by Andy Remic
“No,” said Sargoth. “I swear, I didn’t know the extent! I don’t know these things! My engineers must have… ”
Without looking up, Yoon clicked his fingers again. Sweat danced beads of sweat along his upper lip. He was smiling. He was enjoying the spectacle. He was enjoying the situation. He was enjoying the drama.
The far doors to the Great Palace Hall burst open, and two guards, carrying gleaming razor-sharp pikes, marched an engineer down the marble tiles. His boots were half dragging. Blood stained his nostrils. He glanced up, and tried to scramble back, but a guard punched him in the stomach, folding him over, and he went limp, and was dragged towards his audience with King Yoon.
“This is Devander,” said Yoon, smiling gently. “He was very cooperative. He told us about his report. He showed us his report. It had your signature of witness on it.”
“Noo!” wailed Sargoth, and both his hands came up, pressing against his cheeks. “It’s a lie! A fabrication! A plot by my enemies to discredit me!”
“No,” said Yoon, moving closer to him. “It is a deceit, it is a conspiracy to rob your king of his rightful profit from an investment. How dare you, Duke Sargoth. I knew your father. We were friends… ”
“Until you had him hanged,” whimpered Sargoth.
“Acknowledged, until I had him hanged,” said Yoon, without breaking stride, “but the fact still remains you lied to me. And, as I am appointed by the gods,” he preened a little, running a hand through his oiled dark curls, “and in fact, I am a god, this is heresy. Blasphemy! So I condemn you to… ”
“Yes?” squeaked Sargoth.
“Death!” said Yoon, and even as he spoke the word he was spinning, with the filigree letter opener in his closed fist. It punched into Duke Sargoth’s eye, driving deep into the brain beyond. Blood spurted, and Yoon cackled. And, still clutching the embedded knife, Yoon leapt aboard Sargoth’s huge body on its collapse to the ground, riding him as he would a dying stag, and they crashed against the floor and Yoon started to scream, words almost incomprehensible but containing just enough clarity to be understood by the several hundred people present, “You fucking bastard, thought you’d cheat me, eh? Thought you’d cheat the King of Vagandrak, O you fucking dirty scum, you backstabbing cunt, you motherfucking bitch cunt scumbag commissioning your own fucking report then planning on cheating your very own fucking KING out of monies due to him, well I know your sort, I know them!” He twisted the makeshift murder weapon, ground it around in the eye-socket, then withdrew it with a schlup. He stared at the blood for a while. The corpse slowly deflated. Then with a sudden vicious movement, he stabbed the blade into the good eye socket. Blood welled up around the silver, pooling out over the dead face of Duke Sargoth, flowing down in tiny red rivulets. Yoon tugged out the blade, and stabbed again. And again. And again. He started to stab down violently, randomly, taking the blade by both hands and working himself into a frenzy as he stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, panting and spitting and grunting, blood splashing up over him, into his face and smearing his hands and arms and robes of state. After maybe two hundred blows, when the corpse of Duke Sargoth no longer had a face, just a concave platter of blood, bone and pulped brains, Yoon slumped to one side, lying alongside the corpse, cradling the dagger, and crooning softly, like a child who wants nothing more than sleep or his mother.
“I am surrounded by vagabonds,” he said.
“I am surrounded by liars and cheats,” he said.
“I am surrounded by the immoral.”
Not one person in that chamber moved, or breathed, or made a sound. They’d frozen, watching in horror at the violent outburst of this, their king, their monarch, their leader, appointed by the gods and repeatedly stabbing his victim in the eyes, in the nose, in the face.
Distantly, a door opened. A military man marched in, boots stomping, sword held by his side, face grim above his dark armour. He was a broad man, powerful, and exuded not just confidence but a natural leadership, an intrinsic authority. This was Zandbar, Captain of the King’s Guard, and he looked supremely pissed off.
“King Yoon!”
“Yes?”
“King Yoon, get up!”
A hush settled over the chamber. Nobody, nobody spoke to Yoon that way. Yoon giggled, then sat up. More blood had pooled out from the corpse and stained his robes, his arms, his legs, everything. Every part of him.
“King Yoon. Please. Compose yourself.”
“What is it?” Yoon squinted, and giggled again. “Zandbar! Is that you? Help me up, man.”
Zandbar reached down, and in distaste, covering himself with Sargoth’s blood, he helped Yoon to his feet.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I need a drink,” said Yoon. Immediately a young woman, naked from the waist down, quim shaved and oiled so it looked like polished marble, ran forward, bearing a goblet of Kerankian White. Yoon supped it noisily, and it left trails through the blood on his chin.
“We have a situation.”
“What kind of situation?”
“An extremely serious one.”
“It’s not the fucking Red Thumb Gang again, is it? I have a mind to exterminate half the city to eradicate those scum. Burn the whole fucking place down! Torch the slums. Burn the poor. I’m sure they won’t mind. I bet they have nothing better to do.”
“I don’t think you’ll need to,” said Zandbar, voice dangerously soft.
“Hmm? What? Why?”
Zandbar snapped a salute. “King Yoon. I, Zandbar, Captain of the King’s Guard, feel it necessary to report that we have a wyrm in the city of Vagan.”
There came a long pause.
“A worm?” said Yoon, swaying a little. “We have many of those, my friend.”
“No. A wyrm. A Great Wyrm. A fucking dragon, Your Highness.”
Another long pause.
“Surely you must be mistaken?” slurred Yoon.
“Please. Sire. Come with me.”
Zandbar, in an unprecedented show of over-familiarity, took Yoon’s elbow and propelled the uncomplaining monarch towards the Great Doors. They were big doors. In fact, they were great doors. Thirty feet high. Oak and bands of iron. Domineering. Oppressive. Designed to instil awe in bloody poor people. Designed to instil fear in those who feared for their lives. Which was almost everybody.
They burst out into the evening air. The sun was sinking behind the jagged, saw-toothed skyline of the city.
Yoon squinted, turning his head, hand coming up, photophobic after days in the luxury of his palace, drinking, taking drugs and fucking. Oh yes. And killing.
“Yes, yes, this is foolish, there’s nothing there but the setting sun.” Yoon stared hard at Zandbar, his blood-caked face breaking into a scowl. “Are you failing me, captain? Have you gone simple in the skull? Brain turned to sour milk? Do I need a new Captain of the Guard?”
“Look, Your Highness!”
And King Yoon looked. And King Yoon saw.
It leapt from the Tower of the Moon. There came a mammoth beat of wings, and the black dragon soared, banked, and dropped with infinite grace. Fire roared out, and several buildings went up with walls of raging fire, sending fireflies sparkling up into the heavens, as others were smashed apart by the huge, whipping tail.
Yoon blinked.
The dragon had gone.
“Did I just see that?” he said, tongue darting in and out. “Or was it, you know, part of the noises. The things I’ve been seeing. Like, mud-orcs and elf-rats.” He squinted again, shading his eyes, scanning the horizon.
Nothing.
“It’s real,” growled Zandbar.
And suddenly the dragon was there, looming up from a narrow street, wings knocking bricks from walls, tail snapping rafters and disintegrating roofs in great striking sweeps. It lifted its head, and the dragon roared, and flames blasted the sky. The tail crashed against the corner of the palace, and pieces of white stone were smashed free, and came raining down, amidst pebbles and stone dust.
A fist-sized stone bounced from Yoon’s head.
“Ow!”
And another from his shoulder.
He clutched it, and rapidly retreated to the shadows of the arched doorway. Yoon was frowning now. “A dragon? In my city! But… but I didn’t give it permission!”
“I have a feeling,” snarled Zandbar, “that this creature needs no permission. And I also feel, Highness, that if we don’t do something quickly then the Chaos Halls are going to break loose. Permission to assemble the City Guard. And I mean, the City Guard.”
“Granted. Oh yes.” Yoon was dreamy again. He smiled at Zandbar, swaying, as if he was a weak-limbed branch on the breeze.
“Yes?” snapped Zandbar, with efficient military bearing.
“Summon Chanduquar,” he said. “I’m going to get cleaned up.”
* * *
King Yoon led the way, with the small, wizened figure of Chanduquar following closely behind. Then came Zandbar, erect, carrying a hefty pike, and they were followed by another twenty pikemen, all hardened veterans, all aware that where they travelled now was not the safest of places in the city.
The tunnel led steeply down. It had a high, arched ceiling of skilfully placed stones, many of them huge and terrifying – if one were to fall it would crush many men under its sheer weight. The walls were smooth, almost polished, the very finest black granite. The cobbles beneath their feet were damp and slippery, and polished by centuries of use.
“I hate it down here,” grumbled Chanduquar, who was renowned for his brash and aggressive behaviour, his constant complaints, and the disrespectful way he spoke to the king. Yoon would have happily had him skewered on a pike, but he was just too valuable an asset.
Yoon glanced back. He studied Chanduquar for a moment. This small, skinny man, with skin the colour of ebony. He wore a short length of black cloth covering his genitals, and black boots, but little else – unless you counted the hundred or so piercings which adorned his scrawny body. He had an over-large skull, yellowed eyes from decades of alcohol abuse, and his lips were tattooed with a delicate script rumoured to facilitate his spells and focus on magick.
“Stop moaning,” said Yoon, dropping into the sort of talk he knew Chanduquar understood.
“Well, it’s true. It’s a miserable and grim bastard place, even more miserable than the main streets of your city, ha!” He grinned, showing small neat teeth.
“Well, we’ll get the job done, then you can get out of here, little man.”
“Of course we can, fat king.”
Yoon stared at him. I could have you executed in the blink of an eye, he thought, sourly. I could have your skin peeled off, your toenails ripped out, hot pokers shoved up your tight little arsehole; I could have your nipples and your nose cut off, which would make an awful mess when you fucking sneezed… I could cut off your fingers one at a time, giving you a day between each snipping to really savour the pain and the proposed disability… I could have your spinal discs crushed with a sledgehammer, one at a time, as I pinned down your head with my boot and sang songs about happiness and wine…
Yoon took a deep breath.
He calmed himself.
No. Not now.
He looked at the little man, the little thorn in his ego, the spear through the skull plate of his narcissism, and yet, bizarrely, also one of his most important tools; his greatest weapon.
Not yet, he told himself, and turned away, and continued to march deep deep down into the bowels beneath the palace.
* * *
During the journey, there had been several trembles in the stone, felt even this deep.
“What’s happening above?” asked Yoon, after a while.
Zandbar fixed him with a glass stare. “I don’t know, Your Highness. But, from extensive reading in the Great Rokroth Library, I believe dragons can cause quite a lot of damage.”
“I’ll show it fucking damage,” growled Yoon, and for once, and this didn’t happen often, Zandbar actually found some respect for the King of Vagandrak. He might be – occasionally – as insane as a Keekum smoker after three bowls, but on occasion he could show quite an amazing set of balls.
As they got closer to the location, to what Yoon had discretely referred to as “The Cells”, so a noise started to come to them. It erupted from the deep interior. It consisted of banging, and scratching sounds – like steel against stone. Screeches, long and high-pitched. Thuds. Crumbling sounds. Battering sounds.
Yoon and Zandbar exchanged glances. Chanduquar seemed nonplussed.
The heavily armed soldiers, on the other hand, were visibly twitchy. Several were wiping sweating palms on uniforms, and a few kept dropping pike heads as if expecting some sudden frontal assault.
Tension was running high.
They came to a door. It was big. And, suspiciously, it was not like the usual oak portals they had crossed. This was iron. And when Yoon produced a thick key from around his neck, and inserted it into a well-oiled silent lock, the door swung open revealing the portal to be extremely thick. Thicker than any human or dwarf prisoner could ever expect. Thick enough to make any person entering wonder about the contents of this eerie prison chamber.
Zandbar stopped on the threshold.
Yoon stopped, also, and turned. He smiled, but the smile did not spread to his eyes.
“Have you been doing what I think you’ve been doing?” said Zandbar.
“And what do you think I’ve been doing?” said Yoon, voice a croon, without any splinter of fear.
“You’ve been collecting splice. Rounding up the rogue ones. The ones that got away after Orlana was… ” He was going to say killed, but knew it was probably not exactly accurate. In all reality, the Horse Lady had probably been banished to an eternity in the Chaos Halls, alongside the sorcerer Morkagoth. Zandbar shivered with intuition.
“I confess,” said Yoon, examining his brightly polished fingernails, “that I do have a certain fondness for the creatures of Orlana the Changer. There is in them a certain… primitive violence. And also an essence of corruptness, of metamorphosis, to which I am greatly attracted.”
“King Yoon, they are the demon blendings of man and horse. They’re fucking evil! In what way could you possibly be attracted?”
“I am attracted to their decadence,” growled Yoon, and licked his lips. “Now let us move on.”
They came into a long, low chamber. Huge iron posts had been fitted at intervals, each the size of an oak tree trunk. These formed the cornerstones of the prison cells. Between each post was a wall of iron, several feet thick and set on massive, broad wheels dropped in grooves which had been carved through stone.
Beyond, in the cells, came various snarls and crashes. There also came the clanking of huge chains.
“You there,” said Yoon, pointing to one guard. “Go and pull that lever.” He gestured to a huge iron staff, inserted into the wall alongside many others.
The guard stared, helplessly.
“But, but what will happen when I do?”
“If you do not, your head shall suddenly detach from your body,” said King Yoon with a grin, but it was a toothy grin, like an exhumed skull, not the happy smile of a reigning monarch.
The guard stumbled forward, and he suddenly seemed less than threatening, and more like a child charged with a dangerous task.
He looked around.
Everybody stared at him, tense with apprehension.
Beyond the steel wall, something raged.
He pulled the lever, and leapt back as if something might jump out and snap off his head. It was an amazing intuition, for the creature that was revealed was nothing less than an abomination.
It was part horse. Part man. But there, any likeness to either of the host creatures ended.
The splice, one of Orlana the Changer’s special creatures, special pets, special killers, was bigger than a horse, although of different proportions. It was vast, uneven, stocky, with bulging lumps of muscle distending from its torso, seemingly at
random – as if flesh and bone had been broken in places and forced back together again under a blind surgeon’s scalpel. It was a rich black, glossy, like the finest stallion, and yet the uneven skin was patched with horse hair in segments, as if it had suffered burns from a fire. It hobbled forward on four legs, but the front left did not touch the ground, for it was too short, and bent forwards at a deviant angle giving the creature an irregular, if terrifying, gait.
The beast suddenly leapt, screaming in a high-pitched voice like that of a woman, although without any discernible clarity of words.
There was a clanging and clanking, and the splice was yanked backwards at the end-trajectory of its leap by the thigh-thick chain which restrained it.
Yoon stepped forward. He was panting.
Everybody else stepped backwards.
“Kneel!” he commanded, and licked his lips in nervous pleasure, as he admired the heavily muscled body, thick horse legs with twisted, iron hooves, uneven chest, up to the head, the great misshapen head that was too large to be right, too twisted and elongated to be living. The head was a broken horse skull, long and pointed, but with the mouth pulled back, jacked open way too far, showing huge yellowed fangs oozing blood and pus and saliva. The eyes were uneven on the head, one green, one blood red and nearly double the size, and from the top of the bent skull curved a jagged horn, easily the length of a short sword and fashioned from yellowed bone.
The splice observed Yoon, and its lips quivered, black and yellow against fangs which could rip his head clean off.
Yoon moved forward.
Zandbar hissed, “Nooo!”
Yoon was within the perimeter of the chain now, which lay slack on the floor. The splice looked down at its tether, then up again at Yoon, eyes bulging, throat gulping, as if this vast, distorted creature was starved of oxygen.
It knew. It realised.
It could snap Yoon like a twig.
“Sit down,” said Yoon, and his voice was gentle, almost a song, which surprised both Zandbar and Chanduquar. They had never heard Yoon utter such words. Even more surprisingly, the great, tufted monster obeyed and dropped to its front knees, then its rear haunches collapsed, and the head came up, quivering, eyes searching, and it fixed on Yoon and the head tilted, and it…
