The Archon's Assassin (35 page)

“A freak, you mean.” He’d gotten the same in Sarum. They’d called him corpse-boy, unclean, demon-child. After a while, he welcomed it, used it to build his reputation. But he never forgave the initial sting of their taunts.

“The homunculi are a hard race,” Bird said. “They have no place for illness and deformity. The newly begotten are checked for defects. Those deemed no good are fed to the seethers and the other things that dwell in the deepest chasms of Gehenna. I was tasked with checking you. I was supposed to throw you to the seethers.”

“But you didn’t.”

Bird sat beside him on the bed. “Qlippoth changed me. There, amid the nightmares of the Cynocephalus, I glimpsed what that poor creature is afraid of. Together, the denizens of Qlippoth are like a fractured mirror, revealing the face of the Demiurgos. Seeing this for myself, I was repelled. Repelled, and ashamed of what we are; what I was.

I had seen beyond the shadows on the walls of Gehenna, and upon my return, I no longer fit in. I tried. I tried, because I had nowhere else to go, but when I saw you, rejected for being different, I felt… I felt only kinship and the need to get away.

I knew there were dissenters among the homunculi. Knew and never approved, until that moment. I took you to them, to Mephesch and Abednago and the others, and they arranged for your escape.”

“So, you gave up your people for me?” Shadrak said. “I don’t get it.”

“Where’s the profit, do you mean? Where’s the gain?”

Shadrak shrugged. That was the world he moved in. No one did nothing for nothing.

“I glimpsed a truth among the horrors of Qlippoth. When you stare deception in the face like that, it gives perspective; gives form to that which is other than you have known. The Demiurgos lives to disperse, to sow discord, disharmony; yet in having that clearly before me, I glimpsed another way, another power in the cosmos.”

“The Archon?”

Bird laughed at that. “No, not him. Not even Eingana, though they both mean well. There is something more, though, something beyond even the Aeonic Triad.”

Shadrak’s brain raced to connect all the inferences. “You mean Nous?” The god Shader believed in. The god the Templum imposed on most of the Earth outside Sahul.

“Ah, that is a name steeped in deceptions of its own, but yes, I think it points in the right direction.”

“Kadee said—my foster mother—she said something similar. She had her gods, the gods of the Dreamers, but she always said beyond them was something greater.”

Bird sighed and smiled at the same time. “She would have gotten that from Mamba, the snake-headed man who brought you to her.”

Shadrak didn’t need to ask about the snake-man: his question must have been written all over his face.

Bird pressed his hands together over his lips. “The Dreamers see Mamba as a god,” he said in a hushed tone that might have been mocking. “Others would call him a freak.” He peered at Shadrak. “A hybrid. But he has more kinship with the beings of Qlippoth than any others, though his people are older—the firstborn of the Cynocephalus, you might say. The dog-head shed them like the Demiurgos shed the homunculi, and while there is antipathy between our races, the Sedition and the hybrids have a common aim: we would both see the Cynocephalus freed from fear, and his mother, Eingana, avenged for the rape visited upon her. One other thing unites our races: neither is the work of Sektis Gandaw.”

There was so much more Shadrak wanted to ask, but his mind was a blur of competing questions, thoughts, realizations. And how did this new knowledge affect what he was to do about Nameless? Should he cooperate with the Archon, or did he need to go beyond that, hunt out the truth of things for himself?

Shog, that would make him as bad as Shader. No offense, the bloke was a great fighter, but his head was shoved so far up his arse he couldn’t see where he was going. No, this was too much. Too much for him to take in, too much for him to give a stuff about. He was a doer, not a thinker. Not strictly true: he was a thinker in terms of planning, and then he put into action whatever it was he’d decided upon. But this was different. This knowledge wasn’t anything he could use. It just introduced confusion and indecision, the kinds of things that could get you killed.

“So,” he said, “now that you’ve filled my head with all this garbage, what am I supposed to do with it? Take orders from you? From Mephesch? Because I bet the Archon will have a thing or two to say about that. I get that you don’t want me to kill Nameless, but what if the Archon keeps pushing? What do I do then?”

“Listen,” Bird said. “Watch. Discern.”

“Big shogging help. Thanks a bunch.” Shadrak stood and thumped the wall.

“There is only truth and deception,” Bird said. “My wish is simply to be the less deceived.”

“So, it’s a game, between you and the Demiurgos, right?”

“Not a game, and not just for—” Bird raised a finger. His eyes rolled to one side, and he cocked his head, listening. “We have arrived.”

Sure enough, the background hum of the plane ship had stopped. It was enough to snap Shadrak back to the task in hand.

With the singleminded focus that had kept him alive all these years, he shut down all inner chatter about Nameless, Nous, the Archon, and all the other cosmic crap Bird had dumped on him. With scarcely a thought, he set his fingers to checking over the blades and razor stars in his baldric, down to the handles of his pistols.

The door had barely slid open a foot when he slipped through it and headed for the control room, followed by the flutter of tiny wings.

VERUSIA

Earth

T
he air in the control room was thick with anticipation.

Shadrak entered, the butterfly that was Bird trailing him like a wasp on honey. The others looked up expectantly, then their eyes tracked the butterfly’s arcing descent to the floor, where the homunculus grew from the dissolving particles of its wings.

Nameless was back, which was an improvement from him moping in his room. The giant’s gauntlets were clenched into fists like mace heads. One was wrapped around the haft of his part-melted axe. He pivoted the scarolite helm toward Shadrak. His movements seemed stiff, and if he had anything to say, he kept it to himself.

Ekyls was hurriedly stowing Albert’s pots and pans and other paraphernalia into a bright yellow backpack. Shadrak didn’t bother asking where they’d found it. Didn’t take no genius to guess Albert had been snooping while he was busy speaking with Bird. Probably, it came from the same place Shadrak had found his goggles and the never-full bag. He just had to hope the poisoner hadn’t found anything else: anything he might use when the time came to make his move.

Galen hovered by entrance to the makeshift stable, holding Beatrice’s reins. The horse was frisky, treading her front hoof against the metal floor and shaking her head.

Bird swirled his cloak of feathers about himself and went to nuzzle her, all the while cooing at the back of his throat. Sounded nothing like horse-talk to Shadrak, but it seemed to do the trick, and Beatrice settled.

“You should read this.” Albert held out his book.

“The Ballad of Jaspar Paris?” Shadrak took it and turned his nose up. “Ain’t that what the bitch was talking about? Why, think it might help me sleep?”

Ludo looked up from his Liber. “My only concern is that it was taken, not borrowed.”

Albert sneered. “I’m sure Aristodeus has better things to do with his time than read Quintus Quincy. I’m only enduring it for the sake of our quest. I just hope the sacrifice is appreciated.”

Shadrak riffled through its dog-eared pages then handed it back. “Not my kind of thing, romance.”

“Ah, but the pay-off comes right at the end,” Albert said. “I found it rather validating. Never trust a woman—especially one who’s all lips and breasts.” He shuddered and made a sick face.

“Whatever.” Shadrak punched in the door code and strode for the cubicle that would take them to the exit corridor. He didn’t wait to see if they followed him. He knew they would.

Somewhere at the back, he heard the clopping of hooves, and Galen muttering sweet nothings into his horse’s ear. Stupid shogger. If Shadrak had his way, they’d chop the nag up and salt it for rations.

He almost did it, too, when they all crammed into the cubicle along with the horse, and he got a face full of arse and tail. One whiff of flatulence, one hint of manure, and Beatrice was dead meat.

Time they reached the outer door, the horse was trembling. Could have been the cold. The temperature had dropped massively, and Shadrak could feel ice eating at his bones even beneath his cloak. Could also be that Beatrice had read his mind. Could have been something else, too. There was no mistaking it: the atmosphere. No one spoke, but he could see the worry on their faces—all except Nameless’s, that is. But even the dwarf seemed hesitant, reluctant to leave the safety of the plane ship.

Shadrak entered the code, and the outer door opened onto a wall of ice. He rapped it with his knuckles, then wiped its surface with his palm.

“Well?” Nameless said.

Shadrak scratched his head. “Bottom of a frozen lake? Middle of a glacier?”

“How did you manage that?” Albert said.

“Plane ship had trouble, remember. Something was blocking us. She must have found another way.”

“Well, that was handy,” Albert said, “seeing as we can’t even get outside.”

“What the shog do you want me to do about it?” Shadrak fought back the urge to gut the fat bastard then and there; save himself the trouble later. But that would be impulsive, and nothing good ever came from unplanned actions.

“Is this the only way in and out?” Ludo said.

Shadrak rolled his eyes and sighed. “No. No, it is not.”

He pushed past and headed back to the cubicle, and of course, they followed him like obedient ducklings. They were starting to remind him of the journeymen that gone with him to kill the mawgs beneath Sarum. Didn’t help his mood recalling how that had turned out. Useless bunch of scuts.

Back in the control room, he swiped shapes across the dark mirror on the console until a ceiling panel flapped open, and a steel ladder dropped down.

Ekyls was on it in an instant, lithely climbing up out of view like a man who’d been buried alive. An instant later, he started back down again, shivering.

“Freezing,” Ekyls said. “Walls, door-thing are ice. Me go back down.”

“No, laddie,” Nameless said, taking the first rung below him. “Back up is where you’ll go. You’ll get used to it. They say there’s nothing like cold to toughen you up.”

Ekyls snarled, but Nameless slapped him on the rump with the flat of his axe, and that was enough to send him up again.

“What about Beatrice?” Galen said. “She can’t climb up there.”

“Leave her in the stable,” Shadrak said. “Just remember what I said about no shit on my floor.”

Shadrak climbed up after Nameless. At the top, Ekyls was bashing his shoulder against the outer hatch, and when that didn’t work, he used his head.

“Laddie, laddie,” Nameless said with a sigh. “Out of the way.” He grabbed Ekyls by the arm and yanked him back from the hatch. He held onto a rung with one hand and lowered Ekyls behind him with the other. Shadrak backed down the ladder to make room.

“Is there a lock or something?” Nameless asked, craning his neck to scan the ceiling through the eye-slit. “Can’t see one of those panels.”

“Opens when the ladder comes down, normally,” Shadrak said. Either they were beneath more ice, or the shogging piece of crap wasn’t working properly. Thing is, who was there to repair it?

“Must be iced up,” Nameless said. “You should have pushed harder, laddie,” he called down to Ekyls. With the slightest of shoves from one of the giant’s gauntlets, the hatch burst open, and half a mountain of snow dropped on Nameless and everyone below.

Shadrak cursed and brushed ice from his beard and hair.

“Ah, the crisp air of winter!” Nameless declaimed.

Whistling a jaunty tune, he climbed up through the opening like a child sensing the prospect of snowballs.

***

Snow-dusted pines shone silver in the light of the waning moon—just the one moon, not the three of Aethir. It looked odd and alien to Shadrak after so long away.

He shifted the rifle on his back for the thousandth time, touched both his pistols, and the thundershot wedged in the back of his belt. Did the same with his blades, every contact assuaging some unspoken, irrational fear that bad shit would happen if he didn’t check they were all there.

The forest dropped down toward a dark artery that oozed along the valley floor. To the west, clusters of ghostly lights cut through the mist like a warning. Beyond them, a jagged tower jutted above night-blackened walls with battlements like teeth. Atop its turret, a flag shimmered argent in the moon’s glow.

Shadrak rummaged about in his bottomless bag and pulled out the goggles with the pliant strap. Fixing them in place, he focused on the lights of the settlement.

The darkness brightened to a soft green tint, and he could now see squat houses as if he were up close to them. They were arrayed about a domed structure in perfect circles, each with a hanging lantern marking the entrance. Broad concourses divided the dwellings like the spokes of an enormous wheel, every avenue leading to hub that was the dome.

Raising his eyes to the castle, Shadrak could see hazy red figures passing between the merlons, ascending and descending the steps coiling around the tower.

The flag came into sharp focus next, its frayed and stained fabric bearing the emblem of a cross.

He lowered his gaze to the rocky plinth at the base of the curtain walls. There were scores of spikes thrust into the ground, sacks or rags hanging from them like an army of scarecrows.

“Place puts a creep in my crotch, laddie,” Nameless said, breath misting through the eye-slit of the great helm. “What can you see?”

Shadrak lifted the goggles and left them pressing against his hair. “Wolfmalen.” He pointed at the town, which had reverted to pinpricks of brightness against the still black of night.

“In the heart of Verusia’s Schwarzwald,” Ludo said, squinting into the distance, arms hugging his chest. His lips had the faintest tinge of blue, and the moonlight etched his face with deep crevasses and pools of shadow.