Tales of the Old World (65 page)

He coughed, more out of habit than anything else, and swept the camp with his
gaze. It wasn’t until he noticed the dark bulk of the sepulchre that remembrance
hit him with an impact as dizzying as vertigo.

This was no trail camp, no woodland clearing or rocky overhang. There would
be no quiet breakfast routine here, no wistful meditations. This was Celliers,
the village where Sir Gilles had finally found a monster worth killing.

But Sir Gilles was nowhere to be seen.

“Sire?” Claude called, his voice cracked with sleep and uncertainty.

“Sire?” he called again, louder this time against the dumbing curtain of fine
mist that had begun to dampen the air.

There was no reply. Claude wrapped the roll of blankets tighter around the
frail stalk of his neck and studied the ground. A deep depression still marked
the spot where the knight must have kept his vigil last night, although some of
the crumpled blades of grass had already sprung defiantly back. The old man
shook his head and hissed. His master must have been gone a fair while.

“Sire?”

No reply.

He looked further and studied the semicircle of burnt out torches that
surrounded the spot. Their black stumps jutted out of the damp earth like a jaw
full of bad teeth. None of them, it seemed, had been disturbed.

“Si-?” Claude began, and then froze. He listened, straining his ears against
the blanket of drizzle that had begun to fall. For a while there was nothing
more than the muffled sounds of a damp and dreary morning and the distant croak
of pheasant. One minute crawled towards the next, then the next. Finally the old
man began to relax. His ears must have been playing tricks on him, he decided.

Then he heard it again.

The low moan drifted as softly as a dandelion seed on the morning’s breeze.
Claude listened cautiously as the cry faded back into nothingness and shivered
suddenly as it ceased. His fingers, arthritis forgotten, clenched tightly around
the heft of his stake.

Surely that weak and inhuman keening couldn’t be from a man, he told himself,
let alone a knight.

Yet where was Sir Gilles?

Once more the cry came floating through the haze, raising the wiry hairs on
the back of Claude’s neck. He waited until the fell voice began to wane and
then, with a blasphemous combination of curses and prayers, the old retainer
lurched forwards towards the sound.

He left the burial pit behind him and stomped past the dripping grey bulk of
the village shrine and the first of the houses. The village seemed as desolate
and empty as any ghost town. There were no scurrying children or scolding women
or singing artisans. All that moved here was the drizzle, its silent rain
weighing down on an atmosphere already leaden with dread.

The moan came again, louder this time. Louder and closer. In fact, Claude
decided as he shivered the weight of blankets off his shoulders, whatever was
making the noise seemed to be around the next corner.

A ghostly reflection of his master’s wolverine smile played around the old
man’s lips, a nervous reaction as he plucked the dagger from his belt with his
free hand. Then, with a last murmured prayer to the Lady, he stepped around the
corner.

And froze.

Sir Gilles was there, the centrepiece of the huddled mob of peasants. The
sight of his broad armoured shoulders shook a delighted bark of laughter from
Claude, who allowed the wavering point of his stave to drop.

“Sire! You’re all right?”

“Yes, of course,” the knight replied, a pair of puzzled lines marking his
brow as he turned. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

Claude shrugged, still smiling with relief. Then the plaintive wail that had
brought him here rang out again and for the first time he noticed the girl.

She squatted in the cold and damp of the earth, supported on either side by
two solidly built village women. They flanked her protectively, like two mother
hens with a single chick, but she obviously drew scant comfort from their
presence. The girl herself was pitifully thin, the bundled rags she wore
incapable of hiding the frailty of her frame. Every shuddering breath she took
seemed to rattle down the knuckles of her vertebrae, every choking sob seemed
ripe to burst the tight cage of her chest.

Claude felt obscurely glad that her face was turned away from him. He had
heard such misery before, of course. From battlefields and deathbeds and
scaffolds he had become familiar with the sound of the human heart torn and
bleeding. Yet had he ever heard such horror mixed in with the grief?

Without giving himself time to think the old man pushed forward into the mass
of cringing villagers who encircled the girl. He looked over her shoulder to
the… the shape that lay upon the crimson turf.

Just think of it as meat, he told himself. It’s not human. Not now.

But the signs of the thing’s humanity were still horribly plain to see.
Almost half of its face had been left, the exposed tendons and drained flesh
conspiring to lock the man’s face into a final eternal scream. Some of its
fingers also remained. They were as rigid and gnawed as the branches of autumnal
trees and even more dead. Claude studied the savaged expanses of the man’s
forearms, shoulders and neck. The frenzy of half-moon bite marks somehow
reminded him of a head of corn.

Biting back a sudden rush of bile, the old man looked away and studied the
faces of the villagers whilst composing himself. He read the disgust and
frightened rage he had expected, the emotions as clear as any sculpture could
ever make them. But there was something else there too, something that skulked
guiltily behind their horror like rats behind a skirting board.

It took Claude a moment to recognise it as relief. The realisation snared his
revulsion, gave it a target. Selfish swines! Relieved for their own worthless
skins even with this child choking her heart out over the corpse of her father.
His lips drawn back in a silent snarl, he turned to Francois, the village elder.

“I thought you were told not to let anybody go out on their own,” he spat.

But if Francois heard the anger in Claude’s voice he gave no sign of it. “We
didn’t let anyone go out on their own. Jules here, Lady guide and protect him,
went out with Jacques. Jacques whose absence from the village stopped the
killings. And whose return brought them back.”

Claude stepped back and dug thumbs into his forehead in an effort to stop the
turmoil of his thoughts.

“Look at the wounds on Jules,” Francois added. “What beast leaves marks like
that?”

Claude gazed steely eyed at the carcass. It was the same as a hundred others
he had witnessed. His career had led him through many valleys a lot more
death-filled than this one. He had seen savaged bodies abandoned by all manner of
wild beasts. Aye, he thought grimly, and ones trained to it too. Yet something
about this one was different.

“Of course!” he finally cried out, voice thick with horrid realisation. “The
teeth. The bite marks. They’re like mine. I mean like any human’s,” he added
hurriedly—even this far from the border, Sigmar’s hungry witch hunters had
ears—and daggers. “So Jacques was the vampire?”

“No, he’s no vampire,” Sir Gilles cut in with a sigh. “He only has human
teeth. He’s just a man. A sick man.”

“Sick?”

“Yes, sick of mind. Or Chaos-tainted perhaps. It matters not. My cousin told
us of it the last time he returned from the Empire. There they call it the
madness of Morrslieb, the contagion that flows from the Blood Moon when it’s at
its zenith. That is when your problems began, isn’t it?”

This last was addressed to Francois. The old man shrugged vaguely, then
nodded.

“Madness indeed,” Claude muttered, taking a last look at the corpse which lay
congealing in front of its daughter. “Shall I prepare the horses, sire?”

“Yes. Light tack. Against this pitiful creature we’ll need speed more than
power. Francois, are there any hounds here?”

As Claude turned to ready their horses, he heard the bitterness of the
disappointment that edged his master’s words. But he realised that above the
sobs that still wove through the mist he alone had heard it, and for that he was
thankful.

The day’s hunt was a futile affair. The only hounds to be found in the
village were a trio of aged boar hounds, gaunt beasts whose stiff movements and
swollen joints made Claude wince in sympathy. Sir Gilles, still hiding his
disappointment behind a flawlessly polite mask, had decided to leave the motley
pack behind, overruling Francois’ attempts to press the dogs into service by
explaining that speed of horse and clarity of vision would suffice to hunt down
the fugitive.

It had proved to be a foolish boast. The beast of Celliers, although only a
man and a crazed one at that, had vanished with all the ingenuity and cunning of
any other animal. As Claude followed Sir Gilles out of the village the
impossibility of their task struck him. What chance did they stand of finding
the fugitive in the mighty swathe of forests and crevasses that covered this,
his native territory?

By the time they had cleared the fields and broken into a canter the old man
had begun to wonder why the same thought hadn’t occurred to his master. It
wasn’t until Sir Gilles, with a wild cry that ignited frustration into
exhilaration, closed spurs that Claude finally understood.

Their task here was complete. Jacques was gone. They might catch him, they
probably wouldn’t. Either way it made little difference to the lunatic. Alone
and unarmed against the predators and dark races of this savage land he wouldn’t
last long.

He gave his own horse its head, allowing it to race along behind the knight’s
charger. Holding on to his mount with aching knees, branches slashing over his
head and the wind stinging his eyes, Claude listened to the rolling thunder of
their horses’ hooves and felt a rush of excitement course through him.

By the Lady this was the life! Ahead of him, pulling away as swiftly and as
surely as a stag from a drunken orc, Sir Gilles crested a low hill. By the time
Claude had reached the spot the knight was already disappearing into the arms of
the wood that lay beyond. Just before he was lost to sight the armoured figure
turned in the saddle and called back.

“The pass. Meet me at the pass.”

“Aye, sire, the pass it is.” Claude bellowed his reply as Sir Gilles
vanished. As if sensing that the race was lost Claude’s horse slackened its pace
from gallop to canter to brisk walk.

“Lazy beast,” he muttered affectionately as they plodded along. The blood was
still racing briskly through his veins after the impromptu charge and, despite
the continuing grey dampness of the day, his spirits were high. And why not?
Celliers’ problems had been resolved, the beast had been vanquished. Even if he
did return to the village, the madman, now that he had been unmasked, would find
little chance of repeating his atrocities. For the people of this valley, at
least, the winter would hold no more than the usual dangers. For himself and his
master, though…

Claude sighed, his high spirits draining away at the thought of the coming
months. “I’m too old for this,” he told nobody in particular and spurred his
mount into a canter.

By the time he reached the high saddle of the pass, Sir Gilles’ horse was
already grazing contentedly. The knight himself sat perched atop a boulder, dark
eyes scanning the valley below. His aquiline nose and deep, predatory stare made
him look a little like a beast himself, Claude thought as he toiled up the final
approaches to the pass.

“It seems the king has more than one hippogriff,” he muttered to himself, the
words lost beneath the clatter of scree underfoot.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Sir Gilles called out as his man
approached. Claude bit back on the expression of mortification he knew had crept
treacherously across his weathered features and shrugged.

“And how else would I have meant it, sire?” he asked ingenuously.

Sir Gilles barked with laughter and jumped lightly from the boulder. The
tension of the preceding days seemed to have melted away leaving the young man
full of fresh energy. It was almost as if the conclusion of Celliers’ problems,
bloody and seedy as it had been, had lifted a weight from his shoulders—almost
as if his task had been accomplished.

Claude hardly dared to ask, but the sudden rush of hope within his chest was
too much to be denied.

“Sire…” he began, then hesitated, not quite knowing how to put the question.
A moment’s confusion passed before he shrugged and ploughed on: “Is our quest
complete?”

The knight’s brows shot up in amazement as he studied his old retainer.

“No, of course not. Why should it be?”

“You seem… rejuvenated,” Claude explained, trying to keep the weight of
disappointment out of his voice, out of his posture. It was hard work.

“I thought maybe you had seen the Lady after, you know, saving the village,”
he continued with another shrug.

Sir Gilles’ brow cleared with sudden realisation.

“I understand,” he nodded. “But no, I have done nothing yet. And yet I do
feel as if a burden has been lifted. I’ve come to a decision. I’m going to
exchange greaves and bucklers and lances for furs and push on into the heart of
these mountains. It is only there that I can be sure of proving the strength of
my belief in the Lady and continue slaying the evil that would devour her
people.”

Claude felt a moment’s unease as he watched the features of the knight
harden, straightening into a mask of fanaticism stronger than any steel. Even
after all these years this transformation of his masters from men into
something… something
more…
still sent a cold shiver racing down his
spine.

But then his master was once more just Sir Gilles. His expression softened as
he turned his attention from the jagged spikes of distant mountains to his
faithful old retainer. “The other decision I’ve made is that you’ll stay in
Celliers until I return. Or until the summer, whichever comes first. I’ll leave
you gold and a letter of safe conduct in case I am found, um, wanting.”