The Hollow King, page 2
Finally, a change. There had been a war, a new invasion to add its layer of blood to those that had come before. This one wrapped itself in promises of hope and help. It echoed, to Cado’s ears, the hubris of the past, spoken in a new voice. Faith, alliances, light, order and majesty… all of it so crushingly familiar. All of it empty of anything except inevitable failure. The Realm of Death was a broken dream still sliding into darkness. Chaos had breathed its taint into everything, and the unquiet dead took what little kindness remained.
In the great cities of the underworlds, the living clung either to the protection of the servants of the Lightning God of Heavens, or the tyranny of the undead and the shadow of Nagash. Both were a lie. Sigmar, Lightning Born, could not undo the poison poured by the Dark Gods into the Realm of Death. It ran too deep. Nagash and his legions tried to make empires of bone and shuffling corpses, as immune to corruption as they were to time: another bargain, made with a lesser torment.
The people who had led the caravan through the forests had been humans. Either their forebears had survived under the hand of Chaos, or they had come to resettle this land. Regardless, they were fleeing whatever life they had made. They were trying to find safety, Cado guessed: a city guarded by the forces of Sigmar, a way out, other mortals to join up with. All lies told like stories to soothe frightened children. Now all that remained of their credulity and hope was an old man in battered armour gasping his last in shallow, bloody breaths. Cado paused and knelt beside him. The guard did not react. Pain and the nearness of death had stolen his sight. Cado could feel the tug of hunger rise to the reek of the man’s blood. Slowly, carefully, he reached out. The guard flinched at the touch of Cado’s hand on his neck. Cado flexed his fingers and felt vertebrae crack in the man’s neck. Then he stood and picked up his captive again.
He dragged his prisoner to one of the remaining wagons. It had slewed off the road and pitched onto its side when its wheels caught a rut. A tree bore its weight now, branches bunched against its side. The tree was in bloom, Cado noticed. Purple blossom covered its twigs and branches in thick clumps, petals open to the moonlight. He fastened the prisoner to a wheel with an iron chain and pitch-dipped rope. The man’s head lolled forward, unconscious. The bronze mask still hid his face, blood dripping from under its edge. Cado watched the thick scarlet droplets slide down the man’s chest. The heart inside that chest was still beating… Warm… soft… the rhythm of redness.
He had gone very still. The smell of the drying blood and torn flesh all around him was suddenly a haze threading his senses. Hollowness opened wider inside him, screaming with silent hunger.
He stepped back, closed his eyes. The world was red threaded with black. A high, dry shriek filled his head. The blackness was roaring up from inside.
Hunt now, run through the night and find the living. Rip, tear and feast…
Red warmth. Emptiness filled with crimson. The comfort of iron and copper on the tongue.
He held himself motionless. Slowly the shriek faded to a dry chuckle. He could still hear a remembered echo of that false laugh when he opened his eyes.
The face of the moon was looking down on him from a break in the trees above the road.
He shivered then raised his hands in front of him. Nine rings sat on the fingers. Each was iron. He looked at them for a second, forcing himself to read the names etched on the metal. His eyes closed briefly again. He touched his right thumb to the ring on the index finger.
A cold shiver just behind his shoulder, and then her voice breathing into his skull.
~You are troubled.~ Solia’s voice was the same as it had been when she had been his tutor. He opened his eyes. The blurred haze of her shade was just behind him and on the edge of his sight. If he turned and tried to look, her presence would shift too, so that she was always just out of view.
‘I am…’ He paused. ‘Weary.’
~The dead can’t become tired, my boy. It’s a privilege left to the living.~ He almost smiled at that, but it faded as she spoke again. ~The weight you bear, I can see it is growing heavier.~
Yes, he wanted to say. Heavier by the day and by the year, each one added to the others. Links on a chain dragged behind him through time. Every prey brought down, every new road trodden… heavier with each step.
~It shall end, one day, my prince,~ said Solia.
My prince… She had called him that even when he had become a king. He could still remember her standing on the balcony on the high wing of the palace. Straight-backed, black hair fading to grey where it fell down her blue-and-ivory robes.
‘Scholastis Solia,’ his father had said, and she had turned and knelt to him.
‘Your majesty,’ she had replied. His father had said something and then turned and left. Cado had blinked, looked down, and begun wrapping his fingers over each other, then remembered his mother and nurse’s scolds about fidgeting. He put his hands behind his back. He wanted to look where his father had gone, but that was not what you did. Solia, still kneeling so that she was on a level with him, had smiled.
‘Do you know why I am here?’ she had asked.
‘To teach me,’ he said. ‘You are my…’ He tried to form the word that his mother had said. ‘My tutor.’
She smiled more broadly. There were flecks of amber in the deep blue of her eyes. He smiled back.
‘That’s right, my prince,’ she said.
~You have not fed,~ said Solia’s shade.
He shook his head. He had not fed since before he had crossed the boundary into this underworld. Even then it had only been the congealing remains of a single vial. Warm blood, rich with fading life, and the beat of a panicked heart… he had not tasted that since he had left the City of Rivers. The rictus face of the moon had twisted through darkness and crescent once since then.
‘I have the prey we were tracking,’ he said and nodded at where the man in the bronze mask lay against the wagon wheel.
~So you have,~ she said, and he could imagine her frowning, eyes taking in details as she listed them. ~It is one of the Hidden Ones, an acolyte of Change. No marks of the higher mysteries. Alive too, or for a while at least. Two limbs broken. Bleeding inside. You won’t have long to get answers if you get any at all.~
Cado nodded. He could hear the man’s soul struggling to hold on to body and flesh. There was an edge of cooling iron in the smell of blood dripping from the chin of the mask onto the man’s chest. Life dimming drop by drop. Cado crouched next to him.
~What do you wish of me in this, my prince?~ asked Solia from behind him. He could hear the hesitancy in her voice, the plea. She was a shade, an echo of who she had been in life, bound to the iron of the ring. Like all the dead, she was beyond the concerns of flesh, but the weave of her soul remained. ~Is this going to be distasteful?~
He did not answer. Another thick drop of blood formed on the hooked nose of the man’s mask. Cado raised his hand; ice breathed from between his teeth. Pale light grew from his fingers. He placed his hand on the man’s chest. The light flared and then sank into the skin. The masked head jerked up, and snapped around. Muscles bunched against the ropes and chains. The man’s heart was a thunder roll of panic. Then his eyes found Cado, and he became still. Cado could not see a mouth, but he was certain there was a grin behind the mask. The man drew a breath. It sounded wet, rattling. When he spoke, it was in the sing-song rhythm of verse.
‘By what twists of fate, mere knaves and beggars do find themselves in cruel hands, made cold by death’s grave smile,’ said the man. ‘From the Call of Trisanda, Vagabond’s chorus, second act. Do you know it?’
Cado nodded once. Long ago… players moving between trees, laughter in a lost kingdom. He knew the words and knew that they had been written in an age that only the immortal and the dead remembered. Through the mouth of this man, the Dark Gods were laughing at him.
‘I know it,’ he said.
The bound man laughed, blood spattering from the mouth of his mask.
‘And I know you, Hollow King.’
CHAPTER TWO
The masked man leant his head against the wagon wheel. Blood was seeping freely from his mouth and the edge of the mask. He did not seem to notice.
‘I know you now, though I confess I did not before. The Great Sorcerer reveals what is needed to those whose eyes can see it.’ He cocked his head. A bloodshot eye fixed on Cado, framed by a bronze eyehole. The iris was yellow, the pupil a slit. When his voice came, it clacked and scratched like scales and claws. ‘I see you Cado Ezechiar, last of a line of corpses, inheritor of a throne of ashes. I can see your tears in my thoughts and hear them fall on the pyres of your people. Weakness. Failure. Cowardice. All of it I see, and know, for ours is the Great Knowing.’
~Stars-of-all-the-firmament, but they always like to talk,~ said Solia. Cado could hear the discomfort behind the words. Ever loyal, never judging, she still did not like the necessities of the path he walked. ~His patron is pouring knowledge into him as his life drains. This one was an initiate, my prince. He will have been going through this place with a purpose. He may be dangerous.~
The man’s head twitched as though at a sound.
‘Is one of your shades here?’ he asked, looking around. ‘Nine souls stolen back from the fires of your kingdom, carried with you, a court of echoes and failure. The winds of truth tell me of them, Hollow King. Which one is here? Your brother? No, not him, not unless you want to wallow in the pain of guilt. The tutor? Yes… The parent that never bore you. The one who was too weak to do anything but pander to your delusions. Yes, she is here, isn’t she? I will meet her soon, when the Changer of Ways claims her soul at last. We will dance in the Veil of Fire and Revelation, won’t we, fair rose?’
Cado looked at the man for a long moment, then reached down and hooked a finger under the mask. He pulled. The man gasped with pain. The mask held in place. There was a sucking sound, and then it came free. Blood dribbled from inside. Hooks and toothed spikes covered the inner surface. There was no skin on the face within. Bare sinew oozed blood and yellow fluid from dozens of tiny wounds. There were eyes looking out from cheeks, forehead and jaw. Some were tiny, green or blue orbs with cracked pupils. Others sagged in loose sockets, spiralling with threads of colour. All of them rotated to Cado. The man’s mouth opened like a razor slit.
‘All is laid bare before the eye of truth,’ he said, half laughing.
Cado dropped the mask on the ground; it rocked, face down. He blinked. He could feel the hunger growing inside him. The hunt for this disciple of the Dark Gods had taken him longer than it should – too long – and now the abyss that held the place of his soul was roaring at him to make the kill, to let anger and vengeance tear the throat from this man and let his lifeblood fill the emptiness within.
His eye found a scrap of rag, snagged on a nail in the wagon’s side. A drying smear of blood marked the boards beneath. Someone, already bleeding, had fallen against it, trying to stand or fight or get away. Then the wolves had reached them. A moment of pure terror and agony marked by blood-matted threads clinging to a nub of iron. That was this man’s fault. He had hidden amongst these people. The wolves had smelled the sorcery and taint on him and come. This man had sacrificed every soul in this caravan. Not in grand ritual, not for the making of some vile magic, but to petty indifference. Cado had seen what creatures like his captive did to those that they used for greater ends. He had seen the sheets of eyes and sinew stretched over blue flames, somehow still able to scream. And the old man, chained in the bottom of a tower, books of stolen truth sewn into his skin so that the pages breathed like fish gills. That was the way of those who turned to the Dark Gods; everything lost meaning beside the demands of their path to glory and damnation. He felt his lips pull back from his teeth.
The man grinned back at him.
‘You must be hungry. Your kind only persist on the blood of the living. Why didn’t you kill the girl?’
‘I have you,’ replied Cado.
‘Then it is true,’ the man said. ‘A Soulblighted killer who thinks himself pure because he spares the innocent and eats only the cursed and unworthy.’ He laughed. Pupils bloomed wide in his many eyes. ‘When I heard that whisper, I thought it a joke. To find that it’s true… Oh what a jest to play! How do you set that against your nature, Soulblight? How do you wash the rivers of blood of that ideal? When you have nothing left, at least you have a code to live by?’
Cado had the man by the throat. Neck muscles bunched under his fingers. He could feel blood beating through veins. The man laughed again, forcing the sound out in gasps. Cado’s mouth opened. He could see the red of his gaze in the man’s nest of eyes. His teeth were dagger points.
~My prince…~ Solia’s voice was low, controlled. ~Remember your purpose. He is trying to protect his secrets by dying.~
Cado didn’t move, his hand still locked around the man’s throat. He felt the cold roar of rage pulling at his limbs. He let the man go, stepped back, closing his eyes as the black storm thundered in his skull. He could hear the man laughing.
He opened his eyes.
‘You left Glimmerheart after I killed the rest of your cabal. You are fleeing to another circle of your cult. You shall tell me where you are going and who you would meet there.’
‘I will tell you nothing,’ said the man.
Cado stood back and reached under his cloak. The cultist must have thought that a knife or blade was about to appear, because he spat and sneered.
‘There is nothing that you can do to me. My soul will flow to the Changer of Ways. I shall transmute and return, as shall we all. This is our realm, Soulblight, our dominion and our age no matter whether false or dead gods say otherwise.’
Cado looked down at him, and then began to pull a length of rusted chain from a pouch. A padlock hung from it. The man’s eyes blinked, and he gurgled a laugh. Bubbles of blood popped and foamed around his teeth.
‘This is a shacklegheist chain.’ Cado looped a length of links around the man’s neck, then another. ‘This is its lock.’ Cado joined two of the links with the loop of the padlock, and then held up a key. Corrosion clogged its teeth and haft. ‘And this is its key.’ The man’s eyes fixed on the key, unblinking now. He was very still. ‘You know what this is, don’t you? Close this lock and far off, the spectres of torment will hear it shut. They will rise and come across land through sea and stone. They will come and grip this chain, and pull your soul from your flesh before you can die. They will drag your soul after them, down to where there is no life, no heat, no hope. Your patron will not remake or consume you. You will be just another scrap of agony, without eyes, without tongue to scream.’
‘No…’ The word began low, at the back of the man’s mouth. It was quiet enough that Cado did not hear it at first. Then it came again, panting from the cultist’s mouth as he tried to bite it back. ‘No, no. No!’ His head was shaking, his body shivering.
~His soul is cracking,~ said Solia. And it was. A part of the man’s soul, the part that he had sold to the Chaos God of Deceit, knew that Cado was telling the truth. The chain and lock would do just what he said. An eternity of grey torment without hope of change or release. Perhaps it was fear of such an afterlife that had pushed the man to the Dark Gods. People did not fall to darkness because of the promise of power or strength or pleasure. Not really. Always at the root it was fear. And the man’s fear was now at war with the god he had given his soul to.
‘I will not…’ hissed the man, back arching against the wheel. Muscles bunched against ropes. Spine bones cracked. ‘You are grave slime, Cado Ezechiar. You are the Fateweaver’s puppet. You sold your soul for a jest, and eternity laughs. The fire illuminates me. I am revealed and eternal. The mud of life shall not touch me. Death shall not claim me.’ Cado let the iron of the chain touch the man’s shoulder. He gasped, and his head thrashed from side to side. ‘Pl– Please–’ The words came from the mouth in bites. It was a different voice, thinner; a starved sound. ‘Please, I can hear the rattle of them in the chain– I–’
‘Where were you going?’ said Cado.
‘Your kingdom burned, Hollow King.’ The man’s voice cackled back, spite swallowing the sound that had come from it before. ‘All burned, but all the souls inside are still screaming!’
‘Where?’ snarled Cado, as he began to wind the chains around the man. Ghost voices slid through the air. The cultist’s head snapped back. His tongue was writhing behind his teeth. Blots of blood appeared in his eyes. Pink bubbles frothed on his lips. He was panting, fighting. Cado snapped the jaws of the lock around the man’s neck. The wind was rising. Cado could taste cold metal on the air. He held up the key that would close the lock. The man’s eyes were wide. He shook again, twisted, teeth champing as though trying to bite off his own tongue.
‘Aventhis!’ The word tore from his mouth. Suddenly his body slumped. Two of his eyes burst and collapsed into their sockets. His head slumped back to his chest. A force had gone out of him. He whimpered, then spoke again. ‘I was making for a city called Aventhis. To the south on this road.’
‘Where were you to go once you were there?’ asked Cado.
‘I was to find the tower with the blue-and-red door. Somewhere in the mid-city. That is all I know.’
‘You were going to be sheltered?’
‘Sheltered…’ The man’s voice was low now. ‘We are the hunted creatures in this realm now. Shelter is all we can hope for.’
