The Rostikov Legacy

Chapter Nine

  There was a deathly stillness out in the forest, that air of expectancy that seems to wait, breathless, for some event to occur or some danger to pass before customary activity may be resumed. It was the dead of night, but even at this hour there should have been more life. As Konrad passed through the half-frozen, mist-drenched trees, animals hid in their burrows and birds cowered in the dormant winter branches. Even the moon refused to shine, hiding itself behind a cloak of heavy cloud.

  Konrad ignored it all. He had his purpose now, and this was the part that he both anticipated and dreaded: the hunt, and at the end of it, the kill. He strode on, relentless, following Irinanda’s directions in his mind as he made for the house where the treacherous poison-man resided.

  He found the house, though not without difficulty. Nanda had told him to use his spirit-eyes, and so he did. He had not yet asked her how she had come to take this approach, nor how she was able to as a mere apothecary. That conversation could wait. But that Irinanda had secrets of her own was becoming quite clear to him.

  He let the deep shadows of the real world fade as his physical vision gave way to his spirit-sight and the forest turned pale and gauzy. In this state, walking halfway between the planes, he could just about bear the extreme brights and darks of the spirit lands. The contrasts served him well now: the trees and earth faded to white, while figures and structures stained themselves darkest black.

  The house revealed itself to him, tucked into the embrace of a hoary old tree. A slight sound reached his ears, coming from within. Someone, then, was at home.

  Konrad stopped, letting the spirit-vision fade. He could see it, now that he knew where it was. The doorway was nothing but a slit in the woodwork, just wide enough for a grown man’s shoulders to fit through. He took a moment to extract the powder packet from his pocket. With his other hand he drew a long, obsidian-bladed knife from the sheathe on his boot.

  Thus equipped, he went inside.

  A man stood facing the far wall, his back to the door. This man was tall, with skin and hair of similar shades to Konrad’s own. Konrad watched him for a moment in silence, blocking the doorway with his own tall frame. The man was pulling things out of a rough cabinet, rummaging in drawers and packing things into a bundle that lay beside him. He worked fast, knocking things over in his haste. He hadn’t heard Konrad’s arrival.

  ‘Are we going somewhere?’ Konrad asked in a low voice.

  The man spun around, eyes wide. He didn’t ask who Konrad was; he didn’t need to. Konrad had thrown off the camouflage that protected his identity during his daily life. Everything that he was shone in his face, in the aura of menace and power that hung heavy in the air around him.

  The man’s lips moved soundlessly, his chest heaving with the effort of drawing in breath under the sudden paralysing fear that seized him. Konrad watched him in silence.

  ‘She… spoke the truth.’ The words emerged shakily, and sweat shone on the poison-man’s forehead.

  Konrad lifted a brow. ‘She. That “she” whose sanity you condemned in order to save your own worthless skin. Another offence, for which you must also pay.’

  ‘Malykant,’ gasped the poison-man, and Konrad smiled.

  And waited.

  The rush of fear began to abate a little, and cunning reasserted itself in the eyes of the man who had destroyed Navdina Rostikova. Good. This one would fight for his life; he would run, and perhaps he would run to the one person he imagined could protect him.

  ‘Shall we get on with it?’ Konrad said mildly. He stood aside, leaving the door free. ‘You have one chance.’ As he spoke, he summoned the serpents from their place deep in his heart and they streamed free, coalescing into sudden brightness.

  ‘Better hurry,’ said Konrad.

  And the poison-man ran.

  Konrad followed. He didn’t bother to run. His stride lengthened and ate up the ground, carrying him through the pitch-dark forest at inhuman speed. Ahead of him the poison-man stumbled and fell, picked himself up and ran on, then fell again. Each time he tumbled to the ground Konrad slowed his pace, allowing his quarry to maintain his apparent lead. But he never let himself fall far enough back to lose sight of his prey. He knew that every time the poison-man glanced back, he would see the dark shape that was Konrad still in silent, relentless pursuit, with the shivery gleaming shapes of Eetapi and Ootapi riding the winds beside him.

  The only question that remained in Konrad’s mind was the poison-man’s probable destination. Where was he running to, in this last despairing flight? That he was going to Analena was likely, but she was not at home and Konrad guessed that the man knew that. It would be some secret meeting spot that he was aiming for. A rational man might think better of leading the Malykant to his co-conspirator, but Konrad had deliberately frightened this one. Frenzied with fear, still imagining desperately that he could escape, the poison-man did exactly as Konrad would expect of a coward.

  Back into the city they went, in this mockery of a chase. The quarry charged down silent streets, gasping for breath through lungs burning with exertion, wandering frequently off course as he checked repeatedly over his shoulder. Konrad was still there, unshakeable, untiring, relentless.

  But when he sensed that his quarry was nearing the end of his flight, it became time to drop back, conceal himself in the shadows and allow the poison-man to think he had shaken his pursuer. He sent the serpents after him instead, and they sailed away, dampening their spectre-glow to a mere flicker.

  It was to a small, innocuous looking terraced house that the hunted man went, a narrow building with empty windows, decaying shutters and an overgrown garden. Konrad watched as the poison man went inside and the serpents, virtually indiscernible, ghosted in after him. A moment passed, and then a light went on upstairs. A figure moved past the window, and a second followed: a feminine shape.

  It was time, then.

  He stepped softly up to the house. The man had had the presence of mind to lock the door behind himself. Laudable instincts at a time of crisis, but little impediment to Konrad. He touched his cold fingers to the lock. The mechanisms sprang open under his icy touch and the door creaked ajar.

  The house was too small to possess even an entrance hall. He walked straight into a small sitting room, devoid of furniture and very poorly kept. Paper hung off the walls in peeling strips, the carpet was rotting away and everywhere he looked he saw chipped paint. The rest of the house was no better. As he climbed the stairs, he worried that the faltering woodwork would fail to hold his weight. The steps shook as he climbed, but they held.

  The sound of raised voices reached his ears and he paused, registering the source. At the end of a short, dim corridor a door stood closed, a slim bar of light shining at its base. There were his killers, neatly boxed and ready for him.

  He approached on silent feet, listening.

  ‘… don’t truly believe he was the servant of The Malykt?’ It was the female voice who spoke, and her tone dripped scorn. ‘He is a fairy story to frighten children, nothing more.’

  ‘Fool,’ replied the poison-man. ‘What of Navdina’s missing ribs? What of your husband’s?’

  ‘The police do that themselves, to generate fear in the perpetrators. It makes us easier to catch, so they believe. Looking at you, it might well work. Lans, pull yourself together.’

  There was silence for a few, long seconds.

  ‘And the man I just met? What was he, an actor hired by the police? Your complacency will kill us both.’ Lans, as it appeared he was called, could not hide the tremor in his words.

  ‘You may depart as you choose,’ Lena replied with cool indifference.

  ‘What?’ Lans gasped. ‘You dismiss me? And so easily? What of your promises?’

  ‘Which were they?’

  ‘You spoke of marriage -’

  ‘And you believed me! That is the precious part. What will you do, Lans, kill me as well? You will certainly get nothing more that way. Leave quietly
and I will see that you are rewarded.’

  Konrad heard the distinct sound of a man spitting. He could imagine the refined Lena’s revulsion.

  ‘I will leave,’ Lans snarled. ‘I don’t know how he found me before. He could find me again. You’d be wise to leave too, but if you won’t - if you are too convinced of your power - I for one will not mourn your death.’

  Lena laughed, the way a woman might laugh at a party when in company with a handsome gentleman. ‘Charming boy. Go, then. I’m tired of you.’

  But when Lans turned to leave, he found Konrad blocking the door. The Malykant watched as the horror dawned anew in his eyes and his breath stopped in his chest.

  Then, to Konrad’s surprise, his eyes filled with weird glee and he laughed.

  ‘Well,’ he chuckled. ‘If it must be too late for me, at least we shall fall together.’

  The words were clearly directed at Lena, but she made no sign of having heard them. She stared at Konrad, not with fear but with something nearer calculation. Her close gaze inspected every inch of his attire, noting the knife he held in one hand and the packet he clutched in the other.

  ‘I knew it was you,’ she said. ‘When you kept appearing at my house. It was you that I saw in the Bones that night, when Navvy Marodeva spoke. I was right.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

  ‘You should be dead,’ she said then. ‘How did you avoid my assassin? I sent the very best.’

  ‘He was good,’ Konrad admitted. ‘But the Malykant is not so easy to kill, I’m afraid.’

  Lena only sneered.

  ‘You knew ?’ gasped Lans. ‘You’ve known all along that the Malykant hunted us!’

  Konrad gave her no time to reply. His arm moved sharply, and the knife flew. Lena gasped as the long blade buried itself in her shoulder, pinning her to the wall. She struggled like a stuck butterfly, but she remained caught.

  In the same movement, his free hand dipped into the mouth of the bag he held and emerged bearing a pinch of sunbane powder. He threw this into Lans’s face, and the swarthy man stopped laughing abruptly. Instead, he choked as the powder flew down his pipes and into his lungs. His body went rigid and he fell.

  And all movement ceased. Konrad bent over him, looking right into his eyes.

  ‘For The Malykt,’ he murmured. ‘For your crimes against His Laws, the Overlord claims your soul.’

  That was all. He sometimes made longer speeches, but he’d had conversation enough with this one.

  Navdina’s sharpened rib bone was in his hand. He dropped and buried the bone in Lans’s chest, listening for the puncturing sound it made as the tip pierced the killer’s heart.

  ‘The Malykt comes for you,’ he whispered. ‘And the soul of Navdina Rostikova seeks vengeance upon you.’ He leaned closer. ‘She shall have it.’

  Fear shone bright and sharp in Lans the poison-man’s eyes. For a few quick seconds he continued to breathe, ragged gasping breaths around the fluid filling his lungs. Konrad felt the familiar chill descend on the poor terraced house as The Malykt arrived to tear away his soul.

  ‘Lord,’ he murmured, remaining on his knees for an instant out of respect. No answer came, but he did not expect any. His Master waited for him to complete his task.

  Konrad stood, slowly. Then he turned to Lena.

  She wasn’t looking at him. Her wide eyes were fixed on the fresh corpse that had been her lover and accomplice only a few moments ago. Her pretty face was chalk white, her trembling lips almost as red as the blood that soaked her arm and torso. She had stopped struggling, though that may only be the paralysing effect of shock and fear.

  Konrad moved until he stood directly in front of her. It was only then that she lifted her eyes to his face and met his cold gaze.

  But not with contrition. In an instant, her manner changed from a shocked stupor to fiery anger.

  ‘You’ve no right to judge me,’ she spat.

  Konrad stilled. Had she known somehow, precisely the right words to say to make him pause? Was she expecting a reprieve, some kind of weakening in him? Or was this nothing but the wild pronouncements of a mind in trauma?

  He was not given to self-doubt. It was one of the qualities that made him a suitable servant to Death’s Overlord. But when he did doubt, it was on these terms. He himself was no saint. He had committed offenses of his own in the past, some of them grave. That, too, rendered him a fitting Malykant, for he was no self-righteous zealot; like those he hunted, he had to atone for his past.

  But he also had more understanding than was comfortable. Sometimes, he was called upon to punish the crimes of individuals whose circumstances he could relate to all too well. He could not even say for certain that he himself would have acted differently, were he placed into a similar situation. Lena’s case was not one of these; she had taken her revenge not on the perpetrator of the crimes against her but against people who were uninvolved. No excuse could be made for her.

  Still, he could not help but sympathise with her anger at the turn her life had taken, when she had been due so much more. It made it harder to stand here as her executioner and hear her story, knowing that the ending could not be changed.

  He kept his face expressionless as he looked back at her, his doubts hidden. He made no reply to her accusation, merely waited.

  Lena lifted her chin and stared at him with pure hatred. ‘Well, then. Do as you must. Why do you hesitate?’

  ‘It is no hesitation,’ he replied. ‘I must first hear your … explanations.’

  She sneered. ‘I will not explain myself to you.’

  He smiled, in a small way. ‘It is not to me that you must explain yourself. The Malykt hears your words.’

  She went very still at that, her eyes darting as if she might see the Overlord crouched somewhere in this pitiful room. She would not, of course. When The Malykt was near, there was no manifestation: only a presence, cold and dark and stern.

  Another moment passed, and she began to feel it too. He could see it in the way her breath stopped and the fear crept back into her eyes.

  ‘Most of your story is known to me,’ Konrad said. ‘One element only remains unaccounted for.’

  ‘And what is that?’ she breathed. Blood still poured from the wound he’d created in her shoulder, and she was growing pale.

  ‘The role of your husband, Amrav Rostikov, in this tale.’

  Her mouth twisted. ‘I won him fairly, though it wasn’t hard. It was Navdina that introduced us, isn’t that ironic?’ A shiver wracked her body, beginning at the bleeding shoulder still pinned to the wall. ‘What?’ she added when Konrad said nothing. ‘What are you really asking? Did I love him?’

  Konrad narrowed his eyes. ‘What I am asking is, did you kill him?’

  ‘Yes.’ She said it simply, without inflection or any apparent feeling.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he knew.’

  He didn’t have to ask what Amrav Rostikov had known. Her face told him everything. Lord Rostikov had discovered somehow that his wife had planned and ordered the killing of his cousin. Perhaps he’d also learned of her true history. Here lay the recurring, and so frustrating tragedy of crimes: one led so swiftly, so easily, to another.

  So she had killed her husband in order to conceal her involvement in Navdina’s death. But was it so simple? He remembered Lans’s words, spoken only minutes ago. You spoke of marriage.

  ‘His death was planned,’ Konrad guessed. ‘But not so soon, and not like that.’

  ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Something “accidental”, and undramatic. But he pried into my affairs.’

  Konrad recognised that tone. It said, “I deny responsibility for this offense; I was pushed to it by circumstances beyond my control. The victim brought it upon himself.”

  It never did fly with him.

  ‘And Etraya?’ he asked.

  At that her cold blue eyes turned to twin chips of ice. He shivered a little at the depths of her hatred for her former nurse; for
her supposed mother.

  ‘Is she dead yet?’ she said.

  ‘No, nor will she die anytime soon. Your accomplice failed.’

  Her eyebrows rose. ‘I was told… ijgaroot is always fatal.’

  Konrad smiled mirthlessly, thinking of Irinanda. ‘He was tricked.’

  Lena looked as though she would like to hunt Etraya down herself and throttle her to death with her own hands. Konrad didn’t doubt that she was capable of it.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop at killing her ?’ Konrad asked. Not that he would have condoned the murder of poor, broken Etraya Marodeva any more than that of Navvy Rostikova, but it would have made more sense.

  Lena shrugged, then gasped with pain as the gesture pulled her torn shoulder against the knife. ‘My goal was not vengeance. My goal was to regain what’s mine.’

  He shook his head. ‘You could have publicised the story Etraya told you. She would have vouched for her part in it, I’m sure.’

  Lena shook her head vehemently. ‘Not when it would have damaged Navdina. She loved her more than she ever loved me. Of course she did; Navdina was her child. And besides, who would believe the word of a mere nurse and her daughter? Wealth, status: these things will always win over any little matters such as truth or right.’

  Konrad’s lip curled involuntarily. ‘And the poison? You could have given her a quick death; instead you chose a prolonged and most painful one. Was that not vengeful?’

  She stared at him with hatred. ‘She had my life,’ Lena hissed. ‘My life! And in exchange for all those years of stolen affluence I inflicted a mere ten minutes’ pain upon her. I was lenient.’

  Konrad considered this information; considered her, helpless before him and facing her own death, yet still defiant and wholly unrepentant. Still capable of seeing herself as the injured party. She’d destroyed her cousin-by-marriage, despite the fact that Navdina could bear no responsibility for her mother’s actions. She had further planned and carried out the murders of her husband and her former nurse in order to cover her earlier crime and secure her position as the only possible recipient of the Rostikov title and fortunes. And she had concealed her knowledge of the Malykant’s hunt from her accomplice Lans, probably hoping that he would bear the brunt of The Malykt’s vengeance instead of her.

  All of this had been done with no apparent compunction at all.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said at last. He took the knife from her shoulder and she drew in a quick breath, a gasp of mingled pain and fear. She swayed, on the point of collapse.

  ‘And now?’ she said, with the barest hint of a tremor.

  ‘Amrav is waiting,’ Konrad replied.

  Her body tensed, just for a split second. He had been waiting for that. Gathering her flagging strength, she bolted, running for the door. But he was too fast for her. He tossed a handful of the powder into her path and she ran full into it. In seconds she had fallen to the ground beside her lover, all her striving reduced to the simple effort to breathe through paralysed throat and chest.

  Konrad stood looking down at her for an instant. He took no pleasure in this part of his role: if he had he would have been no true Malykant, no better in fact than she herself. But he could do it, because he must. And because the part of himself that would have screamed and wept at his actions was gone, taken by his master.

  The bone was in his hand, its sharpened tip ready. Her eyes moved in her drawn face and she watched its progress as he knelt over her. What was she thinking behind those frightened, defiant eyes? Did she know that her soul would be bound to her murdered husband’s until she had paid for his death? Did she guess how fierce the torment would be?

  Deliberately, he put those thoughts away from his mind and raised the bone. A single gesture, and it was done; the stake was buried in her heart; her life drained away, and Analena’s soul was given into the unforgiving care of The Malykt.

  Konrad waited in silence while his master’s work was completed. When the Overlord’s presence had drained away and only the familiar, unthreatening chill of winter remained in the room, he stood. He gazed for a moment at the twin corpses of Lans the poison-man and Lena Marodeva lying side by side, the bones of their victims piercing their cold hearts.

  Then he left the house, stepping out into the drifting snow that fell softly from the darkened skies.