Claws wrenched at his hair as one ghoul attempted to haul Kane’s head back and tear out his throat. More talons raked at his arms, and jaws chewed at his shoulder, determined to rip through the cloak to his flesh and bone. The sensations filled him with loathing, and he thrust the torch into the faces behind him. He heard and felt it dig with a moist hiss into an eye or a mouth, and the claws let go of his hair. This let him twist around and beat off the attackers, first with the torch and then with the sword, chopping indiscriminately at the pack. He felt as if he were hacking at meat – certainly at nothing human. A belly shed its innards, and a scrawny limb was cleaved from a shoulder. A throat was laid open, exposing the windpipe, and a snarling head was almost parted from its body, tilting back so far that it might have been parodying a martyr’s heavenward gaze. Soon a mass of bodies blocked the corridor, and Kane flung the torch at the rest of the pack before he scrambled up the heap of corpses to grab the edges of the doorway overhead.
He hauled himself up on his trembling forearms and fell forward as he heard a chorus of snarls lurch towards him. The ghouls were close to swarming out of the crypt after him. Perhaps the corpses of their fellows were too immediate a temptation, for Kane heard the ghouls begin to feast on those instead. He dragged himself away from the trapdoor and raised his head. He was at one side of the church, surrounded by weather-beaten monuments and their ragged shadows on the untended grass beneath a full moon like a luminous primitive mask. Snow floated through the chill air as if fragments were crumbling off the moon. Where was Father Michael? Kane could deal with him, but now it occurred to Kane that in the midst of his encounter with the ghouls he had seemed to hear a distant scream that might have been the priest’s. Had Father Michael fallen victim to his own unholy flock? They might not be delayed too long by the scrawny corpses underneath the trapdoor. Kane had risen onto his haunches to shut the door and weigh it down with stones when he became aware that he was not alone in the churchyard.
The three men who had been watching his escape closed in on him. They were almost as massive as the stone figures silhouetted around them. Their faces were overgrown with symbols composed of inflamed flesh, but Kane recognised them. One face still boasted its tattoos, entangled with Malachi’s sigils. The second man retained his luxuriant beard, and the third remained as bald as the moon. All their eyes were as black as the sky, which had turned cloudless now that there was no sun to obscure, and all of them were grinning like wolves at some joke too cruel for mirth. As the bearded man stepped forward Kane saw a rounded object dangling from his fist. “Friend of yours?” the man asked Kane, and shied the missile at him.
It landed on the frozen earth beside Kane and rolled onto its back, staring up with eyes as empty as the sky around the moon. The neck had been crudely hacked from the body, and the mouth gaped wide in a mute protest. It was Father Michael’s head. “We don’t like priests,” the bearded man explained.
“We don’t like anyone that prays,” said his tattooed companion.
“Was you at your prayers?” the bald man enquired of Kane with a jeering laugh.
“Better hurry up and say amen,” the bearded man said, and then he peered at Kane’s face. “Have a look at this, lads. Remember this one?”
The bald man crouched to stare at Kane, who saw that the occult symbols had even infested the shaved pate. In the moonlight it resembled an embroidered skullcap made of skin. His eyes widened as though to encompass more darkness as he identified Kane. “He’s not a fighter,” he said.
The third raider took some time to recognise Kane, relishing the process. “What are you doing here, Puritan?” he said, and the mass of tattoos and sigils around his mouth drew back lazily, peeling open a vicious grin.
Kane rose to his feet. His strength was returning, and he did not waver. He gazed into each face and saw only corruption, inscribed on the flesh and polluting the eyes to the depths of their souls. “So,” he said, “you have given yourselves over to this evil, have you?”
The bald man grinned more broadly still, exposing rotten teeth and blackened gums. “You should try,” he said. “It gets you more than praying.”
“Malachi will hold all this land soon enough,” the bearded man declared and spat on a grave at the foot of a stone angel. “What’s the point in you fighting?” he said and raised the bloody axe he bore in one thick fist.
The word, or the sight of Father Michael’s blood on the axe, appeared to excite the bald man. “And the only thing round here is fighting,” he said before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
An eager grin tugged the tattooed man’s lips awry. It was clear that he was barely able to contain his anticipation. “But you don’t do that,” he said, “do you?”
A single consciousness seemed to be appraising Kane, but it did not belong to their leader. The Overlord’s attention must be elsewhere, and Kane was faced by simple gleeful brutishness – the dull group intellect common to every mob that has found a scapegoat for its hatred. “Well,” he said slowly and softly, “you know, I may just have changed my mind about that.”
He watched understanding creep into the corrupted eyes. It failed to make the men wary of him; they seemed delighted that he was proposing to put up a fight. The tattooed man took a deliberate pace towards him and reached lazily for his sword. Before he could draw it Kane strode to meet him and seized the man’s fist on the hilt. The man’s eyes widened in furious surprise, and he wrenched at the weapon. He was striving to free it and his hand from Kane’s grasp when Kane drove his knife deep into his adversary’s right shoulder.
The man’s eyes bulged with disbelief, and a snarl drew back his lips. His sword arm was useless now. Kane felt the fist grow slack as he sawed the blade through the man’s shoulder towards his neck. Perhaps the pain was so great that it drove all capacity for thought out of his opponent’s head. The man twisted his whole body to escape the blade, but he was turning towards it. The knife sliced across his shoulder and cut his throat wide open.
He staggered sideways, spitting gouts of blood, and crashed to the earth among the graves. As Kane drew his sword the bald man rushed at him, thrusting his own blade at Kane and roaring at the top of his voice. Whether the cry expressed his fury or was intended to daunt Kane, it had no effect on him. He parried the man’s sword and met his onrush with the knife, plunging it between the ribs into the heart. A punch in the face sent the dying man backwards and left the dagger in Kane’s grasp. As the raider sank to the frozen ground, clutching his chest in a vain attempt to stem the gush of blood, Kane turned on the bearded man.
His courage appeared to have left him as his companions had. He was already backing away, swinging the axe in front of him with such force that drops of blood flew from the blade, spattering monuments black in the moonlight. If the sweeps of the axe were meant to ward Kane off, they only enraged him. He stalked at the man and slashed his arm with the sword. The axe sprang from his hand and chopped into the earth. Kane seized the handle and, tugging the axe free, raised it high.
He was tempted to rid the earth of the bearded brute. Instead he turned the axe and clubbed the man to his knees with the flat of the blade. As the man tottered on the edge of consciousness Kane flung the axe away among the monuments and seized the man by the front of his stained leather jerkin. He dragged him to the trapdoor outside the church and threw him down, planting one foot on his chest as the man’s head dangled backwards over the edge. A chorus of hungry snarling greeted the sight, and the bearded man twisted his head to peer into the crypt, and then gazed up fearfully at Kane. More than the moonlight turned his disfigured face pale. “What are they?” he gasped.
“They are your brothers and your sisters.” Kane stared down at the man, whose very fear seemed bestial, and the mass of monstrous faces beneath him. “No,” he said, “even they are better than you. They were cursed, but you chose to become part of this evil.”
He rested the point of the sword on the man’s throat and lifted the locket
from his own neck. In the moonlight Meredith’s face and her mother’s looked drained of colour – of life. A snowflake settled on Meredith’s lips like an icy kiss, and Kane brushed it away before lowering the locket towards his captive. “This girl,” he said urgently. “Your kind took her.”
The man shook his head so vigorously that it drew blood at the point of the sword. “I don’t know her,” he protested.
“Look well.” Kane used his foot to shove the man back so that his shoulders were over the edge. As the man clawed at the frozen earth for support, Kane said “It is your only chance to save your pitiful life.”
The ghouls snarled – they might have been agreeing wordlessly – and the bearded man stared down to see them leaping almost close enough to seize him. “Have you seen her?” Kane demanded.
The man turned his fearful face up and peered wildly at the locket. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I saw her.”
Kane leaned on the man’s chest until he felt ribs begin to crack. “Where have you seen her?”
The man licked his lips and made a last effort to struggle free before he had to respond. “She’s dead.”
“Dead?” The word tasted like ash in Kane’s mouth. “Don’t you lie to me,” he said through his teeth, and pricked the man’s throat with the sword.
“I’m not.” The man’s eyes rolled from side to side in their distorted sockets. “No, I want to live,” he pleaded. “I wouldn’t lie. She’s dead. I threw her out of the wagon myself.”
Kane was hardly aware of speaking. He might have been listening to someone else recite the formula of a prayer. “She isn’t dead.”
“She is,” the man cried and clutched at Kane’s leg in sudden panic. “I told you what you wanted,” he said like a betrayed child. “Let me go.”
“Go,” Kane said, less with anger than from the depths of an utter indifference born of despair, and shoved him over the edge. The man fell screaming into the crypt, where many taloned hands jerked up to catch him. As the screams grew more agonised, accompanied by the splintering of bones and by snarls muffled by feasting, Kane walked away without a backward glance. He came to a halt when the shadow of an angel laid a hand across his path. “She is gone,” he said. “She is gone and I am lost.” He raised his eyes to the angel as if he might find some hint of hope there, but the weathered face might have symbolised the decay of all his faith, and the white eyes were as unresponsive as the moon.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kane rode through the dead land, leading two horses that had belonged to dead men. The fields were sheets of ice, spiky with lifeless grass and weeds like carvings of white ivory. Snow and wind and the endless winter had reduced the scattered trees and shrubs to bones picked clean even of colour. Patches of mist drifted across the fields, unable to rest or to fix on a shape, wandering like lost souls of the landscape. They were no more aimless than Kane. The chill of the sunless afternoon reached not just into his marrow but to the depths of his soul, finding little but emptiness there. It was no longer worth saving now that Meredith was dead.
When he saw smoke in the distance he thought a village was on fire. Such things had ceased to concern him, and he made for it only because it lay ahead. But the smoke came from chimneys, and a few minutes’ weary ride brought him in sight of a small town. He no longer imagined that he was being guided by his destiny. That had abandoned him now that Meredith was dead.
A gradual slope descended to the town. At first Kane failed to grasp why the slope seemed unnaturally deserted, and then he realised that he would have expected to see children sliding down it on makeshift sledges and to hear their shouts and laughter. If there were any children in the town, they had been silenced. He could have been given no clearer sign that the land had been drained of life.
An archway led into the single street. Perhaps the solitary entrance had let the townsfolk believe that their town was defensible, but they would hardly think so now. It must have been a market town, though there were few traces left of this – just the remains of a few half-demolished stalls. As he passed beneath the arch Kane heard the desultory clank of a blacksmith’s hammer and saw two men struggling to load a barrel onto a cart. Two women standing amid the frozen ruts of the street gazed up at him as though he might represent some hope, but glanced away hastily when they found none. Once their plight would have enraged him, but now it roused only indifference. It was the way of the world now – of Malachi’s world.
The street ended at a wide square almost too irregular to earn the name. A motley assortment of cottages and larger buildings surrounded it, raising a haphazard roofline to the featureless grey sky. Every building was brown as dead grass. Apart from a man in drab clothes, who was winching a bucket up from a well, the only occupants of the square were several raiders. They stood outside an inn, laughing and cursing between gulps of ale from tankards. Either drunkenness had dulled their curiosity or the land was so much under Malachi’s control that the presence of a lone rider did not trouble them, for they stared at Kane with no apparent interest. They turned away as he rode past them to stables next to the blacksmith’s, where the man with the hammer peered hard at Kane over the sparks of the anvil.
The stable-master emerged into the square to greet Kane. He was slighter than the blacksmith, wiry and quick-eyed. “Good day to you,” he said and glanced past Kane at the raiders. “You’ll be stabling your horses.”
“No,” Kane said. “I want to sell them.”
The man gave them an appraising look, and then his gaze hardened. He sent a second glance past Kane and reached a swift decision. “Bring them in here,” he said low.
Kane dismounted and led the horses into the stables, less speedily than the stable-master appeared to like. A smell of hay and horse dung met him beneath the rafters. A line of stalls, fewer than half of them occupied, led to the back of the large room. A boy of about Samuel Crowthorn’s age was shovelling out a stall, but the stable-master beckoned to him. “Go to your mother, Joseph,” he said, “and tell her that I may be late.”
The boy scratched his curly head in bewilderment. “But father –”
“Do as you’re bid,” his father said and made to cuff him across the ear.
As soon as the boy darted into the square, the stable-master led the horses to the far end of the passage alongside the stalls before turning to Kane. “How did you come by these animals?” he said just loud enough for Kane to hear.
“What does it matter?” said Kane.
“They bear the mark of Malachi.” The stable-master pointed to the saddle and the harnesses, where Kane had failed to notice an embossed symbol – an oval filled with swarming flames, like a spyhole into Hell. “If you stole them...” the stable-master said and gazed unreadably at him.
“You cannot steal from dead men,” Kane said.
The man frowned at Kane’s weapons before peering down the passage, beyond which Kane heard the raiders crowd shouting into the tavern. As the square grew quiet the stable-master murmured “Did you kill them?”
Kane was done with boasting. He had no pride left, nor any reason to describe his exploits. As he responded only with a stare the stable-master said “We heard of a man such as you who has been hunting them.”
Kane found no cause to reply to this either. Perhaps his muteness unnerved the stable-master, who said “You must hide, sir.”
Kane discovered that he had not entirely lost his self-respect. “I hide from no man,” he declared.
“The town is theirs.” By now the stable-master was unable to keep his gaze on his listener. “All around here they hold sway,” he said under his breath. “There are spies who work for them. They listen in the shadows and betray any who would fight back. If they know you are here –”
His furtiveness angered Kane. “I don’t care who knows,” he said so loud that a horse whinnied in a stall.
“But listen.” The man laid a hand on Kane’s arm. “There are those here who would fight,” he murmured. “They are only waiting f
or enough men.”
“Then let them fight,” Kane said. “Pay me.”
The stable-master withdrew his hand and turned it up as though still hoping for a reward. “Will you not join them?” he said so incredulously that he forgot to murmur.
“No,” Kane said and held out his own hand. “Now pay me.” In case he had left the man in any doubt, or with any vestige of hope in Kane, he said “Pay me enough to drink myself into oblivion.” It was the nearest to a prayer that he had left in him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The ground floor of the tavern was a room as large as a barn. Kane found a table to himself in the darkest corner and shouted for ale. The raiders had joined several of their fellows, and all the disfigured brutish faces glanced at his shout. Their indifference might have suggested they thought that, besides representing no threat, he was no better than they were, but even this notion failed to inflame him. He was there for one purpose only – to achieve stupor.
As soon as the landlord brought a tankard and a jug of ale Kane filled the tankard to the brim and quaffed the contents. The man gave him a doubtful look but pocketed the coins Kane slammed on the table. Once the landlord trudged away Kane gazed around the room. Dozens of men sat on rough benches at the oaken tables or stood in groups on the bare plank floor. Some he took for townsfolk, others for travellers breaking whatever journeys brought them to this defeated region, but there was little of the uproar he would have expected to hear in a tavern. Only the raiders were boisterous, while the rest of the drinkers kept an uneasy peace. The blurred murmur of conversations felt like a promise of insensibility, and Kane raised a mocking tankard to it before he gulped another mugful.
When the afternoon darkened he thought it was matching his mood. Dusk crept into the tavern like a spy or a conspirator, and the landlord lit rush-lights on the tables. Kane welcomed the gloom, not just for letting him stay unobserved. He lifted the locket from around his neck and laid it open on the table. The tiny fragile portraits looked as weather-beaten as monuments, which was all they were now. Rain and snow had smudged Meredith’s features and her mother’s, so that they might have been depicting how his memories of them had already begun to fade, erased by ale. The unstable light blessed them with a kind of life, a cruel illusion. Kane felt unworthy even to pray for their souls, and he drained the tankard in the hope that the ale would wash away the last of his emotions. The jug was empty, and he planted it on the table with a blow that would have driven a nail deep into a coffin. It brought the landlord, who made to replenish the tankard from another jug, but Kane seized his arm. “Leave it all,” he growled and threw a bag of coins in front of him. The landlord grabbed the bag and retreated as Kane refilled the tankard. Even when he downed the bitter contents he seemed incapable of recapturing the apathy that had felt within his reach. It was not just the interruption that had distracted him. Somebody was watching him.
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