Path of the Incubus Read online

  Sybris had been member of the clique of hekatrix bloodbrides who were present at Archon Xelian’s ‘accidental’ death. Previously Sybris had been well favoured, well enough to aspire to replacing Aez’ashya as succubus until Xelian’s sudden fall had frustrated her ambitions. That frustration had quickly flared into open antagonism when Aez’ashya was thrust into the position of archon in Xelian’s stead. Aez’ashya knew Sybris well, they had sported together both on the battlefield and off it in the past. In fact Aez’ashya knew enough about Sybris’s style and methods to have a small qualm of doubt about the upcoming bout.

  Sybris favoured two half-moon shaped blades that she used with a hip-swinging, straight-armed, momentum-driven technique she’d learned from Quist disciples in Port Carmine. The blades were heavy enough to smash through a parrying blade and Sybris was agile enough to snap them outward to catch a would-be dodge with eye-blurring speed. But it wasn’t her enemy’s weapons that particularly concerned Aez’ashya. It wasn’t even Sybris’s lustrous, wire-strung braid of hair. The braid was tricked out as a flexible weapon some two-metres long and tipped with barbs and blades. Aez’ashya knew that Sybris could seamlessly work strikes with that braid into her other attacks. One flick of her neck just so and Sybris could cripple or kill an opponent. An unexpected slash from the side or below… those half-moon blades whirling up for a decapitating strike and it was all over. But that wasn’t what was giving Aez’ashya doubts either.

  Before every other challenge someone had sent Aez’ashya advice on how to defeat her opponent: a weakness pointed out, a poison suggested, a habitual manoeuvre to avoid. This time there had been nothing, no sly messenger with words of wisdom and so Aez’ashya was truly on her own. She repeated to herself that it didn’t matter, and that it didn’t mean that Sybris had received a message of her own that revealed the secret of how to defeat Aez’ashya.

  It didn’t matter. Aez’ashya was wearing a pair of hydra gauntlets, skin-tight armoured gloves that sprouted a profusion of lethal crystalline blades from fists, forearms and elbows. She could feel the sharp tingle of the drug serpentin coursing through her veins, the mélange of hormonal extracts heightening awareness and sharpening her already preternaturally quick reflexes even further. She would overcome this challenge with or without outside help.

  All these thoughts had raced through Aez’ashya’s mind as she walked out along the narrow silver path. Now she was within a dozen strides of the centre disk and Sybris raised her twin moon-blades in salute. The movement seemed a little awkward, shading just beneath the fluidity and poise that could be expected of a hekatrix bloodbride. Aez’ashya kept her face in a cold, haughty sneer but she laughed warmly inside. Others might be unwilling to help but she still had her own tricks to deploy, as Sybris would discover to her dismay very soon.

  The slave’s fingers had been cut down to little more than stumps. Burn tissue on its hands and face made it look like it had been a necessary surgical procedure, but most probably it wasn’t. Kharbyr still found himself vaguely admiring the deft agility the slave demonstrated in chopping and weighing powders, the thick stumps gripping the narrow blade and handling the thin twists of paper with easy familiarity. Kharbyr looked at the slave’s horribly burnt face disinterestedly for a moment and yawned, wondering when his contact would arrive. He was waiting beneath an awning fashioned in the appearance of trailing orchids of silver and gold outside a drug den on the Grand Canal and his patience was rapidly running out.

  Once upon a time a wide promenade of polished stone tiles a hundred strides across had separated the black, sinuous loop of the Grand Canal from the lower palaces of Metzuh tier. Over time the drug dens and flesh halls of Metzuh had sprawled out to clutter the open space with furnishings, slave cages, awnings and apparatus. Each expansion had been the subject of a bitterly fought turf war between neighbouring establishments, forming an untidy patchwork of feuds and vendettas as varied as the objects themselves. The slave’s little hutch off to one side of the entrance had probably cost a thousand lives in duels and murders over the years, the silver and gold awning had been around for so long that it had probably cost a million.

  The battles for ownership of the banks of the Grand Canal were a crucible that had done much to form the network of petty kabals making up the current power structure of lower Metzuh. Eventually a point of equilibrium had been reached where no one dared to claim the last twenty paces up to the canal’s edge for fear of upsetting one or other of the self-proclaimed lords of lower Metzuh. The uneasy peace was normally good for business yet right now the slave was bereft of customers. The miserable creature still kept cutting, re-cutting and weighing its wares with all the eagerness of a pet performing a trick. Kharbyr, for his part, had already sampled all that the slave had on offer and decided he would rather stay sober.

  He glanced up and down the empty canal bank for the hundredth time and considered whether to bother keeping his rising anger in check any longer. There was no sign of anyone watching him right now, but that meant nothing. There had been an indefinable sense of someone or something following him for days now, and Kharbyr had taken elaborate measures to shake off any stealthy bloodhounds on his way to the meeting. The fact he could sense nothing now could just mean they were being more careful. It didn’t help that the wrack he was here to meet was late, again, and his choice of meeting place was a reminder of past transgressions that Kharbyr had worked hard to overlook. He had a dozen other places to be that all promised better entertainment and profit than this particular corner of Commorragh. The only thing keeping him here was that the wrack, Xagor, only ever ran errands on his master’s account and that meant it was probably important to find out what he wanted.

  Most of the Epicureans were out holding a noisy processional along the open space at the bank of the Grand Canal. It was partially a diversion for bored pleasure seekers and partially a display of power – an implicit warning to the adjacent districts not to mess with lower Metzuh. The city had been tense of late, taut with anticipation of… something. There was change in the air, a forest-fire scent of imminent disaster that the inhabitants of Commorragh were always quick to sense and react to. Rumours were rife about murders and skulduggery up in High Commorragh and it was said that the great tyrant was distracted by sinister machinations even his castigators could not seem to fathom. In back alleys and hidden souks soothsayers and rune casters muttered of dire portents. The desperate and the dispossessed were gathering in dark corners and plotting how to seize advantage in the coming troubles.

  So it was that the Epicurean Lords had summoned their coteries for a show of strength. All over Commorragh similar scenes were being played out as restless cults, covens and kabals gathered to promote their claims to dominance in the prevailing climate uncertainty. Kharbyr could have confirmed a lot of their worst fears based on what he’d witnessed in person over the past weeks, but he chose to stay in the shadows and smirk at their posturing instead.

  First came rows of oiled and naked slaves of a variety of races holding the leashes of the Epicurean’s pets. Slinking sabercats snarled at imperturbable massiths, blade-legged helspiders marched beside drooling, heavily sedated bhargesi. A kaleidoscopic display of fur, feathers and scales was guided slowly along by the sweating slaves under the watchful eyes of the beastmasters. Occasionally a sudden disturbance in the ranks marked where an irritated pet had turned on their handler, but the steady flow of exotic beasts never halted.

  Behind the pets came the favoured slaves. Most of them had been freakishly altered by the flesh-carving arts of the haemonculi into walking sculptures of bone and meat. A few opulently dressed turncoats moved among the staggering, skittering throng and shouted grovelling praises to their masters for their continued existence. It was hard to tell if the braying and moaning of their heavily altered compatriots signified their agreement or disapproval.

  Next came the artisans: cadaverous haemonculi with their wrack servants in th
eir barred masks, they mixed freely with master weapon smiths and forge overseers resplendent in their kilts of blades, gravity sculptors walking with wheels of knives spinning above their heads. Here and there gaudy mixologists and painted Lhamaens warred with another to produce the most overwhelming musks and pheromones. Brightly coloured clouds leapt in to the air from their flasks and vials like flights of escaping birds.

  The artisans were favoured enough to wear the sigils of their sponsors, all being members of the host of minor Epicurean kabals that passed for authority in lower Metzuh tier. Here was the triple slash of the Soul Cutters, there the rearing serpent of the Venom Brood, or the sickle blade of the Shadow Reapers or a score of others. The artisans mingled despite their temporary allegiances. Their skills were in such great demand among the Epicureans that their loyalties shifted frequently, and for them today’s rival might become tomorrow’s ally in the anarchic lower courts. False flattery and insincerity thrummed through their ranks as they greeted one another over and over again with the most extravagant courtesies.

  Kharbyr tensed. The feeling of being watched was back, as sudden and direct as if someone was standing right behind him and breathing down his neck. He anxiously scanned the slowly moving column trying to identify the source. There, a masked wrack still quite far away down the procession, just occasionally bobbing into view among other apprentices and journeymen. But that particular iron-barred masked looked too frequently towards the awning where Kharbyr stood for it to be coincidence. Was this his contact finally approaching or an imposter? Anything was credible right now. Kharbyr loosened his knife in its sheath before settling back into the shadows to wait and find out.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Question Of Escape

  The gloomwings became progressively less numerous while at the same time becoming larger and more corpulent. Some were big enough to engulf a person whole, but they were much slower and less aggressive than the rest. Large or small, Morr tirelessly slaughtered everything that came within reach of his klaive and drove the remnants before him in a shrieking, chittering wave.

  Eventually a break among the filth-encrusted walls showed an unfamiliar gleam of metal. Closer examination showed a low side-shaft sloping upward at a gentle angle. It had once been guarded by a grillwork of bars, but time and the gloomwings had eaten away at the soft metal to leave only broken stubs like rotten teeth in an open mouth. Morr crawled inside without hesitation, using his klaive to lever himself up against the slippery walls and rapidly disappearing from sight.

  The motley one sniffed and peered after the incubus with comical dismay. ‘Really?’ he called. ‘I say again, this is really the best you could come up with?’ Stubborn silence met his jibe and after a while, and with an audible sigh, he bent down and followed.

  The shaft proved to be short, no more than a dozen metres long, before it emerged into the side of another, larger, sloping shaft at right angles. The filth here was so prevalent that it was pitch dark, almost like swimming in black water. Rustling, chittering noises echoed weirdly around the shaft, along with the scraping sounds of something big moving around.

  ‘Morr, is that you I can hear?’

  Guided by instinct alone the motley one skipped aside as something came rushing out of the blackness. Its impact against the wall of the shaft was shattering, a thunderclap sound in the enclosed space.

  ‘Oh enough is enough!’ The motley one muttered as he threw a small object on the ground. The inky blackness was riven by a flash of light so bright it was as though a sun had blinked into existence for a microsecond and engulfed that dark hole in its brilliant photosphere. The momentary glare revealed a monstrous, cloaked figure poised over something that thrashed and struggled in the leaping shadows. A flock of tiny gloomwings overhead shrieked and died in the flash, their nerveless bodies tumbling down like a sudden storm of black snowflakes.

  Darkness swiftly descended again, but only for an instant. Red lightning flared from where the cloaked figure had stood, followed by the pure white flash of a power weapon strike. The armoured figure of Morr wielding his klaive was revealed in the actinic afterimage. He seemed poised in the act of striking at rippling curtains of dark flesh surrounding him. Another strike flashed followed by another, the flickering stop-motion progress of the incubus’s assault speeding up into a continuous blur of light.

  The monstrous figure was revealed as not cloaked but winged – many-winged, in fact – as was shown when it reared back to try and escape its tormentor. It gave a deep, ululating cry of despair as the klaive bit deep into its flesh again and opened its body sac to disgorge a tidal wave of offal. The thing collapsed into a writhing mass, its fleshy wings flailing at the stone with horrid strength. Morr dodged through the thrashing mass to cleave through its primary nerve stem, reducing its dying spasms to a few shuddering twitches.

  Morr eventually rose from the centre of the dying mass like a gore-smeared phoenix, his klaive sizzling and steaming with caustic ichor. Motley applauded him lightly.

  ‘Bravo, Morr, once again you prove more than equal to the challenges set before you!’ Motley smiled before coughing theatrically into his sleeve. ‘Though of course we mustn’t overlook the small contributions made by your gallant companion.’

  Morr glared at the implication. ‘The creature was under control before your intrusion,’ he argued hotly. ‘It may have hastened matters but it did not change the outcome.’

  ‘Well time is of the essence so you are welcome anyway, my friend, we’ve only a short while before Commorragh becomes isolated by the Dysjunction and we’re stuck here among a lot of people that want you dead,’ Motley said brightly as he nudged an outflung wing with one elegantly pointed toe. ‘So… I assume this is why not many people come this way?’

  Morr snarled something unintelligible and stomped off up the sloping tunnel. Motley edged carefully around the dying creature that had once been known as patriarch to a thousand offspring and skipped nimbly after him.

  The tunnel levelled out ten metres before it, and the roof opened to admit another vertical shaft with no visible means of climbing it. The tunnel itself came to a dead end dominated by a wide ellipse of sparkling metal and silvery stone that was reminiscent of the outline of a great eye. Blank stone showed behind the structure and it seemed to hang in the air unsupported by any of the tunnel walls. There was an aura of quiescent power about it, as though a swift, silent river was flowing nearby.

  ‘Ah ha!’ exclaimed Motley. ‘This looks like an old ship gate, well a smallish one anyway. That’s why I love this city you know, Morr? Turn a corner and you never know what you might stumble across.’

  Morr directed a withering gaze at him in return. ‘Archon Kraillach secured this gate long ago to be his own secret means of entrance and egress to the city. It is not locked to a destination, nor is it monitored in any way.’ Motley blanched a little at the incubus’s words.

  ‘With a Dysjunction imminent doesn’t that mean…?’ Motley asked.

  Morr continued as if Motley had not spoken at all. ‘When the Dysjunction occurs this gate may collapse altogether; it will certainly be forced open for a time and anything that finds it might come through into the city. We must be far from here before that happens.’

  ‘We? Oh Morr, I didn’t know you cared!’ effused Motley. ‘You see? We’re becoming such good pals already!’

  ‘I cannot prevent your unwanted attentions, I must endure the inevitable consequences of my actions,’ Morr intoned. The words seemed to form a personal mantra for him and he repeated them quietly. ‘I must endure the inevitable consequences of my actions.’

  ‘Not merely endure. I’m afraid, my old friend, that you must atone for them too,’ Motley said sympathetically, ‘and not just the actions you’re thinking about.’ Morr turned his blank helm to face Motley, its crystal eyepieces seeming to flash with red flames. Motley obediently lapsed into silence for a moment before c
hanging the subject.

  ‘So is it safe to assume you know how to activate the gate? Is there a mechanism for sealing it behind us?’

  Morr grunted and turned his attention to a panel on the lower edge of the gate. Initially Motley took a mild interest in Morr activating the gate but became increasing distracted by the tunnel behind them. He glanced back several times before wandering aimlessly a short distance away from where Morr crouched with head tilted as if listening. Motley suddenly snapped his fingers together, plucking something out of the air in a half-seen blur of movement. He examined his prize with interest.

  ‘Oh, interesting,’ Motley said. ‘I think you should look at this, Morr.’ He thrust something tiny towards Morr, something small enough that it was barely visible pinched between Motley’s gloved thumb and forefinger. An insect, seemingly, but surely no living insect was ever spun so finely from metal and crystal as the spying device Motley held.

  ‘The flare must have blacked out their primary sources so they had to send up back-ups at short notice, no doubt there’s more of them around.’ For a moment Motley’s voice held none of its usual levity or hidden jests, then he brightened again and smiled capriciously. ‘Someone is watching us, my friend,’ Motley said and turned the device towards himself before enunciating clearly into it. ‘I do hope they just watch and don’t intend to do anything to interfere, that would be unfortunate,’ Motley crushed the spy fly between his fingertips and blew away the dust of its wreckage.

  ‘Let us find out what our watchers intend,’ Morr said ominously, straightening and stepping back from the gate. A curtain of shimmering energy began to coalesce within the gate. At first it was made of pure silver light but as the curtain strengthened it became shot through with flashes of gold and umber. After a moment coiling threads of green and blue snaked across the surface. There was something venomous-looking about the portal, an intrinsic malevolence that made both Morr and Motley take another involuntary step back from it.