The Grim Company: 1

by Luke Scull

  ‘Enough,’ Barandas commanded. Garmond let the corpse drop to the floor. The other brother twitched once nearby, and then lay still.

  Taking stock of the situation, Barandas saw that Legwynd had got the better of the rebel he’d been fighting. Bodies were strewn everywhere. He counted eight corpses. ‘Do we have their leader?’ he asked.

  ‘Over here, Commandant,’ Thurbal shouted. Barandas walked over to the shadowy alcove where his fellow Augmentor was waiting. He stared down at the grisly sight on the floor. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded.

  Thurbal gave an insolent shrug. ‘I thought he might try to make a run for it,’ he said, ‘so I cut off his legs. Then he tried to pull a crossbow on me, so I cut off his arms.’

  The twitching mess of flesh at his feet moaned weakly. With the amount of blood he’d already lost, it was a miracle the rebel leader still lived. He was trying to say something, red froth spilling from his mouth down over his double chin. ‘I can’t understand you,’ Barandas said. He put his ear close to the man’s mouth.

  ‘Who…’ he croaked weakly. ‘Who betrayed us?’

  Barandas shook his head. ‘It’s not important now. I regret what this man did to you, but you knew the price of treason. Go to your peace now.’ With those words, he placed the edge of his sword against the rebel’s fleshy neck and slit his throat.

  He glared at Thurbal. ‘You and I will have words. Your conduct is unacceptable.’ He frowned suddenly. He could hear a faint ticking noise. He raised a questioning eyebrow, but his surly grey-haired colleague pointedly ignored him.

  Before Barandas could press him further, a glint near the dead man’s severed leg suddenly caught his eye. It was a small crystal, likely quartz, of a pretty green hue. Like Lena’s eyes, he thought. It was slightly smudged with ash, as if it had been in a fire. He rubbed the grime away and put the stone inside one of the pouches hanging at his belt.

  There was a slight sensation of wind brushing against his face and suddenly Legwynd was standing next to him. ‘No sign of anyone else alive,’ said the cherub-faced killer with a smile. ‘But I found this.’ He thrust a map at Barandas, who took it from his hands. It illustrated Dorminia and the surrounding region in impressive detail. A hastily drawn circle immediately got his attention. It outlined a specific location east of the city.

  ‘The Wailing Rift,’ Barandas muttered under his breath. Nine corpses, none of them female. Our informant said there were twelve. Sudden comprehension dawned. ‘Legwynd,’ he said. ‘You will go to the Wailing Rift immediately. I believe these rebels were plotting to take advantage of our sojourn at the Obelisk.’

  Legwynd grinned and threw a salute. ‘I’ll be there before midday. If I find any rebels at the Rift, they’ll be in for a surprise.’ He patted the daggers at his belt and then sped away almost as fast as the eye could follow.

  Barandas looked around at the temple. He had been born into a godless world, yet the sight of so much bloodshed in this once holy sanctuary made him uneasy.

  ‘Thurbal,’ he commanded. ‘Finish searching this place, and then burn these corpses.’

  It was an unpleasant business, but a man did what was necessary.

  An Unexpected Message

  The depository was a shambles.

  Eremul wheeled his chair slowly forwards, circum-navigating the ruined piles of books and soggy reams of paper that had congealed together, becoming little more than clumps of worthless pulp. A soft squelching noise accompanied his slow circuit of the ruined archives. Most of the water had retreated back into the harbour, but the carpeted floor of the depository remained flooded.

  He slumped in his chair. The project he had worked on for the last thirteen years was in danger of becoming a literal washout. Thirteen years. That was how long he had persisted in this farce, trying to build some wretched facsimile of a life for himself after his mutilation and exile from the Obelisk. The depository had been a welcome diversion, something to take his mind off the truth of his wretched existence.

  Eremul fought back the urge to wheel himself out into the streets and rain fiery death down on anyone stupid enough to wander within his immediate vicinity. Why not go out in a blaze of fury? Why not give the slack-jawed fools a taste of the shit they had so gleefully flung at him over the years?

  Come, one and all! Come and gawk at the legless cripple. Go ahead. It’s not as if I’m a real person, after all.

  The answer to his own question was, of course, staring him in the face. To abuse the gift of magic would make him no better than that monstrous shitstain Salazar – the bastard who had torn his life apart and taken his legs in the process. And what the Magelord had done to him was but a speck of dust compared with the avalanche of horror that was his latest crime.

  The Tyrant of Dorminia had dropped a billion tons of water on a living city and instantly created the biggest mass graveyard since the Godswar five centuries past. Forty thousand men, women and children had died in an instant. One second they were alive; the next they were gone. All those lives, extinguished with the same callous lack of regard a farmer might show for an ant’s nest as he drowned it in boiling water.

  The ineffable wrongness of that act had shocked Eremul in a way he had not thought possible. That any man should have the audacity, much less the capacity, to enact such judgement on so many unknowing souls… why, it would be an affront to the gods, if the gods weren’t already dead.

  What use for boundaries, when a man has already cast down his makers? Salazar and the other Magelords know nothing of what it means to be human. They forfeited that right long ago.

  The destruction of the City of Shades had caused ripples that would be felt for a long time to come. The most immediate was the tsunami that had surged north across the Broken Sea, hitting Dorminia earlier that morning. It had lost most of its energy by the time it reached the harbour, but even so it had destroyed several of the city’s battered fleet and flooded the docks as far north as the Tyrant’s Road. The homes, shops and taverns that clustered along the harbour had been damaged, some irreparably, and an entire community of Dorminia’s poorest families had simply been washed away, along with the ramshackle huts that had sheltered them.

  And what of brave Isaac and his companions, trapped out on the water?

  Eremul couldn’t help but feel a certain amusement at the irony of the situation. The enchantment he had placed on the cutter guarded it against capsizing, but he had no idea how the boat would fare in the grip of a tsunami. Would it be dashed against the coast? Would its passengers tumble out and drown in the hungry waters of Deadman’s Channel before it hit the rocks?

  Much as he hated to admit it, Eremul hoped neither was the case. He needed his assistant. Why, his arms were already starting to ache from the effort of wheeling around the cumbersome contraption Isaac had designed for him. If only he could float up off his chair and drift serenely through the air, like a noble genie riding an invisible steed from the stables of the heavens themselves.

  Alas, that was the stuff of fairy tales and Magelords. His own powers didn’t extend to being able to wipe his own arse effectively, and Creator knows he’d tried. No, if you wanted a party trick, some minor deceit or frippery to amuse the children, the Halfmage was the man for the job. Anything more substantial required a real wizard.

  During his lowest moments – which tended to occur roughly four times on any given night – Eremul had pondered why it was that, in spite of the terrible suffering he had endured, his magic remained so pitifully weak. Surely losing his legs meant he should be compensated in other ways? If reality worked the same way as those awful stories he kept buried in the depository, he ought to wield power to rival the mightiest Magelords.

  The truth was a very different matter. It seemed the Creator had decreed that if Eremul was to be a man, he would be the most pitiful of men; and if he was to be a mage, he would be the most pitiful of mages. The injustice of it all made him snigger for a second, until the strain set his haemorrhoids
to throbbing once again. He shifted around on his chair, searching in vain for a position that would ease the discomfort. Isaac possessed an ointment that helped considerably when applied, but it seemed the bastard had taken it with him – most likely out of spite.

  A fine way to reward years of gainful employment. In his experience, if a man extended a hand to you, it was probably intended as a distraction while he cudgelled you around the back of the head with the other. The most sensible solution was, therefore, to ignore the hand altogether.

  Or else simply to steal the cudgel and scramble the bastard’s brains before he did the same to you.

  He stared around at the wreckage of the depository one more time. He needed some air. Pushing open the sodden door of his ruined archive, the Halfmage inhaled deep the smells of his beloved city.

  Saltwater. Rot. Shit? The city’s ageing sewer system had been hit by the deluge and had leaked its contents onto the streets above. The late-afternoon sun had barely begun to dry out the abused lanes of the harbourside sprawl, and the incessant sound of trickling water formed an almost pleasant background to the sight of turds floating down the flooded avenues.

  Ah. Dorminia in all its glory.

  Squelching footsteps suddenly caught his attention. He wheeled his chair around, startling the boy who had been approaching behind him. With his threadbare clothes and grime-covered face, Eremul judged him to be one of the homeless urchins who operated in the city’s markets and ran errands for those too savvy or dangerous to pickpocket. Most of them failed to make it to their adult years, desperation driving them to reckless deeds that earned a public execution. Some, the comely ones, were sold in clandestine auctions to powerful men in government. Their fates were the most tragic of all.

  This particular orphan gawked at him in amazement, the sealed scroll in his grubby hands forgotten as he stared at the man with no legs.

  ‘What is it?’ Eremul asked irritably. He wasn’t in the mood for this.

  ‘Got a message for you, sir,’ the boy responded, his eyes still glued to the spot where most men sprouted additional limbs. Eremul snapped his fingers and the urchin suddenly seemed to remember where he was. He proffered the scroll. ‘A lady asked me to find you and hand you this. Gave me six copper crowns. Said you’d give me the same when I delivered it,’ he added hopefully.

  Eremul narrowed his eyes. ‘What did this lady look like?’ he asked.

  The boy’s brow creased in confusion. ‘I can’t rightly remember,’ he admitted. ‘She was mighty strange. Made me nervous. Olly wanted nothing to do with her, but he’s a pussy.’

  ‘Indeed. Six crowns is more than generous for a brief jaunt across the city. As you can see’ – he pointed to the interior of his ruined depository, then at his ruined body – ‘I’m hardly Gilanthus the fucking Golden himself. Hand me that and run along.’

  ‘Who’s Gilanthus the Golden?’

  Eremul sighed. ‘The Merchant Lord. God of wealth and commerce. Not one of the Primes, and besides, he’s been dead these last five hundred years.’ He reached across and took the scroll from the lad’s unresisting fingers. ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ he added. ‘Piss off.’

  The urchin blinked and suddenly began to cough. He raised his hands to his mouth and hacked into them. Eremul rolled his eyes.

  ‘Ah, that old chestnut,’ he said. ‘Let me just reach into my robes and withdraw a nice big bag of fuck-all to hand to this poor afflicted youth, whose sad lifeless corpse I will surely encounter at some point in the near future…’ He trailed off as the boy continued coughing. He was bent over now, his body convulsing in wild spasms. When the urchin finally recovered enough to stand up straight, Eremul saw that blood flecked his chin and stained his small hands.

  The boy would, in fact, be dead within the year.

  The Halfmage slipped a hand inside one of his pockets and withdrew a silver coin. ‘Buy yourself something to eat,’ he mumbled. ‘And drink plenty of honeyed tea. It will help with the cough.’ He tossed the coin at the lad, who didn’t react quickly enough. It struck him on the side of the head and rolled into a puddle. The urchin picked it up off the muddy ground, his eyes wide with disbelief.

  ‘Thank – thank you,’ the boy stammered, but Eremul had already turned his chair around and wheeled himself back inside the depository, slamming the door shut behind him.

  The scroll was blank. He had known it would be. Only a fool would entrust an unencrypted message to a street urchin. The Crimson Watch was known to employ street rats for the sole purpose of diverting literature meant for the eyes of malcontents and using it to track them down.

  He ran his fingers down the parchment. The enchantment was faint, absolutely undetectable to anyone not skilled in the arts of magic. In this post-Culling era, when mages were about as welcome in Dorminia as the plague, that meant there were precisely two people in the city capable of discerning its message: himself, and a certain genocidal Magelord.

  Muttering an incantation, Eremul summoned forth the latent energy that hummed within him. Every wizard was born with a certain capacity for the harnessing of magic. Salazar and the other Magelords possessed a veritable ocean of power to draw from. For Eremul, it was more like a puddle. Raw magic – the essence of the gods – could be siphoned to replenish or augment a wizard’s strength, but it was consumed by the process. Without such external help, a wizard was restricted to the limits of the power they were born with. While that tended to increase with age, the speed with which it recovered once spent slowed at a similar rate.

  Of course, Salazar and the other Magelords controlled the distribution of raw magic with an iron grip. Already possessed of power that dwarfed mortal wizards, they widened the gap further still by maintaining exclusive access to the corpses of the gods.

  Magic was fading from the world, and as soon as the last divine corpse was sucked dry, there would be nothing left, unless further discoveries like that of the Celestial Isles were made. The murder of the gods had broken something fundamental in the world: the land was slowly dying, refusing to rejuvenate itself as it had prior to the Godswar.

  Eremul finished his evocation and then waited. Slowly but surely, spidery words of glowing white energy seeped up from the blank page to float a fraction of an inch above the parchment. The message was starkly simple: Attend us at the abandoned lighthouse north of the harbour two nights from now. Be there at midnight precisely. Do not be late.

  And that was it. Eremul hissed in frustration. The lighthouse in question was a good mile to the north, situated on top of a large bluff overlooking the harbour. It was an uphill slog most of the way. He hoped Isaac had returned by then.

  The cryptic note bore all the hallmarks of the enigmatic individual whose attention he had been seeking for many months now.

  The White Lady.

  And if there was one individual in the Trine capable of deposing the Tyrant of Dorminia, it was the enigmatic Magelord of Thelassa.

  No Brother of Mine

  He could hear footsteps. Torchlight flared, and it seemed to burn as brightly as the sun. He squeezed his eyes shut immediately, blinking away tears and the crust accumulated from countless days spent in impenetrable darkness. A harsh voice reached his ears.

  ‘The Sword of the North. Huh. That’s a fancy fucking title for a man as wretched as this old greybeard.’

  The footsteps slowed. Sounded like three of them, though he couldn’t be sure. Another voice.

  ‘He ain’t seen the outside of that cage for nigh on a year. It’s a wonder he ain’t as mad as a wolverine.’

  Silence. One of the men coughed. He opened one eye a fraction. How long had it been since his last meal?

  The first voice again. ‘Fucker’s awake. Listen up, Kayne. The Shaman wants you brought to the Great Lodge. Guess who the Brethren found holed up in a cave up in the Devil’s Spine?’

  Sudden terror. Had they discovered her? He wanted to scream. Bracing himself on the fouled floor of his prison, he pushed himself up, wil
ling his atrophied muscles into life. The weeping sores covering his body chafed agonizingly with his every movement. He didn’t care. He squeezed the bars of the cage, trying desperately to force them. They didn’t move an inch. He remembered exhausting himself attempting to escape when he’d first been imprisoned. He had no chance now, not after a year of wasting away, yet he grunted and redoubled his efforts.

  The harsh voice again, this time amused. ‘That got your attention. Your wife. What’s her name, Mhaira? She did well, evading the Brethren for all this time. And she ain’t a young thing either, though that didn’t stop the Butcher having his sport.’

  His teeth ground together. His eyes felt as if they were going to explode and he tasted blood. Still the bars wouldn’t budge.

  A third voice, this one known to him. ‘That’s enough. Let’s just get the cage on the platform.’

  He stopped struggling. Stared at the speaker, met his eyes. Saw shame there. Shame and regret.

  ‘My son?’ he managed. His voice cracked; it sounded like a foreign thing to his ears after all this time. ‘Where is my son?’

  The man who was known to him looked down at the ground. ‘You’ll learn soon enough,’ he said, and his tone was apologetic. ‘Don’t struggle, Kayne. You can’t change what’s coming.’

  He sank back to the floor of his prison. Covered his face with his hands. He’d suffer a thousand agonies, embrace an eternity of torment for the chance to avert the atrocity he knew would be committed at the Great Lodge.

  But it was no good. He couldn’t change what was coming.

  ‘Kayne.’

  The rasping voice dragged him awake and into a world full of misery. His body hurt all over. He opened his eyes to be confronted by the unpleasant sight of Jerek’s scowling visage staring down at him. The Wolf had a few bumps and bruises but otherwise appeared unscathed.