Kell’s Legend

SEVEN
The Watchmakers

“Don’t do this,” said Anu, backing away, her face an image of horror as Shabis’s fangs gleamed, her claws flexed and she leapt. Anu somersaulted backwards, away from the attack, landed lightly, and as Shabis leapt again, claws tearing the carpet, oil gleaming in her eyes, so Anu leapt, kicked off from the wall and flipped over Shabis’s head. She landed in a crouch, unwilling to reveal her own killing tools, unwilling to fight her sister.

“Shabis!”

Shabis whirled, mad now. “You will die, bitch!”

“With what poison has he filled your head? What lies?”

Shabis charged, claws swiping for Anu’s throat. Anu swayed back, brass and steel a hair’s-breadth from her windpipe, then punched her sister in the chest, slamming her back almost horizontally where she hit the carpet on her face and coughed, clutching her chest, pain slamming violent through heart and gears and clockwork…

Anu’s eyes lifted to Vashell. “Call her off.”

Vashell backed away, tongue wetting his lips. She could see the bulge in his armoured pants. He was getting a thrill out of this: out of watching two sisters fight to the death.

“Stop her!” shrieked Anu, as Shabis crawled to her feet, the corners of her mouth blood-flecked.

“No,” he said, voice barely more than a growl. “This is the final trial. Don’t you see? This is the final…entertainment. A repayment, if you like, for all the pain and suffering you have caused. Shabis.” Shabis looked at him, the rage in her eyes flickering to love. “If you kill her, then we will marry, we will spend a glorious eternity together; you will never have to work again, we will languish in a blood-oil rapture; just you and I, my love.”

Shabis turned to Anu, head low, eyes dark. She let out a snarl and charged at Anukis who was crying, great tears flowing down her cheeks, soaking her golden curls, and Shabis leapt like a tiger, both sets of vachine claws coming together to crush Anu’s head and Anu swayed, ejecting a single claw which swiped down, sideways, as Shabis sailed past. There came a tiny flash, an almost unheard grinding sound, and Shabis hit the ground hard, rolling, wailing, her clawed fingers coming up to her face where blood and blood-oil mingled, leaking from her severed…fangs.

Anu had cut out Shabis’s fangs. The ultimate symbol of the vachine.

“No!” wailed Shabis, blood-oil pumping as the cogs in her head, in her heart, ejected precious blood-oil. “What have you done to me, Anukis?” She climbed to her feet, ran to Vashell, who put out his arms to comfort her as she sobbed, her blood-oil leaking into his clothing and his eyes lifted to read Anukis who stood, face bleak, as she retracted her single claw.

“Now you need another assassin,” said Anu, triumph in her eyes.

Vashell nodded. “You are correct.” With a savage shove, he pushed Shabis away, drew his brass sword, and with a swift hard horizontal swipe, cut Shabis’s head from her body. Blood and blood-oil spurted, hitting the ceiling, drenching the walls and bed in a twisting shower of sudden ferocity. Shabis’s head hit the sodden carpet, eyes wide, mouth open in shock, pretty features stained. Anu could see the clockwork in her severed neck, between the fat and the muscle, the veins and the bone, nestled and intricate, bonded, and it was all still spinning happily, now slowing, as cogs could not mesh and a primary shaft failed in its delicate spin. Shabis’s eyes closed, and her separated body folded slowly to the carpet, as if deflating. Her vachine aborted. Shabis died.

“No!” screamed Anu, running forward, dropping to her knees beside the corpse of her sister. Her head snapped up. “You will die for this!” she raged.

“Show me.” Vashell still held his sword; it was a special blade, specifically designed for slaying vachine; for the killing of their own kind. It had a multi-layered blade, and carried a disruptive charge. It wasn’t so much sharp as…created to cut through clockwork.

Anu’s eyes narrowed. “You are a V Hunter?” she said.

“Yes.” He smiled. It was a sickly smile, half pride, half…something else. Amongst the vachine, the V Hunters were despised; it was a rank handed out by the Watchmakers, and a V Hunter’s sole role was to hunt down and exterminate rogue vachine…to cleanse and, essentially, betray their own. Amongst the population they were feared and loathed. Their identities were kept secret, so they could work undercover throughout Silva Valley. They reported directly back to the Watchmakers, and indeed the Patriarch, and answered to no Engineer.

“You have been hunting me all this time?”

Vashell laughed, and sheathed his sword. He turned, running hands through his hair drenched in the blood-oil of Shabis. He turned back, and stared down at Anu. “Don’t be so naive. What would I want with you, pretty little plaything?”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want something much more precious. I want your father, Anukis. I want Kradek-ka. He has gone; fled. Left you to suffer, along with…that.” He stared, a snarl, at Shabis’s corpse. “Now, you will take me to him. By all that is holy, by all the relics of our ancestors, you will take me to Kradek-ka.”

Anukis overcame her fear, and snarled with fangs ejecting, and leapt; Vashell dropped his shoulder, and with an awesome blow backhanded Anukis across the room where she hit the wall, cracking plaster, and hit the floor on her head, crumpling into a heap. She groaned, broken, and her eyes flickered open.

“I’ll leave you to clean up the corpse,” said Vashell, and leaving footprints in Shabis’s blood, he stalked from the room.

Anu stared for long, agonising moments, her eyes seeming to meet those of her dead sister. Tears rolled down her cheeks, her body slumped to the ground, and her eyes closed as she welcomed the oblivion of pain and darkness.

It began as a ball. A tight ball; white, pure, hot like a sun. And that ball was anger, and hatred, and rage so pure, so hot, that it engulfed everything, it engulfed her concept of family and name and honour and duty and love and spread, covering the city and the valley and the Black Pike Mountains; finally it overtook the world, and the sun, and the stars, and the galaxy and everything broiled in that tiny hot plasma of rage and Anu’s eyes flickered open and it was dark, and cool, and she was thankful.

She lay on a steel bench. She was dressed in plain clothes, and boots. She looked down, and started, and started to weep. Her vachine claws had been removed, the ends of her bloody fingers blunt stumps. She reached up, and winced as she felt the holes where her fangs should have been. Inside her, she felt the heavy tick tick tick of clockwork, in her head and in her breast; and she cursed Vashell, and cursed the Engineers, for they had taken away her weapons and she would rather be dead. It was what they once did to criminals before the Justice Laws, and just before a death-sentence was meted out. It was the lowest form of aberration. The lowest form of dishonour; beyond, even, the transformation to canker. Even a canker had fangs.

Winter sunshine bled in through a high window, and Vashell emerged smugly through a door. He wore subtle vachine battledress, skin-armour, they called it, beneath woollen trousers and a thick shirt and cloak. His weapons, also, were hidden. His eyes shone.

“Get up.”

“No.”

“Get up!” He ejected a claw, and held it to her eye. “Anukis, I will take you apart limb by limb, orb by orb, tooth by tooth. I will massacre you, but your clockwork, your mongrel vachine status, will keep you alive. We know Kradek-ka made you special; you think us fools? You think the Engineers haven’t been inside you? Examined every cog, every wheel, every tiny shaft and pump? Kradek-ka did some very special things to you, Anukis, technology we didn’t even know existed. First, we were going to kill you. It was fitting. You are an abomination. But then a specialist discovered…the advanced technology, inside of you. You will help me find Kradek-ka. I promise you this.”

“I don’t know where to look,” she said, voice low, staring at the razor tip of Vashell’s claw.

“I have a start point. But first, I want to show you something.”

Vashell tugged on a thin golden lead, almost transparent, and scaled with a strange quartz mesh; sometimes, it could be seen, rippling like liquid stone; other times it was completely invisible, depending on how it caught the light. Anukis felt the jolt, and realised it was connected to her throat. Another humiliation. Another vachine slight.

Vashell tugged, and Anukis was forced to stand. She growled, tried to eject her fangs by instinct but only pain flowed through her jaws. She wept then, standing there on the leash. She wept for her freedom; but more, she wept for her dead sister, wept for her lost father.

“Follow me.”

Anukis had little choice.

“Where is this?”

“Deep. Within the Engineer’s Palace.”

“I did not know these corridors, and these rooms, existed.”

“Why should you? Even Kradek-ka would not tell you everything. After all,” he smiled, eyes dark, filled with an inner humour, “you are female.”

The corridors were long, and the more they delved into the Engineer’s Palace, the deeper they penetrated, conversely, the more bare and more undecorated it became. Gone were carpets, silk hangings, works of oil-art. Instead, bare metal, rusted in places, became the norm. Deeper they travelled, Anukis trotting a little to keep up with Vashell’s long stride.

They walked for an hour. Behind some doors they heard grinding noises, deep and penetrating; behind others jolts of enormous power like strikes of lightning. Behind others, they heard rhythmical thumping, or the squeal of metal on metal. Yet more were deadly silent beyond, and for some reason, these were the worst for Anukis. Her imagination could create Engineer horrors worse than anything they could show her.

Vashell stopped, and Anukis nearly ran into him. She was lost in thought, drowning in dreams. She pulled up tight, and he looked down, his look arrogant, his eyes mocking, and she thought:

One day, I will see you weep.

One day, I will watch you beg, and squirm, in the dirt, like a maggot.

One day, Vashell. You will see.

“We are here,” he said.

“Where?”

“The Maternity Hall. Your father’s creation.”

“Maternity Hall? I have never heard of this.” A cold dread began to rise slowly through her, and Vashell pushed at the solid metal door, grey and unmarked, and Anukis found herself led into a huge, vacuous chamber which stretched off further than the eye could see. It was filled with booths and benches, and the air was infused with the cries of babes.

Goose-bumps ran up and down Anu’s spine. She stood, stock still, her eyes taking in the bleak, grey place.

She walked forward, as far as her leash would allow, and Vashell tugged her to a halt. Obedience. She stared at benches, where babes lay, squirming, their cries ignored as Engineers worked on them. In the booths which drifted away she could see what looked like medical operations taking place. Many of the babes were silent, obviously drugged. Around some, a cluster of Engineers worked frantically. Every now and again, a buzz filled the air, or a click, or a whine.

Anu stared up at Vashell. “What are they doing?” she whispered.

“Welcome to Birth,” said Vashell. “You don’t think the vachine create themselves, do you? Every single vachine is a work of art, a sculpture of science and engineering; every vachine is created from a baby template, the fresh meat brought here shortly after birth to have the correct clockwork construct grafted, added, injected, implanted, and from thence the true vachine can grow and meld and begin to function.”

“So…we all begin as human?”

“Yes.”

“But we feed from human blood! The refined mix of blood-oil! That makes us…little more than cannibals!”

Vashell shrugged, and smiled. “Blood of my blood,” he said, sardonically. “I find it hard to believe Kradek-ka never explained it to you. He kept you in a bubble, Anukis. He created this; this structure, this schedule, he elevated the systems of clockwork integration to make us better, superior, to elevate us above a normal impure flesh. With vachine integration we are the perfect species. Can you not see this, Anukis? This is your family’s life work. This is the creation of the vachine.”

Anu sagged, leaning against Vashell, her mind spinning as she watched a thousand babies undergoing vachine integration. She saw scalpels carving through flesh, through baby chests and into hearts, replacing organic components with clockwork, replacing valves and arteries with gears and tubes. Babies cried, squealed, and their wails were hushed by pads held over mouths until they lost consciousness. Blood trickled into slots and was carried away to be further refined and fed back into Blood Refineries in order to create the blood-oil pool.

“We are vampires,” said Vashell, staring down at Anu who was pale and grey, a shadow of her former self. “Machine vampires. We feed on the human shell; revel, in our total superiority.”

“What we’re doing is wrong, ” snarled Anu.

“Why? The creation of a superior species?” Vashell laughed. “Your naivety both astounds and amuses me. Here, the rich noble daughter, blood-line of our very own vachine creators-and you do not even understand the basics?”

A babe squealed and there was a chopping sound. Anu saw the flash of a silver blade. The tiny head rolled into a chute and was sucked away. The corpse was thrown into a bag, and an Engineer moved to a distant cart and slung the body aboard, along with all the other medical waste.

“So,” said Anu, fighting for air, “every babe that is born, here in Silva Valley, it comes here? It comes to be formed into vachine?”

“Yes. But more than Silva; the vachine have spread, Anu. We are breeding soldiers in other valleys. We are growing strong! We grow mighty! Our time for domination, for expansion, for Empire, is close.”

“But-” said Anu.

Vashell frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Something is wrong,” said Anu, with primitive intuition. “What’s going on, Vashell? What’s happening here?”

“We need to find Kradek-ka.” He scowled. He would say no more.

For an hour Vashell dragged Anukis through the Maternity Hall, and she saw things so barbaric she wouldn’t have believed them possible. The babies were operated on, implanted with clockwork technology-in their hearts, in their brains, in their jaws, in their hands. Even at such a young age they were given weapons of death, using blood-oil magic, clockwork, and liquid brass and gold, silver-quartz and polonium, in order to control and power and time the mechanisms of the vachine.

“How many work?” she said, at last, exhausted.

“I do not understand?”

“How many babes…become vachine? Successfully?”

“Fifty five in a hundred successfully make it through the-shall we say, medical procedures. Fifty five in a hundred accept the clockwork, accept the fangs, and can grow and meld and adapt and think of themselves as true machine.”

“What about the others?”

“Most die,” said Vashell, sadly. “This is a great loss; if we could improve the rate of melding, our army would be much larger; we could advance so much more quickly.”

“And?”

“The cankers?” Vashell laughed. “They have their uses.”

“Take me away from this place,” said Anu, tears on her cheeks, fire in her part-clockwork heart.

“As you wish. I thought you needed to know, to understand, before we set out on our quest.”

“Quest?”

“To find your father. He was working on a refined technology. In trials he had pushed acceptance from fifty-five to ninety-five in a hundred; we barely lost any babes. You see, Anu, why we need to find him? If you help me, if we pull this off for the Watchmakers, for the whole of vachine-kind, then you will be saving hundreds, thousands of lives, every year. You understand?”

“You bastard.”

“Why so?”

“You have played me like a jaralga hand. I must help you. I must help end this atrocity.”

“Your father’s atrocity,” corrected Vashell.

“Yes,” she said, face ashen, voice like the tomb.

Anukis walked down long corridors of stone. She walked down long tunnels of metal. She became disorientated by it all; by the directions, the elevations, the dips and curves and banks, the smells of hot oil and cold metal. In weakness, she resigned herself. She was a puppet now, a creature to be controlled by Vashell. He had taken away her gifts, taken away her special gifts. She felt hollow. Abused. In pain. But more…she felt less than vachine, less than human, a limbo creature of neither one world or the next. She was a shadow; a shadow, mocked by shadows. Tears welled within her, but she would not let them come. No, she thought. I will be strong. Despite everything, despite my weakness, despite my abuse, I will be strong. I need my strength. I will need it as I hunt down my…father.

“Good girl,” soothed Vashell, misunderstanding her compliance, and keeping her leash tight in his gloved fist. Anukis did not struggle, did not pull, did not fight her taming.

She smiled inwardly, although her face was stone. She was beyond the displaying of hatred. And when she killed him, when she massacred Vashell, as she knew, coldly, deep down in her breast and heart and soul that she would, it would be a long and painful death. It would be an absolution. A penance. An act of purifying like nothing the Engineers had before witnessed.

They walked, boots padding.

“Where are we going?” she asked, eventually.

“You will see.”

Gradually, the stone and metal walls started to show signs of the Engineers; symbols replaced numbers, and decorations became evident as the wall design became not just more opulent, but more instructive. Anukis found herself staring at the designs on the wall, the artwork, the very shape of the stones. Many were fashioned into toothed cogs, gears of stone, and the whole corridor began to twist with design as the stone gave way to metal, gave way to brass and gold, laced with silver-quartz mortar. Slowly, the walls changed, became more than walls, became machines, mechanisms, clockwork, and Anukis recognised that this was no longer a corridor, but a living breathing working machine and the Engineer’s Palace was more than just a building: it was a live thing, with a pulse of quartz and a heart of gold.

“Stop.”

Vashell held something, what looked like a tiny circle of bone, up to a mechanism beside a blank metal door. There came several hisses, of oiled metal on metal, as the object in his hand slid out pins and integrated with the machine. The portal opened, but in the manner of nothing Anukis had ever seen; it was a series of curves, oiled and gleaming, which curled around one another, twisted like coils as the door didn’t just open, it unpeeled.

They stepped through, into a working engine.

The room was crammed with a giant mechanism of clockwork, a machine made up of thousands and thousands of smaller machines. Brass and gold gleamed everywhere. Cogs turned, integrated, shafts spun, steam hissed from tiny nozzles, brass pistons beat vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and everywhere Anukis looked there were a hundred movements, of rockers and cams, valves and pistons, and she shivered for it reminded her of the clockwork she had watched inserted into babies…only on a much, much larger scale; a vast scale. A terrible scale.

Vashell led her forward, through a natural tunnel amidst the heart of the vast machine which stretched above them for as far as the eye could see, away into darkness. She could smell hot oil, and the sweet narcoleptic essence of blood-oil. And another smell…a metallic undertone, acidic, insectile, the metal perfume of a million moving parts.

Vashell’s boots stamped to a halt, muffled against the brass floor, and Anukis looked up, blinking in the poor golden light. There was a simple metal bench, and behind it sat a woman. Her hands toyed with a complex mechanism, which moved and spun and gyrated and morphed, even as her hands moved endlessly around and within the machine. It was like watching a doctor performing high-speed surgery inside an organism, a living, beating, functioning organism. Anu looked to the woman’s face. It was perfect and distorted at the same time. She seemed to wear a brass mask, which glittered dully.

“Hello, Daughter of Vachine,” said the woman, smiling, her eyes shining, her hands still constantly merging and integrating with the almost organic clockwork. “My name is Sa. I am Watchmaker.”

Anukis could not hide her amazement; nor her distaste.

The Watchmakers were clinically paranoid, in Anu’s opinion. They never walked amongst the people, instead hiding away in the Engineer’s Palace and issuing orders many of the vachine population found detached from the real world, divorced from the society in which a modern vachine lived, operated, ate and drank.

“You have abused me,” said Anu, simply.

“We have strengthened you,” said Sa.

“What do you want of me?” said Anu.

“We have a problem,” smiled Sa, her golden brass eyes kindly, her fangs peeking just a little above the lip of her mask. She was beautiful, Anu realised, in a vachine way. Despite her lack of stature, despite an athletic and powerful appearance, Anu realised this small dark-skinned woman exuded energy and she noted Vashell’s subservient stance. An ironic reversal, considering the behaviour she’d witnessed back in her cell: it had been a stage-act, just for her benefit. Anukis scowled. She was a pawn. Manipulated. Played for a fool. A tool in somebody else’s workbox.

“You need my father,” said Anu, voice now cold, eyes hardening.

“Our problem goes far, far deeper than your father,” said Sa, head tilting to one side. Still her hands played, sinking into a mist of spinning gears and wheels. “It is the blood-oil.”

“What about it?”

“We are running dry,” said Sa, watching Anukis carefully. “As you know, to the north we have the Fields, out past the Organic Flatlands. But the cattle are dying, have ceased to breed, and our refined blood-oil supplies are nearly exhausted. We have sent a scouting force south, beyond the Black Pike Mountains; they are searching out new possibilities for fresh cattle.”

Anu gave a single nod.

“Do you understand the implications of what I am saying?”

“If the blood runs out, it cannot be refined into blood-oil; then the vachine will begin to seize. And die.”

“Yes. This is a threat to our civilisation, Anukis. But more than that, the Blood Refineries your father helped build…to develop and engineer. They have contracted, shall we say, a fault. Something endemic to his math, his engineering, his blood-oil magick, and subsequently an element only he can put right. Kradek-ka was a genius.” She said it low; with ultimate respect. “He was Watchmaker.”

“What happens if the Refineries fail?”

Sa smiled, but there was no humour there. “We will return to a state of hunting and savagery. But how can eighty thousand vachine satiate their blood-oil lust? We will devolve, Anukis. Our society will become decadent, will crumble, will fade as we turn on one another, revert back to clans and tribes. It does not even bear thinking about. The dark ages of our civilisation were a bloody, evil time, where the only vachine who suffered was vachine. Now, we are fed by the blood of others. Our population is fed by cattle, bred for the purpose. The age-old war with the albinos from under the mountain, all that is in the past. We conquered, we dominated, they became our slaves-and all because of our culture, our civilisation, our evolution! I cannot allow this be taken away. I cannot let this hierarchy, this religion, fail.”

“I am impure-blood,” said Anukis, voice low. Her eyes were fixed on Sa. “You have cast me out from your vachine world. Why should I care if you perish? Vashell has abused me, humiliated me, murdered my sister, and I am cast out by my own people because of a twist of genetics over which I had no control. I hate to be crude, Sa, but you meat-fuckers can suffer and die for all I care.”

Sa smiled. Her eyes glittered behind her mask. “Did your father ever tell you about the origin of the cankers, sweet Anukis?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cankers are…Kradek-ka’s greatest achievement. They are, shall we say, a method of utilising waste product. They are bred, and nurtured, deformities; a mish-mash of twisted clockwork and flesh, and put simply, the insane end-product of when a vachine goes bad. We keep them apart from vachine society; so you know the term, I am sure, as insult. But you have never seen the end product.” She took a deep breath. “However…”

The pause hurt Anukis. She could not describe why she felt such a sudden, indescribable terror, but she did. Her eyes grew wide. Palpitations riddled her clockwork breast. Her hands clenched together, and fear tasted like bad oil in her mouth.

“What are you saying?” she said.

Sa stood, and placed her fluid clockwork machine on the bench. She walked around its outskirts, hand trailing a sparkle of clockwork slivers, gold dust, blood-oil. She stood before Anukis, looking up into the pretty woman’s beaten face, deformed now by the removal of vachine fangs. She stood on tip-toe and kissed Anukis, her tongue slipping into her mouth, fangs ejecting and biting Anukis’s lower lip, a vampire bite, a tasting, a savouring, a gentle taking of blood…

Sa stood down. Anukis’s blood sat on her lips, in her fangs, and their eyes were connected and Anukis, finally, understood. Her hate fell, crushed. Her anger was crumpled like a paper ball. Her sense of revenge lay, stabbed and bleeding, dying, dead.

“You will help us find Kradek-ka. You will help us repair the Blood Refineries.”

Anukis nodded, weakly. “Yes,” she said.

“There are some things far worse than death,” Sa said. Then turned to Vashell. “Show her the Canker-Pits on your way out. Only then will she truly understand the limits of her…future potential. And the extremes of her father’s twisted genius.”

“Yes, Watchmaker.” Vashell bowed, and dragged Anukis on her leash.

Alloria, Queen of Falanor, sat in the Autumn Palace looking out over the staggered flower fields. Colours blazed, and the trees were filled with angry orange and russet browns, the bright fire of summer’s betrayal by autumn and a final fiery challenge to the approaching winter.

She sighed, and walked along a low wall, pulling her silk shawl a little tighter about her shoulders as her eyes swept the riot of colours stretching out, and down, in a huge two-league drop from the Autumn Palace to the floodfields beyond. Distantly, she could see workers tending the fields; and to the left, woodsmen cleared a section of forest using ox to drag log-laden carts back to the palace in readiness for the harsh snows which always troubled this part of the country.

“There you are!”

Mary ran along the neatly paved walkway and gave a low curtsy to her queen. Alloria grinned, and the two women embraced, the young woman-Alloria’s hand-maiden for the past year-nuzzling the older woman and drinking in her rich perfume, and the more subtle, underlying scent of soap-scrubbed skin and expensive moisturiser.

Mary pulled back, and gazed at the Queen of Falanor. Thirty years old, tall, elegant, athletic, with a shock mane of black hair like a rich waterfall, now tied back tightly, but wild and untamed when allowed to run free without a savage and vigorous brushing. Her skin was flawless, and very pale; beautiful in its sculpture as well as translucency. Her eyes were green, and sparkled green fire when she laughed. When Alloria moved, it was with the natural grace of nobility, of birth, of breeding, and yet her character flowed with kindness, a lack of arrogance, and a generosity which ennobled her to the Falanor population. She was not just a queen, but a champion of the poor. She was not just queen by birth or marriage, but by popular consent; she was a woman of the people.

“You are cold,” said Mary. “Let me bring you a thicker shawl.”

“No, Mary, I am fine.”

Mary gazed out over the splendour of fire ranged before them. It was getting late, the sun sinking low, and most of the workers were finalising their work and walking in groups along pathways through distant crops. “The winter is coming,” she said, and gave an almost exaggerated shudder.

“I forgot,” smiled Alloria, touching Mary’s shoulder. “You hate the ice.”

“Yes. It reminds me too much of childhood.”

“Never fear. In a week Leanoric will have finished his training, and the volunteer regiments will be standing down for winter leave; he will meet us back at Iopia Palace and there will be a great feast. Fires and fireworks will burn and sparkle for a week; then, then you will feel warm, my Mary.”

Mary nodded, still very close to Alloria. “I will never be as warm as when I am with you, my queen,” she said, voice little more than a whisper.

Alloria smiled, and placed a finger on Mary’s lips. “Shh, little one. This is not the place for such conversation. Come, walk with me back to my chambers; I’ve had a wonderful blue frall-silk dress delivered, and was wondering how well it will fit.”

They walked, arm in arm, along stone and marble paved walkways, between sculpted stone pillars and under roof-trellises filled with roses and winter honeysuckle. Scents filled the air, and Alloria closed her eyes, wishing she was back with her husband, her king, her lover, her hero. She smiled, picturing his smile, feeling his hands on her body. She shivered, then, as a ghost walked over her grave.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I am just thinking of Leanoric. I miss him.”

“He is a fine husband,” said Mary. “Such strength! One day, perhaps, I will find such a man.”

“Erran has been watching you, I think.”

“My lady!” Mary blushed furiously and lowered her eyes. “I fear you are mistaken.”

“Not so. I have seen him watching you, watching the way you walk, the sway of your hips, the rising of your breast when you have run an errand. I think he is in love.”

Erran was the Captain of the Guard at the Autumn Palace, thirty-two years old, single, muscular, attractive in a dark, flashing way. He was gallant, noble, and one of the finest swordsmen in Leanoric’s Legions; hence his placement of trust in protecting Queen Alloria.

“You jest,” Mary said, eventually.

“Come, let us ask him!”

“No, Alloria!” gasped Mary, and Alloria let out a giggle, breaking away from the younger woman and running up a flight of marble steps. At the summit two guards stood to attention carrying long spears tipped by savage barbs. They stared, eyes ahead, as Alloria approached and swept between them, skirts hissing over inlaid gems in the gold-banded floor.

“Erran! Erran!”

He arrived in a few heartbeats, at a run, hand on sword-hilt. “Yes, my queen?”

“Do not worry, there is no alarm. I have a simple question for you.”

Mary arrived, panting a little, and Alloria saw Erran’s eyes drift longingly over Mary, then flicker back to her face, a question in his eyes, a sense of duty restored. “I will do my best, my queen.”

“No,” whispered Mary.

“I wondered if you’d found replacement guards for the two men taken sick last week? It leaves us with a force of only eighteen in the palace grounds.”

“Word has been sent to the nearest town, my queen. Replacements are riding even as we speak from the local garrison. I have the captain’s personal guarantee that he sent two of his finest men.”

“Good! When will they arrive?”

“Later this evening, I believe,” said Erran, with a smile of reassurance. “Have faith in those who serve you, my queen.”

“I do, Erran. I do.” Her smile was dazzling and she moved towards her chambers beneath arches of alabaster, steel and marble. Behind, the bloated shimmering sun was sinking over the horizon, and near-horizontal beams cast a rich ruby ambience throughout the Autumn Palace. Mary followed, a hand on Alloria’s arm, her face flushed red.

Erran stood stiffly to attention. “My queen,” he said.

“Oh, one more thing.” She turned, suddenly. “Mary here is feeling a little flushed, a little tired. I wondered if you might walk with her, out in the gardens? Give her maybe an hour of your time? She would greatly appreciate it.”

“I would…be honoured, my queen. But I am on duty.”

“I am taking you off duty.”

Erran gave a crooked smile. “And who would do my job whilst I walk in the gardens?”

“Oh hush, there are guards everywhere, man, and I am but a few heartbeats away. I have lungs, do I not? And I was trained by Elias, Leanoric’s Sword-Champion. I am not as fragile as many people assume.” She grinned, her eyes twinkling. “I could beat you, I’d wager.”

Erran smiled broadly. “I know this, my queen,” he said. “I have seen you best three of my men with a blade. The humiliation stung my pride like a horsewhip! But-”

“No buts. This is a direct order,” said the queen. “And I would hate to inform Leanoric you disobeyed a direct order.”

Erran snapped a salute. “As you wish, Queen Alloria.” He turned, and smiled at Mary, who seemed suddenly incapable of speech. “If you would like to follow me, my lady? I will escort you for fresh air.”

Mary nodded, threw a scowl at Alloria, and departed, her silk slippers silent on marble steps.

Alone now, Alloria entered her chambers and closed the doors. She loved to be alone, without guards or hand-maidens, without servants or lackeys. She knew attendance came with her position, and this made her crave solitude even more…except at night, in the cold dark hours, when she would cry out for Leanoric, missing him terribly, missing their two sons, Oliver and Alexander, aged twelve and fourteen, who were travelling with their father learning the Art of Warcraft.

No. In the darkness, Mary would come and climb into bed with Alloria, and they would hold each other, sharing warmth, sharing the simple comfort of human contact, and Alloria knew that Mary loved her, knew that Mary loved her in a way slightly accelerated from the contact and comfort Alloria craved, and that Mary treasured those nights they spent, only thin layers of silk and cotton between their firm, sleep-warmed bodies. But Alloria belonged to Leanoric, her king, her one true love, her hero and soldier and lover and father and husband, a man, a real true strong man, who…

The image flashed like lightning, piercing in her mind.

The Betrayal.

She stumbled a little, righted herself, and gasping ran to a stand and poured water into a goblet. She drank, greedily, then slapped the cup down, panting, cursing herself for having a memory, or at least, having a memory of those terrible days and weeks when she had No, don’t say it, don’t even think of it… it did not happen; it was a dream, a bad dream.

Why had she done such a terrible thing to the man she loved? Her husband? The father of her children?

And he had forgiven her. Her smile was cracked as she looked at herself in the silver mirror. Her eyes had lost their green fire. She blinked away tears, found inner strength, and reached towards a tiny stone jar. Her hand paused over the jar, which was intricately decorated with ancient battle scenes and heroes from Falanor’s long turbulent history.

“No.” Her word seemed loud, and cracked, in the echoing empty chamber, despite the proliferation of hanging silks and furs and the many tapestries which adorned walls, again depicting the history of Falanor.

Her hand moved away from the jar and hovered, uncertainly, for a moment; she felt weakness flood her, rising from her toes to her brain like the sweep of an Elder wand, and her hand snaked out, knocked the lid clumsily from the jar which clattered to the marble table-top. Alloria refrained from cursing, and didn’t look inside the jar, simply wetting her finger and dipping it into the dark blue powder therein. She stared at her green eyes in the mirror as she rubbed the powder under her tongue, instantly enjoying the relaxing honey of blue karissia entering her blood, entering her mind, and she knew it was weakness and a certain specific horror from her past that made her indulge in this rare drug, and that was no excuse, but it was something she had come to rely on during the old days and the bad days when things had seemed so unclear and seemed to go so wrong. Blue karissia pulsed in her, flowed with her heartbeat, and the world swayed and quickly Alloria slipped from her shawl and dress and climbed into bed to fall instantly asleep, her dreams filled with colour and beauty and an enveloping blue.

Alloria woke to darkness, and the world felt wrong. She could taste the bitter after-effects of the narcotic, and wondered how long she had been under its spell. An hour? Three hours? She sat up, disorientated and feeling mildly nauseous. She shivered, and stepping from her bed pulled on a long silk gown, kicked her feet into thick slippers and found the water jug. She drank greedily, the dehydrated drink of the blue, and only then did a flood of questions tumble into her gradually awakening mind…

Why had the lanterns not been lit? In her chambers, and also outside, on the paved walkways? Normally the garden would be filled with globes of light. Alloria found it hard to believe the lightsmiths had been remiss in their duty.

Warily, she moved to the doors of her chamber and opened one a crack. Outside, a velvet silence rolled through the Autumn Palace. Alloria listened for the familiar footsteps of guards, the distant clink of armour. She heard nothing. She opened her mouth to call out, and closed it again, changing her mind.

Where was Erran? And the other guards? During the hours of darkness she usually had two men posted outside her sleep chambers. Where were they? It was unthinkable they would be away from their post.

Her eyes scanned the black, and goosebumps ran up and down her flesh. Something was wrong; deeply wrong. She could feel it in her blood and bones. Slowly, she eased the door shut. She had a short sword, nicknamed a glade blade, back by the bed. She crept away, back, and padded across the floor. She winced as she drew the blade, for it whispered, oiled steel on leather, but she felt better with the sword in her hands. She knew how to use it; how to defend herself; although she had never been called upon, in reality, to kill, and somewhere deep in her subconscious she wondered how she would respond to the necessity.

She stood, in the darkness, uncertain of what to do.

Then a voice broke the silence; it was cool, clear, and way too arrogant. “What are you going to do with the sword, sweet little Queen Alloria?”

She tensed, poised for attack, tracing the voice that was in the room, gods, he was in the room and with her and where was Erran, where were the guards? Would she have to fight the intruder alone?

Fear flooded her.

“Who are you?” Her voice was stone. Ice.

Something moved in the darkness, and Alloria lifted her sword, a swift movement, or so she thought. In retrospect, it was probably hampered by the drugs she’d taken to help her sleep; to help alleviate the nightmares.

“I am here to help.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Graal. I have travelled a long way for you, my queen.” He stepped into a pool of light filtering through high windows; he was tall, athletic, and moved with grace. He had long white hair and blue eyes blackened by the night. His face was beautiful, and Queen Alloria found herself paralysed by the effect. He carried no weapon.

“My guards are nearby,” she said, voice quieter than she would have liked.

“Your guards are all dead,” sighed General Graal. As if emphasising his point, and with perfect timing, something huge moved outside, crunching wood, gouging marble, and settled with a grunt. It was big, Alloria could sense that; and primitive. It grunted when it breathed, its shadow a crazy dance on a far wall.

What are you? she thought, with a shudder.

What is happening here?

Graal approached, and the sword flickered up with a hiss, but he carried on moving and stepped within her reach, batting the blade aside with a consummate ease that shamed her. She tried to withdraw the weapon, to stab at him, but he held the blade and then he held her jaw, and fear flushed through her like an emetic.

“Where is Mary?” she said.

“Alas, nearly everyone is dead.”

“No!”

“All dead.”

“Erran?”

“All dead, my sweetness. It is you we have come for; and your…drug taking has made it so easy. So sweet.” Alloria fell from the world, then, fell and fell and only recovered when she realised Graal was removing her clothes.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked. Outside, the huge creature shifted again, cracking timber.

“Alas, this is a necessary consequence of war.”

She started to fight, but Graal was too strong, and he punched her, suddenly, viciously, and she lay stunned half on the bed, her gown hitched high, her cold pale loins exposed in the gloom.

Without passion Graal fucked her, raped her, and she cried and her tears soaked into the bed sheets and as Graal rose to ejaculation so his head lowered, incisors ejecting, and her bit her neck and she screamed and he tasted her blood, drank her as with a grunt he came, and she felt warmth inside her and blood pumping from her, and everything made her sick and weak and weeping; she turned, and vomited on the bed, and conversely, this seemed to give Graal some pleasure; some form of satisfaction.

He pulled up his breeches, his childmaker pale and thin and glittering with complex gold and brass wires in the spilling light from the moon. Emphatically, he licked Alloria’s blood from his vachine fangs.

“My husband will hunt you down for this,” snarled Alloria, eyes narrowed, fingers plugging the twin wounds in her neck. Hatred was a real thing in her core, a toxic scorpion wild in her breast.

“I hope so,” said Graal, and gestured, to where Mary was held in a tight embrace by an albino warrior. She was bound, gagged, her eyes wide. She had seen everything. Graal smiled, a crooked smile full of malice. “See she is released near to Leanoric’s camp. It will provide…interesting results, I feel.”

“What are you doing?” hissed Alloria.

A sword pressed against her throat, and she whimpered, and Graal leant in close. He kissed her lips, passionately, with love, and she was too frightened to pull away. She could still feel his seed, warm inside her, and with shame she feared him, but more, with guilt she feared the cold darkness of death.

“I am laying a trail,” he said, and gestured. Mary, the sweet little one who had attended Alloria so honourably, was dragged by her hair from the room. Blood streaked her face, her breast and her loins. She had not been treated well.

“He will kill you,” hissed Alloria. “He will kill you all!”

“We will see,” said Graal, and struck a savage blow which knocked her to the bed; then to the floor. Darkness flooded in, and she remembered no more.