by T. O. Munro
“Aargh,” he cried out as Xander dragged a knife across his wrist. He could feel the blood leaking profusely across his hand.
“Careful,” Haselrig rebuked the prince. “We don’t want it bleeding too fast. He must be weak not dead when the ceremony climaxes.”
“Then you’d better get on with the ceremony,” the mage suggested.
Marius turned his head, unleashing a wave of dizziness in spite of his prone position. The mage and the antiquary were standing either side of him. Haselrig held in his hand the crescent symbol of the Goddess and was waving it in invocation of a priestly spell. In some recess of his fading consciousness, Marius remembered a rumour of long ago scandal, how the court antiquary was a defrocked priest, denied advancement in the church for an unforgiveable indiscretion.
“This was your ancestor’s mistake my Prince, why he never succeeded,” Haselrig was saying. “There have to be three for the ceremony, and despite his many talents Chirard could not be all three.”
On his other side the mage was also summoning a spell and now Xander loomed over Marius’s helpless form. He wiped the bloodied knife clean on Marius’ shirt. “You are a disgrace to your father,” the dungeon warder muttered with failing breath.
Xander nodded genially. “So he often tells me. Maybe if he hadn’t neither of us would be here now. Think on’t my poor old soldier.”
The ex-priest and the forbidden mage were circling Marius now and the gem rose from its wrappings, hovering above his chest. As the focussed magic poured into it, the great jewel shone and sang, humming with vibrations and within it the dark shadow flickered back and forth at an ever increasing rate. The sharp note of the resonating crystal was deafening, the light blinding and in the midst of it Marius heard Haselrig cry, “now my Prince, strike now.”
Marius looked up helplessly as Xander raised the knife two handed high above the dungeon warden’s chest, high above the spinning levitating jewel. The prince shifted the knife to his right hand and drew the blade across the palm of his own left hand. Marius gasped as a rich stream of regal blood dripped straight down onto the spinning singing humming crystal.
“Enough, get back all of you,” the mage commanded and the three conspirators stepped back away from the spectacle as the gem began to smoke and then exploded in a shower of sand that scoured Marius’s face waking him from the anaemic slumber into which he had all but fallen.
Out of the dust a dark shadow rose. Like smoke it drifted back and forth, growing denser with each moment and then, on a faint intake of breath, the cloud shot inside Marius’s mouth, his nostrils his lungs. It filled him consumed him. Strange things were happening to his body. The rope bindings fell from his hands and feet, he felt himself sit up, though he did not remember thinking it. Hands were raised to his face. They were his, but then they weren’t. His arms withered and blackened before his eyes, skin stretched tight across bone, fingers gnarled into twisted shapes and yet they then flicked with rapid dexterity in a sudden complex gesture.
A wispy cloud of steam appeared infront of his face and condensed into a reflecting surface of increasing clarity. As the image sharpened before him, Marius was horrified to see not his own old careworn features, but a blackened skull, with paperthin skin on fleshless bone. Teeth sat improbably in a gumless mouth and where his eyes had been there were two blood red lights glowing in empty sockets. He would have screamed but his mouth no longer answered to his will. With another flick of his wizened fingers, Marius observed himself dismiss the invoked mirror and turn to face the trembling forms of the prince, the antiquary and the mage.
It was as though watching himself from a great distance. He heard Haselrig stumblingly announce, “welcome oh great Magister, we your servants rejoice in your resurrection. Our names are….”
Already the eyes that Marius could see through but not direct had moved on, gazing around the walls of the cavern, through the walls. His transformed hand waved Haselrig into silence and a hissing sibilant voice emerged from a throat Marius could no longer feel. “Your namessss are not of any consssequence. You have purposssee only in ssssso far asss you can ssserve me. Do sssso well and your rewardsssss will be great. Fail me and eternal ssssuffeering will be your lot.”
Marius could feel a mind inhabiting his own, displacing his consciousness as it had abrogated his control of his own body. He wanted to cry out, to exclaim he was here still, inside this nightmare creature, but the presence within him was too great effortlessly squeezing him out of existence.
Haselrig was struggling to speak again, but the hissing voice quelled him once more. “Thissss issss no place of sssafety for me. There issss much that I musssst know and much that you mussst do, but firsssst let ussss leave this prissson.”
Marius’s dwindling sense of self saw the fingers flicker in yet more magic and then the chamber vanished and reformed a different place. It was smaller, darker with the monster from the gem and the three traitors, but Marius was no longer there.
Part One
Nordag the ogre was not a politician, but he nonetheless held the title and office of Mayor of Woldtag. There had been some ceremony twelve months earlier, led by the Governor. It had been called an election. Ten frightened men had sat around the council table and put their hands up when the Governor told them to. Nordag hadn’t seen the point, but the Governor had said it was important to observe the formalities.
Nordag rather wished the Governor hadn’t bothered or at least chosen someone or something else. He was a fighting ogre, a warrior hardened by single combat and triumphant on the battle field. That was his chosen forum, where clubs and swords had the deciding votes and mouths were for the fearsome battle cries, not mewling arguments about percentage tax returns or decisions on this freehold or that.
Still, Nordag had his way of getting things done. He’d only had to use his club a few times in council meetings to find that people learned to agree with him quickly. It wasn’t that the problems they presented went away, just that they decided they had rather sort it out themselves, than tell Nordag it hadn’t or couldn’t be done. In fact more recently the ten of them, or as it now was eight of them, had become so effective at preventing problems that council meetings were much shorter with far fewer brain aching decisions for Nordag to make. So much so that there was time for recreation every night.
As that thought flickered across his mind, Nordag increased his pace hurrying to his chambers and hoping that the guard captain had made a wise choice. The orc guards at the door, from his own personal platoon, were the strongest tallest broadest of their breed, but Nordag still towered head and shoulders over them. Only the grandeur of the old mayoral palace prevented his head from brushing the ceiling. They came simultaneously to attention, old tribal rivalries held in check by the rigid military discipline of the Governor’s new order. They were soldiers of a disciplined army not members of squabbling gangs. Nordag, grinned contentedly, my how far they had come, and how far they would go.
“Has the Captain been?” Nordag grunted.
The orc on the left nodded straight faced, the one to the right supressed all but the faintest twitch of a grin. Nordag scowled at them. “No interruptions, understand.”
Both nodded, but for added emphasis Nordag warned them, “I see either your faces before dawn and I change their shape, understand.”
Then he pushed his way into the Mayor’s private chambers, closing and barring the door behind him. In prior times the mayors of Woldtag had kept a suite of rooms within the town hall, at the top of the building. The smaller rooms were ill matched to Nordag’s size but the main chamber, in which past incumbents had done their entertaining, served all the ogre’s simple needs. The magnificent dining table made a sturdy bed, piled high with cloth and furs. The balcony with its view over the market square served as an effective latrine and in so doing also discouraged the casual callers and petitioners who might otherwise have ventured into the town hall.
He unclasped the heavy gold broach that held
the cloak around his neck. The cloak had been a gift from one freeholder anxious to ingratiate himself with the new power in Woldtag. It was one of the few garments that matched the ogre’s size and the man had sent his daughter forward to present it. Nordag remembered still her trembling prettiness and the alacrity with which the man had included her with the gift when Nordag made the demand. Another memory brought a twisted smile to Nordag’s lips. There was a slight movement to the pile of furs on the table and the ogre strode towards it with renewed interest.
He savoured the moment as he stood at the foot of the outsized bed, loosening the straps of the battered steel breastplate. He tried to gauge from the quivers in the bed clothes where the captain had hidden this evening’s frightened plaything. He guessed which side just as the metal armour fell silently to the marbled floor. Flinging aside the bedding, he had just a moment to register the oddity of the noiseless clang of metal on stone before he saw her.
She was not the type that the captain normally picked out for him. In a second he saw she was older, just past the end of adolescence as far as he was any judge of human flesh. Taller than most and sinewy, clad in dark shirt and breeches rather than the night shift he expected. Flame red hair spilled across her shoulders and green eyes blazed at him with a defiance rare in someone brought before Mayor Nordag. Rather than lying trembling within the folds of bedding this one crouched on her haunches looking up at him. The final abnormality he had time to notice was that her hands were not bound behind her, but free infront of her. One held a glinting steel dirk and the other fist grasped a crescent talisman.
Then she erupted like one of those amusing jack-in-the-box toys that more astute freeholders had learned to give Nordag as a gift. Driving upwards sword arm outstretched before her, she sprang towards him, driving her blade into his throat even as his mouth gaped open in astonishment. Standing now on the edge of the table her face was level with his chin, her green eyes glaring into his dimming yellow ones.
Nordag struggled to raise his arms, to grab that scrawny neck with his last strength, but she leant back and away, whipping her blade out of his neck with a cruel sideways twist. A gurgling flood of green blood sprayed from his wound as Nordag fell heavily but silently to his knees. Still the whole event was wreathed in unbreakable silence as the ogre’s choking gasps for help remained inaudible even to his own ears. Now she was looking down on him, her face and clothing flecked with his blood, her expression blankly purposeful. His fading vision saw her swing her arm in one last strike across his neck and then the ogre toppled sideways in a silent thump to the floor, a pool of green spreading across the marble.
His killer wasted little time. She wiped the blade clean on the soiled bedding, tucked it into her belt and reached under the table to pull out a carefully coiled rope and grapnel. Then she hurried to the balcony and hooked the grapnel to the balustrade. Outside all was quiet and dark, the curfew well observed by all in Woldtag. She swung a leg over the edge and abseiled quickly down to the street below. A flick of the rope loosened the hook and brought it tumbling down, but before she could move to catch it a figure detached from the shadow of the wall and intercepted its flight a few feet from the ground.
“Well met, my lady,” the newcomer greeted her softly.
She scowled back at him. “What did you do with the girl?” she hissed.
He looked hurt, “I saw her on her way, through the sewage outfall at the east end and pointed her in the direction of home.”
“You were supposed to see her all the way.” Her tone was low but unamused as she briskly re-coiled the rope and flung it over her shoulder.
“I came back for you, my lady.”
“I don’t need your help Kaylan, the girl did.”
He bowed his head at the rebuke, absorbing it with habitual subservience. “Of course, my Lady.”
“And I’ve told you I’m not your lady, not anybody’s lady, not anymore.” She glanced quickly left and right and then jerked a finger towards the shadows around the temple wall. “This way.”
“Yes my…. miss, yes….” He hesitated to speak or to follow, tongue flicking across his lips before he dared to utter her name. “Yes Niarmit,” he whispered when she was just out of earshot.
***
Kimbolt’s fingers drummed nervously on his sword hilt, infected by the contagious anxiety of his master. A few feet infront of him Thren Longsword, Crown Prince of the Salved Kingdom, Castellan of Sturmcairn and Warden of the Barrier blew on frozen fingers and gazed for the fourteenth time at the distant outcrop of rock. “How late are they now, Captain Kimbolt?” he demanded.
“Just above an hour and half, sire.”
“Captain Thackeray, he’s a friend of yours isn’t he.”
“He was already a captain when I was just a common soldier, sire. He taught me a great deal and he’s very experienced.” Kimbolt kept his voice measured, trying to balance his Prince’s fretful anxiety with a calmer reassurance than he actually felt.
Thren thumped his fist on the snow covered parapet. “So why is such an experienced captain bringing his patrol in so late, with less than an hour to sunset?” He swung away from the view west, where the Sun was sinking behind the mountains. “I do not like this.”
“No need to light the beacon yet, Sire.” Kimbolt essayed a light hearted joke, jerking a thumb towards the carefully stacked pile of wood and faggots that filled the central space behind them in this topmost tower of the fortress of Sturmcairn.
Thren met his jest with an incredulous glare and then looked away sharply. He took three strides around the edge of the massive dormant bonfire, turned back to look at Kimbolt, his mouth opening to speak and then shutting as he sought a better form of words. The four beacon sentries stayed stiffly at attention eyes straight ahead despite the palpable anger of their impetuous castellan. Princes might argue with Captains, but it was not good for discipline for common sentries to see it, or at least to acknowledge they had seen it.
At last Thren spoke. “This is no time for humour Captain. Twenty men on foot patrol, eight miles as far as Eadran’s folly and then eight miles back. How long should that take, on a day such as this?”
When Thren waited, glaring, Kimbolt realised it was not a rhetorical question. “Four hours, sire,” he answered. “Five if escorting exiles beyond the barrier.”
Thren snorted. “Aye, and Thackeray had no exiles this time, so an hour and a half overdue. Something has happened.” He shook his head heavily. “Something is not right, by Eadran’s blood I feel it in my bones.”
“I see them, sire,” the western facing sentry exclaimed. Kimbolt and Thren both followed the direction of his outstretched arm. A small line of figures was emerging from behind the overhanging rock where the path turned out of sight en route to Eadran’s folly.
“See, sire, they have an injured man that is the reason for the delay,” Kimbolt called out, for the troop was led by four men bearing a makeshift stretcher and occasionally stumbling as they navigated the uneven path that was the approach to Sturmcairn’s western entrance.
Thren said nothing, he was counting, lips almost silently moving, as the rest of the patrol hove into view. “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty….. twenty one. By the Goddess no!” Again he slammed his fist into the parapet with another cry of, “no!”
“Twenty one?” Kimbolt stammered, trying quickly to check for himself as the returning party gathered for the home straight. “No, it can’t be.”
“Twenty go out, twenty come back,” Thren fumed. “Nobody else returns from beyond the barrier. Exile is exile!”
“Yes, sire, of course sire.”
Kimbolt’s acknowledgement was wasted on empty space, for the Prince had left the platform, bounding down the spiral staircase calling out, “hold the outer gate, let none in!”
***
Niarmit and Kaylan surveyed the stinking mess. The orcs and nomads who had taken over the city had quickly grasped the concept of an open sewer system into which one cast all the
ordure and detritus one wished to dispose of; they had been less swift to realise how to make it work. In days gone by, water from the town aquifer would have been used to flush through the sewage outfalls, but the organisation which had overseen that task had been wiped away along with most of the machinery and bureaucracy of government. The clearing of the channels fell entirely to the mercy of the rain clouds which might occasionally bless them with enough of a downpour to clear away some of the tide of waste. After a few dry days the smell was indescribable. However, the channels were not yet entirely blocked and so afforded the assassins an unguarded escape route. The sewers ran under the thick town walls at four places in culverts wide enough for a person to crawl through. The perimeter’s integrity was maintained by a grill of iron bars half way under the curtain wall. However, there was a gap beneath the bars through which a determined and strong stomached outlaw could pass. Entering the town during daytime had not been difficult, for Kaylan was a master of disguises, but leaving after curfew through guarded gates would not have been so easy and Niarmit had calculated the recent weather would give them a rare opportunity to get in, do the job and get out.
“By the Goddess it reeks, my Lay…. Er… Niarmit,” Kaylan observed.
“Hold your nose and it will soon be done,” Niarmit told him.
“Ladies first?” Kaylan ventured.
Niarmit gave a snort of exasperation and stepped gingerly into the half empty ditch. Kaylan followed her, treading carefully through the sludge filled water. As they neared the wall it became necessary to crawl on all fours, the darkness a blessing in hiding from sight if not scent the nature of the objects that bobbed past them.
At the bars Niarmit did not hesitate. She drew a deep breath, ducked down and pulled herself through scraping her stomach along the bottom of the ditch and then surfacing on the other side to pull in a lungful of precious if fetid air.
