The Hollow King, page 8
He saw what the man had seen and done. His name was Agen. That was no mask or cloak. His father had given him that name, and now it was one of the few things he carried of a childhood that had been brief and ended with horror and death. He saw the reason why he had joined the order: the naive hope of saving others from what had happened to him. He was there when the master-at-arms broke two of the bones in his right arm and told him that the order would never take anyone so weak.
Cado looked into the eyes of a young mortal as Agen pulled them from the ruins of a spell-broken house. He felt his lips move as the young witch hunter – so young, too young – told them it would be all right, that they were safe. The pain exploded in his side as the young mortal breathed a curse to the Dark Gods and rammed a knife into Agen’s side. And then he was there, after seasons of fire and sorrow, coming to a city built around a spire of rock and looking up at the first settlers rebuilding the old ruins and thinking that if the darkness was not here yet, it would be soon.
Cado stood back. His jaw was wet. The bloody wound in the man’s neck was already closing. They looked at each other. Red eye to red eye. They were almost one now. The blood of each beat in the other’s veins. The ghosts of thoughts and sensations hung between them.
‘Tell me what is happening here,’ said Cado.
Agen looked up. Cado saw an impression of what the man was seeing ghost over his own sight. His eyes were red coals in a gaunt face. Burning. Inhuman. Cado felt the man’s will rise to deny the command.
‘Tell me what is happening here,’ he repeated, with a surge of his own will. Agen twitched, and such was the force of the command that his lips mouthed in time with the last words.
‘…happening here.’
Cado nodded, and then, one word at a time, the man began to talk. He did it simply, moving through all that Cado wished to know as though he wanted nothing more than to speak. In a sense, he did. Cado’s will and blood had intertwined, and Cado’s will was strong enough that it was now Agen’s will too. So he talked.
‘There is a rot here,’ he said. He did not sound like a soldier, but like an old priest, erudite but weary. ‘A rot and an enigma. I am the only one of the order in the city. I came alone, amongst a second wave of settlers that arrived after the first expedition claimed the ruins and gave it a name. Hubris, to take a city and give it a name before you know you can hold it. I came because no one had expected them to find a city here. A few settlements out in this land of carrion birds, that’s what was expected. There was nothing in the celestial records, nothing that had stirred the eyes of heaven. The geomantic lines converge here from across this underworld, but there was supposed to be nothing at that point. If the powers had known, then there would have been more than the hopeful and the desperate in the vanguard. Once they were here there was no help to spare, and against all odds somehow the city held. Nothing holds forever without knives and swords and blood, though. So I came here. Was sent here to watch. No army of holy might. Just me. Unnamed and unknown. And they were right to send me. Darkness and the weakness to see it flourish, it’s all here.’
He paused, and Cado felt the stirring of memories. Disappearances, chance deaths, a body found pinned to a dead tree with crow’s wings nailed to the skull.
‘Tell me,’ said Cado, nudging the man’s focus back with a tug of will.
‘I am alone, and so there is a method that has to be followed. You must find your own help. You must prepare for anything, and you must keep it all out of sight. Fear, that is the second enemy. A people without fear are weak, but if they fear too much then they become both dangerous and weak. They start to destroy the strength they need to fight. The enemy can use that, can hide in it, can even use it to turn people. The third enemy is trust. Trust is a chain that can pull you down into betrayal.’ Agen paused. His eyes flickered with amusement, and his lip curled. ‘You know that truth too.’ Cado had to shut down the memory billowing up in his own thoughts: red fire, and the screams of the living as daemons dived from the sky. ‘That’s the problem,’ continued Agen. ‘In the end, the only person you can really trust is yourself. Isn’t it?
‘I found one of them. Almost killed me.’ He touched a scar across his jaw. ‘They were a nothing, a grain shifter in the storehouses. Small, weak, the type that talked too much and about nothing that mattered. It was just after I had found a… a shrine. A tortured bird pinned to the rock wall behind a ruined house. They were nearby. I saw them. They were watching, so I followed them, asked a question.’ Agen paused. ‘They had a mask. A mask under their skin. They were not scrawny either. Altered, powerful, stupid tough. That’s another thing people don’t understand – the servants of darkness can be foolish and naïve and as incompetent as anyone. If they had watched from further away, if they had played dumb when I asked them what they had been doing, I would have known nothing. Instead, they showed their face and ended with a knife in the guts. I burnt the body. No one noticed the smoke or the smell. People don’t like to notice what might make their world break. They were not alone, though. There are others. They are here.’
‘You did not tell the city’s rulers,’ said Cado. The man chuckled as if Cado had made a dry joke over a cup of ale.
‘You cannot trust anyone or anything under the stars. That’s another thing we both know. Just because someone doesn’t wear a mask doesn’t mean they are not hiding beneath one.’
‘So you recruited a band of hunters to help you fight a hidden war.’
‘Hunters…’ Another chuckle. Cado felt a heady wave of blurred sensation. The man swayed in the chair as though drunk. The blood bond was making him giddy. His eyes were clear though. ‘Hunters… agents of the holy comet and hammer, warriors against the dark…’ The laughter drained from his mouth. ‘Old soldiers, and boys barely old enough to hold a sword. When you haven’t got anyone you can trust, then you use whomever you can. You…’ He shook his head, blinked. Cado could feel the man’s will pushing against the bond. He was stronger than he seemed. Cado held his own mind firm. The man blinked and continued, his voice touched with a melancholy that bled into Cado. ‘You can’t be alone. You can’t fight alone. Not for long. Not for ever. That’s another lie – the lone warrior, strong, needing nothing and no one. These realms make lies like that as swords to cut you and clubs to break you.’ He shrugged. ‘I found a few people, told them something, showed them other things. Good people, even when they end up with their throats cut.’
The man shivered and became silent. The beat of his heart was getting faster as though it were trying to outrun the matched beat of Cado’s pulse. The spell was breaking. Cado wanted to ask more, but once the bond broke, he would not be able to create it again for a long while. He needed to ask the last and biggest questions now.
‘What are the servants of the Crow God doing in this city?’
Agen nodded, blinked slowly, and answered.
‘There is something in the rock, under the city. I have found places where they have been tunnelling or where walls built into the cliff have been broken through.’
‘What is inside?’
‘I don’t know, but I can guess.’ Agen paused, blinked again. The red was fading from his eyes. He shook himself. Cado felt the blood bond between them weakening. He snapped his will taut, and the man’s head came up as though yanked by a hand. ‘I think that’s where they are and where the rot came from. Down there in the dark at the heart of this city is something that the Old Enemy left. They are hiding it, worshipping it – working on it, perhaps. Behind us and under our feet, this city is not ours, it’s theirs.’
Cado nodded. He did not have much time now and he needed to make sure that this man did not come after him. ‘Do you know a tower with a blue-and-red-painted door?’
‘No,’ said Agen, shaking his head. ‘No.’
Cado’s nose flared. His lips pinched tight, but there was nothing he could do. The witch hunter had given him all the answers time allowed.
Cado reached out towards the man’s eyes.
A gong sounded. The metallic note rose and reached through the walls. Then another crash and another, and more gongs were ringing, the sound rising from the lower walls. Cado looked around as a fist beat on the door.
‘Cado!’ It was Amaury’s voice. ‘Cado!’
He hissed, went to the door and pulled back the bolts. Amaury looked at him, mouth opening to speak, and then looked past him at Agen bound in the chair. The sound of the gongs was louder, echoing through the mist.
‘What has happened?’ asked Cado.
Amaury looked up at him. He could see the war of questions behind her expression.
‘Those are the wall gongs,’ she said. ‘An enemy is at the gates.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The lone horseman stood in the mist as the gongs continued to sound. The people on the streets were hurrying back in behind their doors. Strings of bird bones clacked against sealed shutters. The citizen guard were moving down the slope to the walls as Cado and Amaury moved through them. Most of the militia were already on the walls. Torches had been lit and every fourth soldier held a burning brand. There were few of them, Cado noticed. Spread across the circuit of the wall, they were a thin line. That was what the citizenry with their odd coverings of armour and mismatched weapons were for: to fill the wall with warm bodies.
No one stopped Cado as he climbed to the parapet. Everyone’s eyes were looking beyond the wall, and with his armour and weaponry he looked like someone who needed to be there. Amaury moved away, going to join her militia comrades or just to distance herself from him. He could tell that she had been disturbed by seeing Agen tied to the chair. More disturbed by the way that the man’s head lolled, his eyes rolling in his skull and the fact there was no mark of harm on him. Cado had told her to go out, and when the door had closed, he had reached out and touched the man’s eyes. A jolt of will, a breath of syllables and the man’s mind was his own. That is, except for the time since Cado had begun to follow him. That went, burned away and running out of his mouth as his head slumped on his chest and a bead of black blood slid from his lips. He would come around and keep nothing of what had happened. Except perhaps a dream that he would wake from when the skull moon was full, but never be able to remember.
Cado saw the lone horseman as he reached the top of the wall. He slowed, eyes straining to pick out the curve of the helm, and shield, and the marks etched into the standard it held. He knew what it was, and what it meant.
‘What’s it doing?’ hissed someone close by.
‘Is it a…?’
‘Shut up…’
‘It’s not moving, why isn’t it moving?’
It’s waiting, Cado wanted to say, but held quiet. Head bowed, mount and body so still that only the discs hanging from the standard shifted in the wind, clicking together. He could feel the fear growing around him. Most of these mortals could not have named what they were looking at. But they knew. In their bones, they knew.
Slowly the horseman raised its head. Polished finger bones reached up in a crest from the crown of its helm. Its face could have been a mask, or a sculpture taken from the side of a tomb…
As am I, so shall ye be. As you are, so once was I…
It raised the banner higher. Dank fabric stirred. The mount beneath it was the image of a horse drawn in stolen bones. The mist gathered in the cave of ribs that was its belly.
‘I come for what is due,’ said the rider, and its voice seemed to form from the sigh of air. The gongs had quieted. The city listened. ‘I come to give you safety. I come to count you amongst the eternal empire that shall never end and shall embrace all. Who shall answer for your debts?’
‘We owe you nothing.’ The voice came from the section of wall closest to the rider. Cado looked to see who it was. A figure in red-and-ivory robes, head heavy with a headdress that arced like a golden comet above her crown. Guards in plate armour stood beside her. Others on the wall were looking at her. ‘This city is free and under the protection of Sigmar, Lord of Heavens, and breaker of tyrants. We will give you nothing. We owe you nothing, and if you come to our walls again, we shall break you and burn you to dust.’
‘All that is bone shall be returned once life passes from flesh. So it is marked and so it is. No other claim is truer. You shall bring the bones of the dead from grave and tomb and set them on the spot I speak from. You shall do this by light two rises of the moon from now. The counting of this tithe shall be one hundred and eighteen thousand.’
A murmur ran through the crowd: revulsion, anger and fear, all in hundreds of hissed breaths and muttered oaths.
‘We will give you nothing,’ said the woman in the robes. ‘We owe you nothing. You shall have nothing. Go now and tell your masters that.’
‘If the counting is not met then we will claim the tithe from the living. For your payment you shall be protected, for you are the keepers of the harvest and no other shall harm the crop that is yet to ripen. This is the debt and the promise.’
‘Shoot it,’ said the woman. Along the wall a ballista’s arms released with a thump. A bolt the length of a spear hissed through the air. The rider did not move. The bolt struck it on a downward arc. It punched into the rider’s chest, passed through and down into its mount with such force that it pinned both to the ground. A ragged roar of defiance went up along the walls. Then the heap of bones on the ground stirred. Rider and mount pulled themselves up to standing, grinding on the shaft of the bolt. The rider gripped the bolt and pulled it free. The crowd on the wall was silent. The rider held the bolt up, pointing it at the walls.
‘Two rises of the moon. The tithe shall be given.’ Then it threw the bolt into the ground and left it there quivering, as it turned and rode back into the mist.
There was silence after the rider left. Heavy, dense, settling like a fresh layer of fog around the city’s spires. Standing on the walls, Cado heard someone cry out, then fall silent. The quiet ached through the grey light.
‘Go back to your work and prayers,’ came the voice of the woman in red, calling loud. ‘We will not submit, and we will not fall. Go back to your prayers and know that Sigmar shall hear you.’ None of the mortals on the wall moved for a long moment. Then a few of them began to turn and make for the steps off the parapet. There was no rush, no panic, just a slow draining of people back into the half-broken, half-rebuilt streets. The fear was there in that silence, though, sullen and deep, the beginnings of desperation without hope.
Cado followed them, thinking.
Two days. That was the time he now had. He supposed that the city might pay the Bone-tithe the rider had demanded. But the woman in red had refused. She looked like a member of the Sigmarite cult and a person of authority. That meant that if these mortals were going to pay the tithe, they would have to change who was in charge – which meant bloodshed and mayhem was inevitable. Either the city would be attacked for refusing the tithe or there would be an uprising. He did not doubt that the rider could deliver on its threat to take by force the bones it wanted – he knew its kind and what they were capable of. Two days. Two cycles of light and dark to find the Old Enemy, pick up the trail of the Burning Hand and be gone. It was not much time, and its grains were falling into the past with every step and heartbeat.
‘What was that?’ Amaury’s voice pulled his eyes around. She was standing under the low eve of a house. She had been waiting for him. He had not expected that. Somehow, he had thought she would dissolve back into the city. She had become a risk more than an aid, but for now it was better to keep her close. Better that than give her space to think and unravel the lies she had decided to believe.
‘They are the Bonereapers,’ he said, as she fell into step beside him. ‘The Great Necromancer–’
Amaury hissed and touched a bird skull around her neck. Even alluding to the Lord of Undeath was a curse to many. Call him and he shall hear and come with chains for your soul, that was what parents told children, and many believed it themselves. The truth, Cado knew, was worse by far. The Great Necromancer did not need you to speak his name for him to covet your soul. He would come for you anyway.
‘He created them to be his legions. To conquer all the underworlds of Death. They are called the Ossiarchs because they are shaped from bone and filled with souls that want nothing but to create an empire of the dead.’
‘It asked for bones…’
‘Everything they make is shaped from them. Soldiers, fortresses and the weapons they carry to conquer the living. Without bone they cannot grow the silent empire.’
‘Why not attack and kill everyone in the city and take what they want from corpses?’
‘Because they need the living. The living grow the bones that the empire feeds on. They want their tithe, and they want cities to rise and prosper, safe and bountiful. In exchange they offer protection.’
‘Like a farmer who protects his herd.’
Cado nodded. ‘And just like a herd, the farmer has only one reason to protect his cattle – so that he can harvest them.’
‘And there are places that agree to that?’
‘Many. Even in cities like Lethis there are people who smuggle bones out to the Ossiarchs, in the hope of buying clemency.’ Cado paused. He thought of the walls he had seen fall around defiant settlements, and the lines of living mortals lined up, shivering with fear while the Ossiarchs made their calculations, waiting to see how many would need to be culled to pay their bone debt. ‘In the end all they buy is a little more time before the debt comes due.’
‘They won’t agree to it. Cometarian Damascene already refused.’
Cado was silent for a moment, strides carrying him up the city.
