Deathblade: A Tale of Malus Darkblade Page 11

  The armoured messenger finally reached the rise. Malus grinned coldly at Korbus as his mother’s servant bowed before him. The petty sorcerer looked absurd in the old armour he was wearing. ‘You look like a rat playing wolf,’ Malus scolded the servant. ‘What did you do, strip a drowned Naggorite on your way here?’

  Korbus kept his eyes averted and emotion from his voice when he answered. ‘Lady Eldire felt I would be more inconspicuous if I looked like a warrior.’

  Malus laughed at the declaration. ‘If you looked like a warrior. My mother should have disguised you as a slave, Korbus. You would wear rags better than mail.’ A kick of his heels brought Spite lurching towards the servant. The horned one’s forked tongue flickered out as it tasted the conjurer’s smell. Korbus recoiled from the reptilian brute.

  ‘What word do you bring me from Eldire?’ Malus demanded. A rumbling hiss from Spite added still more menace to the drachau’s question.

  ‘All is in readiness, dreadlord,’ Korbus said. ‘She is prepared to work her auguries. She but awaits your presence.’ He hesitated, licking his lips nervously. ‘She says that to ensure the accuracy of her divinations, she will need some of your blood.’

  ‘So long as mother doesn’t take too much, eh, loyal Korbus?’ Malus joked. He glanced back across the beachhead, still unable to find anything that resembled his mother’s pavilion. ‘You lead the way,’ he ordered Eldire’s consort. A prod of his boot against Spite’s ribs brought a growl from the beast. ‘Not that I doubt your loyalty, or mother’s, but you should understand that if anything happens, you die first. Remember that, Korbus.’

  ‘Of course, dreadlord,’ Korbus said. The conjurer’s voice was firm and properly deferential, but he couldn’t quite hide the anxious tremble in his step as he led Malus down from the rise.

  Malus was careful to keep a few yards between himself and Korbus as they climbed down from the rise. Just enough space so he could keep his eye on his guide, but not so much distance that Spite couldn’t leap upon the elf at the first hint of treachery.

  Even when it came to his own mother, Malus felt it judicious to be cautious.

  EIGHT

  The smell of death struck Malus the instant he flung aside the curtain covering the entrance to his mother’s pavilion. The stench lent a still more sinister air to the place, as though its sorcerous camouflage wasn’t uncanny enough. Even with Korbus guiding him, Malus had been unable to see the pavilion until he was only a few feet away from it. It wasn’t invisible; the magic in play was more subtle than that. It was as if his eyes had refused to focus on the tent, sliding away from its image, straying from it to gaze elsewhere. When he came within a dozen yards of it, a clamminess wrapped itself around him, an oily sensation that repulsed him and made him want to draw away. Spite had felt it too, refusing Malus’s efforts to drive the reptile onwards. He’d been forced to dismount and leave the beast behind as he followed Korbus that last leg of their journey.

  Now he stood within his mother’s sanctum. Malus watched as Korbus walked over and ignited a brazier of coals with a wave of his hand. The drachau shook his head at the display. Whether the conjurer had evoked some petty spell or had simply dropped some caustic powder on the smouldering coals, Malus wasn’t impressed.

  He glanced at the rich tapestries draped about the walls of the pavilion, arcane glyphs woven into each one in threads of silver and gold. Dried heads and hands, desiccated herbs and bundles of roots and weeds dangled from the poles that gave the grand tent its shape. On the floor, a rug cast into the patterns of the Pantheonic Mandala stretched across the floor, the symbol of Khaine at the heart of the mandala glowing with an eerie crimson light. He could feel icy fingers of magic pawing at him, blindly groping at his flesh. A phantasmal music tugged just at the edge of his hearing, indefinable melodies that both enticed and horrified. In the depths of his soul, Malus could feel Tz’arkan stir, responding to some aethyric vibration only spirits could sense.

  ‘Lady Eldire is beyond the veil,’ Korbus announced, beckoning Malus towards a dark curtain. Malus recognised that curtain. It had been woven from the tresses of Hag Graef’s fallen sorceresses, shorn from their corpses before the last warmth deserted their cold flesh. The Naggorites had called such a veil a ‘soul hanging’, believing that the spirits of those whose hair was bound into it were enslaved and compelled to ward away inimical magics directed against those who sheltered behind them.

  ‘Leave us,’ Malus ordered Korbus. There was only the briefest flicker of hesitation on Korbus’s part, then his mother’s servant bowed and withdrew from the pavilion. Malus waited until the conjurer was gone, then brushed aside the soul hanging and stepped into the gloom behind the partition. The stench of death intensified and closed around him, drawing him into itself in a cadaverous embrace. His hand tightened about the warpsword’s hilt.

  A strange blue light slowly grew from the darkness, illuminating a space that appeared impossibly vast for it to exist within the confines of his mother’s pavilion. The curtains and tapestries lining the walls were familiar to him, recalling Eldire’s sanctum inside the Scion’s Tower in Hag Graef. Somehow, Malus felt that if he reached out and pulled aside those hangings he would find not the canvas of the pavilion but the stone of his abandoned palace behind them. It was an impossible prospect that made his heart clench inside his chest.

  Seated on the floor, her legs crossed beneath her, was Lady Eldire. She wore the black silks of a sorceress, her hair bound within the claws of a filigree basilisk, its eyes shining with a strange luminescence in the weird blue witchlight. Around her was a circle drawn in powdered bone and around it a second ring rendered from the intestines of a harpy. Between the two grisly circles were drawn the astrological symbols of each of the Cytharai.

  Eldire’s eyes were closed, her face drawn and pale. She held one hand against her heart, while the other was stretched before her in an arresting gesture, as though pushing against some unseen barrier. She didn’t look at her son when she spoke. ‘I ask you, Malus, to reconsider what you would have of me. The aethyr is in turmoil. The old magic runs wild and is slow to heed the command of even Eldire.’

  Malus stepped towards his mother, careful to keep beyond the arcane circles she had crafted about herself. ‘I must know,’ he told her. ‘You are the only one I can trust to gaze ahead and tell me what waits there. Glory or death, I must know!’

  A despairing sigh shook the sorceress. For the first time, Malus noticed wrinkles marring his mother’s beauty, saw hints of silver polluting her black tresses. Until this moment, he hadn’t considered the toll her divinations might exact from her. There could be no going back, however. If he relented now, he would lose everything. He would be nothing more than Malekith’s pawn, cast aside while the Witch King’s armies fought the real battle far away. His name would be reduced to a jest – the hapless dreadlord who’d been massacred while the host of Naggaroth made war against the asur.

  ‘The future, mother,’ Malus hissed. ‘I must know what it holds. I must know the path to take.’

  Eldire’s outstretched hand trembled, her splayed fingers twisting into patterns that threatened to dislocate every bone. ‘The pattern of what is yet to come is ever in flux. Every decision we make, every choice we abandon, every action we bring into being sends ripples through that pattern. To steal secrets from the future is to catch smoke in one’s hand. Only the most powerful sorceries can lend solidity to the smoke, can pour reality into what is only possibility.’

  ‘You have such power, mother,’ Malus said. ‘Among all of Malekith’s fleet, there is no sorceress as mighty as you.’

  Eldire shook her head slowly. ‘I am alone, Malus. A manticore is mighty, but it is alone. The dogs are weak, but they are many. Their numbers make a strength that can overcome the might of that which is alone.’

  Malus stood and glared down at his mother. ‘You delay!’ he accused. ‘Who would dare raise thei
r hand against you while I am still drachau. You aren’t alone. You have the might of Hag Graef to protect you. What enemy do you fear? The witches of the black ark? I’ll have Aeich slaughter them for you and bring you their hearts. Drusala? What can that enchantress do to threaten someone who defied Morathi herself?’

  Eldire sighed once more. ‘The answers you seek are already here,’ she said. ‘In my auguries, I saw you would not be dissuaded from your purpose, yet I refused to abandon hope.’

  Malus felt a tremor of fear pass through him. ‘The omens are ill, then? You have foreseen disaster?’

  ‘To look into the future is to give it shape,’ Eldire answered. ‘To give it shape is to wrap chains around the present. Prophecy binds the present to itself, compels the purpose of now to fulfil the dictates of what is yet to be.’

  For the first time, she opened her eyes. Malus recoiled when he saw that Eldire’s eyes had become black pits, like chips of obsidian set into her face. Little fingers of pulsating darkness wriggled from her pupils, as though beckoning to him. ‘The abyss of eternity holds all that is possible. To pluck from it what might have been and transform it into what will be is a magic even the gods fear to contemplate.’ Eldire’s voice trailed away, losing volume and vibrancy. It seemed the most colossal effort when she pointed a finger towards something lying sprawled on the floor.

  His flesh cold from the dreadful emanations of such potent magic, Malus slowly approached the prostrate form. The stink of death clung heavy to it. The mutilations visited upon it made it impossible to tell if the corpse had recently been either man or elf. What he could tell was that the victim had been alive when the worst of the atrocities were inflicted upon it. The forbidden names of Hekarti, the Mistress of Magic, entwined with the obscene glyphs of Atharti, Lady of Desires. Even an outsider like himself understood the danger of invoking both of the Cytharai sisters in the same ritual, for they were the most dire of enemies. He could only wonder at what kind of ritual demanded such power that such evocation was unavoidable.

  ‘Reach inside the offering and remove the heart,’ Eldire told her son, her voice now not much more than a whisper. ‘Crush it in your hand. Squeeze the blood from the dead flesh and you will find the future you seek.’

  Through one of the ghastly cuts inflicted on the corpse, Malus worked his hand between shattered ribs and torn flesh. His fingers froze when he felt the heart beneath them. The organ was moist and warm to his touch, and as his fingers lingered, he felt a hideous pulsation pass through them. The heart yet beat! By some unspeakable magic, there was life still pulsating through this abominably tortured body.

  Where another elf might have quailed in horror at so obscene a spectacle, Malus firmed his grip and yanked at the beating heart. Inch by inch, he worked it free from its fleshy moorings, drawing it back through the broken chest that had once housed it. As he removed it, he saw that the thing had turned black, cancerous with the same aethyric taint he’d seen in his mother’s eyes. Black worms, no more solid than a shadow, slithered and writhed from the organ as he tightened his grip and began to squeeze.

  Drop by drop, the blood began to seep from the heart onto the floor – far more blood than it could possibly have held. Soon there was a puddle at Malus’s feet, and within that puddle he saw things, images that flickered and changed with each drop that fell from the heart.

  He saw the great army of Hag Graef marching away from the shore of Tiranoc. He saw his warriors ranging across the land, seeking battle with the asur. He saw skirmishes with the bastard kin of Nagarythe and raids mounted by the chariots of Tiranoc – far too little to threaten the mighty host he had unleashed against Ulthuan. Onwards his army pressed, the asur refusing to give them the mighty battle they sought. Then the Annulii Mountains loomed before them, towering above the landscape. Between the snow-capped peaks, there was the pass connecting the Shadowlands of old Nagarythe and Ellyrion, joining the Outer Kingdoms to the Inner Kingdoms. Blocking that pass, its battlements soaring hundreds of feet between the mountains flanking it, was the Eagle Gate.

  For an instant, Malus felt his ambition turn sour. This was the fortress Malekith had commanded him to take. This was the place where the despot expected him to die. He gazed upon the massive stronghold with its megalithic gates, at the glittering spears and helms of the army garrisoning it, at the fiery wings and cold claws of the giant phoenixes that soared above it. He heard the names of great heroes whispered to him – Yvarin and Shrinastor – and he felt despair begin to bind his hopes.

  Then, in the pool of blood, Malus saw a sight no druchii had ever seen. He saw the titanic doors of the Eagle Gate torn asunder. He saw the towering battlements crack and crumble. He saw the gleaming army vanquished, their dead impaled upon their own spears, a grisly forest to honour Khaine and the ancient hate of the druchii.

  Malus grinned. His mother had peered into the world beyond worlds, and brought back omens of glory and victory. Victory such as would shame even the Witch King’s pride!

  ‘You may rest now, mother,’ Malus said as he cast aside the shrivelled heart. He saw her hand slip away from her own heart, watched as the blackness faded from her eyes and she slumped forwards. He rushed to her side, wondering if he should have heeded her warning, if maybe he hadn’t demanded too much of her sorcery.

  ‘You have seen?’ Eldire asked. With the spell broken, there was already a bit more vibrancy in her voice.

  ‘I saw,’ Malus told her. ‘Your magic has told me what I must do.’

  Lady Eldire looked at him, her gaze penetrating deep into his soul. ‘Prophecy is a lie we tell ourselves. Be certain of what you have seen. Beware that it is not what you merely wanted to see.’

  Malus laughed. ‘This vision is both. It is victory.’

  Eldire pulled away from him. ‘Then I am pleased,’ she said. ‘All I have done has been for you, Malus. Always remember that. You are my legacy. Your glory is my triumph.’

  With his mother’s words still ringing in his ears, Malus was stunned to find himself no longer standing in the blue light. He was back among the tents, right beside the place he had hobbled Spite. Ahead of him, he could feel the clammy wrongness attached to his mother’s pavilion, but he could no longer see the place.

  Malus shrugged aside the disorienting wrongness of his magical ejection from Eldire’s presence. She had shown him what he wanted to know. There wasn’t anything else he needed of her. At least for now.

  ‘Come along, old comrade,’ Malus said to Spite as he climbed into the horned one’s saddle. ‘I have new orders to give my army.

  ‘Now I can tell them where they’re going.’

  Lady Eldire could feel the shadows of unborn potentialities clinging to her, trying to draw existence from the magic that coursed through her body. Removing the clinging embers of possibility from her was like burning leeches from flesh. It was a revolting, painful necessity. Each dream she burned away, each parasitic hope that thought to fatten itself upon her sorcery, each reflection of what could have been but would never be, all of them took their toll upon her stamina.

  She should have refused Malus’s command. In more stable times, when the aethyr hadn’t been transformed into a raging cataract of magic and the tides of Chaos weren’t spilling into the mortal realm in a deluge of arcane malignance, she would have been able to render her divinations more easily. They wouldn’t have left her feeling like a dried-out husk.

  No, Eldire corrected herself, even then, even with the full resources of Hag Graef at her beck and call, what she had done for Malus would have been no easy thing. She had indeed seen his future. She had seen what would be. With her magic, she had changed what was to come. Her vision had penetrated beyond the cascade of time, into the morass of possibility, into the streams of not merely what would be but of what could be. Merely gazing upon such things was a mark of the mightiest sorcery, but to reach into that pool of impossibilities, to draw it out and
graft it to the stem of eventuality, to take the unreal and compel it to become real – that was a magic only the cold-blooded toad-mages of the jungle dared to harness. One misstep, the tiniest falter of heart or mind, and such magic would do more than destroy. It would obliterate. It would erase. What it consumed wouldn’t simply die, it would never have been.

  She had reached into the pool of never and brought forth victory for her son. She had bound a dream of conquest to the fact of Malus’s army marching from their beachhead. She had seen that impossible vision, of Malus making war upon the shores of Chrace, and she had chained it to the flow of the present.

  She hoped it was enough. She begged Hekarti that it was enough. Through Malus, she could carve a legacy. Without him, she could build nothing.

  Had she done enough? Had she done enough to change that awful future she’d seen, the vision she dared not even whisper? To speak the future was to give it shape – that was the true threat of prophecy. How many divinations had brought themselves into being over the long march of history? She could not risk even a single gesture, a single word, that might bring Malus to the end she had foreseen!

  Eldire rose to her feet, aware that she was no longer alone in her sanctum. This refuge existed in the spaces between space, neither fixed to her pavilion on the shore of Ulthuan nor her chambers in Hag Graef. It was possible some daemon might intrude upon such a shadow place, but the presence she sensed was mortal, or at least near enough to mortality to clothe itself in flesh, to have a heart beating in its breast and a brain thinking inside its skull.