The Hollow King, page 7
‘To enslave the living and the dead. To see everything that is not theirs burn, and to laugh at the suffering they create.’
‘I meant here. You must have an idea of what they are doing here. Light of Azyr, but they killed the gate sergeant-at-arms and are inside the militia. All of the killing and the enslaving and the burning, they must have a specific aim for that in mind.’
Cado did not answer. He had not considered that point. Find the tower and the door. Hunt down the disciples he could. Find the thread that he could follow to the Burning Hand. The specifics of what was happening in this city did not figure in his thinking. Or they had not, but Amaury was right; they were here for a reason. If he understood that purpose, he could find them.
‘The sergeant, he did not come looking for you, or me. He was looking for what might be happening in that ruin. He knew about the mask. He came to see who had come back for it,’ he said.
‘The… other one, they were going to kill him there and anyone who was there too.’
‘There is a war going on,’ said Cado. ‘Out of sight. The Old Enemy is here but some know that and are hunting them.’
‘Cometsworn?’
Cado almost laughed. It seemed that no idea could persist in the Realm of Death without acquiring a name. Cometsworn, the name of any group taking it on themselves to find the followers of Chaos amongst them, real or imagined. Witch hunters were sanctioned by the Order of Azyr, cloaking their activities in the blessing of their god. Cometsworn were the wild breed of the same idea – hunters and killers of what they saw as evil without the sanction of a higher power. That did not stop witch hunters using their feral cousins to reinforce their efforts.
‘Something like that,’ he said. He was turning the possibilities over in his mind. There was a chance here, just a chance, that he could prise something out of this. ‘We need to find them.’
He turned his gaze on Amaury. She shook her head. Whatever partially thought-out idea had brought her to him, it was fading now.
‘No. We were there when two soldiers of the city died. We… you killed one of the others. You have authority, use it. Walk up to the worthies and take charge. Go through the city like a scythe, but without that we are two killers with blood on our hands.’
Part of him wanted to tell her the truth then. Instead, he shook his head.
‘Truth is rarely seen in the light,’ he said. ‘It scuttles into the shadows, so that is where I work.’
She began to shake her head.
You should let her go on her way, said a voice at the back of his head that sounded like Solia. You are letting her believe a lie. This could end in worse than death for her.
‘There will be someone in the militia,’ he said, ‘someone who knows. Find them, find what they know.’
She started to shake her head again.
‘You want to leave here?’ said Cado, and the words were edged with a subtle force that leaked from the void in his soul. ‘You want to escape this trap? This is the price, and the price you agreed to.’
She paused. In his mind he saw a blurred flash of crimson as a tall figure bent down to him.
‘I will show you.’ A finger touched his chin and tilted it up. ‘A single drop of truth… All the vengeance eternity can give…’
‘There is someone,’ said Amaury. ‘They were close with the sergeant. Same type, old friends, and close with the city seneschal, but… I don’t know. They might be nothing to do with any Cometsworn. They might know nothing.’
‘The only way to find truth is to hear it spoken.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘We ask,’ said Cado.
The man left the parapet as the dawn light was diluting the black of the sky to grey. A flock of black-and-green-feathered birds was wheeling between the rock stacks. Their calls blended with the dull sound of the hour bells. This was the southern length of the lower wall. The blocks of stone hitched over a spur of crags, and most of it looked new. Wooden beams tied together bits of statue and irregular blocks. Large-lever crossbows sat on stands along the parapet. Poles topped with bird skulls, wing feathers and iron comets rose into the air every ten paces as a ghost fence. Cado wondered how well they would hold against the Nighthaunt. It was a question that had been plucking at his thoughts since he had seen the city. It was defended, yes, but it was large, and the dead should have been drawn to it like insects to a candle. Yet it stood, and from what Amaury said there had been few significant attacks by spectres. When they came, they had not come in a mass, but as individuals. Something was keeping them back for now, and Cado doubted that it was the charms atop the wall.
He watched the man touch one of the iron poles before he took the steps down from the parapet. Another militiaman gave a rough salute as they passed. The man did not seem to notice. He was putting a burning taper to the bowl of a pipe and puffing smoke into the dawn fog. He looked worn and tough. He was called Agen apparently, one of the first soldiers that had come with the expedition that had resettled the city.
The man took a deep pull from the pipe and set off up one of the alleys that led from the wall. Most of the buildings here had collapsed a long time ago. A few still stood, but most of those were empty apart from the birds. They perched in sullen clumps on top of broken walls. Occasionally a flock would take to the air, wheel through the mist, and then return. Cado watched from a door arch two storeys above the streets. His cloak blended well enough with the grey of the morning, but he had other means to make sure that eyes slid off him if they looked his way. The man Agen climbed up through the bones of the buildings, breathing smoke, eyes on the street. Once he was past, Cado began to follow him, sliding from empty window to broken door. Once, Agen stopped and looked around, and Cado went still, wondering if he had seen him. The man tapped the ash out of his pipe on a wall, refilled and lit it, and kept walking.
Cado did not know if the man was heading for a dawn drink or bed. Amaury had not known where he lived, only what division of the wall and militia he looked after. He was a loner, Cado decided, as he watched him continue to climb. One of those souls on the outside looking in, even when in a crowd. Few friends, just people he saw or talked to. There were a lot of living souls like that in the underworlds now, colder than the grave-born spirits. He let himself wonder where the man had come from. Perhaps one of the great free cities of this realm or of the other realms beyond the sky. Had he looked up at the face of his mother or father and thought that he would be a soldier in some forgotten city? Had he stepped out of a gate long ago, bright-faced and filled with the certainty that he was going to play his part in something greater than himself? Had he thought he might come back one day to hearth and home and familiar smiles? All hopes and dreams long gone. The ghost of that self just lines left on a hard face by the retreating tide of time.
Cado held to the man’s shadow until he reached a squat building a third of the way up the city. It had been larger once, but the settlers had repaired just a part, leaving the rest in rubble. The street that it sat on jutted out from the face of the rock spire. There was one other inhabited building in sight. The rest were empty shells. Scaffold joists and buckets of hardened mortar sat around some, as though masons had left for the night and never come back. It suited the man. A place on the edge of things, with only the cries of the birds to betray that anything lived.
Agen unlocked a door of pitch-brushed planks. He paused on the threshold to look around, eyes moving across stones, mist and sky. Cado wondered if the man had sensed something, or if this was habit. After a moment, he went in and closed the door. Smoke began to breathe from the chimney a few moments later. Cado watched the street, as much with his taste and hearing as his eyes. He heard Amaury before he saw her and moved through the grey light until he stepped out beside her. She flinched, then caught herself. She was wearing an oilskin cloak and hood over leather jerkin and trews. There was nothing to mark her as part of the militia. Unless, of course, someone saw and knew her face. In a city of thousands, that was still possible.
‘I’ll watch the street,’ she said. ‘If anyone comes, I’ll delay them. If I can’t, well… be listening for a racket by way of warning.’
Cado nodded and began to step out. He heard her draw breath to say something. To ask again what he was going to do. He had told her that he was going to find out if this man Agen was a Cometsworn, and what he knew. She had asked how, but he had only said that he would not harm him. That, for the greatest part, was true. Amaury’s spark of trust and hope was flickering though, he could tell. Despite the fight in the burnt ruins, the grey light of day had found her frowning. He could read the doubt in the slight hesitation of her movements. She was beginning to wonder if she had been foolish. She was beginning to wonder if he was someone to follow or to run from.
He looked back at her.
‘Keep a clear eye,’ he said. She nodded.
He approached the man’s house from the side. The ruins of the rest of the street gave a tangle of stone and shadows to move through. The fog had thickened too, and he did not need to call on any sorcery to dissolve into a silent blur. He reached the house and worked his way across the roof and down into the narrow space behind. There he found a small door, barely wide enough for a grown mortal to pass through without crouching. Its planks were thick. Iron bands bound them together and there was no sign of a lock or keyhole. It was what he had thought and hoped he would find: an escape door. A man like Agen did not believe in the strength of walls, small or great. There always needed to be a way out. Cado pressed his hand against the planks. He could feel something push back against his presence – charms nailed to the inside of the door to keep any spirit that got past the city walls from entering. At least any spirit that was not strong enough that walls and doors would not matter. There was a bar too, dropped across the door and held by brackets at either end. Cado could hear it rock in place ever so slightly as he pressed the wood.
He inhaled and pulled the taste of the mist down into the blackness inside his soul. The charms nailed to the door were strong but directed at one thing: keeping something unwanted from passing through. They did nothing to stop someone opening it. Cado breathed out and the breath billowed black from between his lips. The cloud flowed across the planks of the door, found the cracks, and poured in. Cado’s fingers flexed. He could feel the iron of the locking bar, as though it were resting in his hand. Slowly, he began to lift. Inside the door, the bar shifted and then rose, slow and silent. Cado felt his teeth clench with effort. There were some of his kind that could have dissolved themselves into mist and flowed through the cracks in the stones and wood. Others could have dissolved the iron to rust and dust. He was not one of them. Sorcery was not the chief gift of his blood, and the greater powers he had mastered came with a price.
As the bar came loose, he pushed the door and reached into the gap fast enough to catch the bar before it hit the floor. He set it down. There was light. The dim glow of a fire in a hearth seeping round the corner of a passage. He slid inside. He could hear the beat of the man’s heart as he moved towards the light. He pulled the gloom of the corridor with him as he stepped around the corner. Agen had shed his armour and was bending over a pot hanging in a wide fireplace. Strips of parchment scrawled with images of comets and hammers hung from nails that dotted the ceiling. Bits of mismatched furniture punctuated the space of a room that was too big for one life to fill. It might have been a kitchen for a larger house that had fallen around it. A fur-covered cot sat close to the fire, a table and one wooden chair beside it. Unlit candles dotted the surfaces. It reminded Cado of the Candlelight inn. There was a tinge of incense mingling with the smell of sweat, woodsmoke and living flesh. It reeked of loneliness and bitter faith.
Cado stepped from the passage. The shadows coiled back from him.
‘Guard Sergeant Agen,’ said Cado. ‘I have questions for you.’
The man did not move from where he bent over the fireplace, his back to the room. Cado heard the glop of a ladle stirring what was in the pot.
‘I thought there was something following me all the way up from the wall,’ said the man. ‘Didn’t see you, though. You must be good, or something else.’
He turned then, fast. The pistol came up. Its barrel mouth was a cruel circle. The striker poised above the flash pan. Cado sprang forwards and twisted. The man pulled the trigger. The striker snapped down… and bit into Cado’s fingers. He clenched the pistol. For an instant he saw shock bloom in the man’s eyes. Then he wrenched the pistol free. His other hand gripped the man’s throat and lifted him off the ground. He closed his grip on the pistol. The wooden frame and steel barrel broke. He dropped it. Black powder spilled out. A heavy silver ball rolled from the barrel. Cado saw the silver shot and the sigils cut into it in the same moment that the man pulled a knife and stabbed it at his chest. It was wooden, fire-hardened and carved with the same sigils as the silver shot. It could hurt him, Cado realised. It was made to hurt him. He caught the stabbing arm before the blow landed. The man was purple-faced now, neck tense against Cado’s grip.
‘Witch hunter,’ Cado hissed, and threw Agen back against the fireplace with enough force that his body went slack, and his eyes fogged over.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Order of Azyr. Breakers of the darkness, and bearers of light. Men and women of grim resolve who pursued the foes of Order that nested in the mortal throng. Their agents moved amongst the reconquered lands like a shadow of Sigmar’s supposed light. They judged, killed and burnt with impunity. To some they were heroes. To most they were figures of fear.
Cado brought the man to with a touch to his forehead. He jerked upright. The bonds holding him to the chair bit into his arms and legs. He went still, stopped struggling. His eyes focused on Cado, hard knife holes in green irises. Cado felt his mouth twitch despite himself. It was a while since he had looked into the eyes of a fanatic like this.
‘You are thinking of how to kill me,’ said Cado. ‘Beyond that, you are weighing the chances of calling for help. Both are equally unlikely to succeed.’
The man called Agen looked back at him and said nothing. He would not speak, Cado knew. Not willingly at least. This was a soul who saw suffering as a sacrament: whether his own or someone else’s did not matter.
‘You are an agent of the Order of Azyr, and though it appears otherwise, that puts us into an alignment of purpose.’ The man tilted his head to the side. His eyes were sharp points of hate. ‘You have found an enemy inside this city. You have recruited others to help you root out that enemy. I am here because I will know everything you know. Then I will deal with the matter, and then I shall leave. You shall live. These people shall live, but I will have what I seek.’
Agen’s face twitched, as though he wanted to spit something at Cado, but he said nothing.
‘I want you to know and understand this. I want you to consider that this is a kindness to the people and order you serve.’ Still the hard expression of hate in the man’s eyes. ‘Now we begin. I cannot say that there shall be no pain, but pain is not the point. A lesson your order refuses to learn.’
Cado stepped forward and raised his left hand to his mouth. His teeth sharpened. He bit down on the meat of his palm. Blood welled from the wound. It started to clot to ash at the edges. He gripped Agen’s face with his right hand and forced his face up. The man fought, twisting in his chair. Cado squeezed the mouth open. The witch hunter was breathing hard now, heart beating fast as he tried to put all his strength into turning his head away, to keeping his mouth shut. Cado kept squeezing. The jaw popped. The mouth opened for an instant. Cado clenched his left fist. Blood fell into Agen’s mouth. He tried to spit then, but it was already too late. The pupils went wide in the man’s green eyes. Cado heard the beat of his heart stutter. The darkness would be flowing into him now.
The blood of the Soulblighted could do many things. It could give back strength, it could heal, it could bind a weak soul to a grave-lord, and much more things besides. What a Soulblight could do with their blood depended on their lineage, skill and knowledge. Cado understood some of these powers but used them rarely. There was too much risk, too much to lose. In this case he needed insight, and the kind that he would not get by threats or pain.
Agen juddered, convulsing, and then went still, eyes closed. Cado let the man’s head go and waited. He listened. The man’s heartbeat was low and steady. His eyelids opened. The pupils were starbursts of red in green. Cado could feel the hate fuming off the man like heat from a fire now. At the edge of his thoughts, he saw flashes of images: the street of a city under a pall of red-black cloud; a child trying to shake awake a figure lying face down, oblivious to the wound leaking crimson onto the cobbles; people in armour passing, the screams of slaughter the only sound.
Cado let the images and the hate wash over him. It was a good sign. The man’s hate made the bond formed by the shared blood strong. It would not last, though. Soon the curse would fade from his veins. He saw Agen flex against his bonds. The ropes creaked but held. Cado had used three times as much as was needed to hold even a strong mortal. For these moments, this man had a portion of Cado’s own strength.
Cado leant down, fangs growing. The false beat of his heart matched the rhythm in the man’s chest. He stilled his thoughts, emptied his mind, and bit.
A flood of red.
Then the instinct to feed, to rip and drain.
He yanked the instinct down, felt it roar in anger.
Then came the hate and fear, and all the jumbled flotsam of a mortal mind. He felt the weariness that was growing in the man with every day he woke to. He felt the regrets, small deeds made sharp by loss: the face of a friend never wished farewell, now gone; a chance to say yes to what might have been happiness; a road begun under a bright sky, never looked back on.
