From Hell's Heart Page 11

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it? Please, enlighten me?”

  The moon was a thin crescent, its light too faint to blot out the bright scatter of thousands of stars that webbed across the inky void. It was a pretty picture. But this night, and all that had filled it, belonged as much to the past as it did to the present. It seemed no matter how far I’d come, no matter what I thought I’d achieved, not much had changed. I’d been a dragon, a powerful sorcerer, and the advisor to a great king, but they were just parts I’d played. Underneath it all…

  “In the deep grain of my spirit, I’m just a cold-blooded killer.” I bestowed upon him my best, wolfish smile, fully aware that it did not reach my eyes. “And you would do well to remember that, master Johann.”

  12

  The Company of the White Star performed in four more unremarkable towns before reaching Valen, by which time I was heartily sick of the play, the players, and everything to do with artifice and theatricals. I also knew every fucking line in Cobb’s blasted play, which in my considered opinion, and despite the exuberant braying of the crowds, wasn’t all that. Had I a sense of humor with regards such things, I might have found it amusing. I couldn’t cast so much as a simple light spell without passing out or setting fire to everything, but I could recite a fifteen act play about a flatulent prince.

  A day’s ride from the city, a brisk wind heralded the dawn as the wagons rolled onto the vast plain. In the distance lay Valen, a giant beast of stone and smoke, its scale-backed shadow seemed to stretch across the rind of the world.

  “The Vale of Plenty,” Jojo exclaimed excitedly. I did not share his joy upon sighting the great green ocean or the city beyond. The last time I’d been here, the air had been thick with bloated crows, too fat to fly after feasting on the thousands of dead that I had helped to make.

  A few miles out from the city, I could see where the last battle had taken place. The only marker was a pale scar on the land where nothing much was growing. You’d miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but I knew it. I’d expected that the sight of it would churn my guts, and it did, but forewarned is forearmed as they say. What I hadn’t expected was to see a tented shanty town sprawled around the city. This wasn’t how I remembered Valen at any time I’d been here. Again, it was odd seeing a place that was at once familiar and yet so strange.

  The wind shifted, rolled the tusky grasses into a whispering wave, and whipped the graveled edgeland between the shanty and the fields into a dust-danced Sarabande. Only I could taste the bitter residue of sorcery and hear the cries of the ancient dead in its gentle sigh. My drear thoughts were drowned by the exuberance of those members of the company who hadn’t seen the city before.

  The youngest members of the cast and crew leaped from the wagons and ran laughing through the grass. Sakura and Jojo first amongst them. The girl was a pale ghost, racing the wind through the viridian sea. Jojo’s iridescent wings flashed, and his brown curls shone gold in the rising suns’ light. Everyone was happy; relieved to finally be where they could display their talents before a more discerning and more importantly, wealthier crowd than they had so far entertained. I sank into silent contemplation of the vale and the city, the past and present.

  When the Great North Road turned into the Grand Processional Way, the dirt track was replaced by polished marble, and every mile was marked by triumphal arches. Unnecessarily boastful declarations were etched into the imperial follies, which I was informed by a giddy Captain Cobb all bore the likeness of the current Empirifex in all his many roles as statesman and father of the nation. ‘Valen, the Mightiest City in the World!’ was carved upon the first. ‘Valen the Magnificent’ declared the inscription on the next. ‘Alen, the Grape Crap Tit in the Worm!’ So read the legend on the last arch, the sculptor’s marks having been artfully transformed by the application of plaster and paint. Amusing though it was, the vandalism was as dangerous as it was audacious given that it was on the arch closest to the city.

  Such a treasonous act would not have been possible in the Valen I had visited with Tobias, Clary, and Tosspot. Back then, the perpetrators of such an outrage would be hunted by knights and sell-spells and hung by their giblets as punishment and warning. And that was something else. We didn’t meet any greenshanks patrolling the highway, let alone see regiments of imperial knights marching across the city walls. The lack of law would explain how the sprawling shanty town could fill the land between the arch and the city gates. It was like the refugee camp where the displaced citizens of the Empire had sheltered before the final battle against Shallunsard, only this place had an air of permanence.

  A harried looking herald came riding from the direction of the city, kicking her reluctant urjac on as she shouted hoarsely. “By order of the Empirifex, the gates are closed until the morrow! The gates are closed until the morrow! The gates…” The announcement was greeted with grumbling resignation. The company coach drivers took the wagons off the road, watched by the toothless young and toothless old that were scavenging in packs along the highway. I threw a handful of tin bits into the dirt—a cruel act I know, but I was in a knifish temper. A clump of ravenous creatures descended upon them and bound themselves into a blade-limbed knot of desperation as they fought over the pennies.

  Cobb sent some of the crew to find suitable accommodation for the company while the rest of us waited with the wagons, growing more fractious as the suns climbed into a cloudless sky, and the heat drew tempers thin. Before there was outright mutiny, somewhere to stay for the night was found. Whips cracked, and the put upon urux lumbered down an unnamed shack alley.

  “It’s bloody outrageous, is what it is.” Cobb grumped as we pulled into the compound of the Vagrant Rose. “Absolutely outrageous, like this bloody weather. It’s supposed to be spring. Spring! It’s like the middle of bloody summer.” He climbed down from his wagon and wiped sweat from his brow. Emma followed, shaded from the glare of the suns under a dainty parasol.

  The smiling ogren innkeeper swept from the inn and clapped her hands, summoning a gaggle of hirsute youths to help with the wagons. “Welcome to my humble establishment!” she enthused, eyes bright above a pair of blue glass spectacles. “We are honored that the famous Company of the, er, White Star has chosen to stay with us.”

  The hostelry was about three hundred feet from the road, at the end of a maze of mudbrick and found timber buildings, roughly parallel to the humorously defaced arch. The Rose was on the outskirts of the shanty, next to the scrubby borderland between the town and the nearest farm, which was about three miles to the east. It looked like it had been built and added to over many years— as and when materials came available. It would explain why, if not how, the hull of a ship had ended up here, sandwiched between three wagons that had been stacked on top of each other, tacked on to the side of a mudbrick house. The top deck of the ship had been converted into a third story, the windows of which overlooked the compound wall, affording a delightful view of the slums. The figurehead of a fighting brachuri overlooked a bar that was situated on the flat roof of the mudbrick house. Patrons of the inn were breaking their fasts on the roof, dining amongst the fragrant blossom trees under a pergola made of broken mast spars, which had been draped with painted canvas and hung with brass lanterns.

  If you want to see real drama, don’t watch a play; watch the players when they’re hot and tired and haggling over who gets to stay in which room. It’s as savage a conflict as thugs fighting with broken bottles and certainly more entertaining than a play about farting. While the cast bickered and Cobb growled at Hammerhand, Emma set about negotiating with the innkeeper over a jug of mint tea. I had spent too long in the wagon and decided to go for a walk and stretch my legs. That there was somewhere I wanted to see was incidental, or so I told myself, as I left the compound.

  “You going somewhere, Breed?” Jojo called.

  “What gave it away?” I carried on walking.

  “You’re…oh, right.”
He ran after me. “Want some company?”

  “Not really. I thought you weren’t talking to me?”

  He glanced at Cobb, who pretended not to notice. “I wasn’t, but now I am.”

  “I see.” I didn’t see.

  He swatted my confusion aside. “Don’t question it. It’s ineffable.”

  “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” Taking my bearings from the city gate, I made my way to where I thought the Hammer’s tomb and the angle gate should be. Johann hurried after me. “How come you don’t fly sometimes?”

  “It’s tiring. My wings get too dry if it’s very sunny or too wet if it rains, and you saw what those vagabonds did. I get tired of people pulling at me or trying to grab my feet or shout at me if I happen to fly past their windows and catch them at it.”

  “Sorry I asked. How come Cobb wanted you to come with me?”

  He laughed too soon and too shrilly, displaying most eloquently why he wasn’t an actor. “He didn’t. I just thought I’d like to go for a walk, and as you rightly pointed out, it’s better not to wander off on one’s own in a strange place.”

  I let the lie, lie.

  It had been a while since I’d been here and also hardly any time at all. It made my head hurt if I thought about it too much, so I didn’t. I just wove through the tents and out, onto the plain, letting instinct and good direction sense guide me.

  The vegetation was sparse where the battle had been fought. What little grew there was stunted and ill-formed. It might have been my imagination, but I thought the air tasted bitter out here upon the barren swathe where the old city had once stood.

  “Where are we going?” Jojo was red-faced and sweating. As he was spying for Cobb, I felt little sympathy for him.

  “Right here.” I found the mound where the angle gate should have been, only it wasn’t. “I don’t understand. Where is it?”

  “Breed?”

  I climbed to the top of the mound, scanned the surroundings in case I’d been mistaken, even though I knew I wasn’t. Nothing. His tomb should have been here. A sharp gust of wind swirled dirt around the mound. Light reflected off the tiny specks of glass in the windsweepings and summoned shimmering ghosts. I saw the battle again, the dead piled ten feet deep. I saw her cradling him, smelled the blood again, heard the screams. I felt dizzy, sick, furious. I had to get away from here. I stumbled and fell.

  “Breed?” Coughing, Johann approached. I warned him away with a snarl.

  He stumbled back. “Are you all right?”

  Something awful began to gnaw at my guts. My heart began to pound. The ground turned black beneath me. “Get…away…Jo—”

  It turns out that trying not to unleash one’s sorcerous might was as hard, if not harder than giving vent. Being a bright lad, Jojo unfurled his wings and flew away while my ghosts clamored for attention, and the burning power pulled at my aching guts. I dug my hands into the earth as flames lit upon my arms. “No, no, no, no…”

  I couldn’t hold it in so I drove the power down. The ground buckled beneath me. I heard myself scream.

  “Back again?” Jojo was sitting by a small fire some distance from the patch of blackened ground on which I lay. “How are you?”

  “It feels like my bones have been drilled out and filled with liquid pain. And my jaw aches for some reason.” I rolled onto my back, blinked grit from my eyes. The suns were still up, so I couldn’t have been out for long. Long enough to get my throat cut had anyone a mind because I had been completely insensible.

  “You had me worried there,” said Johann. After what happened he was understandably looking at me like I was dangerously insane.

  “I’m not mad. I said that aloud, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m not. Despite what they say about those who deny being mad. I’m not. I’ve just woken up, is all.” Shut up, you fucking loon. “Sorry that you were worried. I’m fine, really.”

  He smiled nervously. “I’m pleased that you’re hale, but for a minute there I was worried you were going to …” He wiggled his fingers. “You know, spell me to death.”

  I propped myself up on my elbow. The air stung, and somewhere beneath me sand hissed as it ran through a fissure. “Why would I do that? And don’t say, ‘spell me to death’; it sounds stupid.” Deep beneath me, the ground groaned. “Did you hear that?”

  Johann nodded. “I think you should…” The ground suddenly sagged beneath me. “MOVE!”

  I’m an athletic cove, but not even I knew that I could leap almost vertically from a reclining position until I did it. The ground gave way as the column of vitrified earth beneath the blackened crust shattered. I dug my claws into the shifting ground and crawled away from the lip of the crater and over to where Jojo was standing, open-mouthed, safely beyond the limits of the collapse.

  “What?” I said, all casual like.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Good. Shall we go?”

  “Yes please.”

  I dusted myself down, feeling both guilty and relieved, which is an odd feeling. On the upside, accidentally unleashing a terrible blast of sorcery had taken my mind off the fact that my father wasn’t here anymore. My father. The very thought made my head spin. The legendary Hammer of the North was my father, and he’d died about seven-hundred years before I was born. Or perhaps it was last week. I had no fucking idea.

  Jojo and I wended our way back in awkward silence. I was desperate to tell him to keep his mouth shut about what he’d seen, but I knew that would have been a waste of breath. As we approached the slum, my gaze was drawn to the city walls and the towering, bronze covered gates that shimmered in the suns’ light. Ludo. He was in there somewhere and soon I would be too. As much as I didn’t want to hurt anyone, if it came to it, I would level the whole fucking city to find him…And then I remembered that Shallunsard had destroyed the city when he’d killed Tobias.

  13

  “My carbunculous mistress!” Cobb declared drunkenly at the top of his voice. “My fecund inspiration. I bow before you, mighty Valen!”

  “I think that counting cove wants to see you,” I said as our caravan made its way through the trade gate where excise officers were searching wagons and scrutinising the Company’s papers. Cobb’s knotted eye stalks swayed towards Emma. The seamstress had rolled up her sleeves in ritual preparation for a good old haggle over how much tax and bribes they would have to pay to bring the wagons into the city. Cobb wobbled unsteadily after her.

  We were in Valen, a city that I hardly recognized.

  It turned out that the gates had been closed the day before, because on a whim Empirifex Durstan had declared a feast day due to his horoscope indicating that holding a feast would be auspicious. Such disruptions were apparently a regular occurrence. The greenshanks guarding the gates were understandably pissed off having to shakedown twice as many weary travelers than normal due to the backlog from the day before. Those of us who didn’t look wealthy enough to hit up for a bribe were waved through and told to report to the customs office, which was in the first court of the city’s southern quarter.

  As we passed I noted that the servants of the Empire were accoutered with the usual amount of sharp and pointies. As expected, they were also garbed in uniform tunics bearing the Empirifex’s device. What I hadn’t expected was how dishevelled they were. Their uniforms were faded and patched, some wore mismatched shoes that were likewise heavily repaired, and most didn’t look like they’d bathed in months, which was bad even for humans. They looked like greenshanks from some provincial backwater, but this was the great capital of the Empire. When I’d been here with Tobias, the clanks and city guard had been smartly attired, highly disciplined cunts. They were obviously still cunts, but now they were scruffy, slouching cunts, little better than your average crew of cheap sellswords.

  The city was also not how I remembered it. There were no elegant, iron walkways soaring above the streets. There was just the ground level, a
nd everything had been built upon it.

  As far as I could discern through the stove brew of a thousand chimneys, every acre, every yard was planted with forests of timber framed buildings and lapped by waves of brick walls. Because the ground sloped away from the gate, I guessed that some of the taller buildings were eight, nine, even ten stories high. The uppermost levels of these precarious structures were linked to each other by swaying bridges of rope and silk, which spanned the vertiginous chasms between tenements. The verdant hills of the city rose in the distance like islands floating in the haze, crowned by stands of poplar and cypress.

  Legalities dealt with and bribes paid, a more sober Cobb and a harried-looking Emma returned from the factor’s office while I was waiting to collect Sakura’s dinner from the grub wagon. I watched the captain trying to climb up to sit beside his unamused spouse on their wagon. I wasn’t alone. Some of the company even made bets on how long, or indeed if, he’d make it. With the help of Hammerhand, he finally took his seat. When the captain and everyone were back on their wagons the drivers cracked their whips and the caravan rolled into the city.

  “It smells funny,” said Sakura.

  I handed her what amounted to a bucket of stew, the minimum required to keep a growing arrachid sated. “The food?”

  “No. The food smells like it always smells.” She opened the window in the door and sat back to eat. “I mean the city.”

  I leaned on the door and took in the view as we trundled along, while trying to spot any familiar landmarks. “That’s the smell of greatness.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “It smells like night soil.”

  “Indeed. A great deal of night soil, and a great deal of day soil, and let’s not forget the slaughterhouses, charnel houses, factories, thousands of cook fires. I’m sure there’s a flower market too somewhere. Of course flowers can’t compete with the stink of fire and shit.”