Hero Risen

Grakk’s head popped out of the window to satisfy himself that Brann was ready and, at a nod from the bald head, he felt the rope tighten and lift him from the ground. He started to spin and, alarmed, grabbed the rope with both hands, scrabbling with his feet at the wall to try to keep him facing the surface. His ribs and the wound on his left arm stung, but he managed to get into a rhythm, half-walking and half-bouncing with his feet as he was pulled upwards in rapid lurches. He was concentrating so much on maintaining his balance that the thought of discovery from below was forgotten. One step, then the other, he was jerked upwards. He looked up, and was surprised to see the window only the height of a man above him. He could just make out the sound of soft whispers, and grinned at the thought that he would soon be among his friends.

The whispers stopped. The movement of the rope stopped. Everything seemed to stop. In the silence and stillness, Brann became aware of the soft wind blowing his hair across his eyes, a breeze that would have been welcome at ground level but served here only to remind him how exposed he was. How vulnerable. He was at the mercy of others from above even more than below. Who would think to look up, much less launch any sort of missile almost six storeys upwards with any accuracy? On the other hand, any loosening of the rope above…

He hung, totally dependent on the rope. It was bearing his weight without even the slightest give; it could only be that it was tied off. But why? His mind raced. The whispered voices had stopped abruptly, but there had been no further noise. They must have heard something and be either trying to remain unnoticed or preparing to defend themselves. If it was the latter, it went against his nature not to help them. And in either case, he hated not knowing.

He flinched at the sound of a door crashing open. Shouts burst briefly, then a quiet voice spoke. Brann could not make out the words, but they were shortly followed by the clatter and clang of metal hitting stone: dropped weapons. His stomach knotted. His breath came loud in his ears. He started to haul himself up, hand over hand, his left side searing with pain, the agony overpowered by his urge to reach his friends. The rope creaked as he moved, but softly; he could only hope it was soft enough to merge with the noises of the town beyond. In any case, the consequence of it being heard, grave as it would be, was still preferable to being discovered a short distance below the window and a long drop above the ground.

And in any case, the idea of doing nothing while his friends were in danger had started his muscles moving even before his mind had debated the issue.

He reached the window undiscovered. He forced his heaving breath to be still and eased the last few inches that let his vision clear the sill. And he froze.

His friends stood unarmed, each with a lightly armoured guard on each arm and a blade at their throat; Sophaya closest to the window and just to its right, the rest extending away in a curved line. To the left, regarding them calmly across the room, was a well-dressed man, diminutive in height and almost unhealthily slender, who pulled thoughtfully on a bottom lip that was as thin as his face was pinched and pale, features that merely emphasised the sunken depth of his eyes. He ran the hand through thin dark hair and sighed. ‘But you are all so ordinary! How could you possibly think you could succeed?’

A door beyond him stood open and Philippe, his face wild with fear and marked with a swelling on one cheekbone, was dragged through by a lean guard with hard eyes, unarmoured but wearing a tunic that was black like the tabards of the other guards – in his case with a red stripe down the centre.

The small man smiled. ‘Ah, you thought yourselves so clever, did you not? A man on the inside; a man with a potion.’ He took a goblet from the guard holding Philippe. ‘Thank you, captain.’ He sniffed the dregs curiously. ‘No odour. Instantly dissolved, I believe.’ The captain nodded. ‘Fast acting, too, I hear. Interesting. Most interesting. If any of you have more of this most effective powder on you, I will enjoy investigating it further in due course.’ He looked at them. ‘Yes, effective, though you see my captain standing here before you, most decidedly awake. You see, you thought you knew everything, I am sure, but you did not know me. You did not know that I have no interest in the minor issue of how my captain or anyone else sates their desires as long as they can still serve me as I require. My captain has no need to be secretive from me, and no fear of anything needing to be hidden from me. So when your pretty boy here did not hide well enough his inept attempt to slip powder into a drink, my good captain was able to subdue him and alert me that something must be afoot. The rest was simplicity, waiting to see if someone would come to me, as the boy is incapable of doing anything of any great importance himself. Waiting, moreover, to see who would come, how they would come, why they would come.’ He chuckled with the contentment of a man who is more clever than all around. ‘We have seen the if and the how – and soon we will hear the who and the why.’

Brann’s arms were beginning to shake, but he forced his fingers tight around the rope. Now was not the time to give himself away. Or to fall, for that matter. The rope groaned as his weight rolled slightly to one side. He caught his movement and his breath in the same instant.

But the small man was pacing nonchalantly as he looked at the sullen faces staring at him, his footsteps loud enough to mask any small noise from across the room and outside the window. ‘What, no conversation? Let me start it off, then. What was your purpose? Robbery? Or perhaps murder?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘No answer?’ He looked at one of the guards holding Sophaya, her eyes defiant and glaring. ‘If these gentlemen remain so rudely unresponsive the next time I ask, please cut her throat. Keep the head unmarked, though, as I have plans for it.’

Gerens’s eyes bulged, and his voice growled. ‘You said she would not be harmed if we gave up our weapons.’

The Duke, as Brann assumed he could only be, smiled indulgently. ‘Of course I did, and she was not harmed, was she? But that was then, and this is now. I have further use for this bargaining tool, do I not? Especially as it proved so effective the first time.’ He pursed his lips in consideration. ‘Maybe we should just slice her soft throat now as a statement of intent…’

Gerens roared and strained at his captors, managing a step forward. The Duke turned again to regard Sophaya, but Grakk’s calm voice dragged his attention away once more.

‘Strangely enough,’ he said, ‘it was actually a quick chat with yourself that brought us here. Perhaps we could dispense with the unnecessary gripping of arms and just pull up a chair.’

The Duke looked with intrigue at the precise speech and cultured tone, then laughed in delight. ‘I think I will keep you till last. But unfortunately, you do not seem willing to give me a sensible answer, so…’ He looked at Sophaya again. ‘Kill her.’

Brann moved.

He yanked at the rope to fling himself forward, all of his senses focused on the scene before him and far from any pain in his wounds. In the instant between his hands leaving the rope and reaching for the inner edge of the windowsill, he felt a coldness settle over him, his eyes hungry for movement that made his choices for him. He pulled at the sill and his legs came up under him, bracing on the ledge. As he launched, he saw the Duke’s eyes widen with the sharp surprise that hits hardest at a man who is convinced he has control, and then he was tumbling to roll on one shoulder. On the way down, his long knife slashed, parting, like thread, the rope as it tensed against the wall sconce it had been tethered to, and as he came out of his roll it sliced just as easily across the back of the knees of the guard lifting his blade to execute Sophaya.

The man screamed as his legs buckled and the girl wheeled, the soldier’s knife in her hand. Almost faster than Brann’s eyes could follow, she had cut across the back of the hand of the man to her right, his fingers spasming and releasing his sword and, as her second movement opened his throat, Brann came to his feet and battered his shoulder into the dying man, knocking him into the next guard along. The guard had let go of Konall and was turning towards them, but now found himself entangled in the arms and slipping in the blood of the body thrown against him. Brann’s hand flicked his axe up from his belt and, with a roll of his wrist and a wild swing, cut the black metal through the dead man’s arm and into the neck of the struggling soldier. It was not a time for finesse.

He wrenched the axe free and blood sprayed into the face of a man poised to stab a short spear at him. He dropped to a crouch, away from the line of the lunge, and thrust his axe forward, hooking the head behind the man’s ankle. Jerking the axe as he stood, the man was upended and he continued the movement to swing the axe over and down to stop with a crunch in the centre of the man’s forehead. It was quicker to draw his sword than drag the axe free, and he spun in a crouch, blade held ready, as he sought the next danger.

He saw carnage. It had been a natural reaction for the guards to turn towards unexpected danger, but it had also been a fatal reaction. As the captives were released, each had instantly reached for the closest weapon, either their own from the floor or whatever they could reach from the belt of the guard.

‘Wait!’ The Duke’s voice cut across the room, and they stood, chests heaving, blood dripping, every guard lying dead. Every guard but one – a sound came from a man curled around his entrails, a low bubbling moan was all that could emerge from the half of his face that was left.

Gerens bent down, and now every guard lay dead. They faced the Duke, and saw the captain beside him, Philippe held in front with a knife at his throat. The captain grinned.

Brann’s hand reached fast behind his neck for the throwing knife he kept strapped at the top of his spine, but Konall grabbed his wrist.

‘Too risky a target for anyone, and I have seen you throw when you have time to think about it.’

He let out his breath, the cold fire of combat fading. The Northern boy was right. Brann’s throwing was atrocious.

He flinched as a flash flickered past him, and the captain screamed in agony, his hand clutching at an eye suddenly gushing blood. Philippe stumbled and ran from him and, as the man swung wildly with his knife, Grakk neatly ducked under the swipe and finished him with a thrust of a sword up under his ribs and into his heart.

With a low growl, Gerens leapt for the Duke, but Grakk was quicker, placing himself in the way. ‘Not just now, young Gerens.’

The boy’s eyes burnt darkly still, but he halted and nodded, looking at the captain’s corpse and then at Philippe. ‘Well, at least that has saved us the bother of stopping in to visit that bastard for you on the way out.’

Philippe smiled weakly, but the relief in his eyes was strong.

The Duke glanced at the door, but saw Konall standing in its way, arms folded and a cold smile on his face.

Without taking his eyes from the Duke, the boy closed the door and, with exaggerated deliberateness, slid home the bolt.

The Duke’s eyes lingered on the broken and bloody bodies of his guards but, rather than fear, his expression was lit by an excited fascination.

Grakk came to stand before him. ‘Now,’ the tribesman said, ‘perhaps we could have that chat we mentioned.’ He looked around the room. ‘Although perhaps it might have been easier to have it when I first suggested it.’

The Duke’s eyes were still alight. ‘But then I would have missed your exhibition of such magnificently efficient brutality.’ He turned his lascivious gaze on Brann. ‘And this one – oh, I could find some wonderful uses for one such as he.’

Brann looked back impassively. He had seen this man’s sort before, baying and slavering in the crowds at the pits of Sagia’s depraved City Below. Such people meant nothing to him.

A noise came from behind them and all spun, weapons in hand. A small girl, aged no more than six years, stood at the bottom of a winding staircase, staring up at the group. Barefoot and dressed in just a simple shift, she looked around the room. With a cry, Sophaya rushed to her, sweeping the girl into her arms. She felt over the small figure quickly. ‘Unharmed, I believe,’ she said over her shoulder.

Brann looked at Grakk. ‘And unmoved by the gore,’ he said quietly.

Grakk nodded. ‘Unhurt physically, perhaps, but…’

Sophaya took the girl to a chair at the far side of the room, sitting to cradle her and speak soothingly to her.

Brann turned to Gerens and Konall. ‘I’ll take a look up there with Grakk.’

‘You will not dare!’ the Duke screamed, fury filling the words. ‘No one goes up there but me. No one!’

Brann looked at the sudden emotion with interest. He pointed at the girl in Sophaya’s arms. ‘She did. And now we will.’ The Duke screamed in rage, his eyes bulging, and Brann looked at Konall and Gerens. ‘You two keep an eye on him. If you have to ensure he stays still and quiet,’ he gave a half-smile, ‘please do it in a way that will still allow him to speak.’

The pair said nothing but turned to stand and stare at the Duke. His ranting continued, and Gerens punched him hard in the face. The man fell silent but still quivered and stared, his anger barely controlled.

Grakk followed Brann up the stairs, and they emerged into a room the same size as the one below. A lavish bed sat against the far wall and a desk strewn with documents lay between them and it, but it was the shelves around that drew their eyes. Jars contained organs and body parts, the former suspiciously human-looking and the latter definitely so, all floating in liquid. A trolley lay in front, the top lined neatly with an assortment of shining blades, saws, pincers, and other instruments that Brann had only seen before in the rooms of the top physicians in Sagia, those who tended the elite, and expensive, gladiators. His eyes moved past the trolley and came to a table of metal and…

His head swam. He felt his knees go from under him. He staggered to one side and retched onto the floor.

A boy – a boy’s body – lay on the table. His face was untouched, revealing that he had been much the same age as the girl downstairs, but his torso had been sliced to allow the skin to be peeled back to either side. Ribs had been clipped away to allow complete access and for the organs to be exposed. Some of those organs had been removed and lay neatly to one side. The rest were still visible.

And the heart was still slowly beating.

‘Oh by all the gods,’ Brann whispered. ‘What evil is this?’

A sheet of notes in neat and precise script lay beside the boy, and as Grakk moved to seek some clue from it, he noticed a small empty vial near the child’s head, and sniffed it briefly. ‘What little consolation there can be is in the fact that he has slept through this.’

Pain constricted Brann’s throat, making his voice hoarse. ‘But when he wakes?’

‘He must not wake.’ Grakk picked up a slender blade, its tip curved, from the trolley and deftly nicked a vein in the small boy’s neck, dark blood swiftly pooling on the table top. ‘He will not wake.’ A single tear ran down his cheek, but the tribesman seemed unaware. ‘The gods will have him now.’ He moved beside Brann and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You wondered about the gods? This is where we need to believe they are there to care for those such as this poor soul.’

Brann nodded, but felt a fury building in him. He rose and reached for his knife.

Grakk’s hand tightened on his shoulder. ‘I know,’ the man said. ‘I know. But we are here for a purpose. We have seen the monstrosity of our enemy in the past, and for the sake of other children like this, we must not let further examples of the same divert us from our course.’

Brann nodded, and forced his breathing deep and slow. He looked away from the table. He would not look back. He gasped as his eyes lit on two cages, tall as a man’s waist and narrow – in one, a small boy crouched. Brann almost slipped as he rushed to it, but as he drew close he saw his haste was wasted. The eyes were open but unseeing. The hands were missing several fingers, but still grasped the bars with what ability they had possessed. He had been cut and stitched with precision in multiple places, with some wounds having partially healed while others were clearly more recent. Again, a sheet lay alongside – a quick glance revealed a list of dates and notes, but a quick glance was all Brann could bring himself to give it. The body was stiff to the touch, but he still felt at the small neck for a pulse. He had never thought he would find himself glad to find a child to be dead.

Two similar cages sat alongside, both empty. On one, the latch was bent and the door ajar – it seemed most likely to have been the home of the little girl.

Grakk was at the desk, looking through the documents. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘This is what we seek.’

Brann moved across, averting his eyes from the boy on the table and glad of something to take his attention that did not involve the torture of children.

Grakk indicated piles of paper, one a map and the rest covered with text or diagrams. ‘There is more here than we can peruse at this time.’

Brann shrugged. ‘So we take it all.’ He pulled a sheet from the bed and laid it by the desk, lifting the papers onto it. Grakk nodded and helped him, tying it into a bundle when they had finished. Brann looked back at the bed. ‘To think he slept here, chose to sleep here, in the midst of all of this.’

They couldn’t leave the room quickly enough, and wound their way back down the stair.

The scene was much as they’d left it, except that the Duke had acquired a swollen eye and was clutching one wrist to his chest. Brann stood in front of him, staring, and wondering what happened in the head of such a man that made him capable of such things.

‘You saw my workroom, then?’ the man said brightly, almost proudly. ‘So much has been learnt in that room. So much has been discovered, such advances achieved, such help that will be brought to those who seek to progress the human condition. If you can grasp even a fraction of the enormity of what has been achieved in that room, you will thank your gods for the work wrought by such higher thought.’ His eyes glittered, and he shook with excitement. ‘If you will but permit me to share just some of my findings…’

Brann fought to control himself. ‘Right now, I thank the gods that I am ordinary.’ He looked past the Duke. ‘Gerens, it is time for this man to answer our questions.’

Gerens nodded solemnly. ‘The slow way or the quick way?’

‘To be honest,’ Brann said, ‘I would love the slow way, but we are not blessed with time. Those who knew that something was amiss, I would expect, are all in this room, dead or alive, so we can do what we have to do. But I would rather we were on our way,’ he thought of the scene in the room above, ‘sooner rather than later.’

‘The quick way, then.’

He marched the Duke to the window and pushed him backwards until he was lying on the sill. Grabbing an ankle in each hand, he tipped him until the man was hanging upside down above the drop.

‘He’s gone quite rigid, chief,’ Gerens said. ‘I think he’s a bit frightened.’

Brann was sure he was. ‘Are you sure you can hold on to him? Remember we need information.’

‘He really is very light,’ Gerens reassured him. ‘There’s actually nothing to him.’ To demonstrate, he let go with one hand, then leant out of the window slightly. ‘Now, don’t wriggle. You might break free, don’t you think?’ He reached out and grabbed the free ankle again. ‘There, we go. Don’t want him to get too scared to speak, I suppose.’

‘Good,’ Brann said. ‘Ask him about Loku.’

Gerens leant forward. ‘My friend would like to know if you have encountered a man called Loku recently. Or maybe you know him as Taraloku-Bana?’ There was a muffled sound from outside, and Gerens spoke over his shoulder. ‘He knows him as Loku, and he was indeed here when we thought he was. It appears he is a colleague.’

‘Ask him who he reports to.’

‘My friend would like to know who your boss is in your affairs with Loku.’ He turned his head again to Brann. ‘He says Loku was arranging a meeting across the water with others like them, to report to he who controls them and receive instructions. This dangling man is to meet this boss for the first time at that meeting.’

‘Ask him where Loku is now.’

‘My friend would like to know where that bastard Loku has gone.’ He relayed the message once again to the room. ‘He says there is a camp near here, a day’s ride to the east. He might still be there. Some have already been sent to the next stage of fulfilling their purpose, and he was to assess who would be ready to go next.’

Konall strolled across and looked with interest over the top of Gerens. ‘I must say, this Duke is being fairly eager to help.’

‘Would you not, in that position?’ Brann asked.

Konall frowned. ‘It would be impossible. I am too heavy for Gerens to hold for such a length of time.’ He noticed something and eased partially past Gerens to peer out of the window at an angle. ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely to Gerens.

‘Of course,’ Gerens said, leaning flat on the sill to allow Konall to lean further. A moan came from outside the window.

Konall turned back to the room. ‘Two guards have come round the corner. The fools are chatting enough that they are unlikely to look up here, but the man hanging from Gerens’s hands will be able to see them very soon, and I’m pretty sure he will start shouting.’

Brann looked at the others, and saw that they were looking at him. He considered the options and the situation. ‘We need to shut the Duke up, and we need to divert the attention away from the front door.’

Gerens turned from the window, empty-handed. ‘That’s easy. Anything else?’

The Duke’s wail was cut short by an audible thump, precipitating shouts of alarm.

Brann shrugged. ‘That should do it.’

‘A quicker end than he deserved,’ Konall reflected.

Brann kicked a stool, sending it careering across the room. ‘You don’t know the half of it. Let’s go.’ He looked at Sophaya. ‘Ready?’

She nodded and stood, the waiflike figure still huddled in her arms. Grakk ripped a curtain from its hanging at the opening to the stairs leading upwards, and they wiped the worst of the blood from their faces and hands. They retrieved what weapons were still protruding from the various bodies lying around the room and cleaned them also, sliding them back into their sheaths. Grakk pulled the object from the captain’s eye and wiped it on the curtain, turning it over curiously in his hand. It was a flat piece of metal, shaped into a star with barbed points, and the tribesman looked at Sophaya. ‘An interesting weapon,’ he observed. ‘I have heard of such among some guilds of assassins in the Empire.’

She stroked the child’s hair. ‘You mix with all sorts when you work in certain sections of society in a big city. It pays to develop contacts, especially when you can learn from each other.’

Grakk was still examining the star, weighing it on his hand and turning it on his fingertips.

‘Keep it.’

Grakk smiled. ‘Thank you. You are kind.’

She shrugged. ‘I have several.’

Brann sheathed his axe, eager to organise their exit. ‘For the first few floors, at least, we will try to pass unobtrusively. Or, at least, as unobtrusively as can be managed by a group that looks like us.’ He turned to Philippe. ‘We need someone to lead us down.’

Konall looked at him askance. ‘We just keep going down stairs, surely, until we reach ground level. How much leading does that need?’

‘No,’ Brann said, his eyes still on Philippe, ‘we need someone to look like they are leading us down, at least for as long as we can manage before someone realises that something is wrong. Every step we don’t have to fight for, hastens our departure.’ He put his hand on Philippe’s arm. ‘Can you act a part?’