by C. L. Werner
‘Taal’s Mercy!’ the rider gasped. ‘I didn’t see you there! Morr’s oath, I saw only the wolf!’
‘Then you missed,’ Brunner said, picking himself from the ground and gesturing at the injured tree. The bounty hunter’s eyes were narrowed and filled with menace, scrutinising the horseman and his weapons.
The rider’s face flushed somewhat at the remark and he shoved the pistol back into its holster with an embarrassed motion. ‘I am truly sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know there were other hunters abroad tonight. Those damn Kislevites will be whoring and drinking by this time and, well, they are burying Otto in the morning.’
Brunner stalked over to his horses, trying to quiet them down. Only the fact that it was tied to Fiend’s saddle had prevented Paychest from bolting during the ghastly encounter. He paused to regard the rider, his interest piqued not by apologies for slovenly marksmanship, but by mention of hunters and a hunt.
‘What’s this about a hunt?’ he asked.
The rider seemed to be taken aback by the question. ‘Then you weren’t engaged by my father?’
‘I don’t even know who your father is,’ Brunner said, patting and rubbing the neck of his packhorse.
The rider straightened in his saddle, throwing out his chest in a manner that would have looked out of place even in a Sierck play. ‘I am the Baronet Dietrich Hartog, son of his lordship the Baron Friederick Hartog.’
‘An awful lot of barons for one stretch of forest,’ Brunner muttered under his breath, looking sadly at the gory wreckage of Viktor Schwartz.
‘I am sorry about your friend,’ Dietrich said. ‘I will help you take him back to the village for burial.’
Brunner turned away, shaking his head and pulling himself into Fiend’s saddle. He cut away the tether and threw it onto the ground beside the body. ‘Leave him,’ the bounty hunter said, his voice cold. He cast a last glance at the mangled corpse. ‘He’s no good to anyone… now.’
As Dietrich Hartog led him through the forest, the baronet filled Brunner in regarding the situation in his father’s domain. Roughly a year before, a strange predator had appeared, preying on the herds and generally wreaking havoc through the district. Every effort made by his fathers gamekeepers to track it down failed and before long the beast progressed from picking off the odd goat or calf to feeding on those who tended them. Once a month, when Morrslieb the Chaos moon was at its height, new outrages would shock the district. Those few who had seen it and survived described an enormous black wolf, bigger than a steer and possessed of unnatural strength and boldness.
Dietrich was not prepared to endow the wolf with such powers, though he grudgingly admitted it was far more cunning than common for its breed, ‘more fox than wolf,’ he mused. It was too smart for local hunters to bring down and his father had been forced to recruit hunters from all across Stirland to try and defeat it. One and all had failed, many of them becoming victims of the wolf themselves. In desperation, the baron had finally increased the bounty on the black wolf to five hundred crowns and had dispatched couriers to bear news of the reward to the far corners of the Empire.
The swollen bounty had brought wolf hunters swarming upon the district, but even experienced marksmen from Hochland and veteran woodsmen from the Drakwald had failed to best the beast.
‘My father can hardly increase the bounty any more than he already has,’ Dietrich said as they emerged from the tangle of the forest and into the open fields beyond. In the distance, little snakes of smoke marked the village and beyond it, with the morning sun just beginning to peek above its battlements was the looming bulk of Castle Hartog. ‘And if the wolf isn’t stopped, the peasants will start abandoning us in droves.’
Brunner gave the nobleman a shrug. ‘They expect the baron to protect them. That’s why they pay him taxes and give him their fealty. If your father can’t honour that obligation, then he has no right to expect them to stay.’
Dietrich’s face flushed with outrage at the impertinent words, his hand falling to the jewelled hilt of his sword.
Brunner seemed to ignore the angry gesture, pointing instead to a curious structure standing in the middle of the fields. ‘What is that?’ he asked, nodding his chin towards the ring of crude stone monoliths and the little wood hut nestled in their shadow.
‘A shrine to Rhya, the Earth Mother,’ Dietrich answered, almost automatically. ‘It has stood here since before the time of Sigmar, so they say,’ he added with a surly note.
‘Your people must be extremely pious,’ Brunner said, watching as a line of figures draped in black emerged from the hut and began to walk into the stone circle. Closer now, he could see a pile of wood at the centre of the circle. Towards this, the figures bore a burden covered in a linen shroud.
‘The nearest priest of Morr is three hundred miles from here,’ Dietrich said. ‘It is imprudent to wait for him to visit us, so we consign the dead to Morr’s gardens in the old way.’ He pointed at the shrouded body. ‘I don’t think Otto will complain.’
The mourners laid their burden upon the pile of kindling, then began to step away from the mound. Brunner put his spurs to Fiend’s flanks as he saw another mourner emerge from the hut, a flaming brand in her hand. Dietrich cursed and spurred his own mount after Brunner, taken aback by the bounty hunter’s sudden rush toward the circle.
Brunner reined his horse before the woman bearing the torch, blocking her from the pyre. He saw now that he was mistaken, she was not one of the drab mourners, but a priestess. Beneath a cape of woven leaves and a mantle of flowers, she wore a shift of thin white cloth, a garment so fine it might have been crafted from strands of gossamer. The almost transparent robe left nothing of the woman’s supple body to the imagination and the face that regarded him from beneath the flowery headdress was of almost divine beauty. There was no accusation in her soft blue eyes, no hardening of her velveteen lips as the huge black charger blocked her path. She simply gestured at the sky and spoke in a voice that was like the sigh of a breeze through long grass.
‘The morning grows apace, child,’ the woman said. ‘If this poor man’s soul is to be entrusted into Mother Rhya’s care, I must consign him to fire in time for the flames to meet the first rays to shine upon the sacred circle.’
‘I will only be a moment,’ Brunner told her, turning Fiend and moving towards the pyre. He barely looked up when he heard Dietrich reach the standing stones, the nobleman’s face contorted with restrained rage and something more, an expression of profound relief.
Brunner reached down and pulled back the shroud, staring intently at the face, then passing his gaze along the length of the man’s mutilated body.
‘You dare interrupt the ceremony?’ Dietrich challenged. This time he would have drawn his sword, but for the slender hand that restrained him.
‘There is time yet,’ the priestess said. ‘And it is fitting there should be one mourner here who did not come because of the baron’s largesse.’
Brunner watched the exchange, noticing the way the priestess’s eyes lingered on Dietrich, the way her hand tightened almost imperceptibly around that of the baronet. He filed the observation away with the others he had already made.
Brunner pulled the shroud back in place, leaning back in his saddle. He nodded to the priestess. ‘I don’t recognise him, or at least he doesn’t look like anybody I’m interested in.’ He stared at Dietrich. ‘It looks like the wolf played a bit of havoc with your man.’
‘Maybe you should reconsider your interest in my father’s reward,’ came Dietrich’s cold response.
‘Maybe,’ mused Brunner. ‘But your wolf has already cost me three hundred gold crowns. It would be nice to make that back, and with interest.’
Confusion showed on Dietrich’s face. ‘My name is Brunner,’ the bounty killer explained. ‘I hunt men. That carrion we left in the forest was bound for Reiksfang prison and the court of Judge Vaulkberg.’ Brunner smiled thinly as he saw the disgust on the nobleman’s face when he mentioned his
profession. ‘I admit that wolves aren’t my usual quarry, but for five hundred crowns I’d pull a troll from its hole. Besides, is a wolf really so much different from a man?’
Brunner let the nobleman consider the barb, turning instead to regard the comely priestess. He made an expansive gesture to the pyre. ‘I’m done. You can burn him now.’
Baron Friederick Hartog was an old man and the years had not been kind to him. Only wisps of hair clung to his scalp, his wrinkled skin sunken against his weary bones. His toothless mouth drooled from the corner where a stroke had paralysed his face and the eyes which stared out from deep with their sockets were heavy with melancholy and despair. The rich purple robe he wore seemed almost to smother him and press down upon his weakened frame with its weight. A page ran after him, carrying his ring and crown and other badges of rank and office. The old baron wheezed as he sank into his gilded chair at the head of the long table in the castle’s grand hall.
The arrival of the bounty hunter, and his harrowing escape from the wolf, had provoked the baron into holding a feast. Brunner suspected it was an excuse to hold the celebration, a futile effort on the old man’s part to escape from his problems, if only for a few hours.
Brunner found himself seated close to the baron, much to the chagrin of the courtiers and landed gentry who surrounded him. He suspected that, in the current crisis, the baron had more use, and more reason to entertain, the company of men such as himself than fawning hangers-on who could offer no solution to his troubles.
At the baron’s side, glowering at Brunner whenever his eyes strayed in the bounty hunter’s direction, was Dietrich. The baronet had tried to convince his father that even in their duress they did not need the services of a hired killer such as Brunner. Indeed, Dietrich had argued the subject with surprising vehemence until finally roared down by a diatribe that brought a fit of coughing from his father’s wasted body.
When he was not glowering at the bounty hunter or trying to soothe his father’s fears, Dietrich’s eyes would stray down the table and linger on a slender figure seated among the district’s aristocracy. A less observant watcher might have missed the coy glances shared between the baronet and the raven-haired beauty from the stone circle. She had discarded her thin robe and leaf mantle for a more sociable emerald gown and doeskin gloves. This, Brunner learned, was Frieda, the priestess of Rhya and the district’s spiritual mentor. Brunner had heard little about the worship of Rhya, her faith was suborned to that of Taal in less backward provinces. Only in Stirland did she still receive worship in her own right rather than as the wife of the nature god Taal. He wondered what manner of strictures the Old Faith had regarding its priestesses and how Mother Rhya might take one of her servants dallying with a baronet.
‘This damnable wolf!’ the baron cursed, spilling wine from his goblet as he slammed it angrily against the table. The cheery lute music of the minstrels died away and conversation around the table fell to a hushed whisper. The celebration had done nothing to snap the baron from his brooding thoughts and now he was giving voice to his outrage.
‘I can feel its damn fangs at my throat!’ Friederick said, closing his clawed hand about his neck. ‘It is bleeding me dry! The peasants are too frightened to work the fields, too terrified to tend the herds! My land is dying around me and there is no one to save it!’
‘We have try, great boyar,’ the words came from a dusky ruffian seated to Brunner’s right. He was a stocky, powerfully built man, bald but with bushy eyebrows and moustache. His clothes were the furs and leather of a colder clime, heavy bearskin boots and a furry goat-hide jacket. The stink of sweat and kvas had soaked into the garments so that even the smell of the feast could not mask them. This, Brunner understood, was Kazan, one of the Kislevite wolf hunters.
‘I have hunt the wolf in many land,’ Kazan continued, pausing to noisily slurp down a goblet of wine and snap his fingers at a servant to bring more. ‘I have the many pelt to show for my skill. One of my wolf, his hide sit in the Tsarina’s palace, and no lie!’ He tapped his chest. ‘When Kazan tell you this wolf, he is clever, then you know it is truth. But he will no get away from Kazan and Pujardov!’
Kazan reached his arm beside him, grabbing the shoulder of the man seated next to him. Pujardov was much younger than Kazan, his thick black hair tied back in a long scalplock, his face just starting to darken with beard. Like the elder Kislevite, he wore rude garments of hide and leather and around his neck was a crude necklace of bear claws, talons that looked to be sharper than daggers, even removed from their original owners.
‘Will that be before or after the crops fail!’ quipped one of the aristocrats. Kazan glared at the courtier, but the arrival of another goblet of wine distracted him from the object of his ire.
‘The wolf, very soon he is being mine,’ Kazan promised. ‘Pujardov saw sign of him only this night.’
The baron sneered at the boast. ‘Nurse that wine, Kazan. It is liable to be the last you take from my table.’ The old man scowled at the two wolf hunters. ‘So your son found sign of the wolf, did he?’ A crooked finger pointed at Brunner. ‘This man saw more than sign. He saw the beast itself! That is more than you Kislevite layabouts have done in six months!’
Dietrich closed his hands on his father’s shoulders, easing him back into his seat. ‘They have done better than the other hunters,’ he reminded his father. He stared directly into Brunner’s icy eyes. ‘The others were all killed by the wolf.’
Brunner set down the sliver of cormorant he had been eating. He stared back at Dietrich and smiled. ‘If it is a wolf,’ he said. He had kept certain things from Dietrich and his father, but the boasting of the Kislevites had made him think that perhaps he had made a mistake in doing so.
‘What you mean, “if it is wolf”? You no think Kazan know wolf when he see his tracks!’ The Kislevite grabbed the breast of Brunner’s tunic, pulling the bounty hunter to his feet. ‘You say that again!’
Brunner said nothing. Instead he buried a fist in the wolf hunters gut, doubling the man over, then brought his forearm smashing into Kazan’s neck, spilling him onto the floor. A kick to the head ensured the Kislevite would stay there. Brunner stabbed his finger into Pujardov’s face as the youth surged towards him, pointing straight between the boy’s eyes. The menacing gesture brought the young Kislevite short and he took a step back.
‘Enough of this!’ shouted Dietrich. ‘If you scum cannot conduct yourselves like civilised men, you can go take your supper in the kennels!’
Brunner shook his head and chuckled as he returned to his seat. A pair of servants dragged the unconscious Kazan away. Pujardov lingered for only a moment, then hurried after his father, pausing only to rip a bottle of wine from the hands of a valet.
‘At least it smells better now,’ the bounty hunter said, returning to the roast cormorant on his plate. Dietrich continued to glare at him, but whatever he was going to say was cut off by his father’s voice.
‘You say it is not a wolf, Kazan insists it is,’ Friederick said. ‘One of you must be wrong.’
‘Kazan is an experienced wolf hunter,’ Dietrich interrupted. ‘What does this… this assassin know about hunting wolves?’
‘It isn’t a wolf,’ Brunner repeated coldly. ‘Did you ever see a wolf that walked upon its hind legs or had hands to close around its prey? Has Kazan told you how a wolf can ignore lead bullets and steel bolts, how it can dance away unmarked after being struck with an axe?’
‘Then if it is not a wolf but some invulnerable monster, how did you escape?’ Dietrich asked, his voice thin and mocking.
For an answer, Brunner tossed a few burnt weeds onto the table. The dramatic gesture brought gasps from those closest to him and those further away craned their necks to see what he had produced. Frieda rounded the table and stepped over Kazan’s vacated seat to examine them.
‘Hawthorn,’ she pronounced, drawing away in revulsion. ‘A strange weapon to use against a wild animal. How did you think to burn hawtho
rn to drive it away?’
Brunner rubbed a hand through his close-cropped hair, scanning his audience, trying to judge their mettle. Any community so far from the niceties of civilisation was likely to be more pragmatic than pious. Whatever he said, if they thought he could help end their problem he would be safe enough.
‘I encountered an old woman in the forest,’ Brunner said. ‘It was she who gave me the weeds and told me how to use them.’
The reaction of the other listeners was nothing beside that of the baron. He straightened himself in his chair, leaning forward, gazing intently at Brunner.
‘The woman! How was she called?’ growled the baron. It was a demand, not a question.
‘Miranda,’ Brunner answered. ‘Mamma Miranda.’
The baron’s face became ashen. Trembling, he rose from his chair, then stumbled, relying upon his son to help lead him from the dining hall. Shocked silence followed his exit.
Brunner watched the noblemen leave, then looked over at Frieda. ‘I guess that means dinner’s over.’
As a valet showed Brunner to the room that had been prepared for him, he found himself suddenly face-to-face with the baron and his son. The old man was still visibly shaking, the sadness and defeat in his eyes even more pronounced.
‘You were not lying when you spoke at my table?’ the baron asked.
‘I don’t lie to people about to pay me five hundred crowns,’ Brunner answered, his words clipped with irritation.
The baron grabbed his hand, holding it tight in his withered claw. ‘You shall have a thousand, two thousand!’ The offer faded into a wracking cough. Dietrich tried to assist the baron, but the old man waved him back.