The Red Knight (35 page)

“Agreed,” said Thorgulsen.

“So shall it be.” The image of the sorcerer faded.

“Get this dog out of the keep, and find me four more. Shula!” The Thane bellowed at one of his terrified hirths who’d been watching while the sorcerer had laid down its terms. “Go get the chests we took from the treasury. Take them outside and post a guard. Telvier—you’re with me.”

The next morning, Thorgulsen ordered his people into a square near to the ruined Arth and insisted that Telvier join them. The Suvian reluctantly complied—the pig was paying his wages even if he was bartering away the spoils.

A half-dozen hirths guarded the chest of gold that had been carefully weighed against their lord. Four beaten and bound Steelskins lay nearby. They looked terrified, the shadow of their fate written on the Guthlanders’ blood splattered faces. The unfortunate Frannel had been savagely beaten. Telvier felt neither pity nor anger towards her, or indeed any of the Ants. His hate was reserved for the Guthland pig who had bargained his gold away.

The Suvian paced aimlessly while they waited for the sorcerer to arrive, his restless gaze often drifting to the chest. He’d thought employing the Obsidian Prince to find the Queen would be a stroke of genius, a marvellous short cut. The last time he’d made a pact with the Void-spawned bastard he’d made a handsome profit and it had been so very easy; a sack of gold in exchange for a Fey trinket. “
Call on me anytime,”
he’d said. He hadn’t mentioned that he would ruin him if he did.

I should have made the bargain myself,
thought Telvier bitterly. That lackwit Thorgulsen had asked for too much. Damn the sorcerer, and damn Thorgulsen. Between them they would make a pauper of him.

Telvier smiled at him.
Man looks like a fucking skull in a wig.
Thorgulsen gave Telvier a nod and took a swig of the brandy Beth had brought, but declined the food. The smell of burning human always robbed him of his appetite. Beth’s laugher intruded on his thoughts. She was talking with the hirths while they waited for the sorcerer.

He knew her game. Bringing the food was an excuse—she’d come to gawk at the demon. Fucking woman was drawn to trouble like a fish to water. One day she would go too far and burn for her wickedness and there’d be nothing he could do to save her.

They’d been waiting for about an hour when the air in the centre of the square began to shimmer and the temperature suddenly dropped. There were no warning bells this time when the Obsidian Prince stepped out of the air. Without a word of acknowledgement he extended a skeletally thin hand, as black and shining as his namesake, towards the chest. The heavy wooden box shimmered, grew pale and insubstantial, and slowly vanished.

“Excellent, although you were a little generous,” the sorcerer hissed. “I shall forgive you this time, barbarian. I find your brutishness endearing, you would have made a fine, savage pet. Now give me the spine.”

“Don’t you need to know where you’re going?” Thorgulsen asked.

The sorcerer made a rasping noise that might have been laughter. “Aren’t you the inquisitive one? Fear not, the path I walk will lead me unerringly to my prey. It may take a little time, but I will find them before the day is out. You haven’t wasted your stolen gold.”

Thorgulsen shrugged, the mockery of a monster didn’t offend him. He spat on Frannel. “You do her, Telvier. The coward’s blood would shame my blade.”

Telvier sighed and took off his gloves. A knife dropped from his sleeves. He grabbed the unconscious knight by the hair and opened her throat. Indifferent to the Steelskin’s dying agony Thorgulsen watched the knight feebly struggle for breath as her blood gushed across the flagstones and her face bleached. When she stopped twitching, Telvier hacked out her spine.

For all that he knew what he was doing, it must have been a while since he’d done any real butchery; the peacock was sweating like a pig when he’d finished.

Do him good to get his hands dirty.
Thorgulsen smirked, while Telvier dug through the ruin of the knight’s back and pulled out her quivering heart. Wiping sweat from his face, he accidentally anointed himself in her blood before dropping the grisly relics at the sorcerer’s feet.

When they saw their fate, some of the other prisoners found the courage to fight, but it was far too late. Thorgulsen gave the order and his hirths slashed the Steelskins’ throats. Before the bodies cooled, they cut out their hearts and tossed them at the feet of the sorcerer alongside the other ghastly tribute.

The sorcerer fell upon the organs, and one after the other, sucked them dry. When he’d slaked his thirst, he raised his arms above his head and began to chant. The eerie, inhuman voice and the strange words all preyed upon the most ancient fears locked deep within Thorgulsen, a shiver ran down his spine. In contrast, Bethanglyn’s eyes were shining. Thorgulsen saw her mouthing the aberrant words under her breath.

Still chanting, the Obsidian Prince turned his shadowed face towards her. She flashed him a brazen smile. Thorgulsen weighed the axe in his hand and wondered which one of them he’d like to kill the most.

The sorcerer ceased chanting. For a moment nothing happened, and then the air above the bloody spine began to run like water on glass.

“I’ll see
you
again,” he said to Bethanglyn before stepping over the spine and vanishing into the watery nothingness.

Thorgulsen didn’t like magic but there was no doubting its power.
What about the price?
He was an ambitious man, but when he considered the question:
how far would I go?
The answer was:—
not that far, not again.
If only he could say the same of Bethanglyn. Thorgulsen broke the spell of silence that had settled over the square by slapping his wife across the face.

He turned to Telvier, who took a cautious step back. “Round up your people, we’re leaving this midden. Gathorl! Gather the warband and send the scouts ahead to this, Gallen Arth. I want whatever the Void-spawn leaves.”

He was consumed with rage and guilt when Corvinius had taken over and imprisoned Hyram, but that was nothing compared to how Garian felt watching Weyhithe burn, knowing there was nothing he could do to save it. A few hours earlier he was about to sneak back into the Arth, when he encountered another of Hyram’s agents, wading through filth beneath one of the garderobes. She was called Jarel, and what she told him saved him the trouble of climbing up through the slimy shithole, as she’d just climbed down it.

A cobbler by trade, she’d stayed in the Arth as long as she’d dared. When the Guthani began to kill indiscriminately, she decided it was time to get out with what little information she’d been able to glean. She told Garian that the Guthlanders had ransacked the Arth when they couldn’t find the Queen or Corvinius. As the skinny cobbler cleaned herself up, she explained how she’d heard that the knights guarding the Queen had been found dead in her apartments some time during the previous evening, but that was all she knew. The Guthlanders’ murderous rampage aside, Garian was reassured that Stenna had succeeded in getting the Queen out of the Arth. The agents wished each other luck, and then went their separate ways.

That had been hours ago. Now he was sitting on a rooftop, watching his city burn. He desperately wanted to stay in Weyhithe and hunt down the bastards who’d torched his home, but he had his orders. With a heavy heart, he turned his back on the conflagration.

When he could go no further by rooftop, he climbed down into an alley a few hundred feet from the East Gate. The moment his feet touched ground, a group of mercenaries rounded the corner.

“Hey, you!” One of them shouted at him in Suvian and drew her sword.

“Stay where you are, I want to talk to you!”

Without wasting breath Garian unhooked the small crossbow, spanned it, dropped a bolt in the notch, aimed and squeezed the trigger. The woman fumbled her weapon and staggered, dumbly clutching at the shaft sticking out of her chest. Her three companions charged past her, yelling obscenities at Garian. He dropped the bow and ran.

There were many who could run faster than him, and a good few who knew the city better, but he was a damn sight faster and more knowledgeable than the mercenaries chasing him and soon lost them in the guts of the city.

With his blood still pumping from the chase, he turned a corner and ran straight into another group of mercenary scum who were busy looting a half loaded cart. Lying in the road nearby were the bloody bodies of the family the cart must have belonged to. As soon as they saw him, the mercenaries stopped what they were doing and drew their weapons.

“Wrong time, wrong place, boy…” one of them snarled in Antian and advanced towards him.

There were four of them, all armed and armoured. He was about to turn around and run back the way he’d come when a door opened behind him and another one stepped into the street carrying a large trunk. When he saw Garian he sighed, put the trunk down and unhooked the axe from his belt.

“Whatever you’ve got, hand it over and we’ll let you go on your way. Isn’t that right, Dario?”

“Like you let these people go?” Garian spat.

The one called Dario shrugged. “They wouldn’t play nice.” He laughed. “Don’t make the same mistake, boy. Drop the knife and hand over your purse and you can run along, unless you want to stay and play? Pretty lad like you, who knows? Play nice and I might end up giving you
my
purse.”

Garian drew his knife. The mercenaries closed in. He backed up against the wall, trying to keep them all in view. They stopped. Their smiles faded, their eyes widened.

Garian wasn’t arrogant enough to think he’d inspired such a swift change of attitude. They were staring at something above him.

He desperately wanted to know what it was, but daren’t risk a glance, not while they were within striking distance. A shadow passed over him; he felt a whoosh of air and ducked instinctively. When he looked up he understood why the mercenaries were afraid.

The beasts were sickeningly fast and the uneven contest was over before the mercenaries had time to scream. When they’d finished, one of the seven foot tall monsters raised a dripping, dagger-clawed hand and pointed above him. Garian looked up to see Suli clinging to a drainpipe, smiling down at him. He’d never been so pleased to see anyone in his life.

She dropped the last six feet and landed lightly beside him. She wasn’t wearing traditional Vodoni dress today, but practical buckskins. A knife was hanging from her belt, although with her companions, he doubted that she’d need to use it.

“You did so well to get away from the first lot,” she said, and kissed him.

“How long have you…? I mean are they…when did you…?”

“Not long, and they’re my cousins. When we saw the smoke we came as quickly as we could. It took a while to find your scent in all this mess
and
because you don’t actually use the streets. You go under them and above them, but not often
on
them. You’re a strange fellow, Garian Tain; did I ever tell you that?”

“Yes, I think you did.” Garian refrained from commenting on the two hulking shapeshifters that were snuffling about the pile of corpses not five feet away.
And she calls me strange
. He returned her kiss with interest.

“We need to leave this place quickly. There’s something here that we do not want to run into,” said Suli.

He would take her at her word; whatever it was must be pretty bad for her to say that. “Lead on. I trust you and… your friends know a way out of the city?”

Suli looked expectantly at the shifters. The shaggy beasts sniffed the air and exchanged a look. Their feral yellow eyes glowed in the light of the fires licking at the nearby buildings.

They seemed to come to an agreement, although it was hard to tell, their conversation was conducted in grunts and sniffs. The male nodded to Suli before he and his companion loped off the way Garian had come.

“Let’s go,” said Suli and took off after them. Garian followed.

The Children of the Moon made escaping the city seem easy. Garian and Suli clung to their massive backs and the two shifters flowed up the wall faster than he could have run the distance on the flat. Minutes later they were on the other side. If anyone saw them, they didn’t dare try to stop them.

When they were safely down, the shifters bounded off ahead. Garian and Suli were forced to sprint just to keep them in sight. On all fours, they could almost be mistaken for animals, but when one or other of them stood on their hind legs to sniff the air or peer into the distance, they were clearly more than mere beasts. Garian could see elements of wolf and cat in their facial features, but no animal ever looked at a person with eyes like theirs.

In spite of the circumstances of their reunion, he was overjoyed to see Suli. He was still distraught that Weyhithe was being sacked, like everything else he’d loved; it was being destroyed by an act of wanton brutality.

He had a sudden desire to keep running, to go somewhere far away with Suli and never look back. He was suddenly afraid for the girl running by his side.