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The Method of Madness – Peter McLean

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Red Feast’

A Black Library Publication

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The Method of Madness

Peter McLean

‘There’s a gorestorm blowing in, High Master,’ the guide said, his heavily sutured face twisting into a frown as he stared into the reddening sky above the war palanquin’s armoured canopy. ‘Best make haste now.’

Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia snapped open his fan and cracked its iron spines twice against the mouth of the communication tube, not deigning to speak. Hearing the command, the ten-band of mindbound below who drew the travelling throne threw themselves into their draught harnesses, and the conveyance picked up speed.

Bloodfall began to come down outside the mail curtains of the palanquin, hot gore splattering on the canopy overhead. The mindbound would soon be running wet with it, Vignus knew, and the thought made him smile behind his alabaster mask. Ahead, the spiked walls of Carngrad were coming into view through the crimson downpour, the severed heads that topped them glistening, slick with black rot and the falling blood.

Such storms were common across the vast expanse of the Bloodwind Spoil, but Vignus thought this one looked to be heavy even by the standards of that ever-changing land. The thought pleased him.

‘Fleshripper’s Gate up ahead, High Master,’ the guide announced. ‘I brought you here, m’lord, how I said I would. There was talk of a reward, sir, when I’d done that.’

Vignus looked down from his travelling throne into the vile face of this base character who persisted in daring to speak to him. That was repellent enough, but to have the temerity to expect a reward simply because one had been promised? Behind his mask, Vignus’ thin lips twisted into a cruel smile. A reward it would be, then.

‘So there was,’ he said.

He spoke softly, his cultured voice barely carrying over the hammering bloodfall, but still the guide quailed before him as though realising the lack of wisdom in his request.

Vignus took something from his robe, a small glass orb, and casually let it fall into the servant’s well to the left side of his throne where the guide crouched.

The orb hit the iron floor and smashed, and an oily black vapour rose around the guide’s sutured face. He screamed.

His howls of torment served to herald the coming of the war palanquin of Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia to Carngrad.

The guards on Fleshripper’s Gate looked up as they heard the siren call of agony and madness, and then Vignus’ second ten-band of mindbound were up and throwing. Their alchemical bombs landed amongst the gate sentries and detonated, the noise of them swallowed by the howling fury of the gorestorm.

‘Get them off me!’ one of the guards shrieked, over and over as he scrabbled frantically at his armour as though it were covered in fang-leeches. ‘Get them off me!’

Another drew his thick-bladed stabsword and laid about himself with it in a maddened frenzy, gutting three of his comrades before they could react. That one fell as another split his head with a great spiked axe, then their last surviving member hurled himself at the axeman and tore out his throat with a rusty dagger.

‘Please, please, get them off me!’ he shrieked, flailing at hallucinatory terrors before finally plunging his blade into his own heart to end his torment.

So it was that Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia of the Hands of Darkness warband entered Carngrad unopposed.

The Cypher Lords will not be denied, he thought as his palanquin ground over the corpses in the worsening bloodfall. I am here. Fear me.

‘Let the Lords of Chaos rule,’ he whispered.

The palanquin passed into the warren of narrow, twisting streets that marked the outskirts of the Reaver City. Shanty buildings loomed above them, their upper storeys leaning precariously out over the streets and looking ready to collapse at a moment’s notice. The twin stenches of blood and dung warred for mastery in the thick, foetid air. One of the mindbound pulled the guide’s bubbling, dying body from the servant’s well and dumped it unceremoniously into the gutter where it would not offend the High Master’s eye.

Vignus wafted his fan lazily in front of his alabaster mask and sat back in his travelling throne with a smile of contentment on his unseen lips, ignoring the unprompted action.

‘The ways ahead are too narrow, High Master,’ a voice said.

Vignus looked to his right, where his chief mirrorblade stood in the other servant’s well. Mirrorblade Semili Calcis looked up at him, her dark eyes unreadable through the slits in her own mask. The long hilt of her polished glaive protruded over her right shoulder like a war standard, the pommel carved to resemble a face of screaming madness.

‘Then widen them,’ Vignus said with a dismissive waft of his fan.

Calcis leaned over the parapet of the war palanquin and barked curt orders to the unharnessed mindbound below. A moment later six or seven of them were off and running into the shadows of the streets with rough leather satchels over their shoulders. Vignus turned away before the alchemical explosions started ripping through the close-packed buildings, tearing them out of his way like so much brushwood in a dry forest. Flames leapt into the rapidly darkening evening sky, but were swiftly quenched by the unceasing bloodfall. The palanquin ground forward into the widened thoroughfare as all around them families burned unmourned in their demolished hovels.

‘High Master, your Word is mighty and will never go opposed,’ Calcis said, ‘but we lack the explosives to so widen every thoroughfare of this city to make way for the greatness of your passing. The cargo takes up much room within the palanquin, and space for ordnance was thusly limited, as your eminence knows.’

Vignus knew it was as Calcis said, but he was a great believer in making a proper entrance when he first came to a new place. These worthless scum needed to understand who they were dealing with, after all. Still, he supposed, that would have to be enough for now; the cargo was very important to him, and if conveying it had meant sacrificing space more commonly used to hold his carefully brewed alchemical explosives then so be it.

‘It is understood,’ he said. ‘The palanquin must remain behind, it seems, although it must not go unguarded. Without the cargo there is no sense to my being here at all.’

‘So it is decreed, High Master,’ Calcis said, and she bowed her masked head deferentially. ‘So shall it be done.’

She swung down from the palanquin with the lithe grace of a hunting lioness, her voice cracking like a whip in the bloodfall as she barked orders at her two mirrorblade disciples and the two ten-bands of mindbound under her indirect command. She was the Thrallmaster’s Voice, chief among his most trusted warriors, but she was not close to being his equal and Vignus knew that she understood that.

Life in the hierarchy of the Cypher Lords was strictly stratified, as such things should be, and even the most trusted and exalted mirrorblade was not a Thrallmaster and never would be. For all that, Vignus reflected, Calcis was the most able and deadly servant he had ever had in all his long life. Only his luminate, the mute Palania who rode in the hold with the cargo, stood equal to her and answered directly to Vignus himself.

Vignus sat back in his travelling throne and regarded Carngrad through the blood-slick mail curtains of his war palanquin. The city writhed around him, a restless pit of human venom and spite. This was Carngrad’s flesh district, so his advance spies had told him, home to slave pits and flesh markets beyond counting. This was where the lowest detritus of the Bloodwind Spoil washed up, to be sold for labour or meat or still baser things.

The spies of Vignus’ Hands of Darkness warband had been in the city for a month or more already, planting in strategic places the sorcerous Eyes of Noschseed through which Vignus could watch and listen and command. He closed his physical eyes behind his mask and reached out for the nearest one that he could feel, his mind ranging across the swirling Paths of Chaos as he opened the sorcerous Seeing Eye of his mind. He found one of the small silver-and-gold stones stuck high to the chimney of a forge not three streets away. Through it, he could make out his war palanquin, glistening with gore and reflecting back the flames of destruction that were still guttering out around it in the pounding bloodfall. The forge itself looked promising, solidly built of stone and easily defensible, but regrettably not large enough to house the palanquin. He cast around with the Eye of Noschseed, searching the surrounding area until he spied what appeared to be a half-collapsed warehouse in the next street.

Vignus nodded to himself and opened his physical eyes behind his mask. He snapped his fan open and rang its iron spines against the side of his throne in summons.

Calcis was at his side a moment later.

‘I live to serve, High Master,’ she said.

‘The next street to the left,’ Vignus said. ‘There is a warehouse there. We shall secure the palanquin and its cargo within, then proceed on foot to a sturdy forge I have chosen as my temporary base of operations.’

‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis said, and slipped once more into the pounding bloodfall.

Three mindbound ran ahead to secure the warehouse, and barely minutes later the palanquin was moving once more. It bulled its way through streets too narrow for its passing, but there were no more explosions. Instead the mindbound simply chopped down obstructions with their axes, and any dwellers who emerged from their houses to protest the action received the same heavy-bladed treatment. They were all armed and ugly, base warriors to a man, but the mindbound were in the presence of their High Master and under his gaze they fought with an unstoppable ferocity in the close confines of the stinking street. Vignus wafted his fan in front of his masked face and ignored it all. He was a noble scion of Noschseed, and such disputes amongst animals were beneath his notice.

Soon the thralls pried open the great rotting wooden doors of the warehouse, and Vignus ordered that his palanquin be brought inside. Once the huge, armoured conveyance – almost the size of a Thunderscorn dragon ogor – was safely secured within and the mindbound freed from their draught harnesses, Vignus sat up in his travelling throne and stretched until his shoulder joints popped. Without needing to be told, Calcis ordered one of her pair of mirrorblade disciples, Darrath by name, and half a ten-band of the mindbound to remain and guard the conveyance and its precious cargo. They would do so with their lives if need be, Vignus had absolutely no doubt about that.

The alternative, of course – to face his wrath if they lost the cargo – would be so much worse.

That done, Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia climbed down from his palanquin and set his feet upon the ground of Carngrad at last. He immediately felt the pulse of the city through the hard-packed earthen floor beneath his iron-shod sandals, trembling with a delicious undercurrent of suffering. Carngrad was a place of misery and degradation, that pulse told him, of dying dreams and offal and pain.

The Cypher Lords’ dreams would not die in Carngrad, Vignus vowed. Misery was for the weak, and defeat for the unimaginative. Might was cheap upon the Bloodwind Spoil, but intelligence and cunning seemed to be in vanishingly short supply amongst the rival warbands who crossed that ever-changing land. Lumbering behemoths like the Iron Golems could shatter walls, perhaps, but could they out-think a foe? Of course they could not. There the Cypher Lords held the upper hand, and in the endless game of influence and power, brains beat simple brawn every single time.

Vignus Daneggia pulled his cowl up over his alabaster mask and motioned Calcis and her other mirrorblade disciple to his side. They had one and a half ten-bands of mindbound and Palania the luminate in their wake, and Carngrad held no terrors for the Thrallmaster that night.

‘The forge,’ Vignus said softly. ‘I want it.’

‘So it is decreed, High Master,’ Calcis said. ‘So shall it be done.’

She turned and waved Relak, her disciple, ahead, and they swept out of the warehouse into the pounding bloodfall with the mindbound behind them.

A moment later Vignus followed with Palania at his side, her sickle-topped war-staff in her hands.

His warband had gone barely a single street from the warehouse when the first mindbound fell with a crossbow bolt through its neck. It twisted and went down in a spray of blood that was almost lost in the pouring wrath of the gorestorm, and the mindless slave following in its wake tripped over its still-kicking corpse and pitched forward into the red mud as well.

‘Ambush!’ Calcis roared, her voice carrying like a war-horn in the echoing confines of the narrow street. ‘Relak, follow!’

She was off and running then as more bolts streaked from the rooftops and cut down three more mindbound. Calcis and her disciple moved like dancers in the shrieking bloodfall, pirouetting around falling bolts even as the crossbows thumped above them. She was the first to the wall, running three steps straight up it and kicking off to jump onto a stretched canvas awning above a closed shop. She used that to spring higher and grab a lamp bracket even as she reached over her shoulder and whipped her glaive free of its harness with one hand. She spun a somersault around the lamp bracket and jack-knifed her legs, propelling herself up onto the edge of the roof in a fluid motion that spoke of strength and reflexes heavily enhanced by drugs and alchemy. Her glaive flashed a whirlwind of silver in the gore-flecked twilight, and men died around her as her disciple emulated her feat and joined her on the rooftops.

Vignus opened his Seeing Eye for a moment and looked through Calcis’ own eyes, working the mind-bond that slaved her to his service. He felt her quicksilver grace and fluid strength as she danced between the crude blades of the lumpen, misshapen street warriors before her. Her glaive swept through humped torsos, twisted necks and crooked thighs as she whirled in an ecstasy of killing.

‘Take their leader alive,’ Vignus whispered, and he felt Calcis shiver with acknowledgement.

She was often hard to rein in when the killing blood was upon her, but she had been broken to his voice of command at barely six years of age and had grown up under the hammer of his Word. He could feel through the bond that she would obey him now.

As Relak slaughtered the rest of their hopelessly outclassed foe, Calcis stalked towards a twisted man in a tattered black cloak, her glaive dripping red. She let the two-handed weapon fall slack in her right hand, and raised her left to point at him with slim, extended fingers.

‘You are called unto service,’ she said. ‘My High Master has asked of you.’

‘You what?’ the deformed brigand spat. ‘This is Carngrad – no one talks like that here outside the Court of Talons, and the likes of you and me ain’t welcome there.’

Oh, I think I will be, Vignus thought to himself, and allowed a cruel smile to play across his hidden lips.

Calcis ignored the twisted man’s words and took a step towards him, her glaive still hanging deceptively loose in her right hand.

‘Come hither,’ Vignus whispered with her voice as he took control of her through the mind-bond. ‘You are called to mine service.’

‘Stick it up yourself,’ the brigand said, raising his long, rusty blade in both hands.

Vignus gave Calcis her head, and she swept her glaive in a glittering one-handed arc that caught the brigand’s blade at exactly the right angle to rip it from his hands and send it spinning away over the rooftops. She stepped forward and grasped the hilt of her descending weapon with her off-hand, assuming a guard position that placed the tip of the glaive at the man’s throat. Barely a quarter of a second had passed since she had first moved.

‘Come hither,’ she said again, in her own voice now. The impression of her High Master’s mental voice rested over her own mind, letting her speak with his authority even though he had now released the channel of the mind-bond. ‘You are called unto service.’

The man teetered on the edge of the roof for a moment, obviously weighing his chances if he jumped. They were three storeys above the blood-slick cobbled street, and he was no mirrorblade to arrest his fall with somersaults and handsprings. After a moment he lowered his eyes.

‘Whose service?’ he asked, the defeat plain to hear in his voice.

‘My High Master’s,’ Calcis said. ‘Come, follow me.’

Behind her, Relak had finished butchering the rest of the roof-runner gang and was standing watching, his weapon bloodied. The younger mirrorblade was not even breathing hard. The gang leader bowed his head in submission and acknowledgement of Calcis and her disciple’s greater prowess. That was how it was done in Carngrad, each animal bowing before the superiority of the greater predator in the chain of survival.

And I am the apex predator come to this foul city, Vignus thought to himself as he watched the cowed roof-runner captain bow down through Calcis’ eyes. She to whom you submit is but my tool, a piece upon my game board. Oh, you vile peoples of Carngrad, know that I walk among you. You shall come to know my name, and learn to fear it.

The forge was strongly built, as Vignus had observed through his Seeing Eye, and it was warm and dry inside, providing shelter from the relentless bloodfall that still washed the streets outside its walls. Vignus listened to the splatter of the falling gore against the closed shutters as Calcis forced the gang leader’s head down onto the great anvil that stood before the open forge fire.

The smith himself was nailed to the back wall, over the wooden rack that held his hammers and tongs. He had been reluctant to allow Vignus and his warband into the forge, and there he had been shown the error of his ways. I want it, Vignus had said, and when a High Master of Noschseed wanted something, they got it.

Vignus cast an uncurious eye over the smith’s body, wondering only if the man had made the long iron nails that held him to the wall with his own hands.

There would be such a delightful poetry to it if he had, Vignus thought.

The man wasn’t dead, of course, merely crucified, but from the way the breath was bubbling in his throat Vignus doubted that he would last until the dawn. He gave the smith no more thought, and turned to Calcis and her captive.

‘Well,’ Vignus whispered. ‘What an interesting place Carngrad is proving to be. A battle, not an hour after entering the city, and all we did to provoke it was remove some vermin from our path. My dear Calcis, it is truly as though these pitiful street afterbirths don’t know who I am!’

‘I suspect they do not, High Master,’ Calcis said. ‘This is a low place, which word of your splendour has likely not yet reached.’

‘Oh, how terribly unfortunate for them,’ Vignus said. ‘Imagine living in such ignorance, Calcis.’

‘I cannot, High Master,’ she said.

‘Of course not,’ he agreed. ‘You have been mine since childhood, Calcis. This unfortunate, however, has only just begun his belated and undoubtedly very short service.’

‘M-master?’ the roof-runner whispered, causing blood to spill between his broken teeth and onto the anvil under his face.

Calcis had not been gentle with him in bringing him into the fold, Vignus had to allow, but then why would she be? Such worthless creatures as this deserved neither patience nor mercy, and Calcis was well known to possess little of the first and none whatsoever of the second.

‘You wish to speak?’ Vignus asked, feigning surprise. ‘Why, what a delight! Then speak.’

‘You haven’t asked me anything yet,’ the man whined. ‘I… I don’t know what you want to know.’

Calcis lifted one of the blacksmith’s hammers and twirled it lightly in her slender hand, for all that it must have weighed fifty grains or more. The regular cocktail of alchemical drugs and potions that Vignus had fed her since she had been a child had left her almost superhuman, he thought, with a degree of satisfaction. The hammer plummeted with a force that would have cracked granite, and arrested in Calcis’ hand barely a straw’s width from the roof-runner’s head.

‘Everything,’ Vignus whispered. ‘I want to know everything.’

‘I’m no one!’ the man sobbed. ‘I’m just a roof-rat. I don’t know anything, High Master!’

‘Oh, I’m sure you do,’ Vignus said. ‘Everyone knows more than they think they do, in their own city. Who do you work for?’

‘I’m my own man,’ the roof-rat said.

Calcis brought the hammer down onto his left ankle hard enough to split stone.

He shrieked as the bones shattered inside his cheap boot.

‘Try again,’ Vignus said.

‘Gorrius,’ the man sobbed, spit bubbling between his broken teeth as he fought the fire of agony in his ankle. ‘I work for Gorrius!’

‘And who is that?’

‘He’s boss of the roof-runners in the flesh district,’ the mewling man confessed, and just then he found some unwise well of courage and defiance somewhere inside him. ‘He’s the boss! He’ll have you lot burned at the stake, you just watch! You’re nothing, here in Carngrad!’

‘Am I not?’ Vignus asked, and paused as though musing over the question. ‘What say you, Calcis?’

‘You are a High Master of the Cypher Lords wherever you may be in the Mortal Realms, master,’ she said. ‘This one would do well to learn that.’

The hammer thundered into the man’s kneecap, pulverising it.

He howled.

‘As I thought,’ Vignus said, and he smiled behind his mask. ‘Tell me, you pathetic specimen of misplaced masculinity, where would I find this Gorrius of yours?’

‘I dunno,’ the thug whimpered, trying to free himself from the anvil that Calcis still held him pinned to. ‘He always has me brought to him when he wants me, and it’s always to somewhere different. A gambling house, usually, but there’s a lot of them in Carngrad. He likes to play Torments, Gorrius does.’

‘Mmmm,’ Vignus said, and opened his fan to waft it gently up and down before his expressionless alabaster mask. ‘This Gorrius has had the temerity to allow his rooftop scum to attack me. However pathetic and doomed to failure that action may have been, that makes him my enemy. What else can you tell me?’

‘Nothing!’ the man almost screamed, wide-eyed with terror as Calcis raised the hammer once more. ‘I don’t know anything else!’

‘Well,’ Vignus said, ‘then you’re of no more use to me, are you?’

Calcis’ hammer slammed down onto the anvil and crushed the man’s head like an overripe fruit.

They spent the night in the forge, listening to the bloodfall outside the shutters and the wheezing of the smith’s death agonies.

By the morning the smith had finally died, as Vignus had expected, although he gave no orders to take the man’s body down from the wall. The crucified corpse served as a standard, in a way, a testament to the intent of the Cypher Lords in Carngrad. The smith had been part of the old order, as Vignus saw it, representative of how life in the flesh district of Carngrad had been before his arrival. He meant to change that order, and raise himself up in the hierarchy of the foul Reaver City. The people who mattered would come to know his name, and to fear it.

They had simply thrown the body of the roof-runner captain into the alley behind the forge and forgotten about it. One more dead body would be unremarked.

Let it rot there, Vignus thought, with a measure of distaste. That, or someone will take it away and eat it, and be grateful for the meat.

Such was the way Vignus conducted his business as a nobleman. Open battle was not the way of the Cypher Lords, although their mirrorblades could write red slaughter when it was called for. No, High Masters like Vignus Daneggia dealt in politics and subtlety, treachery and poisons long before they came to drawn blades. That, Vignus reflected, was the true mark of civilisation.

But was civilisation an advantage, in a place like Carngrad? Vignus had to admit, if only to himself, that he wasn’t yet completely sure. Out here on the Bloodwind Spoil it was a rare thing, that was a certainty, but Vignus regarded himself as a man of civilisation and refinement wherever he found himself. Whether the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse valued such things remained to be seen, he supposed, but in his long experience all high kings had need of spymasters and assassins. The Cypher Lords could be the very best of both of those things in Archaon’s divine service, if they could but gain his notice and win his favour. That was the sole reason why Vignus was in Carngrad in the first place.

He had spies spread throughout the Bloodwind Spoil, of course, as did anyone of noble consequence in Noschseed, but Vignus had had the foresight to plant his infiltrators in the Reaver City, from where the lifeblood of commerce flowed towards the Varanspire itself. Through those spies he had learned of the Court of the Seven Talons, the loose alliance of warlords who ruled the city of Carngrad between them. Each one was like a king or queen in their own right, ruling their urban fiefdoms and the lands they controlled with an iron claw.

Vignus had a plan to infiltrate their world of hedonism and chaotic rule, and the means to do that were contained within the hold of his war palanquin in a warehouse three streets away.

The High Courtier Claudius Malleficus of the Seven Talons was, so Vignus’ spies told him, a man of great and decadent refinement, with an all-consuming taste for the physical pleasures of life and death in all their many and various forms, and intoxication above all others. Vignus had, accordingly, brought with him to Carngrad a great quantity of Noschseedian firewine, a ferocious liquor that was highly prized across the Mortal Realms and almost impossible to obtain in the Eightpoints. That, he thought, would be to the great delight of Claudius Malleficus, and delighting one of the Seven Talons would give him a way to meet with the High Courtier, and there put his full plan into play. That plan, Vignus was sure, would gain him the notoriety and influence in Carngrad that would bring him to the attention of the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse himself.

Or so he very much hoped.

‘Send a mindbound to the warehouse,’ Vignus said to Calcis, ‘and have it tell Darrath and his half a ten-band to bring my equipment and the barrels of firewine here. The palanquin is expendable, its cargo is not.’

‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis said, and went to do her lord’s bidding.

It was a short space of time until the barrels of firewine were rolled into the forge by the six sweating mindbound, while Darrath the mirrorblade watched over them with a hand ready on the hilt of his glaive. The gorestorm had let up by then and the skies above Carngrad were clear, but still the cobbled streets ran red with blood that smeared the barrels as they rolled and caused them to leave sticky red tracks in their wake.

Vignus smiled behind his alabaster mask as he oversaw the delivery of the barrels, and of the other things even more so. Alchemy was his lifeblood, and he had travelled with his most precious equipment as he always did. He had alembics and retorts and tubes and vessels of cunningly wrought glass, things to condense fluids and things to distil them. Oh, praise the power of the Lords of Chaos that was contained within the subtle mysteries of alchemy!

It was alchemy that bound his thralls to him, and it was alchemy and addiction and subtle torture that had first broken Calcis’ mind and slaved her soul and blade to his Word. Alchemy was the ultimate mystery of the Mortal Realms, the key that could unlock the great truths of life and death and power.

‘Now we shall see,’ Vignus murmured to himself as he set up his equipment in the ruddy glow of the forge fire. ‘What does it take to break the mind of a High Courtier?’

His smile widened behind his mask as he opened the chests of rare, precious ingredients that it had taken him half a year and more to gather. Any ordinary man could be broken easily enough, but of course those powerful enough to raise themselves to the Court of the Seven Talons would be far tougher nuts to crack. Vignus and the Hands of Darkness had journeyed far and wide across the Mortal Realms before ever he ventured to the Eightpoints, bartering, bribing and killing for the most noxious and potent ingredients known to mortal minds.

He laughed as he began to mix a concoction of the most sublime madness.

Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia stood on the front step of the forge he had commandeered and looked out upon the streets of Carngrad. The sky was clear in the morning light, burning bright with sunlight and fell promise. Vignus smiled up at it, defiant in the face of the light. He had his own path to follow, and light had little enough to do with it.

‘Let the Lords of Chaos rule,’ he whispered to himself.

‘My High Master,’ Calcis said from behind him as she stepped out of the protective glow of the forge to join her lord on the threshold. ‘What is your will?’

‘Go forth into the city, and upon its roofs,’ Vignus said, without looking at her. ‘Find the rest of these vermin, and exterminate them. Grind them into dust in my name.’

‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis said, and she bowed before her lord. ‘So shall it be done.’

‘Oh, and Calcis?’

‘High Master?’

‘Take Palania with you. Make examples of them, for all the city to see.’

‘Yes, High Master.’

The days passed, and in those cycles of light and dark Vignus carefully selected from amongst his precious cache of hard-won ingredients and brewed his special poisons, while out in the city Calcis and Palania fought a street war in his name.

Oh, how they fought! The two-pronged fork of his power, sublime violence and insane illusion, were both unleashed together. The flesh district didn’t know what had hit it.

Vignus watched through the Eyes of Noschseed that Calcis and her two disciple mirrorblades had begun to place throughout the flesh district, and with his Seeing Eye he looked also through her own eyes. He grew accustomed to the sight of the mirror-bright glaive slicing through human flesh, to the spray of blood and the wet sound of severed limbs hitting the cobbled streets.

It was Palania, though, who caused the greatest terror amongst the common street murderers of Carngrad. Where the mute luminate walked and spread her subtle illusions, men and women ran mad in the streets and rent their faces with their broken nails, howling as their minds boiled in their skulls. The luminate disseminated fear and madness, dropping alchemical poisons into this man’s ale, that woman’s stew, until all those around her saw horrors beyond imagining stalking them through the reeking alleys and foetid slave pits where they plied their various fell trades.

He watched the luminate enter a flesh market barter pit where the severed wings of Chaos furies were traded against the bile sacs of venom wyrms. He saw her blow a handful of rancid purple powder into the air, and heard her gurgle softly to herself with amusement as she did it. Within moments all those there present were convinced that those self-same furies and wyrms were risen from their dripping constituent parts, clawing their way out of the reeking flesh vats to attack them. In the ensuing madness of Palania’s illusion, fully thirty of the murderers of Carngrad slew each other in their panic while the luminate watched and laughed in her High Master’s name.

Meanwhile Calcis and her mirrorblades took heads and nailed them to walls and above tavern signs or set them on posts, grim totems to proclaim the ever-expanding boundaries of the Hands of Darkness’ streets.

Make examples, he had said, and between them Calcis and Palania certainly did that. They both were ruthless in their carrying out of his orders, each in her own way and according to her own particular skills.

He had them plant more Eyes of Noschseed as his territory expanded, more of the small spheres of silver and gold that allowed him to watch over his growing domain. On the second day, Calcis burned the barter pits nearest to Fleshripper’s Gate, and took fifteen heads. Palania unleashed a hallucinogenic poison into the heating ducts of a public pleasure house. She gurgled to herself as the customers and workers tore each other to bloody shreds in one of the greatest orgies of pain and bloodletting that the flesh district had seen for months.

On the third day she opened a slave pen and gave the freed wretches inside knives and a few drops each of an alchemical compound that gave them a superhuman, if self-destructive, strength. She turned them loose on their masters in a rampage of torture and savagery that became the talk of the city for weeks to come. On that same day Calcis, Relak and Darrath slew twenty-five warriors between them and strung their heads from a rope above the slave pits, knotting their filthy hair to the hemp to hold them aloft for all to see. By the end of the fourth day in Carngrad half the flesh district was his, but that was inconsequential. Vignus was no petty street gangster, to care about such base things.

On the fifth day, they finally made some progress that actually mattered.

Calcis and her mirrorblades with half a ten-band of mindbound behind them had cornered a group of roof-runners in a filthy, reeking tavern. Vignus used his Seeing Eye to watch through Calcis’ eyes as they fought across a room that was thick with the greasy smoke of tallow candles rendered from human fat. The street scum were nothing before the three elite warriors, and for a moment it looked as though this battle would be as easy as the ones that had preceded it.

For a moment, anyway.

Nothing worth taking is ever so easily won, Vignus reflected as something dark swept down out of the shadows of the ceiling and took the head from one of his mindbound with a vicious swing of its great hooked blade, sending a spray of blood jetting into the air. The newcomer wore a beaked bone-and-iron mask that looked like the skull of some terrible avian creature, and long black feathers adorned the shoulders of his leather torso harness.

He landed on the ball of one foot and spun into the turn of his cut, leaping back into the air with a killing screech as the hooked blade flashed out once more in a murderous arc and slew another of the mindbound where it stood.

The terrible weapon lifted again, and Relak’s glaive met it with a ring of steel on steel that brought a grim smile to the Thrallmaster’s hidden lips. He knew the foe his mirrorblades now faced, and hatred drew his attention to it like iron filings to a lodestone.

Corvus Cabal.

That the vile, blasphemous Cabal should also be active in Carngrad alongside his own warband was no great surprise, he supposed, but for one of them to be in the same room of the same tavern in a city this size?

No.

No, that was no accident.

The Cabalite swept Relak’s glaive aside and lunged for the mirrorblade’s flank with a short, wicked dagger held in his off-hand. Relak twisted away at the last moment and only took a long scratch along his ribs even though he stumbled to the boards in his haste. The Cabalite screeched and raised his hooked blade in killing triumph.

‘Child,’ Calcis said, her icy tone cutting through the frenzied air.

The Cabalite turned and glared at her, his eyes blazing behind his hideous bone mask.

‘Cypher witch!’ he spat at her.

Calcis laughed and spun her glaive in one hand as she met the Cabalite’s baleful stare.

‘Would you truly attempt to prey on the chicks in their nest, while the mother eagle circles above you with her talons extended?’

‘What do you know of the mountain raptors?’ the Cabalite spat at her. ‘Nothing!’

Relak was hauling himself to his feet now, one hand clutched to his wounded side but his glaive held tight in the other, and Darrath had finished his own man with a straight thrust to the throat. Both her disciples were poised and ready to fight, but Calcis raised her free hand to stay them. She looked the Cabalite slowly up and down and twirled her glaive once more.

‘Stand back, my sons,’ she said, although her disciples were no spawn of her own barren flesh. ‘Mother is working.’

‘Mother, is it?’ the Cabalite sneered. ‘Come and face me if you dare, witch.’

‘Keep the others from fleeing,’ Calcis told her disciples, and they moved to stand over the remaining roof-runners where they cowered as she took a slow step towards the Corvus Cabal warrior. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘Your arrogance is filthy!’ the feathered creature spat at her. ‘You are the sort of blasphemer who would sell your skills for coin!’

Vignus knew the zealot creature meant that as the foulest insult, but Calcis just laughed behind her mask.

‘My skills belong to my High Master, heart and soul,’ she whispered, and far away across the flesh district Vignus smiled to himself.

Kill it, Calcis, he sent down the mind-bond that bound her to his Word. Make it suffer, and make an example of it.

‘Yes, High Master,’ she said aloud.

‘What?’ the Cabalite snapped. ‘You speak to one who is not there. Madness! It is true, then – all the Cypher Lords are insane, poisoned by their own alchemy!’

‘Come and see, child,’ Calcis said, and snapped her glaive up into a two-handed guard before her.

The Cabalite shrieked like a swooping bird of prey and leapt into the air, his dagger flashing down to block the mirrorblade’s glaive even as his hooked blade swept up and over in a killing blow. Calcis turned into the swing and pirouetted on one foot, her other flashing out to catch the Cabalite in mid leap and slam her iron-shod heel into his exposed side. He grunted and crashed into a table, overturning it and shattering the glasses it had held against the rough stones of the hearth.

‘Child,’ Calcis repeated, her mocking laughter echoing around the room.

The Cabalite spun faster than the eye could follow, jamming an elbow against Calcis’ lead hand and smashing her glaive aside with his long blade. His dagger flashed down across the back of her forearm, drawing a thick line of blood from her pale skin.

The Cabalite was a skilled warrior, there was no doubt about that, but Calcis was an elite mirrorblade and the Voice of a Thrallmaster. She whirled sideways and evaded the downward sweep of the hooked blade that followed the initial strike, and slammed a knee diagonally upwards into the Cabalite’s midriff. She whip-cracked her body back the other way and brought her descending elbow down on his temple, the alchemically enhanced strength of her blow shattering his bone mask. The follow-up cut from her glaive swept through empty space where the Cabalite’s head had been but a moment before.

‘Oh, you’re good,’ she had to admit.

Kill it! Vignus screamed at her through the mind-bond.

She was tiring now, whereas the Corvus warrior turned an effortless backflip to avoid the return slash of her glaive. He tumbled across the blood-slick floor and came up with his blades in his hands, now some ten strides away from her.

Vignus could feel the first edge of fear touch his mirrorblade, fear not of death but of the possibility that she might be about to fail him.

Calcis took the moment to dip a hand into her pouch and grasp one of the specially prepared compounds that her High Master had prepared for her on the long journey to Carngrad. She pushed her hand up under her mask and thrust the bitter pill into her mouth, biting down hard and grinding the foul-tasting powder against her gums with her tongue.

The world began to sing. A shudder ran through Calcis’ limbs as the savagely strong stimulant took hold of her. Watching through her eyes, Vignus smiled with satisfaction to see how time seemed to slow down for her. The Cabalite moved like a man underwater, to Calcis’ eyes, his blades swinging almost lazily as he ran towards her.

‘Witch!’ he spat at her, but he was moving so slowly now while Calcis was just working up to her full killing frenzy.

Calcis snarled, and turned a lightning-fast somersault clean over the savage cut of the Cabalite’s blade.

She landed behind the Corvus warrior, back to back with him, reversed her glaive in her left hand and rammed it backwards under her own armpit to impale her adversary through the spine before he even had time to register that she had moved. Her bright blade burst out of his sternum in a great spray of blood, and he sagged to his knees with a dying groan.

‘So it is decreed,’ Calcis whispered. ‘So shall it be done.’

She shook the body of the dead Cabalite off her glaive and turned to regard her disciples, who both bowed their masked heads to her in gestures of utmost respect.

‘Kill those,’ she ordered. ‘Give me their leader.’

Relak and Darrath and the remaining three mindbound did as she bade them, their glaives and short blades making fast work of the last handful of roof-runners. They left the leader untouched, and Calcis stalked towards him. She slammed him backwards against a damp wooden wall and tightened her hand around his throat.

Behind her, the rest of them lay dead on the floor in a lake of blood.

‘My High Master and I are getting bored now,’ she said. ‘Five days of slaughtering you pointless scum has become tiresome in the extreme. Where is your leader? Where is Gorrius?’

‘Hah!’ the roof-runner spat. ‘You can’t touch Gorrius. He’s connected.’

Calcis tipped her head to one side, her eyes curious behind her mask.

‘To the Corvus Cabal?’

‘Mind your business, you stupid out-realmer.’

Calcis’ grip tightened on the man’s throat, her unnaturally strong fingers close to bursting the sides of his neck.

‘Some respect would be wise,’ she whispered, her hand shaking with the force of the stimulant that still burned in her veins.

‘Oh, plague touch you, I know I’m dead anyway,’ the man snarled. ‘I ain’t stupid, but you are if you think you can take down Gorrius. He’s tight with Nasharian the slaver and his feathered out-realm friends, and he’s in with the plaguing Court of Talons! You touch Gorrius and you’ll be flayed alive in the Square of Torment, you mark my words!’

Calcis laughed, a sudden, brittle sound in the blood-soaked silence of the tavern.

‘I’d tell you that I’ve felt worse things, but I dare say you wouldn’t believe me,’ she said. ‘Now, where would I find Gorrius, and Nasharian the slaver?’

‘You’re mad,’ the man whispered.

Calcis let the glaive fall from her hand and leaned forward to thrust her head close to the thief’s before she reached up and lifted her mask to show him her face.

He screamed at what he saw, heels scrabbling helplessly against the rotting boards beneath his feet as he struggled to pull away from her horrifying countenance. There was a sudden, sharp smell of urine as he lost control of his bladder.

‘Answer me,’ Calcis said. ‘Or kiss my oh-so pretty face.’

‘The House of Silver Bells!’ the man almost wept, eyes wide with sheer terror and revulsion yet seemingly unable to look away from the appalling ravage of her face. ‘It’s a gambling den, down by the barter pits. They… they meet there to play Torments and do business. Don’t come no closer, please!’

Calcis laughed again, and she slowly closed her left hand until the man’s throat ruptured and his blood sprayed hot into her ruined face.

She ran her long tongue delicately over the shreds of flesh where her lips had once been, and lowered her mask back into place.

‘The House of Silver Bells,’ she whispered. ‘My thanks.’

She tossed the corpse aside hard enough to propel it into a wall ten feet away, and stooped to retrieve her blade.

‘Mirrorblades, come,’ she said. ‘Mother wants a game of Torments.’

Vignus smiled upon her through the mind-bond, and told her that she had done well.

In the firelit darkness of the forge, Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia smiled at Calcis’ determination. The compound she had consumed would take a hard toll on her body when it wore off, he knew, but her suffering would be worth it. He looked up from the bubbling alembic on the bench in front of him and pointed his fan at the nearest mindbound.

‘You, beast,’ he said, speaking slowly to the simple-minded slave. ‘Go to Mirrorblade Calcis at the House of Silver Bells. Tell her High Master wants slaver Nasharian brought to him alive. Tell Mirrorblade Calcis to kill the others, but not slaver Nasharian. Hurry!’

The mindbound trembled with awe at being directly addressed by the High Master, its jaw clenching with the pain of adoration it caused. It bowed low and fled into the night.

Calcis and her disciples were just two streets away from the House of Silver Bells when a mindbound came sprinting towards them, looking ready to collapse from exhaustion.

‘Mirrorblade,’ it wheezed. Calcis stopped as she recognised the thrall. It was doubled over and vomiting black slime onto its boots through its mask, and Calcis knew at once that it came at the High Master’s bidding. Only the Word of the Thrallmaster could induce one of the near-mindless slaves to run itself to the point of death to carry an urgent message.

‘Speak, thrall,’ she said.

The mindbound shuddered and hacked up another string of bloody drool, then straightened as best it was able.

‘The High Master wants the slaver Nasharian alive,’ it choked. ‘He says to kill the others, but not Nasharian. You’re to bring Nasharian to the High Master.’

Calcis nodded shortly and turned away with her two disciples in her wake. Behind her, the mindbound keeled over and hit the ground with a wet thump. Perhaps it would rise again and perhaps it would not, but Calcis gave it no more thought. Thralls were cheap.

Despite its grand name, the House of Silver Bells was as dilapidated as every other building in the flesh district of Carngrad, if somewhat larger. Calcis paused to examine it for a moment, taking in the entrances and exits. The ground floor was windowless, but light flickered behind shutters above and she could hear the sound of drunken merrymaking wafting out into the street. She spoke wordlessly, giving commands in rapid hand-sign that directed Relak to the front entrance and Darrath around the back to the courtyard where the privy stood rotting behind the door. She made the sign for the small alchemical bombs that each mirrorblade carried in his pouch, to tell them what to do once they were in position.

Her disciples bowed their masked heads in obedience and went forth to poison the air of the gaming house and drive those on the ground floor mad with hallucinations. Calcis herself stepped lightly up onto an upturned barrel and jumped, her hands catching the ledge of an upper-storey window.

She pulled herself up with lithe grace and placed an eye to the gap between the ill-fitting shutters. She could see into the main common room of the gaming house, where various base characters played their gambling games with razor-edged ivory cards on splintery tables that were already sticky with blood. Torments was not a game for the weak, but these rough men of Carngrad were drinking in raucous camaraderie even as they flayed each other’s fingers for forfeits in the game. Her quarry would not be there amongst that low rabble, she knew.

So she must hunt, and a mirrorblade hunts best in the shadows.

The window to her right was lit as well, but to her left there was only darkness behind the closed shutters. Calcis lowered herself down from the window frame until she was dangling at the full length of her arms, then kicked her legs back and then forward to build up a swinging momentum. She launched herself up and to the left, her hands reaching out for purchase as she flew through the air.

Her left hand caught the windowsill but the rotten wood tore away in her grip and for a moment she was weightless before gravity took her. Her right slapped up and grabbed the very end of the ledge as she started to fall. She grunted as a stray nail tore through the palm of her hand, hooking her there.

She drew in a breath and let it hiss slowly out between her teeth as she pulled herself up one-handed, the nail ripping all the way through the back of her blood-slick hand as she put her entire weight on the wound.

Just like training, she thought as she remembered the ways in which the High Master had raised her in her youth, and the training, the endless tortures of mind and body that had made her the perfect killer she was now. Training makes me stronger, High Master. Pain is power, High Master. Pain is strength, and strength is pain. Under the wisdom of your Word, High Master, I grow ever stronger.

She heaved with her back and twisted her hips, and a moment later her foot hooked the ledge and her other hand was on the shutters, prying them open to give access to a darkened room. She swung up and into it, wincing as her right hand twisted on the nail. Only then did she reach out and pluck the rusty length of iron straight through her hand like a thorn to free herself.

She lifted the nail and raised her mask just enough to lick it clean of her blood, then slipped it into her pouch for a keepsake. She treasured the memories of pain.

Of victory.

That done, Calcis closed the shutters behind her and dipped the fingers of her unwounded hand back into her pouch, searching in the darkness amongst the things it contained until she found the small jar of salve. She placed a finger into the reeking ointment and smeared a little of it over her injury. The pain was sharp and immediate, as it had been when she had healed her forearm before leaving the tavern, and once again she smelled the acrid tang of burning blood as the wound closed and sealed itself. The High Master’s alchemical magic always hurt, but it always worked too, and what was one more scar to her? What was one more hurt, on a lifetime of hurts?

She flexed her hand, feeling the iron strength returning to it, and nodded in satisfaction as she closed the jar of salve and slipped it back into her pouch. She reached in there once more and found the dropper of Nighteye. Tipping her head back, she pushed up her mask and allowed one drop of the oily liquid to fall into each of her lidless eyes. It coated her pupils with a thin, stinging film, and her surroundings began to present themselves to her as the alchemically induced night vision took hold.

It was a small storeroom, piled with crates and barrels and broken furniture. Bright points of light stood out against the walls on three sides, and Calcis realised it was coming through tiny spyholes drilled through the wood to enable anyone in the room to look into those adjacent whilst remaining unobserved. She put her eye to the first to see what lay beyond. It was the gaming room she had seen into earlier through the shutters, and there seemed now to be a fight in progress. The fumes from Darrath’s and Relak’s alchemical bombs had already made their way up the stairs from the ground floor, it seemed. That was of no interest to her, she thought as she watched a man swing a chair into another’s face and shatter his jaw, but with luck the noise would help to cover the sound of her own actions. The second spyhole showed into an empty bedroom that was hung with mouldy red silks and velvets, but its owner obviously wasn’t working that night and Calcis turned away once more.

The third looked out into a small, private gaming room where two men sat across a Torments board from each other, although neither seemed to be actually playing.

‘I’m sorry, Gorrius,’ the one with his back to her was saying, ‘but your petty street war is your own problem. I’m not intervening on your behalf, and you’ve lost your mind if you think the Court of Talons cares one way or another who rules the roofs of the flesh district. Defend your own territory or sink into the abyss of the gutter with all the other failures. This is Carngrad, after all, and that is how things are done here.’

‘A fine friend you are,’ the other snarled. ‘After what I pay you…’

He was one-eyed and unshaven, somewhere in his early fifties but tough-looking with it, his exposed, muscular forearms dark with old, crude tattoos. He was also, Calcis realised, about to stab the other man. That would not do. The man with his back to her had to be the slaver Nasharian, and she was to bring Nasharian alive before her High Master. So it had been decreed, and so would it be done.

Calcis’ glaive tore through the damp, rotting wooden wall as if it were parchment, and she kicked the shattered boards aside and strode into the room, where the two men were staring at her in open astonishment. Nasharian started to rise but she slammed him back down into his chair with her left hand even as Gorrius kicked the table over and leapt forward with a stabsword plunging towards her belly.

She turned into the blow, spinning like a dancer, and the edge of the blade merely scored a slim line along the leather of her belt as she slammed her left elbow into Gorrius’ throat. He stumbled back a step and Calcis completed her turn, her glaive sweeping out to take his hand off at the wrist.

The stabsword spun away and clattered to the floor with the severed hand still clutching it, before Calcis whirled once again and took the head from his shoulders before he even had time to scream. Blood jetted across the walls and low ceiling as he fell, unmourned, behind her.

She turned and regarded Nasharian with a pitiless stare that still burned bright with Nighteye.

‘Come hither,’ she said. ‘You are called unto service. My High Master has asked of you.’

The ceiling exploded above her and something plummeted into the room, smashing Calcis to the floor. It shrieked like a raptor diving on its prey, and a great hooked blade whistled down and ripped into Calcis’ shoulder. She rolled with the blow, feeling her flesh tear open as the blade came free. Her left arm ran slick with her own blood as she whipped her body to hurl herself back onto her feet, her glaive already licking out one-handed.

The Corvus spire stalker parried with his hook-sword and slashed at her with the wicked iron claws lashed to his left hand, opening three long cuts across her thigh. The wounds were shallow but burned like fire where the filthy talons had sliced her open.

Calcis spat and cursed, already beginning to tremble as the stimulant she had ingested earlier started to wear off.

Not now! she mentally screamed.

She had intended to be back at the forge long before the awful after-effects of the drug took hold of her, but now this delay had made that impossible. A violent convulsion shook her body, and her guts cramped with sudden nausea.

The spire stalker laughed behind his hideous mask.

‘Is this a mirrorblade of the Cypher Lords?’ he sneered at her. ‘Shaking husk of drug abuse. Addict. Pathetic!’

He dashed Calcis to the floor with the back of his armoured hand and stood over her, laughing as her body began to spasm. The Cabalite clearly intended to humiliate her before he took her life.

That was his mistake.

He reached down with his clawed hand to rip the mask from Calcis’ face, as a trophy or offering to his foul God she could only assume, when a cry went up in the corridor outside.

‘Mother, where are you? This is taking too long!’

Calcis’ mouth had filled with foam and vomit when the fit took hold of her and she was unable to cry out, but she managed to slam an iron-shod foot into the slaver Nasharian’s ankle hard enough to make him shout in pain.

The door slammed open with a crash and the spire stalker spun to find Relak and Darrath charging him with drawn glaives flashing bright in their hands.

‘Die!’ Relak bellowed.

Darrath threw himself at the Corvus warrior, his glaive coming down in a glittering arc. The foe parried with ease and raked his claws across Darrath’s chest as he whirled away in a flurry of long, black feathers. Relak vaulted the table and hacked the man’s left arm off at the elbow with a vicious two-handed swing of his glaive.

The Corvus screamed and staggered, blood spurting from the stump of his severed arm. Even so he counter-attacked, the tip of his hook-sword ripping Darrath’s mask from his head and scoring a long cut across his cheek that missed taking his eye out by barely a straw’s width.

Ashamed at his unmasking, Darrath attacked in a furious storm of blows that drove the spire stalker backwards into Relak’s reach, and between them they hacked the blasphemous abomination to bloody rags.

‘Mother,’ Relak whispered when it was done, dropping to his knees beside Calcis where she thrashed helplessly on the floor. He turned from her to look at the terrified Nasharian, and nodded. ‘So it was decreed, so has it been done.’

‘Were there any other survivors?’ Vignus asked when Calcis forced the slaver down onto his knees in front of him in the forge.

‘No, High Master,’ she said.

Once she had recovered somewhat from her fit and removed Nasharian from the building, she had ordered her two mirrorblades to slaughter every living thing in the gambling house. Vignus approved of her decision.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m sure everyone in that establishment had enemies beyond counting. This way no one will know who did this thing, and for now that suits my purpose. I do not want more trouble with the foul Corvus scum at this time. You have done well, Calcis.’

‘Yes, High Master,’ she said.

‘Now, secure him and then see to your wounds. I must work.’

‘Yes, High Master.’

He left Calcis to make the slaver fast to a chair, and considered the man. They were much alike in build, and if Vignus was slightly taller and somewhat leaner then he could compensate for that with a slight stoop and perhaps just a little padding. The face was the important thing. It always was.

Apparently Nasharian was widely regarded as a very handsome man, so Vignus’ spies had told him, at least as such things were reckoned in Carngrad. This mostly seemed to mean that he still had both of his eyes, most of his teeth, and his nose. He had swept-back grey hair that was still thick despite his sixty or so years. The face was deeply lined, yes, but in the craggy way that Vignus had always felt added dignity, perhaps even gravitas, to a man’s countenance. It would suit him, he thought.

He turned a valve on one of his alchemical vessels and put a glass beaker under a spigot to catch the colourless, slightly cloudy liquid that spilled out. He allowed perhaps an inch of the fluid to fall into the vessel, then shut off the valve and held the beaker up to the light to examine it. Faint motes danced in the swirling distillate, wriggling as though they were alive.

Which, of course, they were.

He placed the beaker back on the workbench and pricked his finger with one of the spines of his fan, allowing a single drop of his blood to fall into the alchemical fluid. It darkened at once, the blood swirling out like skeins of silk in the viscous liquid. The dancing motes went berserk, thrashing into a frenzy until the stain of the blood was completely gone.

Vignus nodded his head in satisfaction and approached the now helpless slaver.

‘You must be thirsty,’ he said.

Nasharian, who had been watching the operation with clearly mounting horror, shook his head violently.

‘Oh, come now,’ Vignus said. ‘You are not a foolish man, you know how this will end. I can make you scream in torment like you have never heard a living thing scream before. Why don’t you save us both a lot of time and yourself a great deal of agony and just step forward to the part where you drink this?’

‘Why poison me?’ Nasharian whispered. ‘If you want me dead, just have your pet assassin knife me.’

‘I don’t want you dead,’ Vignus said. ‘Great Lords of Chaos, that would never do. Calcis walked through a wall and battled a terrible foe to ensure that Gorrius and the Corvus Cabal did not kill you, in fact. You probably remember that.’

Nasharian swallowed and looked sideways at Calcis in obvious fear, and said nothing.

‘Besides,’ Vignus went on, ‘did I say that this was poison? Just drink it, Nasharian, and then we can talk.’

After a moment the slaver’s shoulders slumped in defeat and he dutifully opened his mouth. Vignus reached out and grasped the man’s temples, pushing his head back until he could pour the contents of the beaker into his mouth. Nasharian swallowed on reflex, his eyes bulging in his head as the taste of the stuff coated his tongue with the flavour of rotting offal. He gagged for a moment, then gulped. Sweat stood out on his brow in bright pinpricks.

‘What… what was that?’

‘Poison,’ Vignus said.

‘But–’

‘Did I say that it was not poison?’

The slaver let out a bitter laugh and bowed his head in defeat.

‘How long until it kills me?’

‘It won’t kill you,’ Vignus said. ‘It will… loosen you.’

‘What does that mean?’

You’ll see, Vignus thought, but he only smiled behind his mask and said nothing.

By the dawn, Nasharian was howling. He thrashed in the ropes that held him to the heavy chair, drool hanging in thick strings from his mouth and his eyes wide with shrieking madness. He was almost ready, Vignus thought.

‘Calcis, my instruments,’ he said.

The mirrorblade went to her master’s equipment chest and removed a roll of oiled leather which she spread out on the flat top of the smith’s anvil. The things inside glittered bright silver in the ruddy light of the forge fire.

Vignus selected a pair of sharp-tipped forceps and a tiny blade, and stood over the ruin of Nasharian with one in each hand. Leaning over him, he began to work carefully around his hairline and under his jaw. His potion, aside from breaking the slaver’s mind, had indeed loosened him. His face and scalp hung slack from his skull, connected now only by thin strings of skin around the edges. It was the feel of their face gradually sliding off their skull as it became looser and looser over the space of eight or nine hours that drove them insane, Vignus was sure. The wriggling, burning presence of the tiny alchemical creatures that chewed it free from the inside probably didn’t help, either.

It is of no consequence, he thought. A man without a face doesn’t need a mind, and a man without a mind doesn’t need a face.

He worked until the whole thing came free, a still-living mask of flesh and hair that hung screaming from his bloodied hands. That done, Vignus nodded to Calcis and she reached out with reverential hands and lifted her master’s mask free from his head. He raised Nasharian’s face and set it carefully into place, the inside warm and slick against his own countenance. He smeared an alchemical ointment around the edges to blend and bond it to his skull, and blinked as new eyelids settled into place over his own.

He took a small silvered looking glass from his roll of instruments and lifted it to regard himself. Nasharian looked back at him from the reflection, and he smiled.

‘Your Word is mighty, High Master,’ Calcis praised him.

Vignus walked over to look down at the hapless Nasharian, still shrieking in his chair with thin smears of blood on the crown of his naked skull. He looked up and saw Vignus wearing his face, and if there was anything left of his mind, it went then. He slumped in the chair with a feeble sob, his lidless eyes glazing as the horror overcame him.

Vignus looked down into the whimpering, bubbling countenance of the now faceless man, and his new lips twisted into a sneer of disdain.

‘Your mewling bores me, Nasharian,’ he said to the slaver. ‘In the many and varied Names of Darkness, can there be a greater crime in all the Mortal Realms than to be boring?’

He snapped his fan open with a casual flick of his wrist, and the razor-tipped iron spines took Nasharian’s throat out with all the efficiency of a scalpel.

It was full daylight by then, and Vignus went forth into Carngrad with half a ten-band of unmasked mindbound as an escort. To go unmasked was anathema to a Cypher Lord, but mere mindbound didn’t rank highly enough for him to be concerned for their feelings on the matter. They would do as their High Master commanded, in this as in everything else in their miserable lives. He would have preferred to have had Calcis at his side, naturally, but her mask was too distinctive, and without it… no, that would not have done. No one could bear to look upon Calcis’ true face for long, and those who caught so much as a glimpse of her terrible countenance never forgot it. Instead he had dressed his mindbound thralls in old, spare clothes that he presumed had belonged to the dead smith, and he himself wore Nasharian’s garb. Nasharian the slaver was abroad with five rough bodyguards, that was all anyone would have seen, and Vignus was pleased enough with that.

Wearing the slaver’s stolen face he led the five across Carngrad, and no one dared to offer them violence or insult even in the most base parts of the Quarter of Suffering. Nasharian was widely known indeed, and greatly feared it seemed, and that was well.

They passed under the shadow of the great Aqueduct of Pain that brought water into that part of the city, and below the high hill where the aqueduct terminated and the water was collected in huge cisterns and channelled into the decaying lead pipes that fed hand pumps throughout the flesh district. Rotting bodies swung from the length of the huge stone aqueduct, an endless line of gallows stretching out beyond the city walls and into the Bloodwind Spoil beyond.

Once past Water Hill they turned west, and the vast edifice of the Court of the Seven Talons rose before them above the rooftops. It was domed in black volcanic glass and bedecked with spires and spikes beyond counting, and on every spike a severed head. This was the true seat of power in Carngrad, and now Vignus wore the face of a man who could gain entry to its heavily guarded halls.

It was time to set the game in motion.

Nasharian was known even at the black iron gates of the Court of the Seven Talons, as Vignus had hoped, and there the heavily armoured guards admitted him and his retinue without question. He was shown through the outer curtain wall, and there a nervous slave led him across a courtyard where flesh-flecked bones sat reeking in gibbets while plague crows cawed and pecked savagely at what was left. The sight of the birds put Vignus in mind of the Corvus Cabal, and his jaw tightened with anger. He paused for a moment and looked up at the rearing walls of the great citadel before him, and an idea began to form in his mind.

The slave bade his guards wait in the courtyard, but ushered Vignus through a pair of high double doors and into the dark, looming Hall of the Supplicant. Vignus made himself appear humble and obsequious before the blind clerk of supplication as he begged an audience with a representative of High Courtier Claudius Malleficus.

After an insultingly long wait, during which Vignus managed to subtly secrete an Eye of Noschseed within the oppressive darkness of the hall, an ancient robed man came to speak to him.

‘You remember me?’ the man said, his voice dry as ground bones. ‘I am Bravuk, the third under-domo to the major-domo of the High Courtier. You’re that slaver, the pretty one. I remember you. What do you want?’

Vignus forced a smile onto Nasharian’s face, holding down his anger at the insult that so lowly an underservant had been sent to treat with him, and apparently a simple-minded one at that.

Not with me, with Nasharian, he had to remind himself, before the urge to open his fan overcame him. This is an insult to his person, not to mine.

‘I bring news that, it is my greatest hope, may please the illustrious High Courtier,’ Vignus said. ‘Within the flesh district I have made contact with an out-realmer merchant, a nobleman of distant Noschseed who trades in Noschseedian firewine. It is known how hard it is to come by such a delicacy in the Eightpoints, and well known also is the High Courtier’s love of sensation and finery. I had but a thought to finesse an introduction between your major-domo and this trader, and so better serve the whim of the High Courtier. What say you, Bravuk?’

‘I say your speech has become a good deal more flowery than it was the last time we spoke, Nasharian,’ the under-domo sneered. ‘Airs and graces won’t do you any favours here. It’s results the master wants, not pretty words.’

‘Results, yes, of course,’ Vignus said, inwardly picturing the wizened old man roasting on a spit, ‘although I’ll wager he’d want firewine as well, if he knew it was to be had. You would perhaps be unwise to keep that news from him.’

‘Aye, I’ll grant you that.’ The servant sniffed and wiped his over-large nose on the already crusty sleeve of his robe. ‘That, but no more. You think the High Courtier accepts gifts from just anyone? Who’s to say this stuff isn’t poisoned?’

‘I say so,’ Vignus said, putting all of Nasharian’s pompous gravitas into the words. ‘I have tasted the drink myself, and found it most pleasing.’

‘Have you now?’ Bravuk mused. ‘Oh very well, if the great Nasharian says so. Send your trader here and have him ask for Apolonia, but don’t feel no need to come yourself. The usual fee will apply, of course, but you make my nose run.’

Vignus simply bowed, for all that the man’s closing words made no sense to him. What did his nose have to do with anything? The ways of the infinite Lords of Chaos could be strange indeed, and they afflicted each of the faithful in different ways. One man’s madness was another’s conversation, he supposed, although this fellow was quite clearly not of entirely sound mind.

That aside, the news was good. For him to have attended the meeting as both Nasharian and himself at the same time would have been problematic, although not completely impossible. This way was better.

‘As you say,’ he said. ‘The usual fee, then. Expect the noble trader at sundown.’

‘What’s his name, this trader of yours, so I can let the gate guards know to expect him?’

‘Vignus Daneggia,’ Vignus said with Nasharian’s lips.

That done, he left the Court of the Seven Talons and not before time. He had been kept waiting overly long, and already he could feel that Nasharian’s face was beginning to die. What had felt like his own flesh and blood not two hours before now felt like a strange, flexible mask that was ill-fitting and beginning to chafe. By the time they were in the vicinity of the central barter pits under the aqueduct the left ear had fallen off. Vignus was making haste to return to the forge and rid himself of the thing when his eye alighted on an unwelcome sight.

The House of Silver Bells was on the left of the square he was crossing with his disguised mindbound around him, and opposite it stood a gaunt razortree. Such were common throughout the Bloodwind Spoil and grew here and there even in Carngrad, and were nothing in themselves to be remarked upon other than their inherent danger. This one was, though.

This one had a mirrorblade hanging from it, torn into shreds by the tree’s predations. For a brief moment Vignus feared that it was Calcis he was looking at, until he spotted the intricate blue-and-green tattoo on the inside of the corpse’s left bicep where the tree had eaten away its light armour. No, not Calcis then. This was Relak, her disciple who had been with her in the attack the previous night. His glaive and chakram had been neatly placed at his feet like an offering.

The man was very, very dead, and there was a sigil carved into the taut flesh of his stomach. Vignus halted his mindbound and crossed the square to investigate, being careful to keep out of the tree’s reach. It slashed at him with a wickedly thorned branch anyway, already craving fresh blood, but it failed to touch him. Vignus looked up at Relak’s swinging body, discerning from the pattern of wounds that he had been stabbed through the side of the neck with a thin blade before he had been given to the tree. That was precise work, he reflected, but it was the sigil carved into his mirrorblade’s flesh that most enraged him.

It was the sign of the Corvus Cabal.

The High Master returned at noon, in as black a mood as Calcis could remember. The slaver’s face was rotting in place over his own, lending him a ghastly aspect that made the drug-induced hallucinations of her childhood stir deep within her memories where she had buried them.

‘High Master?’ Calcis ventured, and she realised that she was afraid for the first time in a very, very long while.

‘Where is Relak?’ the High Master demanded.

‘Scouting in the city,’ Calcis said at once. ‘With my shoulder still healing, I sent him out to–’

‘To die!’ Vignus bellowed at her. ‘He is hanging from the razortree in the Square of Silver Bells, and he has been cut with the sigil of the thrice-damned Corvus Cabal! It cannot be borne, Calcis!’

The High Master’s words were like a hammer-blow to Calcis’ guts. Her disciple was slain, and she felt the loss as keenly as a mother receiving word that her son had fallen in battle.

‘No, High Master,’ she whispered.

‘Two battles with those scum were not enough to dissuade them, it seems,’ he raged. ‘They have taken revenge, Calcis! On me! How dare they?’

She remembered his rare rages from her distant youth, and the searing agonies that had resulted from them, and for a moment she was young again and terrified of him once more. She forced down the panic that threatened to rise in her throat. She was a mirrorblade now, even the Voice of a Thrallmaster, and far beyond such childish things as fear. She steadied herself and thought on what the High Master had said.

It was ill news indeed. The Corvus Cabal and the Cypher Lords were long-standing enemies, both masters of stealth and assassination and both seeking the attention of the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse through the same methods. That they were abroad in the city as well was no secret by then, but to lose a valued mirrorblade had quite understandably driven her master into a towering rage. For herself, Calcis felt only grief and the furious need for revenge. Her disciples Relak and Darrath were as sons to her, and now Relak was slain. Had she still had the ability to weep, she would have done so then.

‘They were clearly after Nasharian too, as the battle at the gambling house would attest,’ Vignus growled as he ripped the dead slaver’s face free from his own and hurled it into the fire.

Calcis lowered her eyes, not having the rank to be permitted to gaze into her master’s true face, and deferentially handed him his mask. He turned his back to put it on, and when he rounded on her again the look in his half-hidden eyes was bloody murder.

‘Find them, Calcis,’ he ordered her. ‘Find them, but do not attack until we have gauged their strength. I have the inkling of a plan for dealing with these wretches once and for all, but it will take time to bear fruit. Plant Eyes around their hiding place, that we may watch and learn how best to defeat them.’

‘Yes, High Master,’ she said.

It was plain that the High Master meant now, so Calcis summoned her remaining disciple and half a ten-band of mindbound and led them out into the city.

Let the hunt begin, she thought. Relak will be avenged.

All that afternoon they worked their way across the flesh district and on into the Quarter of Discipline, where the whipping posts stood in long ranks and bones rotted in gibbets on the street corners. There a hooded man spied them from an alley and hurried out into the light, making a discreet hand-sign as he came. Calcis read the sign and knew she had chanced upon one of the High Master’s spies, who had no doubt been watching and waiting for her.

She guided the man around a corner and down the steps of a disused flaying pit, out of sight of the street. Old skins hung from rusty hooks on the wall, some of them completely intact. It took great skill to remove a skin in one piece, Calcis thought with admiration, and wondered who the flayer had been. Torture was not her way, but she felt that one expert owed their respect to another, whatever their field might be. She admired the drying skins for a moment while Darrath and her mindbound took up guard behind her to ensure their privacy.

The spy cleared his throat, and Calcis turned from the skins to regard him. He was a plain man, lightly built and nondescript. She supposed that the best spies were the sort of people one would be disinclined to notice in a crowd, or to remember.

‘Voice of the High Master,’ the spy said, bowing his head respectfully to her. ‘I bring dire news. There are Corvus Cabal abroad in the city.’

‘I know that,’ Calcis snapped, and again she thought of Relak. ‘Where?’

The spy looked up at her in surprise. ‘Have they already struck?’

‘Twice I have fought and bested their warriors, although in truth only narrowly,’ Calcis said. ‘They took one of my disciples this morning, in retribution. Relak walks the Path of Shadows now.’

The spy folded his hands in respect and made the sign for mourning.

‘May he walk in glory,’ he murmured.

‘He’s rotting on a razortree,’ Calcis said curtly. ‘Where are the Cabal?’

‘They have taken over a flesh-butcher’s factory and made it a shrine to their false Gatherer God,’ the spy said. ‘It stands at the corner of Gorewind Alley and the Square of Howling.’

Calcis blinked in surprise. The Corvus Cabal were renowned for their stealth, and in truth she had expected no answer to her question.

‘How do you come by this truth?’

‘They have been hunting my men for weeks,’ the spy admitted. ‘Only through chance was I able to conceal myself in a dung cart and have the driver follow them one night as they crept back to their roost.’

Calcis nodded.

‘You have done well,’ she said, and turned away.

‘Mistress?’ the spy ventured.

‘Speak,’ she said, without looking back at him.

‘They have many men in their warband. Very many.’

‘I understand,’ Calcis said, and returned to Darrath and the mindbound.

Too many for you to fight, the spy had meant, for all that he hadn’t dared tell her so to her face, but that was well enough. Calcis was a battle dancer, a ferocious and all-but-superhuman warrior, but even she understood that open warfare was not the chosen way of the Cypher Lords any more than it was that of their foes, and that they had always been unlikely to be able to match a rival warband in terms of sheer numbers. She made her peace with that, and sent Darrath out across the rooftops to plant Eyes around Gorewind Alley and the Square of Howling, to watch over the Corvus Cabal’s stronghold and report back what they saw there to her High Master’s Seeing Eye.

The High Master will find a way to triumph without battle and still avenge Relak, she told herself. He already has the beginnings of a plan. He always does.

The sun was setting when the Noschseedian trader Vignus Daneggia announced himself at the gates of the Court of the Seven Talons. He was masked, in the way of the high-ranked of Noschseed, but he carried no weapons. He allowed the gate guards to inspect his retinue of five unremarkable, somewhat slow-witted men while he patiently fanned himself and waited. The men had a small hand-barrow with them, and in it was a short barrel.

‘I believe I am expected,’ Vignus said. ‘I was told to ask for someone by the name of Apolonia. I have a gift for her master.’

‘If it’s drink you’ll be off to a good start,’ one of the guards said with a brown-toothed grin.

‘Drink?’ Vignus echoed. ‘I assure you, this is a sample of the very finest vintage Noschseedian firewine to ever make its way across the Mortal Realms to the Eightpoints!’

‘Whassat then?’

‘Drink,’ Vignus admitted, and the guard laughed. ‘Very, very fine drink.’

‘In you go then,’ the guard said.

Vignus retraced the steps he had taken that morning while wearing another man’s dying face, and settled down to wait in the Hall of the Supplicant with his thralls around him. This time he was not kept waiting anything like so long, and he was met by the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus’ major-domo herself.

Apolonia stood seven feet tall in her clawed boots, whip-thin and with a great mane of matted silver hair that reached almost to the waistband of her studded leather britches.

‘You are the firewine trader?’ she demanded, looking down at Vignus and his retinue. ‘You’d better have brought some with you.’

Vignus turned and gestured to the small barrel that was nestled in a bed of straw in the hand-barrow, carefully wrapped to protect the precious cargo.

‘A gift, of course,’ he said.

‘Obviously,’ Apolonia said. ‘The High Courtier does not trade.’

Vignus thought of the carefully brewed potion he had mixed into the barrel of firewine, and smiled broadly behind his mask.

Oh, he will, he thought. He will beg to trade with me.

‘Of course not,’ he murmured. ‘It is an offering, no more than that, made as a symbol of my greatest respect for your master. I am Vignus Daneggia of Noschseed, and I can be found at the old forge by Fleshripper’s Gate.’

‘Who cares?’ Apolonia snapped. ‘Come here and open it.’

‘Mistress?’ Vignus asked.

‘Open it, I said,’ Apolonia demanded. ‘You think I put just any gift in front of my illustrious master? This is Carngrad, you fool – everyone here is always trying to kill everyone else. You’ll taste it yourself, to prove to me it isn’t poisoned.’

Vignus forced himself to remain still.

‘I understood that my noble friend Nasharian gave assurances…’ he began.

Apolonia snorted.

‘Nasharian is neither noble nor anyone’s friend,’ she scoffed. ‘Tap the barrel and drink, trader, or I will assume it is poison and have you flayed alive.’

Vignus looked at the barrel, and thought again of the extraordinary combination of rare and foul poisons that he had mixed and poured into it. He had long since built up an immunity to most of his noxious alchemical creations, of course, but this?

No, not this one. He had never made this poison before.

This was something he had not foreseen.

Curse that worthless slaver, he raged to himself. He is not so trusted here as he thought he was, it would seem.

There was nothing else for it – he was going to have to drink the stuff and pray to the numberless Lords of Chaos that he could remain sane long enough afterwards to try to make an antidote. It was time to cast the dice.

Unwilling to risk suspicion by raising further complaint, Vignus did as Apolonia bade him. He tapped the cask and poured himself a cup of what, to eye and taste at least, was an extremely fine firewine. He raised his mask just enough to drink it down where the towering major-domo could see him do it, then lowered the mask once more and sighed with satisfaction.

‘It is very good,’ he said. ‘A gift fit for a king.’

Apolonia watched him through narrowed eyes, but Vignus simply stood and bore her inspection in silence. Inside him it was another story. His body, long accustomed to dealing with poisons and hallucinogenics in all their many forms, was screaming danger at him so loudly he could scarcely think clearly.

‘Very well,’ Apolonia said at last. ‘Leave the barrel and get out.’

Vignus bowed deeply to her, his haste to be away making it far easier to swallow the insult than it would normally have been.

You’ll see, he snarled silently to himself as he hurried from the Court of the Seven Talons with his disguised mindbound around him. This is a gift that no man can resist for long. And when it is gone… oh my dear, your precious master will crawl to me to beg for more.

That was well and good, but already his vision was blurring at the edges and he was beginning to hear sounds that he knew were not real.

Vignus made great haste back to the forge by Fleshripper’s Gate, trying to hide from his thralls just how badly his hands were shaking. For the first time in a great many years, Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia was afraid.

He blundered into the forge and kicked over a chair that he had mistaken for a large rat. He cursed as his vision swam and he saw it was just a chair after all.

‘Palania, stay with me,’ he ordered. ‘Everyone else, get out. Now!’

Calcis gave him a curious look, but the mute luminate pointed at the doorway and snarled until the mirrorblade did as her High Master bade her, taking Darrath and the mindbound with her.

Vignus turned to his luminate and found that he was panting like an ice warg on a hot summer’s day.

‘Poisoned,’ he gasped. ‘By my own hand! I need you to help me, Palania, and tell no one of this. No one!’

The mute gurgled at him, and Vignus brayed laughter into his mask. Already he could hear the brittle edge of madness in that laughter.

So soon, he marvelled with the part of his mind that was still sound. Truly this time I have excelled myself. I had just not planned to consume the distillate myself!

He laughed again, shaking where he stood, and ripped his mask off so he could wipe his sweating face. That Palania could see his face was truly the smallest of his concerns at that time, and he could be assured the tongueless woman would tell no one of it.

He began to laugh once more, and struck himself brutally across the face to make an end to it.

‘Prepare the alembic,’ he snapped, balling his hands into tight fists as he forced himself to concentrate. ‘Light the burners, Palania. I must work, and with great haste!’

So it was that Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia worked through the night with only his mute luminate for assistance, raving and screaming by turns but forcing himself onwards, only the strength of his towering will enabling him to fight the madness of his own making long enough to concoct an antidote that he could be sure would work. Even then it was only his existing immunities that made it possible – the poison he had made had no known antidote, he had made sure of that.

At last, as the sun was coming up outside, he drank down a viscous liquid so foul that he almost vomited it up again on the spot. He beat his fists against the anvil and forced himself to choke it all down, then sagged to his knees and rested his naked face against the cold iron block and wept as he gave thanks to the nameless Lords of Chaos for his deliverance. He knew that he was without dignity in that moment, unmasked before a subject and weeping on his knees, but already he could feel the barbed talons of madness beginning to recede from his mind.

That was the closest he had ever come to succumbing to the insanity which he spread so freely around himself wherever he went, and the fear of it had almost unmanned him. At last he hauled himself to his feet and reached for his mask with hands that trembled a little less than they had an hour ago, and set the mask on his head once more.

‘I have triumphed,’ he said. ‘My Word is mighty.’

Palania simply looked at him, but as Vignus had said, she would tell no one.

It took three days and a night, no more than that, and on the morning of the fourth day Apolonia, major-domo of the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus, made her way to a small, sturdy forge in the broken streets near Fleshripper’s Gate.

She was surrounded by guards and resplendent in a flowing gown of sewn human skins, but still Vignus could see the worry in her eyes when Calcis admitted her to his presence.

‘Why, my dear Apolonia,’ he said, fanning himself idly as he reclined in the chair he had killed Nasharian in. He had buried his disgrace deep inside himself, and no one would ever guess how close the great alchemist had come to destroying himself with his own poisons. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

Behind him, the body of the smith hung crawling with maggots and reeking on the wall.

‘My lord trader,’ Apolonia said, and swallowed. ‘I must offer apology for my brusqueness, the last time we spoke. I meant to offer you no offence.’

Liar, Vignus laughed to himself.

‘It is nothing,’ he said. ‘How may I serve you in my humble abode?’

‘My master, the High Courtier, is… in need of soothing,’ Apolonia said diplomatically.

He’s tearing at his face and seeing horrors that aren’t there, Vignus thought, and suppressed a shudder at the thought that he had so narrowly avoided exactly the same fate himself.

‘Oh?’

‘He was much taken with your offering of the fine vintage firewine, and sends his most sincere thanks.’

Has he started soiling himself in public yet? It can’t be far away by now, if not.

‘My pleasure to serve,’ Vignus said.

‘My master is a man of… of noble appetites,’ Apolonia went on, stretching euphemism to the breaking point, ‘and I fear your gift has already been wholly consumed. He is greatly desirous of more, if such could be had. I am, naturally, more than prepared to pay this time.’

He’s screaming for it, isn’t he? Oh my dear Apolonia, when I brew an addiction, it could break the soul of a God.

‘Firewine is difficult and expensive to import over so great a distance, and is thus very costly,’ he began.

‘I have gold,’ she said.

‘Extremely costly.’

Apolonia’s jaw clenched, but the determination in her eyes told Vignus that her High Courtier was by then all but tearing down the Court of Talons with his bare hands in his desperation.

‘I have a great deal of gold,’ she said.

‘So be it,’ Vignus said. ‘It seems that perhaps the High Courtier does trade, after all.’

Of course the High Courtier trades, Vignus reflected. Everyone does, one way or another.

He had relieved Apolonia of eighty grains of gold for another small barrel of firewine, and the dose of his personally created, ferociously addictive alchemical hallucinogen in this one had been double that of the last.

Once she had left him, Vignus sat down before the fire and permitted himself a smile of satisfaction. He allowed his eyes to close behind his mask, and opened his Seeing Eye. He reached out across the Paths of Chaos and found the small silver-and-gold Eye of Noschseed that he had hidden in the Hall of the Supplicant whilst he had been waiting there wearing Nasharian’s face.

Through it, his Seeing Eye watched Bravuk the ancient third under-domo pacing nervously up and down, clutching at his robes in obvious distress.

‘Keep calm, Bravuk,’ someone said, out of the Eye’s field of view. ‘She will return with more.’

‘What if she doesn’t?’ the old man whispered. ‘What then, Ulluk? Are you going to be the one to tell the master? Well, are you? Will you be the one to say “no” to him?’

‘Not likely,’ the other man said. ‘If Apolonia fails then she’s telling him herself.’

‘He’ll flay her with her own teeth! Actually that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Might mean a promotion, that.’

‘Rather her than me, and if anyone’s getting promoted around here it’ll be me not you,’ Ulluk said. ‘Anyway, she won’t fail. She never does.’

He shuffled into view then, another old man in stained robes, with a pronounced hump to his back.

‘You didn’t hear how she spoke to the merchant when he came here,’ Bravuk fretted. ‘Noschseedian nobles are haughty types at the best of times, and they don’t take insults lightly. He won’t like it.’

‘She took a hundred grains of gold with her, he’ll like that well enough,’ Ulluk said. ‘A hundred grains for a barrel of drink, for the Great Lord’s sake! Ain’t no merchant in the Mortal Realms would turn that down.’

‘It’s not just drink,’ Bravuk muttered. ‘It can’t be. I like a drink as much as the next man, but it don’t make me want to worship dead women who quite obviously aren’t there!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Ulluk urged. ‘People listen, and they gossip and tell tales. This is the Court of the Seven Talons, everyone listens and tells tales. Do you want the master hearing that sort of talk? It’s not that I like you, you understand, Bravuk, but if you go to the flaying pits I’ll have to do more work, and I don’t want that.’

‘No one’s going to the flaying pits,’ Apolonia’s voice cut over them, then she strode into view with a rapidly uncoiling whip in her hand and lashed each old man viciously across the back with it, the barbed leather splitting their robes open and drawing blood. ‘I have more, and for only eighty grains.’

‘That’s still a fortune,’ Ulluk muttered, pulling sullenly at his bloodied robe with a three-fingered hand.

‘Yes, it is, and I dare say next time it will be even more costly,’ Apolonia said, ‘but it seems we are set on that path now. The master is far past listening to reason on the matter.’

‘And what happens when this merchant runs out of the stuff?’ Bravuk said. ‘There’s only so much of it he can have brought with him all this way.’

‘I don’t know about you,’ Apolonia said, ‘but when that happens I intend to be as far away from here as I can get.’

You can’t run, Apolonia, my dear, Vignus thought to himself as he closed his Seeing Eye and looked into the forge fire once more. Everyone thinks they can run from me, and everyone is wrong.

Four days later Apolonia returned to the forge’s door, and this time the fear in her eyes was plain to see.

‘The price has gone up,’ Vignus said bluntly when he finally allowed her into his presence.

‘Oh, of course it has,’ the major-domo said, the bitterness like venom on her tongue. ‘Who are you, trader? What do you want of my master?’

Vignus had spent a good deal of time over the last few days thinking on his plan to eradicate the Corvus Cabal in Carngrad, and now he smiled behind his mask as the first opportunity to put that plan into action presented itself.

‘An audience,’ he said. ‘A personal audience, with your master and his inner circle of advisors and warriors.’

‘I can arrange that,’ Apolonia said at once. ‘Consider it done.’

‘And a hundred and fifty grains of gold.’

She blanched at that, but she paid anyway. Of course she did. Vignus knew all too well what she would have returned to in the Court of Talons, had she refused him. He was supposed to be playing the part of an avaricious merchant, after all, and gold was always useful.

That had been two days ago, and now the time of the appointed audience had arrived. Vignus set out into the streets of Carngrad with Calcis at his side, both of them masked as befitted their station and with Palania and Darrath and five mindbound around them. They had brought yet another barrel of doctored firewine with them. A large one.

Vignus was welcomed at the gates of the Court of the Seven Talons as an honoured guest, and nothing was made of the glaive on Calcis’ back or the blades and chakrams carried by her men, nor even of Palania’s sickle-topped war-staff. It was clear that orders had been given to admit him and his retinue, and with all haste.

Once within they were ushered into the Hall of the Supplicant where Apolonia was waiting for them in a gown of human teeth sewn over supple leather. She led them down one of the seven long, winding corridors that led from the hall, one for each of the courtiers of the Seven Talons. Her master’s corridor led out into a small amphitheatre of tiered seating with a huge carved throne of bones looming over it. There a man sat wearing a coat of human scalps, flowing with matted, greasy hair of various length and hue. He was raving, clawing at the air around him with his free hand even as he gulped firewine from a fine crystal goblet.

Various advisors, soldiers, fixers and hangers-on clustered the benches below the throne, dressed in a wide array of attire, from heavy armour to flowing painted silks.

‘My Revered Lord Malleficus,’ Apolonia said, ‘may I present the Lord Trader Vignus Daneggia of Noschseed?’

‘Firewine!’ Malleficus roared, upending the goblet over his mouth and swallowing enough to drive a horse insane in a single gulp.

He is so far gone already, Vignus marvelled. This vintage may be my very best yet.

‘Who is this masked savage?’ one of the assembled advisors barked. ‘Seize him and confiscate his barrel!’

‘You seize no one in my court!’ Malleficus screeched, and hurled his empty goblet at the advisor’s head. ‘I rule here! Me! Me and her!’

He waved vaguely at the space beside him as he spoke, the space where there was no one.

‘My lord?’

‘She rules beside me! Beautiful!’ His voice broke then, and a sob caught in his throat as he began to weep. ‘So… she is so beautiful in her suffering. You are not fit to… You! Not fit to gaze upon her wounds! Punish him!’

Guards rose up from behind the tiered benches and seized the advisor who had spoken, clubbing him brutally to the ground in the name of a wounded woman who quite clearly did not exist outside of the courtier’s own broken mind.

Only when the man was dead on the floor with his head shattered like a dropped egg did High Courtier Claudius Malleficus sag back into his throne and wave for a fresh goblet of firewine. He drank a great draught of it, then peered down at the company assembled on the floor of his audience chamber as though unsure of what had just happened.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, his voice sounding suddenly like that of a frightened child. ‘Why are you here? What do you want? Make them go away!’

‘They bring you a gift, your majestic excellency,’ Apolonia said, as though that gift had not been purchased for the price of a war-trained bull cygor. ‘Finest firewine, your favourite.’

‘Firewine! This is marvellous news! A toast!’ Malleficus shouted, and drained his goblet.

There was blood seeping through the crotch of his britches, Vignus noticed with satisfaction.

‘A toast indeed,’ Vignus said. ‘It is my honour to bring such joy to one so exalted as yourself, your majestic excellency, and to all those here gathered.’

He smirked behind his mask as he used the ridiculously overblown title, watching black drool trickle unheeded from the corner of the High Courtier’s lips. A man had seldom looked less majestic, in Vignus’ recollection, and again he shuddered inwardly to think how close he himself had come to that very fate.

Still, he smiled as a slave refilled his master’s goblet and the High Courtier drank again. His servants tapped the cask that Vignus had brought with him and poured goblets of the savagely poisoned liquor for all those there present.

Malleficus thumped his goblet down then and fixed the Thrallmaster with a furious glare.

‘Your gift is given,’ he snapped, then turned towards the non-existent woman he supposed sat at his left hand. ‘What does he want, my dear? Why… oh, the blood! The suffering! Oh my sweet, putrid love…’

The High Courtier began to sob, and Vignus knew that he had won. Now it was time to set his plan into motion.

He opened his Seeing Eye and envisioned the apparition that High Courtier Claudius Malleficus saw beside him, the maggots writhing in her empty eye sockets and the blood that poured like honeyed wine from her lush lips to spill down the front of a white silk shroud that was crusted stiff with dried vomit. He plunged his will into the apparition and felt the courtier’s carefully engineered madness facing him like a living thing. He grasped that madness with the psychic claws of his sorcerous mind, and he squeezed.

‘Hear his words,’ he said in the voice of the rotting woman, a voice that only Malleficus could hear. ‘He speaks with the voice of the Great Lord.’

‘Speak!’ Malleficus shrieked, his eyes bulging in their sockets like boiled karnsnake eggs as he turned the full, burning fury of his insane gaze on Vignus. ‘What say you, emissary of the Great Lord?’

Vignus cleared his throat and regarded the assembled benches of various advisors, soldiers, fixers and hangers-on. He spoke, as His Majestic Excellency Claudius Malleficus had bade him.

‘Your will is mighty, O majestic excellency, and your benign power rules Carngrad as one of the Seven Talons of the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse,’ he began. ‘But know you this, exalted lord – there are heretical interlopers right here in the heart of the great Reaver City. Even under the all-seeing gaze of the Court of the Seven Talons, sedition and treason has been allowed to fester and grow upon these noble streets!’

He paused to allow the hubbub from the benches to subside, his eyes fixed firmly on the gibbering form of the High Courtier. The man reached out with his left hand, clutching as though for reassurance at the hand of a woman who wasn’t there.

‘Who?’ Malleficus barked at last, and had to pause to pluck a rope of particularly thick phlegm from his chin. He flicked it away to slap wetly against the cheek of his nearest advisor, and swallowed a great gulp of firewine before continuing. ‘Who would dare?’

‘They are out-realmers, O revered lord, foul heretics and unbelievers from beyond the Eightpoints,’ Vignus continued. ‘They call themselves the Corvus Cabal, and they worship a false abomination. And thinkest thou, my assembled lords and ladies, thinkest thou, my arch lord courtier, that the Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse has truck with this carrion false god they call the Gatherer? He does not! ’Tis nothing but base heresy! And here, upon your very streets, they did sacrifice a man of mine, a loyal man, wise and true, and they did defile his flesh with foul sigils. I say to you, my lords and ladies, I say to you, it is enough! Such insult cannot be borne, not to the pure and wise doctrine of the Lord Archaon, and yet neither to the righteousness of your own rule over these streets. They do us grievous insult, and shall we stand for it? I say that we shall not!’

‘Never!’ shouted someone in the audience.

‘Abomination!’ called another, raising his cup of firewine high. Already the first purple flush of the poison was spreading around his lips, so strong now was the mix in that barrel. ‘Destroy them in the name of the Rotting Lady!’

‘The Rotting Lady!’ someone else howled. ‘All hail!’

They blaspheme, and they do not even know it, Vignus thought with delight.

He had tailored the dose in the barrel to the High Courtier’s already greatly raised tolerance levels, of course. Those advisors present who had never tasted the poisoned brew before were overdosing before his very eyes, some going into spasms while others began to screech and howl and tear at each other in their ecstasy of madness. He felt Calcis stiffen beside him, her hand going protectively to the hilt of her glaive, but Vignus touched her arm with his fan to still her.

Their madness was a collective thing, a shared thing, and it all fed from the High Courtier’s own delusions. Vignus reached out once more with his Seeing Eye and found the horror they called the Rotting Lady, the totem of their collective insanity, and he wore her like a psychic puppet.

She tottered to her feet beside the High Courtier’s throne and put a three-fingered hand on his shoulder, gangrenous pus oozing from the stump of the missing digit. When she spoke her voice was like a fell wind blowing from an open tomb, and all those affected by the poisoned brew heard her clearly as Vignus manipulated the shape of their madness with his twisted power.

‘Kill them,’ the Rotting Lady rasped. ‘You have the power, O great men and women of Carngrad. This Corvus Cabal offends mine maggot-filled eyes. Eradicate them. Feed them to the rendering pits in the name of Archaon himself, in answer to their insult. This man Vignus serves the Great Lord. Pass unto him the Staff of the General, and he will do this work in your names. Kill them, and revel and bathe in their blood, and we shall all dine on firewine as the unbelievers burn for our pleasure on the great pyre in the Square of Judgement.’

‘Kill!’ someone shouted, and then the chant went up.

Firewine and poison and madness sang in their veins, and they smashed their goblets together until they shattered and blood sprang bright from the gashes in their hands. Above them all the Majestic High Courtier Claudius Malleficus laughed and wept and soiled himself with reeking joy.

‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ they shouted.

‘Call out the troops!’ someone howled. ‘Give him the staff!’

Vignus smiled as a heavily armoured warrior handed him a long staff, topped with a great spike carved with arcane runes.

‘Lead our troops in this matter, O emissary of the Great Lord,’ the warrior snarled. ‘Kill!’

‘Slaughter, in the name of the Rotting Lady!’

A cheer, at that.

‘Slaughter!’

It was pandemonium in the court of the beasts.

‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’

Vignus turned to look about himself, with Calcis and Palania at his side, and he knew his work there was done.

The entire audience chamber of the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus might have been reduced to gibbering, hallucinating wrecks of humanity by the time Vignus left their presence, but by then it no longer mattered. By then he had the totemic Staff of the General in his hands and the entire military might of one of the Seven Talons at his disposal.

He and Calcis and Palania led the massed ranks of heavily armoured warriors through the streets from the Court of the Seven Talons to the Square of Howling, where the Corvus Cabal had made their stronghold in the flesh-butchers at the corner of Gorewind Alley.

While they were still half a mile distant Vignus paused under the Aqueduct of Pain to open his Seeing Eye, and he gazed out through the Eyes of Noschseed that Calcis and Darrath had planted around the square. He saw the Corvus scum about their business, some fifty of them in all if he gauged it correctly.

He had three hundred heavily armoured men at his back. They marched on until they reached the Square of Howling, the tramp of their hobnailed boots echoing from the close-packed houses that lined the streets.

Vignus and Palania stood back with Calcis and Darrath as a bodyguard, and he raised the Staff of the General and used it to point at the building ahead of them.

‘Destroy it,’ he told the massed forces of the High Courtier. ‘Kill everything within.’

A thin smile stretched his lips behind his mask as they charged forward to do his bidding, and at his side Palania gurgled with laughter.

‘Your Word is mighty, High Master,’ Calcis said beside him as battle was joined in the stinking street. ‘Your enemy kills your enemy, and we stand back and watch, and smile, and need do nothing.’

‘Such is the way of the Cypher Lords,’ Vignus said. ‘Let the Lords of Chaos rule.’

The Lords of Chaos surely ruled in Carngrad that night, as the army of the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus surged across the Square of Howling and into the flesh-butcher’s place, putting all there to fire and the sword. The Corvus Cabal fought hard but they were stalkers and assassins not so different to the Cypher Lords themselves, and they were not prepared or equipped for a pitched battle against three hundred heavy shock troops.

Vignus watched until the cobbles of the Square of Howling were streaming red with the blood that poured from that killing place, and then he turned away.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have one more task to complete this night.’

Calcis followed the High Master back the way they had come, just her and Darrath and Palania with him now. The threat of the rival warband had been eliminated in the way of the Cypher Lords, and they had no need of mindbound to protect them from the common scum of the Reaver City.

All the same, she could tell that the High Master still had something on his mind.

He led the three of them to the foot of Water Hill, and they began to climb the narrow, slippery stone steps that wound around it until they reached the summit. Here was a high, stinking place, a place of cisterns and pipes that gurgled and bubbled into the ground under their feet. Here was where the Aqueduct of Pain let into the city from the great catch-basin out on the Bloodwind Spoil and fed the flesh district’s blood-tainted supply of drinking water. It was one of many such aqueducts that were the only things that made a settlement as large as Carngrad viable out on that blasted plain.

The High Master strode forward, and only then opened his robe to reveal the heavy flask that he wore at his belt.

Calcis knew little of alchemy but she had watched her master at his work often enough to understand something of the principles. Over the preceding few days she had seen him prepare his potent brew for the High Courtier Claudius Malleficus. She had watched him taint the first barrel with two drops of his merciless concoction, the second with four, and the final one they had brought to the Court of the Seven Talons that night, the barrel which had driven a room full of men almost instantly insane, with eight.

By her reckoning, the flask at her master’s belt held perhaps a hundred thousand drops.

If not more.

Beneath her mask, Calcis licked her naked teeth with the tip of her tongue.

‘They will all want more of it, High Master,’ she said. ‘Even those who tonight had their first taste. The dose was so strong… they will need it, won’t they, High Master?’

She shuddered involuntarily at the thought, at the thought of her own carefully crafted addictions. She of all people understood what it was to need. There were many types of alchemical slavery, and even now she literally could not live without the foul concoction that her High Master brewed for her once every month.

Somewhere in the buried depths of memory behind her ravaged face, Calcis wept for the child she had once been, and for the memory of Relak.

‘They will be frantic for it, Calcis. They will howl and shriek and wage war for it,’ the High Master said. Then he stepped up onto the stone rim of the great water cistern and upended the flask of terrifyingly strong poison into it. ‘And they shall not have it.’

Palania gurgled her tongueless mirth in the darkness beside him.

‘Master!’ Calcis gasped. ‘The whole flesh district…!’

Thrallmaster Vignus Daneggia turned his masked face towards her, and he laughed as he recited the ancient rhyme:

‘Heed the wisdom of the Fool,

Let the Lords of Chaos Rule.

Blissful screams and madman’s drool,

Let the Lords of Chaos Rule!’

About the Author

Peter McLean has written several short stories for Black Library, including ‘Baphomet by Night’, ‘No Hero’, ‘Sand Lords’ and ‘Lightning Run’ for Warhammer 40,000, and the Warhammer Horror tale ‘Predations of the Eagle’. He grew up in Norwich, where he began story-writing, practising martial arts and practical magic, and lives there still with his wife.

An extract from The Red Feast.

As he stepped from the shadows of the caravan-court’s drapery, Athol let out the breath that had gathered tight in his chest. His anticipation was not matched by the others who lined the rope-bounded oval that denoted the taer-huma, the bladespace. Where before he had seen eyes wide with excitement, lips quivering with bated breath, now his quick glance observed disinterest from the courtiers of Prophet-Queen Humekhta III, fourteenth Aridian Empress. A few yawned in the late afternoon heat that pushed through the canopy above, others fiddled with sceptres and jewellery. In seasons past his muscular body and pale skin had brought remarks and admiring glances, but the novelty of his outlandish appearance had faded, particularly following his marriage to Marolin and even more with the arrival of his child seven summers earlier.

A couple of the youngest courtiers, Humekhta’s nieces Aless and Joira – twelve summers and eight respectively – smiled as their war-trainer made his appearance. A desultory ripple of applause moved around him, barely louder than the flap of porch canvas in the strengthening wind.

Athol raised the spear he held loosely in his right hand, always careful never to point the tip at the Prophet-Queen. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his face, following the line of his helm’s chinstrap.

‘I am the Spear-carrier, champion of Humekhta the Third,’ he declared, his other hand curling into a fist that touched lightly upon the gilded bronze of his breastplate, the knuckles barely touching the sculpted pectorals. ‘Trial has been called and I offer my spear in defence of the Prophet-Queen’s honour.’

Humekhta sat cross-legged upon a cushioned throne-step. She seemed to float upon a cloud of dawn-light, her legs lost in a billow of silken layers, each a subtly different shade of purple, orange and yellow. Her scarlet regal attire was bound tight to stomach and chest, covering her to the neck but leaving her arms bare. Serpentine tattoos covered her upper arms and ruby-crusted gilded bangles circled her forearms, matched by the rings on her fingers and the half a dozen hoops that hung from each ear. A veil of delicate black cloth obscured her face, hanging from an opal-studded headband, her scalp above it a fuzz of close-cropped hair dyed a stark violet.

At her side a great double-handed sword stood against a wooden frame, its pommel higher than her head, fixed with a fist-sized shard of amber that contained a preserved scorpion. Its scabbard was made from greenish drakona hide, bound with thread of thick bronze and gilded rivets. Though it looked unwieldy, the Jagged Blade of Aridian was wrought from a feather-light metal; not just the heirloom and symbol of the Prophet-Monarchs for fourteen generations, but a weapon of war that Humekhta herself had carried into battle just as her predecessors had done.

But this was a matter of law, and that meant a trial by combat, a deed beneath the sacred blade and its owner. Thus, Athol had been called from his encampment downwind of the royal city.

From behind her stepped Orhatka, the lawsmith. He had a round, soft face which masked the quick, ruthless mind that had seen him rise to the position of lawsmith before his fortieth summer. He moved with the casual grace of a swordsman, a firm believer in keeping the body fit so that the mind also remained sharp. He had never raised a weapon in trial against Athol, but several opponents, beaten in logic and law-knowledge, had resorted to desperate injunctions and fallen beneath his blade. Athol was glad not to have tested himself against Orhatka, not because of any fear or failure, but because such a dispute would mean division between Humekhta’s two closest allies.

‘Accused is Williarch of Bataar, for theft from the Holy Prophetess, namely six hundred head of whitehorn kept in the Delnoas Plain. Accused also for the illicit profiteering in his encampments by means of crooked gambling and withholding wage. Sundry lesser charges also apply.’ Orhatka gestured towards the fur-clad trader, who scowled at the lawsmith from beneath a domed felt hat, the spearpoints of Humekhta’s court guards at his back. ‘You have chosen to defend yourself by trial of arms, as is your right.’

‘I have,’ growled the merchant, the two words thick with his western accent.

‘Do you wish a weapon brought forth?’

‘I wish word sent to the train, for champion to come.’ His grimace eased into smugness. ‘Me champion will fight.’

‘You did not make a nomination of your champion when first accused,’ grumbled Orhatka.

‘I not know Aridian law so well,’ Williarch replied with a smirk.

‘Prophetess, what is your guidance?’ asked Orhatka, turning to his monarch. ‘By rights he should fight his own trial…’

Humekhta turned her steady gaze upon the accused man, whose self-satisfaction wilted under her stare. Athol watched his tongue flick along thick lips, his fingers fidgeting with the furred hem of his coat. Williarch’s face was a mask of sweat.

‘What do you say, champion of mine?’ Humekhta asked, not turning her gaze towards Athol. ‘Do you wish to face this man or his champion?’

‘I would not have any man or woman denied justice on a technicality, Mother of the Plains. Let him have his champion.’

Williarch’s lips twisted into a sly smile almost immediately.

‘But I would like Orhatka to remind the accused of his punishment should his case be proved false,’ Athol continued, eyes fixing the stranger as though spitting him on the point of his spear.

‘The crimes of which he is accused carry the penalty of abandonment,’ the lawsmith announced with some relish. Williarch’s confidence faded as Orhatka continued. ‘If proven guilty, he shall be taken forth from the camp for five days into the heart of the Long Dust and there left without food or water. He shall be cut upon the arms and legs, ’til the blood runs freely. If Sigmar looks kindly upon him he shall survive long enough to find a spring or companions. If not, he shall die of thirst or by the claws and fangs of the great hunter-beasts that prowl the Long Dust.’

‘Send for his champion,’ declared Humekhta, rising. ‘We shall convene this court again in two days’ time.’

She swept from the tent-room followed by a coterie of retainers, her nieces included, though Orhatka remained behind. With a flick of the hand he commanded the guards to escort Williarch back to his cage.

‘He is desperate,’ said Athol as the lawsmith approached.

‘He made no attempt to bargain for leniency – he declared for trial by arms the moment he was brought to me.’

‘Is he guilty?’

Orhatka shrugged. ‘Surely that is the point of the trial?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, he is as guilty as the plains are hot. Five hundred of the queen’s whitehorns were still in his camp when Makhred’s scouts found them. The others he had already sent on to Bataar. He was brazen about it. He had three dozen of the Oldfire tribe working the herd and they complained he had been robbing them.’

‘Strange. The Oldfire are not meek. Why would they not simply take back what was theirs?’

‘I don’t know, and that concerns me. Williarch is from Bataar, a cunning serpent like all that breed, and he is altogether too confident. I think he intends to make a mockery of us. To take our livestock and whistle in our faces as he does so.’

‘I will beat his champion and he will die alone and frightened in the wilderness. You have my word on it.’

‘There’s always a first time to fail, Athol.’ Orhatka stepped closer, dark eyes fixed on the champion. ‘Don’t let this be that time. These Bataari will be all over us like flies on dung if they see profit in it.’

‘That won’t be my concern.’ Athol turned away and strode back towards the side entrance of the royal tent. ‘If I fail, it’ll be because I’m dead.’

Dawn was still some way off when the jingle of mail and slap of leather broke the stillness in the woods that overlooked Wendhome. The town sat across a narrow, fast river that glittered in the starlight, a stockade with a red stone base and wooden palisade encircling nearly three thousand tile-roofed houses. A few wisps of smoke still drifted from chimneys, the cook fires long extinguished. Here and there a dog yapped, and cats screeched in argument with each other.

Moving from the shadows of the trees, a line of warriors formed, curving in places around the scattered bushes and outcrops of rock that broke the slopes of the broad hill. More emerged after them, until nearly a thousand men and women crouched in the dry grass.

At their fore knelt a man broad of shoulder, his vest of chainmail distorted by heavy muscle underneath. In his hand he carried a long-handled axe, its head tapering to a point as was common among the Vancian tribes. He wiped a hand over his shaven head, staring down at the sleeping settlement. Rising, he lifted the weapon and his warriors stood also, the last rays of starlight glinting from the bared blades of swords and axes.

Threx turned to the man at his side, showing his teeth in a broad grin.

‘Just as I hoped. Only the dogs are awake.’

‘Lazy,’ replied Foraza. In one hand he held a pole that split at head height, a triangular banner hanging from the twin gold-sheathed tips. The pale cloth of Threx’s personal standard was stitched with red thread, a rendition of a horned skull at the centre of a chain-link ring.

‘They’ll not sleep as soundly after today, that’s for sure.’

Threx turned and started along the line to his right, his voice raised but calm.

‘You all know why we’re here. We’re being laughed at by those rat-eating Korchians down there. They think so little of us they don’t even set watch for our coming.’

He was answered by grumbles and snarls, and as he continued his anger grew, fuelled by his own words. ‘Their disdain is a mockery of us! They think the Skullbrands will do nothing in retaliation. Well, we’re going to do something all right, and the Korchians won’t forget it for a long time.’

Threx returned to his position at the centre of the line and took a few paces forward, his warriors moving with him. Once more he lifted his axe high, its head gleaming with the first hint of sunlight coming from across the river valley.

‘Let’s wake the dog-bastards up!’

Dying embers barely lit the cave but the heat from the near-dead fire still prickled sweat from the creased skin of the old man crouched beside the cave’s walls. His fingers moved rhythmically, dancing from one of the various pots to the hand-smoothed stone, a flick and smudge, and change of finger into another clay vessel loaded with a different colour. He squinted in the bad light, almost unable to see what he painted, though the image he tried to recreate was burned into his waking thoughts by dreams every night.

Finally, it was too dark to see, and he straightened with a groan, old bones protesting, wiry muscles trying their best to move his withered frame. He wiped the paint on his bare belly and glanced towards the hollow where he kept his wood pile, already knowing it was empty but hoping all the same that he misremembered.

He hadn’t. There was no more wood.

That meant he would have to leave the cave.

The painter’s gaze moved to the sliver of light that shone down from a crack in the ceiling. He hadn’t realised it was daytime. That was good, for though it meant he had missed another night’s sleep and prophetic dreams, at least the outside would be safer. Many of the creatures that prowled the wooded hills beneath which he dwelt were cowed by the daytime.

Many, but not all.

The artist found a rag of cloth – a remnant of a cloak he had discovered discarded by the trail to the south-east – and wiped the paint properly from his fingers and torso. He gave his latest work a last look. He could see almost nothing of its form now, lost in the shadow he cast.

Moving to the stretch of cave beneath the opening, he tugged a thin rope free from a peg in the wall. He pulled at the frayed cord, hauling an old rope ladder up to the opening as if he were hoisting a sail.

He stopped briefly at the recollection. He hadn’t thought of the sea for many years now. Dredging his memories, he recalled a vast expanse of blue flecked with white. Everything seemed to be just colours these days, punctuated by swirls of light or darkness.

Everything except his dreams.

The thought of them nagged him out of his reverie. The painter secured the rope so that the ladder hung in place, and ascended with practised skill, though his knees felt the pain more than usual, punishment for spending too much of the night crouched at his work. He reached the top and pushed with his hand, moving a piece of woven reed matting that helped obscure the hole. Climbing the last few rungs, he pulled himself through the opening, bringing him to the upper chamber. This cave was natural, rough and uneven, unlike the chamber below that he had gradually smoothed, patch by patch, over the preceding years.

Years?

Longer?

It was part of his cursed memory that he recalled little of what had happened in his long life, yet his mind was full to breaking with images of what he was sure would come to pass.

More than sure. His entire existence revolved around the fact. He had been set upon the world to make it so. He was the recorder of the future but also its catalyst. He knew this because he was always in his dreams. If somebody else had been marked to usher in the next age, they would have been dreaming those dreams instead.

He replaced the matting camouflage and squeezed through to the opening of the cave. Beneath a rock, in an alcove he had fashioned himself, his weapons and armour waited for him. They were scraps pieced together from corpses the beasts had left. He could smell the dried blood on them, a scent that seemed so much stronger in his nostrils of late.

There was so little of his wasted body left that the vambraces were barely more than studded tubes of leather on him. He could not find a breastplate that sat on his sunken chest and so instead he pulled on a thick harness with a small plate of iron nestled over his heart. He did not need extra weight to slow him – speed and wits served him better in his task – so he left the coif and simple round helm in their hiding place.

He looked at the spear, snug in the crack beside the main cave opening, but again decided it would be more of a hindrance. Instead he removed a dagger as long as his forearm from beneath the helm and mail, tying its belt around a waist pot-bellied in comparison to his spindly limbs.

Thus prepared, he stole to the mouth of the cave, checked the clearing outside and stepped out into the light of day.

Click here to buy The Red Feast.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Warcry: The Anthology in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Paul Dainton.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-352-9

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