Morr grunted with satisfaction and went to retrieve the helmet and severed hands. Motley blanched as Morr produced a spool of wire from his belt and threaded the grisly trophies together prior to hanging them from the skeletal rack that rose behind his shoulders for just such a purpose.
‘Is that really necessary?’ Motley protested. ‘Is it not enough to take a life in honest combat that you must play the ghoul afterwards?’
Morr stood and looked at Motley through glittering crystal lenses, his face unreadable behind his blank-faced helm. Motley regretted his outburst immediately. He had allowed himself to forget that Morr was a denizen of the dark city where grisly trophies are always at the height of fashion. Hearing the story of Morr’s maiden world origins had softened Motley’s already somewhat empathetic view of the incubus’s plight even further. He told himself to recall this moment if he found himself making the same slip again. To Motley’s surprise when Morr spoke it was without any trace of rancour.
‘If one brother opposes my approach to the shrine then there is a high chance there will be others that feel the same way,’ the incubus intoned. ‘The sight of their predecessor’s remains may give them pause.’
‘Surely the hierarchs won’t tolerate any such interference?’ Motley asked. ‘You’ve come here to seek their judgment, how can they accept such disregard for their authority as waylaying plaintiffs before they can even reach the judge?’
‘The right of one Incubus to challenge another is sacrosanct. It is a law beyond the authority of any hierarch to overturn. Thus it has always been.’
‘So you’re saying you may face a succession of challengers then?’ Motley snorted. ‘The path to the shrine will be littered with their corpses at this rate.’
‘It is more likely the remainder would attack as a group, and from positions of ambush,’ Morr said imperturbably, ‘there is no ordinance that the challenges must occur singly or openly.’
‘But why would they be so set against you seeking judgment?’
Morr was silent for a long moment before answering. ‘They believe, rightly, that my guilt is manifest and incontrovertible,’ Morr said, ‘I killed my liege lord and there is no denying the fact. For them that is the end of the matter. They believe that there is no possible mitigation for the actions I have taken and that I will dishonour the hierarchs by even bringing the case before them.’
‘So they want to stop you reaching the shrine before anyone’s feathers get ruffled or any awkward questions get asked?’ Motley asked incredulously. Morr nodded solemnly in response.
‘If they come at us again there will be no discrimination,’ the incubus said, ‘they will try to kill you as well as me. Turn back if you wish, you are not beholden to me to continue.’
Motley grinned wolfishly at the notion. ‘More fool them, I’m not just a pretty face, a fantastic wit and an inordinately good dancer, you know.’ He skipped energetically through the first few steps of a complex pavane to illustrate his conjecture. ‘So do I have your permission to get involved next time?’ Motley asked brightly. ‘Defend my honour and, coincidentally, my life and all that?’
Morr nodded again and turned to continue down the causeway without another word.
‘Of course there is one other possibility, Morr,’ Motley called after him. ‘They might think you’re the one that’s been corrupted – you know, got the story backwards. Happens all the time.’
Morr made no response. Motley hurried to catch up with the towering incubus before he vanished into the coiling mist.
The intimate secretary was furious. It was not an uncommon state of mind for him, although ordinarily it derived from less certain causes and felt empowering rather than emasculating as it did now. This was a truly impotent fury and it tasted bitter on the secretary’s serrated tongue. The Master Elect of Nine had given him with the task of dealing with Bellathonis, before Asdrubael Vect learned of the role the renegade had played in triggering the Dysjunction. No doubt by doing so the master elect had fulfilled his own instructions from a deeper degree of the Black Descent – a patriarch noctis or perhaps even a Grand Reeve – to ‘do something’ about the renegade master before the coven suffered Vect’s wrath. It left the intimate secretary with little choice to obey and get it done right after Syiin’s prior failure to do so. Unfortunately the intimate secretary found himself quite unable to devise any suitably cunning schemes at present because he was fully engaged in staying alive.
The intimate secretary was concentrating on creeping through the spiralling labyrinth of the Black Descent. He was moving through the seven hundred and ninety-one motions necessary to travel from the sarcophagus chamber at the sixty-fourth interstice across to the twenty-ninth interstice where his own workshop-laboratories lay. Ordinarily this would have given him no cause for concern. The steps necessary to navigate the labyrinth were etched into his memory in symbols of indelible fire – but that was before the Dysjunction. The Dysjunction had riven the labyrinth just as badly as the city above. Traps had been triggered, hostile organisms had been released and whole sections were rumoured to have collapsed into the oubliettes below. The wracks that had returned from investigating had reported traps completely choked with fiends, ur-ghuls and a thousand other wretches that had broken loose from their cells.
Even so it was necessary to go through all the necessary motions to reach the interstice. Many of the labyrinth’s traps reset automatically, and some would work as efficiently as ever no matter what happened as they were inimical to life by their very nature. The intimate secretary fumed and ground his filed teeth together at the delay as he ducked beneath an invisible monofilament web that might, or might not, still be in place to slice through an unwary explorer at waist height. There were better, faster routes with few or no traps that could take him to his destination, but his degree of advancement in the coven was insufficient for him to know them. He moved six more paces and sidestepped to avoid a pressure plate connected to a trap alleged to be so heinous that he had never been informed of its function. He could not tell if the stupid thing had been triggered or not.
He had to improvise the next ten motions, hidden spigots overhead had cracked and deposited their loads of organic acid onto the plain basalt floor below. The black rock still bubbled and spat where the acid had touched it and was forming searing puddles that stank evilly. The intimate secretary climbed along the wall with spider-like agility to avoid the whole mess, stepping back onto the floor to perform the six hundred and eighteenth through to six hundred and thirty-first motions required to avoid a sequence of moving gravitic anomalies along the next stretch of corridor. Another sidestep to avoid a timed flame funnel and he was at the entrance to the twenty-ninth interstice. He cautiously stepped inside and surveyed the chamber.
To his relief he found two hulking grotesques were stationed guarding the entrance, blocking the entry as effectively as a pair of thick, fleshy doors. Their puny heads covered by their black iron helms seemed like afterthoughts amid thick ridges of bulging muscle and sharp bony growths. The hunched giants drooled as they recognised him, their thick, ropy spittle dangling down from their grilled masks like jellied worms. The intimate secretary cursed the brutes and drove them back with blows from his short rod of office in order to get past.
Beyond the grotesques low walls divided a long, gloomy hall up into stalls occupied by various wracks working at benches and the handful of haemonculi that were directing their efforts. The benches groaned beneath a collection of multi-coloured glassware, bubbling retorts, jars, assorted metallic plates and components, surgical blades, organs pinned to boards, crackling wires and runic grimoires. Hisses, pops and bangs accompanied their work and combined to produce a drifting miasma of choking vapour and noxious fumes.
The intimate secretary ignored all of the activity for a time as he pondered. Syiin had attempted to use subterfuge to eliminate Bellathonis. Clearly the time for subtlety was past.
The wracks and haemonculi in their stalls were all busily preparing weapons. All the deadliest creations of the haemonculi were present: virulent toxins, viral swarms, liquifier guns and needle-fingered flesh gauntlets, agoniser-flails and hex-rifles, traps for the soul and devices to destroy the mind were all here.
The secretary gnawed his lips as he sought the answer. Weapons were all well and good with someone to carry them. Perhaps a sudden rush of grotesques and wracks armed for slaughter? But how would they find their quarry and who would lead them? If a member of the coven was sent they might inadvertently draw the tyrant’s eye to precisely what they sought to hide and that would not do at all.
As he thought his eye was drawn to a particular stall where no activity appeared to be occurring. This area was occupied not by benches and wracks but by a pair of curved two-metre high, three-metre long objects currently hidden beneath dirty grey cloths. The moment he saw it his fury rekindled, here was the answer – discarded and forgotten! He stalked across to the stall with all of the dignity he could muster.
‘Ah intimate secretary, you have returned!’ a secret master said ingratiatingly as he came forward from an adjacent stall. This master was masked in steel and adamantium, his smooth, oval head craning out on a thin neck above robes of layered metal mesh. A cluster of tiny lenses over one of the master’s eye-holes rotated spastically until it settled on a satisfactory configuration.
‘Why are these engines not functional? Are they damaged?’ the secretary snapped impatiently, jerking his head sharply at the cloth-covered shapes.
‘Not as far as I am aware, secretary,’ the master replied warily. ‘I have not tested them since… the event began, there should be no reason to believe them otherwise, that is–’
‘Then ready them for action immediately!’ the secretary almost shrieked.
Somewhat nonplussed the secret master tilted his smooth head enquiringly. ‘To what purpose, secretary?’ he asked carefully. ‘By which I mean what configuration should be used?’
The intimate secretary half-raised his rod of office to strike the secret master but mastered himself. It was not truly an unreasonable question – how best to ensure Bellathonis’s death? The secretary thought quickly.
‘They must be self-directing,’ the secretary said. ‘Able to hunt down their quarry independently. Their target will be an individual, when they find the target they must destroy every atom of it.’
‘I understand, secretary,’ the secret master nodded, ruminating. ‘A psychic trace will be sufficient to find the individual if an imprint can be supplied.’
‘It can,’ the secretary sniffed.
‘And the capabilities of the target?’ the secret master asked patiently, as if ticking off articles on a mental checklist. ‘Would they be a runner or a fighter by nature?’
The intimate secretary paused and considered. From what he knew Bellathonis could be either, but if he tried to run from the engines while the city was in the grip of a Dysjunction he was unlikely to survive the experience.
‘A fighter, with a high chance of being in a defended location,’ the secretary declared confidently.
‘Very good, secretary,’ the secret master said with satisfaction. ‘I’ll begin the preparations to receive the imprint immediately.’
The secret master turned and nimbly flicked the cloths away from the front of one the hidden shapes to reveal a curved, gleaming prow of metal. A nest of knives and needles could be glimpsed tucked up underneath it, a set of jointed metal limbs folded as neatly as insect legs.
The intimate secretary stared thoughtfully at the engines that would encompass Bellathonis’ inescapable doom. His taut, viridian lips pulled back into a disquieting smile as he found himself warming to his scheme. It would work, it had to work.
‘Dispatch them the moment they are ready,’ the intimate secretary instructed. ‘The imprint will be supplied momentarily.’ The secret master nodded silently, already busy with his work. The intimate secretary moved on to find sufficient acid and enough wracks to quell the occupant of the sarcophagus at the sixty-fourth interstice.
CHAPTER 10
Another Sort of Inheritance
Young Razicik Yllithian was hunting in the lower halls of the White Flames Fortress when the archon’s summons came. Some Venomyst infiltrators had been found sneaking their way up from the catacombs shortly after the Dysjunction so Razicik and his clique had taken it upon themselves to hunt down more of the vermin. It had been a frustrating business with scant diversion to it. The infiltrators set traps and ambushes, ran away like slaves and were generally annoying about the whole affair. It wasn’t too surprising really, the Venomyst were just a remnant and more used to running than fighting. The late, great Zovas Yllithian had forced the last vestiges of Archon Uziiak’s Venomyst kabal out of the fortress centuries ago. The Venomyst had been forced to scrape an existence among the somaphages and starvelings in an adjacent spire as their fortunes sank ever lower. It was debatable, really, whether the Venomyst were attempting to invade the fortress or just trying to escape from whatever hell-pit their own spire had become.
So the arrival of the message gave Razicik an opportunity to bow out from the frustrating hunt with good grace by casually mentioning that the archon was calling for him in person and so he must go at once. He suspected a trick at first, some cheap attempt by his siblings to jump him when he was alone, but the message carried the personal sigil of Nyos Yllithian, archon of the White Flames. There was no doubt as to its authenticity. Razicik left his companions to their poor sport and began springing up the first of the innumerable stairs he would have to climb in order to reach the top of the fortress with youthful exuberance. Now was not a time to trust one’s fate to malfunctioning grav risers and definitely not to portals so the whole climb would perforce have to be made on foot.
Razicik thought briefly about trying to secure transport to fly around the outside of the fortress instead. The sloping, armoured eaves of the fortress’s precipitous rooftops overhung a three-kilometre drop on two sides to where its foundations abutted onto Ashkeri Talon and the docking ring. The closest two spires on the remaining sides were controlled by kabals nominally allied to the White Flames. Archon Uziiak’s poisonous offspring and a number of other petty archons dwelled in a skeletal spire of dark metal close by, but they posed no threat out in the open. The profusion of decorative barbs, columns, rosettes and statues that encrusted the exterior of the White Flames’ palace concealed Dark lances and disintegrator cannon by the score.
The immediate vicinity should be safe and it would be quicker and much easier on the knees. Of course under the circumstances those very same disintegrator batteries might well pick off anything they detected flying close to the fortress quite regardless of its allegiance. The anarchy of the Dysjunction had wrought a sense of febrile excitement in the air, a feeling that anything could happen and probably would. It prompted a distinct inclination to shoot first and ask questions not at all. Such an unfortunate ‘accident’ would be too convenient for some of Razicik’s siblings to resist arranging it, and so the stairs it must be.
Razicik was amused to note how quickly the stairs altered as he climbed up through the fortress. At its lowest levels the stairways were narrow and twisting with the steps worn to almost U-shaped declivities in cheap, porous rock or corroding metal. Climbing upward they straightened out and became noticeably wider and more richly appointed. Here the steps were unblemished and made of gleaming metal or polished stone.
Razicik couldn’t remember the last time he had met the archon, old Nyos Yllithian, face to face. Most of his blood siblings felt it was generally safest to steer clear of the old schemer and avoid drawing excessive attention to oneself. Old Nyos could be positively restrained in comparison to some of his peers, but he was still a cold-blooded killer with no compunction about strangling a potential rival at birth. It dawned on Razicik that Nyos might want to d
o away with him, but summoning him to do the deed seemed unnecessarily convoluted unless some personal affront was involved. Razicik wracked his memory for anything he might have done to arouse the archon’s ire. He could think of nothing and failing to appear would mean a death sentence anyway so he continued to climb, albeit less exuberantly than before.
Higher still and the stairways became sweeping curves of alabaster and onyx that were festooned with decorative balustrades and finials of frozen flame. On these levels Razicik encountered two of the archon’s incubi standing waiting for him. They directed him to an antechamber with an entry arch that was sculpted in the shape of great overlapping wings of platinum, gold and silver.
The incubi did not accompany Razicik inside and as he passed the entrance the sculpted wings animated and folded into place across it, leaving him in semi-darkness. The walls were exquisitely decorated with frescoes of White Flames victories and hangings made from the skins and banners of fallen foes. As Razicik’s eyes adjusted to the dim light he beheld a small circular table in the centre of the room. A simple throne at the far side of the chamber was its only other furnishing. Razicik realised with a start that a cowled figure appeared to be slumped in the throne. As he stepped forward to investigate the figure shifted slightly and spoke.
‘Ah Razicik, you’re here at lasst,’ the voice was that of the archon but twisted somehow, sibilant sounding. Ghostly fingers of fear brushed Razicik’s spine for the first time. What was going on?
‘I am here, my archon, at your command,’ Razicik replied uncomfortably. ‘How may I serve you?’
‘I have dedicated my life to this kabal, Razicik, I’ve laboured endlessly to ressstore the noble housess. Every action I take iss born out of the love I bear for my housse and for the presservation of all our futuress, but now my time iss done. Do you understand? Thiss body of mine can sstand it no longer…’
Razicik was both shocked and delighted. There had been rumours that the archon had been injured and was incapable, but to have face-to-face admission of the fact meant two things – the archon was taking him into his confidence, and that old Nyos was weak and vulnerable. Razicik eagerly stepped closer.
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