bastard!” Hawkwood spat, but he was not sure who he was speaking of.

The things came roaring out of the night again. Seven arquebuses went off, felling about half a dozen of them, but the rest kept coming. They were amongst the surviving soldiers, biting and clawing and bellowing: apes and jaguars and wolves, and one snake with arms which Hawkwood slashed at viciously with his iron-bladed dirk so that it thrashed to the ground screaming thinly, its head becoming that of a beautiful woman even as its coils lashed in its death throes.

Cortona was smashed to the ground by a great were-ape and had his face ripped off with a twist of its fist. Murad seized the dead man’s arquebus, slid out the rammer and jammed it into the creature’s reeking maw. The iron of the rammer tore into the roof of its mouth and it fell. Something came at him from behind and raked his back with razor-sharp talons. He spun to find himself facing a huge black cat, and stabbed the rammer into its livid eye. He laughed as it shrieked and spun away, the gun tool protruding from its punctured pupil.

One of the soldiers was hoisted into the air by two of the beasts and torn asunder between them like a rotten sack, his innards exploding to shower the fray with stinking gore, the gold which he had stuffed in his shirt and pockets clinking out along with it. Another was pinioned whilst a werewolf bit through the back of his neck, his spine splintering in the tremendous jaws, his head lolling on a tenuous connection of windpipe and skin.

Mensurado had followed Murad’s example and was stabbing out left and right with an iron arquebus rammer. He was roaring in a kind of battle frenzy, shouting obscenities and blasphemies, and the beasts actually made way for him. All he had to do with his crude weapon was break the skin, and the sorcery which maintained the beast form of the shifter would be broken. The iron would poison its system as surely as if a bullet had pierced its vitals.

Hawkwood grabbed Masudi. “Take Bardolin. We’re going to run for it.”

“Captain!” the big helmsman cried despairingly.

“Do as I say! Mihal, help him.”

Masudi hoisted the unconscious mage on to his broad shoulders whilst around him the dwindling company fought for their lives. The three mariners had as secondary armament the cheaply made iron ship’s knives which were more tool than weapon, but which were more valuable than gold in the mêlée, more effective than a battery of culverins could be. They slashed a way forward, the iron blades snicking back and forth in their hands as though they were threshing wheat. The beasts retreated before them: they knew that one nick from the knives meant death to them.

Behind the trio of desperate sailors the soldiers fought on with rammers and gunstocks and knives. But they had too many assailants. One by one they were enveloped, brought down and torn to pieces. The road was littered with gold coins and the fragments of bodies puddled with gore and entrails. Murad, Mensurado and a couple of others made a last effort, a combined charge. Hawkwood risked a glance back at them, but he could only see a crowd of monsters huddled together as if feeding at the same trough. They broke apart as Murad, his shirt torn from his back and his skin in strips, burst through them, wielding a shard of an arquebus’s wheel-lock. The nobleman sprinted away at unbelievable speed, a dozen shifters in pursuit, and disappeared into the night.

Hawkwood’s group shuffled onwards, turning and spinning to keep their assailants at bay with lunges of their dirks. The wall of the volcano towered above them now and they were surrounded by trees and vegetation; they had left the main part of the city. The cleft in the crater wall could be seen as a wedge of stars ahead.

Mihal was too slow. As his arm snaked out to stab at a shifter it caught his wrist. He was yanked off into a scrum of snarling shadows and could not even scream before they had finished him. One knocked Masudi down from behind. Bardolin went sprawling and Hawkwood staggered, his dagger flying out of his hand.

He scrabbled off on hands and knees into the bushes, rolling and shoving himself forward into the vegetation like a fox intent on going to earth. Then he lay, utterly spent, the jungle teeming with howls, leaves brushing his face. He tried to summon a prayer, a last thought, something coherent out of the terror which washed across his brain, but his mind was blank. He lay there as dumb and senseless as a cornered animal, waiting for death to come ravening out of the darkness.

It came. He heard the bushes crackling, and there was a sensation of heat beside him, the impression of a hulking presence.