Vile

by Keith Crawford

  “Mmmh!”

  No. If she killed it, another would come, and another. It was too soon to know if that was what she wanted. She knelt next to the Warden and cleared away some of the shattered screen. A dark eye stared from within, wide and frightened. It had a face—a human face, or something close to it—dark-skinned like its Northern masters. Elianor’s heart raced. The secrets of the Wardens were right here before her, exposed, eviscerated, in her grasp. Elianor grabbed the cable that led from the helmet to the baton, took it by the root, and pulled. It snapped free. There was a hiss, and a crackle like burning leaves. She tossed the cable aside and dragged off the Warden’s helmet.

  “Stop struggling,” she snapped. “I’m helping you.”

  The Warden was a middle-aged man, no more than forty-years old. His high cheekbones might have been handsome if they were unbroken, his brown eyes beautiful if not bulging with fright. Old bruises and broken flesh marred his dark skin. No matter how he struggled, he could not speak, because his mouth was stitched shut.

  “Who did this to you? No, wait.”

  She took her sword and cut the stitches free. Any horror she felt was subdued by the cold logic of it. The North had some way of knowing if you killed a warden. But capture it, torture it, control it? She released the final stitch. He snapped his mouth open and spat gobs of scab and saliva as he sucked in breath and heaved out words.

  “Kindred detected in breach of the treaty. Extraction requested.”

  The baritone sounded oddly fragile when gargled through blood. Elianor suddenly realised that it hadn’t been attacking her when it had grabbed her leg: it had been trying to catch up with her. Idiot machine. Still, she imagined one didn’t have much choice with one’s mouth stitched shut. An odd thought passed through her head—how had it managed to eat? Was it really any sort of man at all?

  Elianor rolled up one of his shoulders, and with great effort pushed him into a seated position. His left arm dangled uselessly, the armour shattered at the elbow, the bone shattered underneath. Once she had him balanced, she moved back round to face him.

  “By what right do you make laws here?”

  His eyes were blank, and she wasn’t sure he had understood the question.

  “All nations are subject to international law.”

  The answer seemed automated. Not a he then, an it.

  “Shut up,” she said, and slapped it across the face. “Scan me again.”

  It rocked, a frightened child, and then lifted its right fist from the floor. From a compartment attached to the front of its armour, it withdrew a small card, covered in symbols Elianor did not recognise. But she knew the type. This was its book of law. The ten little lines written on a card attached to its armour were the Warden’s book of law.

  “Scanning,” it said. “Scanning.”

  The Warden’s eyes turned blue. Elianor felt the light illuminate her face. She closed her eyes, her heart beating so hard she thought she would be sick, but she had to know. She picked her sword back up, slowly, ready to strike.

  “No taint detected,” the Warden said. “Thank you for your co-operation.”

  Impossible. No. Unexpected. Deal with the facts of the case as they present themselves. The Kindred Prince had given her blood. She had been born with Kindred Blood. So why didn’t the Warden scan detect her?

  “There are Kindred, here in the castle. Will you help me fight them?”

  It sucked in a long, slow breath, and took another look at its card.

  “All nations are subject to international law.”

  She spat in frustration and got to her feet. Weakly, the Warden raised its head. Its blue helmet had cocked at an angle. Blood ran from its torn lips. Its irises wobbled as it struggled for independent thought.

  “No,” it said. “I cannot help you fight.”

  “Then what good are you?” Elianor said, and left it there in the tunnel.

  Chapter 76

  There was a corpse on the guardroom table. Elianor recognised the big foreman from the mine, the one Nathaniel had called cousin, but she couldn’t remember his name. A blood-soaked sheet was pulled over him, as if to keep him warm. Elianor walked past the table. She had closed the trapdoor behind her.

  Elianor went out through the back door into the closed courtyard, the one that led to Persephone’s apartments. There might be a way from here up onto the roof, which she could traverse like on her first night in Shadowgate, onto the Manor house and down through to Nathaniel’s chamber. Was he doing the same thing? Dragging his library piece by piece over the castle and under the mountain?

  She secured her sword and ran across the courtyard, light on her feet and forward on her toes. The door to Persephone’s building was open, the same as the guardhouse doors and the trapdoor before them, as if someone had been through recently. Elianor ran up the stairs. This time, when she burst through the door, there was nobody there. She went straight for the open window. The room looked out over another set of roofs, rising and falling, waves on a wind-beset tide.

  Elianor rubbed her hands on her trousers. There could be another door, one she had not seen, hidden in the corners of the courtyard. Nathaniel could just as easily have travelled another way. She climbed onto a dressing table beneath the window. As she ducked under the window frame, her boot caught a child’s music box left on the sill. It smashed when it struck the floor.

  Outside, bright daylight opened like a great dome above her. There was neither wind nor snow. Crouched low, she scurried across the rolling rooftops and then doubled back along the flattened walkway over the guardhouse. Once there she stopped and looked all around, from the back walls around the stables up to the high towers that sprouted from the mountain like warts. There were two courtyards: the larger contained the main gate, the blacksmith’s and the Manor. The smaller was around the back of the guardhouse and overlooked by the kitchens. She could see nobody. She could hear nobody. Was the castle deserted? Did only corpses remain, in an ossuary for failed rebellion?

  On her first trip across the rooftops, she had skirted around the main courtyard, bouncing across the blacksmith’s and via the scaffolding around the main gate itself. That had been at night. If she tried the same route in daylight, she would be easily spotted. But now the desire to confirm there were survivors crawled at the back of her throat. She lowered herself back onto all-fours and climbed across the prison roof until she could see the gatehouse and the long end of the castle wall. No guards in the guard towers. She got on her belly and shuffled forwards until she was right at the end of the building, directly above the door into the prison. The great gate was bolted shut. The main courtyard was empty. The bodies from the battle at Derec’s hanging had been cleared away.

  The Manor door swung open and Lena came out. She had Lord Vile’s greatsword, Demonslayer, wrapped in her arms. Even the scabbard was larger than its bearer. Her grey dress shucked up to her knees as she tugged the sword sideways through the door then struggled down the steps. Elianor dug her fingers against the slate and waited. The old woman set off across the courtyard. Elianor crawled backwards like a spider up a waterspout.

  “No, the crossbow. We can still set a kill zone behind the gate.”

  Sergeant Rees and two other guards came out of the kitchens, below her and to her right. They were armed and armoured. As Rees got to the top of the short flight of stairs, he barked an order and pointed towards the prison. Elianor thought he had seen her, crouched here, right in the open, like a burglar who had forgotten the pragmatic benefits of committing crime by night.

  There was a sudden clatter behind her on the roof.

  Nathaniel stood five metres away, at the junction between the rolling roofs and the guardhouse courtyard. He dropped his bag and glanced left to right; his hand twitched towards the hilt of his sword, his feet towards the nearest route away.

  “How did you get here so fast?” he said. Then he stopped and shook his head, as though his thoughts were in a muddle that could only be straigh
tened in motion. “Weren’t we just together, watching them give Begw to the monks? No. That’s impossible. I wasn’t here that night. If the Shaper changed both our memories, gave us both the experience, does that still mean it didn’t happen?”

  Elianor got to her feet, silently counting the steps it would take to get him in reach of her sword, watching from the corner of her eye to see if Rees, the guards, or even Lena had spotted them chatting away on the rooftops.

  “Where are the bottles? Do you still have them?”

  “Where are Seren and Begw?”

  He must be able to see the blood on her jacket. Hard to miss.

  “What happened to you, Nathaniel? I saw you on the barricades in the capital, during the student riots, facing the soldiers, pointing towards the future. What happened to that man?”

  Nathaniel arranged his feet along the line of the gutter.

  “The barricades? I was telling them to turn back. That if we marched on the soldiers, we would all be killed.” He drew his longsword. The exact same longsword she had strapped to her waist. “I was wrong. Only most of us were killed.”

  “Sometimes people must die for a greater cause. You were the one who reminded me of the importance of efficiency.” She shifted her weight, rotated her hips, and drew her longsword. His longsword. All it would take was for someone in the courtyard to look up and they would see her, threatening Lord Vile’s second son. “Don’t try to run.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “But where does it stop, Elianor, after you’ve killed me? Another great purge? Anton and Persephone? My father?”

  “Did you practice this speech?”

  “Your own father?”

  “Shut up!” She snapped her pistol from the holster, sword in one hand and firearm pointed at his head.

  “That’s the thing about Magistrates. When you’re the only one with a gun, it becomes the answer to every problem.”

  He threw his sword at her. A pathetic feint. Elianor had time to sheath her pistol before contemptuously knocking the blade from the air with her longsword. It clattered across the rooftop. She didn’t realise it was a distraction until Nathaniel began to shout.

  “Rees! Up here! Help!”

  She shouldn’t have looked. Rees and his two guards stood open-mouthed in the back courtyard by the kitchens, staring right up at her. It gave her no time to adjust as Nathaniel, arms outstretched, barrelled forward and pushed her off the roof.

  Chapter 77

  Elianor cycled her legs as she fell. The sky turned above her, and the air gave way beneath. As thoughts rushed through her head on her fall to probable death, it was the taste of Kindred blood that rose to the surface. Could the blood grow her wings? If she called to the Kindred Prince, would it hear, would it shape her form to survive her peril?

  Then she hit the ground and pain drove out all thought. It should have been red and then black. Instead, there was shouting and the giving of ground. She had not hit stone floor but landed on some pile of refuse in the courtyard. Elianor scrambled for balance against the uneven surface, bones miraculously unbroken, as she coughed and sucked in air past the pain of impact. She struggled to open her eyes past the shock. She saw blood. Her longsword – Nathaniel’s longsword – the other Nathaniel’s longsword—had snapped, fragments of steel driven into her thigh in a great gouge of blood and flesh. She rolled away and found herself face to face with a dead old woman, visage fixed in furious rictus.

  Elianor had fallen into a cart full of corpses. These were the casualties from the battle at the hanging of Derec Garn. A hand smacked against her face, another dead hand, another dead limb. The stench rose and covered her, the stink of shit, sweat and urine, of dead flesh and dried blood, pulled her down as she strove to drag herself up. Her hand fixed on the hilt of her broken sword. Nathaniel’s blade had betrayed her again.

  “Get her out of there,” growled Sergeant Rees.

  Rough hands grabbed her by the boots. Surrounded by the limbs of the lost, she could do nothing more than scream as the guards pulled her by her injured leg and threw her to the ground. Her ribs caught the step of the cart and she ended face in the dirt. Gravity domed reality around her and vomit rose in her mouth, but she kept hold of her broken sword: the hilt was real, the weapon was real. Elianor pushed forward, up on one knee, and without looking at Rees, directed her snarl at the other guards.

  “You there. Arrest Sergeant Rees.”

  Sergeant Rees stood still. The other two men looked at him, and back at her. She climbed to her feet, the blood flooding from her thigh, impossible it would take her weight but then there she was, standing tall, almost at chest level with the shortest of the men.

  “Citizens,” she said, scooping up her satchel. The book of evidence was still inside, but it hung on a cluster of frayed threads and the strap was almost torn through. “I am a Magistrate of the Peace. This man is a traitor and a conspirator.”

  Rees seemed caught between the desire to laugh and to punch her in the head.

  “These men are loyal retainers of the House of Vile,” he said.

  “If you surrender, I guarantee you a fair trial.”

  “Like the one you gave Derec Garn?”

  “Summary sentencing it is,” Elianor said. She checked her pistol. It was still in the holster at her waist. She pointed her broken blade at his face.

  “Kill this lunatic,” Rees barked at the guards, but he didn’t wait for them. He drew his sword and lunged at her.

  The walls of Shadowgate exploded, and the sky turned into fire.

  Chapter 78

  As the cannonball hit the smithy, the gunpowder hidden inside exploded. Fire surged through the pipes, where it found the secondary and tertiary stashes Anton had hidden within the walls. The main gate of Shadowgate Castle shattered from within.

  Anton threw up his arms to protect his face.

  Flame and stone rose on a great bubble of force. The heat, the ferocious, smothering heat. Slabs of stone and blocks of mortar thrown high in the air now tumbled like dominoes. The walls fell. A spoke from the portcullis pitched past swept ahead of a great cloud of dust that rushed to hide the massacre. The cloud enveloped them, blinded them, suffocated them and then let them go.

  When his sight returned, Anton saw Dale nearby on his hands and knees and offered him his arm.

  “You didn’t think I’d do something stupid like challenge my father to single combat, did you?”

  Dale’s strangled response was incomprehensible but almost certainly rude.

  There was a cavernous gap where the main gate had been. What remained of the wall, burned. Fire up the mountainside reached towards the high towers.

  “Grab your swords and your neighbour’s balls,” Massen shouted. “If you don’t keep running, I’ll cut you myself!”

  There was a ragged, choking cheer and Anton’s army broke into a low jog. At the far side of the span, the cavalry sounded their horns and came charging to join them. When Anton went to move, his feet stayed stuck to the ground. The flames on the walls swayed orange and yellow. His scars ached and grew warmer. He couldn’t move.

  “Last bastard inside is a landlubber’s whore!” Massen shouted to his soldiers. “Get in there and take the castle!”

  Cripples don’t gain special powers to compensate. The deaf don’t see more sharply, the blind don’t hear more clearly. That’s a lie whole people tell to feel better about themselves.

  He couldn’t move his feet.

  “Anton! We need you!”

  Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Fundamental wounds stay, they fester, they grind the bones and sap the organs until eventually, for those lucky enough to survive that long, they kill.

  Anton couldn’t move his feet.

  “Anton?”

  Massen had returned. He put his hand round the back of Anton’s neck, fingers in the short hair of his nape, and brought himself nose to nose. Anton could hear him, but he couldn’t see more than a black shape.

  “Scared of fire?” Mass
en gripped the front of Anton’s shirt. “My father was the same way, after his ship went up. Just get through the gate. Eyes on me, follow my feet.”

  Massen turned and Anton stumbled forward, his view fixed on Massen’s heels as the mercenary lieutenant pulled him through the rubble. Anton’s own legs rotated but barely carried his weight. The lieutenant started to run. The flickering of the flame reached for the corners of Anton’s eyes. It was impossible to breathe. The shame was so great it almost stopped him from pissing himself.

  “Don’t look,” Massen hissed. “Sword ready.”

  They clambered over the wreckage where the gate had been. This was where Rees should have brought his guard to bear. But if there were any survivors, they had been driven back by the force of the explosion, the shock of the reversal, the shattered arrogance of fortification. Anton couldn’t hear what Massen was shouting. He searched between broken rock and twisted metal for a smashed limb, a broken corpse, some proof that his father was dead.

  “Here they come!”

  A sudden impact. Massen grunted and Anton fell on his knees. The rock was red hot. He snatched his left hand back from the heat, lost balance, and pitched onto his face, his sword arm still in the air. Steel clanged on steel close to his head. He couldn’t look up. Shadows flickered back and forth between him and the flame. From somewhere, he thought he could hear his father laugh.

  “Anton!” Massen shouted.

  He only parried because his sword was already there, held up in a desperate attempt to balance as he knelt, two knees and one hand, face near the ground. Then Massen’s boot was against his torso, in a tangle of legs with someone in a Shadowgate guard uniform. Fight, damn you, Anton’s mind said to his heart. But his heart ran too fast and his skin pulled too tight: don’t look up, got to run, got to get out before the building collapses.

  “Fuck it,” Anton whispered, tears at the corners of his eyes.