The Grim Company tgt-1

by Luke Scull

  He reeled away in agony, turning back just in time to catch a headbutt to the mouth. He fell back against a bench and spat out a tooth, bloody drool spraying everywhere. The world spun.

  The Augmentor’s face leered into view above him. It was covered in red spots, pus-filled cysts already beginning to form. ‘Like to fight dirty? You’re not the only one. I’m gonna enjoy this; take my time.’

  The scimitar inched down towards his face. Cole watched it descend with growing horror. As it got closer he could see that the blade was vibrating, the motion so fast it was almost imperceptible. He tried to kick out, but the Augmentor had his legs pinned. All he could do was bring Magebane across to try and cover his body — a futile gesture.

  His tormentor laughed. ‘Think that will protect you? This scimitar can cut through anything, boy. Even your enchanted pigsticker.’ With a grin, the Augmentor brought his weapon down, lowered the edge against Magebane.

  There was an explosion of white light and a noise like a horse screaming its death cry. Redness filled Cole’s vision. Clashing kaleidoscopes of colour danced across his eyes, but he could just make out his opponent’s scimitar spinning wildly away across the marble floor. He shook his head desperately. It seemed to take an eternity to clear.

  He heard a wet gasping noise from just ahead of him. The Augmentor was lying face down. His right arm and leg rested six feet away on the floor like a couple of tasty morsels thrown to a dog. The sinewy stumps just below the man’s shoulder and above his knee squirted fresh blood with every beat of his heart, turning the marble wet and slippery.

  The Augmentor’s ruined scimitar lay nearby. The weapon’s glow was gone and the curved blade was bent out of shape. In sudden panic Cole glanced at Magebane. It appeared to be unharmed, the magical radiance that surrounded it stronger than ever.

  There was something else, another sound besides the dying man’s gasps. He closed his eyes and concentrated.

  Tick tock tick tock.

  With a growing sense of dread, Cole reached down over the maimed Augmentor and untied the pouch hanging from his belt. He reached in and pulled out Garrett’s pocket watch.

  Time seemed to stand still.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ He grabbed the Augmentor’s face and turned it towards him. ‘Where? Tell me!’

  ‘Why?’ the maimed man breathed.

  ‘It belongs to someone very dear to me.’

  There was no reply except for an ugly chuckle. Cole turned the fallen Augmentor onto his back, heedless of the blood spurting up his trousers. ‘Tell me where you got this!’ he demanded again.

  The Augmentor’s sightless eyes stared at the ceiling, his mouth frozen in a permanent death grin. His chest had stopped moving.

  Panic seized Cole. He had tried to leave a message several times while at the militia camp but had not received any response. He wanted to flee the Obelisk, to run through the city to Garrett’s estate and the temple at the Hook and anywhere else his foster father might be found.

  Instead he gripped the pocket watch tightly, trying to calm himself as he watched the hand tick slowly around the face. Whatever had happened to his mentor, Garrett would want him to see this through.

  With a deep breath, he climbed the stairs to Salazar’s personal chambers.

  As it turned out, the top two levels of the tower had been forcibly merged into one. The ceiling above the sixth floor had caved in during the magical assault on the tower, leaving a sloping pile of rubble to form a makeshift staircase. Cole found no sign of Salazar or anyone else on the wasted remnants of the sixth floor, so he sheathed Magebane and began climbing towards the guest quarters above him. Rock and debris shifted beneath his feet. The air was cooler now, and he could feel a light breeze brushing against his cheek.

  Grunting, Cole hauled himself up over the edge of the shattered ceiling and onto the seventh floor. Just ahead of him the Obelisk’s roof had been split open, revealing a blue sky overhead. Smoke and dust still drifted through the air, obscuring his view. It seemed to be blowing from the east, so he plunged into it, pulling up his hood to shield his face and mouth. Either side of him collapsed rooms poured their destroyed contents across his path. He was forced to climb over the wreckage of four-poster beds, ornate dressers, grandiose armoires that had spilled their contents everywhere. His boots trampled silk gowns and gold-trimmed jackets into the filthy debris as he clambered across them. The wind grew stronger and the dust began to clear…

  The Tyrant of Dorminia bled into view.

  The Magelord was gazing out at the city, his back to Cole, scarlet robes and cloak fluttering out behind him.

  He edged closer, as silent as a ghost. The yards closed between them. Fifteen. Ten. Five. He reached under his own cloak, placed a hand on Magebane’s hilt. This was it. One thrust and it would all be over.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  He froze. Salazar didn’t turn around. The Magelord’s voice was calm, measured. Cole’s mind raced. Should he charge, stick the bastard before he had the chance to react?

  ‘The White Lady sent you, did she not? A knife in the back. That was always her style.’

  Salazar turned to face him.

  Cole stared from beneath his hood. The most powerful man in the north seemed small up close. Small and very ancient. His skin was sagging and lined with wrinkles and he leaned on a cane, apparently unable to carry the weight of his withered body without support.

  Tick tock tick tock.

  The instrument at his belt, Garrett’s timepiece, reminded him of the folly of judging this man by his wretched appearance. He was a despot. A Godkiller. A Magelord.

  ‘I’m not here because of the White Lady,’ Cole said grimly. ‘I’m here because of the people of Dorminia. I’m here because of what you did to me.’

  Salazar raised an eyebrow. ‘And what have I done to upset you, young man?’

  Cole threw back his hood. ‘You had my father killed.’

  The Magelord didn’t react. He simply stared at him. His eyes were sunk so far back in their sockets he looked as if he hadn’t slept in months. ‘Illarius,’ he said eventually. The ancient voice betrayed no emotion.

  ‘Illarius Cole,’ repeated the young Shard. ‘A hero. A hero you murdered for daring to stand against you.’

  The Tyrant of Dorminia cocked his wizened head slightly. ‘Is that what they told you?’ he asked softly.

  Cole could feel the anger rising within him. ‘That’s the truth! Don’t try and manipulate me. Your magic won’t work. My father’s legacy protects me.’

  For the first time he saw a flicker of emotion on Salazar’s face. ‘You have Magebane, then.’

  Triumph flooded Cole. He tore the glowing dagger free of its sheath and brandished it before him. ‘Yes. A hero’s weapon. And it will be your death.’

  That pronouncement wasn’t met with the sudden fear he expected. Instead the Magelord closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again he looked tired. So very tired. ‘You are aware Magebane’s power functions only for you. Did you ever question why?’

  Cole shrugged. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘The weapon you hold is tied to your father’s blood, which you alone share. It is bondmagic.’

  ‘No — that’s not true!’ Cole felt anger take hold. Bondmagic was something only Augmentors used.

  Salazar raised the thin cane on which he leaned and pointed it at Magebane. ‘The blade is an alloy of unique potency. Abyssium is rarer than dragon’s teeth.’ He lowered the cane and leaned on it once more. ‘The process of enchanting the weapon was complicated. It took me ten days spent in isolation. It is perhaps my finest work.’

  Cole’s mouth dropped open as the implications of what he was hearing sank in. ‘You created Magebane?’ he asked in astonishment.

  Salazar nodded. ‘After a cabal of wizards attempted to have me assassinated, I decided the city must be purged of those with the gift.’ The tyrant sighed and shook his head. ‘It was not an easy decisio
n. There was a time when I defied the very gods to protect my brothers and sisters from persecution.’

  ‘What does the Culling have to do with my father?’ Even as he asked the question, Cole could feel cold dread worming its way into his heart.

  The ruler of Dorminia raised an age-spotted hand to stroke absently at his drooping moustache. ‘Illarius was a man of many qualities. Loyal. Reliable. Ruthless. He alone I deemed fitting of the weapon you hold. He served me well as an Augmentor for many years.’

  My father… an Augmentor? One of Salazar’s killers? Cole wanted nothing more than to plunge his dagger into the wizard before more lies could spill from his mouth. ‘You’re lying!’ he shouted. ‘My father was a rebel leader! Everyone knows that!’

  ‘Do they? How many men and women in the street, when stopped and asked, have heard the name Illarius Cole?’

  Despite his rage, Cole paused to consider this. Only the older Shards, it seemed, had ever mentioned his father: Garrett, and Remy and Vicard, on occasion. They had never been very effusive on the subject. But why would Garrett and the rest lie to him? Salazar’s trying to trick me into letting my guard down.

  ‘If he truly did serve you, why have him killed?’ Cole shot back, desperately hoping he had found a fatal flaw in the Magelord’s argument.

  ‘The abyssium that I used to forge Magebane did not react quite as expected to the binding spell. It left me… vulnerable.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Cole, now genuinely confused.

  ‘The bondmagic possessed by my Augmentors should remain bound to me. Yet I had no control over Magebane. I could not sense its presence, or that of its wielder. I could not siphon from it. Most troubling of all, I could not sever the weapon’s link to Illarius when it had fulfilled its purpose.’ He sighed, and there was a hint of regret in his voice. ‘It pained me to order his death. There was simply no alternative. Not after witnessing his efficacy during the Culling. The threat was too great.’

  Cole wanted to refute that cold logic, ridicule the words as a pack of lies. He couldn’t, and so he played the last card he possessed. ‘My mother would never marry an Augmentor!’ he spat. ‘She was a good woman.’ Garrett had always told him so.

  Salazar was silent for a time. ‘The Illarius Cole I knew never married,’ he said evenly, without humour or malice. ‘His son was begat on a whore.’

  His son was begat on a whore.

  Cole took a step towards Salazar. ‘My mother was named Sophia, you lying bastard! She was the daughter of a shipwright. We had a house on-’

  ‘-on Leviathan Walk just north of the harbour. Yes, I recall. I had offered him an estate in the Noble Quarter. Illarius was never much for ostentation.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Sophia… An exotic name. The kind a harlot would choose.’

  Cole’s world was threatening to collapse around him. It all made sense now. The story about his father being a hero. His mother dying in childbirth. The false legacy he held in his hand, a few feet from Salazar’s wrinkled old neck. Lies. All lies.

  He stared out past the Magelord, towards the fierce fighting that still raged far below them in the distance, and came within a whisker of tossing Magebane over the edge of the tower. What was the point? He wasn’t the hero they thought he was. He was a fraud. No better than Isaac. And Sasha had probably known it all along, which is why she had rejected him.

  Tick tock tick tock. He reached down, pulled out Garrett’s pocket watch. His foster father had lied to him as well. He had known the truth. He had known that Davarus was the bastard offspring of a murdering Augmentor and a whore.

  He stared down at the city again. Far in the distance he could just about see the old merchant’s estate west of the river. He had spent much of his time there, growing up. Despite his parentage, Garrett had taken him in. Offered him a home. Treated him like his very own son.

  He swallowed the lump in his throat. Garrett had lied to protect him, he realized. Lied only because he didn’t want to see him hurt.

  Tick tock tick tock.

  He shifted Magebane slightly, brought his hand a fraction closer to Salazar. ‘We can’t change who our parents are,’ he said slowly. ‘But we can decide who we want to be. A chance you’ve denied to countless innocent people.’

  Salazar stared back, unafraid. ‘I have always done what I thought necessary. The longer one lives, the more one understands that there is no inherent goodness in the world.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, and Cole was shocked to see wetness glistening on the wrinkled skin beneath those sunken sockets. ‘My daughter’s heart was the purest I have ever known. If good ever really existed, it was within her. And the Inquisition burned her alive.’

  Cole stared back, too surprised to speak.

  ‘I punished all those responsible. I erected this city and named it in her honour. I planted her favourite tree, but even that was desecrated.’

  Cole remembered the Eternal Tree which once had stood in Verdisa Park. He recalled the urn down in the Stasiseum. The name that was engraved there. Dorminia.

  ‘You are not the first to stand here today and judge me,’ the Magelord continued. He drew himself up to his full height then, straightened his robes and wiped the tears from his face. The momentary weakness was gone, and he was once again the formidable Tyrant of Dorminia. ‘I would have tried to kill the other — but even at full strength I might not have succeeded. And I would not give that selfrighteous bastard the satisfaction of witnessing my failure.’

  There was a moment of deathly silence — and then Salazar raised one wasted hand. ‘So. You wish to be a hero? Let us see if you have what it takes.’

  Cole gasped as Magebane began to throb in his palm. Almost instantly it was boiling hot, burning through his glove to sear the flesh beneath.

  He was across to the Magelord in an instant.

  Gasping from the pain, still clutching Garrett’s pocket watch in his other hand, he plunged the glowing dagger through those scarlet robes and deep into the withered body underneath.

  Salazar’s arm wavered and then flopped down to dangle by his side. Magebane’s hilt cooled almost instantly as the Magelord’s magic sputtered and died. The killer of gods, the most powerful man in the north, began to sag.

  Cole held him up, staring into the wizard’s eyes. He was shocked to find that he weighed less than a child. ‘Why?’ he asked quietly. ‘You had the power to change the world for the better. Why didn’t you?’

  The Tyrant of Dorminia sighed softly. Cole had expected Salazar to die screaming and cursing his name, but the Magelord appeared peaceful. Almost content. His voice was a bubbling whisper.

  ‘Things… rarely go as we hope they might. I once thought to save humanity from the gods…’ He coughed suddenly, blood bubbling around his mouth to stain his beard and moustache the same colour as his robes. ‘I did not realize humanity needed the gods more than they needed us. I was blinded by hatred.’

  ‘And Shadowport? Was hate the reason you murdered an entire city?’

  ‘“Hate”…’ the dying Magelord repeated, his voice now so weak Cole could barely hear it. ‘That was not hate. That was… compassion.’

  Compassion? That made no sense. ‘What do you mean?’ he was about to ask, but Salazar’s breathing had stopped. There was no sound but the whistling of the wind and the tick tock tick tock of the timepiece in his hand.

  The Magelord shuddered once. His fading gaze settled on the pocket watch. ‘Time… to die…’ he whispered.

  His eyes closed one final time.

  Cole slid Magebane free of Salazar’s body. He was about to lower the corpse to the ground when suddenly it began to glow. He jerked backwards as it floated up and drifted out of the side of the tower, rising higher and higher, above even the Obelisk itself.

  Without warning, blinding rays of golden light burst from the dead Magelord’s eyes and mouth. Cole shielded his own eyes as the incandescent rays shot upwards — a stream of divine energy fleeing its host to return to the heavens whence it
was stolen.

  The spectacle continued for two or three minutes before the light died. Salazar jerked once when the last golden motes had finally faded. Then the Tyrant of Dorminia began to fall, tumbling end over end.

  The body struck the courtyard hundreds of feet below and burst apart.

  The Wolf

  Sasha gasped and reached down to her side, probing at the four-inch sliver of wood stuck there. Her fingers came away bloody. A grunt ahead snapped her attention back to the fighting raging ahead of her, and before she knew it a Watchman was grappling her to the ground, his hands closing around her throat. She grabbed hold of his fingers, tried to prise them away. He was too strong. She scratched at him, attempted to bite his face, but he laughed at her clumsy efforts and squeezed harder.

  She could see her short sword lying on the trampled turf. She stretched for it, every muscle in her arm straining, but it was just out of reach. She tried to scream, but the crushing hands around her throat turned her cry into a pathetic squeak.

  She stared up at the leering face above her. The man’s rancid breath filled her nostrils. Her vision began to blur. Her assailant’s cruel eyes seemed to fill her world, sweat glistening off a nose cratered with blackheads. ‘Die, bitch,’ he panted.

  Her right hand closed around the shield fragment protruding from her waist. With a wild effort, she wrenched it free. The pain was excruciating, but she had no time to indulge it; her strength was almost spent. Slowly, almost dreamily, as if she were detached from everything going on around her, she raised her arm from the ground and drove the makeshift dagger through her would-be killer’s eye.

  His scream was hideous. The pressure around her windpipe evaporated as her attacker flung his hands up to his face and reeled away from her. She choked in air, rolled over and pushed herself to her feet. Her legs almost gave away beneath her and she stumbled, but she did not fall. With deliberate care she picked her sword up off the ground.