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  “How goes the day, nephew?” he asked Valerius. His voice was deep and resonant, surprisingly so coming from that weak-looking body.

  “Profitable, uncle.”

  A cold smile passed across the old man’s face. He leaned forward and sniffed one of his orchids. “I am very displeased with you.”

  “I suspected as much, uncle. I have missed out little chats.”

  “One day that insouciance will be the death of you, my boy. Most men are terrified of my displeasure, and rightly so.”

  “May I enquire as to how I have incurred your ire? If I have given any offence I apologise most humbly. I have no wish to become subject to your terrifying wrath.”

  “I doubt that, Valerius. As I doubt that anyone is taken in by your pretence of humility.”

  “You wound me, uncle, when you suspect me of dissimulation. It makes me think you have been listening to my cousin’s slanders.”

  “My son does not like you, Valerius. He suspects you of plotting to gain the throne of Karnak, which he sees as rightfully his.”

  “I am shocked that anyone could suspect me of that.”

  “I can tell.”

  “You did not summon me merely to repeat these ancient untruths, did you, uncle?

  “The Emperor has been asking about the increase in piracy, Valerius. He set me to investigate this matter, and I have set you. The Emperor is displeased by the lack of progress and when the Emperor is displeased I am displeased. And when I am displeased…”

  “There is no need to be any more explicit, uncle. I understand quite well enough the fruits of Imperial or familial displeasure.”

  “And yet you have made no progress.”

  “I would not exactly say that, uncle.”

  “Then what would you say? Pray enlighten me, so that I, in turn, may enlighten His Imperial Highness.”

  “I have gathered information from all of the survivors of the pirate raids.”

  “I had understood that there were none.”

  “There have been a few, picked up in the Wastes, found wandering in the deserts. One of them was mad and one of them was so ill that he could only be made to speak with the most powerful of potions.”

  Lord Karnak licked his lips and leaned forward. “And what did they tell you?”

  “They talked about sorcerers and black blades. The pirate captains used them.”

  “Black blades have been forbidden since the Demon Wars. They can be forged only by those aligned with the Demon Worlds.”

  “That is why I decided to attend the Black Crab Pit Fight last night. Rumour had it that Lem would be using one.”

  “And he was?”

  “Indeed he was. And I intend to find out where that blade came from. I will pursue the investigation tomorrow. Tonight I attend the opera.”

  Lord Karnak smiled. “It seems I underestimated you, Valerius.”

  “I doubt that, my lord, but the implied praise is always welcome.”

  The old man began a languid gesture of dismissal then stopped it. His gaze rested on Ulrik. “May I ask who your companion is?”

  “He is my new bodyguard.”

  “The gladiator you paid such a steep price for? The one who defeated Lem.”

  “The same.”

  “A new bodyguard, eh? Are you implying that our House troops can no longer be relied upon to protect your person?”

  “I do not rule out that possibility.”

  “Very sensible,” said the old man, and completed his gesture of dismissal. “Don’t fail in this matter, Valerius. More is at stake than you might guess.”

  Valerius whistled a cheery tune as they emerged from the lord’s chambers. It increased as soon as he saw who was waiting there. It was a tall man who bore a distinct family resemblance to the wizard although he was broader and more muscular, more a swordsman than a sorcerer though wizardly adjuncts festooned his clothing. His features were coarser and rather more brutal. When he saw Valerius his face went cold.

  “My dear cousin,” he said, making it sound like the worst insult he could imagine. “Father has summoned you at last.”

  “Indeed, Telerius. We had business to discuss.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I am not at liberty to discuss it, alas. I am sure your father will tell you if you ask.”

  “I am sure he will. I am the heir after all.”

  “How privileged we all are that is so. It is reassuring to know that our House will be in strong hands on the, let us hope, long distant day, when your father goes to his eternal and well-deserved rest.”

  “And is this your latest pet?”

  “He is my new bodyguard.”

  “Guardmaster Leon will be most insulted to learn that you no longer place any faith in his troops.”

  “I have every faith in your friend Leon and his men. I merely feel the need to have a little extra protection when I go abroad.”

  “You should be careful, cousin. I would hate to see anyone else kill you.”

  “As ever, I find your concern for my well-being deeply gratifying.”

  A servant in House livery arrived and said, “Your father will see you now, Master Telerius.” With a final glare at Valerius, the heir vanished into the inner sanctum.

  “There is a man who does not like you,” said Ulrik.

  “Alas, it is not possible to be universally popular.”

  “What does he have against you?”

  “An ancient joke involving a novelty cod-piece and a ventriloquism spell. How that man can hold a grudge. Anyway, enough about such things. We must prepare to depart. We have business to be about this evening.”

  Ulrik suspected that there was more to the Telerius’s hatred than Valerius’s glib words let on. He looked like a man who would have Valerius killed painfully if he could. Ulrik understood the feeling.

  Chapter Five

  Ulrik stood on the landing stage and looked out into the night. The cool fingers of the breeze rippled his cloak. He was outside for the first time in months. He was washed and dressed in clean, fine clothes. He carried a weapon and protective amulets and he wore no shackle. Despite himself he felt almost happy. He could almost fool himself into believing that he was free.

  Nearby four House guards stared at him. They were big men and they carried glowing stormlances as well as swords. Rhea stood nearby dressed in a long rust coloured formal gown slashed at the midriff to reveal her stomach. Ulrik could not help but notice that she had no navel. Small suspensors held up the gown’s train so that it swirled as she moved without ever getting the hem dirty on the ground.

  Their gondola arrived, a long slick flying teardrop with a rotor on the rear. Ulrik was surprised when Valerius motioned for him to get inside along with Rhea and himself. He had expected to join the pilot in his elevated cockpit above the elemental engine.

  He walked along one stubby wing, being careful to avoid treading on the aileron and dropped into the luxurious leather covered interior. The vessel bobbed slightly under his weight.

  The scent of ozone filled the airboat as the engine roared to life. The rotor picked up speed. The Tower of Karnak slipped away and they were out over the jewelled lights of the city.

  Magelamps lit every tower. Huge illusions filled the sky over the trading houses, illustrating their wares. Winged men and gargoyles flashed past, pinions spread, racing along with messages and bundles of food. Gondolas moved in glittering shoals. The shifting patterns of their running lights were almost hypnotic. Ulrik was excited. He had never been anything else in a flying vehicle since his first time aloft as a boy.

  Valerius brought him back to reality, “Get changed,” he said, tossing Ulrik a package of clothes. Rhea was already stripping. The dress floated over her head to be replaced by a grotty, hooded leather jerkin and a half face-mask. Ulrik found his own clothing was that of a down-at-heel mercenary. Valerius was dressed similarly.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, as he changed.

  “Change
of plan,” said Valerius. His long-winded manner of speech had altered, becoming brisk, clipped, and business-like. His voice was an octave lower. He sounded like a ship’s captain, slightly hoarse from bellowing orders on deck. Whatever else he might be, the wizard was an incredible mimic. “We’re not going to the opera. We’re going to pay a visit to Sentius.”

  “Lem’s owner?”

  “The very same. I have a few questions to ask him about where he got the black blade.”

  “He might not want to answer them,” said Ulrik.

  “He will by the time we’re finished with him,” said Valerius. He was dressed now in the black robes of a Warlock of Xerus. He reached down and opened a casket that lay on the floor. He opened it. The stench of raw meat and alchemicals filled the air.

  “I thought you told your uncle you would investigate this tomorrow?”

  “Lean forward,” Valerius ordered. Ulrik found himself obeying the voice almost before he had thought. “This won’t hurt. Just stay still.”

  Valerius reached down and lifted a handful of pink, fleshy stuff from the casket. He slapped the sticky, moist stuff onto Ulrik’s face. Valerius’s long fingers flickered, kneading the material. He cocked his head to one side as if judging his work, nodded then spoke a word of power. A faint smell of singed meat filled the air. Ulrik’s face warmed.

  Valerius spoke another word, placed his hands together and then pulled them apart. The air between them shimmered, mirror-like. Ulrik looked at his reflection and was surprised to see a face that looked nothing like his own.

  Valerius repeated the process on himself. His features became hard and bloated. He gave himself jowls and a huge bulb of a nose with a wart on it, all the time studying himself in the floating mirror. When he was satisfied, he spoke another word and the shimmering mirror vanished like a popped bubble.

  Rhea had rubbed something into her fur, giving it a mangy look, and blackened her teeth with an agent so dark as to make many of them look missing. Her breasts were bound tight and flat to her chest and she wore leather britches. She could have been a slim cat-boy. Two daggers were sheathed at her waist.

  “I take it we are going somewhere you don’t want us to be recognised,” said Ulrik.

  “You’re very quick,” said the gruff new voice of Valerius. His whole body language was different. He looked fatter around the waist and rounder of shoulder. There was no trace of the dapper wizard left save the keen eyes that watched everything with cynical intelligence.

  “Perhaps showing up in a House Karnak air chariot might give your enemies a clue,” said Ulrik.

  “Look out the window, skyboy,” Valerius said. They were descending into the vast ancient rubble of the old city from which Typhon had arisen and to which it would one day return. The great multi-coloured ring blazed above them in the night sky. “For the rest of the evening, my name is Vaz, your name is Urm, and her name is Ktaya. Got that?”

  “Yes, boss,” said Ulrik in his best imitation of a portside rogue.

  “Not that anybody will ask but we’re mercenaries looking for work.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Right, let’s go.”

  They clambered out of the side of the coach onto the roof of a ruined building. The vehicle drifted skywards and back towards the towers at great speed, as if it were a living thing afraid to be in the Old City.

  They stood on an artificial island looking out over an endless web of damaged streets. Many of the nearby buildings were roofless. A few had tarpaulins or patched skysails stretched over their tops. People flooded the roadways. Dim glowglobes burned everywhere. Ulrik could smell poverty and cheap booze, hear the shouts of the hawkers and the whores. This was a good place to get your throat cut or your purse lifted. It reminded him of Hydra, his home city.

  “We’re a long way from the towers,” said Ulrik. Although the nearest towers were fountains of light behind them, they might as well have been a day’s flight away by airship.

  “Forget you ever saw them, till we get back,” said Valerius. “If we get back.”

  They headed down into the teeming streets. He kept his hand on the hilt of his blade as they clambered out of what once had been a window into what was now a street.

  Ulrik wondered how the mage planned on getting them out of here.

  After months caged in the Pits, the streets of the Old City almost overwhelmed Ulrik. There were tall Patricians from the towers, surrounded by bodyguards. There were mighty green-skinned Uruks from the wasteland, a head taller than he, their leathery muscle-augmenting exoderms making them seem taller and broader still. Red-skinned skylanders from the Rust Deserts mingled with tattooed, hairless vat-bred hookers from the Undercity. Gnarly pimps, their skin art matching those of their girls, watched the trade in flesh with augmented eyes that missed nothing. Blue-cloaked mages from the sky cities of Quantara thrust through the crowds, translucent sylphs whispering in their ears, and rippling their silver hair with swirling fingers of mist. An ancient golem, its metal skin pitted with rust, creaked along, its gears whirring, its cog-wheeled limbs grinding as if in need of oiling.

  Rhea attached herself to Valerius’s arm, a lowborn foisting herself on a newly arrived patron, desperate for cash. It looked so real that Ulrik wondered how often she had played this part in truth. She seemed at home here, amid the poverty and the clash of commerce and desire.

  So did Valerius. He strutted along, glaring around him with ferocious eyes, as if daring any other mage to challenge him. Suiting himself to his role, Ulrik took up a place two steps behind them, hand on blade, eyes scanning the crowd for threats, ready to activate his protective amulet at any time.

  He had missed the action of the streets, the thrill of being in a dangerous place after dark. The scent of joysmoke and opium assailed his nostrils along with the odour of spilled beer and blood. From the open front of a nearby tavern came the sound of blade on blade, as a low level Pit fight took place. The wail of pipes mingled with the beat of drums and the fleshcraft amplified voices of Singers. A beggar tugged at the edge of his tunic and retreated at his glare. A couple of bouncers eyed him professionally, and he responded with the courtesy nod of one hired bravo to another. A few of the bar girls took in his size and his muscles at a glance and beckoned enticingly.

  The scent of death overlaid with funerary spices hit his nostrils as a Shadar corpseman strode past. Undead muscles moved under translucent skin. Witchfires burned in empty eye-sockets. Worms had made those pockmarks on his face. He wore the colours of an Undercity Bone Gang, and the living moved out of his way as he went about his shadowy business. A few second later a palanquin passed, born by scrawny corpsemen, their skin flaking off, their appearance even more skeletal than the first’s. Valerius moved out of his way, for not even the crazed members of the Brotherhood of Xerus sought trouble with a Shadar Necromancer.

  Valerius strode up the walkway that ran along the side of a broken stump of a tower. The ruined building loomed over them like the remains of a man-made mountain. More open shop fronts lay ahead of them, with shopkeepers selling a variety of wares. Enforcers from the Black Crab faction watched over the area. All of them bore the tattoo of their organisation on cheek or arm. Hucksters shouted enticements from more doorways.

  Valerius paused and talked briefly to one before being shown inside. Whoever he claimed to be, he was known here.

  No one paid any attention to Ulrik as he swept along in his companions’ wake. He counted up the number of faction members as he went. There were at least a dozen. If things went wrong it would not be as easy getting out as it had been getting in. They moved along corridors past familiar looking chambers. In them Ulrik could see pit fighters sparring with mock weapons, as trainers looked on and shouted instructions. Most of them were newly-bought slaves and doubtless would die in the meat markets of the streets they had just passed through.

  A few more guards swapped jokes with Valerius. From what he overheard Ulrik worked out that his master was pret
ending to be a small-time gambler who liked to hang around training Pits and bet on fights. Valerius had put some time into creating a cover story for this identity. Judging the man by the persona he presented back in the Tower of Karnak, Ulrik would never have guessed him capable of this.

  They went up a ramp. The glowglobes were dimmer and there were more gangsters, all of them sporting painwands and swords and other less common weapons like razorbats and spinewhips. Valerius spoke to each in turn, saying something about coming to collect his winnings, and the guards nodded to him contemptuously, men used to the lies of inveterate gamblers who thought it more likely that Valerius was here to pay off their boss than to collect from him.

  As they progressed, Ulrik’s nerves wound tighter and tighter. The place was even more of a fortress than the usual Pit and those were designed to contain desperate men trained at arms. Sentius seemed to be something more than a mere trainer for the Black Crab faction. He looked like he was a boss. Ulrik hoped that Valerius knew what he was getting them all into. He told himself to relax, if Valerius did not it was too late to do anything about it now.

  “Get ready to shield your eyes as soon as I act,” murmured Valerius as they passed through the doorway.

  The door shut behind them. A group of men sat around a table in the huge skeelwood chamber, playing with animated tarot cards. Ulrik fought down alarm. All of the men were armed and formidable and one wore the azure robe of a Sky Sorcerer.

  “You brought my money, Vaz?” asked the hulking, apish figure at the head of the table. He was stripped to the waist. Interlocking patterns of black crab tattoos covered his brawny chest. They moved independent of the gangster’s own motions.

  “Got it here,” said Valerius reaching into his pouch. His hand scattered a handful of glittering dust into the air. He spoke a word of power and the dust caught fire, turning into an intricately blazing pattern of light. Ulrik blinked his eyes, hoping that no one present shared the magical protections that had been built into them. All around the table men lay slumped and stunned. Out of nowhere, a knife appeared in Rhea’s hand and buried itself in the wizard’s eye. One man appeared unaffected by the spell. Ulrik sprang forward and smashed the pommel of his blade down on the side of the man’s head. There was an awful cracking sound and his target fell unconscious.