by Warhammer
When he woke again, it was to a soft noise. Long years of experience in dangerous awakenings had taught him not to make any sudden noises or movements. Instead he moved only his eyes, passing them slowly over the small area of dark room that he could see without turning his head. Nothing. Had he imagined it? No. The soft noise was repeated, and followed by quiet rustlings and shiftings. Someone, or some thing, was most definitely in the room with him.
He could make out the corners and edges of things now, illuminated in a dim glow of moonlight from the small, thick-glassed window. He eased his head a few inches around, as quietly as he could.
Yes, there was someone in his room, and she was stark naked, the pale light highlighting her slim, youthful curves as she dropped her robe to the deck.
‘What are you doing here?’ Felix asked.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ said Fraulein Pallenberger.
‘And so you decided that I shouldn’t either.’
She sighed and sat on the bed, shivering a little in the chill as she lay a hand on the covers that draped over his legs. ‘You use harsh humour to hide your misery, Herr Jaeger, but I know that, beneath your cruel words, you long for solace. You drive me away so that you will not have to share your pain, but in your mind you are calling, ”come back, come back”.’ She lay down on top of the covers and brought her face close to his. ‘And so, I have.’
She closed her eyes and leaned in to kiss him. Felix turned his head so that her lips fell awkwardly on his ear.
‘Fraulein,’ he said, then struggled with the bedclothes and sat up. ‘Fraulein, you cannot be here.’
She rolled over and looked up at him, stretching as she raised an eyebrow in what he was sure she thought was a sultry expression. He swallowed. Despite her overplaying, she did look rather fetching sprawled out like that.
‘And why not?’ she said. ‘You long for it. I long for it. Surely you are not some prudish…’
‘I do not long for it!’ snapped Felix. ‘And you… This has more to do with putting one over on Magister Schreiber and rebelling against your order than any attraction you have to me.’
Her languid look vanished in an angry flash of eyes and she sat up too, all semblance of desire gone. ‘Why shouldn’t it?’ she hissed. ‘Don’t you see that this might be my last chance? Herr Jaeger, I am young! Young! I want to taste the world before it is taken away from me! I want to live before I die! It is my gift – my curse! – to predict the future, and I predict that the rest of my life will be a long, grey corridor, full of dust and charts and telescopes and pale, wrinkled old men!’ She covered her face with one hand. ‘I know I cannot leave the Colleges. The Empire does not suffer a witch to live. I know I have to go back and shuffle along with the rest of them, but for now – for these few days…’ She looked up at Felix with eyes that burned with a shimmering fire. ‘I want to live!’
Felix sat back, torn between heartbreak and laughter. ‘Fraulein Pallenberger, this is all very moving, but the Celestial Order is not a celibate order. You may marry. You may take your pleasure as you like.’
‘Not until I become a magister,’ said Claudia sullenly. ‘And that might take until I am thirty! I will be old then. No one will want to look at me. My youth will be behind me.’
This time Felix did chuckle. ‘And how old do you think I am?’
‘It’s different for men!’ she cried, then started to weep in earnest. ‘Oh, I’ve made a terrible mistake!’ she bawled. ‘I didn’t want to join the order! I don’t want to be a seeress!’
‘Shhhh, shhhh,’ said Felix, taking her hands. ‘You’ll wake the ship.’ He groaned as he imagined Max finding them like this. ‘Please, fraulein. Calm down.’
She muffled her sobs with her hands and fell heavily against his chest, nestling her head against his shoulder. He folded her in his arms and stroked her hair – not in any romantic way, he told himself – purely to comfort and quieten her. But when her hands crept around his torso and she pressed herself against him, he found desire stirring within him despite himself.
He fought it down and pried her off, but she clung again as soon as he let go.
‘Do not cast me out, Herr Jaeger,’ she murmured in his ear. ‘Let me live. I beg you.’
‘Fraulein – Claudia,’ he said, trying to disentangle himself. ‘You really overstate your case. Thirty, even for a woman, is not…’
Her lips found his, and then her tongue. He responded before he could remember not to.
‘Claudia, please,’ he said, pushing away from her at last. This wasn’t right. He loved Ulrika. Her memory was still fresh in his heart. He doubted it would ever die. He didn’t want anyone else but her. And since he could not have her, then he would have no one at all. It would be sacrilege to defile the memory of their love with some petty animal flailing.
Claudia’s hands trailed down his torso and gripped his legs as she kissed his neck. He shivered. On the other hand, there was something to be said, in this world of trouble and pain, for taking pleasure where one could find it. Ulrika’s words came back to him again. ‘We must find happiness among our own kind.’ He still wasn’t certain that happiness was possible, but comfort might be.
With a sigh and a silent apology to Ulrika, wherever she might be, he lowered his lips to Claudia’s and kissed her, long and deep. The seeress whimpered and pressed harder against him. He pulled his nightshirt off over his head and moved his lips to her throat, kissing and nibbling tenderly. She shivered and groaned. Felix chuckled to himself. It had been a while, but he appeared not to have forgotten what to do. He pressed her back against the bed and kissed her clavicle, then down between her breasts. She moaned and clutched him, trembling as if with fever. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Here!’
By Taal and Rhya, thought Felix, delving lower, no wonder the girl regrets her apprenticeship, she’s as enflamed as a rutting cat.
‘Here!’ the seeress shrieked, and scrambled up out of the bed, kneeing him in the cheek in her haste.
‘Claudia, what…?’ he said, then stared.
She stood in the centre of the tiny cabin, her arms thrust wide and her eyes rolled up in their sockets, shaking like she was bracing against a high wind.
‘Here!’ she screamed. ‘Here is the source of the visions! I can feel it! It is from here that the ruin of Marienburg will spring!’
Felix heard the thumps and questioning cries of his fellow passengers through the walls all around him. He jumped out of bed and snatched her robe up off the floor where she had dropped it. He had to get her dressed and back to her own cabin. But it was impossible. She continued to stand with arms outstretched, as rigid as a sword, and he could not get both of her sleeves on her at once.
‘Here!’ she wailed in his ear as he tried to wrap the robe around her nakedness. ‘Here is where we will find Altdorf’s doom!’
It was in this tableau that the others found them when they slammed open the door – Max, Aethenir, Captain Breda, Gotrek and assorted swordsmen, sailors and elves – all staring at Felix and Claudia struggling and naked in the centre of the room, with the seeress’s robe fluttering once again to the deck.
‘Could you be quieter about it, manling?’ rumbled Gotrek. ‘Some of us are trying to sleep.’
SEVEN
Captain Breda dropped anchor there and then, but there was little point in looking around in the dark, so they waited until first light before lowering the boats and rowing them to shore to see if they could find the source of Claudia’s vision.
Gotrek and Felix set out in the boat that carried Max and Claudia and their eight Reiksguard knights, Aethenir and his elf warriors were rowed in another, and Captain Breda sent another party of sailors to look for fresh water to replenish the stores. As they all left the ship, Felix could see the sailors at the rail looking at him and elbowing each other lasciviously. His face burned crimson. They had been laughing behind his back since word had spread of how he and Claudia had been discovered. He didn’t know what they had to snicker abou
t. She had come to his cabin and not theirs after all.
The sailors’ mirth was unfortunately not the only fallout. Max had not spoken to him since. Nor had Claudia. She seemed too embarrassed to look at him. The ride to the shore was therefore silent and uncomfortable.
They pulled the boats up onto a rocky beach hemmed in on three sides by high sand dunes. A cold wind whistled through the saw grass that topped them, and clouds scudded by above them in a steely autumn sky. A few raindrops fell. Max and Aethenir turned to Claudia, expectant, while the Reiksguard and the elf warriors prepared to march and Felix shrugged into his chainmail and strapped on his sword.
‘Have you further insight as to where this evil lies, seeress?’ asked Max, who had grown very formal with her since the previous night. ‘Or what it might be?’
Claudia shook her head, unable to meet his eyes. ‘The vision has passed and I have not had another. I’m sorry, magister. It is near here, but I don’t know where, or what it is, precisely.’
Max nodded. ‘Very well, then we will split up and look for it. You and I will go south with Reikscaptain Oberhoff and his men along the shore. High one, will you take your kin inland and look there?’
‘Of course,’ said Aethenir.
Max turned to Gotrek, pointedly ignoring Felix. ‘Slayer, will you and Herr Jaeger walk the coast to the north? We will search until mid-morning, then return here and compare notes. And whatever you find, let it lie until we may all examine it together.’
Gotrek nodded.
Felix stiffened at the snub, but said nothing. He had, after all, all but promised Max that he would have nothing to do with Claudia, and he had gone back on that promise – however unwillingly – so he supposed he deserved a snubbing. Still, it felt a bit petty. Maybe Max was jealous that Claudia had chased Felix instead of him. The thought sparked others. Was Max married? Did he have a mistress? Did he even care about such worldly matters any more? Felix didn’t know.
As they took packs and waterskins out of the boats, Felix found himself for a moment alone next to Claudia. He leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘I hope Max hasn’t scolded you too much for last night’s–’
‘You might have covered me,’ she snapped, cutting him off. ‘I’ve never been so embarrassed.’
‘I tried!’ said Felix, defensive. Then he got angry. What right did she have to criticise his actions? ‘And you might have stayed in your own cabin and saved us both a lot of bother!’
‘Oh!’ she said, and turned away without another word.
He watched her walk away and found Max giving him the evil eye again. Felix cursed silently and turned away, shouldering his pack.
Rain began to spit intermittently from the sky as Felix and Gotrek set off to the north, staying within sight of the water. This was not as easy as one might have thought. The shore was not all beaches and dunes. In fact, most of it was swampy, foul-smelling wetlands, an endless flat swamp with the occasional scrawny, leafless tree sticking up out of it like a witch’s claw reaching up from a drowning pool. They slogged through brittle, knife-sharp grass – waist high for Felix, chest high for Gotrek – that grew out of rank, spongy ground, their footprints filling in with water behind them. The muck exhaled a low, foetid mist that swirled around their ankles, and clouds of midges and mosquitoes rose from it continually, getting in their eyes and noses and biting them unmercifully on every inch of exposed skin. Weird cries echoed through the humid silence, and once something big splashed heavily into a stream nearby, but they didn’t see what it was.
Gotrek took the flies and the mud and the smell and the unnerving noises without apparent discomfort, but Felix was slapping and cursing and stumbling and walking into enormous spiderwebs the whole way. It seemed all of a piece with his vile mood. He couldn’t get over Claudia’s unfair anger at him. It wasn’t his fault she had been found naked in his cabin. He had tried to get her to leave, repeatedly. It was she who had come uninvited and tried to seduce him. It was she who had decided that the best time to have a vision of the future was during love-making. Even more galling was the fact that Max seemed to think that he had lured her there, that he was some sort of low lothario that preyed upon young, inexperienced girls. It made him want to go back and shout the truth in their faces. It made him forget to look where he was going and step into a puddle that filled his boots to the top with freezing, green-scummed water.
His cursing startled a flock of ducks who flew over their heads, complaining querulously, and started a racket of strange shrieks off to the west that made his skin crawl. He cursed them too.
If only he had some idea what they were looking for, it might have made the journey more bearable. That was Claudia’s fault too. Did she have to be so vague? What good was an ability that only gave half-answers? Should they be on the look-out for some ruined tower? A ring of stones? A weird tree with tentacles for branches? A fissure in the earth that radiated a ghastly glow? Without some goal in mind it all felt like some wild goose chase. Maybe Claudia had no powers of foresight at all. He had seen nothing conclusive to prove to the contrary. Maybe she made all of it up just so that she would have an excuse to leave the confines of the Celestial College. He wouldn’t put it past her.
Gotrek discovered the footprints just as they were about to turn back and report their failure. They had trudged up out of the marshland onto a hillocky plain that was covered in bramble bushes and scrub pine, and had found, carving through the brush to the sea, a narrow, clear-running stream with high, undercut banks. Below one of these banks was a line of bootprints, paralleling the stream and heading inland.
They drew their weapons and followed the prints as they weaved in and out of the water for perhaps a quarter of a mile. They stopped at last at a place where the stream widened into a pool and the banks drew back to make a muddy little beach. Here the first prints were joined by many others, and also the imprint of the keels of small boats at the waterline and the circular imprints of barrels, sunk heavily into the mud. It was clear that a landing party had been here recently and refilled their water barrels, just as Captain Breda’s men were doing now further south. And the narrowness of the prints also made it clear – at least to Gotrek – who had collected the water.
‘More elves,’ Gotrek growled.
Felix nodded, and they turned back. It had been a discovery, but it didn’t seem to be the portent of doom they had been looking for.
The rain chose that moment to begin sheeting down like a waterfall. Felix sighed. Of course it was raining. A day like today wouldn’t be complete without being soaked to the skin.
As the sky grew darker and the downpour got heavier, they turned inland, partly to be good scouts and search new ground, but mostly to avoid the marshes during the rain. It appeared that Max and Claudia and their Reiksguard escort had done the same, for they met them coming north about a quarter of a mile inland from the beach where they had landed. The two wizards were much the worse for wear, their cloaks and long robes muddied to the waist, their hands and faces scratched by brambles and dotted with insect bites. Felix felt a warm glow at the thought that Claudia had shared his misery. It served her right.
‘Anything to report?’ asked Max, raising his voice over the hiss of the rain as he mopped his face with a handkerchief. Despite the chill wind and the downpour, he and Claudia were beetroot-red and boiling from their exertions, as were their swordsmen, who were steaming slightly, and appeared to be regretting having worn breastplates and pauldrons for the march.
‘Not much,’ Felix shouted in return. ‘We found signs of an elf watering party at the limit of our march.’
‘A watering party?’ asked Captain Oberhoff. ‘In this godforsaken place? Must have been desperate.’
‘Or searching for something,’ said Max. ‘Like us.’
The clink of scale mail brought their heads up and they saw, coming over a hill to the east, Aethenir and his escort, marching in perfect double file. Felix was annoyed to see that, though wet, their surcoats were
still pristine, and their boots clean. And not one of them seemed to have been bitten by mosquitoes.
‘A disappointing search,’ said Aethenir as the elves joined them. ‘We found nothing.’ He looked to Max. ‘I hope you have had more success.’
Max shook his head. ‘Nothing. Gotrek and Herr Jaeger have found signs of a recent elf watering party to the north, but nothing else.’
‘Elves?’ said Aethenir, his eyes narrowing. He turned to Captain Rion and asked him a question in the elven tongue. The captain shook his head and Aethenir looked troubled. ‘I pray it was only elves,’ he said to Max, then turned to look at Claudia. ‘And has Fraulein Pallenberger experienced any new revelations about our goal?’
‘No,’ said Max. ‘Not yet.’
Claudia hung her head. ‘I wish I could call them forth, high one,’ she said glumly. ‘But they come when they come.’
The elf smiled slyly. ‘So I have observed.’
Claudia turned crimson at that, and Max’s eyes blazed. Even Felix felt angry. The girl might be a young fool who needed to learn restraint, but there was no need to make her feel worse about last night’s embarrassment.
Aethenir turned towards the beach again, oblivious to their anger, his escort following. Max opened his mouth to speak, but Claudia grabbed his arm and shook her head, pleading silently. Felix could see her point. Protesting would only make her the centre of more excruciating attention. Max relented and they all followed the elves as they trudged up the hill into the driving rain.
Felix was slipping and stumbling down the far side and thinking that perhaps stealing his father’s letter from Euler might have been the better option after all, when suddenly Claudia gasped and staggered into him.
He caught her but then lost his footing and they both went down together. It took all his will to be polite.
‘Are you all right, fraulein?’ he asked. ‘Have you trodden on something?’
But Claudia’s eyes were wide and unseeing, and she clutched her robes with spasming, white-knuckled hands. ‘The flames! The sea crawls with flames!’