The Trials of Empire, page 39
I reached Vonvalt. His white cloak had been shredded, but I realised – though he was doused with blood – that he was unhurt. The cannonballs were a ghastly revelation, turning walking, talking and breathing people into smears of muscle and viscera and bone splinters.
Vonvalt looked at me, his eyes wide. He took a few moments to realise who I was.
“Helena?” he said, his features creased in confusion. The impact of the cannonball had robbed him of his senses. “What are you doing here?”
“The cannoneers!” I shouted in his face. We were both shouting.
I looked up to the wall and the Victory Gatehouse. The men and women there were moving like automata. I realised what had happened: they had been enthralled.
“They’ve been possessed!” I shouted. I flinched as a crossbow bolt cracked off the flagstones to my right, and a splinter of wood stuck into my right cheek. I whirled around to see the bowmen shooting indiscriminately into the crowd below. The Imperial Guard had raised their shields overhead, but the other forces had no such discipline. And besides, sohle shields didn’t stop cannonballs. The only thing working in our favour was that the cannons were monstrously slow, taking an entire team of people many minutes to prepare and fire them.
“Helena, I…” Vonvalt said, still insensible. He rubbed his face and eyes with his hands, trying to blink away the confusion. “The walls. Captain Rainer… We must retake the walls.”
“Nema,” I spat. I looked around. I could see Rainer in and amongst the Guard, easily picked out by the captain’s markings on her surcoat. She was frantically directing men and women, drenched in a great splatter of gore.
I ran to her. The arrows were coming thick and fast now. Several times I came within a hair’s breadth of being feathered. But although I made it to her side quickly enough, I hadn’t been needed to give the instruction. Already several companies of Guardsmen were on the move, some heading to the gatehouse, others heading for the nearest set of steps that led to the top of the Estran Wall. Their sohle shields were feathered with dozens of arrows.
I was wearing Guard armour, so I should have seen what was coming next; nonetheless, I was surprised when someone grabbed me roughly by the arm and threw me into the rear of one of these formations.
“Get your shield up!” someone roared at me. I did so just as another dozen arrows thunked into the shield wall; one cut halfway through my shield, splitting the wood with the sound of an axe against a stump.
I was pulled onwards with the rest of the company. In seconds, I had gone from volunteer messenger to a part of the very thing Vonvalt had contrived for me to avoid; the vanguard. Around me, men and women grunted, teeth gritted, faces – framed by mail hoods or sallet helms – grim set. We moved up the stairs quickly, and I stumbled as I tried to keep up. My arms were on fire with the effort of keeping my shield overhead and interlocked with those of the people around me. I was so preoccupied with the physicality of what we were doing that I barely registered the creatures, dancing in the corners of my vision, flickering in and out of existence.
The Estran Wall was seventy feet high, and by the time we crested its punishingly steep steps I was exhausted and glad I was at the rear of this formation. But by some horrible twist of fate, a ballista bolt slammed into the column of men and women in front of me, impaling them like a skewer through a rotisserie chicken. Once again I was treated to a face full of human matter, and when I had wiped it clear I found that I was now the foremost soldier on the left-hand side of the company.
I had a clear view of the ballista crews and cannoneers. Their movements were precise, with only the rudiments of autonomic movement left. They moved completely heedless of us, mechanically preparing the huge iron cannon to fire again into the host below. Beyond I could see more men and women doing the same, and in and amongst them archers and crossbowmen shooting arrows as though they were on the range. Others lay dead, perhaps too strong-minded or – if the term was the right one – pious, to have been taken over.
An odd pause followed. Clearly, we had expected to be set upon, but the thralls ignored us, so bent to their task that the Imperial Guard killed them almost hesitantly.
But kill them we did.
I do not know by what power Claver or Ramayah managed to turn these people against us. The air atop the walls had a bizarre quality to it, almost as though it were thick, like soup. The whispers that had plagued me since the beginning of the battle were all the louder, and my mind physically hurt as though grasping fingers were threading through my ears and nose and mouth and scratching insanity into my brain. I saw several Guardsmen shake their heads, discarding their weapons and clutching at their faces and ears. One even hurled himself over the side of the battlements.
For my own part, I staggered forward and cut halfway through the wrist of a crossbowman, feeling my sword squeal against bone. He turned to me, hand dangling by a few threads. There was no expression on his face. His eyes were glassy and vacant. A brief flash of surprise widened his eyes as I stabbed him through the throat. It felt like a crime, killing this man who but a few minutes before was prepared to give his life in the defence of Sova. But I managed it.
As the slaughter continued, I moved to the parapet. I gripped the merlon and looked out across the southern aspect of Sova and the Ebenen Plains. My stomach dropped as I saw the mass of thousands of Templars there. They were moving up very quickly now that the trebuchets and cannons and ballistae and crossbowmen had been neutralised. Their ranks were festooned with poles with open codexes, braziers, flags and pennants. They sung hymnals and held relics aloft. Battle priests stripped to the waist were daubed in runes. I saw one explode with a wet pop and douse his fellows in gore. Still they had not fully mastered the power.
And yet, the walls stood. The gates stood. There was no sign of a mass of barrels of blackpowder, though their baggage train was enormous and very long indeed. How on earth did they plan to get in?
I was about to find out very quickly.
I wish they had used blackpowder.
XXVIII
Hearts of Iron
“Courage cannot exist without fear.”
SOVAN APHORISM
Lady Frost’s pagan shamans now crested the steps of the Estran Wall. The last of the thralls of this section were dispatched, their throats ruthlessly cut and their bodies thrown over the side. The shamans spoke powerfully, exhorting the air around them to shed its malignant qualities. They brandished relics, blessed bones and gripped scrolls of illuminated texts. I watched, mesmerised, as these sacred pagan artefacts glowed like torches. No one else seemed to notice.
With the wall and its foul vapours cleared, I hoped then for some respite, however brief; but mere moments later, an enormous rumbling groan thundered through the air. Many looked up, expecting the heavens to open – for it had sounded like a great timpani of thunder.
But no. The flagstones trembled beneath my feet, and the unmistakable clanking rattle of chains filled the air, and I realised that the Victory Gate was being opened. Those guarding the enormous gate winches had been possessed in the same manner as the cannoneers. Vonvalt’s worst fear was being realised: that Claver would not even need to breach the walls of the city to take it. He would waltz into Sova through an open door.
I looked frantically over to the gatehouse. That itself was the size of most provincial castles. I felt my fear return tenfold. Heinrich growled next to me, his ears twitching and flapping as though he was being troubled by some bothersome fly. He was focusing on something which I could not see.
“Fuck,” I panted, close to despair. I turned to the nearest Imperial Guardsman. “We need to get in there!” I shouted, pointing to the gatehouse with my short sword. “They are opening the gates!”
He said something but I did not hear; my attention was drawn by a sudden flurry of movement below. I looked over the battlements to see, charging down the Aleksandra the Valiant High-Way, a mass of men and women. They moved like rabid dogs, making feral, inhuman noises. Some carried weapons, but many did not. I squinted, some small detail catching my eye, and saw with horror that many of them wore iron claws which had been grafted to their fingers. Behind, in the rear and now completely unmolested by the city’s artillery, the Templars stood. In the vanguard were Claver’s battle priests, each one’s features a mask of intense concentration.
In the centre of the mass, surrounded by a life guard of knights, was Claver himself.
He looked up at me.
“To the gatehouse!” I shouted, and Guardsmen began to charge in. “In the name of Nema, quickly!”
I turned away from the merlon and Heinrich and I made our way back down the steps – pushed our way back down the steps, for they were now thronging with a great press of soldiers seeking to surmount the Estran Wall. “Get back!” I shouted, shoving my way through and earning a barrage of unspeakable oaths and curses and insults in response. Heinrich barked and growled madly next to me, sensing my urgency. “Get back! Down, down! The gate, watch the gate!”
The gate continued to rumble open, but haltingly. Whispers and shadows plagued me as I burst out of the rearmost of the Guardsmen and back on to the compacted dust and dead grass of the Nastjan Fields. Here the pagans were moving up with the Hauners to take the place of the Imperial Guard who had now mostly gone to retake the walls – walls that did not need retaking! – and I could see the first crack of grey daylight appearing through the Victory Gates where they opened.
I saw a solitary arm, scrabbling and clawing madly through the gap.
“What the fuck is that?” I heard someone say as I sprinted past. Many others echoed the sentiment. I looked for Vonvalt, and found him next to Count Maier, urging him and his men up, directing with his short sword.
“Thralls,” I said breathlessly. Sweat dribbled down my face. I heaved in great lungfuls of air.
Vonvalt looked sharply over to the door. “I need to get on to that wall,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He seemed distracted. We had attempted to expect the worst, plan for the worst, but no one had anticipated such calamity this early.
“What is the matter, girl?” Count Maier called down from his horse.
I looked up to him. “They are thralls,” I said. “Demons, inhabiting the bodies of men.”
“Bloody Nema,” he muttered, looking over to the gates. “Are we undone so soon? How do we deal with them?”
A sudden memory came to me: the words of the dying Templar in the bowels of Keraq, and of my desperate fight with that rabid nun in the castle latrine.
“Fire,” I said, remembering. “Fire – the Flame of Savare!”
Both men looked at me as though I were a simpleton.
“What?”
I gritted my teeth as frustration welled up within me. I didn’t have time to explain it. It was arcane. It defied explanation.
I held out my two hands in front of me as though I were holding a ball. “I set fire to the nun in Keraq. I said ‘Flame of Savare’ and something happened, something transformative. Something acted through me to give the fire a special property which burnt the demon away.”
“How on earth are we going to get consecrated fire?” Maier asked.
“The Flame of Savare. In the temple,” Vonvalt said immediately.
“Not the bloody great bonfire that burns there?”
“The Eternal Fire, yes,” Vonvalt said, and then he stopped. We all stopped. I had heard something, a voice speaking in my ear.
“Did you hear that, too?” Maier asked uncertainly. His horse snorted and whinnied, spooked. Heinrich lay down, whining.
I started as Sir Radomir appeared at my side. “What the fuck is going on over there?” he asked, pointing his short sword at the Victory Gate. Dozens of soldiers were there now, doing everything they could to jam it up and stop it from opening. The pagans, who seemed to have a glut of reckless bravery, had formed what was, in essence, a large cork in the wine bottle neck of the gatehouse.
“Demons wearing human skin. They need to be set afire, and quickly,” Vonvalt said grimly. Several knights of Maier’s retinue glanced over to us as they listened to this insane exchange; most, however, were preoccupied with trying to calm their horses, which foamed and champed and whinnied, spooked. Some presence had interposed itself amongst us, and it was driving the animals mad with fear.
“There is enough pitch up there to drown half of Sova,” Sir Radomir said, nodding to the Victory Gatehouse, “if fire is all you need—”
He was already moving away to give the order, but I grabbed him by the wrist. “It has to be blessed. It has to be the Flame of Savare.”
Sir Radomir squinted at me as though I had lost my mind. “How the fuck are we going to do that?”
“The Eternal Fire in the Temple of Savare!” Vonvalt shouted, now with great conviction. “Go there now,” he said to me. He jabbed a finger into Sir Radomir’s chest. “You go with her. Bring a torch back, lit from the brazier. We will set the pitch afire with it and hope to Nema it does the trick.”
“Here, take my horse,” Count Maier said, dismounting. “You will not find a faster beast. Sir Dalibor! Give this man yours.”
Sir Radomir and I mounted up. “For fuck’s sake,” Sir Radomir muttered to himself, and kicked his heels into the horse’s flanks. “Come on then!” he shouted, and he and I charged down the high-way.
We thundered through the streets, the warhorses putting on an extraordinary turn of speed. I saw people in spite of the strict curfew. Many had turned their faces to the sky, frightened and confused by the stubborn darkness. Plenty were crying and wailing in despair as the city was saturated with malign energies and became a living nightmare for its inhabitants.
We took a now familiar route through the main roads of the western closures of the city, up the Aleksandra the Valiant High-Way, west down the Petran High-Way, then north up the Veleurian Road. Our horses’ hooves thundered against the flagstones, and I knew that such a hard surface was jarring for their joints, especially given how laden with armour we were. It was not a short journey either; we must have covered nearly three miles at full tilt. There was no way the horses would be able to gallop back. We had exhausted them and would need to find replacements.
The Temple of Savare was in the same state of disrepair as when I had last seen it, its façade scorched where the Imperial Guard had burned the doors down. Sir Radomir and I dismounted with reckless haste, especially foolhardy since a turned ankle would render me as useless as if I had lost a leg. We charged through the door of the temple—
—and I slowed to a stop. It had changed. This was not the wide, vaulted main hall where the Eternal Fire burned and where the large statue of Savare the God Father stood next to an Autun colossus.
No. This was not that place.
What I first took to be stalactites hanging from the ceiling were in fact bodies. Thousands of bodies. Many of them were desiccated and grey; many more were skeletal, their skin hanging down like strips of dried leather or banana peel. They dangled down in great ribbons, sometimes dozens of feet long. Every one wore the same wound; a deep incision from the base of the throat all the way down to the groin. Every one of them had been emptied, opened and filleted and drained like livestock. The floor was covered in an ankle-deep pool of blood. It dripped and trickled in that dark space like rainwater in a cave.
The statue of Savare had changed, too. Instead of the striking alabaster colossus, it was now a ghastly demonic figure, obsidian-black, eyeless, its head distended and phallic.
It grinned at me.
“S-sir Radomir?” I whispered. But he had gone. I turned sharply: there was no sign of the door through which I had come.
I turned back. At the far end of the hall was an enormous throne. It seemed to be made from flesh, but mottled and decayed. A great stink filled the temple.
“Girl.” A figure appeared in the gloom: it was Sir Radomir, but his flesh was black, and as he spoke great quantities of blood flowed from his mouth, running down his chin and chest.
I backed away. A low rumbling pulse, like a monstrous heartbeat, boomed somewhere in the back of my mind.
“Who are you?” I asked, keeping my voice as level as possible.
“One who would be your friend,” the Sir Radomir doppelgänger said, in a voice that was not the sheriff’s. “Let us exchange names.”
I took another step back, conscious of the hot blood sloshing around my ankles.
“What is this place?”
“It matters not. Tell me your name and I shall tell you mine. Then we can talk about what you should do to save the lives of your friends, and loves.”
“Tell me your name first.”
Sir Radomir smiled. It was ghastly.
“You have been told many things about the place you call the afterlife, the holy dimensions, the astral plane… Many things, and yet, so much of it false. You fear us, we who dwell in this place. You have been taught to be frightened of us. That we are monsters. But it is not true.”
“What are you?” I asked.
“We could have been together, girl. We could have spent an eternity entwined. I could have taken your spiritual essence and melded it with mine as surely as coal dust and iron.”
Sir Radomir was suddenly in front of me, caressing my face – though I could not feel his hand on my cheek. A great stink emanated from his mouth. Maggots writhed there, nestled in and amongst black gums. Blood dribbled from his mouth. His entire surcoat was soaked in it.
I took a faltering step back, terrified. My hand clutched the charm that Kunagas Ulrich had provided me with. Sir Radomir’s eyes widened and he suddenly recoiled like a startled cat, screeching.
“Tell me your name you fucking cunt bitch!” Sir Radomir roared—
And the vision disappeared.
I was standing in the Temple of Savare – just the empty, cold, vaulted hall, with the statue of the God Father looking over us. The Eternal Fire crackled and blazed in its iron brazier.
