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A Moment of Cruelty – Extract

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A Moment of Cruelty

Phil Kelly

Alabastian Valenth the First awoke to the surging patter of sleet on his bedroom window. He groaned, scratching his hip as his sleep-gummed eyes peeled open. Feeble light diffused through the musky fug that hung in his bedroom. Always so damn gloomy in Shyish. Not like Azyr. Not like the land of his true birthright.

Mhurghast’s sun had always been weak. It was why the mists lingered in the city’s streets so long. They made people-watching out of the Valenth mansion’s attic window, his favourite pastime when drink-ridden and melancholy, a rare indulgence. ‘A kind of morbid voyeurism,’ his best friend Harratio had called it. Perhaps there was some truth in that, for he had developed a habit of idly dwelling on peasants’ tales whilst staring into the mist. Tales of tortured phantoms and leering cannibals, of hungry things that could take human form and beasts that walked as men.

How wonderful it would be to have a proper summer to burn the mists away. Just a few weeks of undiluted Hyshian sunshine to put some colour in his pale skin and banish the dark thoughts. Was that too much to ask?

The young noble raised an arm, bleary-eyed. He turned the limb in the half-light, a master carpenter examining a pearwood carving fresh from the lathe. Still near perfect, even in his late twenties. Still wrinkle-free, blemish-free. Small wonder so many ingénues and princelings had shared his bed sheets of late.

Alabastian cut a dash in the high society of Mhurghast, and used his reputation as an eligible scion to full effect. In fact, in the recent past, he had been described by one of his admirers as magnificent. He smiled at the memory, stretching like a cat, then winced as a beam of afternoon sun crept into the corner of his eye. Admittedly he was not feeling quite so magnificent today, but given that he preferred to sleep alone – and had kicked out many a conquest during the small hours to ensure it – it hardly mattered. A slow, insidious headache was mounting an offensive on his frontal lobe, almost certainly thanks to another late night with Harratio and his viciously strong–

Pater Nagash! His costume meet!

Alabastian sat bolt upright in a tangle of stained silk, stomach lurching with a queasy bulge of vomit that he only just managed to keep down. How could he be so careless? He cast a bitter glance at Mother’s water clock by his bed, the Azyrite relic accusing him as usual with its constant drip, drip, drip. Three hours late. He reached over to turn the clock sideways, but his drink-torpor made him clumsy, and he knocked it into the cupboard instead. The intricate artefact spun away, bouncing hard off the chaise longue before shattering on the floor’s mosaic of bluestone and jet.

‘Damn it all.’

Slowly he felt his rage dwindle and pass into sullen languor and irritation. The floor was always a little too cold for his bare feet, no matter how much wood he had Maltratt burn in the hearth overnight. Now, with shards of broken glass scattered across it, it would be even more obnoxious to cross to the bathroom. And with Mother gone, he would have to get the staff to clean it up all by himself.

With a great, shuddering sigh, Alabastian hauled himself out of the other side of the bed. He stepped around the periphery of the room with exaggerated, careful steps. A shard of Azyrite crystal punctured the meat of his foot nonetheless. He hissed, breathing hard, before finding the splinter. His questing fingers yanked it out to send droplets of blood pattering onto the bluestone. A howl of pain echoed down the corridor.

Moments later the heavy thuds of the house guard shook the stairs.

‘Sire,’ came the voice of his head guard, Maltratt. ‘Are you hurt?’ She had a deep voice, for a woman, but given her wrestler’s build perhaps that was little surprise.

‘It’s just a splinter, damn it. You idle buffoons can go back to your card game.’

‘If you are sure you are well, sir, I will leave you,’ said Maltratt. She bowed stiffly, and made for the stairs. Xarantine, her second-in-command, met his gaze for a moment with a look of barely concealed contempt. ‘Our apologies for disturbing your morning exercise,’ she said, turning to follow her reporting officer back downstairs.

Maltratt was deferential enough, but her second-in-command had never liked him. Since Mother had passed away, the redhead hadn’t been afraid to show it.

‘Xarantine?’

‘What?’ she said, turning back with her eyes hooded.

‘Get Lassiter to prepare me a coach. I’m running late. I depart in fifteen minutes for the costumiers, to the very second.’

‘You gave him the day off, remember? After getting back so late last night.’

‘What? I don’t remember doing that.’

Xarantine raised an eyebrow, her lips pursed.

‘Fine then,’ he said, shaking his head to clear some of the muzzy spider silk of his headache. ‘I’m perfectly capable of walking there. I’m a grown man, after all.’

‘Very good.’ The guardswoman’s expression suggested he was anything but. Alabastian smiled mirthlessly, and slammed the door in her face.

The mist from the River Hisset rose over the Necrai Bridge like a revenant crawling from an open grave. Purple-grey, it curled its long fingers through the column-lined sides to cover the flagstones in a haze of clinging condensation. Beyond it the palace dominated the horizon, the baroque shadow of mansions built around it in the Azyrite style only just visible through the mist.

‘More like cursed Ulgu than Shyish, these days,’ muttered Alabastian. ‘Malerion’s breath everywhere.’ In truth the cool, wet mist was not near as dangerous as its Ulguan equivalent. It was a mere inconvenience rather than a hungering, sentient force. Yet the things it could hide gave him a delicious shiver of fear, the undead foremost amongst them.

Face your terrors, Mother had always said. Perhaps that was why he and Harratio had chosen to dress as long-skulled, blood-slicked gheists for the coming Lunaghast Ball, cushions stuffed under their tattered cloaks to give them the hunchbacked silhouettes of glaivewraiths. Legend had it the hunter-spirits were slow creatures, but that the spearing, piercing blades they held before them were inescapable. Much like Pater Nagash’s revenge. The young nobles had considered it an apt metaphor for their rise to prominence in Mhurghast society. Slow, but inevitable.

As he strode towards his rendezvous at the costumier’s, the mist’s chill grasped Alabastian’s shoulders and pushed its invisible talons into the meat of his chest. He pulled his jade pashmina tighter, tucking its ends into his doublet. Good cloth, he thought, distracting himself by admiring its pattern of interlocking Valenth heraldry. A fine garment with which to impress Harratio, and one with a story behind it, for it had been bought for a pittance from a desperate Azyrite seamstress. Yet against the penetrating cold of the Mhurghast night, it was about as much use as a lacy negligee.

A stooped shadow shuffled from the mist to his left, becoming a yellow-toothed woman with a missing leg. She was about Xarantine’s age, but had more in common with a stooped crone, presumably through the trials of what had obviously been a very hard life. Her smashed-up features were twisted into an eager expression, a brown plague-stain on her forehead as if she had been splashed with blood that she had never bothered to wash off.

‘Sally from the castle,’ she said. ‘Water for a tale?’

‘I think not.’

‘I can spin a fine yarn about the Old War, laddie, if you have a drop of aqua to loosen the tongue.’

‘None for you, wretch,’ said Alabastian. ‘I have better things to spend my money on than hot air.’

‘Sally from the castle!’ she shouted after him, as if he would bother to remember her name. His hand strayed to protect the leather-bound phials of aqua ghyranis at his waist. It was precious stuff. Even a few drips of the sacred water could cure a common ailment, or revive a dying rose with which to impress a paramour. Used as a currency across the realms, it was a mark of status to own even one full globe of the stuff. The Valenth dynasty had once owned three entire vats of it.

Alabastian moved to the other side of the bridge to get away from the deranged woman’s accusing glare, and found another shadow solidifying in the mist to his right. A threadbare blanket was spread out before a skeletally thin craftswoman, trinkets of Shyishan poormetal and crow’s bones tied with plaited hair spread across her cloth in an impressive fan pattern.

By the fact there were no gaps in the design, business had not been brisk.

‘Talisman for the young dasher?’

‘If you are living proof of the luck they bring,’ said Alabastian, ‘then I will firmly decline.’

More beggars and madmen lined the bridge, crooning or hawking their wares. They were almost certainly Reclaimed, those poor and underprivileged natives of Shyish who had somehow survived the reign of Chaos and, since the raising of the new cities, found refuge amongst the new wave of Azyrite settlers. They had a reputation for being unkempt, embittered and usually wounded, in mind if not in body.

Alabastian cursed his own tardiness. If he had woken up before late afternoon, he could have taken the Bridge of Nobles before it shut for the evening. He could even have stopped for a little gossip with Ghuara and the rest of the Black Halberds at Bridge’s End, so as to have something to offer Harratio.

Instead he was running the gauntlet of the poor and the disfigured, the madness of the Old War reflected in the eyes of those who had only just escaped it. He clucked in disapproval whenever a shadow approached him in the mist, and steered away, making for the central span to better avoid the living detritus at the bridge’s edge.

For a moment, the mist parted, and Alabastian’s eyes were drawn to the sparkling amethyst lights of the waterfront. All those high buildings and glass-roofed palaces made for a grand sight, their rain-slick obsidian gleaming with the moisture of the River Hisset.

‘Please,’ came a wheezing, phlegm-thick voice.

Alabastian nearly tripped over a kneeling figure, all but prostrate, on the flagstones.

‘A drop, sire. Please.’

The beggar was clad in a filthy green jerkin, head down as if in genuflection. A ratty, threadbare shawl covered most of his features, one eye staring out from the wrapping where the other was no more than a cataracted lump. The man’s arms were outstretched, lined with the most terrible sores, and his palms were offered up as if to receive a gift. Alabastian nearly choked in disgust as he saw the beggar was missing three of his fingers. The stumps were still wet with half-dissolute flesh, a fluid like off-white gruel dripping from the stubby remnants of his digits.

‘Please,’ hissed the apparition, his voice dry and hoarse. ‘Please. I beg of you. Just a drop.’

‘I think not,’ said Alabastian, staggering in his haste to get away. ‘Better luck in the next life.’

He pressed on, looking back to dispel a horrible, irrational suspicion the leprous beggar was crawling after him. He heard something skitter in the mist, and for a moment imagined the creature shuffling on all fours towards him at unnatural speed.

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