The Grim Company (13 page)

Ah. Dorminia in all its glory
.

Squelching footsteps suddenly caught his attention. He wheeled his chair around, startling the boy who had been approaching behind him. With his threadbare clothes and grime-covered face, Eremul judged him to be one of the homeless urchins who operated in the city’s markets and ran errands for those too savvy or dangerous to pickpocket. Most of them failed to make it to their adult years, desperation driving them to reckless deeds that earned a public execution. Some, the comely ones, were sold in clandestine auctions to powerful men in government. Their fates were the most tragic of all.

This particular orphan gawked at him in amazement, the sealed scroll in his grubby hands forgotten as he stared at the man with no legs.

‘What is it?’ Eremul asked irritably. He wasn’t in the mood for this.

‘Got a message for you, sir,’ the boy responded, his eyes still glued to the spot where most men sprouted additional limbs. Eremul snapped his fingers and the urchin suddenly seemed to remember where he was. He proffered the scroll. ‘A lady asked me to find you and hand you this. Gave me six copper crowns. Said you’d give me the same when I delivered it,’ he added hopefully.

Eremul narrowed his eyes. ‘What did this lady look like?’ he asked.

The boy’s brow creased in confusion. ‘I can’t rightly remember,’ he admitted. ‘She was mighty strange. Made me nervous. Olly wanted nothing to do with her, but he’s a pussy.’

‘Indeed. Six crowns is more than generous for a brief jaunt across the city. As you can see’ – he pointed to the interior of his ruined depository, then at his ruined body – ‘I’m hardly Gilanthus the fucking Golden himself. Hand me that and run along.’

‘Who’s Gilanthus the Golden?’

Eremul sighed. ‘The Merchant Lord. God of wealth and commerce. Not one of the Primes, and besides, he’s been dead these last five hundred years.’ He reached across and took the scroll from the lad’s unresisting fingers. ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ he added. ‘Piss off.’

The urchin blinked and suddenly began to cough. He raised his hands to his mouth and hacked into them. Eremul rolled his eyes.

‘Ah, that old chestnut,’ he said. ‘Let me just reach into my robes and withdraw a nice big bag of fuck-all to hand to this poor afflicted youth, whose sad lifeless corpse I will surely encounter at some point in the near future…’ He trailed off as the boy continued coughing. He was bent over now, his body convulsing in wild spasms. When the urchin finally recovered enough to stand up straight, Eremul saw that blood flecked his chin and stained his small hands.

The boy would, in fact, be dead within the year.

The Halfmage slipped a hand inside one of his pockets and withdrew a silver coin. ‘Buy yourself something to eat,’ he mumbled. ‘And drink plenty of honeyed tea. It will help with the cough.’ He tossed the coin at the lad, who didn’t react quickly enough. It struck him on the side of the head and rolled into a puddle. The urchin picked it up off the muddy ground, his eyes wide with disbelief.

‘Thank – thank you,’ the boy stammered, but Eremul had already turned his chair around and wheeled himself back inside the depository, slamming the door shut behind him.

The scroll was blank. He had known it would be. Only a fool would entrust an unencrypted message to a street urchin. The Crimson Watch was known to employ street rats for the sole purpose of diverting literature meant for the eyes of malcontents and using it to track them down.

He ran his fingers down the parchment. The enchantment was faint, absolutely undetectable to anyone not skilled in the arts of magic. In this post-Culling era, when mages were about as welcome in Dorminia as the plague, that meant there were precisely two people in the city capable of discerning its message: himself, and a certain genocidal Magelord.

Muttering an incantation, Eremul summoned forth the latent energy that hummed within him. Every wizard was born with a certain capacity for the harnessing of magic. Salazar and the other Magelords possessed a veritable ocean of power to draw from. For Eremul, it was more like a puddle. Raw magic – the essence of the gods – could be siphoned to replenish or augment a wizard’s strength, but it was consumed by the process. Without such external help, a wizard was restricted to the limits of the power they were born with. While that tended to increase with age, the speed with which it recovered once spent slowed at a similar rate.

Of course, Salazar and the other Magelords controlled the distribution of raw magic with an iron grip. Already possessed of power that dwarfed mortal wizards, they widened the gap further still by maintaining exclusive access to the corpses of the gods.

Magic was fading from the world, and as soon as the last divine corpse was sucked dry, there would be nothing left, unless further discoveries like that of the Celestial Isles were made. The murder of the gods had broken something fundamental in the world: the land was slowly dying, refusing to rejuvenate itself as it had prior to the Godswar.

Eremul finished his evocation and then waited. Slowly but surely, spidery words of glowing white energy seeped up from the blank page to float a fraction of an inch above the parchment. The message was starkly simple:
Attend us at the abandoned lighthouse north of the harbour two nights from now. Be there at midnight precisely. Do not be late
.

And that was it. Eremul hissed in frustration. The lighthouse in question was a good mile to the north, situated on top of a large bluff overlooking the harbour. It was an uphill slog most of the way. He hoped Isaac had returned by then.

The cryptic note bore all the hallmarks of the enigmatic individual whose attention he had been seeking for many months now.

The White Lady.

And if there was one individual in the Trine capable of deposing the Tyrant of Dorminia, it was the enigmatic Magelord of Thelassa.

No Brother of Mine

 

 

 

He could hear footsteps. Torchlight flared, and it seemed to burn as brightly as the sun. He squeezed his eyes shut immediately, blinking away tears and the crust accumulated from countless days spent in impenetrable darkness. A harsh voice reached his ears.

‘The Sword of the North. Huh. That’s a fancy fucking title for a man as wretched as this old greybeard.’

The footsteps slowed. Sounded like three of them, though he couldn’t be sure. Another voice.

‘He ain’t seen the outside of that cage for nigh on a year. It’s a wonder he ain’t as mad as a wolverine.’

Silence. One of the men coughed. He opened one eye a fraction. How long had it been since his last meal?

The first voice again. ‘Fucker’s awake. Listen up, Kayne. The Shaman wants you brought to the Great Lodge. Guess who the Brethren found holed up in a cave up in the Devil’s Spine?’

Sudden terror. Had they discovered her? He wanted to scream. Bracing himself on the fouled floor of his prison, he pushed himself up, willing his atrophied muscles into life. The weeping sores covering his body chafed agonizingly with his every movement. He didn’t care. He squeezed the bars of the cage, trying desperately to force them. They didn’t move an inch. He remembered exhausting himself attempting to escape when he’d first been imprisoned. He had no chance now, not after a year of wasting away, yet he grunted and redoubled his efforts.

The harsh voice again, this time amused. ‘That got your attention. Your wife. What’s her name, Mhaira? She did well, evading the Brethren for all this time. And she ain’t a young thing either, though that didn’t stop the Butcher having his sport.’

His teeth ground together. His eyes felt as if they were going to explode and he tasted blood. Still the bars wouldn’t budge.

A third voice, this one known to him. ‘That’s enough. Let’s just get the cage on the platform.’

He stopped struggling. Stared at the speaker, met his eyes. Saw shame there. Shame and regret.

‘My son?’ he managed. His voice cracked; it sounded like a foreign thing to his ears after all this time. ‘Where is my son?’

The man who was known to him looked down at the ground. ‘You’ll learn soon enough,’ he said, and his tone was apologetic. ‘Don’t struggle, Kayne. You can’t change what’s coming.’

He sank back to the floor of his prison. Covered his face with his hands. He’d suffer a thousand agonies, embrace an eternity of torment for the chance to avert the atrocity he knew would be committed at the Great Lodge.

But it was no good. He couldn’t change what was coming.

‘
Kayne
.’

The rasping voice dragged him awake and into a world full of misery. His body hurt all over. He opened his eyes to be confronted by the unpleasant sight of Jerek’s scowling visage staring down at him. The Wolf had a few bumps and bruises but otherwise appeared unscathed.

‘Shit,’ Brodar Kayne muttered. ‘Help me up.’

Jerek reached down, grabbed hold of his wrists and then hauled him roughly upwards. He tottered for a moment, a hundred little niggles assailing him like a pack of wolves trying to bring down a bear. The old Highlander breathed deeply. His knees ached like buggery and his chest felt as if it had been bludgeoned by a giant’s club, but he could tough it out. You had to, when you were stupid enough to keep doing this kind of shit at his age.

‘The others?’ he asked. Jerek nodded over his shoulder in reply, and Kayne turned gingerly to survey their surroundings.

They stood on a mushy grass slope overlooking the coastline hundreds of yards distant. A little further down, Vicard lay motionless on the edge of a wide shingle beach covered in pools of saltwater. Sasha was kneeling over him. He couldn’t tell if the alchemist was alive or dead.

The wreckage of their boat littered the hill around them. The upturned hull rested a mere dozen yards away, its keel broken and sagging in the middle.

‘Isaac?’ he asked, fearing the worst. Jerek said nothing, simply shook his head and spat. Kayne sighed and began to make his unsteady way down the slope towards the other survivors. ‘Evil luck to lose one of the group so early on this expedition,’ he said. ‘Don’t bode well. The Halfmage ain’t going to be best pleased—’

‘Bastard’s over there,’ Jerek interrupted. He pointed down the coastline to a rocky outcrop that marked the beginning of a promontory in the distance. Kayne could just make out a figure sat perched over the edge.

‘Is he… fishing?’ he wondered aloud. The blurred shape seemed to notice him staring and waved an arm in greeting. ‘I’ll be damned. He’s tougher than he looks.’
Or maybe I’m just old and brittle
.

The two Highlanders climbed down the sodden hill until they reached the girl and the figure at her feet. The alchemist was still breathing. He was also making pitiful whimpering sounds, much to the disgust of the Wolf.

‘How’s he doing?’ Kayne asked. Sasha had a nasty cut on her forehead, but aside from that she didn’t seem too much the worse for wear.

‘Bruised ribs,’ she replied. ‘Twisted ankle. One of his shoulders popped out of its socket but Isaac managed to tease it back into place. I didn’t know he was a physician.’

‘And an angler,’ the old barbarian replied. He was beginning to understand why the Halfmage kept the man around.

Sasha held a strip of wet cloth and was wiping at Vicard’s brow. He made a soft moaning sound and reached weakly for her hands, taking them into his own and holding onto them as if for dear life. Jerek shot him a baleful glare. Even Sasha pursed her lips in distaste.

‘Wolf, go fetch our talented friend,’ Kayne said, thinking it best to give Jerek something to do before he ended up throttling the alchemist where he lay. His friend grunted his assent and stalked off towards the distant crag.

Kayne glanced up at the sky. How long had it been since they’d washed up on the pebbly coast? He reckoned two, maybe three hours. The sun still rode low in the scattering clouds, bleeding golden light into the newborn day and reflecting serenely in the now-calm water of Deadman’s Channel. All in all, the morning was shaping up to be a glorious one. It reminded him of another morning, many months past. That had turned out to be the darkest of days.

‘Do you still have Magebane?’ The girl’s question brought him back to the present. He felt around at his belt.

‘Aye, it’s right here. That wave knocked us a few miles off track. I figure we head north and east until we see the Tombstone.’

Vicard whimpered again. Sasha looked down at him doubtfully. ‘He’s going to struggle on one leg. We can’t leave him here.’

The alchemist pushed himself up so that he rested on his right elbow, moaning all the while with the effort. ‘My bag,’ he panted. ‘Where is it?’

Sasha walked over to where Vicard’s pack rested next to the handful of possessions that had survived the wreck. ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘I’ve already checked inside. Most of it is intact.’ She brought the pack over to the alchemist and dropped it down beside him. He rifled through it with his good arm, becoming increasingly frantic as he failed to locate what he was looking for. Pouches and strange containers were cast aside as his hand probed deeper. A sheen of sweat appeared on his face. Sasha watched him anxiously.