“Be careful what you wish for, little brother—you might not like the answer.”
Bescheiden and Potts fled through the back alleys and narrow passageways of Riddra, keeping to the shadows wherever possible. Once Farrak had captured Kurt and Otto, the necromancer lost interest in the other members of the cohort. The undead warriors went back to guarding the approaches to Three Penny Bridge, leaving the two watchmen free to make their escape. Potts had got the blood out of his eyes, but the raw recruit was still trembling from his brush with death. Bescheiden felt cheated of his destiny. He had come on this mission hoping to find a heroic end for his life. Instead he seemed doomed to survive once more, cursed to carry on with the burden of his guilt.
The watchmen dashed across a street to the Golden Lotus Dreaming House. All they need do was climb down the nearby steps leading to the boat waiting on the water below and they could escape Suiddock. But someone was waiting in the shadows of the drug den, a figure from the past come back to haunt Bescheiden. “Going somewhere?” Woxholt asked as he stepped into their path, the rotting remains of his bulky frame still enough to block their escape. “We have unfinished business.”
Farrak marched up the gangplank and on to the deck of his vessel, Kurt dragged along behind him by two of the undead crew. Once both were on board, the necromancer snapped his fingers and the gangplank retracted itself. Mooring ropes braided from human hair undid themselves from brass rings on the side of Three Penny Bridge, while the ship’s anchors rose up from the depths. Once all was ready, Farrak blew at the sails of skin and they billowed, pulling the ship away from the edge of Suiddock. “My acolytes should have completed their mission in Goudberg by now,” the necromancer announced. “Time I went to collect them. Besides, I tire of southern Marienburg. Let’s see what the view is like from the northern shores of the Rijksweg shall we?”
Kurt could not reply, his voice once more stolen away by Farrak. He hung in the air, an invisible grasp crushing his ribs together, fresh blood still seeping from the wound to his torso. The spell Otto had cast over the cohort was fading at last. Kurt could feel the strength returning to his limbs, but the pain from his wound was increasing too. He had not realised Otto’s incantation had helped dull the hurting, until the side effect was gone.
Satisfied with the course he’d set, Farrak gave his attention back to the prisoner. “Tell me, Captain Schnell, which do you prefer—pleasure or pain?” The necromancer eased the tension in Kurt’s throat, allowing him a voice again.
“Pleasure,” he replied.
Farrak smirked. “You’d be surprised how many say pain. They think it’s a trick question, that asking for pain will spare them suffering somehow. But I’ve no need of such ruses and follies. If it is pleasure you prefer, pleasure you shall have.” He snapped his fingers and Kurt fell to the mighty ship’s deck, the impact cracking two more ribs. The captain cried out in pain, unable to stifle the hurting. “Of course, even pleasure must come at a price,” the necromancer added. He snapped his fingers again and a cabin door opened to reveal a beautiful woman stood inside, a diaphanous gown shimmering round her young, ample curves. “I believe you two know each other?”
Kurt didn’t believe what he was seeing, but he still wanted it to be true. “Sara?”
Sandler approached the acolyte, eyes cast down, his curved sword offered to Farrak’s disciple. “I humbly ask that the undead champion kill me with my own blade.”
“And why should my champion grant you this boon?”
“I shall be your most faithful of servants in death, but ask to leave this life in a manner befitting one of my kind,” the captain said, his head bent forwards in obeisance.
“Your request is denied. My champion has no need of your weapon. But if you must die by that blade, feel free to take your own life.”
“Thank you,” Sandler whispered. He pressed the curved blade against his throat until it drew blood, his eyes closed, his hands trembling.
“End your life, worm. From this moment forth, you shall be my servant.”
Sandler smiled. “I don’t think so.” His blade flashed through the air, decapitating the acolyte. The head bounced away, a howl of fury still on its lips. Sandler wiped his sword clean on the twitching corpse once it had slumped to the floor beside the wooden hatch. “I’m a true disciple of Solkan. Your feeble visions have no effect upon me, fool!”
Belladonna stepped closer to the second acolyte, a dagger clutched behind her back. “One last kiss,” she agreed, preparing to bury the blade in his chest. But the distant howl of the first acolyte betrayed her, Belladonna was unable to stop herself from reacting to the cry. In that instant her quarry stabbed a finger at her face, deep into Belladonna’s right eye socket. She screamed as the acolyte ripped out her eyeball, blood spurting from the wound.
Blinded by pain, Belladonna stabbed at him with all her might, plunging the dagger into his chest and neck—over and over and over. She stabbed him so many times the acolyte’s head was hanging free, just a flap of bloody skin attaching it to his body. Belladonna pulled the knife away and he slumped to the floor, quite dead. But she had paid a heavy price for the victory; his collapsing corpse crushed her lost eyeball.
“I embraced Chaos because it was the truth,” the acolyte whispered at Holismus, his words like the wooing of a lover. “Order, religion, belief—these are placebos for the empty hole in your chest you call a soul, the void in your thoughts that cannot be stilled or made silent. Chaos is the true answer, the only answer to the questions that plagued me, just as they plagued you. Embrace the darkness, become one with Chaos and you shall be rewarded a thousand times upon a thousand times. Join me, little brother.”
Holismus opened his eyes. “Nice speech, very eloquent—it’s just a shame Joost was never that articulate in real life.” He stabbed his stiletto backwards, burying it deep in the acolyte’s chest. The crimson-cloaked figure staggered backwards, dropping the blade he’d been holding at the watchman’s throat. The acolyte stared at the stiletto.
“Is that the best you can do?”
The decomposing remnants of Woxholt lurched at Bescheiden, staggering past Potts. The recruit had fainted, his body surrendering to fear. “You left me to die,” the sergeant slurred. “You trapped me in that tunnel with those mercenaries. You left me to die.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” Bescheiden pleaded.
“There’s always a choice—live or die, kill or be killed.” Woxholt flailed at the watchman, his rotting arm hitting nothing but thin air.
“You’re right, and I chose to live, so you had to die.” Bescheiden sidestepped another lunge, not realising each attack was driving him back into a corner. “But I’ve hated myself ever since. Time and again I’ve tried to trade my life for others. I know I don’t deserve to live, but can my death at least have some meaning?”
“No,” Woxholt thundered, his swinging arm catching Bescheiden in the chest. The weasel-faced watchman flew backwards into the corner, the impact winding him.
“Please,” Bescheiden gasped. “If there’s anything left of the Woxholt I knew—”
“There isn’t,” the dead man hissed, closing his putrefying fingers round the watchman’s neck. “Jan is dead and you killed him!”
Kurt stared at his wife. His mind rebelled against the evidence of his senses, telling the captain what he saw was a vision, an illusion, a hallucination created by Farrak’s dark magic. But Kurt’s heart cried out for Sara, the need to be with her again like a black hole sucking the life from inside him. “Is that you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sara smiled, walking across the deck of Farrak’s vessel toward Kurt, footsteps as gentle as blossom falling from a cherry tree. But an invisible barrier was blocking her path, preventing Sara from getting close to her husband. She glanced at the necromancer. “Can you let him free? Let me touch him —please.”
Farrak nodded, the slightest of gestures banishing the barrier between her and the captive. Sara knelt by Kurt, caressing
his weary face with a soft hand. “You look tired.”
“I am,” he whispered. “Feel as if I haven’t slept properly since…”
“Since I died?”
Kurt couldn’t answer, emotion choking his throat.
Sara leaned closer and kissed him, her lips gentle against his. She giggled, rasping a hand across the stubble on his chin. “You could do with a shave, too.”
Kurt breathed in the scent of her, savouring the moment, never wanting it to end.
“We can be this way forever, if you wish,” she whispered in his ear.
“How?” Kurt asked, looking over her shoulder at the necromancer.
“Pledge yourself to Farrak’s service and he will make you immortal.”
“But this is just a dream. It isn’t real.”
“If it is a dream, you need never wake up. We can be together for all time.”
Kurt wanted to say yes, wanted to lose himself in the fantasy. Every part of him screamed to be with this woman, to throw away the cares and worries and pain of mortal life, to embrace the delusion she was offering. Kurt closed his eyes. “What must I do?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Belladonna staggered through the temple, one hand clamped over the barren, empty hole where her right eye had been, blood seeping from between her fingers. She discovered Holismus on the ground, lying in a pool of his own rotting flesh, the watchman’s arms and legs nothing but gleaming white bones.
A stiletto protruded from his stomach, and another knife was buried in his throat. Holismus opened his lips to speak, but all that came out was a wet gurgle of despair. He stared up at her ruptured face and mouthed two words to Belladonna: I’m sorry.
She knelt beside Holismus while he died, keeping him company to the end.
“Listen to me,” Bescheiden gasped, struggling to speak with the dead sergeant’s hands round his neck. “You were Jan Woxholt once. If any part of him is still alive in you—”
“Stop talking and die,” the living corpse snarled.
“Remember what you were like when you were alive—”
“I said die!” Woxholt tightened his grip, choking the life from Bescheiden.
“Was… r-revenge what… y-you did…?”
The watchman’s eyes rolled up into his head as his body surrendered. Woxholt kept squeezing, but the pressure exerted by his rotting fingers grew less. The pupils of his eyes dilated, and he lurched back a step, letting go of the little watchman.
Bescheiden slid to the ground. After a moment he gasped in a lungful of air, and his eyes opened wide. “W-What happened?”
Woxholt dropped to the cobbles beside him. “You were right… I didn’t believe in revenge… not when I was alive…”
Bescheiden nodded. “You were better than—”
But the words died in his throat, stopped by shock as Potts sliced off Woxholt’s head. The raw recruit kicked the body to one side, a smile of triumph on his face. “I did it,” he beamed. “I saved you from the monster!” Potts pulled Bescheiden to his feet.
The watchman looked at Woxholt’s remains. The body crumbled away to dust, Farrak’s power over the sergeant vanquished forever. “Thank you,” Bescheiden said.
The last of the acolytes found the wooden hatch open, the entrance to the oubliette standing unguarded. It dropped through the square hole, landing nimbly on both feet inside the secret chamber. The skull rested on the pedestal, waiting where it had waited for generation upon generation, hidden away from the world and those who would take it for their own nefarious purposes. The acolyte smiled, triumph in its eyes, and reached out a wizened hand to take the relic.
A blade took the hand, slicing through bone and skin and ligaments. Blood gouted from the stump, creating a crimson aerosol inside the oubliette. The acolyte screamed, enraged. It spun round to face Sandler, the last survivor from the Knights of Purity.
“That must sting a little. You should get it seen to by a healer, maybe an apothecary too. You know how easily diseases can creep into an open wound.”
Sandler lashed out, his sword taking the acolyte’s other hand. Farrak’s emissary howled its pain and fury, as more blood sprayed the oubliette.
“Clumsy me,” Sandler taunted the acolyte. “How ever will you cast your spells without any fingers to direct them? I mean, are apprentice necromancers issued with wands? Even if they were, you’d have to hold your wand between your teeth. Or maybe you could be the first fiend in Farrak’s army to cast a spell with their toes?”
“Enjoy your mockery,” the acolyte snarled. “These taunts shall be your last, fool!”
“I don’t think so,” Sandler replied, drawing back his sword with both hands, preparing himself for the killing blow. “There’s plenty more where they came from.”
The acolyte’s eyes turned black and Sandler felt his arms growing strangely warm. He watched in horror as the skin around his hands blistered away, the flesh and tendons and muscles along his arms withering away until only the bones remained. “Solkan, protect me!” The acolyte’s gaze shifted to Sandler’s face, burning away cheeks and eyes, tongue and tonsils. The captain’s head collapsed in on itself, his brain boiling away in his skull. Sandler died, vanquished by dark magic and his own arrogance.
Satisfied, the acolyte turned back to the pedestal, but Belladonna was in the way. “I’ve already lost an eye today. You want this damn skull, you’d better kill me too.”
“To become immortal, you must first take your own life,” Farrak said, smiling at Kurt. “Free your spirit of its earthly shackles and become one of my resurrected. You’re a brave and brilliant warrior, Captain Schnell. With you as my general, there’s no army my forces could not conquer, no city that could stand against us, no war we could not win.”
“You will become a soldier again,” Sara enthused. “And when you come back home to me as the conquering hero, we will be together forever. We always said our love was immortal, that we would love each other even in death. Now we can.” She kissed him and Kurt responded, unable to stop himself. Sara had been dead for more years than he cared to remember, but her touch, her scent, her beauty, the taste of her lips and the sound of her voice—they all intoxicated him still. He was swept away, utterly lost.
Once Sara had stepped away from him, Kurt went down on one knee before Farrak, pledging his allegiance to the necromancer. “Hand me a weapon, my lord, so I might become your servant for all eternity. I am yours forever and ever.”
Farrak moved a finger and a viciously sharp sword slid across the deck, coming to rest in front of Kurt. “Stab that through your heart, and I shall make you immortal.”
Kurt took up the blade in both hands, holding the point to his chest. “Goodbye, my love,” he whispered to Sara.
“You’re not worthy of my attention,” the acolyte spat, barging Belladonna aside to claim the skull from its resting place on the pedestal. She fell to the oubliette’s floor, her hand finding the curved sword that had tumbled from Sandler’s grasp.
“Don’t brush me aside,” she said, swiping the blade behind the acolyte’s knees. Farrak’s emissary went down, howling in pain and cursing her. Belladonna lashed out again, hacking hunks from her foe’s arms and torso.
The acolyte rolled over and fixed her with that deadly gaze. Belladonna could feel her hands burning. More by instinct than anything else, she held the curved blade in front of her face, the flat surface between her and the acolyte. Farrak’s emissary screamed as the dark magic was reflected back into its face, burning out its black eyes.
The acolyte lashed out with both legs, kicking the sword from Belladonna’s scorched hands and smashing her backwards into the floor. A terrible darkness engulfed her and she knew nothing more.
Kurt lunged at Farrak, swinging his sword through the air in a scything arc. But the necromancer was ready for this attack and caught the blade between his hands. Try as he might, Kurt could not rip the weapon free, nor could he finish what he’d started. The captain was trapped, staring into the fa
ce of oblivion.
“How disappointing,” Farrak sighed. “For a moment I believed the love of a good woman might be enough to turn you.”
“My wife’s dead. Desecrating her memory would never win me over!”
The necromancer closed his right hand round the sword, while opening out his left palm for Kurt to see. “Have you ever witnessed a spell called the hand of dust? It’s a remarkable and terrifying weapon. All I need do is place my hand on an enemy and it causes them to age at a vastly accelerated rate. Not just the enemy, but their possessions too. At its most savage, the hand of dust can age the target by centuries within a second, stealing away their life in the time it takes a heart to beat once, reducing them to dust. Would you like to see a demonstration, Captain Schnell?”
Kurt could not move, his body frozen by the will of Farrak. The necromancer reached out his left hand towards Kurt’s face. “I’ll go easy on you at first. My fingers will steal away one year from your remaining lifespan for every second they touch you. Tell me, Captain Schnell, how old are you at this moment?”
Kurt did not want to speak, but could not resist. “Thirty-three.”
“Then this will come as quite a shock to you,” Farrak smirked.
He slapped his hand over Kurt’s face and the captain screamed.
Inside the oubliette, the acolyte got back to its feet, using the sword from Belladonna’s hand as an impromptu crutch. It hobbled over to the pedestal and snatched the skull. No more defenders leapt out to stop the acolyte, no secret traps were sprung to prevent the theft. The acolyte summoned up a window of blood, using the scarlet pool forming beneath Belladonna’s body to create the portal.
Kurt felt his body dying. His limbs were growing heavier, his muscles sagging and atrophying. Pain lanced across his back, and joints stiffened with each passing moment. It felt to Kurt as if he was being sucked dry, his essence draining away from him. Still Farrak kept his hand pressed to Kurt’s face, stealing another year and another.
[Marienburg 02] - A Massacre in Marienburg Page 31
