Memory 

The adventurer is old, grizzled, with dark scars and hair turned prematurely gray. Pistols hang from his belt in leather holsters, and a notched sword leans against the wall, pitted with use, spattered with old stains. His eyes are hardened from a lifetime in the wastes. He draws in a mouthful of smoke from his carved wooden pipe and fills his mind with memories.

He has seen a gruesome myriad of sights, gazed upon vistas of mutilated grandeur, hunted hideous and sometimes eerily beautiful monstrosities across the thousand twisted landscapes of the Slaughter-lands, conversed with corpses and things whose ancestors might once have been men. The Twilight Cities, those vast monuments that reared to stab at the rent and mottled skies, were the most stunning and the most horrifying, in their sheer density of life and death – ramshackle Lophius with its briny canals and its many malformed little gods; Erebh, poised over the pit, at the end of the world; Marainein with its thousand faded towers and its leprous god-king; Crepuscle with its carnival confusion of peoples and its bustling thoroughfares; the crazed clockwork and quivering spires of Skein; Moroi with its great tree and its blighted slums, teeming with the mad; the winding market-streets of Macellaria, ancient beyond reckoning, air thick with the cloy of blood and perfume; the black silence and discordant laughter of Somnambulon; the grim, alien hive of Dolmen with buildings like stony cobwebs. He has tasted each of them in turn and wandered far beyond their walls, from the shores the Fevered Ocean to the wailing rupture of the Suppuration.

His career was long, full of violence and strangeness. With a shade who fought in a suit of enamelled armour and a pair of witches, lovers, whose books brimmed with dark sigils – a catalogue of death, each eldritch vivisection or evisceration more exotic than the last – the mercenary had plundered the tombs of the Gengrymar, wiped out in the harrowflux plagues in the final centuries of the Desiccation, before turning to the cliffside mansions of the Uzull along the Serrated Coast, their bejewelled cities long claimed by the tides, leaving only a few seaweed-clad spires and derelict palaces along the broken shores, their marble façades yellowed and eroded. After one of the hexers was snatched by a roaming xsur – carried off to some distant eyrie to have her bones added to the barbed, leathery creature’s nest – and the other was devoured by a predatory fungus on the outskirts of the southern fens, he and the shade had traveled north, joined the caravan of some blind seeress on her way to the Gaunt City.

They’d trekked through the mutable randomness of the Tallow Plains evading the aggressive, feral architecture, grown wild in that fragmented space, haggling with the half-mad nomads of the region and repelling the occasional waxborn before arriving, at last, at the iron-clad and glyph-etched gates of the city, a place of asylums and vampire machines. He and the shade had parted and he’d headed north with a band of pilgrims bound for the Shrine of Sighing Winds.

On their way they’d passed through a village with huts fashioned from manskin and human bones, ruled by merciless ghilan elders grown corpulent with the flesh of their mortal tribe’s sacrifices, sitting in the dark of their macabre hall and gnawing on the remnants of their periodic carrion feasts. Later, aboard a clockwork train heading towards Skein, he’d helped defend their carriage from a group of brigands armed with kukri knives and flintlocks and poisoned scimitars, cruel-faced men in the employ of Red Gregory himself, a gunslinger warlord and a living legend. At the Shrine, awed by the daeva that resided there, he’d briefly become a neophyte, shaved his head and devoted himself to the Mysteries of Shaaltelathiel, learned herbcraft and meditated in the whispering stone gardens for a few months before growing bored with asceticism.

Then, in the shadow of the Slouching-devil Mountains, he’d chased bounties in the narrow gorges and scabrous badlands of the foothills, fought off wolves with tentacled maws and screeching harpy-crows with cherubic human faces, delved into the dank tunnels built by gigantic and long-dead architects. With a trio of hunters – a droll axeman with brooding eyes, a lilix pistolier, and a sarcastic swordsmen from the City of the Lamprey – he’d wandered eastwards towards the lands around the Sinew River, then north into Barrow Scrub. Here, in one of the subterranean ruins of the defunct cestoid Imperium, a surreal maze like the bowels of some enormous nightmare-creature, they’d joined a party of zealous Striga-worshippers to eradicate a cult of the wormfolk and their foolish human followers who’d been gutting the kidnapped children of a nearby settlement, spilling blood on the foul altar of the Ravager Worm. Later, pallid and weary with the sapping blanchphage of Etiolation, he’d glimpsed the petrified god itself, the great stone corpse of the god-leech Hirud – or so some claimed.

His travels brought him south, eventually, towards the frontier of Dour Erg. In an impromptu duel over a hand of cards in some dilapidated saloon he’d killed three men in cold blood and fled the justice of the thugs who ran the town, was caught, escaped, nearly died of thirst before crawling through the Butcher’s Gate of the Maggot City. After recovering from his ordeal he became a thief, picking pockets and breaking into storehouses with a rookery of men and women in Resurrection Row.

Later, jaded with such petty parasitism, he’d signed on with a Robber Guild and, for a time, worked with a callous ghul cutthroat-antiquarian and his hulking, stitch-work servitor, an obedient hunchbacked horror with piston-driven limbs and the grafted tail of a giant scorpion. Together they’d plumbed the ruins of the Second Tsathii Republic, drowned in the Red Ravishing, and the old, shattered kingdoms of Voldanc, destroyed by the Scourge Armies during the Membrane Wars, their castle-cities of Scrutatos and Vertegrazze left to crumble slowly into dust. Only the servants of the Voldanc masters remained, elementals bound to eternal servitude, endlessly repeating now meaningless chores in the empty manors of their creators, ignoring the mercenary and his companions as they gathered those few artefacts untouched by prior looters. A pack of fetch had torn the ghul limb from limb on the lonely trail back to Macellaria, the murderfolk swarming over the grave-spawn’s creation. The adventurer ran into the glowering dusk and killed all that pursued him, clutching the grimoire of a court warlock to his chest. He returned to thieving, took up with the leader of the rookery, an icy and ruthless woman who broke his heart and cast him out of the city.

He headed further south, back towards the swamps, fleeing love and death and memories, though all followed him as doggedly as Screamwood hounds. He sought comfort first with the courtesans of Per-Bashti, then with the gods of the Driftwood District. He became a priest again, this time to an aspirant insect-headed godling, but the deity’s shrine was ransacked by rival fanatics and he returned to his former profession.

Briefly he ran with a swordsman-poet, a hagman outcast, and a warrior-monk, tracking down leechkin who’d succumbed to the thirst in the sweltering, demon-haunted murk of the swamps. They dispersed when work grew infrequent and he joined the Pale Legion, a mercenary company based in Crepuscle drawn south by skirmishes between merchants selling to the zerda and the voracious mantid tribes of the Firesong Marches. He fought in a dozen battles and rose to the rank of corporal before being discharged for drunkenness in the City of Red and Black.

He exhales. The memories blur together, but one disjointed chapter of a long and bloody story...

A Wanderer 

For years the wanderer had known only silence and the banal umber endlessness of the vague wasteland. He had been traveling so long that he’d forgotten where he’d started, or why. At first he’s invented a new reason each day, a banishment or exile or quest, but as time went on the past dwindled and his mind wandered along with him. His was a grey existence, a world of blurred shadows, dust, and haze interrupted infrequently by a tombstone or a monolith or a meeting with some surreal creature. The few human (or human-like) beings the vagabond had seen were reduced to distorted figures scrawled in his memory, grown faceless and sinister as remembrance slipped inevitably away and his brain became a mottled, inward-looking thing, lost in its own dark, delirious passages. Only his most outlandish encounters had been burnt more vividly into his mind – these would take much longer to scab over and scar, or drown in the sewers of his subconscious.

Once he’d met a six-armed and carapace-plated man like a giant praying mantis, riding a wagon drawn by four mechanical horses that breathed smoke and flame. The insect-man had tried to sell him oddities: a skull with bloodstone eyes, an embalmed foot, a fob-watch with too many hands, a live, bottled spider, a tiny gilt statuette of a winged infant.

Another time he’d crossed paths with a troupe of dancers, each tattooed in garish colours and garbed in diaphanous silks, cavorting and cartwheeling through the waste. Their lips were sewn shut, each mouth stitched into a different expression; they wore jeweled masks that covered the top halves of their faces.

Yet another time he’d passed by a weeping chimera, a queasy, pitiful, raving monster that constantly changed its shape, flickering through different bodies like a fleshy kaleidoscope – now it had three limbs and a hairy visage, now a segmented tail, now a cluster of horns or extra eyes or wailing mouths, now a glistening chitin shell.

But mostly the waste was simply emptiness, flat and ceaseless and mute, carpeted with bones, with the remnants of past violence – a slaughter-land. There was something of the desert to it, and of the library, and of a dull, meandering dream verging occasionally on a nightmare. The sun and moon seemed only to rise and set out of habit. To speak took great effort. A desiccated limbo – a place of droning, half-heard echoes where time and size and sound seemed somehow soft, and moments ran together and dissolved.

And then, without warning, the City.

It crept up upon him wolfishly, like some huge, ineluctable predator – brooding on the horizon, like a robed stone colossus or a prowling monstrosity larger than the mind could hold. The vagabond was overwhelmed by its defiance, its brute repudiation of the horizontal waste. After the omnipresent flatness, the sudden appearance of such sublime, audacious verticality seemed obscene, even horrific. Tears streamed down the wanderer’s thin cheeks, and a sound cracked and then shattered the glassy silence, a fragile, eggshell sound, part sob and part laughter. He was surprised to discover that it came from his own mouth.

Suspicions circled vulture-like in the musty air before swooping down to gnaw at him. Was the City merely a mirage, the delusion of an unhinged mind? He knew that he was mad, had long been mad, perhaps always. He knew that his eyes were often untrustworthy, though never before had they conceived a vision of such lurid and convincing imagination. Or was the City something more dangerous than a mere phantasm? Was it was something subtler, more sinister – an illusion sent by cruel and whimsical deities to torment him, taunting him with the promise of civilization, of escape, of change, while always growing further away, forever just out of reach? He looked around, suddenly terrified. Had he finally died? Was this the underworld, this City his punishment – an eternity of seeking, never to arrive?

Had he been dead for years?

As he carried onwards the City drew closer, assuaging his fears somewhat. Detritus and ruins marked his approach: bent signs in dead languages, the rusting husks of ancient vehicles, more bones of humans and unlikely beasts, always more bones. Here and there a solitary wall might emerge from the blasted ground, its edges jagged and burnt.

After another eternity of walking the wanderer found a road, a decaying path half subsumed by the wasteland, impossibly old. The City grew larger with excruciating slowness, looming in the distance, quivering with waves of heat. He was a pilgrim, and the City quickly became something sacred. It was his God and his doom, though whether it would redeem or damn him he did not yet know; but as he came nearer a veil seemed to lift from his mind, a new clarity replacing the numbness of the desert.

He met others on the road, mostly solitary but a few in pairs or groups, heading in the opposite direction out into the emptiness behind him. It seemed that he had met them before, or others like them, in dreams or perhaps in the far distance of his past. A pretty, raven haired woman with a whirring mechanical arm traveled with a slimy beast with mouths on its palms whose toad-like skin blistered in the dry air; a man-thing shambled on clawed legs like a bird’s, stitched crudely to his thighs; a melancholy figure in a dusty white cloak and cowl dragged an enormous iron sword along beside him, his face hidden beneath his hood. There was a cart of corpses and a tattooed woman with a tentacled hand and a goggle-clad madman leaning on a copper staff, a gun-toting fox-man and a dyad of blue skinned imps and a yellow-eyed child who rode a chittering mechanical spider and smoked long, black cigarillos, puffing tendrils of smoke into the bruised twilight, a lumbering giant with iron skin plodding behind him. Some of these fellow travelers spoke to him (or themselves) in alien tongues, though the wanderer never answered.

Shuddering machines appeared in the distance, and cracked domes like huge boils on some behemoth fleshscape. After what seemed an aeon of walking the first plantations sprung up on either side of the road: rough, scrap-fashioned farms with withered crops and fields of fissured hardpan earth. At first the farms were abandoned, the bones of livestock and farmers alike overgrown with weeds and fungi, houses with beams like fragile bones and black sockets for windows, with roofs collapsing under their own weight and walls torn apart by creepers, planks sloughing off into clouds of orange wood-dust. Huge ravens and raven-like things infested these cadaverous places, picking at the dead.

Later, the plantations began to show signs of habitation, and leather-skinned farmhands would stare at the wanderer while they fed ugly pigs with matted hair or milked emaciated aurochs or queasy bovine-shaped darknesses. Here the shadow of the City grew oppressive, and the sky swirled with a constant pall of smog. He could make out the shapes of gargantuan chimneys, sprouting out from the main bulk of the towers, which now he could see were actually clusters, conglomerations of buildings piled atop each other without any apparent design or artistry. The hiss of those great chimneys rose up from the City over the murmur of lowing cattle and the yowls of the feline things like hairless cats that haunted the hinterland in packs. A thrumming beat like the tread of a million footsteps or the syncopation of a demoniac machine could be felt through the ground.

As the wanderer walked the road towards the City he began to delineate its details, its endless intricacies. Towers thrust themselves skyward in a thousand needling points, spined skeletons of glass and grey stone. Structures slumped rust-red and variegated, shimmering crimson in the sunlight; conglomerates were wreathed in smoke, all brass and brick and belching pipe. Neon signs winked and domes of cracked marble gleamed wetly like broken skin.

Soon he came to the shanties. They coalesced from the ruins and farmland in patchwork aggregations, coagulating out of the dust and debris and rising up in ramshackle layers – a mishmash second city of wood and rope and mud spreading out beneath its stony parent, tumorous and uninhibited. At night the shanties wallowed in the buzzing artificial light of the towers and seethed with a rustic vitality. Here and there a distant suggestion of movement in the City itself broke the statuesque stillness momentarily.

At night the City was ablaze with light. The stars faded, consumed by its luminescence. The sky glowed about the horizon, softening into twilight.

Just a Squall 

It started with a smell in the air. You could taste it on the wind – a metallic tang, like copper. The sky began to dim. A distant thunderclap echoed across the endless dusty plain. Some thrice-damned fool gawping at the gathering darkness muttered that it looked like rain.

Then, in the distance, the mist. Not normal fog, thick and gray or gray-green or sallow, nor black like smoke, nor the brown haze of a dust-storm, but red. Abattoir red; a seething, roiling crimson.

We took cover as it drew closer, threw tarpaulins over the caravan, the damn horses neighing and pawing the hardpan. Already you could hear it, that steady roar, pounding the desert, mingling with the crackle of the storm-clouds, getting nearer. It churned the ground to viscous mud and the cracked, thirsty plains sighed like a lover and drank in the downpour.

And then it was upon us, out of clear sky, a torrent of it – the Red Rain. It fell in dense sheets, covering everything with its sanguine slick, like some enormous beast had been slaughtered overtop us, or the godsdamned sky itself was bleeding.

Some idiot hireling we’d picked up back in Macellaria got caught out in the thick of it. They say the change is supposed to be invisible, but I’d swear you could see something happen – a hunching of the shoulders, a sudden cruelness about the eyes, a smirk stealing across the thing’s red-streaked face, mouth dribbling the stuff. Every hand went to his gun, tore the fetch in half a dozen different directions, like a puppet being wrenched about, staggering in the muck, clutching his steaming guts and then falling in a twitching heap. It lay there hissing for nearly a minute while we reloaded, crawling towards us with one hand cradling its entrails and its teeth bared and its eyes full of evil till someone put a bullet between them and spattered its brains out the back of its skull.

Like that’d been a cue the Rain let up, moved westwards. We were lucky; we only had a squall. Sometimes the Rain’ll last for hours, even days. They say during the Ravishing whole cities got drowned, streets swimming with red, those that survived the first downpour murdered by family and friends. Puts it in perspective for you.

One lousy sellsword doesn’t seem so bad.

Excerpt from Country of Bad Dreams 

Five

They are in badlands. Wastelands, broken lands. A desert place of dust and demons, stranger things. Ravaged-lands, Slaughter-lands. There are five of them, the travelers, led by a scavenger prince, a king amongst thieves, a lord of tomb-robbers. Hellsteeth, they call him; an affectation of such naked braggadocio it would be absurd were it not for the man’s reputation. Hard eyes peer from a weatherbeaten face, features like chiseled, porous rock-slabs, thin-lipped mouth fixed in a rigid line that twitches at the corners, the ghost of a smile. He coughs, growls, presses onwards into the desolation. Klet at first found it hard to reconcile the scope of legendry surrounding the man with the grizzled, leathery creature that leads them. His incredulity has given way to a near-reverent awe.

The others are less illustrious. There is Somija the hagman, androgynous and green-skinned. His (her? its?) dreadlocks swing in the parched wind. A hex purrs and pulses about its body, moistening, keeping the amphibious witch-warrior hydrated. Once Klet saw it kill an errant fetch with no more than a glottal articulation that left the once-human an empty skin-sac, blue smoke leaking out of mouth and ears and nostrils.

Beside the hagman lumbers Yx, ponderous with muscle-grafts, his head comically undersized atop a gruesomely rippling physique, puckered with odd piercings, with ornate and sometimes quivering tattoos. Huge, calloused fists curl and uncurl; massive boots stir up sallow clouds. Yx prefers to kill with his bare hands. No gentle giant, this one.

Then Oor-Kesh, the shade, an expert marksman, reeking of incense, an old and deadly thing. Oor-Kesh has a man’s body so Klet thinks of him as male. Flesh tanned to a kind of dark ochre colour, dyed in places, stitched in others. The grave-spawn moves mummified limbs as if directed by an unseen puppetmaster, but this jerking, staccato motion does not impair the thing’s aim. He tells esoteric or simply unwholesome jokes – What’s the best time to eat human flesh? When you’re hungry! – and laughs an unnerving, withered laugh that sounds like a man choking. Hellsteeth seems to respect the shade; they speak in dry murmurs to each other, nod knowingly. Oor-Kesh must walk beneath a heavy black umbrella and garb itself in a black leather suit, or the sunlight will expel it from its host.

Klet is the most callow, a barely blooded youth, pugnacious and eager for notoriety. His body is unaugmented. He has only a vague understanding of their mission. A gnawing fear eats at his innards, as mean and tightly coiled as a parasite. He fights it with cheap rum and posturing and garrulous, pretended nonchalance, hefting his borrowed weapons with unearned bravado. He strives desperately for the detached ennui of Hellsteeth, cultivates the man’s seemingly effortless melancholy with fervent emulations, hoping to somehow mimic that unstudied calm.

They stay close together, these five, traveling along obscure roads, across the world which the Lamenters of the Weeping Lady call the Cadaverous Earth, leaving the bodies of abominations and unlikely predators in their wake. They make their way deep into the Slaughter-lands, into a country of bad dreams.

Tallow Plains

For awhile they skirt the Tallow Plains, at the edge of the frontier. The landscape is unstuck, moves in sudden eructations, mottled with feral architecture, with rogue topography gained some unfathomable sentience.

– Shift is weak here, Somija says with authority. Pretty stable.

Klet blinks. The Plains make him nauseous, buttes and mesas bubbling into one another, gentle hills oozing like quicksand. Space here has grown viscous, malleable. The mutancy of the place is retch-inducing.

They fight a waxborn. It gibbers from many maws, speaks a polygot of curses from mouths human and hag and leechkin. It ejaculates a babbling verse of nonsense-poetry from one pair of plump, manicured lips – Spiderwalking mudeater!/ Gloam-blooded shadowman!/ What kind of thing are you? – till the lips close and reopen as eyelids for a slitted, reptile orb.

Its limb rearrange themselves in a fluid analogue to the miscible scenery – scorpion-claw, taloned fingers, tentacle, bone-spur. Its rotund belly (now, scaled, now feathered) dangles with ropy things that might be entrails or genitals or perhaps merely a nest of writhing tails.

They attack it with bullets, with fire-arrows, with a barrage of tissue-melting spells, dancing out of range of its windmilling, multifarious arms. The waxborn’s body cleaves and reforms beneath their assaults. Finally Yx lobs a round bomb towards it, a dull-looking grenade that explodes in a yellowish blast. The waxborn ignites, incandescent and flailing. It smells like a kitchen-full of roasting meats. Klet is sickened by his own salivation, until the smell of burning hair nearly makes him gag. He suppresses the urge to vomit, terrified that his companions might think him weak.

They press on. The light from the bloated morning sun warbles.

Still Growing

They pass through a tangled field that seems to sprout corpses like demented plants, or scarecrows. The stench is horrible. The earth is spattered with their secretions.

– Body-farm, Hellsteeth comments. Cultivar serfs.

– Surprised they’re still growing, Oor-Kesh says. He fondles a rotting limb and the owner twitches and moans. The shade twirls his umbrella daintily, like a parasol, picks his way across the leprous field.

– They’re alive? Klet, who has grown up surrounded by the nightfolk, is aghast.

– They’re wilting, says Hellsteeth, as if this explains things. – They’re still healthy enough to reproduce. He points out fetal saplings, making Klet shudder.

– The field’ll be barren in a few years.

– Didn’t know they got this far north, Yx grunts. The graftpunk is unperturbed by the foulness around them. – Thought the Technocracy got pushed back by the cestoids.

– Could be just an outpost, says Hellsteeth. Probably a Spire round here somewhere.

Klet is lost. He is constantly bewildered by the depth of historical knowledge possessed by even the most brutish scavengers, like Yx. Hiding his ignorance is difficult. He suspects that sometimes they mock him in secret, speaking in a flurry of ancient names and battle sites as if in Alley-speak or some other cant-tongue, their references beyond him.

– There’s nothing here, says Hellsteeth. Smell’ll attract things. Let’s keep moving.

The others grumble their agreement. They move out, as the dusk begins its glowering descent, sky yellowing and then purpling like a bruise in reverse, deepening into black.

Artistry 

The thing in the vat regarded its creator with the vacuous stare of an infant. The fleshcrafter did not meet this dull, wet gaze but fiddled instead with the complex controls of a nearby console, tapping at keys and swearing beneath his breath. A moment later a hissing sound filled the large, domed chamber; and then fire erupted in the vat, and the creature screamed, flailing its limbs for a moment before the flame consumed it. Only a skeleton remained, charred and malformed, scraps of burnt flesh still clinging to the blackened bones. The witch sighed. Another failure – another day wasted.

Rowan Moray was not registered with the Splicing Guild near the Witch’s Gate. He was a freelancer, and if the Guildsmen ever noticed him, they would burn his studio to the ground with him still in it. That he ate into their profit margins was enough to invite their hostility; that he operated beyond the pale of Guild protocol and regulation, refusing their arbitrary restrictions and small-minded narrowness of scope. Fortunately, his business was small-scale, a back alley tissue-shop on the outskirts of the Skin Markets near the border between Wormhive and Velveteen Circus in downtown Macellaria, far from the Guild Citadel in Hexwarren and its chambers of slick, echoing stone.

Rowan’s studio was expansive and many-chambered. Space was far from precious in the City of Bodysnatchers: hundreds of rooms were deserted, whole streets and sectors inhabited only by rats and spiders. He had selected a three-leveled complex in a confusing block of musty streets, in the shadow of a Wormhive spire. A pair of bronze titans, sibling fire-bringers and obscure trickster gods, supported the arched entranceway, crowned with a buzzing neon sign: Body Modification – Grafts, Fleshsculpting & Augmentation. A narrow antechamber followed, lit with the sepia glow of a fitful, naked bulb; through a hexagonal door (magnetically sealed while the shop was closed) was the shop level, its high ceiling lost in darkness, its wares displayed under lamps filtered yellow or crimson, like exhibits in a museum or, perhaps, sideshow attractions – as befitting their grotesquerie.

One display case held a hand with seven fingers and bruise-purple flesh, with long talons black as obsidian, wires feeding it liquids or draining them out; beside it, another case held a mask of pale, living skin, a beautiful woman’s visage placed over a mannequin head. In a larger tank a selection of newly-assembled creations bickered over a rat’s carcass, while a two-headed snake with a pair of human faces hissed in its cage and uncoiled its iridescent, bifurcating body, a piece inspired by the naghini of the Bluebottle Archipelago. There was a selection of limbs and organic weapons, fangs and bony spurs and stinging tendrils. There were lungs that could breathe smoke or water, hearts that could beat faster, de-tox implants and glandular batteries of drugs – all perfectly preserved, kept alive through an ingenious system of tubes and electric stimulations. The lamplight shone through the thin layers of flesh, dappling the domino-tiled floor with sallow illumination.

He catered to two distinct demographics. The first was composed of street-level thugs and toughs looking for an advantage in a brawl or bar-fight – a bit of grafted muscle, an extra limb, steel claws and the like. Rowan considered this hack-work, the necessary toil to keep his establishment running – scum of the sort he dealt with paid in cash, and their jobs were quick, crude, and simple. This sort of augmentation would be ignored by even the most vigilant Guild agent: it was simply too commonplace, too ubiquitous, the work of common graft peddlers in back-alleys or Tatterdemalion Court.

The second clientele base he maintained was considerably smaller and a great deal more affluent, the sort that would attract the ire of his larger, more powerful competitors if discovered. This second class of customers – foreigners, aficionados, even some Fleshmongers looking to acquire some particular perversion on the cheap – ordered strictly by commission, and their requests took weeks if not months to complete. But these commissions, while invariably strange to the point of grotesquerie, were far from hack-work. They were, at least in Rowan’s mind, his masterpieces – they were works of art.

Inchoate 

The celestial sap of the Elder Tree pulsed in his veins, filling him with eldritch light, a suffusion of divine nectar, throbbing in time to his heartbeat – primordial, transcendent, eternal. Sketching an arcane character in the air with the articulated finger of his clockwork gauntlet – sigil scribed, twined with cabalistic wires feeding into his bloodstream – the aspiring witch Magnus Shacklebane muttered the invocation fervently, his eyes clouded with tenebrous puissance, the bloodstone in his right fist sizzling, scorching his leather glove. Laboriously he pronounced the prolix syllables of the incantation, giving each torturous, convoluted phrase of the formula its proper weight, affecting the serpentine sibilance appropriate for the ritual.

The air before him shimmered. Behind his square glasses Magnus’ eyes widened, glowing with sepulchral light. The distortion intensified as the adolescent witch continued the invocation, gesturing with his gauntlet and holding forth the bloodstone. There was a queasy smell – brimstone, copper, burning blood, the syrupy reek of nectar. A vague manifestation half-solidified: a grotesque but monstrously charismatic visage, at once gibberingly mad and unfathomably wise, its eyes sublime voids. For one ephemeral moment those abyssal eyes stared back into Magnus’ own; but then, as the bloodstone singed through his impskin glove to burn bare flesh, the would-be witch’s tongue stumbled over a single whispered syllable. The face flickered; the bloodstone slipped from Mangus’ hand and fell to the floor, where it shattered into a thousand iridescent shards. The face, only a hazy insinuation, melted into a wisp of red smoke.

Gaolor 

The witch unlocked the door to the cellar and began his descent, one hand trailing along the decaying brick wall, the other grasping a glossy black taper for light. Flesh-colored boots padded down the slime-slick stone steps. In the candle’s flicker the witch’s face was thrown into unnerving chiaroscuro, its hard lines sharpened, violet-stained smirk made crueler, wolfish yellow eyes more predatory. The trailing hand tapped at the crumbling brickwork with long, black nails.

At the bottom of the stairs the candlelight bloated to fill the high corners and skeletal vaulted curves of the basement with a swollen gothic glow. A legion of shadows sprung forth from the dim recesses to cavort along the walls, caressing the grotesque marble gargoyles with lithe, black fingers. The witch used his taper to light other candles about the room; the shadow-dancers withered and diminished.

In the center of the floor, surrounded by a chaos of scrawled inscriptions, engraved wards, and circles of red powder, the creature squatted in a cage of black iron, peering at the witch through the bars with coldly hateful eyes. It stroked its wrist with a seven-fingered hand and hissed.

“Hello, Marquis Naberius,” the witch said, revealing a mouth full of sharp white teeth. “I have questions for you.”

The creature shifted its weight in its cage before venturing forth into the light. A huge black raven’s head sat on a slender body with dark purple skin etched with livid orange tattoos, like lines of flame. The lower half was coarse and hairy, with canine paws and tail.

“Music!” The creature demanded, its voice welling with weird echoes, as if it were speaking across a long distance, or from deep underground.

“How ill-mannered of me,” the witch apologized. “One moment, my good Marquis.” He crossed the Court – careful not to break the protective markings on the floor – and withdrew a small wax cylinder from a pocket of his long coat, which he inserted into a polished phonograph. A strange, haunting music something like a nocturne began to play, filling the room with spectral voices and the spindly plucking of strings.

“Ahhh…” The raven-headed thing sighed. Its long digits traveled up and down one sinewy arm, lingering at the shoulder where black feathers segued into smooth humanoid flesh.

“And now then, my excellent –”

“Hush!” The creature commanded, eyes squeezed shut, listening. The witch’s mouth twitched in irritation, but he allowed his captive several minutes to savor the lush macabre textures of the music. While he waited he smoked a long cigarillo plucked with splendidly manicured fingers from an enameled ebony case.

Soon the air was filled with wraiths of pungent blue smoke. The Marquis was making shadow-puppets on the wall, its fourteen spidery fingers contorted into fanciful configurations – lion, three-headed wolf, winged serpent, a man and woman copulating. A tremor of disgust and, beneath, quiet fear traveled down the witch’s spine. He twirled a black ringlet of his wig, and reminded himself of the wards he’d placed, the sigils he’d spent days laboring over before binding the creature to a corporeal manifestation. Were a stray rat to evade the clutches of his vermin-catching homunculi and break even one of the circles… He dismissed his anxieties as the Marquis stirred.

“Very well,” it consented. “Ask your precious questions, mortal.”

Hubris 

The sickly sky above Lophius glowered and spat, swollen rainclouds fit to burst, threatening to engulf the disjointed streets with a torrential downpour. The canals were already flooding, the mossy bridges of granite and marble lapped at by the murky waters, the feet of their decorative statues immersed. Out over the Sallow Seas distant thunder cackled, promising a storm. No ships would sail from the docks of Bile-Mire or Chainwater tonight, lest they join the wooden carcasses in the Driftwood District.

The Gland River battered the pillars of the Bridge of Bravoes, swirling about the huge statues supporting the ancient bridge before rushing out to the open sea. In the midst of the worsening downpour two men regarded each other while the crowds behind them jeered and shouted, humans shivering in the rain, hagmen turning their greenish faces upwards, exulting, black-clad ghilan mute and motionless.

“Draw steel, wormfood,” Iccelus sneered. The graftpunk moved with predatory grace, brandishing the glyph-etched rapier Red Laughter and an evil-looking dagger, crooked backwards in his off-hand. He twirled the curved knife and snarled taunts at his opponent. “Corpse-fucker. Halfman. You should scuttle off to Bad-Fen where you belong, or go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.” There were cheers from the crowd. The young man’s black eyes flashed as he walked forwards, blade held out before him, grafted muscles taut beneath tattooed flesh. “You heard me. Haul your maggoty arse off or I’ll send you back to the pit what spawned you.”

The other figure said nothing but favoured the youth with a sharp-toothed and yellowed grin. He removed his tinted spectacles and drew his sword from its scabbard with deliberate slowness, rasping the blade against the tough manskin sheath and assuming a creeping sidelong stance. A broad-brimmed black hat slouched across his features, shading his face and warding off the rain and the hateful sun; drops of water beaded on his brown leather outfit and pattered off the sewn-in steel disks. Behind the pale fighter were more of his ilk – gray-skinned, dour spectators with mocking amber eyes.

Iccelus’ shaved head gleamed wetly. His many earrings jangled as he advanced, drunk with rage and fear. With a wordless howl he hurled his dagger; it spun through the air in a silvery arc, thudded into the living man’s adversary. The ghul wrenched it from his chest with a smirk and licked the naked blade clean.

“Thrice-damned unman freak!” Iccelus’ face contorted with a paroxysm of raw hate. He danced forward and lunged in a spasm of grafted muscle, his augmented calves writhing. Red Laughter darted out, impossibly fast, bathed in a crimson aura of eldritch energy – and then spun from its wielder’s grasp, knocked aside by the ghul's own blade. It clattered on the flagstones of the bridge and shattered, the demoniac spirit bound within dissipating in a brief ghost of brimstone smoke. Its sigils, previously a blazing red, grew dull.

There was a shimmering blur as the grave-spawn duellist riposted, and Iccelus’ shout of frustration turned to a choked gasp. He clawed at the sword now skewering his throat, gurgling; blood dribbled from his mouth. The ghul swordsman chuckled and wrenched his sword from the graftpunk’s neck. Iccelus fell to the ground and lay still, the pool of blood spreading beneath him already being washed away by the rain. The crowd’s yells died with the youth. They began to back away with suddenly fearful looks.

“Ah, the heady confidence of the young and the living,” the ghul rasped, his voice like snakeskin. He twitched his head and two of his men walked forward, seizing Iccelus’ body by the ankles. “Dinner’s on me tonight, boys.”

Brutality 

Nhar’s gauntleted first smashed for the final time into his opponent’s mouth and applause burst into the air around him as if some intangible caul had been ripped asunder, inundating the arena with noise. He stood there, allowing the after-fight euphoria to suffuse him, bolstered by the spectators’ approval. He let the steely glow in his eyes fade, ushered the unthinking animal part of himself, relieved and uncomplaining, back into its cage. Below him the pulverized remnants of the other combatant twitched in an eerie dance macabre, thrumming its many limbs. Its face was a pulpy, spurting ruin.

Nhar breathed deep, inhaled the heady smells of the Pulsetown pits: the sourness of cheap drink, the faint smolder of smoke from the Temple’s chimneys, and beneath it all that omnipresent, primeval smell of blood, blood, blood, fresh and red and steaming in the arid air, the smell of birth and death and struggle, the quintessence of life, conflict, victory... He spat triumphantly, a glob of saliva and his own blood spattering contemptuously into the spreading puddle saturating the sands.

His dripping fists unclenched.

Celerity 

It was hot – hot like the world had caught a fever, was sweating it out in the quivering air. Everything was twisted with that queasy, shimmery haze, like you were looking at the reflection of the world in a warped mirror. People were black shapes like children’s drawings, undulating, jerking in and out of focus, faceless and faintly menacing; buildings writhed and loomed out over the steaming street, looking somehow hungry, coiling and uncoiling as you drew nearer; the corpulent sun snarled down out of the bleached and raw-blue sky. You couldn’t think, in heat like that – your thoughts seemed to boil and your mind was like sludge, your memories flowing together wet and slippery as runny eggs, yolks popping in the heat, bursting in your brain, frothing out of your ears and nose and bubbling through your pores. Time got thick and tarry; seconds stuck together. Anything black burnt to touch.

High above a Hexwarren street a window shattered and rained down shards of glass even as a figure tore out of the hole like a bullet. The thin, grinning man landed on heavy-booted feet and dashed down the street with uncanny quickness, almost too fast for the eye to follow. In the slowed-down crawl of moments made viscous by the heat his hexed speed became a kind of violence, bruising the air with after-images as the man ducked around carriages and carts, weaving in and out of the motley crowd, round a whip-stitched servitor reeking of formaldehyde, a blind gutter witch who conjured a feeble dust-elemental before a crowd of gawkers, a ghul in a white suit buying books from a street-seller, shading himself from the sun with a frayed umbrella. The running man grasped something tightly to his chest.

Half a breath after the building had spat the quick man out of its upper storey a blast of green, eldritch flame blew the rest of the wall away and spewed sulphurous smoke into the street. A second figure emerged with a roar from the green pall, hulking and heavy, shoving passersby out of the way as he stomped after his quarry. A huge man in a brown leather coat, his lips and hands singed from his spell, already growling some fresh incantation.

Round a corner, down a back-alley, over a rotting wooden fence, up a flight of worn stone steps – Cythos laughed as he wound his way deeper into Macellaria, revelling in his own agility. Only have to make it to Resurrection Row. He heard, vaguely, the pound of the bounty-hunter’s footsteps behind him, an echoing boom as the thieftaker blew through the fence. With simian dexterity Cythos swung up onto a low balcony and then shimmied up to the slate rooftop, digging grafted climbing-nails into the plaster and hauling himself up, then scurrying across the tiled expanse of roof and leaping to the next building. He made it half a block before he heard the thud of his pursuer on the tiled roof behind him. He glanced back but kept running; the hunter was moving fast, channelling as he made his huge, ungainly jumps between buildings. Cythos ducked as the witch sent a swirling hex like a nest of effervescent serpents towards him; the spell struck a chimney and reduced it to a pile of corroded, molten slag.

Cythos jackknifed across a narrow alleyway and whipped out his pistol as the assassin gained on him. Even as the end of the block drew closer the wiry thief squeezed off three shots, swore as a hastily invoked shield of force incinerated the bullets a few feet from his enemy’s body. Cythos skidded to a halt and scrambled down from the roofs, into Murrain Square, still, impossibly, holding the bundle to his chest; the imposing spires of the Fane of Dust rose up in the distance. Graft pedlars scattered and clutched at their gruesome wares as Cythos ran across the square, followed closely by the giant man behind him. A stray hex caught one merchant square in the chest, dissolving his flesh and leaving only a blackened skeleton behind.

Through the square, down another flight of steps, into a side-street – to a dead end. Cythos swore, turned even as a massive fist hurtled towards his head. He dodged, wrenching his neck to the side, felt the man’s arm sail just past him. He tumbled backwards and brought up his foot behind him, kicking the man in the chest, then spun round and jabbed two fingers into the brutish witch’s eyes. The assassin stumbled back, stunned, and Cythos brought up his pistol, emptied his last three shots into his would-be killer’s face.

Breathing hard and wrinkling his nose at the stench of burning flesh Cythos quickly checked his assailant’s body, cursed when he found the tattoo on the back of the man’s hand – a black heart, wreathed in green fire. He shivered.

“Well fuck me,” he whispered to his prize, the polished-black skull that stared up at him with empty sockets. “You must be bleeding priceless for someone to hire the fucking Shroud to get you back.”

Drawing a cloak around him despite the heat he slunk out from the alley and dissolved into the chaos of the city, clinging to the cool and obfuscating shadows.

Vanity 

With its chitin-plated, iridescent walls, its nacreous floor, and the cavernous sweep of its ceiling, the great ballroom of magister Pyrach-Quin achieved a glistening resplendence. Lamps and tallow candles filled the room with a rich green gloom; lush, lively music echoed about the curving organic walls. The masked guests revolved around the ballroom in languid circles, or else lingered on the balconies outside.

Belphora sipped her drink and gazed at the crowd, taken aback by the strange spectacle. Beside the magistras she felt a grey and tawdry thing even in her best finery. Each had a dress more vivid and luxurious than the last, silk gowns cut in a hundred styles and dyed a vibrant myriad of colours, blood reds and midnight blues and soft ebon blacks, golds and greens and purples layered with lace and satin, bejeweled with sewn-in opals and pearls and carnelians. Many had necklines swooping lower than Belphora might have considered seemly, but the magistras wore them without shame, draping themselves with silver and enjoying the effect their naked flesh had on those around them. The men were equally magnificent in coats of red and black and dark green, with ivory buttons and ringleted curls – though they inspired self-consciousness rather than jealousy. And all of them had their familiars, monstrous and sometimes beautiful things somewhere between pets and status symbols.

Each was unique, sharing only the sigil-etched collars and silver chains with their brethren, led in elegant configurations around their owners during the dances, taking care not to entangle the dancers with their chains. A shadowy thing whose limbs blurred when it walked paced about its magister like a well-trained hound; a hulking, muscular creature with a ferret’s head and crimson skin stood with its arms crossed beside its owner; an eyeless, gray-skinned demon whose fingernails were knives muttered from a mouth crowded with tusks; a plump imp with bulbous compound eyes and a baby’s pudgy limbs fluttered on oversized dragonfly wings by its magistra’s shoulder, whining and mewling until it was fed from a tray of sweetmeats.

“Some more wine, milady?” The voice was gentle and urbane, but Belphora nearly screamed when she turned to its owner, a tall, flayed figure whose face was a horned skull, holding out a silver pitcher in one skinless hand. A purple tongue flicked out from between the grinning teeth. She stuttered the beginning of a reply and the familiar's magister turned, eyes dark behind his half-mask.

“Fornus, you are scaring the young lady,” the man said. “Behave yourself.” His familiar bowed demurely and turned away.

“No, no, it’s all right.” Belphora could feel blood rushing to her face. “I was just – startled.”

“I apologize for my demon. Some find his appearance alarming.” The magister was tall and spare, perhaps a bit older than she was, based on the silvering hair at his temples. “You can call me Sorn. It’s much easier to pronounce than my formal name.”

“Belphora. My father is Lord Vlesnk… of the Northern Baronies.”

“Ah of course. You speak our tongue well.” He smiled as her blush deepened, his painted lips curling at the corners. “Your father – a liegeman of the Revenants, yes? Have you seen the Sleepwalker’s City?”

“Once. It was… quiet. Not what I expected from a city so large.”

“Mmm. I trust you’ll find Skein a bit livelier. Would you care to dance?”

She nodded shyly, then – abandoning her drink to Fornus – took Sorn’s arm and let herself be led into the next dance. The familiar followed at a distance, a discrete if somewhat macabre shadow.

The dance was intricate; more than once Belphora nearly stumbled, but Sorn merely smiled and pulled her onwards, ignoring her missteps.

“You are here with your father’s retinue?” His eyes – she saw now that they were dark green, rather than black as she’d thought at first – gleamed in the mask’s sockets as he raised his arm to twirl her, placing one gloved hand in the small of her back to help turn her round.

“N-no… he is conducting business. In the Saffron Ward, I think. We were given invitations, but –”

“But your father disapproves of this sort of revelry. You are here without his permission.” Sorn chuckled and shook his head as she turned again. “I suppose he thinks us a pack of debauchees, drinking madwine and corrupting innocent young women.”

She stammered and blushed again; Sorn laughed and pulled her back into position. “Do not fret, Belphora. Your secret is safe with me.”

They crossed the room, turned again, switched positions, crossed back – and then the music stopped. The players took up a new tune, dark and heady – a nocturne. “Shall we get some air?” Sorn gestured to an arched doorway where a sultry blue-haired magistra and her many-armed familiar chatted with a long-haired ghul in the black robes of a sacerdos. Belphora found herself obeying Sorn without thinking. Each time their eyes met she felt a strange sensation, a kind of pleasant drowning, as if her fears and anxieties were being washed away, or sucked from her body like bad blood by a leech. Suddenly she felt as bold as the magistras, shedding her worries like a shawl. How dare her father forbid her to come? She would not be treated like a child anymore, would not have to slink away like a thief, guilty and furtive. When Fornus handed her back her glass she drank deeply.

The doorway led to a curved balcony; the city spread itself below, glittering in the night, the factory Wards steaming, the gaudily lit pleasure districts alive with tiny milling figures, the occasional spurt of fireworks. They stood silently and drank in the midnight panorama, listening to the nocturne’s velvet melodies. Out on the black surface of the Radula she could see the lights of distant ships. Behind the river rose mountains, craggy and sinister. Belphora shivered.

“The mountains have an ominous look to them,” she said, wrapping her arms about herself. Sorn placed a warm hand on her bare shoulder, caressed it almost imperceptibly; Belphora did not seem to notice.

“The Slouching-devil Mountains are often grim at night. They are full of monsters – but you are safe from them here.”

“They make me uneasy.”

“You should see the view from my own tower. It is taller than this one, and faces south – across the plains.” He drew back her hair with one strong, white hand, exposing her neck. Her eyes half closed; she found his voice hypnotic. Behind the, Fornus stood in the shadows – Belphora had forgotten him entirely. Sorn’s voice was close to her ear; she could feel his breath on her neck. “You cannot see the mountains at all. Would you like that, Belphora?”

Her eyes were closed, her head tilted; she murmured something, vaguely, and then his lips were on her neck.

Hours later as the night sky began to pale the man who called himself Sorn slipped from his bed and dressed quickly. He crossed his bedchamber to the large mirror in the corner and inspected himself, brushing out his long, black hair, checking meticulously for the mar of silver. He squinted at the arched window, where the first rays of sunlight were stealing over the city walls. Muttering curses he paced over to window to tug at the thick curtains; as he did so his hand was transfixed in a wan shaft of the early morning light. His eyes flickered momentarily to the gray and age-spotted claw that clutched the curtain; his brow wrinkled with vexation, and then he flung the curtains shut, blocking out the seeping dawn.

He stopped by the solar on his way to the undercroft to find Fornus gnawing at a lump of bone, its chains piled unceremoniously on the floor.

“I trust you had a rejuvenating night?” The demon said, turning its skeletal visage towards him. “You certainly looked considerably improved. If you don’t mind me saying you were starting to look a bit frayed around the edges.”

“You’ll find what’s left of her in my bedchamber,” Sorn replied, ignoring the jibe. “She's unconscious. An old woman, to look at her, but you'll find her soul palatable enough, I'd wager. Make sure you’re thorough. And have the servants clean up afterwards – she was eager at first but there was some mess towards the end.”

The creature nodded. Its purple tongue flicked out, licking sharp and yellow teeth.

Mimesis 

Lichens writhed through its frame, colonizing its limbs, its crevices. Rust gnawed at exposed parts. It picked its way towards them with spidery marionette motion, one spindly limb at a time. With almost avian movements it cocked its head from side to side, unblinking eyes gleaming. It scuttled into the circle of flickering gaslight.

The automaton wore a ghastly mask of dirt-smeared skin stretched over its visage, its metal cheekbones poking through the scrap of flesh, its beady optics – the glossy black of an insect’s – staring out from rents streaked with scabrous tears. The rest of its body was similarly garbed, its elongated limbs and torso fit with a flayed suit, a demented parody of the human form. Through the inevitable tears and rips, most prominent about the thing’s joints, its brass and iron exoskeleton was visible; beneath the shredded outer layer inner mechanisms clicked and chittered with clockwork vitality. There was something pathetic about the hideous flesh-rags of the automaton, something tragic in its failed imitation, its wretched longing, its ultimate and unavoidable numbness. For a moment a glimmer of melancholy – alienated, desperate, human – flickered in the black depths of its eyes, the ephemeral suggestion of a soul.