Bloodforged (32 page)

But as she jigged closer, Padurowski leapt in front of her, his lilac coat flapping, and went on guard with his conductor’s baton, grinning and mugging to the audience.

‘You see, my lords!’ he cried. ‘How music and culture are the best weapons against savagery and barbarism?’

The audience cheered its approval at this as Ulrika thrust at him. If he wanted to die to protect Valtarin, so be it. His death might shock the crowd from their poisoned euphoria.

But as her blade shot towards Padurowski’s heart, he parried with his baton, and the strength of the block nearly shivered the sword from her hand. Ulrika gaped. How could it be? She should have chopped the slim wand in half.

Padurowski laughed. ‘Lord Slaanesh has been generous with his gifts,’ he whispered. ‘The vigour of youth, and a weapon of power with which to do his will.’

He lunged with the baton, and Ulrika, still stunned and dancing to Valtarin’s tune, did not move in time. It struck her on the thigh, only a glancing blow, but it cut through cloth and muscle.

She cried out in pain and stumbled in her jig as the crowd roared. The world flickered around her, and for a brief second, she saw a different Padurowski in the place of the old man she thought she faced. He was still lanky and white-haired, but his face was unseamed and beautiful, and his frame strong and true – and in his hand was not a conductor’s baton, but a dagger like a needle – a long stiletto blade that shimmered with unearthly power.

‘Play on, Valtarin!’ cried this different Padurowski. ‘I shall take her measure as we tread the measure.’

Then the vision was gone and the world snapped back around her. Padurowski giggled and flicked the baton at her neck, but she had seen its true form now, and parried it as she would a sword. There was a clash of steel, and her rapier was knocked back, a gouge in its edge, but she had turned the thing.

Padurowski cursed and came in again, his cheerful expression slipping, but again she countered, for he was no fencer.

‘It is a shame your lord did not gift you with the skill to match your weapon,’ she sneered.

‘It will be enough, parasite,’ he growled, and slashed furiously.

Ulrika looked to the audience as she danced and circled with him, hoping someone had noticed that they fought now in earnest, but the faces she saw were more lost than before, their glee now bestial, their eyes glittering as much with hate as with cheer.

‘Kill her! Kill her!’ they chanted in time to Valtarin’s playing, and rose from their seats to sway and dance.

Ulrika groaned. If she didn’t stop it soon, the song would consume them completely, but she could still not turn towards the violinist, could still not stop herself from her mad capering. Then it came to her. She must do as she had before. She must go with the current.

She backed from Padurowski, turning so she retreated towards Valtarin.

The conductor’s eyes gleamed, his grin returning. ‘You see? You weaken, while I grow only stronger!’

He lunged in, thrusting towards her heart with the fell dagger. Ulrika staggered back towards Valtarin, flailing behind her with her rapier as if for balance, then smashed it down across the bridge of the Fieromonte.

The result was catastrophic. As her blade snapped its catgut strings and cracked its wooden body, the violin shrieked like a hundred hurricanes and exploded in a ball of purple-white light, hurling Valtarin and Ulrika and Padurowski through the air and knocking the musicians of the orchestra from their chairs. The audience, so recently laughing and dancing, now screamed and shielded their eyes.

Ulrika stared from where she had crashed at the left side of the stage as, from out of the white light, rose a towering, translucent figure more beautiful than any being she had ever seen – no matter that it seemed to have no single shape or face, but shifted constantly from one to another. It howled in the soaring voice of the violin, then turned its golden, ever-changing eyes towards Valtarin and Padurowski.

‘Where are the fools that promised us the souls of an entire city?’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

UNMASKED

Ulrika’s mind rebelled at the sight of the daemon, and the urge to join the people in the audience who were shrieking and trampling each other as they tried to escape its presence was almost overwhelming. But at the same time as it filled her mind with terror, the ever-changing being rooted her to the spot with its beauty and charisma. She could feel her skin tingling in its aura as if she were bathing in acid, and felt powerful forces pulling at her flesh, as if trying to warp her in their own image.

Fortunately, something within her, perhaps the dark power that animated her dead body, seemed to fight against this transformative imperative. Others were not so lucky. All around her, the musicians of Padurowski’s orchestra were writhing and mutating before her eyes. A horn player’s head sprouted a dozen fleshy, gaping stoma that blared like trumpets, while a cellist had become one with his instrument, his body melting into the wooden shape of the cello, and his hands curling up like scrollwork tuning heads. Others simply exploded into shapeless masses of tentacles and mouths, flopping about on the boards like drowning fish.

Many in the audience were similarly affected. The whole of the first three rows were splitting out of their fancy clothes as tentacles and new limbs and screeching heads sprouted from their bodies. Many more, though apparently untouched by mutation, had their sanity ripped away by the advent of the daemon, and gibbered and clawed at themselves in their horror, gouging out their own eyes, savaging their companions and leaping from the private boxes to die broken on the seat backs below.

In the midst of this madness, Valtarin abased himself before the beautiful daemon, pressing his face against the boards. ‘Forgive us, lord!’ he said. ‘We… we… we…’

The daemon pounced upon him, and Ulrika expected to see the violinist torn limb from limb, but instead the being’s insubstantial body sank into him like a ghost slipping back into its grave, and the boy began to scream and glow.

Ulrika crabbed back as Valtarin rose, reforming before her eyes, growing taller and stronger and more beautiful, like a lascivious saint carved from white marble. Gleaming trumpet mouths grew from his spine like a dragon’s ridge of plates, and wings made of fanned organ pipes hung in the air above his shoulders.

Padurowski shuffled towards the daemon on his knees, arms wide. ‘Lord, please! The souls of the city are still yours! You have only to sing and they will beg you to take them!’

The daemon stretched out an alabaster hand and a swarm of piano wires sprouted from it and stretched towards the maestro, wrapping around his limbs and neck and torso like the creepers of a vine, to lift him off the stage. ‘And we will start with you,’ chorussed the daemon, ‘who thought to use us and lock us away again.’

Padurowski’s eyes went wide as he squirmed in mid-air, dropping his dagger. ‘No, lord! Never!’

‘Will you lie to one who knows your darkest desires?’ The daemon’s laugh sounded like a drunken orchestra. ‘Your soul is as open to us as a wound.’

And with that, Padurowski flew apart as the piano wires constricted and diced him into a rain of blood and bone shards and red gobbets that spattered Ulrika and the stage in all directions. Only a shrivelled wisp of white vapour remained, glowing within a cage of dripping red wire.

The daemon raised the cage to its face, drawing the vapour to it, then closed its eyes and inhaled it.

With the beautiful horror distracted, Ulrika at last found the will to stand, and backed away, hoping to escape while it was distracted. She had never been more afraid in life or death. The daemon was more powerful than anything she had ever faced, and she knew she could do nothing to it.

But before she got halfway to the side of the stage, its eyes snapped open and it looked directly at her, freezing her in her tracks.

‘Our rescuer,’ it purred, ‘who freed us both from the tower and the vile, four-stringed prison that held us for too long. We are greatly obliged to you and would reward you.’ It smiled. ‘Yes, for this service, we shall keep you with us. We have never had an immortal lover before, one who could heal from any caress. There are so many things we have wanted to try.’

Ulrika stumbled back as it stepped towards her, its organ-pipe wings fanning majestically, then saw Padurowski’s dagger lying on the stage behind it. She dived under the daemon’s grasp and came up with the dagger, then spun and stabbed it in the back. It was like stabbing a lightning bolt. She flew back, thrown by the shock, and crashed to the stage, her hand smoking where it clutched the dagger. The blade had transformed into a long wet tongue that curled around her wrist, licking her.

‘Foolish girl,’ said the daemon, drifting towards her. ‘Would we give a servant anything that could harm us?’ It stretched out its hand and piano wires again burst from it and wrapped her in an imprisoning embrace. ‘Still,’ it said, lifting her, ‘you must be punished for the attempt. What are the limits of your regeneration, we wonder?’

Ulrika screamed as she felt the wires slowly sinking deeper into her flesh. She writhed in mid-air, but there was nothing to gain purchase upon. The pain increased. Blood welled up as the wires sawed into her neck and wrists. She held out her hands to plead for mercy she knew would never come, but before she could speak, a beam of golden light lanced across the auditorium and struck the daemon in the chest, followed by a howling, unnatural wind that blasted it with daggers of ice, pushing it back through the chairs and the mutated musicians as the proscenium’s velvet curtains whipped and snapped around it.

The alabaster being stumbled and bellowed under the dual assault, and Ulrika thudded to the stage, gasping in relief, as the piano wires whipped away from her. She looked up. The daemon, cringing within the shrieking sphere of light and whirling ice, was turning towards the seats, roaring like a thousand trumpets, and searching for its attackers. Then a second beam of light, brighter than the first, struck it from another angle, knocking it sideways.

Ulrika shielded her eyes and looked out from the stage. Through the glare of the attacks, she could half-see a priest of Dazh standing in the duke’s private box, invoking his god, while coruscating streams of ice and gold poured from another box at the daemon.

The daemon’s angry roaring turned into a song, baroque and discordant and painful to the ear. It sang a violet aura into existence and it blazed around its body, throbbing in time to the melody and pushing back the ice and the golden light. It trilled like a soprano and purple tendrils of power snaked back along the bolts that struck at it, dampening them and reaching for the casters.

One touched the priest of Dazh, and he shrivelled like a raisin and died. His light died with him, and the daemon’s tendrils grew stronger, but before they could touch its other tormentors, more magical and priestly attacks began to strike it from all over the Opera House, and it fell back again, its outlines wavering.

It had been Padurowski’s intention to use the violin to destroy the minds of every magister, witch and priest in Praag, and consequently, they were here, and now that the violin’s spell had been broken, they were angry, and fighting back with all the power at their disposal.

Ulrika tried to crawl away from the great seething nexus of energy that battered the daemon and threw around the chairs and instruments and bodies of the poor, distorted musicians like they were in the centre of a whirlwind, but she couldn’t move. It was all she could do to dig her claws into the stage and hold on.

Finally, the daemon could take no more. It staggered back, its organ-pipe wings falling apart and its song becoming a mere howl again. Its purple aura flickered and faded and its questing tendrils withered.

‘We will return,’ it moaned, glaring out at its persecutors. ‘And all Praag will sing their souls to us.’

And with a thunderclap of scintillating violet light, it crumpled to the stage, shrinking and curling in on itself until it was just Valtarin who lay there, shivering and staring with eyes turned purple and gold and opaque.

Ulrika looked up and blinked around, dizzy and nauseous and pins-and-needles from head to toe. She felt as if she had been trapped inside a giant bell while ogres rang it, but seemed otherwise whole. She was one of the lucky ones. The aftermath of the battle was horrible to behold. The bodies of the mad and mutated were strewn all over the stage and the seats, and the wailing of the survivors curdled the air. Even the stage itself had been changed. The gilded figures that climbed both sides of the proscenium had become twisted, tentacled parodies of themselves, with gleaming purple gems for eyes. It would take many priests many months to purify the Opera House and make it fit to be used again.

After a long moment where she could do nothing but stare at the devastation, Ulrika recovered enough to push herself to her feet and stumble for the wings, desperate to get away before the guards regrouped and stormed the stage.

Valtarin looked up as she shuffled past him, but stared beyond her, unfocused. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, holding out his hands. ‘Oh, gods, I can’t see. I can’t see. How can I play if I can’t see?’

‘Ask the girl you killed,’ Ulrika snarled, and stumbled on. She could have killed him, but it seemed more fitting to leave him to his life. She wished him joy of it.

She had almost reached the curtains when a voice called to her from the back of the theatre. ‘Stay, friend!’ it said. ‘I would speak with you.’

Ulrika looked up. Duke Enrik was stepping to the front of his private box as the rest of his guests cowered warily behind him.

‘Praag owes you a great debt tonight, sir,’ said Enrik. ‘And I would know your name.’

‘Yes,’ said another voice. ‘Show us your face, friend, that we may thank you.’

Ulrika turned and saw a magister in rich saffron robes looking down at her from another box. A jolt of shock ran up her spine as she saw that it was Max Schreiber. She was suddenly certain it had been him that had first attacked the daemon, blasting it with his purifying golden light. She stepped back, unsteady. The meeting she had both longed for and dreaded had finally come to pass. A wild impulse to do as he asked struck her with irresistible force. His expression when he saw her face would be worth all the trouble that was sure to follow.

She raised her hand to her mask, grinning beneath it, but before she could lift it off, a beautiful woman in ice blue and white stepped out from behind Max and joined him at the balustrade – the ice witch, his lover.

Ulrika’s mad glee died. She supposed she owed the witch her life, for she and Max had jolted the daemon into dropping her with their combined attack, but she still hated her.

Ulrika let go of the mask and instead saluted the duke, then turned and jabbed two fingers up in Max’s direction before staggering quickly into the wings, laughing at the look of shock and confusion on the magister’s solemn face.

Ulrika limped down the stairs into the understage and looked around, tugging her mask to her neck again. The place was loud with muffled hubbub from the stage above – it sounded as if the duke’s entire personal guard was trooping around upon it, and orders were flying back and forth – but all was quiet below, and but for the dead and dying, empty. She ran forwards and saw the bodies of Jodis and the crook-backed sorcerer lying near the platform, but no sign of Stefan or Evgena. Panic gripped her.

‘Stefan?’ she called, searching the bodies. ‘Boyarina?’

A noise from the hole in the floor made her turn. Evgena was climbing from it with Stefan following behind.

‘What happened?’ Ulrika asked as they came forwards.

‘They tried to flee,’ said Evgena, smiling and brushing the dirt from her dresses. ‘None escaped.’

‘And Valtarin and Padurowski?’ asked Stefan, pulling off his short cloak and wrapping it around his hand. ‘They are dead?’

Ulrika nodded. ‘Dead and worse than dead, and the violin and the daemon within it destroyed. The cult is finished.’

Evgena let out a sigh of relief.

Stefan did too. ‘At last. Then I am finally free to finish my work.’

And before they could ask him what he meant, he picked up one of Jodis’s silvered long-knives with the hand he had wrapped in his cloak, and plunged it between Evgena’s shoulder-blades.

Ulrika stared, frozen with shock, as the boyarina screamed and clawed at her back and the veins in her neck began to turn black beneath her pale skin.

‘What… what are you doing?’ cried Ulrika. ‘I don’t understand!’

‘Only my duty,’ said Stefan, and carefully picked up the second silver knife. ‘Killing Boyarina Evgena Boradin and her brood.’

Evgena turned on him, reaching out a shaking hand and opening her mouth, but before she could do more than gargle, Stefan hacked off her head with the second knife and she dropped to the floor. Her head rolled to Ulrika’s feet. There was no blood. The edge of the terrible silver-struck wound was as black as burnt wood.

Ulrika looked from Evgena’s lifeless stare to Stefan’s glittering eyes. ‘Y-you
are
Kiraly!’ she said. ‘You
did
come here for vengeance!’