The Heretic Kings

What to make of this hidden city? The volcanic stone of the buildings was dark and cold, but the lambent, upright figures of people were about—not many of them now—and a single crescent slice of sunshine glowed like molten silver way up on the side of the crater: the last of the departing sun. Soon night would settle. Best to wait a few minutes.

Something else, though. A . . . smell which seemed tantalizingly familiar.

The imp clambered down the side of the high wall like a fly, head-first. It reached the ground and scampered into a cooler place of deeper shadow, an alleyway it might have been called in Abrusio. There it crouched and breathed in the air of the dying day.

The daylight sank as though someone had slowly covered a great lamp somewhere beyond the horizon of the world. It was actually possible to see the growing of the night as a palpable thing. In minutes the city had sunk into darkness.

But not darkness to the imp. Its eyes began to glow in the murk of the alley and its vision grew sharper.

Still, that smell somewhere, hauntingly reminiscent of something from the past.

To our duty, my diminutive friend, Bardolin’s mind gently prodded as the imp crouched puzzled and fascinated in the humid shadow.

It obeyed the urging of a mind that was moment by moment becoming one with it. Obediently it scuttled around the side of the house which imprisoned the company, looking for the front door, another window, any means of entry or egress.

There were things moving in the streets of the city. To the imp they were sudden dazzling brightnesses darting in and out of sight. It was the heat of their bodies that made them so luminous. The imp whimpered, wanted to hide. Bardolin had to sink more of his will into it in order to keep it under his command.

There—the door they had entered the place by. It was closed, but there was no sign of Kersik, Gosa or the beast-headed guards. The imp sidled over to it, listened and heard Murad’s voice within. It chuckled to itself with an amusement that was part Bardolin’s, and set one glowing eye to the crack at the door’s foot. No lights, no warmth of a waiting body.

Push at the door, Bardolin told it, but before it could do as it was told it felt a growing heat behind it, the hot breath of some living thing. It spun around in alarm.

A man might have seen a tall, bulking shadow looming over him, with two yellow lights burning and blinking like eyes. But the imp saw a brightness like the sun, the effulgence of a huge, beating heart in the bony network of the chest. It saw the heat rising off the thing in shimmering waves of light. And as the mouth opened, it seemed to breathe fire, a smoking calefaction that scorched the imp’s clammy skin.

“Well met, Brother Mage,” a voice said, distorted, bestial but nonetheless recognizable. “You are ingenious, but predictable. I suppose you had no choice: that festering pustulence of a nobleman would have left you no other options.”

The thing was a massively built ape, a mandrill, but it spoke with the voice of Gosa.

“Come. We have kept you waiting long enough. Time to meet the master.”

A huge paw swept down and scooped up the imp even as it leapt for freedom. The were-ape that was Gosa laughed, a sound like the whooping beat of a monkey’s cry but with a rationality behind it that was horrible to hear. The imp was crushed to the thing’s shaggy breast, choking at the vile heat, the stench of the shifter which it had smelled but not quite recognized. It had been confused by memories of Griella, the girl who had been a werewolf and who had died before they had set foot on this continent. It had not recognized the peril close by.

The were-ape limbered off at speed, its free hand bounding it forward whilst the short back legs pushed out, a rocking movement which seemed to gather momentum. Bardolin saw that his familiar was being taken towards the stepped pyramid at the heart of the city.

They passed other creatures in the streets: shifters of all kinds, nightmarish beasts that reeked of Dweomer, warped animals and men. Undi at night was a masque of travesties, a theatre of the grotesque and the unholy. Bardolin was reminded of the paintings in the little houses of worship in the Hebros, where the folk were still pagan at heart. Pictures of hell depicting the Devil as master of a monstrous circus, a carnival of the misshapen and the daemonic. The streets of Undi were full of capering fiends.

He should withdraw now, leave the imp to its fate and slip back into his own body, rejoin the others and warn them of what was waiting for them outside the walls of the house in which they were imprisoned. But somehow he could not, not yet. Two things kept him looking out of the imp’s eyes and feeling its terror: one, he felt nothing but stark fear at the thought of abandoning his familiar, and with it a goodly portion of his own spirit and strength; the other was nothing more or less than sheer curiosity, which even in the midst of his fear kept him drinking in the sights of the nocturnal city through the imp’s eyes. He was being taken to someone who perhaps knew all the answers, and as Murad hungered after power so Bardolin thirsted for information. He would remain in the imp’s consciousness a little longer. He would see what was at the heart of this place. He would know.

“W HAT can he be at?” Murad demanded, pacing back and forth. The room was lit only by a few tiny earthenware lamps they had found among the platters and dishes, but the burning match of the soldiers glowed in tiny points and the place was heavy with the reek of the powder-smoke. Bardolin lay with his eyes open, unseeing, as immobile as the tomb carving of a nobleman on his sarcophagus.

“Two foot of match we’ve burnt, sir,” Mensurado said. “That’s half an hour. Not so long.”

“When I want your opinion, Sergeant, I’ll be sure to ask you for it,” Murad said icily. Mensurado’s eyes went as flat as flint.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s dark out,” Hawkwood said. “It could be he’s waiting for the right moment. There are probably guards and it’s only an imp, after all.”

“Sorcerers! Imps!” Murad spat. “I’ve had a belly-full of the lot of them. Brother Mage indeed! For all we know he could be in league with his fellow necromancers, plotting to turn us over to them.”

“For God’s sake, Murad,” Hawkwood said wearily.

But the nobleman wasn’t listening. “We’ve waited long enough. Either the mage has betrayed us or his familiar has met with some mishap. We must get out of here unaided, by ourselves. Sergeant Mensurado—”

“Sir.”

“—I want that door down. Two men to carry our slumbering wizard—Hawkwood, your seamen will do. We’ll want as many arquebuses ready as possible.”

“What about Gerrera, sir?” one of the soldiers spoke up, pointing to their fever-struck comrade who lay on his litter on the floor, his face an ivory mask of sweat and bone-taut skin.

“All right. Two more of you take him. Hawkwood, lend a hand there. That leaves us with seven arquebuses free. It’ll have to do. Sergeant, the door.”

Mensurado and Cortona, the biggest men in the company except perhaps for Masudi, squared up to the hardwood double doors as if they were an opponent in a fight ring. The two men looked at each other, nodded sombrely and then charged, leading with their right shoulders.

They rebounded like balls bounced off a wall, paused a second, and then charged again.

The doors creaked and cracked. A white splinter line appeared near the hinges of one.

Three more times they charged, changing shoulders each time, and on the fifth attempt the doors sagged and broke, the beam which had closed them smashed in two, their bronze hinges half dragged out of the wall.

The company hesitated a moment as the echo of the crash died away. Cortona and Mensurado were breathing heavily, rubbing their bruised shoulders. Finally Hawkwood raised one of the earthenware lamps and peered out into the gloom of the foyer beyond, in which they had met the old man Faku and his helpers. The place was deserted, the door to the street closed. The night seemed eerily silent after the jungle noise they were used to.

“There’s no one here, it seems,” he told Murad. He lifted the lamp this way and that. There was a stone staircase at the back of the big room. The running water of the pools had stopped except for an occasional drip. Shadows wheeled and flitted everywhere like restless ghosts.

“Now what?”