Strength of Swords (First Cohort Book 2)

by M. R. Anthony

  Next to me, Chant tried to look through one or two of the grilles as we passed, though the rooms beyond were dark. I put a hand on his arm. “Stay focused. We cannot help these people now,” I said to him softly. From the corner of my eye I saw him nod and he stared ahead once more. I could sense his grip tighten on the hilt of his sword.

  “Left here, Captain,” whispered Ploster. “She’s close now. Can’t you feel her?”

  I shook my head and looked at Chant, who also shook his. The first hints of worry started to creep into my mind, wrapping their tendrils about my certainty. I ignored the doubts – the walls of this place absorbed hope and I doubted that the Saviour was confident of rescue. I also had no idea if this new Saviour would be anything like the old one, who Leerfar had murdered. Would she look the same, would she speak in the same way and would she have the same insight? I had no idea, but it was also beginning to dawn on me that I’d never really got to know the Saviour. There had been talk and discussion, but all the promises I’d made to tell her about myself had not come to fruition. I’d had more than ample time to speak to her, but for some reason I hadn’t. It occurred to me that I might be more guarded about my inner feelings than I thought I was.

  We’d taken the left-hand turn that Ploster had indicated. It took us onto another corridor, the same as the last. We followed it for another eighty feet before Ploster indicated the next right-hand turn. There were no guards along here – the prisoners had no way of escape and there was no reason to have anyone on patrol.

  The right-hand turn ended fairly abruptly at another of the metal doors. It was flat and featureless, apart from a metal ring handle and a wide keyhole.

  “Through there,” said Ploster.

  I felt a sudden lurch of apprehension, though I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because this was the chance to recover from my own failing to protect the Saviour adequately against Leerfar, and I was nervous in case Ploster was wrong about there being another one born. I peered through the grille. There were no lights in the corridors, but Ploster had summoned his magical light once more.

  I breathed out loudly. “Just another fucking corridor,” I said. “How are we going to get through this door?” I wondered out loud. There’d been no sign of keys in the guard station. In my mind, I could picture a bunch of them hanging from a hook by the door, but that might have just been my imagination. There might never have been a bunch of keys visible on my previous visits and they might have been with the jailer in his room somewhere.

  I cursed myself for not giving the matter of the keys greater thought at an earlier time and was just about to ask Ploster if he could shatter this metal door, when Chant leaned over and gave the handle a turn. With hardly a scrape or squeal, it opened a crack. Chant backed away, as if he’d overstepped his authority in what he’d done.

  “There’s a lesson for me,” I told him. “Always try out the simplest methods before worrying about the more complicated ones.”

  “I’ll make captain by this time next year,” he joked in response.

  I pulled open the door to reveal the corridor beyond. I had no idea why there’d be a door in the middle of the corridor and I wasn’t familiar enough with the dungeons to remember if the Duke had ever kept his more dangerous or desirable prisoners along here. The implication that he knew he’d caught someone special was worrying. We followed the new corridor. It was only forty feet long and with a total of one door at the opposite end.

  “Through there,” whispered Ploster hoarsely. “I can feel her like a beacon now.”

  “I can feel nothing,” I said, feeling my concerns multiply. It felt as if I were in a dream as I watched my hand reach out for the handle of the door to the Saviour’s cell. I grasped the metal and turned, fully expecting to be once more confronted by the question of how to open a door that would surely be locked this time. It wasn’t locked and the door opened as easily as the previous one. There was a room through the doorway and I stared inside, with my eyes doing their best to penetrate the gloom. I heard a slight scraping noise and I stepped through, beckoning Ploster to follow with his light.

  As soon as I stepped through the door, I knew that we’d been tricked. I don’t think I have any more prescience than other men and had never worried about it up till then, when I suddenly wished more than anything that I could be sensitive to the possibilities of a future as yet unwritten.

  We’d entered a cell, much larger than you would normally expect one to be. It was twenty feet to each side, with plain walls and floor. Set into one of the side walls was a barred window – a strange addition to a prison cell. Since there was no view onto the outside from here, it could only connect to another cell, which seemed unusual and unnecessary. There was also a wooden bench embedded into the opposite wall. Someone sat on the bench, dressed in rags and with long hair, as black as the darkest of nights.

  The figure looked up at us and I saw her face, knowing at once who she was. She was a withered old hag, with one eye gone. The socket of the missing eye was puckered and red, as if the pain of the missing organ continued even in its absence. Her nose wasn’t quite rotted away, but it was hanging off her face by a thick band of flesh and the bones of her skull could be seen. She opened her mouth to speak, drawing her lips into what she might have intended to be a smile. I hadn’t seen her in two hundred years, but time hadn’t made me forget.

  “Captain Charing,” she said in the husky voice of a beautiful siren. “The Emperor sends his greetings.”

  10

  It was clear at once that the Gloom Bringer wasn’t waiting in order to speak with us. Before any of us could react, darkness swirled within the cell, appearing from out of nowhere as if it were a wind-blown cloud come on the bleakest of nights. It was something I felt as well as saw and it gripped at us, holding us still as it quested into our mouths and into our noses as it sought to destroy our minds and our thoughts. It snuffed out Ploster’s flame in an instant, taking the privilege of sight from us, leaving our minds with the struggle of making sense of the sounds around us as we tried to erect mental walls to fend off the assault.

  At first, I kept my eyes closed, as if by doing so it would give me greater strength to fight back. A part of me realised the pointlessness of it and I forced them open. The room was now aglow with blue and white patterns and etchings, as the sigils etched into our skin fought against the will of the Emperor’s Death Sorcerer.

  I was sure the clouds of darkness were meant to bring pain, but none of us cried out as we struggled. Even when you do not suffer from physical pain, there are other ways to bring torment, but I felt pride that we gave no satisfaction to the witch. I heard someone fall and saw the light of his tattoos wink out as he died. There was another sound, a low thump, accompanied by a crunching sound. The sound came again and I was certain it represented another of my men perishing to the magic.

  In my mind, the snakes of the Gloom Bringer’s darkness did their best to violate my brain, striking with hammers of despair at my defences. The Saviour had once sought to overcome me, before she realised my hopes. Then, I had built my iron walls ever higher as she tried to climb over them. In the Duke’s dungeon, I did the same, anticipating each attempt to destroy my mind and placing a solid barrier in the way. Within seconds I knew that her attack was not strong enough to kill me and I battered at the darkness with a glowing sword that my mind conjured up for me. I heard the Gloom Bringer grunt and I attacked again, severing a chunk of the gloom and casting the rest of her magic from my head.

  All at once, the darkness lifted and Ploster’s light flickered alive again. I found I’d been driven to one knee and had somehow come close to the wooden bench, with my sword still in my hand. The Gloom Bringer was gone, but so too were many of my men.

  I looked around the floor of the cell and into the corridor outside, where the last of us had been when the witch began her attack. Several of my men lay together, almost as if they’d been piled intentionally into a heap. I stooped quickly to check them
and could tell that they were dead. Eyes stared back at me, clear but unseeing and I ran my palm over their faces, closing the lids as if this last act could protect them on their final journey to wherever they would travel. I had few superstitions, and this was a one I’d never felt the desire to change. I was gripped by sorrow but no guilt – we all of us knew that death hunted us without cease. Noose was on the floor next to these men, his limbs splayed out in a grotesque parody of a string puppet, as if his attempts to resist had twisted his arms and legs into positions they’d never been intended to achieve.

  It was then I noticed with relief that Jon Ploster had survived – he looked dazed and ran a hand over his bald head in a familiar gesture as he tried to gather himself. There was other movement, though I could already tell that less than half of us had survived.

  When I looked through the doorway, the source of the thumping, crunching sounds became clear. Two bodies were in the corridor, but where they had once had heads, there was now little more than a scattered mess of brains and shattered bone as if the force of the assault and their efforts to resist it had burst open their skulls and spread the contents near to them. By the tattoos on their hands, I knew these men to have once been Linster and Finder. Something caught my eye close to one body and I saw the bizarre sight of a mouth and a nose, attached to the bone of a skull, but to nothing else. It could have belonged to either man, but it was pointless to wonder over which one.

  “Fucking shit,” said Grids, pushing himself to his feet. “What’s the fucking Gloom Bringer doing here?”

  I didn’t answer him at once, since I’d sprinted down the corridor we’d followed to get to this cell. I wasn’t surprised to find that there was no handle on the inside of the door that had been placed in the middle of the passage. I was equally unsurprised to find that the door was now closed and when I pushed it, there was no sign it would open willingly. I took myself back to the room where we’d been trapped, in order to see the full extent of our losses.

  Those who would fight again were already standing. Ploster, Weevil, Beamer, Chant, Grids and Bolt were all that remained of the twenty-one who had left Gold a month ago. Then, I noticed that there was someone missing from the dead that surrounded us. Eyeball had been with us as we travelled through the dungeon, but I couldn’t see his body anywhere. Ploster caught my eye and I could tell that he’d just noticed it too. I put a finger over my lips to indicate that he should not speak about it, since it could only serve to our advantage if one of our number had escaped. When I saw another of the men catch on, I got his attention, pointed to my eye and then put my finger over my lips again. None of them were stupid and they didn’t ask any questions, nor did they even nod in acknowledgement.

  I had little intention of standing on the spot bemoaning the trap we’d blundered into, so I headed along the passageway again, in order to see if I could lever the door open that kept us confined. It was at that moment that I heard the sound of a low, indulgent chuckle as it rattled out of lungs that had long since stopped functioning as a means to get air into the host body. I stopped short and saw him – Duke Warmont himself was standing looking at us through the bars of the window I’d seen on one wall of this cell. The Duke hadn’t brought any light with him, but we were able to see him by the light of Ploster’s magic.

  “You look fucking awful,” said Chant, with a soldier’s lack of concern for a man he no longer served.

  The Duke was a man of above average height, but skeletally thin beneath the thick, unadorned black robes he wore. I couldn’t see his hands from where I was standing, but his face wasn’t covered by a hood. I could remember him once having a thick head of long hair, but now his pate was almost bald. Here and there, a few wiry grey tufts stuck outwards, uncombed and uncared for. His lips were gone completely, but I could see that he still had all of his teeth. Yellow and stained they jutted up from his jawbone, with no sign of gums to nourish them. His cheeks were spotted and sagging, though his once fine cheekbones were still prominent, exaggerating the signs of his age. The eyes were as clear as they’d ever been. Whatever it was that ravaged his body, it had left his mind untouched. It was the mind of a madman.

  The Duke ignored the insult and fixed his attention on me. “Good to see you again, Captain Charing,” he wheezed. “I am glad to see you are as easily fooled as you always were.”

  I didn’t answer immediately. He was right – I had been a fool to stumble so easily into his trap. I could see it so easily now with hindsight - there was no new Saviour at all. When Leerfar had killed our lady, she’d have told the Duke at once by means of a communications locket or something similar. Warmont was a man of great power – I was sure he’d have been able to reach out and pull the questing mind of Ploster towards Blades. Then all he needed to do was wait for us to arrive. He knew me well enough to be confident that I couldn’t stay away - I’d never let other people do my work for me.

  “I hope you’re not too disappointed, Tyrus,” the Duke continued. “But you know I couldn’t let you continue with your freedom and your life after what you’ve done.”

  There were many things I could have asked him or said to him, but I had little desire to open my mouth. I don’t think he’d come to gloat as such, though he was prone to doing so on occasions. I believe that he’d come to remind himself what his enemy looked like.

  In the end, I had to ask him one thing. “What happens now?” I said.

  “Your deaths, almost certainly,” he told us. “The Emperor seems to retain a certain fondness for his favourite captain, and he has asked me to inform him when I have got you in captivity. Perhaps he will want you for something, though I don’t think he will be forgiving of your actions.” The Duke paused for some moments. “He is pleased that the Saviour has been killed.”

  He turned and walked away, his footsteps sounding faint as he walked out of our view. There was no sound of doors opening and closing to give a clue as to where he’d gone. I pressed my head to the bars of the window and looked in the direction he’d left, but I could only see another of the featureless passageways that comprised the dungeon.

  I heard a loud exhalation. Jon Ploster didn’t quite sink to his knees, but I could tell he was close to it. “That old bastard,” he spat. “How could he trick me so easily?”

  Weevil put a hand on Ploster’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Corporal. We had to do something. At least there was only twenty-one of us that came rather than all of the men.”

  “Weevil’s right,” I said. “The Duke’s a clever man and he got you at your lowest ebb. I’m the one who is responsible for us coming here. I could have questioned things more, about how the discovery of the new Saviour came so quickly and so easily. A desperate man with hope is easy prey, it seems. I will not make that same mistake again.”

  Ploster didn’t look completely reassured, but there was no time for platitudes - he could speak about it later if he wished. I headed back towards the sealed metal door with the remainder of my men following behind. I heard Ploster sigh, and he trailed a few paces afterwards.

  I took another look at the door – it was solid and thick. I gave it a kick with the sole of my boot and felt a vibration running through the frame, small enough to tell me at once that I’d not be able to kick it open. I looked around the edges where the metal door and stone doorway met. There were gaps – nothing can be made perfectly – but when I tried to drive my sword in, I was unable to force it deep enough to get any leverage.

  “Shit,” I said. “Corporal Ploster, can you break this door?”

  He approached and knocked it with the palms of his hand in order to get a measure of its weight and thickness. “It’s a lot tougher than that wooden door, but I can probably get through it eventually” he said.

  We stood back to give him some room. There was the familiar feeling of gathering, which Ploster held onto for longer than usual. Then I felt it subside, unspent. I looked at him, querying what had happened.

  “They must have hel
d sorcerers in here,” he said. “No wonder the Duke didn’t seem concerned that we might escape. This door is covered in wards to properly fuck over anyone who tries to use magic on it. It must have taken years to prepare.”

  “Anything you can do?” I asked.

  He smiled, wanly. “I said I could get through it eventually, but now it really will be eventually. I can unravel the markings, but it might take many hours. Days, perhaps. Without the wards, I could have likely had it open in less than an hour.”

  “Get working on it,” I told him. “I don’t care how much noise you make.”

  I strode back into the cell and looked at the bars in the viewing window. They were solid and more than an inch thick. I took hold of one, braced my leg and pulled. There was no give in it at all. I looked at where the bars were embedded into the stone, but there was no sign of weakness or crumbling. Our cell had been well-maintained. With nothing else immediately presenting itself, I swung my sword at the bars, crossways and coming down at an angle. The edge crashed off two of the bars, producing a flare of sparks along the blade, but also along the bars themselves. The sparks were accompanied by a screech and a tiny plume of smoke rose from the place I’d struck. I sniffed at it, and found it had the same odour as the air after a lightning strike, only much stronger. I checked the bars and saw the tiniest of scratches on the surface of one. Suddenly worried, I ran my finger down the edge of my sword’s blade, looking for notches, but fortunately it was as sharp as it had always been.

  “More magic, Captain?” asked Beamer.