A Moment of Cruelty

by Phil Kelly

  Contents

  Cover

  A Moment of Cruelty – Phil Kelly

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Dark Harvest’

  A Black Library Imprint

  eBook license

  A Moment of Cruelty

  Phil Kelly

  Alabastian Valenth the First awoke to the surging patter of sleet on his bedroom window. He groaned, scratching his hip as his sleep-gummed eyes peeled open. Feeble light diffused through the musky fug that hung in his bedroom. Always so damn gloomy in Shyish. Not like Azyr. Not like the land of his true birthright.

  Mhurghast’s sun had always been weak. It was why the mists lingered in the city’s streets so long. They made people-watching out of the Valenth mansion’s attic window, his favourite pastime when drink-ridden and melancholy, a rare indulgence. ‘A kind of morbid voyeurism,’ his best friend Harratio had called it. Perhaps there was some truth in that, for he had developed a habit of idly dwelling on peasants’ tales whilst staring into the mist. Tales of tortured phantoms and leering cannibals, of hungry things that could take human form and beasts that walked as men.

  How wonderful it would be to have a proper summer to burn the mists away. Just a few weeks of undiluted Hyshian sunshine to put some colour in his pale skin and banish the dark thoughts. Was that too much to ask?

  The young noble raised an arm, bleary-eyed. He turned the limb in the half-light, a master carpenter examining a pearwood carving fresh from the lathe. Still near perfect, even in his late twenties. Still wrinkle-free, blemish-free. Small wonder so many ingénues and princelings had shared his bed sheets of late.

  Alabastian cut a dash in the high society of Mhurghast, and used his reputation as an eligible scion to full effect. In fact, in the recent past, he had been described by one of his admirers as magnificent. He smiled at the memory, stretching like a cat, then winced as a beam of afternoon sun crept into the corner of his eye. Admittedly he was not feeling quite so magnificent today, but given that he preferred to sleep alone ­– and had kicked out many a conquest during the small hours to ensure it – it hardly mattered. A slow, insidious headache was mounting an offensive on his frontal lobe, almost certainly thanks to another late night with Harratio and his viciously strong–

  Pater Nagash! His costume meet!

  Alabastian sat bolt upright in a tangle of stained silk, stomach lurching with a queasy bulge of vomit that he only just managed to keep down. How could he be so careless? He cast a bitter glance at Mother’s water clock by his bed, the Azyrite relic accusing him as usual with its constant drip, drip, drip. Three hours late. He reached over to turn the clock sideways, but his drink-torpor made him clumsy, and he knocked it into the cupboard instead. The intricate artefact spun away, bouncing hard off the chaise longue before shattering on the floor’s mosaic of bluestone and jet.

  ‘Damn it all.’

  Slowly he felt his rage dwindle and pass into sullen languor and irritation. The floor was always a little too cold for his bare feet, no matter how much wood he had Maltratt burn in the hearth overnight. Now, with shards of broken glass scattered across it, it would be even more obnoxious to cross to the bathroom. And with Mother gone, he would have to get the staff to clean it up all by himself.

  With a great, shuddering sigh, Alabastian hauled himself out of the other side of the bed. He stepped around the periphery of the room with exaggerated, careful steps. A shard of Azyrite crystal punctured the meat of his foot nonetheless. He hissed, breathing hard, before finding the splinter. His questing fingers yanked it out to send droplets of blood pattering onto the bluestone. A howl of pain echoed down the corridor.

  Moments later the heavy thuds of the house guard shook the stairs.

  ‘Sire,’ came the voice of his head guard, Maltratt. ‘Are you hurt?’ She had a deep voice, for a woman, but given her wrestler’s build perhaps that was little surprise.

  ‘It’s just a splinter, damn it. You idle buffoons can go back to your card game.’

  ‘If you are sure you are well, sir, I will leave you,’ said Maltratt. She bowed stiffly, and made for the stairs. Xarantine, her second-in-command, met his gaze for a moment with a look of barely concealed contempt. ‘Our apologies for disturbing your morning exercise,’ she said, turning to follow her reporting officer back downstairs.

  Maltratt was deferential enough, but her second-in-command had never liked him. Since Mother had passed away, the redhead hadn’t been afraid to show it.

  ‘Xarantine?’

  ‘What?’ she said, turning back with her eyes hooded.

  ‘Get Lassiter to prepare me a coach. I’m running late. I depart in fifteen minutes for the costumiers, to the very second.’

  ‘You gave him the day off, remember? After getting back so late last night.’

  ‘What? I don’t remember doing that.’

  Xarantine raised an eyebrow, her lips pursed.

  ‘Fine then,’ he said, shaking his head to clear some of the muzzy spider silk of his headache. ‘I’m perfectly capable of walking there. I’m a grown man, after all.’

  ‘Very good.’ The guardswoman’s expression suggested he was anything but. Alabastian smiled mirthlessly, and slammed the door in her face.

  The mist from the River Hisset rose over the Necrai Bridge like a revenant crawling from an open grave. Purple-grey, it curled its long fingers through the column-lined sides to cover the flagstones in a haze of clinging condensation. Beyond it the palace dominated the horizon, the baroque shadow of mansions built around it in the Azyrite style only just visible through the mist.

  ‘More like cursed Ulgu than Shyish, these days,’ muttered Alabastian. ‘Malerion’s breath everywhere.’ In truth the cool, wet mist was not near as dangerous as its Ulguan equivalent. It was a mere inconvenience rather than a hungering, sentient force. Yet the things it could hide gave him a delicious shiver of fear, the undead foremost amongst them.

  Face your terrors, Mother had always said. Perhaps that was why he and Harratio had chosen to dress as long-skulled, blood-slicked gheists for the coming Lunaghast Ball, cushions stuffed under their tattered cloaks to give them the hunchbacked silhouettes of glaivewraiths. Legend had it the hunter-spirits were slow creatures, but that the spearing, piercing blades they held before them were inescapable. Much like Pater Nagash’s revenge. The young nobles had considered it an apt metaphor for their rise to prominence in Mhurghast society. Slow, but inevitable.

  As he strode towards his rendezvous at the costumier’s, the mist’s chill grasped Alabastian’s shoulders and pushed its invisible talons into the meat of his chest. He pulled his jade pashmina tighter, tucking its ends into his doublet. Good cloth, he thought, distracting himself by admiring its pattern of interlocking Valenth heraldry. A fine garment with which to impress Harratio, and one with a story behind it, for it had been bought for a pittance from a desperate Azyrite seamstress. Yet against the penetrating cold of the Mhurghast night, it was about as much use as a lacy negligee.

  A stooped shadow shuffled from the mist to his left, becoming a yellow-toothed woman with a missing leg. She was about Xarantine’s age, but had more in common with a stooped crone, presumably through the trials of what had obviously been a very hard life. Her smashed-up features were twisted into an eager expression, a brown plague-stain on her forehead as if she had been splashed with blood that she had never bothered to wash off.

  ‘Sally from the castle,’ she said. ‘Water for a tale?’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘I can spin a fine yarn about the Old War, laddie, if you have a drop of aqua to loosen the tongue.’

  ‘No
ne for you, wretch,’ said Alabastian. ‘I have better things to spend my money on than hot air.’

  ‘Sally from the castle!’ she shouted after him, as if he would bother to remember her name. His hand strayed to protect the leather-bound phials of aqua ghyranis at his waist. It was precious stuff. Even a few drips of the sacred water could cure a common ailment, or revive a dying rose with which to impress a paramour. Used as a currency across the realms, it was a mark of status to own even one full globe of the stuff. The Valenth dynasty had once owned three entire vats of it.

  Alabastian moved to the other side of the bridge to get away from the deranged woman’s accusing glare, and found another shadow solidifying in the mist to his right. A threadbare blanket was spread out before a skeletally thin craftswoman, trinkets of Shyishan poormetal and crow’s bones tied with plaited hair spread across her cloth in an impressive fan pattern.

  By the fact there were no gaps in the design, business had not been brisk.

  ‘Talisman for the young dasher?’

  ‘If you are living proof of the luck they bring,’ said Alabastian, ‘then I will firmly decline.’

  More beggars and madmen lined the bridge, crooning or hawking their wares. They were almost certainly Reclaimed, those poor and underprivileged natives of Shyish who had somehow survived the reign of Chaos and, since the raising of the new cities, found refuge amongst the new wave of Azyrite settlers. They had a reputation for being unkempt, embittered and usually wounded, in mind if not in body.

  Alabastian cursed his own tardiness. If he had woken up before late afternoon, he could have taken the Bridge of Nobles before it shut for the evening. He could even have stopped for a little gossip with Ghuara and the rest of the Black Halberds at Bridge’s End, so as to have something to offer Harratio.

  Instead he was running the gauntlet of the poor and the disfigured, the madness of the Old War reflected in the eyes of those who had only just escaped it. He clucked in disapproval whenever a shadow approached him in the mist, and steered away, making for the central span to better avoid the living detritus at the bridge’s edge.

  For a moment, the mist parted, and Alabastian’s eyes were drawn to the sparkling amethyst lights of the waterfront. All those high buildings and glass-roofed palaces made for a grand sight, their rain-slick obsidian gleaming with the moisture of the River Hisset.

  ‘Please,’ came a wheezing, phlegm-thick voice.

  Alabastian nearly tripped over a kneeling figure, all but prostrate, on the flagstones.

  ‘A drop, sire. Please.’

  The beggar was clad in a filthy green jerkin, head down as if in genuflection. A ratty, threadbare shawl covered most of his features, one eye staring out from the wrapping where the other was no more than a cataracted lump. The man’s arms were outstretched, lined with the most terrible sores, and his palms were offered up as if to receive a gift. Alabastian nearly choked in disgust as he saw the beggar was missing three of his fingers. The stumps were still wet with half-dissolute flesh, a fluid like off-white gruel dripping from the stubby remnants of his digits.

  ‘Please,’ hissed the apparition, his voice dry and hoarse. ‘Please. I beg of you. Just a drop.’

  ‘I think not,’ said Alabastian, staggering in his haste to get away. ‘Better luck in the next life.’

  He pressed on, looking back to dispel a horrible, irrational suspicion the leprous beggar was crawling after him. He heard something skitter in the mist, and for a moment imagined the creature shuffling on all fours towards him at unnatural speed. Must have been a bloat-rat, he told himself. Nothing more.

  Still the young noble felt a burning need to run home and wash himself, to scrub his skin from head to toe in as hot a bath as he could stand. The idea of meeting with Harratio and playing at costumes had lost all its lustre. He wanted nothing more than to hide in his bedroom and blast that spectre from his mind with some strong Glymmsforge sweetblack. Yet already he had committed one faux pas by being tardy for a dressmaker’s appointment. To miss it altogether would invite social rancour from an influential friend, and that he could not afford.

  Alabastian pressed on through the mist, glad beyond words to reach the far end of the bridge. Beyond it lay the cobbled streets that stretched towards the Artisanry District. The Black Halberds kept the riff-raff off the main streets; their wages depended on it. He passed two of the guards at the bridge’s barbican, their upright silhouettes in stark contrast to those of the dregs on the bridge.

  ‘Evening, sire,’ one of them ventured.

  ‘It is that,’ he replied. ‘Though not a good one.’

  Something of his usual confidence bled into Alabastian’s step once more as he continued on past the guards into the well-paved streets of Jeweller’s Row and made his way for Tzendril’s Costumiers. Perhaps something could be salvaged from the day after all.

  ‘I tell you, Harratio,’ said Alabastian, adjusting his codpiece with a great show of effort, ‘it’s an absolute shithole when you stray past the Halberds.’

  ‘How so?’ said his friend, his slender physique revealed once more as he shed the glaivewraith costume’s inner framework and tossed it casually aside. ‘I mean, one hears things, of course, but I haven’t been out of the Quarter for months.’

  It was a well-known fact that Harratio d’Asbe rarely ventured out of the city’s Temple, Palace and Artisan districts. The d’Asbes were even richer than the Valenths, which alone had elevated their eldest son to heroic status amongst their peers. Yet on matters outside his clique, he was painfully naïve.

  ‘You should see the peasants massing on the bridge,’ said Alabastian. ‘Hawkers, thriftsmen, grafters and grifters of all stripes. Stop for even a moment and you’ll walk away with your phials dry and your shoes filthy.’

  ‘How repugnant.’ The d’Asbe looked down his beak of a nose towards Alabastian as if he himself may have become infected. He turned to the costumier, dismissing him with a wave of his white silk glove.

  ‘I know. I live in fear of one of them touching my skin. Transmitting lice or something. If that happened I’d see them all burnt alive.’

  ‘I pity you, dear Basti. Over this side of the water, we talk not of fleas, nor paupers, but of velvet-tongued beauties who shift form the better to entice you.’

  Alabastian managed a thin smile. ‘One day, I’ll be over this side of the river with you.’

  ‘Improving one’s lot is purely a matter of persistence.’

  ‘That and ruthlessness, perhaps. Not something we Valenths have ever lacked.’

  ‘You say that, handsome,’ said Harratio, ‘but I know you better than that. You’re too soft for this side of town.’

  ‘Soft as the steel I’ll see sprout from your back, one day.’

  Harratio pretended to look appalled, then shrugged and flicked him a kiss from long, well-manicured fingertips. ‘Just make sure I’m wearing the glaivewraith costume first.’

  ‘The seamsters have done a fine job, but I still think Pater Nagash might spot you for the callow youth you are.’

  ‘He knows us all, in the end. There is no escape.’

  Alabastian frowned at the odd comment, approaching the velvet-shrouded mirror at the back of the room and idly moving its concealing cloth with an outstretched finger.

  ‘Leave that, please,’ said Harratio. ‘It’s an heirloom I’m taking over to Aunt Dauntrice. Father won’t trust a courier with it. If he sees so much as a finger-smear upon its glass, I’ll feel his horsewhip.’

  ‘Still a tyrant, then.’

  ‘Only when he prises himself from the morgue,’ sniffed Harratio. ‘Anyway. See you at the ball next week. We’re meeting at the Jewel for sundown. Don’t be late this time, or I’ll blacken your reputation even further.’

  ‘After today, the party can’t come soon enough.’

  ‘You should take Negatian Bridge on your way
back, if you want to avoid all that horridness.’

  Sketching a salute with his glass before downing the salty, liquorice-foul sweetblack in a single draught, Alabastian turned to open the doors wide. He took a deep breath of cool air. Free from the cloying scents of the costumiers, he found his spirits were quite restored – and not just because of the fortifying liquor he and Harratio had supped on throughout the fitting session. This was his city, he told himself, ripe for the taking. He would tear through her social strata one after another until all looked up to him. Even Harratio, king of Mhurghast’s trendsetters, would kneel to him one day. It was his birthright; they would be his adoring acolytes, one way or another. He had the beauty for it, and the drive. Woe betide any who tried to stop him.

  Chin jutting and chest full, Alabastian strode out into the night without looking back.

  When he was sure Alabastian would not return, Harratio headed for the mirror on the drawer-board. Carefully taking the shroud from the mirror, folding it and putting it in his leather satchel, he took out a trio of candles and lit them with an heirloom spark-box. The room filled with the scent of sizzling fat, the porcine tang of burning human tallow wafting from the wicks. Harratio said three ancient words of power, and within the mirror coalesced a reflection.

  The image was rippled, making him feel like he was gazing up at it from within a deep black pool. And perhaps he was.

  The apparition slowly resolved into something pox-scarred and foul, and then, as the light of recognition lit its one good eye, it bared its rotting teeth in something approximating a smile.

  The River Hisset was still sending up its mists as Alabastian ventured towards the Necrai Bridge. He felt a thin gruel of fear creep up his throat at the thought of seeing the beggar again, being forced to witness those horrible, flesh-drizzling finger stubs once more, but he choked it down. Face your terrors, he told himself.

  Yet as he grew closer, as the bridge’s statues loomed out of the grey-white nothingness, he found his feet leading him away. There was no rush, no time pressure now that Harratio had been mollified, and the poor etiquette of his being late faded into the province of jest. He would confront his fears tomorrow, perhaps, in the light of day.