by Luke Scull
Sumnian faces turned to stare at her. Some laughed while others gestured obscenities. She ignored them, crossed the avenue and began pushing her way through the soldiers until she finally caught sight of the Darkson again.
Only a few more steps…
There was the sensation of air brushing against her cheek and then one of the White Lady’s handmaidens suddenly blocked the way. ‘Go no further,’ the pale woman ordered in her monotone voice.
Sasha stared boldly back. She knew the handmaiden could tear her apart in an instant if she chose, but the blackness was rising, despair devouring her fear and driving her onwards. ‘I need to speak with that man.’
‘You may not. This is your final warning.’
Her teeth ground together. She stared daggers at the pale woman. She wished she were Brodar Kayne or Jerek the Wolf, so that she might cleave the thing apart. She wished she were a wizard like Brianna or the Halfmage, so that she might obliterate it in a burst of magic. But she wasn’t any of those things.
She was just a girl.
Lyressa looked up from cleaning glasses as Sasha stumbled through the door of the Lonely Siren. The proprietress of the inn was a kindly woman heavy with child. Sasha felt a moment of guilt as she elbowed past her towards the stairs, but it quickly shrivelled and died. Nothing mattered, not the words that spilled from Lyressa’s mouth, words that barely registered, or the woman’s angry expression. The only thing that mattered was that all-consuming need.
She took the creaking steps two at a time. They were wooden; the entire building was constructed from timber rather than the white marble for which Thelassa was famous. The Siren was the cheapest inn the sisters had been able to find, located in seemingly the only part of the city that smelled like a big city ought to.
Just then Sasha couldn’t have cared less if the whole place had reeked of shit. She barged into her room, shielded her eyes against the blinding light of the sun that filtered through the window and hurried across to her bed. She thrust a hand beneath the pillow, searching frantically for the drugs hidden there, the key to the oblivion she craved.
There was a whisper of movement behind her. She felt something break on the back of her head.
And then she was on her back, staring up at the rafters, dancing lights exploding in her vision. A roar began, somewhere far away. It grew louder, until her skull was raging hot fire and a sudden, wet throbbing threatened to burst it apart like a rotten fruit.
‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ Ambryl loomed into view above her. Her sister dangled the bag of green pills in one hand. In the other she held the remnants of the vase she’d just broken over Sasha’s head. She allowed the shards to shower down to the floor, and then she crushed them beneath a booted foot, grinding them deep into the throw rug that covered the empty space in the middle of the room.
‘You hit me,’ Sasha whispered. She blinked furiously, trying to stop the world from spinning.
‘Yes.’ Ambryl knelt down and grabbed a fistful of Sasha’s hair. ‘You promised you would get yourself clean, sister. Swore that you possessed no more narcotics. And yet look what I found hidden in your bed.’ She gave the bag a shake.
‘How… how did you know about them?’
‘You are aware that I served Lord Salazar. That I was an Augmentor for several years. You have no idea of the things I did to protect the city during that time, little sister. I learned to read a lie in a person’s eyes before it left their tongue… often just before the tongue left their mouth. I have maimed and killed and tortured. And I regret nothing, because whoring oneself on the streets gives one a unique perspective on necessity. It is for that reason that I assign to you no blame for your role in Dorminia’s fall. You did what you had to do. But I will warn you one last time: don’t ever lie to me.’
Sasha winced as Ambryl released her grip on her hair. Her sister’s hand came away red with blood. ‘I’m bleeding,’ Sasha said numbly.
‘It’s only a flesh wound. Ask yourself, sister. What would you have done if instead of me lurking in the shadows just then, it had been a man? A man, waiting to force himself on you.’
Sasha didn’t reply. She was beginning to feel faint.
Ambryl stashed the drugs on her person and turned to leave the room. ‘I will dispose of these pills and send Lyressa to clean up this mess. I hope this lesson was worth the cost of that broken vase. We have little enough coin as it is.’
‘Wait,’ Sasha said weakly. Her sister paused near the door. ‘A woman at the market told me about a festival called the Seeding. The White Lady herself will walk the streets. This could be our chance.’
‘Our chance,’ Ambryl echoed.
‘To deliver the Halfmage’s message.’ Sasha didn’t know why she felt so calm. She ought to be furious, aghast that her own sister had just broken a pot over her head. Instead she felt empty.
‘To hell with the Halfmage.’
‘But you said you believed his story!’
‘Oh, I do. He was telling the truth. Or at least what he believed to be the truth.’
‘Then what—’
‘I didn’t come here to deliver a message to the Magelord of this city.’ Ambryl turned to stare back at Sasha, and the expression on her sister’s face was more terrifying than the dead stare of the White Lady’s handmaidens. ‘I came here to kill her.’
Unbroken
Davarus Cole blinked away sweat and attempted to swallow. His throat felt drier than the dust that coated him from head to toe. The pickaxe was heavy in his hands and rubbed painfully against the sores on his palms. He took a shuddering breath and tried to focus on the sheer rock face in front of him. The stone was black and pitted all over, as if some disease in the earth were slowly eating it away.
He craned his neck and stared longingly up at the blue sky peering down through the fissure. The walls were thirty feet high. There was no way out of the pit, not until sundown when the operation would halt for the day and the Mad Dogs would haul the miners out.
It was hard to be certain of the time, but Cole guessed it would be another hour before work ceased and they could all head back to Newharvest. The Indebted and Condemned would each be handed a warm meal and a handful of copper coins; chump change they could spend as they saw fit, though each man was required to return to the dosshouse shortly after the curfew bell or face dire consequences.
Cole had spent his meagre earnings on fresh bandages and salve from the town physician. Though his stomach wound appeared to be healing, it still leaked foul pus when he pushed himself too hard. It was bothering him now.
‘Urgh,’ he said.
‘Easy, Ghost. Don’t let the Mad Dogs see you struggling. Those bastards will cut your throat and call for the corpse-carver before you’re done twitching.’
Smiler flashed a grin as if there was something terribly amusing about the prospect. He had the most perfect set of teeth Cole had ever seen, a mouthful of pearly whites that fitted the rest of his face about as well as a sweet cherry chart served on a bed of horse shit.
‘I need water,’ Cole croaked. The other miners had taken to calling him Ghost, and that was very much what he felt like. Closer to dead than alive. Every day he grew paler and weaker. His hair was more grey than black, now.
‘I’m all out,’ Smiler said. He gave his waterskin a shake to demonstrate. ‘You could ask the retard. Thought the two of you were close.’
Cole frowned and turned to the third man in the pit. Dull Ed was chipping away at the rock with relentless enthusiasm, his face screwed up in concentration as if the act of repeatedly banging a hammer against a wall was a delicate task that required absolute focus. Ed might be lacking in brains but he never seemed to grow tired of the arduous and mind-numbing work.
Cole stared at the waterskin hanging from the big man’s waist and licked his parched lips. ‘May… may I have some of your water?’
The halfwit looked up and his mouth sagged open in confusion. ‘Whuh?’
‘Your water,
Ed. May I have some?’
Ed looked down at his waterskin. His broad face slipped into a sly grin, and Cole sighed, immediately regretting asking the man for a favour. The Condemned transported from the Obelisk’s dungeons were for the most part the kind of men a three-copper whore would cross the street to avoid. Smiler’s eyes held something dark, something even the brightness of his smile couldn’t disguise; Smokes would mutter constantly about his desire to set fire to anyone within his immediate vicinity; Shank had already lived up to his name, proudly boasting of gutting the poor sod Derkin had found face down in the dormitory on the day Cole had awakened from his fever. Dull Ed, however, was different. There was no malice about him, only an endless appetite for juvenile pranks and an unsettling habit of crawling naked under Cole’s blanket in the middle of night, whispering fearfully about monsters hiding under his bed. At first Cole had tried kicking him out, but the halfwit had caused a scene and woken half the dorm and in the end Cole had let him stay. If nothing else, Ed’s lumbering body next to him halved the likelihood of getting stabbed by Shank in the middle of the night.
‘Please, Ed. Just pass me the skin. I’m thirsty.’
The halfwit smiled. ‘Here,’ the big simpleton rumbled. He held out the waterskin.
Cole reached across to take the proffered skin. He felt a sudden burst of charitable feeling towards the big fellow. ‘You know, Ed, I don’t care what the others say about you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re all right—’ He recoiled as a splash of water struck him right in the eye.
‘Hurr hurr!’
‘Cut that out!’ Cole rasped. Despite his outrage he ran his tongue greedily over his lips, lapping up every last drop of water running down his face.
Oblivious to Cole’s anger, Ed gave the waterskin another shake. He wore a huge grin, clearly delighted by the trick he’d just pulled. ‘Hurr hurr!’ he boomed again.
Cole grabbed the waterskin before the halfwit could waste any more of the water. He attempted to wrest it off him, but though Dull Ed had the mind of a child his body was six and a half feet of solid muscle beneath a layer of flab. The two of them lurched around the pit, locked in an ungainly dance, Ed’s laughter loud enough to wake the dead – which in the Blight was a very real risk.
‘Ghost!’ Smiler’s warning caused Cole to look up. Staring down into the pit were a handful of scowling faces.
‘Ed, stop! The Mad Dogs are watching us,’ Cole whispered urgently.
The big man paid him no mind. With another roaring laugh, Ed grabbed him around the wrists and then swung him around, spinning Cole like a doll.
The world seemed to blur. The black walls surrounding him became one long, dark tunnel, Ed’s beaming face at the centre. Cole suddenly recalled his nightmare aboard the ship, floating in an endless void, the yawning maw of a sentient skull-planet waiting to swallow him up—
The vision was interrupted as Smiler inadvertently took one of Cole’s boots right in the face, stumbling back to bump painfully into the side of the pit.
Finally the momentum slowed as Ed decided he had had enough fun for the moment. Big chest heaving, the halfwit set Cole down and proceeded to stagger unsteadily around the pit, a huge smile plastered to his face.
‘The fuck is going on down there?’ bellowed a familiar voice from above. Leather harnesses were lowered into the pit. ‘Get up here! If I have to tell you again, my men will fill you full of quarrels and I’ll send for the corpse-carver to bring you up in pieces.’
‘Good job, shits-for-brains.’ Smiler spat. He had a nasty cut on his face and might have been talking to Cole as much as to Ed. He flashed his teeth, but it was less a beaming smile of happiness and more the snarl of an angry dog about to rip someone’s throat out. ‘You’ve got us into trouble now.’
Cole heaved a weary sigh and grabbed a harness. He couldn’t understand why this kind of thing kept happening to him.
One at a time each of the three men was pulled from the shaft. Cole had to squint against the sudden fury of the red sun overhead as he was dragged out and dumped onto the hard ground. The wasteland that was the Blight stretched out in every direction: tortured black earth where little grew, in places torn open and weeping noxious fumes. The few trees that had managed to put down roots in the area were twisted and sickly things, corrupted by the presence of the dead colossus lying broken beneath the earth.
To the west, Newharvest sprawled like a cancerous growth. Just outside town was the dark outline of the gigantic metal silos in which the magic ore gathered by the miners was deposited at the end of each day.
‘Look at me, bitch.’
Cole tore his gaze from the Blight and towards the even more uninviting sight of Corvac.
The leader of the Mad Dogs and overseer of Newharvest’s mining operation was a wiry little man. What he lacked in size, Corvac made up for with a mean streak a mile wide. That and the kind of demented overconfidence only the unquestioning loyalty of fifty armed thugs could impart.
‘You deaf, bitch? Want me to clean out your ears with my sword?’
Cole shook his head. Ed was still struggling with the straps of his harness, and one of the Mad Dogs helped him out of the device none too gently. ‘Dumb bastard,’ the man muttered. A dozen other Mad Dogs quickly encircled the three miners. They were hard-faced fellows, armed with crossbows and short swords.
Behind Corvac and his Mad Dogs rose the Horn. It towered over them, a monstrous projection of some unearthly black material that seemed to drink in the fading sunlight. From what Cole remembered from Garrett’s history lessons, the body of Tyrannus was said to have exploded when it fell from the heavens and struck earth, the pieces of the dead god scattering to eventually form the Blight. Below the Horn rested the Black Lord’s severed head. Its vile presence enriched the surrounding bedrock with more concentrated magic than anywhere else in the Trine, but it also made the immediate area incredibly dangerous.
Corvac was looking Cole up and down now, his thin lips curling as though he were examining a particularly foul-smelling turd. ‘They call you the Ghost. They say you killed two prisoners aboard the ship that brought you here.’
Cole said nothing. Better to keep silent, in his experience. He had a nasty habit of talking himself into trouble.
‘You ought to be putting in the shift of three men to make up for the two you murdered,’ Corvac continued. ‘You ought to be working your gods-damned arse to the bone.’
The Mad Dog leader swaggered forward and thrust out his chest until he was nose to nose with Cole, who wasn’t a tall man but nonetheless had a good few inches on Corvac. ‘Instead I see you fooling around with the big retard there like it ain’t my nuts you’re busting. Like it ain’t right and proper that murderers and rapists and other scum should pay their debts to society. Let me ask you something.’
‘Yes?’ Cole hazarded.
‘Do I look like a cunt?’
Cole licked his lips. ‘Uh… no?’
‘Then why are you trying to fuck me? No one fucks Corvac!’ The Mad Dog’s voice became a shriek and he sprayed spittle all over Cole’s face. He spun and strolled over to Smiler. ‘You. Are you trying to fuck me?’
‘Me?’ Smiler flashed a puzzled grin. The wrong move.
Corvac lashed out with the hilt of his sword, smashing Smiler right in the face. Blood and broken teeth exploded from the Condemned’s mouth, and Smiler dropped like a stone. ‘You piece of shit,’ Corvac whispered hoarsely. ‘Giving me that queer smile like you’re picturing your dick in my mouth. I told you. No one fucks Corvac! The three of you will pay for your part in this fractious!’
‘Fracas,’ Dull Ed uttered. He hadn’t said a word up until then.
Corvac turned to the halfwit. ‘What did you just say?’ he asked, voice a deadly murmur.
‘Fracas,’ Ed repeated solemnly. ‘You spoke it wrong.’
Corvac was across to him in an instant, his knee driving into Ed’s stomach, sword hilt bludgeoning the big dullard over the skull. Ed hit th
e dirt and then began to sob like a child.
‘You’re calling me stupid? These men hang on every word I say! You’re a cretin who can’t even tie his own bootlaces!’ Corvac aimed a vicious kick at Ed’s head, leaving a scarlet imprint of his boot on the halfwit’s face.
Something stirred inside Cole. ‘Stop hurting him,’ he said in a dry rasp.
The Mad Dog’s eyes narrowed to slits.
‘It was my fault,’ Cole added quickly, scarcely able to believe what he was saying. ‘I’m responsible. If you have to punish anyone, it should be me.’
He didn’t know why he had spoken up. All he knew was that he couldn’t watch Ed get kicked to death. It wasn’t the halfwit’s fault he had the mind of a child.
Corvac made an exaggerated show of pointing at Cole with his short sword and turned to his men. ‘Take a look at this one, lads! Seems we got a genuine hero on our hands!’
‘I’m no hero,’ Cole muttered.
‘You’re a fucking idiot is what you are!’ Corvac sprang at him, the point of his sword aimed straight at Cole’s chest.
A year ago it would have struck home. It was a nice move, a deftly executed killing stroke. He might be a bully but it turned out Corvac knew how to use a sword. Yet he was no Brodar Kayne. Davarus Cole had been trained by the Darkson, the most infamous assassin in the south, a master in the arts of unarmed combat.
He waited until the sword was a foot from his chest and then suddenly he pivoted at the waist, turning so that the steel tip skewered empty air where his body had been but a moment before. Quick as a snake, he grabbed hold of Corvac’s sword arm as the man’s momentum carried him past. A twist and a tug later and he was standing before the Mad Dog leader, Corvac’s own short sword now gripped firmly in his pale and callused hands.
‘You sneaky little bitch!’ Corvac snarled, red-faced with anger or embarrassment or quite possibly both. ‘Men! Kill him!’
Cole watched the crossbows being raised, listened to blades whispering from sheaths. There was a certain dignity in this, he reflected. He would die a good death, sword in hand. Then he saw Derkin watching him with a sad expression, and his calm faltered at the sight of Bessie in the hunchback’s hands. Dignified or not, he didn’t relish the prospect of that huge cleaver going to work on his corpse. All thoughts of a defiant last stand abandoned, he squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the end.
