Deus Necros

“Redd. Protect me,” the master snapped. The command dragged a hook across Redd’s nerves. He pivoted and covered the man with his body even as iron bit again. The collar flared white and dimmed and his breath hitched.

More arms fell. Men who had never once thought about dying sober died without waking. A woman rolled toward warmth in her dream and did not feel the shadow spear that slid through her back. Incense scented the blood and made it taste sweet and wrong. Mercy came to the room disguised as numbness.

Bodies littered the ground as one after the other fell. The prince and Tull were stressing over the unfortunate situation, their eyes peeled for any incoming attack, but since they stuck to the walls, for some unknown reasons the arms never came their way.

The warning the young man named Reddos gave them had worked and they made use of it to stay out of harm’s way.

“Alex, we have to leave,” Tull said. He had never called the prince by name in a room like this. It slipped out because ceremony had no place here.

“Yes,” the prince said. “The board has changed. We are not the right pieces.”

“Protect me,” the leader cried again. A shadow spike took him in the shoulder and pinned velvet to bone. He screamed like a man who had never needed to scream to get his way.

Redd battered shadows aside with chained hands and caught one on the iron like a black fish on a hook. “I cannot hold him back for long. Unshackle me.”

“You will turn and cut my throat.” The boss whined.

“We die together if you wait any longer. Choose.”

The answer came as another spike. It took Redd’s left arm clean at the elbow. The same stroke punched through the leader’s ribs. His breath turned to a whistle. His eyes went wide as if he had discovered a trick in his own chest and did not like it.

“I free you,” he gasped. “I free you from your binds.”

The collar split and clattered to the floor. The shackles sprang, struck the stone, and rolled until they hit the leg of a table and lay still like dead snakes. The brand at Redd’s throat glowed and then dulled to a sullen red.

Redd closed his eyes and drew a deep breath that sounded like a chain being lifted from a well. Despite the torn arm and the pattern of cuts across his body, a weight slid off him that no healer could see. His spine stacked. His shoulders lowered.

“Unfortunate for you,” said the voice from everywhere. “Your freedom will be short.”

The floor budded with dark hands. They rose and struck in a set pattern, neat as a loom. Spears of shadow pinned thighs, chest, throat. Redd sat down hard, then fell over as if the strings had been cut from inside him. Blood poured in noisy sheets.

“Waste,” the leader whispered, stumbling toward a side door with one hand on his ribs and the other hand reaching for a god who did not know his name.

“Tull,” the prince said, listening past the screams to the sound of feet above. “Feel that.”

“I do,” Tull answered. “Something is coming up through him.”

The room went still. The shadow hands froze as if a watcher had lifted one finger. They turned by degrees toward the fallen boy and bunched like the shoulders of hunting dogs. Every blade stamped down together. Not one touched. Heat moved in the air as if someone had opened an oven that had been sealed for years. A shape rose above Redd. It was a woman and not a woman. Long hair lifted as if under water. Wolf ears pricked. The eyes were the color of night seen through leaves.

The blood flowed backward. It ran over floorboards and under cushions and up torn skin. It climbed the holes it had helped make and carried tissue with it, knitting as it went. Flesh sealed. Bone reformed. The missing arm grew ravenously back, bone and sinew, nerves and flesh then finally skin for it to return to how it was. Redd’s chest rose. He opened his eyes and they were a true red, bright as fresh crystals inside a mountain.

“It has been a long time since I felt this free,” he said. The voice was the same and not the same. A second breath lived inside it. He looked across the room until he found the place where the false one had smeared himself into shadow. “And you. Faker. You are not the Ludwig I know.”

He launched. He did not so much sprint as leave the ground in a straight line. He hit a blank wall and the wall ceased to be a wall. Plaster and wood and hidden brick erupted into dust. The other side looked like a kiln with its mouth broken. Something rolled silently from the debris, a dark mass that tried to be a man before it was ready. It skittered toward a darker seam.

Redd stepped through the hole with dust clinging to his hair. Wounds finished closing as he walked. “Better,” he said softly. “So the reports in the western dunes were true. You are the one who kills in someone else’s skin.”

“Interesting,” the shadow voice replied. “You are not fully taken by your kin, yet you carry this much strength. Why.”

“I owe you no answers,” Redd said. “You can die instead.”

He drove forward. The impostor unraveled and poured into the floor like oil sliding off glass. “I got no time to fight a brother!”

Tull moved before thought could lag. He let his body remember drills and long halls and polished floors. He slid across silk cushions and spilled opium and let the short sword ride his hip. The cut came from low to high and snapped through a neck that was not entirely flesh. The head bounced and rolled. The mouth laughed.

“Imperial swordsmanship,” it said through a broken grin. “I see.”

The pieces seeped into cracks and joined the dark. The man escaped through the seams as if he was never there in the first place. The room exhaled. Nothing moved for a count of five breaths.

“Damn,” Tull said softly. The word carried the weight of recognition. The impostor had recognized his swordsmanship. Names and schools were as loud as trumpets to the right ears.

Redd reached him and offered a hand. Tull took it. The grip was dry and strong and did not shake. He pulled Tull up, then looked to the prince with a small nod that carried more respect than a bow would have in this place.

“Strange to find you two here,” Redd said. “Strange and yet not.”

“You say that as if you know us,” Tull replied, though his eyes had already accepted the truth.

“Only a fool would fail to know the Second and his guard,” Redd said. His gaze moved from the prince to Tull and back. “I did not expect to smell your trail in this city. I am not sure whether to call it luck or trouble.”

“Both have been walking with us,” the prince said. He tilted his head and listened. Boots above. Shouts in a corridor that bent away. The rap of a baton on wood. “We should talk elsewhere.”

“Agreed,” Redd said. He stepped toward the ruined wall and then glanced at the leader who had crawled to a corner and hidden behind a screen that did not hide anything. “You will not hold this den much longer. The smell of blood will bring every hungry thing. If you live, change your work while you still can.”

The leader tried to shape an insult and found the breath would not come. He watched them with an animal’s flat hate and silence.

Jelal sat where he had fallen. The eyes were open and empty. The lamp beside him guttered once, then steadied. Incense still burned somewhere and sent a thin thread of sweetness into the copper air.

Tull sheathed the stolen sword, wiped his hands on a clean patch of robe, and looked to the prince. “Right or left.”

“Right,” Redd said “There is a service corridor behind that curtain. It will bring us to a drain that opens onto an alley near the saddle makers. We can buy space there.”

They crossed the room in a triangle, each man covering an angle that did not have a wall. They soon reached the end of the corridor, finding a staircase that led to what looked like the opening of a dry well. Once they jumped out they looked around, no one seemed to have noticed them.

They did not look back. The alley took them, the den settled behind them, and the city waited with its thousand eyes.

The young man named Redd seemed to know a lot of things, and since the two were coming for information. This was a good way to get some.