Lord of Slaughter (Claw Trilogy 3) Read online

  ‘It is the king of all the world who is here!’ shouted both riders together. ‘Basileios Porphyrogenitus, autokrator, ordained by God on high. Bow down before him.’

  ‘We bow down!’

  The gates swung open, and it was as if some great weight of waters swept down on the wolfman. He had been on the Ever-Violent Rapids on the Dneiper on his way from Kiev and been awed by their force. Here it was similar, a great roar sweeping out of the city and over him. He could suppress his fear, tell himself that his fate did not matter and that not one twist in the skein of his destiny would be different for worrying about it, but he could not control his wonder. This place was like nothing he had seen and, though he sat bound on an open cart, he forgot his discomfort, forgot the menace that faced him and just gaped at the spectacle.

  The horses of the outriders lurched forward and the Greeks filed into the city. They walked through the gates, the crowd howling and clapping, people pushing out of the city to greet the strange northerners, to touch their hair and beards, feel their muscles – kiss them, even, in the case of some of the more excitable women. The Vikings weren’t slow to respond, hugging the women and crying out to more to join them. The column halted, pressed in by the throng coming out of the town – merchants carrying silks, food and tents, doctors rushing out waving bandages to advertise their trade, men with great pots of what the wolfman thought must be beer.

  His cart jolted forwards and he really did start to feel a little afraid. The whiteness of the streets dazzled him and the noise of the great mass of people was almost unbearable. Giants looked down on him and a seething growl rose within him, but then he realised these were men of stone or metal – statues, though much bigger than any he had ever seen.

  Alongside the column merchants ran, tugging on the tunics of the Greek warriors, trying to get them to buy fish, bread, candles, gaming pieces, weapons and many things the wolfman just didn’t recognise. It was an uproar the equal of any battle. A man ran along with a table twice his height, poking a hand out from beneath it to tug at the warriors. It reminded him of a creature he had once seen in the possession of a southern merchant – a tortoise.

  The procession moved on, down the avenue of porches, through splendid squares, past huge and gaudy columns, beside what appeared to be an endless bridge following the route of the road. These things seemed monstrous to the wolfman, his head pounded and he was covered in sweat. The biggest town he had been in was Kiev – a village compared to this place.

  He had to endure. His first mission to be killed by the emperor had failed; the harder route now opened to him, the one that would require all his courage. There was a reason for the splendour of Constantinople, Miklagard, the world city. It lay below it, in the waters that flowed under its streets – in the flooded caves that had been made to serve as cisterns to hold water for the fountains, drinking troughs and baths, and beyond them, deeper, to where older waters lay.

  People spat at him and a few threw dung and stones. His guards warned them away, shouting that this was the emperor’s prisoner and whatever harm was to come to him was not for commoners to decide. The warnings proved useless and the crowd continued to curse and throw things. In the end two of the Hetaereia jumped up alongside him and protected him with their shields. They had been instructed by the emperor to deliver the prisoner to the Numera alive, and they knew Basileios’ tolerance for mistakes had evaporated at Abydos.

  The wolfman steeled himself. He’d put up with worse, much worse – with freezing mountain winters, with the hardships of the lone hunter, with weeks spent starving and chanting beneath the harsh sun and the cold moon, singing the song his wolf brother had put into his head.

  He once had a name: Elifr. He remembered it but it had no emotional connection to him now. He’d lived with a family in the north, by the great cliff of the Troll Wall. He’d never felt part of them. While his brothers were broad, tall and blond, he was smaller, thin, but with strong arms as spare and lean as the roots of a tree. Though his mother cared for him, she did not love him as she did her natural sons. He had been taken in as a child, as the return for a favour from a healer who had saved his father from a fever that looked set to kill him.

  So Elifr had grown up lonely, wandering the hills, volunteering to take the sheep to the furthest pastures.

  He remembered the night his wolf brother had come to him. It was summer and he slept only lightly. In the day he had found fresh wolf spoor and he knew the predators must be close by. He’d brought the sheep into a natural bowl in the hillside and lay down on one of its sides, watching over them. He kept his fire going, though the night was warm, to make the wolves more wary.

  Its heat lulled him and he slept. When he woke the fire was dead and a fog lay low on the land, filling up the bowl in the hillside like a milky broth. The sheep had come near and stood beside him, out of the mist. The sky was clear. It wasn’t full dark, but the washed-out light of the northern midnight, and only the moon and the morning star beside it were visible.

  He gazed over the fog, up to the mountains of the north, to the mighty cliff of the Troll Wall looming like something too big for the horizon, as if it should be nearer.

  The wolf appeared on the other side of the bowl of fog almost exactly at his level. The big black creature sat as if upon a cloud. Elifr picked up his spear and scanned for others, his vision swimming in the floating light.

  He shook the spear as if to throw it at the wolf.

  ‘Go! Go on!’

  The wolf didn’t move, just sat watching him.

  Elifr put the spear down, picked up his sling and fitted a stone. Still the wolf stayed. The boy raised an arm to take aim at the wolf but didn’t release the stone. There was something odd about the wolf. It didn’t behave like a normal animal. Wolves were not stupid and didn’t sit still while shepherds aimed slings at them.

  ‘Are you a ghost?’ he said.

  Then he heard himself say: ‘You are the ghost of a wolf.’

  He spoke again, but not with quite his own voice. It was lower and slower, as if he didn’t fully command his tongue and his lips: ‘You are waiting in a wolf.’ What did he mean by that? Elifr thought he really should know what his own words meant.

  A voice seemed to speak in his mind and he mumbled along with the words: ‘You are the rocks and the stream and the rain on the mountain and the light through the rain. You are the movement of the shadow, a shape cut by moonlight, and you are the gold of the sun on the summer grass. You lie still beneath the frosts of winter and are set free by summer’s heat. You are me, as I was.’

  The wolf kept watching him across the bowl of mist.

  A restless feeling came over Elifr – no, more than restlessness, a feeling of cold torment. The wolf was trying to express something. Elifr mouthed some words: ‘Until the act is done.’

  ‘What act? What …’

  But the voice in his head went quiet and the wolf turned back up the hill. Elifr abandoned his sheep and set out after it, on the journey to magic and misery.

  The cart stopped, and Elifr, the wolfman who had been Elifr, was in front of a squat block of a building that sat in the shadow of a great domed cathedral. Elifr peered up. A gold structure sat on top of the dome, a bulbous pillar supporting a crescent moon. It seemed to shimmer in the hazy air. Again, Elifr tasted smoke.

  Elifr had no time to sit and wonder. The Hetaereia lifted him from the cart and set him down on the ground. His limbs ached from the age he had spent sitting.

  ‘Prisoner of the emperor!’ shouted one of the Hetaereia.

  ‘Stand forward with the emperor’s prisoner!’ shouted a tall Greek guard with a bushy black beard and a short whip at his belt.

  They pulled him in front of a doorway which sat like a square of blackness cut out of the bright day.

  ‘Emperor’s prisoner is forward!’ said the man at the side.

  ‘We will receive the prisoner!’

  The guard with the beard took Elifr by the arm and pushed
him through the doorway. Other guards within took him on into the prison. It really was very dark inside, only the weak light of an oil lamp in a niche in the wall to see by. He was in a short corridor that led to another door. The stress and stink of the jail was in his nostrils, blood, piss, shit and vomit and more – subtle secretions undetectable to ordinary men. Only someone who had earned magic from the gods in ritual and privation could have smelled the iron in the sweat, the sour scent of ashes on the breath: the tiny leakings and excretions of human misery.

  Elifr couldn’t understand what the men said and it would have given him no comfort if he could have.

  ‘No torture,’ said a voice behind him.

  ‘None?’

  ‘Not by us. This is one for the Office of Barbarians.’ The man put his hand on Elifr’s shoulder.

  ‘You’re in luck, friend. You’re not going to have to suffer one of our ham-fisted beatings; they’re sending the professionals to deal with you.’

  The wolfman caught the threat in the man’s voice and turned to look into the Greek’s eyes. Then he faced forward again.

  The men opened the door at the end of the corridor and a waft of incense hit him, though human filth was still powerful beneath it. A meandering pipe and rhythmic clapping sounded from inside.

  He couldn’t work out what it was, but he told himself it didn’t matter. His second plan was now under way and he was where he needed to be.

  8 The Chamberlain’s Man

  Loys strode back to his lodgings, along one of the top streets to avoid the crush caused by the incoming army. The bulge where he’d hidden the gold inside his tunic seemed as conspicuous as if he’d stuffed a live goat up there, but he had no choice other than to take the back way.

  With the return of the army the whole city was in ferment, more even than normal, so he didn’t draw particular attention to himself by the briskness of his pace, which broke into a run at points where he felt particularly threatened.

  The weather did nothing to settle him. The sky was strange – a curious and delicate shade of yellow had come over it while he had been with the chamberlain and the sun seemed wrapped in gauze. The light was like dusk and it wasn’t yet past noon.

  He hurried through the backstreets. There were no tall porches here, no merchants selling gold and silk. Constantinople was shot with bright avenues straight as flower stems that bloomed into rich corollas of forums and squares. Here was the tangled mass of alleys that supported them: narrow, winding and – even on brighter days than this one – dim. The backstreets were the province of street hawkers, gangs of hungry-eyed youths who loitered full of simmering intent, unwashed women and drunken men. They sold leather on the Middle Way. Here, flea-raw children scuttled in the gutters, picking up animal dung or even dead dogs to sell to the tanneries beyond the walls. Better-fed and more pious people crossed themselves and prayed or hurried to chapels and churches. The odd sky, combined with the cold, had set men’s nerves jangling and they went to confess their sins and pray.

  He calmed himself. Look at it with other eyes, Loys. There was a man, clearly a doctor in a good saffron gown, walking along. Three priests hurried on through the gloom, children and adults pulling at the holy men’s hands as they walked, asking for blessings to protect them on this strange day. The Numeri – soldiers from the city’s permanent garrison, so called because they were the ones who brought prisoners to the Numera – were a reassuring presence, idling on a corner. Mind you, they seemed more intent on looking up at the sky than guarding the streets.

  Normally he would have enjoyed the mild frisson of danger the backstreets offered but, laden with the chamberlain’s gold and frightened by the task he had been set, he felt vulnerable and conspicuous.

  Loys forced himself to walk more slowly. His fear was nothing to do with the sky or even with the gold he was carrying. It was fear of what the chamberlain had asked him to do – to create a working and efficacious spell in three months. Was it possible? He had no idea. Was it holy? No.

  He would find Beatrice and get out of Constantinople immediately. Ships sailed every day for the north or down to Arabia. The Caliphate was a centre of learning and might welcome a man of his skills. He would not defy God for the chamberlain or for anyone.

  He cut up past the huge brick building of the Cistern of Aetios, a source of drinking water for much of the city, skirting its olive gardens – whose trees enjoyed the emperor’s protection – and towards his lodgings.

  He dived into the even narrower streets of the lighthouse quarter.

  They were curiously empty. People were inside, with the shutters drawn. He looked up to the sky. The yellow was deepening and darkening, the sun becoming a blur. Something between light rain and snow wet the street. He shivered, and not just with the cold. The sky was unnatural, he was sure.

  He went into the building that housed his rooms, up the gloomy wooden passage and stairs. When he got to the top he had to feel his way, the light was so bad.

  ‘Beatrice, Bea?’

  No reply. He felt for the door and knocked at it, knowing it would be locked from the inside. Silence. He pushed at the door and it fell open.

  The light of the gloomy day cast a feeble glow through the open window. The room was freezing. Beatrice was not there, nor any of their possessions. In rising panic Loys ran forward into the separate chamber set aside for his wife. That too was empty.

  He came back out into the main bedroom. There was the mattress on the bed, the chamber pot and the small table which bore a blob of red wax. They had not been able to afford wax candles. He went to it. It was marked with a seal. He picked up the table and carried it to the window. The wax bore a crescent and a star and some words he couldn’t make out in Latin.

  Loys put his hand on the window ledge. The crescent and the star was the sign of the city and so of the emperor and chamberlain. In one way he was relieved. She’d neither left him nor been taken by her father. But now he knew the master of the Magnaura had spoken truly when he’d said he belonged to the chamberlain.

  The sky had darkened even further and great black clouds loomed over the sea, the sun gilding their edges with fire, plumes of inky black backed by burning gold like monstrous cinders. They turned the sea to a field of shining tar and cast a stark blue light on the harbour front.

  A dread was inside him. This weather was not natural – it couldn’t be, the stamp of sorcery was all over it. And rather than fleeing, rather than taking Bea and running from it, he was expected to investigate. Looking at that sky, he could believe the demons had come to meet him.

  He held his hand out of the window. Dirty snow fell upon it. He put his fingers to his mouth and licked at them. They had a fine grit in them and tasted of ash.

  He’d seen a play in the marketplace, the mouth of hell gaping, hungry for sinners to fall into it. Some trickery had allowed smoke to belch out of the gaping maw. Was this it? Were the gates of hell open, smoking and stinking of cinders? Had the day of judgement come?

  Words from the Revelation of St John came to him: ‘And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake.’

  There had been a comet only days before. Was that the censer?

  Then his speculation fell in on itself and he thought only of her.

  ‘Beatrice!’ he said.

  He thumped down the stairs and ran back to the palace.

  9 The Numera

  Elifr’s eyes became accustomed to the torchlight as they pushed him into the Numera. Four men guarded him, two in front, two behind. They paused at the open door at the end of the corridor. Hot air, stale and fetid, breathed out, but it was scented with incense and he heard music, a pipe with a high nasal sound weaving a sinuous reel, clapping in an alien, unfamiliar rhythm. A man’s voice sang what sounded like a song of joy.

  The butt of a spear prodded his back and he stumbled on into a lighter space, a large vaulted
room lit by reed torches. People swarmed everywhere, women, children, some men in rich dress. To Elifr’s left a merchant in green and yellow silks was sitting on a fine chair eating a bunch of grapes, while a woman knelt beside him holding a goblet of wine. It could have been a scene from any rich man’s house apart from one detail – the man wore manacles on his feet and his hands were bound together by an iron chain.

  The piper sat cross-legged in the corner with others around him clapping out a stuttering beat. Some people even seemed to be trading, and a couple had parchment and styluses with them. This was not what Elifr had imagined. It was more like a marketplace.

  The spearman shoved him in the back again and said something to him in Greek. Elifr didn’t understand a word but the meaning was plain enough. This is not where we are taking you. Move on.

  They walked across the vaulted chamber to another door, where a guard stood nodding to the music. The spearman took a small black disc from a string at his waist and presented it to the man on the door. The doorman added it to a string of similar counters at his own waist. Then he unlocked the door and they moved through.

  A long line of pillars stretched away, leaving a narrow walkway between them and the wall on Elifr’s right. In the dappling light of the reed torches they reminded Elifr of a forest in autumn. The smell was far from that of the fresh woods, though. Here it was rank, a thick human stench.

  They walked along the row of columns. Eyes were in the dark and people cried out.

  ‘Have you come for me, Michael, my son?’

  ‘Bread. I am hungry.’

  Someone sang in a high clear voice. It was a hymn, Elifr realised, like the Christians sang and, though he understood not a word, it carried a feeling of great sadness. He sensed it was a song about death.

  Other men just hummed or babbled to themselves. And yet Elifr sniffed food on the air. These were not the worst off here, he felt sure.