Lord of Slaughter

37

The city was falling to anarchy. The chamberlain looked out from a high tower of the palace. To the north-west, high up on the seventh hill, some buildings flared with flame, bright against the night. A gatehouse too was burning.

Were his own men in revolt? Or had the Varangians tricked their way in? He feared the Varangians because he knew they were keen to displace his own Hetaereians. He called in a messenger and dispatched a Hetaereiarch with a squadron of city guard up to the burning gate. The man was white with fear. How many of them would obey? The messenger said the dead lay in piles on Middle Way and there was news of more strange happenings across the city.

The runes that moaned and hissed inside the chamberalin seemed in tumult, unquiet and fretful like sheep in a pen at the howl of a wolf. He was to blame for this chaos, he was sure.

He gestured to his servant to bring him a bowl of water from the stand. The chamberlain lifted it to his lips and tried to take a drink but he couldn’t. His stomach was tight, his throat too. He put the water down, feeling sick, leaning against the wall for support. A bright berry of blood burst onto the tiles at his feet. He put his hand to his nose. More blood.

‘A cloth, a cloth!’

The servant quickly found one and the chamberlain dabbed at his nose.

Still more blood.

He called up a magical symbol in his mind, allowed it to shape his thoughts. The symbol had many names, he knew. Today it seemed to murmur to him in the language of the northerners. Mannaz had always brought him insight before, shaped his decisions, allowed him to second-guess his enemies. Now, though, the symbol was trying to leave him. It was almost as if it was preoccupied with something else. It reminded him of a difficult horse, the sort convinced predators lurk behind every unfamiliar feature and which pays greater attention to its fears than it does to its rider. It seemed much more a living thing than an idea or a vision; he could feel its shape coiling through his mind like a serpent, pulling and tugging to be free.

In the aftermath of his murders it had seemed so easy to command the runes. Symbols was too weak a word for these beings. They were more than just the scribbles of the Norsemen. Were they truly demons in a strange form?

He tried a further symbol, willing it to obey. Othala — again the name in Norse. Were the runes trying to tell him something? He put his hand out, as if to touch the symbol, to use it as he had once used it to secure influence for his family and friends, to bring Styliane to the court and have her adopted by a rich family, to blind people to his sorceries and love of the old religion. It seemed to shy away from him.

He finally stopped the blood from his nose. More shouting, more sounds of torment out in the city. More deaths. He could not see what was causing them. He had performed the rite of divination, mixed dead man’s blood with myrrh and bay leaves to spread as a tincture on his eyes. He had said the words to command the goddess:

‘By the sound of the barking dog, I call on you.

By the hanged who are holy to you,

By those who have died in war,

By this blood, violently taken,

I call on you to grant me revelation.’

The runes inside him had moaned and shifted but nothing had come, no insight into the terrible events. Was this the end of the world? Was this Hecate’s victory over the realms of light?

The chamberlain called on one more rune, the one that burned like a single torch. It was shrouded now, as if seen through mist or the gritty black drizzle that had fallen since the comet had been seen. He tried to concentrate, to make it clearer, but he knew the symbols would not be commanded. They were things that appeared in dreams, in the moment between waking and sleeping, things of the threshold between the physical and the supernatural world. Or rather, they would be commanded, depending on the sacrifices he was willing to make. He remembered his mother’s words: Nothing is won without effort.

‘No.’

It was as if he spoke to the rune, answering a suggestion it had made. But the rune had made no suggestion, given no insight. The chamberlain spoke to himself.

He had thought he had raised Styliane up out of a sense of guilt, as a sign he was not entirely without pity or decent feeling. She was his sister and he felt guilty he had robbed her of any family but himself, and in the days when the magic in him had been easier to use, he had worked to help her.

He saw more. The magic had known what it needed. Shock. He was a man, a poor vessel for such powers. His castration had helped tie the magic to him, but the bonds that had been formed between him and the symbols in the blood light of the well needed renewing. He had let them wither, preferring the comfortable life to sacrifice.

He had sacrificed, of course — the black lambs and the goats and sheep his goddess demanded — but the magic could not be sustained by such meagre offerings. He knew what it wanted — pain, revulsion, a horror to shake the sanity from its everyday existence, to jettison the mind’s clutter and leave it free to understand the fundamental relations of the universe as expressed in the runes he had taken from the waters to plant in his head.

Something moved at the edge of his vision. He wheeled about, searching for it, but there was nothing there. He sensed a presence, though — bitter and angry. His dead sister. Was her spirit doing this? Could her anger enable her to break the bonds of death? She was a priestess of Hecate, goddess of the dead. She had died at the most holy place, where the three waters met. Had the goddess granted her the right to return? Was she sending the symbols mad inside him, loosening his control, letting them pull from him to kill and cause chaos in the city?

He sensed this to be true. He had gained control and insight once, power even. If he was to regain it, he needed a sacrifice equivalent to his first.

Styliane. He had kept her there, his one connection to a life of love, of tenderness and familial feeling. He had bound himself to the runes in the well once and done great things. He needed to be bound again.

Across the city lights flickered, buildings burned, people screamed. What had he unleashed? He mouthed the words of the dedication to Hecate.

Goddess of depths eternal,

Goddess of darkness,

Come to my sacrifices.

I am burning for you some dreadful incense -

Goat’s fat dappled, filth and blood,

The heart of one untimely dead.

Your greatest mystery, goddess

Who opens the bars to the lands of the dead,

Who makes light useless and plunges the world

Into premature night.

He’d thought the words were just an acknowledgement of the goddess’s power, not a description of something that might actually happen.

Again, a movement, a thickening of the air in his lungs.

‘You’re here, aren’t you, Elai? Sister?’ said the chamberlain out loud.

A dog howled in the distance.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you need disturb yourself no more on my account.’ He dabbed the cloth against his nose.

‘I shall come to visit you,’ he said.

Far off on the walls, someone cried out in anguish. He heard distant voices, the screams of battle. Just visible, a mass of torches streamed through one of the lower gates — not the one that burned. Norsemen.

He guessed what had happened. Death in the streets, civil disorder, the incident with the wolfman. It had all become too much for the emperor. Reports had reached him in the east. He had sent his seal and ordered a gate opened to allow the Varangians to do as they had requested — replace the Hetaereian guard. That would not be accomplished without a fight.

It was a move against him. Basileios had trusted the chamberlain with everything, freeing himself up for his campaigns, but if the chamberlain could not keep order or subdue the magic assaulting the city then he would destroy his power by removing his loyal Hetaereia and replacing them with foreigners. It would have been obvious to the chamberlain had he not been so preoccupied with magic. The threat spurred him to action.

‘Get me messengers here now,’ he said to his servant, ‘and send in the new master of post.’ The servant left the room, leaving the chamberlain alone. He put his head into his hands and said, into nothing, ‘This is not the end time. I will endure. Whatever it takes, I will endure.’