He wanted to tell her he was sorry, to remind her that he wasn't always so malevolent – because he had to face it, that's what he was at times: a man who manufactured evil. But he'd not had an easy life, what with his upbringing and…
Here it was at last, the street he'd once lived on. Not with Beami, no – but with his first love, deep in his youth, the girl he had spent forever trying to forget.
Back before he had been bitten.
He could not bring himself to think of her name… it was so long ago anyway.
And there was the house, which had once stood on the very edge of the Wasteland district. Now it was an integral part of the city, as if symbolizing how Villiren had grown too far beyond his own life. The house he was staring at was just a crumbling, terraced cottage with pieces of marbles pressed into the masonry so that it glittered with different colours in the right kind of light. They were all like that, round here. Its door was painted a different colour now and it was inhabited by a different family.
But, once, this was home.
When someone has no future, he realized, they look in the other direction. The ghosts of his past emerged out of the fog, and he removed his mask to confront them, face to face.
*
This is where it ends.
He is as yet unbitten, a twenty-one-year-old father. Styl is there, his son of two years, laughing up at him. The little guy's got the same colour hair and eyes as himself, the same smile. Crafted from the same wood, this one, people have told him. Malum has huge hopes for him, and wants to give him a future he can be proud of. Styl says he wants to be Emperor one day, and he speaks with such a spirit that you might think that it is really a possibility.
Hope: it is one of the reasons Malum works so hard at his small trading company. In a business inherited from his uncle, he distributes wares of all kinds around the city, and even dabbles in the ore market now and then. His wife is cooking breakfast in the morning sunlight, which streams through the kitchen window. She is intensely blonde, with full lips, a chatterbox who's very sensitive to everything he says, and he loves her. Malum relieves her of the spatula, tells her she should go and relax in the warm bath. He kisses her on the collarbone, on her neck, then she heads upstairs, smiling at both of them.
Later in the day they're walking as a family towards the commercial districts, looking to buy food for an evening meal with his business partner.
A unit of Empire military is coming down from the Citadel, apparently on its way to tackle a tribal uprising beyond the city limits, somewhere in Wych-Forest. Nothing serious, just a few hundred of them wanting revenge for the Empire's confiscation of their ancestral lands. Malum crouches down next to Styl, stares at the streams of uniformed men on horseback along the rain-slick streets. Armour and weapons glint in the sunlight during this display of duty and courage.
Someone lets off a firework in celebration.
Suddenly several startled horses lurch, startled and mad, seeking escape from the commands of their riders. Some of them break free, and begin galloping towards the crowd. Malum remembers being knocked sideways, remembers his son screaming and then the sight of Styl's face being crushed by hooves.
A spreading pool of blood.
A woman crying.
Anxious faces blurred through his tears.
Once the uproar has died down, he can barely bring himself to look at the devastating aftermath, at the pitiful remains of his son, and all he and his wife can do is collapse on the cobbles and wail.
The next evening he finds his wife has bled to death in the bath. Her wrists were slashed so crudely he knows she must have taken a long, painful time to die.
That is where it began.
*
Malum flicked a stone at one of the windows of the house, and it pinged off harmlessly. Was it any wonder he hated the military? He would never fight alongside them, no matter what the argument, no matter how much the Night Guard pleaded with him.
He had never risen above that day his life was smashed, where his dearest hopes had died. Eventually, after the witch had helped him, in his new-found bitterness, he turned his young trading empire into a criminal enterprise, channelling his anger.
His cadre had built up around him. They became his family and, eventually, they shared his blood. They stood by him without question, would carve open any enemy on his behalf.
After you see your son killed in such a way, and you find your wife dead from despair, you don't care about much else other than doing whatever you can to capture whatever satisfaction you can from the world.
*
The city was beginning another day.
Traders headed to the irens rolling their carts along by hand. Citizens were moving about their routines, some in masks, bustling about, getting on with their own lives. Bitterly, he noticed a unit of Dragoons trotting past the end of the street. He looked up at the house one last time and then turned to disappear into the fog, wishing that he might be lost forever in its mass.
F ORTY-ONE
Few people were blessed or cursed enough to have their own moment in life, a window of time in which they were the centre of the world and everything revolved around them. Tonight Brynd had a whole city waiting on his every word and, no matter what he said, there would be bodies littering the streets on a scale no one would comprehend.
The mute bombs had changed the texture of the city, the spirit, the geography. Now thousands of people were gathering around the barracks and the Citadel demanding action and protection. Portreeve Lutto had vanished completely. Villiren was Brynd's to control.
With the Night Guard lined up behind him, Brynd addressed the citizens of Villiren at regular intervals for half a day, from a platform high up on the Citadel walls, one that offered too much grandeur for his liking. The crowd huddled below, or amid the thick stone arches and pillars. His throat was raw from repeating his message into the cold wind:
'There is no need for you to panic,' he lied.
'But what do we do?' came the reply. 'Tell us what to do.'
Years of yielding to the will of the portreeve had left these people with no self-sufficiency. He issued instructions for those unwilling to fight to head underground, into the escape tunnels. 'We are to roll the city out past the Wasteland district and into the wilderness, establishing temporary villages beyond Wych-Forest, the other side of the Spoil Tower and Vanr Tundra, or sheltering in disused mining networks. We have ensured basic supplies to cater for this temporary solution. The military stationed on the perimeter of the city are now being brought in, unit by unit, tens of thousands of soldiers, most of the Empire's available resources. We will ensure the stability of the city within.'
Out of this city of several hundred thousand residents, the citizen militias just managed to match the official military presence. There were forty thousand extra people willing to fight, and a total force of, he estimated, eighty thousand. Over the past few weeks, Brynd had ensured the blacksmiths were developing enough weaponry for them. Citizens only now signing up were attached to their own regiments based on the streets they lived in, neighbourhood comrades, with military personnel to guide them through their basic training. Sadly, hardly any of the gangs had opted to join, and none of them were the most violent sort, the few thousand truly skilled civilian fighters in the Bloods or the Screams.
Ten cultists had enlisted, which surprised Brynd because they rarely cared for anything other than their own arcane practices. He herded them in a room together with Blavat to try to discover what might explain the nature of the bombs, then to develop useful technology to help them fight the enemy as equals. He was quickly impressed
