City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [51]
And he wasn’t infected properly.
That woman left him the next day and he never saw her again. Whatever had caused his vampyrism was only passed on at half strength, so he didn’t possess a full-time urge to drink blood. His rage increased in intensity, his muscles hardened over a single week, his ageing process slowed – but it never felt complete, and now neither did he. It was as if his life, from that point, became one endless longing for something more. When his gang brethren begged to become infected with his bite, they too received this diluted strain, they too became only half vampyr.
It took him a while to become accustomed to his new body, and he had sought help from a witch, who assiduously treated his wounds in exchange for a large fee. Vampyrs were not immortal, she had warned, and they were susceptible to many other ways of dying . . . That, she concluded, was why they were so rare.
This was no fairy tale, then, nothing to romanticize. He was a violent monster.
*
Through the second-floor doorway, Malum glanced southwards across the roofscape. Lights glistened intermittently, showing him a glimpse of a city residence, of someone’s life conducted within. Moonlight would steal a moment to expose some silhouetted figure leaping from building to building, on a mission he could only guess at.
Malum sat straddling a chair, gripping the backrest, clenching his jaw against the pain. He had insisted on the door being left open to let in blasts of icy winds – even so, sweat lined his forehead. An arum-weed roll-up burned in one hand, and he took a drag whenever the stinging became too much. At times like this he was grateful that his mask covered only the upper half of his face.
An old man wearing a white gown and with a steady hand was applying a woodblock design to Malum’s naked back, adding layer upon layer of black ink to his exposed skin, then scraping with chisels or gouges. Pain pulsed through his body, before it was dulled by whatever it was within his body that rendered him not fully human.
The man painfully grafted art under Malum’s skin: symbols, decorations, every line of tattoo loaded with meaning and intent. He was assiduous in his scraping. Jars of pungent, coloured ink covered the table to one side. The artist’s slippers shuffled constantly on the tiled floor. Diagrams of designs papered the walls, fluttering in the wind.
Malum took another drag of the roll-up, flicked ash to the floor.
This time he had requested a tribal dragon, a fearsome representation of non-Empire deities, building on an elaboration of designs that crept from the base of his spine up to his shoulder blades.
‘Hey, Malum, you got a moment? I got some news.’
Malum looked up as one of his scouts approached him from behind.
‘Sure. Go on, speak. He can’t hear you. He’s deaf.’ Malum tilted his head to indicate the old artist. ‘Move round the front so I can see you.’
The scout moved into view, by the open doorway. It was one of the older, skinnier men in his service.
‘Well, what have you got?’ Malum inhaled some more arum weed.
‘It’s about the soldier,’ the scout said. ‘The leader.’
‘The commander?’
‘Yeah,’ the scout said, and smirked. ‘You gonna love this. I followed him like you said. And you was right.’
‘And what was I right about?’
‘The soldier was seen going into one of them places where men buy men. For . . . you know, sex.’
Malum contemplated this information for a long moment. His instinct had proven right and, well . . . it just wouldn’t do. There was no way he was going to allow his men to fight for someone like that now, was there? It just wasn’t right. Malum then considered how he could arrange to confront the albino about his despicable activities.
*
Malum didn’t bother going to bed much. Instead he slumped in a chair, reading or smoking, or contemplating the bottom of his glass of vodka. Beami had been playing with her relics all night anyway, and recently it seemed easier if their lives didn’t cross paths. Fine with me.
No, he needed to be up particularly