Bloodforged (40 page)

‘I mean I left him defending my escape against the cultists,’ said Ulrika, wishing she was certain it was a lie. ‘He was wounded, surrounded and outnumbered.’

‘And so you have come to finish his work and kill me?’ sneered Evgena.

‘He did
not
come to Praag to kill you, mistress,’ she said, clenching her jaw. ‘He came to stop the vampire who means to try, as I told you before. And though you have given me great provocation,
I
am not here to kill you either, nor have I broken my vow to you, or ever intend to. I come to ask again the only thing I have ever asked of you. Help me defeat the cult that threatens your city and yourselves.’

Evgena folded her hands in her lap. ‘Raiza said you have learned their plan? What is it?’

Ulrika bowed and began. ‘Thank you, mistress. The cult have acquired a relic of great power, a violin called the Viol of Fieromonte. It is possessed by a daemon, and has the power to drive men mad when played. The cult intends–’

Evgena laughed. ‘A violin? Your all-powerful cult threatens Praag with a violin? Will we all die from bleeding ears?’

‘I have felt its power myself, mistress,’ Ulrika said. ‘Von Kohln and I took it from the cult as they attempted to steal it from the Sorcerers’ Spire. The daemon within it muddled my mind and tricked me into letting go of it, and the cultists escaped with it. I fear it is fully capable of doing what they expect it to do.’

‘And that is?’ asked Evgena.

‘I believe they intend to play it at the duke’s victory concert, using it to turn the duke and all the most important people in Praag – every noble, general, priest and ice witch – into murderous lunatics. In the confusion that will follow, the cult will open the gates to their queen, Sirena Amberhair, a champion of Chaos who hides in the hills with her horde. She will take Praag unopposed.’

The boyarina sneered, and looked as if she was going to dismiss the story, but then her expression faltered and she paused. ‘I… I remember this violin. A passing wonder from just after the Great War against Chaos. Belarski’s White Eagles, the bravest company of winged lancers in that age, were all executed after they went on a rampage while dancing to its tune.’

‘I remember too,’ said Galiana. ‘They butchered their own wives and children, saying they were daemons in disguise. But the violin was burned at the stake, if I recall – a diverting spectacle for the duke’s court.’

‘If a violin was burned,’ said Ulrika, ‘it was not the Fieromonte. It still exists.’

Evgena was silent, thinking.

Raiza coughed politely. ‘Emil spoke this morning of hearing of a disturbance at the Sorcerers’ Spire last night. Agents of the chekist investigated. The bodies of cultists were found.’

‘And Maestro Padurowski, who was to conduct the orchestra, has gone missing,’ added Galiana. ‘My maid told me of it. It was the talk of the markets today.’

Evgena continued silent for a long moment, then opened her fan and fluttered it, agitated. ‘This plot might succeed,’ she said. ‘It is madness, but it might succeed.’

‘It might unless you do something to stop it, mistress,’ said Ulrika.

Evgena shot an angry glance at her. Ulrika thought she saw fear in it. ‘What? What would you have me do?’

‘The concert must be cancelled,’ said Ulrika. ‘You have spies at court. If you told someone the duke’s life was in danger if he appeared at it, they would not allow it to continue. Once that is done, we must find these cultists, destroy the violin and send the daemon back to the Realm of Chaos.’

Evgena laughed. ‘Child, you are mad!’ She snapped her fan closed. ‘Banishing daemons? Drawing the attention of the Tzarina’s agents? I don’t know which is more dangerous, but I’m not about to do either.’

Ulrika finally lost patience. ‘Are you not a Lahmian? Are you not a mistress of secrets and manipulations? I do not ask you to do any of this yourself, but through your minions and blood-swains, as you would normally do.’

Galiana and Raiza were looking at Evgena as if they wanted to urge her to action as well, but were afraid to speak. The boyarina stood abruptly and stalked to the empty fireplace, her every move tense and stiff.

‘Even that is not without risk,’ she said at last. ‘It is one thing to send a gift to the duke through an intermediary and suggest that one man is more qualified for the job of captain of the watch than another. It is quite another thing to ask that intermediary to whisper that the duke’s life is in danger. People who say such things are brought to the chekist interrogation rooms and questioned, and will be asked their sources, and no amount of blood-born loyalty will keep an intermediary’s mouth shut when the irons glow red.’

She slapped her fan against her skirts. ‘I have taken such risks before, when the alternative was ruin, but this…’

‘Ruin is precisely what the alternative is, mistress!’ said Ulrika. ‘I know you fear risk. You have grown comfortable here. You don’t wish to endanger your position, but do you not see that the risk in doing nothing is greater than the risk of helping?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Evgena, tearing the paper of the fan with her claws. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps the wisest course is to retire to Kislev for a time. Our sisters there would welcome us until all had resolved itself.’

Anger boiled up in Ulrika’s breast. For all her cold dignity and superior tone, Boyarina Evgena was a coward, too afraid of taking action to defend herself. ‘Mistress,’ she said, through clenched teeth. ‘I do not believe the Queen of the Silver Mountain would look well upon retreat or–’

Evgena gasped and looked around, and Ulrika broke off, thinking she had spoken too bluntly, but the boyarina was staring past her to the door.

‘They are here!’ she said, then cried out an arcane phrase and slashed a pattern in the air with her hands.

Galiana stood, her doll eyes wide. ‘Who is here, sister?’

‘How many?’ asked Raiza.

A cacophony of screeching and flapping and roaring erupted behind the hallway door, followed by the frightened cries of men and the thud and crash of battle.

Evgena stabbed her fan at Ulrika. ‘Little fool, you have led them to us!’ she hissed. ‘You have dragged us into your idiotic war!’

‘Mistress, I didn’t,’ said Ulrika. ‘I–’

Evgena turned to her men. ‘Go! Out! Guard the door!’

The men-at-arms ran to the corridor door and out. As they opened it, the sounds of battle grew louder, and with them, a familiar voice rising in incantation – the crooked sorcerer. The shrieks of the undead animals changed from rage to pain as he sang his spell, and the cries of the cultists became cheers, then Evgena’s men slammed the door and all was muffled again.

‘They are strong,’ growled the boyarina, then beckoned to Galiana. ‘Come, sister.’

Galiana hurried to her, gashing open her palms with her claws as she went. Evgena did the same, and they joined hands, blood mingling as they touched wound to wound. They closed their eyes and began to murmur together as red swirls of mist formed around them and blurred their outlines.

Angry cries and heavy blows came from just outside the corridor door. It sounded as if Evgena’s men were dying in the defence of it.

‘With me, sister,’ said Raiza, striding swiftly to the door.

‘You took my blades,’ said Ulrika.

Raiza pointed with her metal hand. ‘The window bench.’

Ulrika ran across the room, an icy coil of dread writhing in her guts. How were cultists here? Had she led them? Was Stefan dead? He would never have let them pass him while he lived. Her heart blazed with fury and guilt. She should not have left him. She had killed him!

She lifted the seat of a built-in bench in the window. Inside were her sword belt, rapier and dagger, resting on pillows and furs. She snatched them up and ran back, belting them on as she went.

The door burst in, ripping off its hinges, and Evgena’s guards fell backwards into the room, wounded, dying and dead, as the naked white giantess from the Sorcerers’ Spire strode in, her silvered axe flashing in the firelight. A mob of cultists roiled behind her, fighting a screeching flock of undead hawks and kites. More raptors shrieked around the giantess’s head and shoulders, but their claws could do nothing to her glassy, gleaming skin.

Raiza thrust for her heart, but her sabre was no more effective than the birds’ talons. The giantess swiped with her axe. Raiza dodged, stumbling over a fallen guard. Ulrika charged in, shouting and slashing, and succeeded in getting the woman’s attention, but her attack was as futile as the others.

She danced back from the axe, eyes darting around for something heavy enough to shatter the mutant woman’s slick white carapace. A marble statue of some ancient Khemri goddess stood on a pedestal next to a side table. Ulrika grabbed its cat-faced head and swung it like a club. In life she would have needed both arms to lift the thing. Now it felt hardly heavier than her sword.

The giantess parried with her axe, striking splinters from the sculpture, but before she could follow through, a red shimmer passed through the air like a spreading ripple in a pool of blood, and as it touched her, she began to choke and clutch at her throat, eyes bulging. Blood frothed at her lips and she doubled up – and she wasn’t the only one. The ripple swept across the cultists on the corridor, and they choked too – Evgena and Galiana’s blood-sorcery at work. Ulrika was not slow to take advantage. She swung again at the gasping giantess. The statue snapped in half as it shattered the porcelain skin of her back and crushed her ribs. She howled in agony and swung wildly at Ulrika, vomiting blood.

Raiza buried her sabre deep in the splintered fissure of the wound. The giantess gasped and crumpled to the ground, dead at last. Ulrika leapt her massive body and waded into the cultists in the corridor, with Raiza and the remaining men-at-arms falling in behind her. It was a slaughter, for the cultists were all choking and spewing blood, and still harassed by the hawks that clawed at their heads.

But just as Ulrika began to think they had won, a tremendous silent concussion struck her chest and tore through her mind, staggering her. It felt as if she had been hit by an ocean wave and slammed into a rocky shore. Raiza staggered too, and in the drawing room, Evgena and Galiana cried out in unison, clutching their heads and crashing to their knees. The red shimmer of their magic vanished, and all the hawks dropped to the floor, stiff and motionless, all at once.

‘Mistress!’ cried Raiza, stumbling to Evgena. ‘Are you hurt?’

Before she reached her, something big and black smashed through one of the room’s high windows, taking the curtains with it, and bounced across the rug to the fireplace, trailing dust. It was a bear’s head, the severed neck desiccated and bloodless.

As Ulrika turned the stare at the thing, a figure leapt into the broken window and crouched there, laughing with two voices. It was Jodis, the lithe, dreadlocked Norse mutant with the fat-mouthed goitre growing from her neck, naked and painted for war, her silvered long-knives at the ready.

Here they are, brothers!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘This is the heart of the nest.’

‘Hold the door!’ Ulrika barked at Evgena’s guards, then turned and ran at Jodis, howling with rage.

Ulrika started for her, snarling, but then, from the corridor, she heard more cultists thundering through the house. She cursed and shoved Evgena’s three remaining men-at-arms into the hall, shouting ‘Hold the door!’, then ran at Jodis, howling with rage.

The Norsewoman jumped down to meet her, while behind her, a dozen hulking, bare-chested marauders crashed through the rest of the windows, swords and torches in their hands.

Ulrika lunged low, trying to tear open Jodis’s naked belly, but the silvered knives turned the thrust and darted for Ulrika’s neck. Ulrika parried with her dagger, barely in time.

‘So, the sun didn’t kill you,’ Jodis said from both her mouths. ‘Good. I want the pleasure for myself.’

‘Then you should have come alone.’

She backed away, blocking on all fronts as Jodis and her wild men pressed forwards. She was too weakened from the sorcerous attack that had hurt Evgena and killed her pets to fight so many superior opponents. She felt faint and limp and hollow. A marauder swung a black long sword at her. She twisted aside, knowing she wasn’t going to be able to avoid it, but at the last second, Raiza appeared beside her and beat it away, clawing the marauder’s eyes with her metal hand.

‘Thank you, sister,’ Ulrika breathed, and focused again on Jodis.

Raiza fought on silently, angling to keep the Norsewoman and her men from reaching Evgena and Galiana. Ulrika did the same, but it was impossible. They were only two swords. They couldn’t hold back so many.

But then help came from behind. Weird wisps of red floated towards the marauders like spiderwebs on a breeze. Jodis and her men stumbled and shrieked as the strands tangled around their arms and heads, burning their flesh with each silky touch. Ulrika and Raiza took advantage, and cut down three men in an instant, then pressed Jodis back.

Ulrika dared a glance around. Evgena remained slumped, half-conscious, on the divan – the sorcerous concussion seemed to have struck her hardest – but Galiana hunched over her, her red wig askew and her thin arms outstretched. Red smoke came from her fingertips, then coalesced into drifting strands. At the door, Evgena’s men-at-arms fought more cultists in the corridor. They were holding. If Evgena recovered, they might all have a chance.