Vile

by Keith Crawford

  A piercing, wretched howl filled his ears and a black shape swept from the shadows. It was the Black Dog! The Arbalest-Monster lurched backwards and took the flagpole with him. Anton was hurled into open space. He held tight to the pole, his last grip to life, his full grip on death. He was tossed side to side on the end of the pole, the weapon still stuck in the monster. Fire swirled beneath him. Suddenly, the end came loose, and he was thrown sideways, tossed down, as the mouth of the fire opened to claim him.

  He landed with a thud on the rim of a bathtub, bounced, cracked his ribs on the pole but somehow kept hold, coming to a stop with his face directly over the drop to the burning throne in the gutted audience chamber. He was in the remains of a bathroom, most of it fallen into the pit below, the rest beneath the open sky. A fountain of water from one of his busted pipes turned the smouldering carpet a deeper brown. He pulled the flagpole in towards him. The flag was on fire.

  Arbalest Vile roared. The monster was right above Anton. It was being driven back, tentacles shifting rapidly as the roof continued to give way. At its throat, the Black Dog, its jaws around a tentacle, its claws lashing against Arbalest Vile’s face. The flailing mass of flesh and bone was a firmament above Anton, the rain of black blood falling stars come to meet the rising sparks. Anton moved to the edge of the precipice. The floorboards creaked and bent. Unable to gain purchase, he thrust the pole upwards, driving the point as hard as he could. But the fight was just out of reach. Drops of blood sizzled as they fell against the burning flag.

  A ramp of broken timbers had smashed into this floor of the building. It wasn’t stable. Neither was the floor beneath his feet. He gripped the pole tighter and ran out across the ramp. The flaming flag left a trail of light behind him.

  One of Arbalest’s tentacles drove down, missing him by only a handspan as it reached for solid ground, the monsters above driven back across the tumbling ruins as they collapsed beneath them. Anton swung his flagpole, stumbling, limping upwards. He saw the Magistrate snapped back and forth at the end of a tentacle but still, somehow, striving to cut her way free. She struck downwards, her sword in both hands, and cut the tentacle that held her in two. The whole thing ripped away. There was nowhere for the Magistrate to go but down. Even as she fell, she kept her eyes locked on the enemy, as if she might dive headfirst into the maelstrom and cut her way through to whatever was left of its heart.

  Anton thrust his flagpole spear, but the monster sprang away. It swung the same tentacle and struck the Magistrate in mid-air like a man might swat a fly. She was hurled skywards. There was a crunching impact beneath them and the ramp gave way, sending both Anton and the Monster across the roof. In a flash of black flesh, the Black Dog swept past Anton, his strangely human eyes locked in panic and fear. The world tumbled sideways. Arbalest flipped himself in mid-air, tentacles swirling, and hurled the Black Dog after the Magistrate. The flame reached up to embrace Anton. He fell headfirst towards it.

  Something snatched him in mid-air. With whip-like speed, one of Arbalest’s tentacles plucked him up and suspended him over the conflagration. Arbalest Vile rotated his torso back round towards his helpless son, his fleshy beak lowering until it was at eye level.

  “There’s nobody left to protect you,” Arbalest’s new face snarled.

  “You neither,” Anton said, and drove the burning flag at the open beak.

  The blade caught the mouth. It didn’t catch right; it sliced to one side, just another wound on a bulk that was constantly changing, shifting, opening then healing itself. But the moment the fire touched Arbalest’s face, it ignited like an oil slick. His hundred eyes widened as the whites boiled and popped. The flame shot from limb to twisted limb. The monster jerked backwards and hurled Anton upwards, the tentacle unwrapping as if releasing a spinning top. Anton left the burning flag stuck in his father’s body and flew. The first stars had emerged in the sky.

  As he tumbled, he saw his father shift, change shape again, but the flames just carried up across his whole body, engulfing each metamorphosis, engorging each attempt to escape. A forgotten memory from childhood lessons: Kindred were vulnerable to fire. A tentacle struck the tower. The rear half of the Manor fell as if the whole world had turned on its axis. Anton slammed into a bulbous lump of his father’s shifting flesh. It threw him sideways. Arbalest tumbled past him, bits of twisted skin shredding away like ash from a bonfire. The last of the castle wall fell, following the collapsing tower, peeling open the Manor into which they dropped.

  Anton crashed bodily into a beam. It broke beneath him, knocked him sideways and turned him over himself. Something soft engulfed him. He bounced forward, blinded by a great gout of thick, oily smoke. He landed on another broken wooden floor and went through it.

  “Lena!” Arbalest shouted. “Lena!”

  A wall of dust passed over and beyond them, on the tide of the last fallen wall. Anton was on the ground floor, his fall arrested by a collapsed cupboard and a fountain of women’s clothes he did not recognise. There was a blue dress wrapped around his legs. He climbed to his feet and shifted along the pile of rubble towards what had once been the main hall. The outer walls were gone. He could see all the way across the inner courtyard, where a few survivors ran between collapsed buildings.

  Anton’s feet slipped as he stepped to the ground. Lying broken atop the hall’s great table was Arbalest Vile. He was man-sized again, the great bulk shed, the tentacles burned away, as if in his desperation to find a form that would not burn, he had returned whence he had come. The withered husk that lay on the table had brought with it the remnants of the things that it had been, its head not quite back to its shoulders, one of its blackened arms longer than the others. Its owl-shaped eyes stared and bled in the nooks and crannies of burst flesh and suppurating skin.

  “Lena,” gurgled the ruin of Arbalest Vile. “Lena, help me!”

  Lena stood in the frame of the door at the base of the fallen tower, tears streaming black down her face.

  “Nathaniel is dead,” she said to Anton. “Your father is dead. You are Lord of Shadowgate now.”

  Then she took the stairs back into the depths, back into the fire. Arbalest seemed to want to say more, but he choked on his words, the breath coming out in gags, his voice a strangled hiss on its way to silence.

  There, on a pile of rubble and wreckage, was Anton’s hammer. He picked it up and flipped it in his hand to check for damage, to be sure that the head wouldn’t wobble. With a grunt, he climbed up onto the table. Arbalest’s eye flicked back and forth, trying to find focus, trying to understand why he could no longer move. Anton raised his hammer and, the ground his anvil, his father’s body the iron, set to work.

  Chapter 85

  The vines burned in the Dead Garden. Elianor was on her back in melted snow. She looked along her arm to where the tower had crashed into the building opposite. Great lumps of masonry had transformed the space into a grotto. Across the shattered stone she lay, a puppet cut from its strings.

  I’ve lost another sword, Elianor thought. I can’t move my legs.

  She should be dead. Even without the fall. When the monster had struck her in mid-air, smashed her from the sky with its great tentacle, it should have crushed her skull, turned her bones to powder, killed her long before the drop into the garden.

  Either she was lying here, paralysed, moments from death. Or the Kindred blood had saved her, and, somewhere between the strike and the fall, without knowing it, she had accepted the Shaper’s gift. No. Better to be dying. Better to die Elianor than to live as something else.

  Her foot twitched.

  That was that. No good pretending anymore. Her body still worked, the world still turned, and she would have to get up and find another way out. She pulled her knee up to her chest and rolled sideways. Nothing snapped or cracked. Her satchel scrunched up underneath her. She laid her forehead on the stone for a moment, the sweat and dust mixing, then pushed herself up onto her knees and vomited. Thick goop splashed from her mout
h onto the ground, blackened by the smoke and ash.

  The ruins of the castle had tumbled after her and turned the Dead Garden into a cave. Fallen walls and crumbled stone stood at startling angles, as if pulling one would cause the lot to tumble. The eerie orange glow of diminished fires lit the space through broken windows and shattered doors. Thin trails of soot and stone-powder poured like rain from a sickened cloud, and smoke hung low below the arch of the broken tower. Its acrid stink stung her eyes. Elianor coughed, felt the vomit rise again, and pulled her pistol from its holster.

  Behind her something whined. It was a wet noise, flesh on flesh, a wounded animal.

  “Daniel?”

  She took two tries to get to her feet. Daniel crouched in a corner. His back was twisted and his legs had given way. The bone of his face was exposed and one of his eyes was gone, the eye on the side of the face he kept turning away from her. With every heavy pant, his back shuddered. Did he look more like a man, now that his legs were broken?

  “Shhh,” she said, holding out her left hand towards him. She kept the pistol in her right. “It’s okay.”

  He didn’t move. She wasn’t sure he could. When she crouched before him, he flinched, still trying to hide his wounded eye. She kept her hand on him. Behind his whimper were the razor-sharp teeth, the cruel, elongated jaw.

  “You saved us, Daniel,” Elianor said. “You must have felt it, when your father died.”

  I know because I felt it too, she thought. The ramifications of that are as least as damning as my rapidly healing injuries.

  “You’re the last Vile. Through your mother. The rest are just peasants and children of peasants.”

  He didn’t understand. She reached out and stroked his hair. His remaining eye shot left and right, the white quivering around the unsteady iris. His breathing slowed. Elianor would never be like this. She would never be a Black Dog. She would never be an Arbalest Vile, twisting himself into a beast because he couldn’t control himself, couldn’t control his family. Elianor would be herself.

  “Close your eye,” she said. “Everything will be alright soon.”

  He closed his eye. She lifted her pistol and took her hand from his head to steady the broken firing mechanism.

  “Death to all aristocracies,” she said.

  Daniel lurched. His jaws hinged back, and his mouth clamped on her arm, swallowing hand, pistol, and all just as she pulled the trigger. The powder in the chamber ignited. The pistol exploded inside his head. Daniel’s cranium blew open. Her hand went with it.

  Elianor screamed.

  The world spun left; her head spun right. There was a stump where her right hand had been. Was it only the red light from the fire or had her blood turned black? Kindred blood or not, she had to stop the bleeding. There wouldn’t be much time. Her satchel. There was something important in the satchel. The melted snow was cool against her face.

  She sat by her mother’s deathbed. It was years ago. Her mother was telling her a story. This was wrong, and as unwanted and repellent as the smell of the room in which Marguerite Paine was dying, with swollen black tumours at her throat and beneath her armpits. Elianor’s father had warned her she shouldn’t come. But Sebaraton was mostly drunk these days, and the only thing Elianor wanted less than being here was being around her father. So, she held her mother’s hand and waited to see if the dying held secrets, to be whispered at the moment of death, to somehow fix years of things unsaid here in the last hours of life.

  “Are you listening?” her mother said, or she might have said, “Can you hear me?” Elianor couldn’t tell.

  Her mother lurched. She grabbed Elianor around the neck and hung there, every shard of her strength used to keep her lips at her daughter’s ear.

  “Any change is better than death,” she said, then fell back to the pillow, eyes still open.

  “No,” Elianor said. “That can’t be true. I don’t believe you.”

  “You will.”

  Somebody shouted outside the window. Elianor covered her face with her left hand to block out the light. She didn’t look, but she could feel her fingers curled around her mother’s. It was a man’s voice, shouting, swearing, rage and anger. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay here. She had forgotten something, something important, something she had carried a long way and didn’t want to leave behind. The light was fading fast and all she could feel was her mother’s hand. They had changed places. She was lying on the bed, and her mother was standing in the light of an open door.

  “I’m sorry,” Elianor said to her mother. “It was my fault you died.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be magnificent.”

  Her mother took her hand, her left hand, and led her out of the fire.

  Day 6

  23 Ventros 1682

  To return to the capital in time, Elianor must complete her mission and leave Shadowgate today.

  Chapter 86

  Elianor Paine walked into the ruins of The Last Chance tavern to find Lord Anton Vile, his feet on the only unburned table, rocking in his chair and singing an army marching song. The bottle in his hand was the survivor from a swathe of fallen comrades, and from the way Anton swigged at its lip, the survivor wouldn’t last long. Sunlight streamed through holes where the walls had fallen in. Outside they were burning corpses. The whole placed stank like peat and fried pig.

  “Magistrate! You’re alive!”

  “Dale Brek is dead.”

  “Well. Shit, I didn’t think his wounds were that bad. To be honest, when I checked on you both last, it looked like it would go the other way. When did he die?”

  She checked the balconies, the doors through to the kitchens, the collapsed door through to the porch. Nobody else was here. Most probably, nobody else could stand the smell.

  “During the night. Your father’s last victim.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  She had woken during the night to find herself tucked up in a bed at the Brek farm, newly occupied by the Dragon Helm mercenaries. They had found her unconscious outside the castle walls. Someone had rescued her from the Dead Garden and dragged her out of the burning castle. By early morning, she had recovered enough to be up and asking questions. By late morning, she was ready to act.

  “Hope is irrelevant. Arbalest Vile is dead. You are Lord of Shadowgate now.”

  She had ridden a commandeered horse on the road from the Brek farm, her remaining possessions in a bag behind the saddle and no weapons left, not in a scabbard at her side, not in the holster she had discarded that morning, not in a case across the horses back. She didn’t need them. If anyone doubted what she could do, they only needed to look to the smouldering ruins of Shadowgate Castle, the fires that still burned in town, the wreckage that had been a working mine.

  “They’re saying that was a new incursion, and that you and I turned it back. That we fought a Kindred Prince.”

  “In a manner of speaking, we did. No Truthsense would deny it.”

  With alcohol as an aid to thought, he thought about that for a moment.

  “Nathaniel is dead,” he said. “Lena too. I saw her walk back into the fire.”

  “What about Captain Persephone? And your son?”

  Lieutenant Massen’s scouts had spotted Persephone Vile on horseback with a child, heading East and away from Shadowgate. They hadn’t considered it wise to intervene.

  “He wasn’t mine. He was Olwen’s. If the boy is what Persephone needs, best of luck to her.” Anton took back up the bottle and poured generously into two goblets. “We defeated a Kindred invasion, resolved the problems between the farmers and the miners via the classic strategy of killing everybody, and in doing so removed anyone who might resist my claim to be Lord of the Manor. Even the Northern Kingdoms will support me, now they know we fought a Prince.” He raised his goblet. “Here’s to my plans.”

  Without thinking, Elianor reached with her right hand. The stump knocked the goblet and spilled wine. Her wounds had healed overnight, preternaturally q
uickly, even as Dale had succumbed to a sword thrust Arbalest Vile had given him in passing.

  “Does that include still planning to kill me?” she said.

  Anton grinned.

  “Well, shit, I thought you’d forgotten about that. No, even if I thought I could kill you, I don’t have the reason to.”

  “What was the reason?”

  “The Wardens. I saw how you looked at it in the throne room. I thought you were going to aggravate the Wardens and bring the North down on our head.”

  Not the whole truth, but close enough.

  “I want you to come with me to Lutense and take your seat in the Senate,” Elianor said.

  Anton glared at her over the rim of his drink.

  “The primogeniture thing? You care about that, after all this?”

  “The Queen is weak. The Senate is weak. Only a Republic can defend Shadowgate.”

  Yet as she said it, something felt wrong. Trist needed something better than a Republic: a strong leader, a single sense of direction. Anton’s face broke into a bitter smile.

  “My understanding was that your master sent you here looking for votes for the Queen. What makes you think I won’t do as he asks and vote Royalist?”

  “Because you fought for the Republic in the last war. Because the man I fought beside won’t flinch from doing the right thing.” She picked the goblet up in her left hand. The warm wine was bitter at the back of her throat. “Because re-opening the mines will take investment, and I have a lot of friends in the capital.”

  His smile widened into a grin.