Conquest unbound, p.44
Conquest Unbound, page 44
‘Elabrin?’ she asked.
‘Taken.’ Kantus frowned. ‘And Heko?’
Lim nodded at the cairn, lifting her torch so Kantus could see the smuggler’s body curled upon the bloodstained stones.
Kantus shook his head. ‘Why did the Spiderfangs withdraw?’
‘To toy with us,’ Lim replied. ‘Why else?’
Despair settled on Kantus’ shoulders, heavy as a sodden cloak.
‘We should keep moving.’ He straightened. One prisoner remained to him, he would deliver her to the Order or die in the attempt.
Captain Lim gave a solemn nod. ‘Edge of the forest can’t be too far, now.’
In truth, Kantus did not know. He stepped towards Heko’s body.
‘What are you doing?’ Lim asked.
‘Heko’s equipment might hold the key to your exoneration.’ Kantus knelt to retrieve the smuggler’s crossbow and daggers. ‘I had neither the time nor resources to examine her blades back in Uliashtai, but at the Order’s stronghold I may be able to find traces of the poison that killed Governor Bettrum.’
At first, it seemed as if Heko had succumbed to the throes of spider venom, until Kantus noticed the dark veins of corruption threading her neck. With surprise, he realised her hands were similarly afflicted, her fingernails the exact shade of bruised purple that Governor Bettrum’s had been.
The back of Kantus’ neck prickled. Suddenly, he felt very exposed.
A boot scuffed on dirt, and the witch hunter threw himself aside as Lim’s blade struck sparks from the cairn stones.
‘Couldn’t leave well enough alone.’ Lim aimed another cut at the witch hunter’s head. ‘We could have left this forest together. Heko could have taken the blame. Everyone wins.’
‘Not Governor Bettrum.’ Kantus rolled to his feet. Tossing his torch at Lim’s face, he closed with a fast thrust.
The captain batted his blade aside with her torch, then lunged, far quicker than Kantus had expected. Unable to block her heavier blade, he twisted to avoid the thrust, scoring a shallow cut on her forearm as he dodged past.
Scowling, Lim flexed her hand. ‘The old mage was right – Bettrum would have doomed Uliashtai. The Spiderfang gather on our very doorstep, and what does he do? Dispatch half the city guard on desert patrol.’
‘It is not your place to question. The governor would be privy to information you were not.’
In reply, Lim spat upon the ground.
Kantus circled the captain. Although Lim was likely of equal strength to him, her blade was heavier. She was a soldier – used to the vicious cut and thrust of battle, but Kantus was a skilled duellist, Azyr-trained and blooded. Had this been a duel, he would have tried to tire her out and reopen her wounds, but time was not on his side. The Spiderfang could return at any moment.
He launched a series of quick cuts, leaving his left side exposed. As the witch hunter had hoped, Lim thrust at his chest. He skipped aside and swung a wide cut at her face, twisting his wrist at the last moment to aim the backswing at her throat.
Unable to block the cut, the captain surprised Kantus by dropping her torch and reaching up to catch his blade. Blood welled through her thick glove, the only thing having prevented her from losing her hand. She screamed as Kantus tried to rip the sword free, but held firm.
Her own blade came up, and Kantus desperately hooked her wrist with his free hand. Lim’s breath was hot on his cheek as they twisted and strained, each trying to force their blade closer to the other. The captain was strong, but every moment saw Kantus’ sword bite deeper into the flesh of her palm.
A heartbeat, perhaps two and it would be at her throat.
The captain twisted her blade’s hilt, and, with a soft click, a small blade sprang from the base of its pommel. Little more than a finger’s width, the concealed blade had a sickly purple sheen, its edges glistening with vile toxin as it hovered mere inches from Kantus’ eye.
‘I had hoped to spare you this.’ Lim shifted to put her weight behind the blade, bearing down.
The witch hunter’s arms trembled with strain. Desperately, he drove a knee into Lim’s stomach, and the captain let out a surprised breath. In the momentary weakness before she could catch her wind, Kantus jerked her blade away from his face. He meant to rip his own weapon free before she could bring the poisoned dagger to bear once more, but instead of stabbing at him, Lim dropped her blade and punched Kantus in the face.
He staggered back, eyes watering as the captain hit him again, and again. Kantus tried to raise his blade, but his head spun, his movements jerky and wooden. Dully, he felt his sword ripped from his hand, then the cold bite of steel as Lim drove it into his midsection.
Kantus fell back against the edge of the cairn, boots churning the bloody ground as he struggled to rise. It was as if Kantus were buried under the cairn rather than slumped against it. Through blurry eyes he watched the captain bend to retrieve her sword, straightening with a pained grunt.
‘I am sorry for this. You seem like a true servant of Sigmar. As for the others…’ Lim turned to nod at Heko’s corpse. ‘For all her faults, Heko was a great purveyor. She could get anything for anyone, and didn’t ask questions.’ The captain paused. ‘Perhaps she should have.’
‘Sigmar damn you.’ Kantus’ curse ended in a bloody cough.
‘If it is any consolation, you have saved Uliashtai.’ Lim offered him a bloody smile, stooping to retrieve her torch, then cocked her head as the Spiderfang drums began once more. ‘The death of a witch hunter will surely bring retribution on the grots.’
Kantus tried to speak, but the words would not come.
‘Alas, I must leave you alive, I’m afraid. The spiders would avoid a poisoned corpse, but living prey…’ She took a few steps, and paused. ‘I will tell everyone you died a hero.’
It was all Kantus could do to keep his dimming gaze fixed upon the captain’s back as she fled down the trail. At last, Lim’s light faded, leaving the witch hunter alone in a pool of guttering torchlight.
No, he was not alone.
Whisper-quiet, spiders gathered in the darkness above. Eyes glittering like coals in the hungry shadows, they descended on silken threads, legs like knives, mouths like daggers.
SERVANTS OF NAGASH
THE THRESHOLD
David Annandale
It was, at last, his season of rest.
Lord Ormand walked slowly along the Suspire Bridge. The graceful, buttressed span used to link the keep in the upper reaches of the free city of Lugol to Blindhallow Pass, a narrow, treacherous fissure in the western arm of the Stonepain Mountains. The middle of the bridge was gone now, destroyed on Ormand’s orders, part of the physical and symbolic severing of Lugol from the darkness of Shyish. The jutting arcs, forever reaching towards each other and never to touch again, had become, for Ormand, the icon of the victory that had been the goal of his entire life. The goal achieved and secured, he could lay down his arms at last. There were others who were taking up the defence of Lugol in his stead. He could rest.
He had to pause twice, leaning on his ebony cane, before he reached the stump of a column that had been placed for him a few yards away from the gap in the span. With a groan, he sat down, facing the city. From here, he had a commanding perspective of Lugol and its surroundings.
The free city was built on a narrow, steep, rocky hill that stood apart from the sudden rise of the Stonepains. Its high walls protected it from enemies approaching on the plains. Concentric rings of battlements encircled the hill, all the way to the keep that surmounted the peak. Since its founding, it had never been taken. It had been more than a year, now, since the last siege. A year since the shattering of the Suspire Bridge. And a year since Lugol’s greatest wall, one that was built of something much stronger than stone, had been completed.
Far to the east, a caravan was making its way across the barren plain towards Lugol. Trade from Arkavas, no doubt. Two days’ march away, it was Lugol’s closest neighbour. It was not a free city. Its citizens bowed the knee to the Mortarch of Blood. Merchants still travelled between the two cities. Lugol could not, and had not, cut itself off from all intercourse with the other inhabitants of Shyish. It had, though, erected a barrier that mattered between it and the rest of the realm. Lugol was not just free of the domination of Neferata. It was, Ormand believed, free like no other city in Shyish.
The fight for that freedom had consumed him. He no longer had movement in his left arm. Walking was slow and painful. He had lost his right eye. He did not think he had another year of life left in him. He did not mind. He was grateful for what he had been able to accomplish. And he was grateful to have reached, at last, his season of rest, a time for him without struggle while he still drew breath. The final sleep would not be long in coming, and until it did, he would savour the hard-earned calm.
Sitting here, by himself, in the quiet of an evening – this was a prize worth the life he had paid for it.
‘It is a pleasant evening to look upon the work of a lifetime.’
The woman’s voice, low and rich, a sepulchral ambrosia, ran a frozen claw down Ormand’s spine. He jerked around painfully.
He froze in shock. His heart beat like a war drum, and his flesh prickled cold.
Neferata, Mortarch of Blood, sat on the edge of the Stonepain section of the span. Twenty feet of empty air separated her from Ormand. From the darkness of Blindhallow Pass, something huge growled.
Neferata glanced over her shoulder. ‘Hush, Nagadron. Behave yourself and do not interrupt.’ She turned back to Ormond and smiled.
Ormand clutched his cane. He wished for a sword. He tried to stand, but his legs betrayed him.
Neferata kept smiling. ‘I wish you would not flee, Lord Ormand, and deprive us of an interesting conversation.’ She sighed. ‘If you must go, though, then you must. Or perhaps you would be more comfortable if you summoned your guards?’
Ormand hesitated, aware that his reactions implied that he doubted Lugol’s defences.
‘Do I look as if I have come here for battle?’ Neferata asked.
She did not, Ormand admitted to himself. She wore no armour, clad instead in riding clothes and an enormous wrap of blood-red silk. Its ends extended ten feet past the vampire queen, floating effortlessly in the evening breeze.
‘A battle, no,’ Ormand said. ‘I think you would be content with an assassination.’ He could not run. He could not fight her. If this was his end, he would face it without wavering. She was powerful. It was possible that she could breach Lugol’s greatest barrier. Enough to kill him, at any rate.
‘Assassinate you?’ Neferata raised her eyebrows in amusement. ‘Why would I wish to do that?’
‘Vengeance,’ said Ormand.
‘For what?’
‘For sealing Lugol away from your foul touch.’
She pretended to be hurt. ‘That would be a very petty thing for me to do.’
‘It would also be futile,’ Ormand told her. ‘My corpse will be disposed of like any other, and my death would in no way weaken the city. My succession is assured.’
‘So I have heard,’ said Neferata. ‘You have trained your daughter well. I gather that Kristane is already, in all but name, the ruler of Lugol. I congratulate you both, but you most of all, for your achievement.’ She lifted her hands towards the city. ‘Behold Lugol!’ she cried to an absent audience. ‘The city of Shyish where death is forbidden!’
‘Your mockery is a sign of impotence,’ said Ormand.
‘My mockery?’ She clicked her tongue. ‘I am justly chided, Lord Ormand. My pretence at ignorance does me no credit. I should declare things as they are. The powers of Death have no purchase in Lugol. Is that a better summation of your accomplishment?’
It was. There were no vampires in Lugol. No ghosts haunted its streets. There were no cemeteries inside the city walls. Any citizen who died was taken out to the plain and cremated there. And runic defences, a labour that had lasted throughout Ormand’s reign, warded off all necromantic arts from the city’s hill.
‘The accumulated wards of your sorcerers are powerful,’ Neferata said approvingly. ‘I am an admirer of ambition executed well.’
‘Which you have nevertheless come to destroy. I can guess your intent. You wish me to invite you into the city, and so destroy us from the inside.’
Neferata laughed. ‘Are your wards so easily bypassed? Is that all it would take? A single traitor in your midst? One citizen whose fit of pique brings down an entire city? Is this true?’
‘It is not.’
‘I am glad to hear it! And tell me, Lord Ormand, do you feel an urge to ask me to join you on your half of this broken span?’
‘I would sooner die.’
‘That too, I am glad to hear,’ Neferata said. ‘It would appear, then, that you have nothing to fear from me.’
The fact that she was making Ormand’s case for him made him more uneasy. ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded.
‘I am here because you interest me. Lugol is unique among cities. I have never encountered the like before. I adore the unique. I collect it.’
‘You will never collect Lugol.’
‘Forgive me. I misspoke.’ Always that smile. None of Ormand’s defiance seemed to diminish the Mortarch’s good humour. ‘What I should have said is that I would like to understand you better.’
‘There is nothing for the likes of you to understand.’ Ormand used his cane to lever himself to his feet.
‘Are you going?’ Neferata asked.
‘I am.’
‘Perhaps we shall speak again tomorrow?’
Ormand didn’t answer. He turned his back on the vampire and walked away. He expected a tug on his will to pull him back. He braced himself to struggle against the undertow of Neferata’s power. But his return to the keep was no more difficult than it ever was.
‘I wish you a pleasant evening, and an untroubled rest,’ Neferata called.
Ormand reached the portcullis that guarded the access to the bridge from the base of the keep’s north-east watchtower. It was open, and Kristane was waiting for him there, along with an escort of guards. She was in full armour, sword in hand.
‘You saw us, then,’ Ormand said.
‘Yes. Should we have come to your aid, Father? We were ready, but you did not look for us or call for help.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Ormand said. They entered the keep, and the guards lowered the portcullis. It descended with an emphatic clang, another of the city’s defences sealing off the danger without. ‘An unprovoked attack might be exactly what Neferata seeks. No one is to confront her. No one is to venture onto that bridge.’
‘And you, Father?’ Kristane asked. ‘The same applies to you? We cannot risk you.’
Ormand looked at his daughter, as strong and commanding as he had once been, but far wiser. Including now, at this moment, because though he knew she was right, he was also curious about the vampire’s interest. ‘What happens to me is not important any more,’ he said.
Ormand told Kristane the same thing the next day. In spite of Neferata’s well-wishing, he had slept badly. He had lain awake, revisiting every detail of the encounter, trying to find the key to the puzzle it presented. He did not believe Neferata’s purported reason for seeking him out. If she was here, she presented a threat, to him and to all of Lugol. What he could not see was the nature of that threat. He continued to wrestle with the puzzle when he rose at dawn, and then throughout the day, even while, at Kristane’s side, he ensured that the defences were reinforced, and that the city was put on a war footing.
When evening came, and the watch sent warning that the Mortarch of Blood had appeared on the Suspire Bridge again, Ormand made his way to the tower portcullis without hesitation or internal debate. He had known since last night that he would return. Neferata might not have used force of any kind to pull him out, but she had played well on his curiosity.
Kristane walked with him as far as the portcullis, trying to convince him not to venture out onto the bridge. ‘She’s manipulated you into speaking with her again,’ she said.
‘I know,’ said Ormand. ‘I can see that very well.’
‘Then I don’t understand why you are doing what she wants.’
He sighed, feeling the deep ache of the years in his bones, and sensing how short his season of rest would be before his end. ‘Because I have to know what she intends. I know this is a risk, but I do not think it is to Lugol, not if we are careful.’
‘Careful how? Other than ignoring her. If you do not make yourself her plaything, she will be forced to change her tactics.’
‘We will be careful by ensuring that any possible harm ends with me. If I die, then I must be disposed of like any other corpse. I must be hurled from the end of the bridge if necessary. I will land outside the city walls. Still, I don’t think she plans to kill me. I think she was truthful about that.’
‘On what possible basis can you say that?’
‘That my assassination would be too crude an act for a being such as her.’
Kristane looked unconvinced. ‘Even if you are right, you are still playing her game by going out to meet her. Neferata does not engage in games she thinks she can lose.’
‘And if we do as you suggest, and hide behind our walls, refusing to confront her, what if that is what she wants us to do? What if that is playing into her hands?’
Kristane didn’t answer.
‘So we are clear? No matter what, do not put the city at risk to save me.’
She sighed. ‘Clear, Father.’
