The Heretic Kings: Book Two of The Monarchies of God

by Paul Kearney

  He left. The old man clapped his hands and two younger versions of himself appeared, shut the doors of the room—which the company saw was a kind of foyer—and stood expectantly.

  Murad and his soldiers were glaring about them as if they expected an armed host to rush out of the walls. It was Hawkwood who smelled the cooking meat first. It brought the water springing into his mouth.

  Kersik said something to the old man, Faku, and he clapped his hands again. His helpers swung open side doors in the big room, and there was the gurgle of running water. Marble pools with fountains. Clean linen. Earthenware bowls of fruit. Platters of steaming meat.

  “Sweet Saints in heaven,” Bardolin breathed. “A bath!”

  “It might be a trick,” Murad snarled, though he was swallowing painfully as the smell of the food obviously tantalized him.

  “There is no trick.” Kersik laughed, darted into the room and snatched a roasted rib of the meat, biting into it so the juices ran down her chin. She came over to Bardolin and stood close to him.

  “Will you not try it, Brother Mage?” she asked, offering him the rib.

  He hesitated, but she thrust it under his nose. That secret amusement was in her eyes. “Trust me,” she said in a low voice, vixen grin on her face, mouth running with the meat juices. “Trust me, brother.”

  He bit into the rib, shredding meat from the bone. It seemed the most delicious thing he had ever tasted in his life.

  She wiped the grease out of his silver beard, then spun from him. For an instant he could see her eyes in the air she had vacated, hanging as bright as solar after-images.

  “You see?” she said, holding up the rib as though it were a trophy.

  The men scattered, making for the piled platters and bowls. Faku and his colleagues stood impassively, looking on like sophisticates at a barbarian feast. Bardolin remained where he was. He swallowed the gobbet of meat and stared at Kersik as she danced about the gorging soldiers and laughed in Murad’s livid face. Hawkwood remained also.

  “What was it?” he asked Bardolin.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What kind of meat?”

  Bardolin wiped his lips free of grease. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” His ignorance suddenly seemed terrible to him.

  “Well, I doubt they brought us this far to poison us.” Hawkwood shrugged. “And by the Saints, it smells wholesome enough.”

  They gave in and joined the soldiers, wolfing down meat and slaking their thirst with pitchers of clear water. But they could not manage more than half a dozen mouthfuls ere their stomachs closed up. Bloated on nothing, they paused and saw that Kersik was gone. The heavy doors were shut and the attendants had disappeared.

  Murad sprang up with a cry and threw himself at the doors. They creaked, but would not move.

  “Locked! By the Saints, they’ve locked us in!”

  The tiny windows high in the walls, though open to the outside, were too small for a man to worm through.

  “The guests have become prisoners, it would seem,” Bardolin said. He did not seem outraged.

  “You had an idea this would happen,” Murad accused him.

  “Perhaps.” Even to himself, Bardolin’s calm seemed odd. He wondered privately if something had indeed been slipped into the food.

  “Did you think they would leave us free to wander about the city like pilgrims?” Bardolin asked the nobleman. The meat was like a ball of stone in his stomach. He was no longer used to such rich fare. But there was something else, something in his head which disquieted him and at the same time stole away his unease. It was like being drunk; that feeling of invulnerability.

  “Are you all right, Bardolin?” Hawkwood asked him, concerned.

  “I—I—” Nothing. There was nothing to worry about. He was tired, was all, and needed to get himself some sleep.

  “Bardolin!” they called. But he no longer heard them.

  FOURTEEN

  W HAT is your name?

  “Bardolin, son of Carnolan, of Carreirida in the Kingdom of Hebrion.” Was he speaking? It did not matter. He felt as safe as a babe in the womb. Nothing would touch him.

  That’s right. You will not be harmed. You are a rare bird, my boy. How many of the Disciplines?

  “Four. Cantrimy, mindrhyming, feralism and true theurgy.”

  Is that what they call it now? Feralism—the ability to see into the hearts of beasts, and sometimes the craft to duplicate their like. You have mastered the most technical of the Seven Domains, my friend. You are to be congratulated. Many long hours in some wizard’s tower poring over the manuals of Gramarye, eh? And yet you have none of the instinctive Disciplines—soothsaying, weather-working. Shifting.

  A tiny prick in the bubble of well-being which enfolded Bardolin, like a sudden draught in a sturdy house, a breath of winter.

  “Who are you?”

  Kersik! She has much to learn of herbalism yet. Rest easy, brother of mine. All will come to light in the end. I find you interesting. There has not been much to seize my interest this last century and more. Did you know that when I was an apprentice there were nine disciplines? But that was a long time ago. Common witchery and herbalism. They were amalgamated, I believe, in the fifth century and brought under that umbrella term “true theurgy,” to the profit of the Thaumaturgists’ Guild and the loss of the lesser Dweomer-folk. But such is the way of things. You interest me greatly, Bardolin son of Carnolan. There is a smell about you that I know. Something there is of the beast in you. I find it intriguing . . . We will speak again. Rejoin your friends. They worry about you, worthy fellows that they are.

  H E opened his eyes. He was on the floor and they were clustered around him with alarm on their faces, even Murad. He felt an insane urge to giggle, like a schoolboy caught out in some misdeed, but fought down the impulse.

  A wave of relief. He felt it as a tactile thing. The imp clung to his shoulder whimpering and smiling at the same time. Of course. If he had been drugged it would have been left bereft, lost, the guiding light of his mind gone from it. He stroked it soothingly. He had put too much into his familiar, too much of himself. The things were meant to be expendable. He felt a thrill of fear as he caressed it and it clung to him. Much of his own life force had gone into the imp, giving it an existence beyond him. That might not be to the good any more.

  Drugged? Where had that thought come from?

  “What happened?” Hawkwood was asking. “Was it the food?”

  It was an enormous effort to think, to speak with any sense.

  “I—I don’t know. Perhaps. How long was I gone?”

  “A few minutes,” Murad told him, frowning. “It happened to no one else.”

  “They are playing with us, I think,” Bardolin said, getting to his feet rather unsteadily. Hawkwood supported him.

  “Lock us up, drug one of us—what else do they have in store?” the mariner said.

  The soldiers had retrieved their arms and lit their match; it stank out the room.

  “We’ll have that door down, and shoot our way out of here if we have to,” Murad said grimly. “I’ll not meet my end caught like some fox in a trap.”

  “No,” Bardolin said. “If they are expecting anything, they are expecting that. We must do it another way.”

  “What? Await yonder wizard with a tercio of his beast-headed guards?”

  “There is another way.” Bardolin felt his heart sink as he said the words. He knew now what he would do. “The imp will go for us. It can get out of the window and see what is happening outside. It may even be able to open the door for us.”

  Murad appeared undecided for a moment; clearly, he had had his heart set on a fighting escape. He was still wound up too tightly; they all were. A spark would set them off and they would die here with the questions un-answered, and that was intolerable.

  “All right, we’ll let the imp go,” Murad conceded at last.

  Bardolin let out a sigh. He was utterly tired. He felt someti
mes that this land had fastened on him like a succubus and would feed off him until there was nothing left but a withered husk that would blow away to ash in the wind. Soothsaying was not one of his Disciplines, and yet the presentiment had been upon him ever since they had made landfall that there was something deadly to the ship’s company and to the world they had left behind, and it resided here, on this continent. If they escaped they would take it back to the old world with them like a disease which clung to their clothing and nestled in their blood. Like the rats which scurried in the darkness of the ship’s hold.

  He bent to the bewildered imp, stroking it.

  “Time to go, my little friend.” Can you see the way out, up there in the wall? Up you go. Yes! That’s it. Where the last of the daylight is coming through.

  The imp was peering through the narrow aperture in the wall. The entire company watched it in silence.

  “I may leave you for some time,” Bardolin told them. “But don’t be alarmed. I am travelling with the imp. I will return. In the meantime, stand fast.”

  Murad said something in reply, but he was already gone. The world had become a vaster place in the wink of an eye, and the very quality of Bardolin’s sight had changed. The imp’s eyes operated in a different spectrum of colours: to it the world was a multivaried blend of greens and golds, some so bright they hurt to look at. Stone walls were not merely a blank façade, but their warmth and thickness produced different shadows, glowing outlines.

  The imp looked back once, down at the silent room full of men, and then it was through the high, narrow window. It was hungry and would have liked to share in the meats that had been laid out for the company, but its master’s will was working in it. It did as it was told.

  Indeed, in some ways Bardolin became the imp. He felt its appetites and fears, he experienced the sensation of the rough tufa blocks under his hands and feet, he heard the noises of the city and the jungle with an enhanced clarity that was almost unbearable until he became used to it.

  The rain had ended, and the city was a dripping, steam-shrouded place, fogged as a dawn riverbank. The light was dimmer than it should be; the crater sides would cut out much of the light in the later afternoon.

  What to make of this hidden city? The volcanic stone of the buildings was dark and cold, but the lambent, upright figures of people were about—not many of them now—and a single crescent slice of sunshine glowed like molten silver way up on the side of the crater: the last of the departing sun. Soon night would settle. Best to wait a few minutes.

  Something else, though. A . . . smell which seemed tantalizingly familiar.

  The imp clambered down the side of the high wall like a fly, head-first. It reached the ground and scampered into a cooler place of deeper shadow, an alleyway it might have been called in Abrusio. There it crouched and breathed in the air of the dying day.

  The daylight sank as though someone had slowly covered a great lamp somewhere beyond the horizon of the world. It was actually possible to see the growing of the night as a palpable thing. In minutes the city had sunk into darkness.

  But not darkness to the imp. Its eyes began to glow in the murk of the alley and its vision grew sharper.

  Still, that smell somewhere, hauntingly reminiscent of something from the past.

  To our duty, my diminutive friend, Bardolin’s mind gently prodded as the imp crouched puzzled and fascinated in the humid shadow.

  It obeyed the urging of a mind that was moment by moment becoming one with it. Obediently it scuttled around the side of the house which imprisoned the company, looking for the front door, another window, any means of entry or egress.

  There were things moving in the streets of the city. To the imp they were sudden dazzling brightnesses darting in and out of sight. It was the heat of their bodies that made them so luminous. The imp whimpered, wanted to hide. Bardolin had to sink more of his will into it in order to keep it under his command.

  There—the door they had entered the place by. It was closed, but there was no sign of Kersik, Gosa or the beast-headed guards. The imp sidled over to it, listened and heard Murad’s voice within. It chuckled to itself with an amusement that was part Bardolin’s, and set one glowing eye to the crack at the door’s foot. No lights, no warmth of a waiting body.

  Push at the door, Bardolin told it, but before it could do as it was told it felt a growing heat behind it, the hot breath of some living thing. It spun around in alarm.

  A man might have seen a tall, bulking shadow looming over him, with two yellow lights burning and blinking like eyes. But the imp saw a brightness like the sun, the effulgence of a huge, beating heart in the bony network of the chest. It saw the heat rising off the thing in shimmering waves of light. And as the mouth opened, it seemed to breathe fire, a smoking calefaction that scorched the imp’s clammy skin.

  “Well met, Brother Mage,” a voice said, distorted, bestial but nonetheless recognizable. “You are ingenious, but predictable. I suppose you had no choice: that festering pustulence of a nobleman would have left you no other options.”

  The thing was a massively built ape, a mandrill, but it spoke with the voice of Gosa.

  “Come. We have kept you waiting long enough. Time to meet the master.”

  A huge paw swept down and scooped up the imp even as it leapt for freedom. The were-ape that was Gosa laughed, a sound like the whooping beat of a monkey’s cry but with a rationality behind it that was horrible to hear. The imp was crushed to the thing’s shaggy breast, choking at the vile heat, the stench of the shifter which it had smelled but not quite recognized. It had been confused by memories of Griella, the girl who had been a werewolf and who had died before they had set foot on this continent. It had not recognized the peril close by.

  The were-ape limbered off at speed, its free hand bounding it forward whilst the short back legs pushed out, a rocking movement which seemed to gather momentum. Bardolin saw that his familiar was being taken towards the stepped pyramid at the heart of the city.

  They passed other creatures in the streets: shifters of all kinds, nightmarish beasts that reeked of Dweomer, warped animals and men. Undi at night was a masque of travesties, a theatre of the grotesque and the unholy. Bardolin was reminded of the paintings in the little houses of worship in the Hebros, where the folk were still pagan at heart. Pictures of hell depicting the Devil as master of a monstrous circus, a carnival of the misshapen and the daemonic. The streets of Undi were full of capering fiends.

  He should withdraw now, leave the imp to its fate and slip back into his own body, rejoin the others and warn them of what was waiting for them outside the walls of the house in which they were imprisoned. But somehow he could not, not yet. Two things kept him looking out of the imp’s eyes and feeling its terror: one, he felt nothing but stark fear at the thought of abandoning his familiar, and with it a goodly portion of his own spirit and strength; the other was nothing more or less than sheer curiosity, which even in the midst of his fear kept him drinking in the sights of the nocturnal city through the imp’s eyes. He was being taken to someone who perhaps knew all the answers, and as Murad hungered after power so Bardolin thirsted for information. He would remain in the imp’s consciousness a little longer. He would see what was at the heart of this place. He would know.

  “W HAT can he be at?” Murad demanded, pacing back and forth. The room was lit only by a few tiny earthenware lamps they had found among the platters and dishes, but the burning match of the soldiers glowed in tiny points and the place was heavy with the reek of the powder-smoke. Bardolin lay with his eyes open, unseeing, as immobile as the tomb carving of a nobleman on his sarcophagus.

  “Two foot of match we’ve burnt, sir,” Mensurado said. “That’s half an hour. Not so long.”

  “When I want your opinion, Sergeant, I’ll be sure to ask you for it,” Murad said icily. Mensurado’s eyes went as flat as flint.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s dark out,” Hawkwood said. “It could be he’s
waiting for the right moment. There are probably guards and it’s only an imp, after all.”

  “Sorcerers! Imps!” Murad spat. “I’ve had a belly-full of the lot of them. Brother Mage indeed! For all we know he could be in league with his fellow necromancers, plotting to turn us over to them.”

  “For God’s sake, Murad,” Hawkwood said wearily.

  But the nobleman wasn’t listening. “We’ve waited long enough. Either the mage has betrayed us or his familiar has met with some mishap. We must get out of here unaided, by ourselves. Sergeant Mensurado—”

  “Sir.”

  “—I want that door down. Two men to carry our slumbering wizard—Hawkwood, your seamen will do. We’ll want as many arquebuses ready as possible.”

  “What about Gerrera, sir?” one of the soldiers spoke up, pointing to their fever-struck comrade who lay on his litter on the floor, his face an ivory mask of sweat and bone-taut skin.

  “All right. Two more of you take him. Hawkwood, lend a hand there. That leaves us with seven arquebuses free. It’ll have to do. Sergeant, the door.”

  Mensurado and Cortona, the biggest men in the company except perhaps for Masudi, squared up to the hardwood double doors as if they were an opponent in a fight ring. The two men looked at each other, nodded sombrely and then charged, leading with their right shoulders.

  They rebounded like balls bounced off a wall, paused a second, and then charged again.

  The doors creaked and cracked. A white splinter line appeared near the hinges of one.

  Three more times they charged, changing shoulders each time, and on the fifth attempt the doors sagged and broke, the beam which had closed them smashed in two, their bronze hinges half dragged out of the wall.

  The company hesitated a moment as the echo of the crash died away. Cortona and Mensurado were breathing heavily, rubbing their bruised shoulders. Finally Hawkwood raised one of the earthenware lamps and peered out into the gloom of the foyer beyond, in which they had met the old man Faku and his helpers. The place was deserted, the door to the street closed. The night seemed eerily silent after the jungle noise they were used to.