There were, allegedly, many ways of forestalling the disease—anything from drinking tea brewed from a dryad’s eyelashes to visiting an oracle somewhere high in the Rimeshield Mountains—but despite the efforts of Grandual’s greatest minds there was no known cure. The rot was a death sentence, plain and simple.
“Clay, look. It’s Moog.” Gabriel tugged at his sleeve, pointing to a wall plastered with posters. A number of them depicted the wizard, badly drawn but instantly recognizable. He was grinning from ear to ear, one eye closed in a knowing wink.
Clay squinted to read the words scrawled beneath: “Magic Moog’s Magnificent Phallic Phylactery. Zero to Hero with just one sip. Satisfaction guaranteed!”
Clay scanned some of the other posters on the wall. One offered a bounty for the toxic breath of a rot sylph, another called for bands willing to kill Hectra, Queen of Spiders. He was wondering whether Hectra was actually a spider or merely a woman who styled herself their monarch when the noise around him disrupted his thoughts.
There were men moving up the street, four abreast and three ranks deep, armed with cudgels and oval shields. They hadn’t resorted to violence yet, but had managed to clear a good length of street behind them with iron glares and those big shields. Behind them walked a man in soiled leathers with a wolf’s pelt draped over his head. He raised his arms and called out to the crowd.
“Good people of Conthas! Hear me!”
Clay searched the crowd for good people and came up short, but Wolfhead went on nevertheless.
“Make way for the Stormriders, only just returned from a daring tour of the Heartwyld.” He waited for the rising babble to subside before going on. “They will be preceded by the Sisters in Steel, who have subdued the goblins of the Cobalt Caverns and their fearsome Warchief, Sicklung!” Wolfhead and his shield-bearing goons pressed on, forcing a path where some were slow to make one.
There was a commotion farther down the street. Peering west, he saw a column meandering down the mudded thoroughfare. The Stormriders—a band, Clay presumed, though he’d never heard of them—would have paid out-of-pocket for a parade through Conthas. And as the procession drew near it became clear that those pockets were very deep indeed.
A cadre of drummers led the way. They were clad in long gowns sewn with strips of bark and hats that sprouted tufts of green foliage. Children scampered among them dressed as wood sprites, gossamer wings trailing behind as they ran. Behind them waddled a huge hulk of a man. Half his face was painted blue, in likeness to the Feral Men who called the black forest home and lived on a diet of flesh and blood—or so the stories went, anyway. Clay had met more than a few cannibals who preferred a well-roasted chicken over the fleshy rump of some hapless adventurer, but chickens (unlike hapless adventurers) were notoriously hard to come by in the Wyld.
The brute was draped in exotic fur, with a horn slung over one shoulder that might once have been a dragon’s tooth before someone hollowed it out and made an instrument of it. He jeered at the crowd, working them into a frenzy, and then blew long and deep on the horn. Its call reminded Clay of the wind moaning through high places, or the sound of something wounded wailing in the dark.
Next came the goblins. Two rows of six, each with their hands bound, linked to one another by chains that slithered like iron snakes through the mud. They were a sickly looking bunch, scrawny as beggars, but lively enough. They snapped and screamed gibberish at the crowd, and didn’t seem to mind when someone lobbed a bloated tomato or a rotting fish their way.
They’re probably starving, Clay reckoned. Wait till they get a sniff of rat-on-a-stick.
Behind them came their warchief, Sicklung, limping in his fetters, sporting a face so battered and bruised he looked ugly even by the notoriously low standards of goblinkind.
The Sisters in Steel were not at all what he’d expected. Clay had fought alongside plenty of women warriors in his day, but these three looked nothing of the sort. Their hair was done up in ringlets and tied with bright ribbons. Their eyes were thick with smoky kohl, their lips painted red as roses. And their armour! It looked brittle as porcelain, designed to show off skin instead of protect it from a sword’s edge or an arrow’s piercing tip. They cantered along on a trio of pristine white mares whose silver barding gleamed like mirrors.
A man out front whistled at one of the Sisters as she passed. Uh-oh. Clay winced, preparing himself to see a man trampled into the mud. Instead she smiled and blew him a kiss.
“What in the fuck?” Clay heard himself ask of no one in particular.
Beside him, Gabriel bobbed his shoulders. “That’s how it is now, man. I told you. So much spectacle, so little substance.” He snorted, nodding in the direction of the goblins. “They probably bought those poor buggers at an auction.”
The column marched on. Now came the spoils reaped by the Stormriders during their tour of the Wyld. A squad of men marched by bearing relics of the Dominion: blunted swords and rusted scale armour recovered from ancient battlefields.
Next came an ox-drawn cart loaded with the crumbled remains of one of Contha’s rune-bound automatons. The pieces were fitted together so observers could apprehend how massive the golem had been in life.
“That’s impressive,” said Clay. “Those things go down hard.”
Four heavily armoured men escorted a lanky troll weighed down by heavy iron manacles. The thing’s arms had been severed at the elbow and capped with silver studs to keep it from regenerating new limbs. Two of the men bore torches and used them to corral the beast whenever its coal black eyes lingered too long on someone it thought looked particularly appetizing.
An enormous ape striped like a tiger came after. The woman who held its leash was smiling and waving, occasionally reaching up to stroke the ape’s fur. It grinned whenever she did this, evidently besotted by its handler.
A strange hush had come over the crowd. Looking right, Clay saw another cart approaching. It was as wide as the entire street, hauled by six oxen and rolling on ten stone wheels. The steel bars of the cage it carried were as thick as a man’s leg, and in the shadows within he saw something—a glimpse of coarse fur, the metallic glint of scales …
“Frost Mother’s Hell …” Gabe put a steadying hand on Clay’s shoulder.
And then Clay saw for himself what the Stormriders had brought back from the Wyld. It was a chimera. And it was alive.
He swallowed hard. Felt a pang in his gut that might have been fear, or exhilaration, or both. Either way, he’d felt nothing quite like it in a long while. He’d once heard someone (Gabe, probably) say that while most things were born to live, an exceptional few were born, instead, to kill. Chimeras were very much the latter.
This one was obviously drugged. Its movements were slow and sluggish. Its serpentine tail hung limp between the bars of its cramped prison. Wings that would throw a house into shadow were folded against its back. Of its three heads—lion, dragon, and ram—only the dragon seemed to take interest in its surroundings. Its jaw was clamped shut by an iron muzzle, and smoke plumed from its nostrils, obscuring the slitted yellow eyes that peered through the bars as if it were the one on the outside looking in.
“Why not kill it?” asked Gabriel.
Clay, who had been thinking the same thing, could only shake his head in wonder. “Spectacle,” he said.