The Queen's Assassin

  “There is a plan to stop the coronation tomorrow?” He replied in the same language. If there was something she wanted kept secret it was doubtless for good reason.

  “Unless we find what we are looking for soon, there may not be a coronation. By sunrise the whole city may be in the grip of plague and something worse than plague.” The night suddenly seemed very dark and cold. The snow crunched ominously beneath their boots.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think our old friend Lord Jaderac is performing a ritual right now that will raise all the bodies in this graveyard and turn them into an unstoppable army –he is or some of his associates are.”

  Sardec felt a shudder of fear pass up his spine but he kept his face straight and his tone nonchalant. “You are talking of sorcery of the darkest sort, Milady.”

  “I am, Lieutenant. Does it surprise you that our enemies would use it?”

  “These days nothing would surprise me, Milady.”

  The gates of the Grand Cemetery loomed ahead of them. Sardec shuddered remembering the ghouls they had encountered here. The memory of them was as vivid and as frightening as if it had only happened last night.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked her.

  “It will be easy enough to recognise when you see it, Lieutenant. Look for Terrarchs working sorcery. I would not be surprised if one of them was Lord Jaderac and another was Lady Tamara.”

  “What shall we do if we see them?” Sardec suspected he already knew. Her answer came as no surprise.

  “Don’t take any chances. Kill them - if you can.”

  Sardec nodded and began bellowing orders to the soldiers. They were to split into squads and search the graveyard for intruders. If they saw anyone performing rituals they were to shoot on sight.

  “Just hope there’s nobody in there having a funeral,” muttered the Barbarian.

  “If they are, they’ll soon be having a few more,” said Weasel.

  Sardec watched the soldiers fanning out among the gravestones. He had a bad feeling about this. The night was misty. Frost glittered on gravestone and tree branch. Only occasionally did the light of the moon shine through.

  “What was that?” Asea asked. “I don’t like the smell of this.”

  There was an odd scent of corruption in the air, sickly sweet. There was something about it that made his skin tingle and his lips feel numb. “There is devilish sorcery in the air. We’ve come to the right place.”

  “A lot of people would think we were in exactly the wrong place,” said Sardec.

  “And I would be tempted to agree with them. But if I am right, we have to stop this. Nobody else can. If we don’t, coronation day will be spoiled for a lot of people.”

  Jaderac strode around the perimeter of his pentacle. The smell of the mist from the great canisters filled the air. He could sense the corruption in it, and it thrilled him. There was so much power there. Power to raise the dead. Power to make them into an army. Power that would smash the Taloreans before the night was out.

  He raised the flask to his lips and drank. The elixir had the curdled consistency of the congealed blood that was one of its components. It had the sweetness of blood. Energy filled him, energy that had been drained from dozens of captives along with their blood. He felt a little disgusted, not by the fact he was imbibing blood but by the fact that it was human blood, and tainted by their weakness. He told himself it all served a greater purpose, and that purpose was winning the coming war for Sardea and seeing that he was installed back into the Queen-Empress’s favour.

  He looked at the others with contempt. They were mostly sheep. Lord and Lady Sardontine so desperately trying to keep in with both sides, and finally forced to take his side. They knew the ritual was going ahead, and that by tomorrow Jaderac would be master of the city. They wanted to be on the winning side, and they knew that he would remember them if they betrayed their obligations to the Brotherhood now. All of them looked at the massive hulking figure of the Nerghul with fear. It was even larger than his first one, with monstrous claws and long white fangs showing in its fleshless face. Its eyes glowed darkly. It radiated evil energy.

  The nobles and their bodyguards and followers were beneath his contempt. Only Tamara stood out among them. She was different. It was not just that she belonged to one of the oldest and highest families in Sardea. She was confident where they were sly. She was capable, like her father. He still wondered whether she had really chosen to side with him, or whether she was still her father’s agent. Her comings and goings had been even less explicable than usual recently.

  Not that it mattered now. Things had come too far for him to fail now. He noticed then that she was looking at him, with a sly smile on her face.

  “There are people coming,” she said. Jaderac smiled scornfully. What fools had chosen tonight to wander into the graveyard? Perhaps it was ghouls again.

  “It does not matter,” he said confidently. He could see Sardontine and his fellow cultists were getting skittish. They were nervous, and they might run if they got frightened enough. He was not about to let that happen.

  “I think it does,” said Tamara. “There are soldiers out there.”

  “Have we been betrayed?” Sardontine asked. His voice quavered a little. Jaderac looked at Tamara. “Have we?” he asked.

  She stared at the Nerghul. She knew what it was capable of. She had seen its like before. “Not by me,” she said. Her smile was enigmatic and as always he could not read it. He spoke to his undead creation. “Go kill everyone who you do not see here.”

  The huge unliving creature growled and moved to obey. Jaderac’s enemies were as good as dead. Nothing that lived could best such an engine of destruction by night. It had cost him greatly to make the creature but now it would prove its worth.

  He looked at the cultists. It was time for them to earn their share of the power they coveted. “Take up your positions,” he said. “Ready your censers. We begin.”

  He focused his mind, and concentrated on the ritual. Some time passed before he noticed that Tamara had vanished.

  Suddenly Sardec heard screaming. Muskets flared in the gloom. There was a sound of bones breaking, men dying. A group of soldiers broke and ran. “Stand firm,” he bellowed. He heard Sergeant Hef shouting the same. Something hideous erupted from the brush in front of him. Before he could react it was on him, and he was caught in a grip that made him feel like a mouse in the jaws of a cat.

  Red eyes burned into his. Yellow teeth grinned down out of a lipless smile. He stared into the face of death. He knew he faced a Nerghul, and he doubted he was going to survive this second encounter.

  He slashed at the thing’s face with his hook, peeling away part of its cheek, and letting the white of the teeth shine through. He continued to tug but the blade seemed to have caught on bone. The Nerghul lashed out with its free hand. He went flying, heard the sound of bone crunch as his body impacted on a gravestone.

  Lightning flashed, dazzlingly close. The smell of ozone filled his nostrils. His hair stood on end. He looked up and saw the charred form of the Nerghul reeling away from Asea. Lightning arced from the wand in her hand, smashing into the creature, keeping it at bay even as it stripped the flesh from its body. It tried to get closer but, for all its ferocious speed, it could not move against the flow of deadly energy. Asea did not let up. She knew that if she did the thing would be on her in a flash. Blue sparks flickered from the side of the Nerghul’s head. The snow sizzled where they landed.

  Sardec groaned and picked himself up and checked his limbs. His jacket was torn and blackened. He could smell burning hair. Everything seemed intact until he realised that he had lost his hook. It must have slid free from its mounting and remained buried in the jaw of the Nerghul. It was the metal of it that appeared to draw Asea’s lightning. He could see metal glowing. He thought he understood now how that ever-twisting worm of lightning kept aimed at the undead beast’s head no matter how hard it tried to evade. The metal was
attracting the energy to it like a lightning rod drawing a thunderbolt. Sparks kept leaping from Sardec’s hook. He shuddered to think what might have happened if he had remained attached to his artificial limb.

  The Nerghul spasmed and fell. The lightning crackled and faded. The Foragers sprang into action hacking the creature with their bayonets. Even crippled as it was, it managed to toss them off, and headed towards the source of its torment, Asea. The Barbarian crashed into it from one side. His blades hacking at the thing’s blackened, smoking flesh. Weasel’s rifle spoke thunder and a truesilver bullet smashed into the thing’s brain.

  Karim sprang forward and separated its head from its body with one stroke. Even as he watched the Nerghul began to decompose, as if the unholy energies binding its form together had dissipated and could not longer hold it together. Perhaps the lightning had something to do with it. After a few moments there was only a pool of protoplasm, bubbling in the snow.

  “We won,” said the Barbarian. He sounded stunned.

  “This one was weaker than the last,” said Asea with certainty.

  “If that’s a weak one, I would not like to see its stronger brethren,” said Sergeant Hef.

  “Sergeant, round up the men,” said Sardec. He was proud that there was no sign of the shakiness he felt in his voice. He managed to ignore the pain in his side as he walked over to Asea where she studied all that was left of the Nerghul’s corpse.

  “I would not touch that hook if I were you,” she said. “It’s red hot and most likely poisoned as well.”

  “Let’s hope there are not any more of those things out there,” said Sardec. “We may not be so lucky next time.”

  She nodded. “We’re running out of time,” she said. “The ritual has started.”

  Jaderac chanted. His followers echoed the words. Smoke, bearing the substances they had extracted from the ghoul corpses emerged from the censers they bore, and floated out over the graveyard.

  Black fog flowed towards him, entered his mouth and his nostrils, extended tendrils into his lungs and brain. He felt the fog now, as if it were an extension of himself, as if he had fingers of mist. Playfully he touched Sardontine with them. The old Lord flinched but kept chanting; what else could he do. Like all of them, he knew the ritual could not be interrupted on pain of the most severe sorcerous repercussions.

  Jaderac extended his misty limbs and touched the ground. For days now, his followers had been preparing this area with alchemicals, letting them saturate the ground, sink deep into the earth until all that was needed was the catalyst and the ritual to call all the creatures down there back to unlife. He sensed the substances responding to his touch. He sent his consciousness burrowing downwards, worm-like, and felt the presence of the decomposing forms and the tiny semi-sentient fragments of necromantic energy with which the graveyard had been seeded. He gave orders. The dark spirits flowed into the bodies, providing all that was needed to complete an alchemical reaction already begun. Bodies began to move, to claw their way towards the surface, guided by Jaderac’s implacable will.

  He stood at the centre of a great web of energy now, as it slowly extended its way through the graveyard. He touched the bodies hidden in the mausoleums and felt them respond. They too were filled with death energies. Jaderac called them to him and sent his misty tentacles on through the graveyard.

  In a hundred crypts, dead eyes sprang open, green witch-fires burning in them. A hundred corpses rose and began to shamble out into the night, their minds filled with an unholy hunger.

  Chapter Thirty

  Rik listened to the clock tick. It sounded loud as a drum in the quiet of the apartment. He notched the tip of another truesilver bullet and put it in his pocket. He doubted he would get the chance to use it but it was best to be prepared. He had half a dozen of them now.

  He wondered what was happening at the graveyard, and how Asea and his comrades were doing. He wished he was with them, but the voices whispered to him that his place was here. That tonight was the night that Malkior would strike. Out there, in the snow, the soldiers of Talorea were moving. Everything was in confusion. There would never be a better time for an assassination attempt.

  He thought about the notes they had found, which had told of the ritual. They had the hallmarks of a trap. Rik was sure that Asea knew that as well as he did, but she could not afford to leave the matter uninvestigated. The risks were too great.

  The ticking of the clock became louder, and it began to strike the hour. It was midnight. The chimes were echoed by every clock in the building and then Rik felt it, the tearing sensation that told him that somewhere nearby a shadowgate had opened. Now that the moment had come, he felt weak, as if all the strength had drained out of him. He realised that he might have only minutes of life left to him. The voices babbled. Some urged him to hide. Some urged him to seek his prey. He rose to his feet, and invoked the spells Asea had taught him. A moment later, he sprang out into the corridor and raced through the Palace.

  Even with his metabolism accelerated by spells of speed and strength fuelled by the stolen energies of the Quan, he felt as if he was too slow. It was like being in a nightmare where he ran towards a goal which seemed to recede before him and which he had no chance of reaching.

  As the corridors blurred past, he was not sure he even wanted to reach that goal. Part of him was deathly afraid of confronting Lord Malkior. He knew his chances of survival were not great. Malkior was far older and more experienced in the ways of sorcery than he. He was a Shadowblood with access to all their powers and uncanny skills. Part of Rik wanted to run off into the night and hide yet he forced himself to run on.

  A great hatred burned in him, stronger than his fear. Malkior had killed Rik’s mother and would kill Asea and Kathea if he could. He had left Rik to die in the most horrible way imaginable and all the horrors that haunted Rik now could be traced to that. He planned to turn the whole world into a vast prison camp in which all the humans and all of Rik’s friends would be nothing but cattle to keep alive a race of corrupt immortals. Malkior had become the focus for a lifetime of resentment and fear. He was a symbol of all the things Rik had loathed and dreaded in this world, and he had turned out to be worse than ever Rik had imagined him to be. The Terrarch deserved killing, and if there was even a slight chance that he could do it, Rik was going to take it.

  Ahead of him the Royal Wing loomed. It seemed eerily silent tonight. Rik prayed it was just his imagination.

  “I don’t like this at all,” said Sardec. The mist was thicker and darker than it had been. The smell of corruption had increased. Strange noises sounded throughout the cemetery. The ground shuddered slightly under his feet. Witchlights burned greenly on the branches of trees and the tops of tombs.

  “We need to keep going, and find the centre of this,” said Asea. “That’s the only place we can stop it.”

  Somewhere a metal gate swung open on creaky hinges. Heavy feet crunched on snow. Sardec doubted that they belonged to any of his men. He turned around. Most of them were lost in the gloom. He could barely make out the outlines of Weasel and Sergeant Hef. That huge looming bulk had to be the Barbarian. Karim crouched by Asea, a naked blade in his hand. The sorceress looked like a warrior goddess in the gloom.

  “What’s happening, sir?” asked Sergeant Hef. It was obvious that the question was aimed at Asea. She answered it. “The dead are restless tonight, Sergeant. Necromancers are at work here and we are going to stop them.”

  “Oh good,” said Weasel. “I haven’t seen enough sorcery in these past few months.”

  “Is there anything you can tell us about how to deal with them, Milady?” asked Hef.

  “Don’t let them bite you.”

  “Would never thought of that,” muttered Weasel.

  “Or get any of their blood on you if you can help it. There is a curse in it that it would be better to avoid.”

  “Thank you, Milady,” said the Sergeant.

  “Try and keep the men together now.
There’s no telling what we might encounter next.”

  Jaderac looked out into the night. Dead bodies were there, dead bodies that moved, animated by the dark energy he had summoned. More and more of them emerged from the darkness, drawn by his unholy power. There were dozens of walking corpses. More of the shambling dead appeared all the time. As they did so the mist thinned, as if it were being absorbed into the lungs of his creatures, and granting power to the dark spirits within.

  Sardontine and the others gazed out of the pentacle, horror written on their faces. They looked as if they wanted to run, but they knew better. As long as they were within the Elder Sign, the dead could not touch them. They had no such assurances if they strayed beyond its boundaries.

  Shots sounded nearby, drawing Jaderac from his trance dreams of power. There were soldiers, just as Tamara had claimed. In a way it was good. They would provide the first recruits for his new army.

  The sentries let Rik in. They knew him as Kathea’s rescuer, and they recognised Asea’s seal. No one seemed to doubt his claim that he had an urgent message from the sorceress for the Queen.

  A chamberlain was summoned. Rik wasted a minute waiting for him, and then told the guards he could not wait. The matter was deadly urgent. Reluctant to shoot him or restrain him, they accompanied him deeper into the Palace. Rik was glad he knew the way.

  The corridors were quiet. No one was abroad in this wing of the Palace. “Is it normally like this?” he asked one of the soldiers.

  “I don’t usually come here,” the man responded. He was clearly nervous. His visitor was important but his actions were highly irregular. He was not in the mood for small talk.

  They headed up another flight of stairs into the Queen’s Wing. “Surely there should be guards here?” Rik said.

  “There should be Household troopers,” the soldier agreed. Rik’s worried tone was affecting him now.