The passage ended at a space several times its width – the lobby of the hall. It was dominated by a pair of doors that might have been designed to daunt all who stood before them. The iron bosses with which they were studded no longer lent them the appearance of a shield; now the doors resembled enormous slabs of reptilian flesh that were borrowing breath from the shadows. They were flanked by torches taller than a man, and beside either torch an oval mirror towered, propped on skeletal legs. The torch-flames flickered in the mirrors like the elongated vertical pupils of a reptile’s eyes, but Kane sensed worse in the depths of the glass. None of this had the power to deter him, and he strode to the doors. “Malachi,” he shouted, hammering three times on them with the hilt of a sword. “Malachi, I’m here. Isn’t this what you want?”
The name seemed to conjure forth a silence as chill and indifferent as the farthest reaches of space. Even the sounds of conflict had ceased, unless the unnatural stillness had somehow cut them off from Kane. It felt as if the whole of Axmouth were holding a breath, or did it feel more like the utter absence of breath? He had a gradual but insidious impression that it was growing more palpable, gathering substance behind him, unless the darkness that lurked everywhere in Axmouth was. A faint noise made him turn, a noise like a single breath emerging from many mouths. Under cover of the silence that had blotted out his senses, dozens of the raiders had closed in behind him.
The sight enraged him – their skulking presence did, and his own unwariness, and the brutish unanimity of the corrupted faces watching him. Kane lifted his swords high and stretched his arms out on both sides of him. “Come on,” he snarled.
As they took a concerted pace forward, so ponderous that it seemed to shake the stone floor, Kane heard a sound behind him. It was slow and massive and inexorable, and it brought an icy insubstantial clutch to the back of his neck. It felt as though ice were forming there, and as he swung around, his breath visibly preceded him. The doors to the great hall were standing wide.
A rank of oval mirrors towered on either side of the antechamber. Each mirror was held in a frame as tattered as rotten skin and supported by thin struts like fleshless limbs. Kane had seen their sort before, and now they symbolised a past he had hoped to leave behind. Nevertheless he advanced between them at once. As soon as he was past the doors they slammed together, shutting out the raiders, who had never meant to slay him. They had been deployed to leave him nowhere else to go except the hall.
The echoes of the slam fled into the corners of the great room, to be swallowed by the shadows. The light of torches lined up along the antechamber continued to prance as Kane strode on. The flames might have been celebrating his arrival, but their antics left the depths of all the mirrors dark. He could have been passing between two rows of pools grown impossibly vertical in defiance of the laws of God, and he felt as if inhabitants of the dimensionless dark were observing him. While this troubled him, he saw worse ahead.
He had reached the heart of the evil that had invaded Axmouth. The glow of myriad torches and candles seemed to take a wicked pride in displaying it to him. A figure draped in bejewelled robes of dull crimson occupied the massive seat from which Josiah had pronounced judgement on the youthful Kane. The figure’s head was bowed, no doubt in contemplation of some fresh malevolence, so that Kane saw nothing of the face except a pallor veiled by ropy locks of hair that trailed from the oily pate. The creature had made Axmouth not merely his abode but a monstrous lair, for the corpses of his victims were piled behind his throne and on either side – bloodless heaps in which the individual bodies had grown indistinguishable, though limbs and hands and the remains of agonised faces were visible within the masses of corruption. Kane had the dreadful notion that the soundless cries the mouths still appeared to be uttering might be intended as an oblation – that the whole charnel arrangement was an aspect of an occult ritual. He saw where the victims had met their deaths, on a bloodstained altar placed before the throne as if to honour the occupant – an altar so primitive that it could only invoke an ancient evil. Kane’s gorge rose at the defilement of his ancestral hall. He was ready to shout a challenge to the figure on the throne as he emerged from the antechamber – and then he saw what else the hall contained. To his left was a prison cage, and in the cage was Meredith.
She was crouched on the floor, hugging herself in search of comfort or warmth, but she looked up at the sound of Kane’s tread. Perhaps she was unable at first to focus her eyes, unless she was afraid to believe what she was seeing. Her face cleared, and she wavered to her feet and stumbled to the bars. “Captain Kane,” she cried. “You came for me.”
“I vowed I would,” said Kane.
“I prayed you would come.” Meredith gripped the bars while Kane tramped around the cage to find the lock. “Sometimes I thought...” Her eyes grew moist with an anguished memory as she said “I was afraid you might have died.”
“Not while my vow had to be kept,” Kane said.
He was lifting a sword to break the padlock when Meredith’s gaze strayed past him and her lips parted in dismay. “He will come,” she said almost to herself, and then she threw her hands out as if she wanted to fend off a sight or to seize hold of Kane. “Solomon,” she cried, “it’s a trap.”
Kane whirled about to see the occupant of the throne raising his head. The languorous fluid motion put Kane in mind of a cobra. Until the long pale hand relinquished the chin, he might have fancied that the sorcerer was holding up a white mask. The elongated sharp-nosed face was practically lipless, and it was horizontally striped from the extravagantly high forehead to the pointed chin. Eyes from which blackness seemed to have erased all humanity gazed straight ahead as if they were fixed in the sockets. Perhaps this was a parody of meditation; the sorcerer’s words suggested as much. “Long is the road that the pilgrim walks in the name of his devotion,” he said, but it might have been a stone that spoke, so cold and hollow was his voice. “Yet longer still is the journey home to the land of his fathers.”
The voice seemed to seep into Kane as though it meant to gather in his soul. “I have been waiting for you,” Malachi said, and his depthless gaze found Kane’s eyes. His thin lips twisted in a mocking smile that could hardly have been more grotesque if a reptile had essayed the expression. “Do you like what I’ve done to the place?” he said.
“It will look fairer when your head is on a spike above the gates.” This fell short of conveying Kane’s wrath, and he stalked past the altar, raising both his swords. “You are not fit to occupy my father’s chair,” he shouted.
“Your father was a child.” The sorcerer did not move except to fold his long hands together in a mockery of supplication. “A pathetic fool,” he said, “who made a pact with the Devil.”
His voice felt like a dank fog that was settling over Kane’s soul in an attempt to suffocate all hope. Kane was close enough to see that the lines inscribed on the elongated face consisted of occult symbols. Whatever they represented or invoked, Kane could have thought their power was reaching for him through Malachi’s words. He was distracted by the sight of a gaping pit in the floor beside the altar – a hole edged with bloodstains and exposing a porous crimson mass larger than a man. A slow pulse passed through it, and Kane seemed to sense the monstrous heartbeat spreading almost imperceptibly through the fabric of the great hall. “You tricked him,” he said through his teeth. “You, who were a man of God.”
“He betrayed you, Solomon Kane.” Malachi’s lips pinched together in a colourless sneer. “Your soul is damned,” he said in vicious glee.
“I damned myself. Do not dare to blame my father. I sinned, and now I shall redeem my soul.” He needed to say none of this to Malachi – it felt like being tricked. “Get up!” he yelled.
“Are you still the good loyal son?” Malachi’s lips worked as if they were savouring their contempt, and Kane rushed at him.
The sorcerer reared up and slithered out of the chair. The movement seemed close to boneless – as sin
uous as a snake. As the robe fell about him, Kane saw that he appeared to be unarmed. He felt no compunction over cutting such a creature down, but as Kane slashed two-bladed at him, Malachi clapped his hands together and jabbed them at the floor. He might have been miming an inverted prayer, and the effect was immediate. The space in front of Kane seemed to be sucked into itself, and his swords sliced through a shapeless impalpable mass – a cloud of black smoke as tall as the sorcerer. It was a trick that an illusionist might have performed to astound simpletons or children, and it aggravated Kane’s rage. He swung around to glare about the hall. “Malachi,” he shouted. “Malachi, show yourself.”
Nothing but the sluggish flutter of torchlight and candle-flames answered him. Only shadows were creeping about near the walls beyond the columns and ducking out of sight behind the stained altar. “Malachi, you coward,” Kane roared, but there was no response. He was wasting his time and Meredith’s. With a last glare all around him he strode to the cage.
Meredith had been watching him silently but apprehensively. As he reached the padlocked door she whispered “Don’t you understand yet? It’s a trap.”
“What trap?” Kane demanded.
“They only marked me so that you would come.” Meredith gripped her hands together as if she wished she could squeeze her palm clean. “The Devil wants you, Solomon.”
“The Devil can take me soon enough,” Kane declared and smashed the padlock with the hilt of his sword. The staple of the padlock was trapped in the hasp of the door. He wrenched at it and managed to free the staple from the slot, which the blow of the sword had distorted. The padlock clattered on the floor, and Kane made to throw the door wide. He was reflecting on the wilful pointlessness of evil – on how much carnage and destruction had been perpetrated simply in order to entice him home – when Meredith screamed. She might have been voicing his outrage for him, or his sudden agony. The blade of a sword had pierced his left shoulder and was protruding in front of him.
THIRTY-NINE
As Kane attempted to drag himself free of the blade his assailant drove it deeper, and Kane felt it grind against his collar bone. He clenched his teeth until his head throbbed, and overcame a wave of nausea as he succeeded in keeping both hands clamped on his swords. Before he could wield either of them, his adversary hurled him aside. Skewered on the weapon, Kane was swung away from Meredith with such force that it hurled him off the blade to sprawl many paces away from the cage. The fall inflamed the pain in his shoulder, making his head swim, but he crouched around to face his assailant. The man had not followed him; he stood dangerously close to Meredith, his sword upraised in triumph or anticipating victory. He was the Overlord of the raiders. He was Kane’s brother.
His eyes showed no more emotion than the mask did. Kane could have thought that Malachi himself was observing him through the eyeholes, but he spoke as he struggled onto one knee. “Listen to me, Marcus.”
The only answer was an inarticulate snarl from within the mask. Kane might have concluded that the sorcerer’s influence had reduced Marcus to brutishness – to the simple savage instinct to kill – but he had to believe that his brother could still be reached somehow. “You do not have to do this,” he insisted. “Our father is dead. Malachi has no power here any more.”
Some of this seemed to affect Marcus, who rushed forward with another wordless roar, swinging his sword high to deal a fatal blow. Kane heard Meredith cry “Oh God, Solomon.” It sounded too close to despair. He had not endured so much to abandon her now – it would make a mockery of his vow and her faith. He braced himself on his knee and brought his swords up just in time to meet the descending stroke.
The impact almost overbalanced him. It shivered along the blades and sent a dull ache through his arms. It seemed to widen the wound in his shoulder, which felt as if a claw had dug deep. Perhaps the prospect of leaving Meredith at the mercy of the sorcerer lent him strength. Much of it was in his right arm, but he managed to regain his feet. The swords disengaged, and Kane barely had the chance to draw a breath before Marcus resumed the attack.
Kane parried the scything blow, but it made his shoulder blaze with pain. Marcus came after him, chopping at him with stroke after powerful stroke, giving him no opportunity to fight back and little to defend himself. Soon his left arm was too weakened to help him block the strokes. He had to rely on the other while he sought to wound Marcus with the blade in his left hand – sought only to disable him. Each attempt renewed the agony in his shoulder, and each one fell short of its goal. He was being driven back towards the antechamber, and he could have thought the aim was to deliver him to the raiders outside. He was closer to a worse peril, which he glimpsed once Marcus forced him to retreat between the mirrors. On both sides of him the glass stirred like water that was growing less stagnant, and he had the impression of shapes rising from the unplumbed depths – tall scrawny figures with little to their lengthy faces except round lipless mouths that fastened on the insides of the mirrors. Marcus gave him no time to glance at them until a great two-handed stroke drove Kane close to a mirror, and two arms sprang forth from the glass to seize him.
He glimpsed the hands before they closed around his throat. The grey fleshless fingers were segmented like the limbs of insects, and abominably long. He strained his body forward as they strove to drag him into the mirror – he hacked at them with both his swords, but they did not relent. They were drawing him inexorably within the frame, and he felt the transformed glass parting to receive him. It was colder than ice and lethargically fluid as a swamp. The sensation revolted him, and he sawed at the creature’s right wrist with all his strength. In moments the hand was separated from the arm, but it clung to his throat, more than ever like an insect, while he stabbed at its partner and wrenched himself free. He saw the mutilated limbs disappear into the mirror as though they had sunk into a marsh while he prised the fingers from his neck and flung the severed hand away. It twitched on the floor and almost succeeded in inching towards him before it grew still.
Marcus had watched with inhuman detachment, but now he advanced to trap Kane in the avenue of mirrors. Beyond him Kane saw Meredith ease open the door of her prison. She darted around the cage and retreated behind one of the columns supporting the roof. Had Malachi seen her, wherever he was? How could she escape from the hall? Kane’s brother cut viciously at him, and Kane barely avoided the blow. Now he was between another pair of mirrors, and shapes moved eagerly to wait for him to stray closer. “Where is your master?” he shouted. “Is he hiding in the shadow?”
“His master indeed,” Malachi said. “Your brother is the lord of Axmouth. He is the heir, but he is subject to my will.”
His insidious stony voice seemed to emerge from every corner of the hall. At first Kane could not locate him, and then he saw the sorcerer beside the high seat, one hand resting indolently on its arm in token of ownership. His thin contemptuous smile suggested that he had been waiting to be noticed, having rendered himself not so much invisible as indistinguishable from his surroundings, impossible for the observer’s mind to grasp. The trick of vanishing in a cloud of smoke had been merely a disdainful exhibition of his magic, conveying his scorn for his audience. “Why should I hide from you, Solomon Kane?” he said.
Marcus had halted like a puppet whose manipulator was preoccupied elsewhere. When Kane attempted to dodge past him, however, Marcus drove him back with a lethal sweep of the sword. “Then fight me, you coward,” Kane shouted at Malachi. “Fight me like a man.”
“Why should I stain my hands? I have my champion. I shall set brother against brother.” Malachi lifted one long finger as if he were tugging the string of a puppet. “I want you here,” he said.
Kane glimpsed movement beyond a column, and willed Meredith not to betray her whereabouts. He held Malachi’s gaze with a fierceness born of loathing. “Have you staged this for your entertainment?” he demanded. “Or do you need me to complete your dominion? I will never kneel before you, Malachi.”
“You are of no consequence to me.” The sorcerer’s voice took on the tone of a sermon. “Every step you took,” he said, “every pain you suffered, was punishment for your sins.”
Kane might have thought that Malachi had rediscovered his priesthood if it had not been for the derision apparent on the pallid face. “My master will have your soul,” Malachi hissed.
“Is your master as much of a coward as you?” Kane shouted in some desperation. “Is he afraid even to be seen?”
“He has no need to show himself.” Malachi made a sign that might have been an impious benediction, unless it was meant to ward off the vision Kane had called to mind. “See what he has sent to claim you,” the sorcerer said and glided to the darkest corner of the hall.
Less of the light reached into the corner than its distance from the nearest flames could quite account for. An object as tall as the lofty ceiling stood in the gloom. Malachi turned to it, his robes whirling, and whipped off the enormous discoloured canvas that covered it. He might have been performing his last and greatest trick, but the theatricality gave Kane no comfort. “Dear God,” he breathed.
Malachi had uncovered an oval mirror at least five times his height. For a moment Kane thought the glass contained only the reflections of the flames that filled the hall, but the reddish glow was too intense, and it had too defined and purposeful a shape. It was growing – it was advancing to the surface of the mirror, to claw at the glass. As the talons screeched over it, leaving claw marks within, Kane saw that it was a colossus made of fire and molten scaly flesh. “Your soul is damned,” Malachi gloated, “and this demon will not fail to drag you down to Hell.”
Solomon Kane Page 22
