Tales of the Old World (84 page)

The man spoke, with obvious difficulty, his voice fine wine in a rough wooden
mug. “Kaslain.” The name of the arch-lector.

Arch-Lector Kaslain sleeps, as do all the priests. “Might I find you a cot in
which you could rest until they awaken?” Magnus was a good student and his
lessons served him well on this occasion.

The man straightened himself a little and a flash of pain stained his
features.

“I doubt,” a nobleman’s voice, Magnus was sure now, “I will see the dawn.”
The boy could not deny that, from the size of the stream of blood, which was
nosing its way to a drain beneath the altar, the man was unlikely to wake from
sleep.

“Perhaps,” Magnus took a step forward so the man could hear him without
straining, “I might wake one of the other priests to give you audience?”

The expression might have been a smile. “My last words, the confession of the
sins of my life, are fit only for the ears of the arch-lector.”

Magnus searched for the textbook reply but was interrupted.

“Perhaps it might help you, boy, if I told you who I was. You have heard, I
presume, of Hadrian Samoracci?” The guarded but blank stare by way of reply
convinced the man that he had not.

The man sighed and a licked a fleck of blood from the corner of his lip. The
taste wasn’t enough to carve an expression from the hard muscles of the man’s
face. He continued, the names coming out with the measured curiosity of a man
more used to hearing them than speaking them: “The Tilean Wasp? The Thousand
Faces from Magritta? The Coffin Builder? There are other names.”

“Ah, recognition. You
are
he?”

“I am.” A pause. “And I wish, before I go kicking and screaming into Morr’s
blessed company, to purify my soul of the stains which are upon it. Can you be
sure any lesser priest is so enamoured of your god that he can grant me that
absolution? And, boy, are you the one to deny the arch-lector the greatest
confession your cult has taken in his lifetime?”

There is a certain dignity, lent to a man, even a dying man, who asks
questions which cannot be answered. Magnus walked quickly from the knave of the
chapel and followed a route which he knew well but seldom traversed.

One must pause for thought, to find resolve for action, before waking the
arch-lector of the Temple of Sigmar at Nuln. Magnus waited for several long
moments with his small fist cocked before the door. The distance it had to cross
was hardly the length of his forearm but any distance crossed for the first time
is a journey in darkness. Magnus had to knock twice before a voice came from
inside.

“Your holiness, a man is here.” The reply was predictably scathing and Magnus
waited politely for it to play itself out. “Your worship, it is a man of great
import who asks for you by name. Even now his heartblood spills on the temple
floor.” Over-poetic, perhaps, but Kaslain had a penchant for that kind of
language in his sermons and Magnus took a gamble. The next response would decide
the issue.

“Who is this man?”

Victory. Of a kind.

Two lesser priests came to carry the Tilean Wasp to Kaslain’s chamber. The
killer had drawn his hood over his face and Magnus’ imagination couldn’t help
but conjure up the expression on the face which had looked on death so many
times as he now went to face it.

As the almost funereal procession passed Magnus, the dark head lolled towards
him and the faceless hole studied him. Magnus found something pressing to
examine in the pattern of the marble. He had looked at this pattern many times,
head bowed in prayer, and imagined grape vines, clouds, fish netting. Now he saw
veins, like the pale cheeks of an elderly man.

Left to himself in the dying hours of the night, Magnus began to sponge the
man’s blood from the stones. Some had stained the mortar and Magnus scrubbed
hard, removing most of it. His last act before retiring at dawn—he would be
allowed to sleep until mid-morning devotions—was to open the temple doors to
greet the rising sun. He stepped out onto the wide stone platform and fastened
the doors to the walls by means of their hooks. Solid oaken doors.

Magnus was about to enter the temple and go to his few allowed hours of sleep
when he was stopped by what he saw on the doors. The bronze hammers, usually
fixed to each door had been removed, taken for polishing so Sigmar’s temple
would show no tarnish. He remembered the sound of the stranger’s insistent
banging on the door. He dropped the sponge and walked carefully back down the
corridor to the Arch-Lector’s private chambers.

Kaslain prepared himself, but not as he would for any common final
confession. The cult of Sigmar often received last testaments from dying men,
promising them Sigmar’s blessings on their journey to the land of Morr.

The ceremony was relatively simple but often the man receiving the blessing
had travelled too far on that journey to understand much of what was said.
Sometimes he had something he needed to say, a long-held secret which had ceased
to be important to anybody but its bearer: an evil deed, perhaps, a disloyal act
or a petty criminal doing. Whatever the exact nature of the event, each man
amputated the memory and gave it into the keeping of the priest so the doing
would not accompany him into the next life.

Kaslain had heard many sordid and foul acts recounted to him in this manner
but they seldom made an impression on the ageing priest. He had too many such
tales of his own to be impressed by the petty wrongdoings of some mud-spattered
farmer or bloodstained soldier.

This man he prepared to see, however, was neither of those. What reckonings
had he to make with Sigmar? Kaslain, dressed in his ceremonial garb and ready to
receive his dying visitor, reviewed what he knew about the man.

The Tilean Wasp, so called because of a supposed mastery of the vile arts of
brewing and administering poisons. The Wolf in the Fold, or the Thousand Faces
of Magritta—he had these names apparently because of an ability to disguise
himself with consummate skill and infiltrate his victim’s camp.

For this he was perhaps most famous and there were numerous stories of his
duping this guard or that official. The stories were often recounted as humorous
rhymes, idle entertainment, and each ended with a corpulent public official
having his throat cut or his belly stuck. One could make jokes out of the death
of fattened bureaucrats as few cared for them, but Kaslain knew the truth was
more grisly than such tales allowed.

Another name this man had acquired was the Coffin Builder, because of the
sheer volume of murders attributed to him in a career which spanned almost
twenty years. Everything known about this assassin was premised with “perhaps”
or “supposedly” and almost nothing was held to be indisputable fact. No one
knew his real name and nobody could recognise his face for what it was.

That, thought the priest, was about to change.

The boys carried the man into Kaslain’s private suite and laid him on a
divan. The couch had been covered with a canvas curtain to protect it from the
blood which stained the boy’s white robes and bare arms in generous
brushstrokes.

Kaslain, not normally one for humorous comment, was unusually buoyant,
commenting that the two boys were perhaps alone in having received wounds from
the Tilean Wasp and lived to tell the tale. There was little laughter as the
boys retreated and Kaslain pushed the heavy door closed.

The man spoke before the last echoes of iron and wood had been swallowed by
the woollen mats and velvet curtains. “Father, I have come to make my peace.”
The voice had a sheathed edge about it.

Kaslain steadied his own voice. “You can find here what you seek.”

“I know it to be true. It cannot be given by any man. You alone, father, can
give me peace.” The man’s words were chosen carefully.

“You are a man surrounded by much evil but perhaps we need not speak of it
all. What would you have my ears hear and my heart absolve?” Kaslain repeated
the ritualised phrases with no greater conviction than was usual, but his body
was taut.

“Father, I wish to tell you of how I came to kill a priest.”

Kaslain’s intake of breath was audible and abrasive, the extra air stabbing
at his lungs. A priest! He would have to deal very carefully with the dying
legend on the divan.

The legend coughed and opened his eyes. The blood staining his shaven chin
underlined the eyes which stared at Kaslain. So devoid were they of any feeling
that Kaslain thought the man was already dead. The priest froze in mid-gesture,
as if his slightest movement might push the assassin over the edge before the
all-important absolution.

The man called the Thousand Faces of Magritta struggled onto one elbow and
looked straight at his audience. “My name is Hadrian Samoracci.”

Kaslain raised an eyebrow. If the man was who he said he was, that made him
the son and heir of one of the powerful merchant-noble families of northern
Tilea.

“My name is Hadrian Samoracci and I have been twice bereft. The first time
was long ago and does not concern the matter of which I crave absolution, except
in so much as it made me what I am today. The second time, however, the second
time occurred in the autumn which is only now dying. Dying as I am.”

At first I thought her to be a farmer’s daughter. A simple farmer’s daughter
covered with earth, testament to her daily exertions in the field. She had hair
the colour of the chaff she spread before the swine on the manor estate of the
man who owned her. I saw her beside the road as I rode up to the manor for the
first time and she fixed me with a stare which I did not understand—though I
understand it now. Like knows like. Like knows like, and now she is dead. Such
is the way of things and few think much about it. Just as the hawk preys on the
hare and it is never the other way about, so the peasant works for the lord…

But I have not come here to waste my last breath on politics, and in truth,
she was no hare. I have come here to use my last breath on the things that
matter, at least to me. I have come here to spend my last breath talking of love
and death.

I am a seller of death, almost a merchant you might say, or an artisan, or
even a whore whose body is her only ware. I am all these things. My work takes
me to strange places and I often have cause to touch the lives of the noble,
wealthy and fortunate. Few men pay gold for the blood of a cobbler or silver to
have a blacksmith’s apprentice quietly drowned in the Reik.

The Count of Pfeildorf, a pole-cat of a man, maintained a manor house outside
of the town of that name, for which he had nominal responsibility. A man had
found me, found one of my men in Nuln and got a message to me: twelve ingots of
Black Mountains gold for the death of the count. The gold safely in my vault,
for I never extend the privilege of credit, I travelled to Pfeildorf, adopting
the guise of a trapper of wolves—a subject I knew very little about, though I
was to learn more.

Once in Pfeildorf, I took up residence in a boarding house of roaches and
wenches and went to work. It was a simple enough matter to steal a horse and
ride out to the estate each night. The count’s personal security was extensive—a pole-cat but a paranoid one. His underlings were more accessible, however.

The count’s chief man, castellan and gamekeeper, was a greasy pudding named
Hugo. The count’s flocks strayed on the hillside while Hugo plotted to increase
his consumption of Bretonnian cakes, or pursued some similar activity.

For four nights I crept close to the flock, stealing a lamb. I would wrap the
struggling creature in my cloak and carry it away so its noise wouldn’t wake the
dogs. Here my plan almost faltered for I could not bring myself to slaughter the
animals with their fleece still yellow from their birthing. They were guilty of
nothing. All my victims are guilty of something. Whatever you may say, you
choose to be a killer’s victim.

I left the lambs in my rank room where they consumed the straw mattress and
soiled the floor, similar behaviour to most of the patrons of the establishment.
Each morning I stood on a crate in the market and plied my new trade. A wolf
trapper I was, on the trail of a rogue female, a killer from the north, a huge
brute of a creature which had taken halflings from out of their houses. I made
the creature into a fearsome scourge for the whole district. Many farmer’s woes
were no doubt erroneously blamed on this fictitious blight and some even sought
to hire me to rid them of it. My fee was correspondingly high, high enough that
the poor shepherds could not afford my services. You may imagine that I found
the work tiring but there is an easy calm in playing out my strategies and I
find great delight in the invention of tantalising detail.

Eventually it happened. Hugo waddled into the square escorted by one of the
count’s men. The duo approached me and, after a brief haggle over the price,
which I pointedly refused to drop, engaged me to kill the wolf which had been
taking their lambs.

I was given lodging in the servant’s quarters on the estate, a pallet on an
earthen floor. I have slept in worse places and I have lain between silken
sheets. My unique profession has given me the opportunity to learn about the way
others live their lives, miserable and bleak, often before I take those very
lives. Take them and break them. But I am not without compassion, as you will
see. As I have said, I saw the girl as I rode in and her face stayed with me,
though I did not know why.

My plan was simple: to range the estate making a show of setting snares
during the day and to scout by night, and decide on the best way in which to
gain entrance to the count’s wing. I was to be there three days, no more. Once I
have devised a plan I do not like to be distracted. Thus it was that I was
angered by Hugo’s rousing me early on the second morning and demanding that I
explain the two missing lambs, taken the night before. All of my snares lay
empty and yet the animals were gone. Hurrying because I feared my mock snares
would not stand close examination, I dressed and followed the track up to the
flock just as the count was being served fig and pheasant breakfast in his
feather bed.