Tales of the Old World (86 page)

Kaslain stared at it trying to understand. His mind groped in an unfriendly
darkness. The kidney was too small to be a man’s—a goat’s? How many times had
he sacrificed a young goat to Sigmar on this holy day or that? He remembered the
squeal of the squirming animal and the blood, always so much blood…

The understanding of the ruse came upon Kaslain slowly but powerfully, not to
be denied. His face twisted in alarm and he spun around. The assassin stood
between him and the velvet bell-pull which would summon his guards. He had
divested himself of his bloody cloak and stood, whole and hearty, his face
sporting a victor’s smile. Kaslain lunged for the door and the killer dropped
low, lashing out with the toe of his boot and catching the priest in the knee.
The aged lector met the flagstones heavily and rolled beneath the gilt velvet
curtains.

The Thousand Faces of Magritta stepped forward and gave the curtains an
authoritative yank. They fell, collecting in a heap above the struggling priest.
The assassin rolled the priest with his boot, several times, until he was
cocooned in velvet. He gave the region containing Kaslain’s head a solid kick
and the muffled cries ceased altogether. He then straddled the velvet grub and
sat heavily. For a second, bizarrely, he adopted the posture of a knight on
horseback, hands on imaginary reigns and rocked his hips to the imaginary
rhythms of an absent charger. This seemed to amuse him for a short moment but
then his face turned serious. He reached into his boot, removing a short
stiletto. The Tilean Wasp leant forward with this sting and began to cut a small
window in the velvet wrapping. Eventually he exposed the arch-lector’s
distressed face and made a warning gesture with the blade, telling the priest
that he would end his life at the slightest cry for help.

“Your impatience is disappointing, Kaslain, and now you will not hear the end
of my story. A story which you wrote parts of yourself, although I am writing
this chapter, the last chapter in which you appear. I told you that I must
confess how I had killed a priest. You are that priest, though I no longer have
time to tell you why you must die.”

Magnus changed eyes at the keyhole but otherwise stayed firmly in place, his
back bent, his damp palms flat against the wooden doors. He watched the man sit
on the arch-lector and angle his knife. He watched as the man slid it into the
priest’s neck, muffling the victim’s scream with a handful of curtain. He
watched the man turn and stretch his neck while he looked about for his escape
route.

Magnus had seen and heard it all and had not been able to interfere. He
hadn’t been able to move, until now. But when he began to move he found himself
moving the wrong way, his hands on the handle of the inner chamber rather than
his feet fleeing down the marble hall. He watched, as if he were still an
observer, his hand as it turned the handle. He drew breath when he saw the
chamber within as if he had expected that the keyhole might have been showing a
different reality to the one which now greeted him.

The assassin sprang to his feet. He moved towards Magnus, measuring his
steps, all the time looking at the boy as if he were judging the distance
between them so he might spring. After confirming Magnus was alone he gently
closed the door and rested his back against it.

Magnus stared at the double line of blood on the curtain where the killer had
cleaned his blade, until his concentration was absorbed by need to force air in
and out of his lungs.

“The boy with the bucket?”

“Yes. Yes, but…”

“But you are more than that? Yes I am sure. We are each more than we seem.” A
pause. “You are not injured.”

“So it seems.”

A breath. “What will you do now?”

“I will finish my story. Isn’t that why you came in here?”

Events did not follow my script. The players had their own motives and each
proved to be his own author. Even my own script might have been written by
another. How often had I been distracted from my work in such a way?

Hugo had a cousin who was a priest of Sigmar. He came, a young wisp of a man
with straw for hair and a child’s chin. He announced that he would watch the
animals by night and he would catch this killer. He had all the eagerness of a
soldier before his first battle but he had something else also, the bearing of
an officer, though he had no troops. We were his troops and he strode among us
imagining that we bowed and saluted.

The shepherds laughed at him, having had little to laugh at in the past
weeks. Hugo made an announcement to the effect that his own authority was
extended to his young cousin for as long as the priest chose to stay with us at
the estate. The priest smiled a tight smile and gave a stiff nod.

He stationed himself in the field on the third night of his stay. He had
brought a tome which he consulted before he took up his vigil, then he donned
his white robe and strode into the night.

During this time I had not been idle. I had held two further conversations
with the girl and each time she had agreed she would leave that night. Each
morning I had discovered her, working in the field as if we had never spoken. I
do not know for sure why she stayed, killing lambs all the while, but perhaps it
was because she had found in me some kinship, some kindness which she would not
willingly abandon.

We are complicated creatures and although I do not like interruptions to my
plans I cannot say that I was not gratified to have her stay. I was unconcerned
about the priest and here it was that I made my mistake—not that he was any
danger to anybody, but it was his death which ultimately defeated my strategy.

They brought his body back, damp with dew and bent out of shape. No one had
seen the boy die, the shepherds now being far too scared to share the night with
the sheep, but the jaw marks left little doubt as to his killer. After that,
events moved with an undeniable momentum. The count used his influence to
contact Arch-Lector Kaslain in Nuln and appeal to the same sense of pomp and
occasion which I was later to employ myself.

Kaslain came south with soldiers and witch hunters and they found her, as I
knew they would. The soldiers went among the villagers with clubs and burning
irons. Kaslain did not frighten me, though his performance had the desired
effect on the peasants and staff at the manor. They bowed and scraped to his
face and made furtive warding gestures to his back.

Though their methods were crude, they were effective enough and before
Kaslain had spent two nights in the manor he had her. I would have killed him
then, but I was more concerned in trying to save her. Helplessness is not a
condition I am accustomed to or one which I accept lightly.

Our last conversation had been held in the same barn as our first. I was
angry, fearful for her safety and frustrated by her stubbornness. She reacted
badly to my anger and the meeting did not go well. I wish now it had been
otherwise. I have never been skilled at recognising the actions of fate nor at
accepting its whims. I tried to convince her in any way I could think of to
leave but I knew it was for me that she stayed.

They came and found her and stuck her with their spears. She took three
soldiers with her as I watched from among the crowd of villagers, head bowed and
hooded. Her mother was there too, a woman with thin skin which showed the
pattern of the blood as it flowed about her face. I never got to know her name.
They lashed her to a stake and burned her at sunset. My helpless fingers dug
into my wrist and I made a quiet vow.

The tattered body took some hours to burn and produced an oily smoke, which
caused the onlookers to cough and shield their eyes. Kaslain spoke a prayer to
Sigmar, an obscene stave full of polite hatred and self-satisfied gall, standing
with one foot on the ashen skull. I killed a soldier that night, I don’t know
his name; it is not a deed of which I am proud. I took him as he slept and mixed
my tears with his blood.

In the morning I gathered her ashes in a sack from the ruined barn and
commended them to the forest.

Magnus realised that the assassin had finished speaking and he lifted his
head. The killer was wiping his cheek with a corner of the velvet curtain,
cleaning away what might perhaps have been a tear. He stood and looked directly
into Magnus’ eyes. The stare was not comfortable.

“So that is my tale,” said the Tilean Wasp. “Here lies perhaps my greatest
kill and I feel little satisfaction. You are almost a priest: can you tell me
why?”

Magnus chose his words carefully, grinding his sweating fingers against each
other. “I do not wish, sir, to be one of your kills, even one of the least. I
have seen what happens to those who hear your confessions.” Dawn clawed at the
crack beneath the door. “Perhaps, however, I may venture, you have seen a little
of what others see in death, or perhaps you know that you cannot but kill, even
if you would rather love?”

A moment of contemplation, the time it might take for a tear to fall from an
eye to the flagstones if there was such a tear, no more.

“Nonsense,” the assassin said plainly. “I go now to pursue my lucrative
trade, leaving you as the only one to have seen me as I am and live.”

“Why?”

“Because I may. You ask a lot of questions, boy.”

“I… I have another. What of the count? He still lives.”

“I go to visit him now. What shall my rase be this time?”

“Sir, how am I to counsel you in these matters, one who can even disguise
himself as himself?”

Hugo beat upon the Count of Pfeildorf’s door with fat knuckles. Two men were
standing there in the late morning, the stone chamber which attended the count’s
inner door consumed by their combined bulk. Hugo’s girth was natural but the
other figure wore the hooded robes of a priest of Sigmar, and judging by their
ornate finery an important one at that.

“Awaken, sir!” the wheedling voice pleaded, Hugo a man trapped between two
superiors whose wishes were in conflict. “I would not disturb you, sir, so early
in the day, but I’m sure you would wish to receive so esteemed a visitor.”

The answer from within a bark of an inquiry.

“Who is it, sir? Why Kaslain, the Arch-Lector.”

Sigmar, stop your hammering! Jurgen Kuhnslieb thought, as the throbbing pain
in his head intensified. He winced and shielded his face as the inn door creaked
open, admitting a bright lance of sunlight which seemed to pierce his very
eyeballs. Grimacing, Jurgen gestured to the barkeep, who turned and studied him
with a dour expression.

“My usual,” Jurgen said; it was more of a groan than a sentence. The barkeep
looked unimpressed. The customer slumped before him—with his shabby slept-in
clothes, his cropped black hair and dark, blood-shot eyes set into a keen,
blowsy face—already owed money and did not look to be paying up any time soon.

“You’ve not paid your tab from last night,” the barkeep rambled.

“Come on,” Jurgen moaned, straggling vainly through his hangover to muster
some charm, “just one. For your favourite customer.” The barkeep looked away.
“Look, I’ll have the money in a few days. There’s this man coming in from
Altdorf…”

Jurgen trailed off as the barkeep turned away in disinterest.

Sigmar! Jurgen thought; another place in Nuln he couldn’t get served. If this
kept up, he’d soon end up barred from every establishment in the city. If only
that last job hadn’t gone so terribly wrong—Heinrick and Eberhardt betrayed
and slaughtered, and Rolf good only for begging since he was caught by Pharsos’
men—they would all have been rich, at least for a little while. And Jurgen
wouldn’t be slinking around in dives like this trying to avoid Hultz the
Red-Eyed, the small time crime-baron who seemed to think the whole mess had
somehow been his fault; probably for no better reason that he was the only one
who had survived the bungled job with all his appendages intact. Then there was
the other matter: a few gambling debts which had, well, got out of hand.

No wonder Jurgen was rapidly becoming very unpopular in this city.

Jurgen became aware that a particular kind of silence had descended on the
inn, of a sort usually reserved for the presence of the city watch, or strangers
who were obviously out of place. Jurgen resisted the impulse to turn around, not
wishing to attract attention.

A young man, the apparent cause of the hush, sauntered up to the bar next to
Jurgen and gestured imperiously to the barkeep. He was dressed in fine clothes,
and clearly in the wrong part of town.

“Tell me, do you know a man name of Jurgen?” the newcomer addressed the
barkeep. His manner was languid, but his dark eyes held an intensity that to
Jurgen did not bode well. The barkeep risked a glance at Jurgen, who shook his
head almost imperceptibly, but the young man caught the exchange and he span
like a cat to face Jurgen.

“No need for alarm, sir,” the man smirked, his eyes coming to rest on
Jurgen’s left hand as it inched towards the knife concealed beneath his jacket.
Jurgen paused, waiting for the stranger’s next move. “I’ve sought you out in
order to offer you employment.”

“What are you talking about?” Jurgen said, taking the opportunity to size up
the stranger. His dark eyes were set into a handsome, though somewhat pallid
face; one which—by both appearance and demeanour—indicated a kinship to one
of Nuln’s noble families. His head was crowned by neat fair hair which fell
loose over his shoulders, which Jurgen noted were somewhat stooped.

“I have come here on behalf of my master, who wishes you to… acquire a
certain item for him.” The man studied Jurgen, his voice low. “A very special
item.”

Jurgen leaned forward and hissed: “Not here, you idiot!” The thief flicked
his eyes toward the barkeep, who was standing too close, steadily ignoring the
impatient cries of thirsty patrons and cleaning an already spotless glass. The
noble’s smile tightened, but he nodded to the private booths at the rear of the
inn and strode towards them purposefully. Jurgen followed cautiously, quickly
checking that the knives secreted throughout his person were accessible.