Lord of Slaughter (Claw Trilogy 3) Page 8

  They came to stone steps cut into the floor, which dropped away into darkness. Elifr tested his bonds. He had been working at them since the moment they were put on. Now they were loose enough. He muttered to himself under his breath – ancient rhymes that had come to him in his visions on the mountainside.

  ‘The grey wolf is gazing upon the abodes of the gods.’

  One of the guards glanced at him but said nothing. Elifr repeated the phrase again and again in his head, concentrating on the rhythm of the words, the pattern of their contractions and expansions, their grindings and deep sounds that to him began to take on the quality of natural things – rock on rock, wind on water.

  The men went on down with their torches fluttering against the darkness. Elifr heard groaning, muttered prayers and terrible wheezing. The stink of shit was overpowering.

  The steps turned and dropped again into a large natural cave leading off into black-mouthed tunnels.

  The darkness teemed. There must have been a thousand men down there, but room enough for only half that number. No one ate grapes in his fetters here; the prisoners were secured to the floor with short chains. They blinked into the torchlight, some pale as creatures found beneath a stone, some still relatively healthy-looking. Here and there men lay dead in their irons, wasted almost to skeletons, still pressed against the living who lay beside them.

  ‘A rain of blood is pouring.’ Elifr was drifting away now, his mind freeing itself from the bonds of his humanity. He said the words aloud without thinking.

  A guard said something to one of the others. The man glanced at Elifr and shrugged.

  ‘A loom has been set up, stretching afar and portending slaughter.

  Upon it has been stretched a weft of human beings

  A warp grey with spears that the valkyries are filling with threads of crimson.’

  The words pounded in Elifr’s head like a rising tide of blood. A guard put his hand to his mouth, a gesture that the wolfman should be quiet. He was not.

  ‘We are weaving the web of the spear

  We are weaving the web of the spear

  We are weaving the web of the spear.’

  Elifr rocked back and forwards where he stood. One of the guards laughed. The man with the bushy beard smiled and held up the manacles and made what sounded like a harsh joke, for the laughter it brought from his colleagues. Elifr was indifferent to it.

  The song went on.

  ‘Blood-red clouds are gathering in the sky

  And the maidens of death are singing.’

  Elifr’s limbs felt loose and lithe, his joints supple. The chant seeped into his mind, raising the wolf, numbing the human until all that was left of the man were the words.

  A guard reached towards him to put his hand over Elifr’s mouth but there was no need. The words stopped and his humanity fell away from him like a flower into a river in flood. He split the guard’s nose with a vicious headbutt, a thump like a cleaver hitting a butcher’s block. The man’s knees went from under him. He collapsed, grasping at the wolfman for support, receiving only a knee driven at force into his face. The man fell back, his head hitting the ground with a wet smack. The other guards drew their swords, but the torch had fallen to the floor, where it guttered, its light failing.

  Elifr’s hands came free of the bonds and he was on a guard, past the sword before the man had time to raise it. He drove his thumbs into his opponent’s eyes, and his teeth ripped into his neck, biting away a hunk of flesh and sending a spray of black blood across the torchlight. The guard dropped as the other two came on, but Elifr had the fallen man’s sword and punched it backhand straight through the bushy-bearded man’s chest. Howling, he leaped towards the only standing guard, who fell back over the bodies of the screaming and groaning prisoners, struggling to get away. Elifr leaped again and choked the life from his remaining opponent.

  Prisoners shouted out, some protesting at the men falling on them, others just shrieking and gibbering in the madness of despair.

  Elifr sat on his haunches. The rhyme had come back to him now and he used it to anchor his human thoughts. He controlled his breathing.

  ‘The maidens of death are singing.’ He withdrew from his battle frenzy. Men sobbed in the dark, calling out the names of wives, friends or children.

  He could do nothing for them. Even if he released them they would be butchered by the guards above.

  He said a name under his breath: ‘Adisla.’ The name of a girl he had never seen outside a trance-induced vision. He pictured her face on the mountainside and offered a prayer to the gods of the stream and the snows that he would never see her in real life. He had loved her before, in lives before, died for her before. He would die again but this time for ever. She, he and others had been toys of the gods – their deaths, their misery offered as a sacrifice to the fates to forestall the day when the gods themselves would go to their final slaughter.

  No more.

  He said another word: ‘Ragnarok.’ The twilight of the gods, when the old mad gods would die, the slaughter-fond lords of blood and battle would fall and the world would be returned to peace. It is coming, he thought, it is coming. His visions had led him to this place and they had so far proved true. The end of the gods was near. He had seen it in the comet that had lit up the sky, the yellow haze that hung on the dome of the cathedral, smelled it in the sooty rain of the battle. He had work to do. The end depended on him. Odin, the chief of the gods, master of sorcery, of poetry, of death, war and madness, had given him a part to play in averting the death of the gods and the wolfman would need to struggle if he was not to play it.

  He remembered the hills, the Troll Wall and its caves, how the echoing earth had called to him and how he travelled down into the deep dark, losing himself as he descended, following the ghost wolf. The caves were empty and sightless but he had felt his way down as an animal feels its way. He found cold pools where it seemed right to sit and to freeze, found sharp rocks which had invited him as if they were a bed. In starvation, in freezing and in agonies, the god’s plan for him had been revealed.

  When he had crawled from those tunnels where the air seemed to move and whisper as if through the lungs of a sleeping giant, he was half an animal. He hunted as an animal, stalking his prey without spear or sling to take it by stealth and surprise; he fought as an animal, coming down to rob travellers of food and clothing, disdaining their gold and their jewels. But the man who remained in him would not surrender to his fate like an animal. He had seen her, in his dreams, the girl by the water with the light in her hair, and he was linked to her for ever, a link of pain, misery and death that stretched back over lifetimes.

  He saw himself in those visions too, or rather not himself, but his brother who looked like him. His brother was a wolf, a true wolf, not a man who had sought for the wolf inside him by listening to the singing spirits of the mountain, by following them through the agonies of ritual. His brother was a hunter too and he hunted Elifr and the girl and he brought them to death again and again over many lives. Odin had found his way to earth as a man and died at the teeth of the wolf to please the fates and put off the day when he would die for real. But as he did so, he sucked others down with him to death and dejection again and again. The god was a river whirlpool and mortals were leaves caught in its pull.

  The girl’s face troubled his dreams and he knew his bond was one of love but stronger than love, one of destiny and fate. He would deny it. He would frustrate the gods, run from her and from his brother, take up the strands of his own fate and weave a skein himself.

  Elifr had gone to the mountain for a year, chilled by the cold and baked by the sun, starving and thirsting to find out what to do. He had seen his destiny was to die at the teeth of his brother, the wolf. If he avoided that destiny, if the god himself killed Elifr, then the pattern might be broken, and he, his brother and the girl would be reborn free of each other, free of the god.

  But his dreams had led him to that tent on the field of the s
lain, and the god had put down the sword and refused to kill him. So now he would go to the earth to find what he sensed was down there – Mimir’s Well, the wisdom-imparting waters that the god Odin had drunk in exchange for his eye. The god came from the east, it was known, and now Elifr believed he had seen the location of the well. It lay, below the Numera, somewhere in the old tunnels that led from the lowest part of the prison. In there he would gain the wisdom and insight to bring about the death of the gods.

  In the shifting light of the torch he searched the guards. The one who had carried the torch had flint and tinder. He took them. Then he stubbed the torch onto the ground to extinguish it and returned the prison to blackness. Men groaned and cursed as the light disappeared, but he did not resore it. A wolf needs the light much less than those who pursue it.

  He moved forward through the dark, guided by senses enhanced by his rituals and his trances, by smell, by the echo of the cries of the prisoners on the walls, by the lightest of touches.

  When the Hetaereia finally missed their guards and came running down with lights and shouts to find the bodies of their comrades, Elifr was gone, down into the tunnels to face his destiny, like Odin, seeking death.

  10 The Office of Barbarians

  Loys ran himself to breathlessness down the Middle Way. The yellow of the sky was giving way to black, the dark clouds he had seen over the sea now blooming like ink into a saucer of water above the city. A gritty sleet stung his face. When fatigue made him slow, the sweat chilled on his shirt, which stuck to his arms like a cold poultice.

  Foreboding filled him as he rounded the Numera and ran towards the palace. The sun was invisible now and cast the streets in a blue half-light. The clouds were an unnatural deep grey, almost black, so heavy they looked as if they might fall and kill him. Even in Normandy the rain clouds didn’t look like that. He shivered, and not with the cold. Was this a further magical attack? Would he be called on to explain and counter it?

  Concern for Beatrice welled up in him, swamping all other fear. Where was she? Had she been taken by the chamberlain? Or by someone else? He breathed deep to try to calm himself. It had to be the chamberlain. No normal abductor would have left a seal.

  He ran up the palace steps, under the great portico with its frieze of battles and conquest. Two guards – Greeks – barred his way.

  ‘I am the chamberlain’s man,’ he said. ‘I am to report here.’

  The guards looked him up and down.

  ‘You are a scholar, and a poor one at that.’

  ‘I am the chamberlain’s scholar.’

  ‘So where is your silk and your fine shoes? Why do you smell of the docks rather than of perfume and oil?’

  Loys stood tall.

  ‘I am the scholar Loys, appointed by the chamberlain to do his most valued work. I am to report here for my lodgings and my clothing. The work is pressing, and if you want to frustrate it that is up to you. When the chamberlain asks me why I have not done as he asks, I shall say you stood in my way and defied his will.’

  The two guards said nothing but one stepped inside. When he returned he was with a short man dressed in a yellow silk gown and a three-cornered blue hat.

  ‘This is not the poor door,’ said the man. ‘If you wish to apply for alms go to the kitchens at the rear of the palace.’

  ‘I am the chamberlain’s man,’ said Loys, ‘the scholar Loys.’

  ‘My God, are you really?’ said the man, as if he’d just been informed a toothpick he’d discarded at dinner was part of Christ’s True Cross.

  ‘Proper …’ Loys tried to find fine words, ‘proper raiment has been provided. Take me to my wife. I think she has been brought here.’

  ‘I know nothing about that.’

  ‘She should have been brought here not an hour ago.’

  ‘My shift has only just begun.’ The man examined his tablet.

  ‘You are listed here,’ he said, ‘and expected. Come in and pass quickly through the room.’

  Loys stepped inside and the world was transformed. Outside, under the bubbling clouds, the light cast the buildings in blues and greys. Here, a thousand lustrous colours shimmered under the lamplight.

  Few people had been on the streets but though this room was very large, it was crowded. It was a wonder to Loys – lit with oil lamps that gave off a soft golden light. Every surface seemed alive. The floor was a mosaic of flowers and lilies with the representation of a pond, complete with shining copper fish at its centre. The walls were lined with trees but no tree that had ever grown in a forest. They were rendered in gold and silver with berries of rubies and leaves of green glass. The branches threw a canopy over the ceiling, silver moons and twinkling stars – diamonds or glass, he couldn’t tell – peeping between them. Rich and beautiful people sat or lay on couches, and servants dressed in tunics laced with gold and emerald green served drinks and food from silver cups and plates.

  The room fell completely silent when he entered and everyone turned to look at him. Loys suddenly had a sense of himself standing in the same clothes he’d grabbed as he’d run from Normandy, save for a fourth-hand scholars’ gown, breathless in front of these people who moved like fabulous fish through the waters of a beautiful fountain.

  Another man came forward. He was short, bald and dark and wore a robe of green velvet.

  The man in the silk showed him the tablet. ‘The scholar is to go to his rooms here,’ he said, ‘as quickly as possible.’

  The dark man smiled. ‘This way, sir,’ he said.

  As he led Loys across the room the man said: ‘The Room of the Nineteen Couches. They wait here to see the emperor. It’s become rather more popular since the mouth of hell spewed out all this brimstone across the sky. People imagine the emperor will defend them from the devil’s legions.’

  ‘You know what is causing this sky?’

  ‘That’s your job, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you know of my job?’

  ‘This is Contantinople, my friend. The ancient city of Byzan-ti-um.’ He enunciated every syllable of the city’s old name in a way that was far from friendly. ‘Everyone knows everything about everyone here. And if they don’t, they make it up.’

  Loys swallowed. ‘It is the mouth of hell? You know this?’

  ‘A figure of speech. Surely you should tell me what it is.’

  ‘I don’t know. At the moment my only concern is for my wife. Is she here?’

  The man did not reply, just led Loys out of the Room of Nineteen Couches through a bronze door struck with the sickle and star of the city’s emblem. They went down a short corridor.

  Loys studied the figure beside him. He had been so keen to find Beatrice that he hadn’t really paid any attention to the man. He’d taken him for a servant but he didn’t talk like a servant. And he wore velvet, a deep green. No one dressed their servants so richly, no one.

  This corridor was as splendid as the couch room, the walls glittering with greens and blues showing an undersea scene, complete with images of the sea god Poseidon with his chariot of wave-horses. The light came from lamps arranged all the way down the wall and a big window at the end. It was uncovered and opened on to a lovely garden of orange trees. Loys shivered as the draught blew in.

  They walked down corridors and through rooms glittering with decoration. Loys would have liked to have seen more Christian symbols, but he knew the emperor and his retinue for holy men so could find nothing to object to in them mimicking the art of previous generations. Men love stories and, as long as they saw them as stories, there was no harm in them. But where was Beatrice?

  They came to a corridor plainer than the rest but still hardly simple. Here the mosaic was only on the floor – scenes of rural life, children feeding donkeys, men collecting hay from the fields.

  ‘You’re aware your appointment has caused a stir in the palace.’

  ‘What sort of stir?’

  ‘There are those who say it shows a lack of faith in the abilities of the existing
intelligence services.’

  Bronze doors led off the passage. Was Beatrice behind one of them?

  ‘I have nothing to do with the investigation of foreigners.’

  ‘Then you think your evil magicians could be Romans? You’re in our city for a blink and already you’re slandering us.’

  ‘No. I don’t know. I haven’t started investigating.’

  ‘No, you haven’t, because you don’t know what you’re doing. Let me point out where you might start.’

  ‘I’d be grateful.’

  They had stopped and the man faced Loys directly. He had the appearance of being made of something more solid than flesh, some weighty marble, maybe.

  ‘The Varangians. It doesn’t take a great scholar to work it out. A clear blue day – no problems. The Varangians march in – the sky darkens. So work back. The rebel Phokas is struck dead by magic. Who was there? The Varangians. The emperor fought three battles without them and the outcome was decided by sword and shield. This one by sorcery. Their arrival is heralded by a comet.’

  ‘That wouldn’t explain the emperor’s ongoing illness.’

  ‘The emperor has an illness?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Dear, dear, you need to control your tongue, scholar. That is treason, did you know that?’

  ‘I said nothing.’

  The man glanced around him.

  ‘Indeed not. But you are a northern oaf and may well make such a mistake again one day, and in front of witnesses, at which point you will need friends. I could be one of those friends. Let me give you a word of advice. The Varangians are to blame for this. No question. Make them the focus of your investigation. Limit the deaths this causes.’

  ‘What deaths?’

  ‘Well, for a start we’ll be purging the street magicians as soon as we receive an edict from the emperor.’