Vile

by Keith Crawford

  “Impossible,” Anton hissed.

  Nathaniel was back on his feet.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve seen this before.”

  “What are you talking about?” Anton said, but his brother didn’t answer.

  Arbalest stared at his ruined arm, the bones of his hand, as if even he could not believe he was still moving. He gave his sons a feral glare then clutched his elbow, span on his heel, and limped away out of the tower door before either could overcome their shock and press the attack.

  Anton glanced upwards. The fire had spread along the trusses. Soon the ceiling would fall.

  “We have to go,” Nathaniel said.

  “Well, come on then.”

  Anton started towards the stairs. His father limped up the tower, grunting and roaring like a boar in the woods. Nathaniel caught Anton’s arm as he moved to follow.

  “You don’t understand; we can’t win. Where is Persephone?”

  Anton shook off Nathaniel’s hand.

  “Are you crazy? We have him! I don’t care about Persephone!”

  Nathaniel stepped away from his brother as if he had just been stung.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to save my books. It’s the only way I can know who I am.”

  “Fuck your books!” Anton called after him.

  Nathaniel was out of sight, down the stairs towards the catacombs. Thick black smoke flowed from the Manor hall and Anton couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Everyone is crazy but me,” Anton said, and started up the spiralling stairs. The whole tower had tilted a few degrees. There were long cracks in the stonework. On the wall was a red handprint, followed by a spatter of blood. Anton shoved open the door to his father’s study as he went past, but there was nobody inside, just an empty box on a round table, and an open storybook with a picture of a knight. Arbalest was headed for the roof.

  The door to the roof was on the third storey of the tower. The stairs continued upwards towards a watchpoint and what had been an exit to the battlements before the explosions had blown them apart. Anton staggered out, a great gout of black smoke after him. He couldn’t see much more than sky and wreckage. The deep red from the sunset mixed with the bright red of the flames. Anton tried to suck in clean air but ended up coughing out a mouthful of smoke and filth. At the far end of the Manor, the dragon and sword flag of Shadowgate fluttered in the heat of the fire. Anton grabbed the frame of the tower doorway, hand tight against the warm stone, and retched.

  Arbalest’s war cry came from behind.

  Anton had no breath to drive himself away. He got his shield up just as his father came down the stairs, where he had hidden around the corner. His mouth was wide and black spittle dribbled from his lips. Demonslayer cracked into the rim of the shield and slashed deep into Anton’s shoulder. His hammer flew from his hand. He staggered back onto the rooftop and his father tumbled after him. Anton tried to turn, but he tripped over a huge chunk of fallen masonry, barely raising his shield in time to deflect the second blow. He was falling backwards. He had dropped his hammer. The third blow would be the end.

  His father fell first.

  Anton raised his shoulders from the floor to see Demonslayer slide away across the rooftop. Arbalest was on his knees, blood streaming from his mouth. Nathaniel’s sword had remained stuck through his chest, slowly draining his life blood, and Arbalest, fallen, flapped his arms, trying to get enough of a grip to pull the rapier out but unable to reach far enough behind him.

  Anton struggled to his feet.

  “You can’t kill me,” Arbalest burbled. “If you kill me, you’ll never know the truth.”

  “How can you possibly still be talking?” Anton said. With a grunt he picked up one of the nearby fallen pieces of masonry, testing its weight.

  “I’m the only thing standing between Trist and the Kindred,” Arbalest said, his eyes going out of focus. “Kill me and you kill us all.”

  “Enough!” Anton shouted. “Enough lies!”

  “You understand nothing,” Arbalest said. He had stopped trying to pull out the sword. There on his knees, he rested his hands on the timbers of the Manor roof.

  “Understand this,” Anton said, and swung the rock at his father’s head. Arbalest’s neck snapped, dangling on tendon and ripped muscle at a right angle to his shoulders, falling with the rest of him to the ground.

  Anton took two little steps, dropped the rock, and sank to his knees. He had done it. He had killed his father. All around him, Shadowgate burned. He rubbed his hands clean on his trousers as the roof crumbled beneath him.

  Chapter 83

  Nathaniel stood paralyzed in the doorway of his library as his books ignited one by one. The fire had come through the furnace. Flames licked the air past twisted metal to caress fragile pages, an infant licking icing from a cake. He took two steps inside, paralysed by choice, surrounded by disasters that all needed resolving at once. The table was strewn with the normal detritus, plus a stack of books he had piled next to an open bag. The bag had caught fire. He tried to put it out with his cloak, but this fanned the flames, which caught papers that fluttered across the tabletop. He gathered up his cloak and threw it over the lot, but only succeeded in burning his hands.

  Leave the books, Soronghast thought. Time is running out. The High Shaper is close.

  Nathaniel jumped back, grasping his fingers. Three bookshelves round the back caught light. He edged around the broken furnace then dashed to them. How much could he save? How long until the fire spread and consumed all these years of work, of collected knowledge? He scanned the shelves and the desktops, trying to spot that which was essential to save. But he’d mixed them up in his hurry to pack and the smoke was gathering.

  He heaved the closest bookshelf away from the fire. The structures tumbled like dominos; the books fell like cinders. How could he save them? There was his backpack by the door, the one he’d carried from the monastery, but it was filled with the bottles of black blood. The bottles were proof, essential proof. So were the books. Proof of his father’s lies and the true ancestry of the Vile family. Proof that Kings were peasants and peasants were Kings. He had to save it all, or, if not all, as much of it as possible. He had to take it to the capital, prove to them the real danger of the Kindred, prove that he was Nathaniel—Nathaniel Vile—not something, not someone else. But how could anyone understand if they couldn’t understand it all?

  The old chest in the corner, filled with maps and charts. If he emptied it out, could he drag it after him? Or would he need another bag? What about the one he’d left on the table? To his horror, he saw that the last of the bookshelves had fallen into the furnace, re-igniting the very fire he had tried to put out. A much-thumbed copy of Histories of the Western Invasions Volume 2 curled and blackened under the flames. He dropped the books under his arms and grabbed the histories. An awful shriek rose behind him. He turned back to the furnace. The pipes. The pipes were singing.

  “Nathaniel!?”

  He dropped Histories, and whipped round to find Lena stopped in the doorway by the sight of the flames. Her eyes went so wide he could see the totality of the irises.

  “How did you escape Demon’s Pass?”

  “Abacus? Thank the Gods you’re here. I need your help.”

  “You have to get out of here! The room is on fire!”

  Nathaniel got on his knees to pick up the other books he’d dropped. The chest. He would put them in the chest. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I am.

  “Will you take the bottles for me? I have a cart in the north tunnel. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Let it go,” she said. “It’s over. You must leave. Go west, to the High Choir.”

  A cold thought touched him. Did Lena know? Know about the experiments at the monastery? Know the real identity of the Black Dog? Know the real identity of Nathaniel Vile?

  “Stop looking for family in the past,” Lena said. “I’m right here.”

  She held out her hands to hi
m, tears smudging her cheeks. Smoke blew from the burning bookcases. The singing of the pipes grew louder. Of course she knew. Impossible she wouldn’t.

  “You go, Mama Abacus. I’ll be right behind you.”

  She opened her mouth, as if to say something more. Then she picked up the pack, heaving the bottles up over her shoulder.

  “The cart,” she said. “I’ll take them to the cart. You’ll come and find me.”

  He turned his back, so he wouldn’t have to see her leave. The fire from the bookshelves had caught the chest. The sweat on his chest ran past his tattoo. Silly, really, he thought. Persephone and I should have had the same number.

  The pipes exploded. The fireball rushed to meet him. He was dead before he noticed he was on fire.

  Chapter 84

  The explosion from Nathaniel’s chamber roared full throated up through the Manor. It hurled Anton forward. The watchtower shook, and bits of masonry tumbled after him. Under his feet, the Manor roof split like snapped ribs. He saw his hammer tumble into the gap. The floors of the Manor house opened, spilling furnishings, fittings and floors, gristle from a lanced wound.

  Anton ran towards the wall, the broken remnants of the castle exterior against which the Manor was a collapsing scab. The wall trembled and shook. It shucked off stones dislodged in the first attack. The tower tilted. An avalanche of tiles and timber collided with the wrecked rooftop. Everything fell together. I won’t make it, Anton thought. I can’t run fast enough. There was someone else running along the wall, making their way towards him, but he couldn’t see who it was. Anton jumped.

  He hit the wall as the roof disappeared beneath him. His arm wrapped around a great wooden truss bolted to the stone. He thought his arm would break. It held. He tried to pull. The truss gave way. One bolt snapped and shot out. He slipped, slowly, inevitably. He saw the fall, the flames and death beneath him. Furnace-like heat garrotted his ribs. He strained every muscle, stretched every tendon. The truss gave a last, despairing creak, and snapped.

  Someone grabbed his arm. Anton smashed face first into the wall. The stranger held on tight, grasped the back of his jacket, and pulled. Anton struggled and heaved but stayed stuck in place. He looked up.

  Elianor Paine, on her belly, her shoulders out off the edge of the wall, savage and ferocious, cloaked in a darkness that pressed against the light from the fire, her face so close she could bite his cheek.

  “Pull me up!” he shouted.

  There was a fleck of blood in the corner of one of her eyes. Anton wondered if it wasn’t better to take his chances with the fall.

  “You’re twice the size of me, idiot!” she snarled. “Can you drop safely?”

  The storage room beneath him had shattered into half a bedchamber below, which in turn had collapsed onto the table on the ground floor where, an eternity ago, he had charged his father. Fire engulfed the rest, an inferno that consumed sheet and stock, strut and surface, its maw open and ready to swallow the morsel suspended above it.

  “No, I bloody well can’t!”

  Her grip was slipping.

  “There’s a ledge, broken stone, to your right,” the Magistrate said. “Reach with your foot.”

  The wind twitched, and a flood of smoke followed, blinding them both. Elianor did not let go. Anton stretched out with his right foot. His chest passed over the ridge of rock. He rolled his shoulder over and gripped the Magistrate’s upper arm. Elianor pulled. He felt a great tearing, a surge of strength and pain in the muscles of his back. His leg came up after him and he landed face first on the remains of the roof. Anton tried to push up with his arms, raise his head from the ground, but the cool of the stone was too soothing a contrast to the fire in the air.

  “No time to rest, Anton,” the Magistrate said. “Get on your feet.”

  He shoved a knee forward and an arm out, crawling away from her. The shadows flickered in the light of the fires. As he levered himself up, he got a first proper look at her. If Nathaniel had looked like he had survived a war, Elianor looked as if she had finished one. Her clothes were torn, and her face was bloodied and bruised. She had a sword shoved through her belt. The blood of her last victim stained the steel and the more he looked, the more he saw the splashes and discolorations from whomever else had gotten in her way. Covered in the marks of the violence she had done, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  “Whose blood is that?”

  “The way I came has collapsed and that tower will fall soon. Is there another way down?”

  There was something else here with her. The sunset’s shadows were lengthening. Even so, there should have been light enough to place the soft growling, the scratch of claws from beyond the corner of his eye. Had she rescued him from the fire just so she could kill him herself? Had she brought some supernatural creature to finish the job? He looked for his hammer, but then remembered it sliding from the roof to a long fall. There were no more weapons. He was defenceless.

  “Anton,” the Magistrate said with a new urgency to her voice.

  He could charge her. She hadn’t drawn her sword; her pistol was holstered. She was strong, but she was small. Maybe he could hurl her into the fire before she could call upon whatever evil she had brought with her.

  “Anton,” she said. “Look behind you.”

  A new wind blew across Shadowgate. It lifted the flames higher and spread the smoke in thick gobbets towards the darkening sky. He had made a crater in the mountainside, a pockmark in Shadowgate, a new hole in the history of the world. Guttering flames lit windows in the woven buildings of the castle. The dregs of sunlight disappeared to the West. Anton couldn’t see what she was talking about.

  Then he heard the groaning below. There, in the shadow of the tilted, crumbling tower, moved his father’s corpse. Its wretched head still hung at a ninety-degree angle to its shoulders, but those shoulders swelled, moved, grew. Fingers jerked straight and then clawed, reached out, dragged themselves against smoking timber, and Arbalest Vile rose, a broken mannequin hauled unsteadily to its feet.

  “I don’t understand,” Anton said.

  “Do you have a weapon?” The Magistrate said.

  Even on his feet, Arbalest continued to rise. The swelling from his shoulders sprouted. A tentacle as thick as a tree trunk sprang high into the air, rooting with a crash among the ribs of the Manor roof. Another tentacle, then another, the structure trembling with each strike until the limbs braced like legs and lifted the swelling torso from the ground. Some of the tentacles thickened as they sprouted hair and glossy, chitinous armour; not tentacles but the legs of a vast, carnivorous spider. Arbalest’s head was dragged into his body, his chin folded into his chest to form a fleshy beak, and a ring of eyes and teeth popped out of the bulbous, swelling flesh.

  “I don’t understand!” Anton shouted, his arms to balance himself.

  “He’s surrendered himself to a Shaper.”

  The Magistrate drew her pistol.

  “What Shaper? What are you talking about?”

  “Find a weapon!”

  She pushed passed him and ran nimbly across one of the remaining struts towards the growing monstrosity. The rooftops had caved into a sinkhole. Fire consumed the interior of the pit, a bowl of red and destruction through shattered floors and smashed rooms to the open space of the Manor hall. It made Anton feel sick just watching the Magistrate run out across that precarious beam, balanced above a fatal drop with her eyes firmly on the monster.

  “Anton!” It roared from its beaked chest cavity. “Traitor! Patricide!”

  Find a weapon. Right. He reached to his belt as if he were still in his forge, wearing his apron, but he’d lost his sword in the hall and his hammer when he thought his father was dead. He looked along the wall. Mere yards from here, the whole thing had collapsed, annihilated along with the gate and the stairs. There was no way down to the courtyard and re-enforcements. Climbing across the rubble in the other direction meant risking the tower, which might tumble into ruins at
any moment. He couldn’t think of anything much better than throwing rocks.

  The Arbalest-Monster had continued to grow, its torso larger than a horse now, the enormous spider-legs climbing over a web of broken wood. The Magistrate adjusted her run, leaping in mid-step from one beam to another to keep herself on a collision course with the beast. It rose above her. She did not fire. She kept the pistol in both hands and lifted the sight in tandem with its rising chest.

  The flagpole. Shadowgate’s flag flew on the front end of the Manor house, at the end of a rod whose tip was the head of a spear. Anton hobbled to the corner between the wall and the front of the Manor. The skeletal structure stood firm. Down below he could see the survivors of the battle, gathered together and staring up. One of them pointed and the rest followed with their gaze. Anton turned as well, just as the Magistrate arrived right below the beaked maw of the beast and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. The pistol did not fire.

  “Fuck you!” she shouted. She drew her sword, but a tentacle caught her before the blade was out of the sheath and snatched her up into the air.

  No more time to waste. His eyes on the flagpole, not looking at the fall to the right or the fall to the left, Anton balanced out along the Manor rim. His twisted right leg threatened to slip with each step he took. The fire and the smoke drove against him like thick hands pressed against his chest. Elianor Paine screamed, not in pain but in rage, a Valkyrie at the gates of hell. In great, thudding movements, the Arbalest-Monster surged towards him.

  He grasped the flagpole and pulled. It didn’t move. From the courtyard, the crowd cheered.

  “Don’t bloody cheer!” he shouted back as he heaved. “Shoot it!”

  The flagpole snapped. Anton staggered and nearly fell into the courtyard. Then the weight of the pole flung him forward and he lurched over the flames. Above him rose the monster, the Magistrate held high in the air as she chopped and swung with her sword. With all his might, Anton thrust the spear tip at the warped flesh that had been his father’s face. Contact. The metal bit. He drove forward, leaned in, willed the blade to pierce the flesh and find its way to sever the monster’s soul. Thick black drool poured from its beak. Its eyes flickered and stared. It lumbered over him, not even registering pain. Anton was ground onto his knees. Pitiful, he thought. One last blow before the bastard kills me.