Kell's Legend

you’ve drank your fill of Karakan Red. And left none for me? Tut tut, sweetheart.” He shook his head, eyes mocking. “No wonder you could never marry me, Anukis.” He squared his shoulders. Took a deep breath through fangs stuck with torn flesh. “I see now, with your impurity, with your taint, with your fucking sacrilege, how we could never be compatible.”
    “Damn you, Vashell! What brought you here? Why kill these-”
    “Blacklippers? Why? You ask me why?” He pressed the heavy brass blade against Anukis’s throat and lifted her, panting, from her knees using the point. “Because, my darling, they are illegal smugglers. Because, sweetheart, they undermine our core vachine society. And because, my beautiful little Anukis, they are the unholy, the impure, and the damned.”
    He glanced over his shoulder, to where savage vachine warriors had finished off the last of the Blacklippers in a bought of savagery that had sprayed the walls with blood. The chamber was littered with mangled corpses. The vachine started a low, metallic keening, and with fangs prominent, savoured the kill.
    Vashell leant close. His breath was sweet. “Just like you,” he said.

FOUR
Canker
    Kell drifted in a world of darkness, a sea of dark oil, lantern oil, fish oil, blood-oil, unrefined, a tar mess like offal and the thick syrup from which butchers fashioned their tasty black puddings…and his eyes closed, and opened, in a languid breath for this was a dream and he knew it was a dream, and as a dream it could not be real. But if it was not real, why the hell was Ilanna so damned cold in his hands?
    You must let me in, she said.
    Her voice was cool, a metallic sigh, the voice of bees in their hive, the voice of ants in their nest, and Kell shivered and felt fear, not the adrenalin fear of a sudden bar brawl, nor the terrifying heart-gripping fear of hanging from high places, boots trying to scrabble on ice-slippery rock, sure as hell that when you fell the rocks and jagged natural spikes and the mountain herself would have no mercy, no pity, just a hard fast cold death. No, this fear was different, strange, an educated fear; this was the fear of knowledge; this was the fear of loss. This was Ilanna, the bloodbond axe, and she was in control. But more than that. Sheknew she was in control, and that she would always win the battle.
    No, said Kell, scowling, fists clenching hard. He breathed her in; breathed in her metal, the musk of her iron-oil, the stench of old blood clinging like a parasite to her haft, her blades, her edge. He breathed in the perfume of the axe. The aroma of death. The corpse-breath of Ilanna.
    But you must, she pleaded, I am Ilanna, I am the honey in your soul, I am the butter on your bread, the sugar in your apple. I make you whole, Kell. I bring out the best in you, I bring out the warrior in you.
    No, he snarled. You bring out the killer in me.
    That’s what you always wanted, she said.
    I never wanted what you had to offer.
    You lie! If I was flesh and blood and bone you would have been in my bed quicker than a drunk husband after a whore. But I am steel, with sharp blades and a taste for blood. And you took what I had to offer, Kell, my sweet, you took my gift of darkness, my gift of violence, and you saved your own life. But there is a price, a price for everything, and you know you must let me free, out into the world again.
    Kell laughed. “Must?” Words like “must” ring sour in my head like corked wine; they crack my skull with their…he savoured the word, instruction. What if I climbed the highest Black Pike peak, Ilanna? Dropped you into a crevasse, one of the mile deep pits guaranteed never to see anybody but the most foolhardy explorers? You’d be fucked then, my lass, would you not? Kell grinned to himself. Never again a taste of blood. Never again the splinter of bone. Just darkness, ice, the drip of water, the passing of centuries.
    So you wish to die, Kell? Her voice was a beautiful lullaby, so musical in better times happier times it would have lulled Kell to his bed. Often Kell had pictured the woman behind the voice. He corrected himself. The demon behind the voice, for Ilanna was anything but human, a thousand leagues from mortal. He pictured her as tall, beautiful, elegant; but also haughty, arrogant, filled with a self-love that made her despise all others. A cruel woman, then. And a deadly foe.
    I do not wish to die, he said, and the words shamed him.
    The Harvester is a