Best Laid Plans (29 page)

Sparks danced about their armoured frames, which were conical like Sektis Gandaw’s mountain. Tubes emerged from their bodies and sprayed great gouts of fire at the dwarves.

Amidst the screams and the smell of burnt flesh, Maldark lunged for the statue. One of the metal monsters swung towards him, but he grabbed Eingana and dived. The stream of flame singed his hair as it passed overhead. Without looking back, Maldark sprinted for the door. He skidded on the carpet of charred and liquefying dwarf flesh that was all that remained of his men, but strong hands caught him.

‘Run!’ hissed Mamba. ‘And keep on running.’

C
adman entered the tower alone, leaving a cordon of death-knights outside. The door creaked in protest and he jumped out of his skin as a fist-sized spider scuttled out of his way. Literally out of his skin as the illusion of corpulence deserted him once more and he couldn’t be bothered to bring it back. Couldn’t even be bothered to count anymore. He was bone weary and wanted nothing more than to shut himself up for a century and sleep. He slipped inside and pressed his back to the door.

The ground floor looked the same as he’d left it all those years ago: a circular chamber crawling with cobwebs, thick with dust, and coated with a growth of fluffy black mould that hung in strips like peeling wallpaper. The walls were six feet thick and reinforced by granite buttresses. The door was oak banded with iron and fitted with an incredibly intricate lock Cadman had brought from Verusia. The centre of the room was stacked high with crates. For the life of him Cadman couldn’t recall what he’d packed inside them. A narrow stairwell wound its way upwards in a hazardous spiral with nothing to hold onto.

Braving the stairs to the first floor, he crunched his way across a carpet of dead cockroaches and lowered himself onto the scuffed and torn Chesterfield he’d shipped from Britannia. The leather was holding up rather well, considering the centuries he’d owned it.

Don’t make them like they used to.

Cadman lay back and pretended he was still in Britannia; back with his mother in the thatched cottage, reclining on the Chesterfield and dreaming dreams of discovery.

Science had been his first passion, a vast unsullied canvass tugging at his natural curiosity. He’d had other dreams too—a place of his own in the country; a smallholding—oh, he’d have paid someone to manage it, but there was something altogether satisfying about self-sufficiency; a good woman to share it with—children even, if he’d had a lockable study where he could get away from them. But it was science that had really fired him up; science that had led him to Oxford, and science that had finally taken him to Verusia. Not pure science by then; more of a fusion of the arcane arts with rigorous methodology. The sort of thing that got you ridiculed by one community and reviled by another. It was a path with only one logical conclusion. A path followed in the footsteps of Dr Otto Blightey, one time fellow of Oxford himself, and now a mythical bogey man who had proven all too real.

Cadman reached for a yellowish envelope speckled with insect droppings. He’d left it on the coffee table some considerable time ago. The address was smudged and almost illegible, but for the bottom line:
Verusia
. With a sinking feeling, Cadman slipped the letter out and scanned it. Oddly enough, he remembered sitting on this very sofa and agonizing over the wording. He’d written it shortly after his arrival in Sahul. An apology to Blightey for running out on him. An explanation; a plea for understanding, for forgiveness. It was the desperate hope of a desperate man appealing to reason, appealing for compassion. He’d not sent it. Cadman stuffed the letter back inside its envelope and dropped it back on the coffee table.

It had taken him centuries to work through the trauma left by Blightey and now, with one scaremongering fairy tale, he was straight back to square one.

Damn that tatterdemalion ragamuffin! What’s he have to go and put the frighteners on me for?

Jaspar Paris, Renna Cordelia, flying skulls that drank your spirit—all true. Cadman pushed himself up off the sofa. All too terribly true, and he only had himself to blame for raising the subject with the bard. No matter how far he ran, how much time passed, the threat of Blightey pursued him as inexorably as decay.

He took the stairs up to the second floor, noting with distaste that the canopy of his old four-poster was a sagging belly, the frame bowed, and the mattress a sodden heap with dense brown stains spreading across its surface. He made straight for the rusted ladder that led to a trap in the ceiling. His bony fingers rapped against the rungs as he ascended. The trap, warped by the centuries, refused to budge. Cadman directed his power at the stubborn wood until it crumbled into dust. He cried out as lesions cut into his bones. He could have used his pieces of the statue, probably should have, but something unsettled him each time he did. It was like the dip in temperature when a cloud covers the sun. At first he’d thought it was Blightey, but now he wasn’t so sure. Blightey had a distinctive presence, malignant and somewhat excitable, as if he couldn’t wait to get his hands on you. Whatever it was that followed Cadman’s use of the statue was almost detached, medical even—like a surgeon deciding where to make his first incision. It was deeply worrying. It could have been his own paranoia, he was well aware of that, but it never paid to take chances.

Clambering out onto the roof he walked to the edge of the parapet and gazed at the waning moon. Even that looked like a spectral skull leering at him from the heavens.

He frowned at the driver sitting stoically down below in the driving seat of the carriage. Cadman felt a deepening of his familiar chill as he recalled the maniacal cackle, the eerie effect of the moonlight on the driver’s back as they drove from the templum. It was the first time the man had shown any sign of life. Cadman shuddered. It had seemed like a veil had been ripped aside to reveal something beneath reality; something altogether more sinister and frightening than anything he’d ever imagined—and that was saying something. No sign of it now, though. The man was as lifeless as the zombies Cadman controlled. An empty vessel waiting for an animating intelligence. Numbers started bobbing up from the depths of Cadman’s mind. He tried to let their patterns lead him from his worries, but a niggling thought slipped through the net: unless his own subconscious fears had somehow been reflected in the driver’s uncharacteristic behaviour, someone, or something else must have entered him. Either that, or the man had been acting dumb all along.

His fingers fell to the pieces of statue the same way his thoughts turned to counting. Pulling out the fang and the eye, he brought them together. Warm amber light wafted from them like stardust. Cadman was about to put them away when he glimpsed something pass across the face of the moon. The tatters of his heart thrashed about wildly in his ribcage. Had he just spied the presence that came whenever he used the statue?

He rubbed the pieces between his thumbs and forefingers.
Can’t run forever, Cadman,
he told himself. He’d already come this far, taken so many risks.
In for a penny, in for a pound.

He focused his thoughts through the glowing amber pieces.
Just a trickle of power. Maybe it won’t be noticed.

Cadman’s mind called to whatever it was that had crossed the moon. He waited for the feeling of being watched, but there was nothing. Nothing but the chatter of his own disquieted mind.

And then he caught a scent, which struck him as odd as he’d smelled nothing for centuries. It was a sweet smell, fresh and deeply evocative. It was the smell of a pine forest. And then he heard laughter. Not heard exactly. It was as if his thoughts laughed with a mirth not quite their own.

The flapping of leathery wings startled him and he looked up to see something spiralling down to the parapet. Some kind of creature, humanoid, in the loosest sense, but grey and gnarled like a gargoyle. Its head was angular and horned, the face a jutting beak edged with cruel fangs. The eyes were swirling pools of oil.

The creature lighted on the guttering and leered at him, a barbed tail rearing over its shoulder and swaying like a charmed snake.

‘Are you following me?’ Cadman said with as much command as he could muster.

‘Not you exactly,’ the gargoyle said, fixing its eyes on the glowing pieces of amber.

Cadman thrust the fang and the eye into their respective pockets, but didn’t uncurl his fingers from them. His mind sent out a dark thread and felt a reassuring compliance. Abelard was on his way up.

‘You’re not the first,’ Cadman said, drawing the illusion of fatness around him. ‘It seems everyone who’s anyone is drawn to the statue.’
Like flies to ordure.
He tightened his grasp on the pieces and sent Abelard a mental kick up the posterior.

The creature shifted its weight from foot to foot, its black eyes widening at Cadman’s change of form.

‘You have grown wary of using the statue,’ it said. ‘You have endured great pain rather than risk drawing attention.’

‘But you found me,’ Cadman said.

‘I’ve been watching you for some time. I’ve also been watching the other watchers.’

Cadman felt an icy thrill run through his bones. ‘Who?’

‘I think you know.’ The gargoyle sat on the edge of the parapet and held its chin in its hands.

‘Blightey?’ The name fell from Cadman’s mouth like a dread augury.

He half expected a comet to streak across the sky, or the skull of the moon to descend and devour him. He whirled around at a clamour from behind and then steadied himself with a string of counting. It was only Abelard emerging from the trapdoor.

The gargoyle rolled from its perch and stalked forwards. At a click of Cadman’s fingers Abelard stood in its way and glowered through his one remaining eye, the other dangling uselessly over his cheek. The gargoyle cocked its head and grinned. Its tail whipped out and the barb pierced Abelard’s breastplate. Cadman gaped in horror as the death-knight stiffened and then fell to the floor in a shower of dust.

The gargoyle stepped up close to Cadman, bending its head towards his ear.

5,4,3,2…Oh, crumbs!…1, 0, -1, -2…

‘Shhh,’ the gargoyle hissed. ‘He might hear your thoughts.’

Cadman took a step back, accepting the warmth of the pieces of statue and glancing at the malevolent face of the moon.

‘No, no.’ The creature wagged a taloned finger. ‘The other one might see.’

‘What other one?’

‘The Technocrat of Aethir.’ The gargoyle gave a clacking chuckle. ‘Sektis Gandaw.’

Cadman was starting to feel like a flightless bird cornered by feral cats. ‘Anyone else?’

‘Besides the Dreamer shaman, the Archon, and a philosopher who thinks he can outwit fate, I think there is only one other, but you need not concern yourself with him yet. He is a patient player and has pursued Eingana for an eternity.’

The more Cadman heard the more he wished he’d never become involved. Maybe he should just give the pieces to this creature and have done with it. After all, what was oblivion compared with the horrors of the Abyss?

‘Not everyone means you harm,’ the gargoyle said. ‘Just those with more power. Think about it. If you find the rest of the statue, you’ll be top of the heap. You’d be able to crush them on a whim. You’d even be able to destroy Blightey.’

Now there was a thought. A world without Blightey. A world where Cadman didn’t need to hide away in anonymity. A world without fear.

‘But if I use the statue, they’ll find me,’ he said.

‘Only Sektis Gandaw draws near. Blightey has barely a whiff of Eingana, and he’s not all that interested.’

Probably bogged down with the day-job, torturing his way through the poor folk of Verusia in the hope of experiencing the tiniest spark of life.

‘Sektis Gandaw is your greatest threat,’ the gargoyle said. ‘Like you, he was once a pupil of Blightey’s, but he has far outgrown the master. You know what he plans for the statue? The Unweaving. It has always been his obsession—to unmake the cosmos and begin again. He seeks perfection; the sort of perfection that won’t include you or me.’

Cadman walked to the parapet and looked out across the dark forest.
What should I do? Back out now? Do I still have a choice?
‘What are you?’ he turned to the creature. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘I am the slave of two masters. My name is Ikrys. I am a child of the Abyss.’

Cadman stiffened.

‘Not everything that comes from the Demiurgos is bad,’ Ikrys said. ‘And besides, I have not seen my home for centuries. ‘He has kept me here,’ Ikrys’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘The same one who haunts you. I am Blightey’s unwilling servant. I must be seen to do his will, otherwise you know better than most what fate I can expect.’