The Grim Company (12 page)

Legwynd had closed the distance with the crossbowman lurking in the nave, and now they fought hand to hand, dagger against dagger. Almost too late, Barandas noticed another man targeting him from behind a pillar. The crossbow clicked. Time stood still.

The bolt bounced off his longsword and ricocheted harmlessly off a wall.

The Supreme Augmentor had devoted countless hours to studying every text on the art of combat that could be found in the city. He had regularly spent entire nights practising his swordsmanship, performing routines of such tedium and precision they would drive most men mad. It had cost him much, but Barandas had not achieved his current position by luck. He stalked towards his attacker. The crossbow clicked, and again his sword was there, deflecting the quarrel. He leaped forwards and came up in a roll just before the pillar. The rebel discarded his crossbow and went for the mace at his belt, but he fumbled it. Barandas waited for him to pick the weapon up off the floor. It would make no difference to the outcome.

A quick exchange of blows and the rebel was sagging back against the pillar, his punctured heart leaking blood down his chest to pool around his lifeless legs. The sight gave Barandas pause.

Battle cries split the air, and two large men burst into view. One wielded a hatchet, the other a wooden club spiked with iron rivets. Garmond, gore dripping from his bloodied gauntlets, immediately focused his attention on them. ‘Mine!’ he growled. The two rebels circled him warily.

The brother with the club – they were twins, Barandas realized – swung at Garmond, a powerful blow that would have flattened a lesser man. Garmond the Black raised an arm and deflected it with his vambrace. At the same time, the other brother yanked a loaded crossbow from where it had been hidden underneath his cloak and fired it. The bolt flew true, hitting the steel gorget around the Augmentor’s neck. It should have snapped it, damaged Garmond’s windpipe at the very least, but the enchanted metal held and the quarrel bounced away.

With incredible speed for a man of his size, Garmond launched himself forwards and unleashed a right-handed hook at his would-be killer, who had dropped the crossbow. The man twisted to avoid the full impact, but the gauntleted fist caught him a glancing blow and sent him flying to the ground.

Suddenly Garmond stumbled and went down to one knee. The other brother was attempting to tackle him from behind. The rebel was himself large by any normal measure, but Garmond the Black could not be compared to other men.

The Augmentor reached behind him with one arm, dragging his opponent away from his legs and along the ground towards him. With his other hand, he shoved his fingers into the rebel’s eyes, pushing down with terrible strength. Screams erupted from his unfortunate victim and rivulets of blood welled up beside Garmond’s fingers as they probed ever deeper.

A hatchet suddenly crashed into the back of the Augmentor’s helmet with enough force to jolt his head viciously forwards. Barandas thought Garmond might be in serious trouble, but the giant stumbled to his feet in time to catch the follow-up blow in his open gauntlets. Blood dripped from his hands where the hatchet had made its mark.

Garmond didn’t seem to care. Snarling from behind his horned helm, he tore the hatchet from the rebel’s grip and sent it hurtling across the temple. The twin reached desperately at his belt for another weapon, but he was out of time. Garmond was upon him, his mighty fists shattering the man’s cheekbones, then his jaw, and finally opening his skull with a sickening
crack
.

‘Enough,’ Barandas commanded. Garmond let the corpse drop to the floor. The other brother twitched once nearby, and then lay still.

Taking stock of the situation, Barandas saw that Legwynd had got the better of the rebel he’d been fighting. Bodies were strewn everywhere. He counted eight corpses. ‘Do we have their leader?’ he asked.

‘Over here, Commandant,’ Thurbal shouted. Barandas walked over to the shadowy alcove where his fellow Augmentor was waiting. He stared down at the grisly sight on the floor. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded.

Thurbal gave an insolent shrug. ‘I thought he might try to make a run for it,’ he said, ‘so I cut off his legs. Then he tried to pull a crossbow on me, so I cut off his arms.’

The twitching mess of flesh at his feet moaned weakly. With the amount of blood he’d already lost, it was a miracle the rebel leader still lived. He was trying to say something, red froth spilling from his mouth down over his double chin. ‘I can’t understand you,’ Barandas said. He put his ear close to the man’s mouth.

‘
Who
…’ he croaked weakly. ‘
Who betrayed us?
’

Barandas shook his head. ‘It’s not important now. I regret what this man did to you, but you knew the price of treason. Go to your peace now.’ With those words, he placed the edge of his sword against the rebel’s fleshy neck and slit his throat.

He glared at Thurbal. ‘You and I will have words. Your conduct is unacceptable.’ He frowned suddenly. He could hear a faint ticking noise. He raised a questioning eyebrow, but his surly grey-haired colleague pointedly ignored him.

Before Barandas could press him further, a glint near the dead man’s severed leg suddenly caught his eye. It was a small crystal, likely quartz, of a pretty green hue.
Like Lena’s eyes
, he thought. It was slightly smudged with ash, as if it had been in a fire. He rubbed the grime away and put the stone inside one of the pouches hanging at his belt.

There was a slight sensation of wind brushing against his face and suddenly Legwynd was standing next to him. ‘No sign of anyone else alive,’ said the cherub-faced killer with a smile. ‘But I found this.’ He thrust a map at Barandas, who took it from his hands. It illustrated Dorminia and the surrounding region in impressive detail. A hastily drawn circle immediately got his attention. It outlined a specific location east of the city.

‘The Wailing Rift,’ Barandas muttered under his breath.
Nine corpses, none of them female. Our informant said there were twelve
. Sudden comprehension dawned. ‘Legwynd,’ he said. ‘You will go to the Wailing Rift immediately. I believe these rebels were plotting to take advantage of our sojourn at the Obelisk.’

Legwynd grinned and threw a salute. ‘I’ll be there before midday. If I find any rebels at the Rift, they’ll be in for a surprise.’ He patted the daggers at his belt and then sped away almost as fast as the eye could follow.

Barandas looked around at the temple. He had been born into a godless world, yet the sight of so much bloodshed in this once holy sanctuary made him uneasy.

‘Thurbal,’ he commanded. ‘Finish searching this place, and then burn these corpses.’

It was an unpleasant business, but a man did what was necessary.

An Unexpected Message

 

 

 

The depository was a shambles.

Eremul wheeled his chair slowly forwards,
circum-navigating
the ruined piles of books and soggy reams of paper that had congealed together, becoming little more than clumps of worthless pulp. A soft squelching noise accompanied his slow circuit of the ruined archives. Most of the water had retreated back into the harbour, but the carpeted floor of the depository remained flooded.

He slumped in his chair. The project he had worked on for the last thirteen years was in danger of becoming a literal washout.
Thirteen years
. That was how long he had persisted in this farce, trying to build some wretched facsimile of a life for himself after his mutilation and exile from the Obelisk. The depository had been a welcome diversion, something to take his mind off the truth of his wretched existence.

Eremul fought back the urge to wheel himself out into the streets and rain fiery death down on anyone stupid enough to wander within his immediate vicinity. Why not go out in a blaze of fury? Why not give the slack-jawed fools a taste of the shit they had so gleefully flung at him over the years?

Come, one and all! Come and gawk at the legless cripple. Go ahead. It’s not as if I’m a real person, after all
.

The answer to his own question was, of course, staring him in the face. To abuse the gift of magic would make him no better than that monstrous shitstain Salazar – the bastard who had torn his life apart and taken his legs in the process. And what the Magelord had done to
him
was but a speck of dust compared with the avalanche of horror that was his latest crime.

The Tyrant of Dorminia had dropped a billion tons of water on a living city and instantly created the biggest mass graveyard since the Godswar five centuries past. Forty thousand men, women and children had died in an instant. One second they were alive; the next they were gone. All those lives, extinguished with the same callous lack of regard a farmer might show for an ant’s nest as he drowned it in boiling water.

The ineffable
wrongness
of that act had shocked Eremul in a way he had not thought possible. That any man should have the audacity, much less the capacity, to enact such judgement on so many unknowing souls… why, it would be an affront to the gods, if the gods weren’t already dead.

What use for boundaries, when a man has already cast down his makers? Salazar and the other Magelords know nothing of what it means to be human. They forfeited that right long ago
.

The destruction of the City of Shades had caused ripples that would be felt for a long time to come. The most immediate was the tsunami that had surged north across the Broken Sea, hitting Dorminia earlier that morning. It had lost most of its energy by the time it reached the harbour, but even so it had destroyed several of the city’s battered fleet and flooded the docks as far north as the Tyrant’s Road. The homes, shops and taverns that clustered along the harbour had been damaged, some irreparably, and an entire community of Dorminia’s poorest families had simply been washed away, along with the ramshackle huts that had sheltered them.

And what of brave Isaac and his companions, trapped out on the water?

Eremul couldn’t help but feel a certain amusement at the irony of the situation. The enchantment he had placed on the cutter guarded it against capsizing, but he had no idea how the boat would fare in the grip of a tsunami. Would it be dashed against the coast? Would its passengers tumble out and drown in the hungry waters of Deadman’s Channel before it hit the rocks?

Much as he hated to admit it, Eremul hoped neither was the case. He
needed
his assistant. Why, his arms were already starting to ache from the effort of wheeling around the cumbersome contraption Isaac had designed for him. If only he could float up off his chair and drift serenely through the air, like a noble genie riding an invisible steed from the stables of the heavens themselves.

Alas, that was the stuff of fairy tales and Magelords. His own powers didn’t extend to being able to wipe his own arse effectively, and Creator knows he’d tried. No, if you wanted a party trick, some minor deceit or frippery to amuse the children, the Halfmage was the man for the job. Anything more substantial required a
real
wizard.

During his lowest moments – which tended to occur roughly four times on any given night – Eremul had pondered why it was that, in spite of the terrible suffering he had endured, his magic remained so pitifully weak. Surely losing his legs meant he should be compensated in other ways? If reality worked the same way as those awful stories he kept buried in the depository, he ought to wield power to rival the mightiest Magelords.

The truth was a very different matter. It seemed the Creator had decreed that if Eremul was to be a man, he would be the most pitiful of men; and if he was to be a mage, he would be the most pitiful of mages. The injustice of it all made him snigger for a second, until the strain set his haemorrhoids to throbbing once again. He shifted around on his chair, searching in vain for a position that would ease the discomfort. Isaac possessed an ointment that helped considerably when applied, but it seemed the bastard had taken it with him – most likely out of spite.

A fine way to reward years of gainful employment
. In his experience, if a man extended a hand to you, it was probably intended as a distraction while he cudgelled you around the back of the head with the other. The most sensible solution was, therefore, to ignore the hand altogether.

Or else simply to steal the cudgel and scramble the bastard’s brains before he did the same to you.

He stared around at the wreckage of the depository one more time. He needed some air. Pushing open the sodden door of his ruined archive, the Halfmage inhaled deep the smells of his beloved city.

Saltwater. Rot. Shit?
The city’s ageing sewer system had been hit by the deluge and had leaked its contents onto the streets above. The late-afternoon sun had barely begun to dry out the abused lanes of the harbourside sprawl, and the incessant sound of trickling water formed an almost pleasant background to the sight of turds floating down the flooded avenues.