The Relic Guild
Title Page
Edward Cox
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Contents
Doubt & Wonder
In the long game, defeat was only part of the strategy.
Alone and beaten, Fabian Moor strode across a narrow bridge of stone. Cold purpose drove each of his steps as his path arced over a chasm so deep that light itself was swallowed into an endless void. He looked up at the luminescent stalactites that hung from the ceiling of a vast cavern like the spires of an inverted cityscape, glowing with a violet radiance. With a surge of intolerance, Moor gritted his teeth as he glimpsed something moving among the shadows there. A silhouette, dark and sleek against the pale light, left the cover of a stalactite and sailed down towards him with the slow beating of huge wings.
Without breaking his gait, Moor thrust out a hand. A point of light, no bigger than a pebble, shot from his palm and streaked upward. It hit the silhouette with a flash of silver-blue that illuminated a creature three times the size of any man. The creature recoiled, great leathery wings folding forward, a bellow of pain coming from a gaping maw manifestly designed for rending flesh. As the light faded, a bitter wind moaned around the cavern, followed by the sound of dull creaking. In the gloom, the creature’s frozen body hit the bridge several paces ahead of Moor and shattered into a thousand glassy shards which glittered like jewels as they tumbled and spilled into the abyss.
Icy remnants crunched under Moor’s boots as he continued onward.
The bridge ended at a promontory, where, before the rough and sheer cavern wall, a stone golem stood sentinel. A thick neck and broad shoulders supported its boulder-sized head. The wall of its chest tapered to a marginally thinner waist; massive fists dangled from powerful arms and hung down past the knees of tree-trunk legs. Hulking, easily twice Moor’s height, the stone golem didn’t move, but its eyeless sockets seemed to glare a challenge to the man standing before it.
Moor sneered up at its chipped and worn face. ‘Well?’ he said intolerantly. ‘Let me in, you fool!’
The golem shifted its bulk, its joints rasping with the grind of stone on stone as it turned to face the cavern wall. Raising both massive fists, it punched out at the rock. The hard surface accepted the blows, turning to liquid, as if cowering in the face of a greater might. It then solidified, fusing the golem’s arms to the wall at the wrists. The golem leaned back and heaved. With more grinding, the stony sentinel wrenched free a great section of the wall as easily as if it were pulling out a plug. Its footfalls were heavy as it bore the hunk of rock back a few paces to reveal a round opening.
Without a word, Moor stepped through the opening. A dull boom confirmed that the golem had resealed the way behind him.
Moor entered a circular chamber whose wall and floor were as smooth as if scooped out of the rock. Above, the domed ceiling was coated with a luminous substance that bathed the chamber in a warm, golden glow. A large round table of stone occupied the centre, around which four people sat. All of them stared at the new arrival, but not one uttered a word as he took his chair among them.
Only when he was seated did Moor acknowledge the pain from the injuries he had suffered to his ribs, and the deep fatigue overwhelming his body.
He felt eyes upon him. Each of these people was well-known to Moor, though he would hardly call them friends. They had all been summoned to this council chamber before, and always in secret, but never under such circumstances as these. Their dark cassocks were ripped and stained as Moor’s own, and all but one carried visible wounds.
To his right sat obese Viktor Gadreel; the old man held a bloodied cloth to his left eye, and shallow cuts and bruises decorated his bald head. To his left, Hagi Tabet’s glassy eyes stared off into some unknown distance, a thin line of blood running down the side of her face from a head wound partially hidden by her short, matted hair. Further along, Yves Harrow was shaking, gritting his teeth against the pain of raw facial burns.
The one person present who displayed no obvious injuries was Mo Asajad. She sat calmly opposite Moor. Her long, raven hair was straight and neat; her gaunt, porcelain face was blemished only by a patch of scarring on her forehead – the same ritual scarring each of them bore with pride.
‘Where is Lord Spiral?’ Moor demanded of her.
‘We do not know.’ Asajad’s thin, colourless lips gave him a cold smile. ‘How goes your part in the war?’
Meeting her dark eyes with a chilly gaze of his own, Moor remained silent.
‘Come now, Fabian,’ she said. ‘There’s no shame in defeat.’ Her smile grew thinner and colder. ‘Even my own troops were destroyed today at the Falls of Dust and Silver. I thought I was to die, too, but then I was manifested here.’
Viktor Gadreel grunted. ‘It is the same for us all, Fabian.’ He removed the cloth from his face and looked at the blood upon it. His left eye was nothing more than red pulp. ‘I lost over a thousand today, dead to a man at the Burrows of Underneath. I should have fallen with them.’
‘So many dead,’ Hagi Tabet whispered. With each passing moment, she seemed more and more lost. Whatever wound she had sustained, it had clearly addled her mind. ‘It all happened so quickly …’
‘We didn’t stand a chance,’ added Yves Harrow. He closed his burnt eyelids and continued to shiver.
‘So you see, Fabian,’ Asajad purred, ‘each of
our
armies suffered defeat in battle, and with synchronised precision, it would seem. But you didn’t lead an army, did you? Your part in the war was of a more clandestine nature.’ She gave him a pitying pout. ‘I am assuming, by your presence, your mission to the Great Labyrinth was not a success?’
‘What do you know of my mission, Asajad?’ Moor’s tone was guarded.
‘Enough to make an educated guess that the little magickers of the Relic Guild proved too strong for even Lord Spiral’s most trusted assassin.’
Moor rubbed a hand across his bruised ribs and averted his gaze.
‘Oh, poor Fabian.’ As Asajad’s unhelpful amusement deepened, she looked at each person seated around the table. ‘A sorry lot for sure,’ she sighed. ‘Yet, even in failure, our lord and master has seen fit to spare us from death, to bring us safely to this place. We must indeed be favoured.’
‘But are we few all that remain?’ Gadreel said. ‘Did Lord Spiral save others?’
Before any could speculate further, there was a deep click and a square section in the middle of the round table began to rise.
Moor watched as a glass tank was revealed, slowly rising with puffs of dust and steam. Within the tank stood a small and withered man, his body and limbs wrapped in strips of black cloth. He was bald and pale-skinned. His eyelids were sown together with twine and his lips were fused around a glass tube that connected to a box held in his thin-fingered hands. The box was diamond-shaped and dark, but the symbols carved into its surface glowed with a dull purple hue. A second glass tube ran from the box and disappeared into the withered man’s temple. Thick fluid travelled along both tubes.
A second click was followed by a long sigh, and the man in the tank spoke. ‘Greetings.’ His voice, stony and emotionless, came from all places at once.
Viktor Gadreel was the first to reply. ‘Where is Lord Spiral?’ he demanded.
The answer was matter-of-fact. ‘I am to instruct you in the Lord Spiral’s absence.’
Moor looked around the table. They all knew the abomination in the tank, and knew him well. His name was Voice of Known Things, and not one of them would dare refute him, for he had been created by Lord Spiral to speak the truth. Voice of Known Things was incapable of mistake or lie, and his word was the word of their absent master.
‘The war has reached its conclusion,’ the emotionless voice continued. ‘The Timewatcher’s army has proved too strong, and Her Thaumaturgists have pressed their advantage. Our allies among the Houses of the Aelfir have been broken and scattered. Even as I speak, the Lord Spiral’s enemies are clinching the final victory.’
‘Then the war
is
lost,’ Tabet whimpered. Her eyelids fluttered, struggling to stay open. ‘Lost …’ Blood dripped from her earlobe onto the shoulder of her cassock.
Gadreel growled defiance. ‘No. I will not accept that.’ He jabbed the bloodied cloth towards Voice of Known Things. ‘The Great Labyrinth can still be ours – I refuse to sit idly by while our lord falls.’
Harrow, his facial burns weeping and ugly, hissed between chattering teeth, ‘Yes. Better to die in battle.’
Moor remained silent. Only he understood there was more to this situation than his comrades realised – or so he thought until he noticed Mo Asajad, smiling at him through the glass tank. The other three had not grasped the obvious: none of them would have been saved if it did not serve some greater purpose in the war.
‘You will do only as the Lord Spiral commands,’ Voice of Known Things said. It was simply a statement: the truth. ‘The war for the Great Labyrinth is lost, but your master does not lose hope in the face of defeat. Never again will he bow to the rule of the Timewatcher and Her Thaumaturgists, and nor will his generals.’
A moment of silence passed before Asajad said, ‘How then can we serve our lord in these times of despair?’
Fluid gurgled along the glass tubes, and Voice of Known Things replied, ‘No despair can last forever.’ He turned his head to Moor, as though those ruined eyes could see him. ‘History will record that each of you died during the final days of the war. That is as intended. That is as it should be.’
He allowed a further moment of silence to pass, and the glow of the symbols upon the diamond-shaped box in his bony hands intensified. ‘The plans of your master have not changed, and your orders remain the same.’ It seemed his words were directed at Moor alone. Then, ‘Your flesh is the sacrifice, but your souls are reserved for the Lord Spiral’s will. In this matter you have no choice.’
‘And never could we conceive of refusing him,’ Asajad said. Her voice had become whispery, excited.
‘Indeed,’ Moor added.
He felt a thrill that banished his pain and fatigue. Gadreel, Harrow and Tabet seemed perplexed as they stared at the abomination in the glass tank, but Moor understood where they were being led, as he had always known. For the first time, he returned Asajad’s mirthless smile through the glass tank.
Once again the stony, emotionless Voice of Known Things spoke from all places at once. ‘You are the vanguard of the future. You are the last of the Genii.’
The Great Labyrinth
Marney glanced up at the sky as she ran. A thick blanket of clouds obscured the stars and blurred Ruby Moon to a smudge of dull red. The stench of mould filled her nostrils. The air was warm and humid, dampening her skin, promising heavy rain. Already a fine mist of drizzle had slicked the cobbles beneath her boots, and glinted as it clung to moss growing on the black bricks of the high walls flanking her. Surrounded by miles of intersecting alleyways, with only moonlight and shadows to guide her, Marney blocked the pain of her burning leg muscles and headed deeper into the Great Labyrinth.
Tonight, she searched for a denizen lost among the alleyways: a young woman with bad people on her tail, assassins more accustomed than their prey to the kind of danger lurking in this monstrous maze. The girl would only find despair in the complexities of the Great Labyrinth. However, on this occasion, her would-be assassins had more to deal with than a straightforward killing. They had an empath on
their
tail.
As the alley came to a cross junction, Marney paused in the shadow of a buttress. The alleyways of the Great Labyrinth did not differ from each other much: roughly five paces wide, twisting and curving in seemingly impossible ways, with pairs of opposing buttresses every fifteen paces or so. Usually, cobbled ground and mossy brickwork were all that could be seen for miles on end; but across this junction, standing further down the opposite alleyway, were the remnants of a makeshift camp.
A canvas sheet, damp and covered in mould, had been fashioned into a crude bivouac. The top edge was studded to the brickwork. It stretched diagonally down to roughly the centre of the path, where it was held to the ground by heavy weights. There were a few metal storage containers close by, piled on top of each other, rusty and full of holes. Beside them lay a glow lamp, smashed and useless.
A few rats scurried around the improvised camp and into the bivouac’s triangular opening. Marney could see the dark shapes of heaped bundles inside. She knew it had once been the shelter of a treasure hunter, someone who had died of his own greed and stupidity, probably decades ago. The camp appeared deserted, but maybe deceptively so …
Marney summoned her empathic magic.
Her awareness shifted, falling out of sync with the world of dark, cloudy sky and misted night air. She could no longer smell the damp of her hair and clothes. Detached now from her intuition, Marney focused on a single moment, a single space, and her magic reached out.
The mossy bricks of the alley walls and the slick cobbles became insubstantial as her senses searched for revealing signs: the emotions of an assassin hiding around the treasure hunter’s camp. But the only emotive response was the otherness of rats existing within their simple-minded routines. No ambush awaited her. Marney didn’t know whether to feel relieved or offended.
These rodents weren’t the only kind of creatures dwelling in the Great Labyrinth; there were monsters too, especially here where the maze twisted and turned like the arteries of a black heart. If she had a mind to, Marney could be the worst monster of them all, yet the assassins had left no trap. Perhaps they didn’t perceive her as a serious threat. She was only one old woman, after all …
Marney stopped searching. Her restored awareness once again registered the damp air and foul-smelling alleyways. She took the left alley at the cross junction, leaving the camp behind, and resumed running.
The girl Marney was trying to rescue was known as Peppercorn Clara. Barely eighteen, she was a whore rumoured to have a libido as spicy as it was insatiable. The story was that Clara had killed a client halfway through a job. The man had been a disreputable sort who wouldn’t be missed, and according to Marney’s information, Peppercorn had been forced into a corner and had no choice but to defend herself. Marney believed that somebody, somewhere, had benefited from the murder of Clara’s client. These assassins were on a clean up job.
Marney cut a right and then a quick left. She skidded on damp moss, righted herself and sped down a long alley that stretched straight ahead into the gloom.
Time was running short, and Marney was behind in the chase. Clara was too far away to contact mentally, but her fear left emotional footprints that led clearly through the alleyways. Unless Marney could head her off, and fast, Clara would flee too deep into the Great Labyrinth, to the places where assassins would be the least of her problems.
Between the alley walls, in the little niches and hidden corners of the giant maze, there was a peripheral place that both inhabited the real world and did not. The denizens of Labrys Town called this place the Retrospective; and there pockets of dead time existed – remnants of long gone civilisations. These epochs were a treasure house of forgotten artefacts and secrets, or so it was said. But only the greed of treasure hunters, or insanity, could drive a person to search for the Retrospective. For within that twilight realm dwelt many terrible things.
Manifested as a horde of ghosts, they snaked and weaved through the very fabric of the Great Labyrinth, like tendrils of dark history, remorseless aspects without good or reason; monsters, phantoms from nightmares with names only mentioned in whispers, or upon the pages of secret books. The wild demons of the Retrospective slept with one eye open, always ready to swallow the unwary.
And Peppercorn Clara was heading straight for them.
As the light of Ruby Moon shone brightly through a gap in the clouds, Marney reached the end of the alleyway and cut a sharp right. Somehow, she didn’t see the assassin until it almost was too late.
Boldly, he stood further ahead, in the middle of the alley, dressed in a dark, flowing priest’s cassock and wide-brimmed hat. The violet light of thaumaturgy glowed from the power stone set behind the chamber of the pistol in his hand.
An instant before the power stone flashed and the pistol shot its deadly slug with a low and hollow spitting sound, Marney leapt aside, ramming her shoulder into a buttress, and pressing her back flat to the alley wall. The assassin’s bullet cracked the brickwork a few paces to her right with a spray of stone. A sharp, high-pitched whine was immediately followed by a whirl of icy wind. The noise scrambled Marney’s empathic senses, but she retained control and heard a creaking, deep and dull sounding.
Ice was forming where the slug had hit the wall. It spread out over the brickwork, creeping towards her like frosted breath on a windowpane. In an instant, the ice reached Marney’s right shoulder. She gasped and gritted her teeth as the cloth of her jacket began to freeze. Just as she thought she would have to break cover, the ice ceased spreading and mercifully began to melt.
Magic: that bullet was designed to capture not kill. A direct hit would have preserved Marney’s body within a cocoon of ice. But magical ammunition was rare in the Labyrinth, and no one –
no one
– packed that kind of power into a bullet unless they were damn sure of their skills, unless they were …
well connected
. What kind of enemies had Clara made?
The assassin still loomed in the alleyway. Marney tried to engage with his emotions, to manipulate him into obeying her command, but he was shielded from her empathy. More magic. There was no way she could get close to him while the gun remained in his hand, so she unzipped her jacket and carefully slipped it off. A baldric of slim throwing daggers was fastened around her torso like a girdle. She slid out a single blade. The silver metal felt cool and smooth in her hand.
Marney waited several heartbeats, and then threw her jacket into the alley. Immediately, the power stone in the assassin’s pistol flashed and released a burst of thaumaturgy. The ice-bullet fizzed into the jacket, freezing it in midair. It fell, shattering to shards of ice upon the cobbles. Marney spun into the alleyway and threw the dagger. It sliced the air with a sigh before thudding into the face of her adversary. His head snapped back, dislodging the wide-brimmed hat, and the pistol fell clattering from his hand. The violet glow of its power stone faded and died.
Marney wasted no time. She let fly with two more daggers; one took the assassin in the throat, the other in the chest. He stumbled, but did not fall. Marney readied a fourth blade, but paused before throwing it.
Something was wrong.
Beneath the black cassock, the assassin’s body was misshapen, top heavy. His back was hunched and his chest sunken. His limbs appeared overly long and painfully thin. There was no hair on his head, and his face was grotesquely deformed. The hilt of the first dagger protruded from his eye socket; it reflected red moonlight, but there was no blood, not from any of his wounds.
Silently, he began convulsing. There came a hissing sound and the alley was filled with the hot and acrid stench of dispelling magic. Violent spasms shook the assassin’s body, bending his already twisted form to hideous angles. The hissing was replaced by a multitude of dull cracks, as if every bone in his body was breaking. Still, he emitted not one single cry of pain. Finally the assassin collapsed to the ground where his heaped bulk lay unmoving on the cobbles.
With the dagger still in her hand, Marney moved forwards cautiously. She inspected the remains. A knot formed in her stomach.
The souls of the dead could still talk, but even the most adept necromancer would get no information from this assassin. The creature had once been human, she was sure, but now it was not even made of flesh and blood. The cassock lay as rags upon the alley floor, and within its black folds the assassin’s body had shattered into small pieces of powdery stone. Not enough of the face and body remained intact to suggest that they had ever been part of a humanoid shape.
They said that empaths could never forget, though the Timewatcher only knew Marney had tried. The situation suddenly smacked of something from a long time ago. The assassin’s emotions had not been shielded to her senses; it no longer
had
any. Her magic was useless against creatures such as these. She could not feel them coming …
Her basic instincts kicked in. Spiky pulses of warning rushed up Marney’s spine and stabbed into her head. From the corner of her eye she caught the swish of a cassock and the violet glint of a power stone as a second inhuman assassin rounded the corner into the alleyway. Marney rolled to one side and the dagger flew from her hand just as the assassin’s handgun spat out its bullet.