Vaughn, Baldo and Andreas were your everyday hired muscle that communicated their employer’s displeasure with their fists and knives. They were painfully dull. Brave in their own way, but dimwitted. Vaughn was kind to animals, so there was that in his favour I supposed.
Then there was Jovian. The enigma. His mind was still and empty of all conscious thought, just a flow of experience and immediate goals. It was worrying in a way, but I knew from the old days that if you promised him an interesting time he would run into a burning building with you and laugh all the while. He was a simple man, and yet utterly unfathomable. Nothing ever dented his supreme confidence. I’d never been able to figure out how he did it. He had that twisted sense of Esbanian honour and would at least warn me before sticking a knife in my back.
I could use these killers. They had the wrong stuff. They would kill without hesitation, and as for morals, what little they had would not hold me back.
The big, dumb, hairy brute went for me first, as I knew he would. The others were sly predators, waiting and watching for weakness.
“Get us out of this festering pit,” Vaughn snarled, “and I’ll kill whoever you want.” In his mind I could already see my skull crushed and him off enjoying his new-found freedom in the taverns and brothels of the Warrens. Shame those establishments no longer existed. He’d heard rumours of the devastation topside but couldn’t quite believe it.
I shook my head sadly. “Sorry to disappoint, but you won’t be crushing my skull, Vaughn. And you won’t be enjoying any taverns and brothels unless I say so.”
He stared in shock, which flipped to anger and a raised fist. He tried to punch me but his arm refused to move. I was already in his head pulling his strings. He tried to swear, and failed there too. Instead I made him slap himself, a loud crack that reddened his cheek and shocked the others.
“You don’t know who I am yet,” I said. “But you do know Jovian here.” They shifted nervously, knowing the feral little bastard only too well. “Jovian, would you fight me?”
“I would rather rot here in the Black Garden,” he said with total honesty. “Worst magus ever made.”
“Why’s that?” Coira demanded. I was sifting the group’s thoughts and feelings on the matter and made a mental note to make her my third in case Jovian bit the mud. The woman had tits of steel to face down a magus without blinking.
“My name is Edrin Walker,” I said, smiling. “You might have heard rumours about a tyrant magus saving the city.”
The prisoners stared at me blankly. That was a no then. “Well that tyrant was me.” I could tell some of them knew what a tyrant was. The fear blooming in their eyes always gave it away without me even needing to dip into their minds. They shifted uncomfortably, seriously considering shouting to be dragged back to their dank and festering cells. “And yes, I can get inside your head and make you do whatever I bloody well want.” I paused to raise the tension. “But I would rather not have to.”
That got their full attention. “Here’s the deal. We are off to war up north in the mountains of the Clanholds and I need a coterie
I can rely on – and I don’t trust wardens. You lot are vicious and cunning bastards just like me, and I need that. What do you say? In or out? I don’t have time to play games and make deals.”
“And after the war?” Coira asked. “What’s in it for us?”
I shrugged. “Bound to be lots of corpses and lots of loot to be found along the way. Couldn’t give a rat’s arse what you lot do afterwards. Go wherever you want.”
Plans for my eventual murder began budding in several minds. In Diodorus’ imagination I choked on my own lungs, dissolved thanks to some rare poison he’d made from a particular breed of frog smeared on an arrow. In Nareene’s I was a human candle, my flesh bubbling like wax while she danced around me.
I shook my head sadly and gave them a mental prod. “Are you lot stupid? I can read your minds. And I can do much, much worse. How much do you value your secrets?” I looked at Baldo. “Some of you have stashes of coin.” Then my eyes flicked to Adalwolf and Diodorus. “Others have innocent family or journals full of invaluable alchemic research. It would be a real shame if anything happened to them.”
They got the idea.
All signed on and I requisitioned clothes and weapons from the prison’s armoury. I really loved Cillian’s little scrap of paper and it was so very tempting to have a lot more fun with it before I marched off to almost certain death, or at least a good maiming and being abandoned in a ditch if I was thinking positively. We made one last stop before leaving, a wing of cells containing Skallgrim prisoners.
“I’ve come for my boys,” I said.
The jailor scratched his head skeptically as he looked at the cells. Two filthy, bearded and emotionless faces stood staring at me where there had once been three.
I made them clang against the cell door in front of us. “Them idiots?” he said. “Those are no use to anybody. Feed and water themselves and that’s all they do. Don’t even talk. Rats bit one’s leg and it rotted right off; he didn’t even make a sound.”
“They are coming with me.” I glanced back at my newly formed coterie. “These two are not idiots, just broken. They tried to kill me during the stinking Black Autumn. I broke their minds and enslaved them to my will.”
Fearful silence spread and deepened. “Harsh,” Jovian said, finally. “I would prefer death.”
I felt the same, but put on a show of sneering at them all. “I don’t need you intact. Are we clear?” We were very clear.
My coterie had swelled to ten, the traditional number assigned to guard a magus. They were now my shield, freeing me to be the sword.
Out on the streets, my pale and filthy conscripts were overjoyed at seeing the sun again and I couldn’t resist having a little more fun on their behalf. We walked up to a group of wardens and I essentially stripped them and stole all their equipment. They protested vehemently of course but Cillian’s wonderful little writ left them with no option but to complain to their captain later. Very satisfying it was to send them scampering off up the street in their undergarments. I settled Jovian and the rest of my coterie into the back room of a tavern to sort out all the armour and weapons for themselves. I slid over a small bag of coin and they all eyed it like corvun on a cat.
“Best buy warm winter clothes and boots two sizes too large or your bits will snap off like icicles.”
Jorvan pursed his lips at the comment on boots. “I am missing something, yes?”
“I doubt you’ve experienced a Clanholds winter. It’s a frozen wasteland up there. Stuff your boots with wool and you might not lose your toes.”
He nodded in appreciation. “Toes are useful things.”
On my way out I paid the innkeep for a mound of meat and two rounds of ale – and strict orders to provide only two, though I’d no doubt they would find ways around that. Still, it would hopefully serve to minimise the damage – and then began the long slog uphill to West Docklands and to Charra’s Place. I took
Fisherman’s Way, curving west along the path of the city walls rather than cutting through the devastated Warrens. I had no desire to be reminded of that yet again.
It was early afternoon by the time I arrived at the brothel. Layla hadn’t seen fit to change the name, or seemingly find the time to repair the churned up gardens and trampled moonflowers. The two hulking tattooed clansmen, Nevin and Grant, still guarded the doorway. These days they wore heavy chain and carried spiked axes instead of cloth and clubs. Nobody had time for the old armament laws and everybody from old women to the more sensible children were allowed to roam armed and dangerous.