I grasped the bloke’s skull, squeezed it gently, then firmly, feeling for the telltale sign of bone scraping on bone. But there was none. “Skull ain’t broken.” Whatever he’d endured hadn’t been pleasant. Or quick. “Skin looks, hmmm…” I prodded Brown Cloak’s cheek, working at it with my fingernail. “Feels like hard-tack. Or dried beef. Or—”
“You hungry?” Karl sneered.
“Starving.” I pulled Brown Cloak’s eyelids up. The orbs were sunken, shriveled, opaque, the way a fish’s gets after it’s been dead a stretch.
Sir Alaric’s eyes glimmered, ropes of blue smoke wending out as he scribbled.
Wincing, I dug under Brown Cloak’s ratty beard, ran my thumbs along the ridges of his throat, down to where it softened, then round to the back of his neck. “Neck’s intact. Nothing but sloughing skin and disappointed lice.” I chewed my lip. “Hazard we’re gonna need to get more personal.”
Sir Alaric patted along his belt. “Got a blade?”
One magically appeared in my hand. “Maybe.”
“Mind stripping him?”
“Handsome devil like him?” I slit the bloke’s jerkin from neck to sternum and peeled back the worn fabric, exposing splotchy skin and wizzled chest hair. His sternum and ribs stood stark on his pigeon chest. The heraldic device of the common man. “Fella lead a rough life. Or a rough death, anyway. Starved, looks like.”
Sir Alaric fixed me with one eye. “You been there?”
I looked at Karl. We’d had our more-than-fair share. “Yeah. Sure. Who hasn’t?”
I felt along his rib cage. Despite standing out clear as day and looking fair intact, I palpated them, anyway, sliding from sternum round back to spine, working a finger along each, the interstices between, starting at the collar bones, hoping to feel something maybe I couldn’t see. “Siege at Jaarheim. Lasted near a year. Well-past scarfing back rats. Nigh on activities the church elders frown upon except during sacraments.” I pressed down again on his left side. “They weren’t bad roasted, truth be bare. The rats, I mean. Hmm…” Was that a creak? I pressed again. Yeah. Like stepping on a loose floorboard. “Got a broken rib here.” I massaged deeper, feeling another creak round the back. “Ribs, plural, actually. Two, uh, no three.”
“Where?” Sir Alaric set his pen aside and untied Brown Cloak’s shoes.
“Here. Lower left ones. Floating one, too. Almost at the spine.” I feigned a left hook to an imaginary body. “Fella took some lumps. Or one good one, at least. By some canny diplomat versed well in the politics of the fist.”
“Huh?” Karl raised an eyebrow.
“A good-punching guy.”
“Oh. Aye. Yar.”
I fought off rolling my eyes. Barely.
“Think mayhap it was you yanking him from that crevice?” Sir Alaric pulled a shoe off.
“Fair sure we didn’t break anything.” I paused, reconsidered. “His left knee, maybe. Foot, too. Got hung up under a rock.” I cut the rest of his shirt open down to navel.
Sir Alaric huffed as he pulled off the second shoe. A mismatched pair. Both worn through in more than one spot.
“Got his money’s worth,” I deadpanned.
“And then some,” Karl said.
“Huh…” I pulled open the rest of Brown Cloak’s shirt, cocked my head, trying to take it in, figure out what I was seeing.
“What?” Karl and Sir Alaric both looked up.
“His abdomen’s,” I gave it a tepid prod, “mushy.”
“No bone there,” Karl said.
“Yeah, no shit, Aristotle.” I frowned. “I mean, it’s his skin. It’s fairly hanging off him.” The way his flesh oozed out to either side of him, it looked fair like he’d melted. Or deflated. I grabbed a fistful of it, pulled it up, stretching. Could have grabbed two. Three. More. “Jesus.” I let go. “Feels like a flaccid foot-ball.”
“Eh?” Sir Alaric took up his pen again. “What do you think?”
“What do I think…?” I think I wanted to get the fuck out of this shrinking coffin. Away from this dead prick. Out of this ramshackle keep, this backwater burg, this cancerous land. But it wasn’t going to happen. Not soon enough to suit me, anyways, so I took a deep breath. Settled. “I think we ain’t done looking. Hang on.” Brown Cloak’s arm was torqued funny. I felt along the shoulder. “Arm’s … rrrrg … yeah. Out of socket. Didn’t notice it with the rigor.” I nodded toward his left arm. “One of you tear his sleeve?” It was torn from the wrist up past his elbow.
“No. Get caught on something?” Karl shook his head. “The rocks?”
“Looks torn from the cuff up.”
“What do you think, lad?”
“Don’t know. Nothing, maybe.” I examined the arm. “Here. He’s got a puncture wound at the elbow. Hmm. A couple, actually.” I felt along. “Skin’s puckered. Withered. Like when you’re too long in water. More light.”
Karl adjusted the mirror.
“Good.” Using my thumbs, I eased a puncture open. “Not much blood. None really. But it’s wet. Slick. Cool.”
“Eh?”
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together, “It’s … gooey.”
“Not blood?”
“No, it’s clear. Kinda like…” I held them up to the light. “Snot from a sick kid’s nose.”
“You’ve a keen edge with words.”
“It’s a gift.” I wiped my hand on the dead guy’s shirt.
“Eh?” Sir Alaric scribbled.
“Mmm… Holes. Yeah. Puncture marks.” I stuck the tip of my blade in, gently, probing. “Deep. Scoring the bone.”
“A blade?”
“Dago, if anything, but it doesn’t seem right.”
Sir Alaric swallowed. “Think he offed himself?”
“Eh? I’d hazard not.” I shook my head. “Imagine trying to end it all by poking around the inside of your elbow.”
“Contortionist?” Sir Alaric ventured.
“Why not just slit your wrist? And where’s the blood? He should be covered in it. There’s a fair-large vessel running through here.” I traced a finger along the inside of his arm. “A gusher. And most who go the way of Socrates choose the quick knick.”
“Way o’ who?” Karl rumbled.
“Old dead guy who knocked back a concoction to allay his woes. But this wasn’t that.”
“Aye,” Sir Alaric said. “So was there blood down there? The tunnel?”
“Yeah. But not enough where we found him. No fresh blood in the chapel, either.”
“So he wasn’t killed there.” Sir Alaric lifted Brown Cloak’s arm and squinted at the wounds. “He was killed somewhere else and lugged there.”
“Except that the kid saw him walk in. Saw both of them, all three of them, walk in. Altogether.”
“Shit. Right.”
“Yeah, I know. Damn witnesses. They screw everything up.”
“Known more than a few weren’t worth their salt.”
“Yeah. Me, too. Hell, most of them. But the kid lead us right there. And his descriptions were sound.” I took a long breath. “So then, Rudiger, our killer, and the Grey-Lady, lead the poor bastard into the chapel. Down into the tunnel. Through that bloody crevice. I don’t know how. Or why. Maybe they promised him something? Lured him with the bread? The wine? Whatever. So they lead him downstairs, set upon him, stripped him down—”
“Huh?” Sir Alaric cocked his head.
“No blood on his clothes.” I held a hand out. “Stands to reason they stripped him down before they killed him.”
“But again, where’s the blood?”
“The tunnel.” I let out a long breath. “Must’ve done the deed further down, I suppose.”
“So after they stripped and killed him, then what?” Sir Alaric shrugged. “Dressed him back up again?”
“Shit.” He had me there.
Starting at Brown Cloak’s right cuff, I slit up his sleeve, exposing a wizened arm little more than bone. Should have belonged on some palsied geezer and not some
fella just past his prime. But I saw nothing.
“Didn’t,” I screwed my eyes shut, “didn’t the kid say something about a … a big belly? Something like that?”
“Hmm…” Sir Alaric considered. “Aye, I suppose he did, now you mention it.”
“Folk that are starving sometimes get big bellies. Strange, yeah? While the rest of you’s wasting away, your belly keeps growing in defiance. Gravid with rage. Indignation. Hate. Whatever you got left keeping you to your feet.” I threw up my hands. “I don’t know. The arm seems more along the lines of some animal bite. A dog? Wolf?”
“Tunnel wolfs?” Karl laughed.
“It’s wolves,” I corrected.
“Blow me.”
“Thanks, I’ll pass,” I said. “But if it were wolves, they were dainty wolves. Only nibbling his arm. Nary making a mess. Leaving behind all this … well, some meat.”
“The Grey-Lady helped,” Karl said. “They held ole Brown-Cloak down, let the wolf do the work.”
I shook my head. “That’s a pretty stupid theory.”
Karl grunted in assent.
We stood in morbid silence listening to nothing but our inner fears, Sir Alaric chewing his pipe.
“Something’s gnawing at your craw, old man. That’s plain as day.” I could see my breath mist with each syllable. “You tell us what it is, maybe we can do something more than sit here jerking off.”
Sir Alaric splayed his hands out over the corpse, lamenting, “It’s just this business with this fella and the,” he swallowed, “the others.”
“You knew him?” I scoffed. “Them?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Then don’t bullshit me.” I chopped a hand. “You’ve been around the block. There and back. Ain’t no way some stranger’s gonna go tugging your heartstrings.” I shrugged. “And I’ve seen worse. You’ve seen worse. Hell. We’ve all seen worse.” It was true. As strange as this was, it wasn’t some massive bloodbath. It wasn’t Sluys. Wasn’t Crecy. It wasn’t Asylum.
“Aye, lad, a sad truth.” Sir Alaric ran a hand over his pate and muttered, “I told you to keep on moving.”
“And I agreed. Heartily.” My thoughts went to Avar and Chadwicke, refitting the Ulysses. “But what I want and what I deserve are ever at cross purposes.”
“You and me both, lad,” Sir Alaric shook his head, “you and me both…”
The nameless clan-holt sat deep within the bowels of the monstrous Carpathians, a hard land, a joyless land, a dark land.
Yet we would labor to bring it to light.
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 14.
MY MIND WAS REELING as I trudged through the mud, toward the keep, skirting the tent city strewn like cobwebs across the corners of the yard. I didn’t see Stephan, dwelling amongst his flock, but I could see lips pursed, heads turning, eyes watching, judging, as I made my way along.
It was a bite mark. It had to be. But from what? Jesus. A bloody animal? A beast?
I glanced up at the hoary old breaking-wheel, a charred skeleton standing like in homage to some fallen god.
Corpses… Tunnels… Teeth marks…
I couldn’t help running with it through all the myths, all the fables, all the legends I’d ever heard. The ones everyone’d heard. Everywhere. I’d traveled, more than most, in the service of my old Uncle Charles — God rest his cantankerous soul — dispensing justice from the Ice-Lands to the north, the ancient lay of the dragon-men, beyond Outre-mer in the east, south to the land of Afrika and far west, beyond the pillars of Herakles to distant shores. So I’d heard it all. Or enough at least. Tales of the revenants of old Angland. The cold draugar of the north. Vyrkolakas of the Athenians. Skade-gamutk of the Skraelings. What have you.
At heart? Nigh on all the same. Corpse-men awakened from dead slumber by a terrible lust, scrabbling up from their tombs like worms through the earth, visiting terror in the dead of night. Long fingers soiled black with grave-earth. Stinking breath. Obscene hunger. Preying first on those they held dearest in life. Family. Friends. Lovers. Devouring the soul. The flesh. And, of course, drinking blood.
And it was bullshit.
All of it.
It was a rash of consumption. Of plague. It was sweating-sickness or the grips. A bad well or the horse-fever jumping ship-to-ship, person-to-person, clan-to-clan. Some indiscriminate killer preying on his own folk. A rabid wolf loose amongst sheep. But for some reason, it’s easier for folk to believe some thrall of the Devil’s been set loose. Easier to believe in black magic and necromancy rather than face the fact that God had just stopped giving a shit. Stopped watching over us. Stopped caring.
If he ever had.
A constant smash and crash of blunted weapons from beyond the breaking-wheel marred my ragged solace. Within a few steps, the training grounds slid into view, the cause of the disturbance plain.
Sir Gustav was thrashing someone. And thoroughly. One of the princes, by the look of his fine armor and slender build, both depreciating rapidly. I figured it for Prince Eventine, the non-crippled one, though by his stance and current state, it wasn’t a given. He was down on one knee, weapon and shield wilting like willow branches.
To be fair, Sir Gustav had the advantage.
You stroll into a proving ground with blunted weapons against a hammer-head like him, and you’d best go down quick or beg for mercy. Or both. Blunted weapons won’t even scratch a fella like that.
No, for a bloke like him, you’d have more of a chance with honed weapons and ill intent.
Find the chink. Dig it in. End it quick.
A few others stood on tiptoe on the stockade rails, peering over the top, watching on and wincing. The twins, Harwin and Sir Roderick, smirks plastered across their chinless toad faces. Rotund Sir Aravand pointing out one of the many faults in the Prince’s strategy, if you could call it such, to his mean little prick of a squire, Morley.
Sir Gustav walloped the princeling in the flank, “Uuullg!” folding him in half and toppling him headfirst into the mud.
“Tiiiimber!” von Madbury called through two hands, sitting astride the stockade fence.
Sir Gustav let loose a booming laugh from within his great helm.
The others followed suit.
I kept on moving.
“Got to keep that guard up, Your Highness.” Von Madbury hopped off the fence. He waved a hand, his attention elsewhere. “Or down, as it were.” He adjusted the Mongul tulwar strapped to his hip, all the while eyeballing a peasant girl hustling across the way, an armload of laundry smothered in her white-knuckled grasp. “Oy, lass!” Von Madbury waved a gauntleted hand. “Come over here.” He patted his thigh and sneered. “Got something to show you!”
As soon as the princeling had scrabbled up to one knee, Sir Gustav swatted him across the top of the helm, sending him sprawling lifeless into the muck. Sir Gustav stared down a moment like the big lummox he was then turned his vacant glare on me, the black slit of his helm emotionless.
“Oy, lass!” Von Madbury pointed. “You there!”
The girl froze, eyes wide, whiskers twitching, a rabbit mid-field catching a whiff of fox.
“Keep walking.” I marched on past.
Clutching her laundry, lips pressed together, she hustled on.
“OY!” Von Madbury pushed himself upright, indignant. “You hear me?”
“My Prince?” Brother Miles, a war-priest with a fair bit of mileage by the look of him, knelt by the princeling’s side and shook his shoulder. “Eventine? Please. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”
“He dead?” I stopped by the fence, made a show of leaning over it, eyeballing the felled Prince. “Sure looks dead.”
Sir Gustav shifted, his bucket head angling down as he toed the Prince a couple times to little effect. “Uh…”
“Eh?” Von Madbury stared after the fleeing girl. “What?”
“Him.” I pointed down. “Your liege-lord’s first-born son and rightful heir.”
The good Prince Eventine still hadn’t moved.
“Easy now, my Prince…” Brother Miles gingerly opened the face of the Prince’s helm.
“Son of a—” Von Madbury clambered over the fence, shoved Brother Miles aside, and was on his knees in the mud a moment later. “What the fuck’d you do?”
Sir Gustav shrugged. “T’was a glancing blow,” he sniffed, and though his face lay hidden behind a tooled masque of steel, I felt as though somehow he were smirking.
“You fellas sure like beating the fuck out of helpless folk.” I laid a hand to my chest. “Now don’t get me wrong, I get it. Hell of a lot easier than beating folk who can defend themselves.”
Seven pairs of eyes turned my way automaton-smooth.
“But not smart, crowning the progeny of the hand that feeds you,” I said. “Your bloody meal ticket. Son of the man you swore to protect. Man you’ll swear to protect someday. Should he live that long.”
“Man wants to be king, he needs to know how to fight,” Sir Gustav countered.
“A fair point, but I prefer my kings to suffer as few head injuries as possible.”
“Fuck off.”
“Your highness…” Von Madbury pawed the Prince, rolling him over with Brother Miles’s aid. “Highness!”
The Prince’s arm flopped limp as cooked spinach.
“He breathing?” Harwin stroked his nonexistent chin.
I shielded my eyes against the sun. “That blood oozing out his ear?”
“My Prince—!” Von Madbury slapped him across the face. Hard.
Sir Gustav, on the other hand, only had eyes for me.
Von Madbury hunkered back as the Prince suddenly rolled. He gurgled something that might’ve been, “I — I’m alright…” then puked up a fair amount of something brown, countermanding his point something fierce.
Brother Miles crossed himself and murmured a prayer skyward.
“Ah. Good.” I hocked a wad of spittle. “Some advice, fellas. I’d see fit only to wallop the crippled one. Not as much sport, maybe, but you can’t break something already broke.” I turned and started back on my way. The girl had disappeared into the relative safety of the tents, and von Madbury’s face burned a glorious red, matching his eye-patch.
The Last Benediction in Steel Page 9