Solomon Kane (30 page)

Kane strode to join him. The passages were scattered with the bodies of raiders, dead or mortally wounded, but Kane saw fewer than a dozen of his men still standing. “Is this all you have left?” he demanded.

“All,” Telford said, and there was accusation in his voice.

“The prisoners are free,” Kane said in case Telford thought his men had fought in vain. “Except for Meredith. Free her if you find her, and I shall. I go to pay my debts.”

As Telford stared at him in little more than desperation Kane heard a shot, and a youth beside them collapsed to the floor, blood jetting from his neck. “This is your folly,” Telford protested.

“Just keep them back,” Kane urged him and his men. “Just a few more moments. I think I can end this with a single blow.”

He saw resolution flare up in the eyes of some of the younger men. It could scarcely be called hope. He had often observed it in battle – the grim resolve of men who were looking their own death in the face and who chose to fight on while they lived, to take as many of their adversaries with them as they could in their last moments on earth. “I am proud to have fought beside you,” he said and turned away from them.

He knew where he must go. The passage to the right was narrowed by blazing lengths of wood piled against the stone walls, but he strode between them. No raiders were to be seen. At the limit of the jerking light, steps led upwards. The dimness of the stairway felt like the adumbration of a greater darkness, which Kane seemed to sense waiting for him. He tramped fast up the steps to a door and twisted the iron ring to haul it wide.

It showed him a broad corridor leading to the great hall. Although he recognised the corridor, it seemed dreadfully transformed. Tendrils of some glistening substance had invaded the tapestries on the walls, distorting the faces and gestures of heroes and saints. In the unreliable torchlight the caricatures of figures seemed eager to
display an unnatural liveliness, to participate in some ungodly celebration. The corridor felt as cold and secret as a cavern far beneath the earth. Shadows massed in the gloom beneath the roof, where they crawled and flapped and groped about as if the blackness was searching for a shape in which it could grow solid and fall on its victim. As a boy Kane had felt dwarfed by the corridor, but he was no longer a boy. He would be master of Axmouth, and he strode to the great hall.

The passage ended at a space several times its width – the lobby of the hall. It was dominated by a pair of doors that might have been designed to daunt all who stood before them. The iron bosses with which they were studded no longer lent them the appearance of a shield; now the doors resembled enormous slabs of reptilian flesh that were borrowing breath from the shadows. They were flanked by torches taller than a man, and beside either torch an oval mirror towered, propped on skeletal legs. The torch-flames flickered in the mirrors like the elongated vertical pupils of a reptile’s eyes, but Kane sensed worse in the depths of the glass. None of this had the power to deter him, and he strode to the doors. “Malachi,” he shouted, hammering three times on them with the hilt of a sword. “Malachi, I’m here. Isn’t this what you want?”

The name seemed to conjure forth a silence as chill and indifferent as the farthest reaches of space. Even the sounds of conflict had ceased, unless the unnatural stillness had somehow cut them off from Kane. It felt as if the whole of Axmouth were holding a breath, or did it feel more like the utter absence of breath? He had a gradual but insidious impression that it was growing more palpable, gathering substance behind him, unless the darkness that lurked everywhere in Axmouth was.
A faint noise made him turn, a noise like a single breath emerging from many mouths. Under cover of the silence that had blotted out his senses, dozens of the raiders had closed in behind him.

The sight enraged him – their skulking presence did, and his own unwariness, and the brutish unanimity of the corrupted faces watching him. Kane lifted his swords high and stretched his arms out on both sides of him. “Come on,” he snarled.

As they took a concerted pace forward, so ponderous that it seemed to shake the stone floor, Kane heard a sound behind him. It was slow and massive and inexorable, and it brought an icy insubstantial clutch to the back of his neck. It felt as though ice were forming there, and as he swung around, his breath visibly preceded him. The doors to the great hall were standing wide.

A rank of oval mirrors towered on either side of the antechamber. Each mirror was held in a frame as tattered as rotten skin and supported by thin struts like fleshless limbs. Kane had seen their sort before, and now they symbolised a past he had hoped to leave behind. Nevertheless he advanced between them at once. As soon as he was past the doors they slammed together, shutting out the raiders, who had never meant to slay him. They had been deployed to leave him nowhere else to go except the hall.

The echoes of the slam fled into the corners of the great room, to be swallowed by the shadows. The light of torches lined up along the antechamber continued to prance as Kane strode on. The flames might have been celebrating his arrival, but their antics left the depths of all the mirrors dark. He could have been passing between two rows of pools grown impossibly vertical in defiance of the laws of God, and he felt as if inhabitants
of the dimensionless dark were observing him. While this troubled him, he saw worse ahead.

He had reached the heart of the evil that had invaded Axmouth. The glow of myriad torches and candles seemed to take a wicked pride in displaying it to him. A figure draped in bejewelled robes of dull crimson occupied the massive seat from which Josiah had pronounced judgement on the youthful Kane. The figure’s head was bowed, no doubt in contemplation of some fresh malevolence, so that Kane saw nothing of the face except a pallor veiled by ropy locks of hair that trailed from the oily pate. The creature had made Axmouth not merely his abode but a monstrous lair, for the corpses of his victims were piled behind his throne and on either side – bloodless heaps in which the individual bodies had grown indistinguishable, though limbs and hands and the remains of agonised faces were visible within the masses of corruption. Kane had the dreadful notion that the soundless cries the mouths still appeared to be uttering might be intended as an oblation – that the whole charnel arrangement was an aspect of an occult ritual. He saw where the victims had met their deaths, on a bloodstained altar placed before the throne as if to honour the occupant – an altar so primitive that it could only invoke an ancient evil. Kane’s gorge rose at the defilement of his ancestral hall. He was ready to shout a challenge to the figure on the throne as he emerged from the antechamber – and then he saw what else the hall contained. To his left was a prison cage, and in the cage was Meredith.

She was crouched on the floor, hugging herself in search of comfort or warmth, but she looked up at the sound of Kane’s tread. Perhaps she was unable at first to focus her eyes, unless she was afraid to believe what she was seeing. Her face cleared, and she wavered to her
feet and stumbled to the bars. “Captain Kane,” she cried. “You came for me.”

“I vowed I would,” said Kane.

“I prayed you would come.” Meredith gripped the bars while Kane tramped around the cage to find the lock. “Sometimes I thought...” Her eyes grew moist with an anguished memory as she said “I was afraid you might have died.”

“Not while my vow had to be kept,” Kane said.

He was lifting a sword to break the padlock when Meredith’s gaze strayed past him and her lips parted in dismay. “He will come,” she said almost to herself, and then she threw her hands out as if she wanted to fend off a sight or to seize hold of Kane. “Solomon,” she cried, “it’s a trap.”

Kane whirled about to see the occupant of the throne raising his head. The languorous fluid motion put Kane in mind of a cobra. Until the long pale hand relinquished the chin, he might have fancied that the sorcerer was holding up a white mask. The elongated sharp-nosed face was practically lipless, and it was horizontally striped from the extravagantly high forehead to the pointed chin. Eyes from which blackness seemed to have erased all humanity gazed straight ahead as if they were fixed in the sockets. Perhaps this was a parody of meditation; the sorcerer’s words suggested as much. “Long is the road that the pilgrim walks in the name of his devotion,” he said, but it might have been a stone that spoke, so cold and hollow was his voice. “Yet longer still is the journey home to the land of his fathers.”

The voice seemed to seep into Kane as though it meant to gather in his soul. “I have been waiting for you,” Malachi said, and his depthless gaze found Kane’s eyes. His thin lips twisted in a mocking smile that could hardly
have been more grotesque if a reptile had essayed the expression. “Do you like what I’ve done to the place?” he said.

“It will look fairer when your head is on a spike above the gates.” This fell short of conveying Kane’s wrath, and he stalked past the altar, raising both his swords. “You are not fit to occupy my father’s chair,” he shouted.

“Your father was a child.” The sorcerer did not move except to fold his long hands together in a mockery of supplication. “A pathetic fool,” he said, “who made a pact with the Devil.”

His voice felt like a dank fog that was settling over Kane’s soul in an attempt to suffocate all hope. Kane was close enough to see that the lines inscribed on the elongated face consisted of occult symbols. Whatever they represented or invoked, Kane could have thought their power was reaching for him through Malachi’s words. He was distracted by the sight of a gaping pit in the floor beside the altar – a hole edged with bloodstains and exposing a porous crimson mass larger than a man. A slow pulse passed through it, and Kane seemed to sense the monstrous heartbeat spreading almost imperceptibly through the fabric of the great hall. “You tricked him,” he said through his teeth. “You, who were a man of God.”

“He betrayed you, Solomon Kane.” Malachi’s lips pinched together in a colourless sneer. “Your soul is damned,” he said in vicious glee.

“I damned myself. Do not dare to blame my father. I sinned, and now I shall redeem my soul.” He needed to say none of this to Malachi – it felt like being tricked. “Get up!” he yelled.

“Are you still the good loyal son?” Malachi’s lips worked as if they were savouring their contempt, and
Kane rushed at him.

The sorcerer reared up and slithered out of the chair. The movement seemed close to boneless – as sinuous as a snake. As the robe fell about him, Kane saw that he appeared to be unarmed. He felt no compunction over cutting such a creature down, but as Kane slashed two-bladed at him, Malachi clapped his hands together and jabbed them at the floor. He might have been miming an inverted prayer, and the effect was immediate. The space in front of Kane seemed to be sucked into itself, and his swords sliced through a shapeless impalpable mass – a cloud of black smoke as tall as the sorcerer. It was a trick that an illusionist might have performed to astound simpletons or children, and it aggravated Kane’s rage. He swung around to glare about the hall. “Malachi,” he shouted. “Malachi, show yourself.”

Nothing but the sluggish flutter of torchlight and candle-flames answered him. Only shadows were creeping about near the walls beyond the columns and ducking out of sight behind the stained altar. “Malachi, you coward,” Kane roared, but there was no response. He was wasting his time and Meredith’s. With a last glare all around him he strode to the cage.

Meredith had been watching him silently but apprehensively. As he reached the padlocked door she whispered “Don’t you understand yet? It’s a trap.”

“What trap?” Kane demanded.

“They only marked me so that you would come.” Meredith gripped her hands together as if she wished she could squeeze her palm clean. “The Devil wants you, Solomon.”

“The Devil can take me soon enough,” Kane declared and smashed the padlock with the hilt of his sword. The staple of the padlock was trapped in the hasp of
the door. He wrenched at it and managed to free the staple from the slot, which the blow of the sword had distorted. The padlock clattered on the floor, and Kane made to throw the door wide. He was reflecting on the wilful pointlessness of evil – on how much carnage and destruction had been perpetrated simply in order to entice him home – when Meredith screamed. She might have been voicing his outrage for him, or his sudden agony. The blade of a sword had pierced his left shoulder and was protruding in front of him.

A
s Kane attempted to drag himself free of the blade his assailant drove it deeper, and Kane felt it grind against his collar bone. He clenched his teeth until his head throbbed, and overcame a wave of nausea as he succeeded in keeping both hands clamped on his swords. Before he could wield either of them, his adversary hurled him aside. Skewered on the weapon, Kane was swung away from Meredith with such force that it hurled him off the blade to sprawl many paces away from the cage. The fall inflamed the pain in his shoulder, making his head swim, but he crouched around to face his assailant. The man had not followed him; he stood dangerously close to Meredith, his sword upraised in triumph or anticipating victory. He was the Overlord of the raiders. He was Kane’s brother.