by William King
Mrs Warble hadn't raised any stupid kids, apart from his brother Tinfang, who was dead; Warble was up and running as soon as the coast was clear. Propelled by blind panic, he never noticed what direction he was taking, just so long as it was away from the warehouse, and had only the vaguest idea of how long it was before he collided with something warm and yielding that swore at him.
"Sam! In here!" Lisette dragged him into a side alley, an instant before the night erupted around them. An eldritch glow suffused the darkness, punching through the muffling fog, and a demented howling rose to tear at the very roots of his sanity.
"What the hell's going on?" he demanded.
"I thought you might need some help." Lisette held out a small flask; Warble gulped at it, finding a Bretonnian brandy that should really have been savoured under happier circumstances. "I made some enquiries. Your lady friend was lying about a theft from the Swan."
"I know," he said. "Thanks for the drink."
"Pay me back later. So I had her followed, and asked some more questions. She's a dark elf."
"I know that too. That's a temple of Khaine back there."
"Really." Her eyebrow twitched. "That explains a lot." Warble didn't ask what; if she wanted him to know, she'd have told him.
"The whole rat thing was a blind," he said. "Everyone was after the base it was mounted on. It's some kind of magic stone."
"A bloodstone. Someone like your lady friend can use it to summon daemons." Lisette nodded. "Go on."
"The fat man seemed to know what it was. He was trying to stop her from getting her hands on it."
"He would. There's another cult active in the city. We don't know much about it, but they're just as bad for business. It seems they're in some sort of feud with the Khaine one."
"They won't be active for much longer," Warble said. "They're tearing each other to pieces back there."
"Good." Gradually the magical light faded, to be replaced by the familiar red and yellow flicker of leaping flames. "I think we'll let Captain Roland have the credit for mopping them up."
"What?" Warble turned, listening to the clatter of approaching footsteps, and when he glanced back she was gone.
"Sam." Gil appeared at the mouth of the alley a moment later, a squad of his watchmen behind him. Harald was somewhere in the middle of the group, clutching a battered pike from his shop, and puffing energetically. "We missed you at the Swan. What's happening?"
"It's a long story." Warble took another pull of Lisette's brandy, and sagged gratefully against the supporting wall. "And I bet you thirty lead crowns you don't believe a word of it."
THE PHANTOM OF YREMY
by Brian Craig
Now, said the story-teller, I will tell you a tale of Bretonnia, the country of the marvellous King Charles, who sets himself further above his people than any other lord in all the Old World, and who has so many governors under him that he cannot know their number, let alone their names.
This story tells of a town named Yremy, which was not so very far from Moussillon, the legendary City of the Damned - not far enough, in the opinion of its citizens. The great earthquake which had destroyed the heart of Mousillon had barely stirred the foundations of Yremy, and none of the houses of its gentle folk had fallen. Nevertheless, the tremors had left their mark upon the town, for once the rich and the mighty have felt turbulence in the ground on which they tread, they always walk in fear of losing their position.
This anxiety led the noblemen of Yremy to be especially stern and severe in their administration of the law. Whenever the governor had cause to speak to the good and honest men who had put him in his office he was proud to tell them that there was no other town in Bretonnia whose thieves were so fearful of the rewards of judgment, or where the scaffolds were so frequently hung with the broken bodies of those who dared offend the law and its upholders.
With such an advantage as this Yremy might have been a happy city, but the people of Bretonnia were always a discontented folk. There were among the ungrateful poor a more than tiny number who were embittered by the firmness of their masters, and resentful of the way in which its force inhibited their spirit of adventure.
"How should we live if we cannot steal?" they said to one another when they met in their secret dens and dirty inns. "Must we go back to the land, to spoil our hands and break our backs in the planting and the reaping? And for what? The best grain goes to the rich, who neither dig nor pick, and we are left with the turnips and the beets. We cannot seek honest work as watchmen, for we are the ones for whom watchmen must watch, and our masters would soon perceive that we had nothing to do. We must do what we can to reclaim the night for those who have stealthy business to conduct. We must discover among our ranks a robber of great daring, who can thumb his nose at the governor and his magistrates, and defy every effort of the guardsmen and the secret police to bring him to his reckoning."
Alas, there was a long hard time when they looked among themselves for this paragon of cleverness, and could not find him. Yremy's thieves grew lean in the winter, and less capable in their trade as each of them in turn was caught about his business and returned to his family lightened by a hand.
There came a day, however, when there began a series of robberies which restored hope to the poorest homes in Yremy - not petty thefts of food and trinkets from the marketplace, nor even a skilful cutting of purses, but burglaries of the boldest kind. These crimes were the work of a daring housebreaker who could climb high walls and break strong locks. Again and again he carried away fine jewels, virtuous amulets and gold coins, and sometimes weapons.
Only a handful of the people who were robbed in the early days of his career caught glimpses of this robber, and they could say little about him save that he went about his business clad all in black leather, wearing a mask to hide his face.
Only one man came near to laying hands upon him in those early days, but that was a fat merchant, who was at the time clad only in a linen nightshirt, and he lost all enthusiasm for a tussle when he saw that the thief was armed with a stabbing sword of the kind which is called an epée à l'estoc.
"He stole the bag of coins which was my worldly wealth," wailed this unlucky man, when he told his anxious friends of his terrible ordeal, "and did not hesitate to add insult to injury, for he took my powdered wig as well when I cursed him as a truffle-digging pig, and impaled it on a spike upon my gate."
In another realm, his hearers might have laughed about the wig, but in Bretonnia a merchant who apes the gentry by playing the fop is not reckoned a figure of fun, at least by his own kind. The fact that the robber carried a sword was taken more seriously still, for it was held to be proof of murderous intent, and rich men began to quiver in their beds for fear that when their turn came to attract the attention of the thief, he might puncture their bellies as well as their wigs.
Within a matter of weeks every man of quality in the town was howling for protection or revenge.
"We would expect such things to happen in Brionne," they cried, "but this is Yremy where the law is firm and the peace is sternly kept. Is this a phantom which robs us, that he cannot be captured and held? Is it some black magician who evades our every precaution with his spells? Then let us call upon our wizards and our priests to use their powers of divination! Let us call upon the Gods of Law to reveal this miscreant and deliver him to punishment!"
These anguished cries were heard even in the houses of the poor, where they caused a certain merriment, and the name of the Phantom was thenceforth on everyone's lips, whether they hailed him as a hero or damned him as a villain.
The only comfort which the wealthy could find in the midst of their distress was to say to one another: "In the end he will surely be caught, and then let us see what Jean Malchance and Monsieur Voltigeur will make of him!"
Jean Malchance and Monsieur Voltigeur are two of the central characters of our story, and the only two who can be properly introduced - for the identity of the Phantom must remain a mystery
until its climax.
Malchance and Voltigeur were names invariably coupled, for they had been friends since boyhood, schooling together, courting the same woman (and when Voltigeur married her Malchance swore to remain a bachelor for life!), and in the fullness of time performing their public functions in harness, as senior Clerk and senior Magistrate of the High Court of Yremy. Voltigeur, who was ever the more glorious of the two, if only by a fraction, was the magistrate, while Malchance was the clerk.
Yremy was a large enough town to boast four magistrates in all, and an equal number of clerks, but whenever a man had cause to think of the High Court of Yremy it was Malchance and Voltigeur who sprang first and foremost to mind. They were different from their fellows, because they had a lightness of touch in conducting their affairs which was born of long friendship. They were witty and clever, and their exchanges frequently evoked wild laughter in the public gallery of the court, even when the said gallery was packed with the friends of the accused.
To say that there was a lightness about their manner is not at all to say that there was any lightness about M. Voltigeur's sentencing. Even in that matter, though, the cleverness and wit of the great man shone through. Aided by Malchance, M. Voltigeur was most inventive in his choice of punishments, sometimes devising penalties which were previously unheard of in the whole of Bretonnia. Some said that he followed the spirit of the law more closely than the ordinary scheme of punishment, but it must be admitted that others assessed him differently. M. Voltigeur himself said only that he tried to make a punishment fit the crime by which it was earned.
It is of course true that many people believe the customary scheme of punishment to be already well-designed to serve the end of suiting the penalty to the crime. They hold that there is an abundance of natural justice in the common decree that a murderer should be hanged, a thief deprived of his offensive hand, and a petty traitor - which is to say, a woman who murders the man to whom she has been given in marriage - burned alive. But M. Voltigeur was not entirely satisfied with the beautiful simplicity of this ordinary scheme, and it was his invariable habit to attend to matters of finer detail, which led him to treat different thieves quite differently.
For example, a man who stole an amulet or a gold coin might be allowed by M. Voltigeur to keep his hand, but instead be branded upon the forehead with the imprint of that same amulet or gold coin, heated near to melting-point, so that he must ever bear upon his brow the image of that which he had unlawfully coveted. A man who stole a bolt of fine velvet cloth (an item of much value in civilized Bretonnia) might likewise be allowed to keep his hand - but only on condition that he went about thereafter clad in a shirt of prickly hair which tickled his skin most horribly.
By the same token, a poisoner would not usually be condemned by M. Voltigeur to be hanged upon the scaffold or (if of gentle birth) beheaded by the axe. Instead, he would be placed in the public pillory, and given a series of very noxious brews to drink, until his guts felt as though they were on fire, and the flesh upon his bones turned black-and-green as it rotted expeditiously away.
Even the poorer people of Yremy perceived a clever wit at work in these unusual punishments, and the loyal public which loved to see the excutioner at work thought him a fine fellow for saving them from the ennui which might otherwise claim them when the common business of hanging became overfamiliar. M. Voltigeur was therefore an extremely popular man, frequently called "the Great Judge".
The so-called Phantom had not been long at his work when it became apparent that there was something most peculiar in the pattern of his crimes. For one thing, members of the family of M. Voltigeur appeared more often in the list of his targets than seemed likely. These burglaries stood out for a second reason too: instead of wholesale plunder of the accessible assets, the Phantom removed only a single item from each household, often leaving behind jewels and coin of considerable value. In every case involving a relative of the magistrate, the object removed was something the owner considered very precious, but each victim asserted that the value was chiefly sentimental.
The close relatives of M. Voltigeur at this time numbered five.
He was a widower, but had three surviving sons and two daughters. When the houses of all five had been invaded it became abundantly clear that some special of malice was at work. The fifth incident, involving the younger daughter, left no other interpretation possible, for this daughter had been unwise enough to marry for love, and she possessed nothing that was authentically valuable. She did however have a carved wooden heart which was marked by a patch of red dye in the shape of a teardrop, which she treasured greatly, not so much because of its significance as an emblem of the goddess Shallya, but because it had been given to her by the mother she had lost in infancy. This object was of no worth to any other, yet the clever robber went to some pains to remove it from her.
When the news of this particular crime spread through the town the possibility was widely discussed that the Phantom was engaged in exacting some perverse revenge upon those near and dear to the city's favourite Judge. All Yremy waited to see how M. Voltigeur would respond.
Now M. Voltigeur was a very dutiful man, though even his faithful friend Jean Malchance would never have said that he was unduly loving. He had been cool with his wife in the latter years of their marriage and he had always been cool with his sons. He was perhaps a little fonder of his daughters, but the fact that the younger had married for love had understandably annoyed him more than a little. But he who attacks a man's family also attacks the man, and when M. Voltigeur heard of the theft of the wooden heart he was moved to very considerable anger. He let it be known through the town that he would personally guarantee to double the price which had already been placed on the robber's head, so that the man who caught him would win a thousand silver sequins.
No reward of that dimension had ever been offered in Yremy for the apprehension of a felon, and in the meaner streets the sum was much discussed.
Every petty robber in the town began to watch his friends with avaricious care, and every unhappy child yearned to discover proof that one or other of his parents might prove to be the robber, and exchangeable for ready money.
And when none of the poor could find the Phantom among his acquaintances, the rumour began to be put about that the robber must himself be a gentleman!
This opinion was given further credence when the Phantom was very nearly apprehended in the garden of an impoverished marquis whose dwindling family fortune he had recently reduced by a further half. This time, the man who tried to stop him was no nightshirted milksop but a stout nightwatchman named Helinand, armed with a partizan (which is a kind of spear, as those of you who know Bretonnian weapons will already be aware).
Helinand engaged the masked thief with alacrity, the pressure of his duty reinforced by greed, thrusting at him with his weapon as cunningly as he knew how. But his opponent was equal to his every challenge, parrying every blow with his own much tinier weapon.
"Three times I drove him to the wall," Helinand declared, when he gave an acount of his adventure to M. Voltigeur, "and thrice he slipped away, as delicately as if he were dancing. I could not see his face, but I know now that he is a well-schooled fencer, who fights as only a light-footed sportsman fights, and very cleverly. Though he dressed himself in the plainest leather last night, I would wager everything I have that he is used to calfskin and lace!"
"And did the wretch speak to you at all?" demanded M. Voltigeur, who found this ration of information far too meagre to assuage his hunger for news.
"Why yes," said the unfortunate watchman. "When he finally tripped me up and took my partizan away, he said that he was sorry to have put me to the inconvenience of chasing him, but that he could not be caught until he had settled his account with you, which he hoped to do within the week. I did not recognize his voice, alas!"
When M. Voltigeur heard of this amazing insolence his hands so shook with wrath that he was forced to ask Jean Malchance (who
was well-used to taking dictation from him) to write down a proclamation for him, which he then gave to the First Crier of Yremy, demanding that it be loudly read in every quarter of the town.
The message which the criers gave out was this:
"I, M. Voltigeur, magistrate of Yremy, am sorely annoyed by the miseries inflicted upon my friends and my children by that low felon which the silly common folk have named the Phantom. I declare that this so-called Phantom is in reality worthy of no name save that of Rascal and Coward, and I say to him that if he bears any grudge against me, then he ought now to direct his attentions to my own house, and to no other. Should he answer this challenge, I promise him that he will be caught, exposed for the shabby trickster which he is, and delivered to the kind of justice which his horrid crimes deserve."
This was an unprecedented event. Never before had a magistrate of the town sent such a message in such a fashion. Whether the man for whom it was intended heard it cried, none could tell, but wherever it was broadcast there were hundreds of interested ears to catch it and thousands of clucking tongues to pass it on, with the result that when the curfew tolled that day there was no one in Yremy who had not heard it repeated. It had been told to ancients so deaf they could hardly hear it, and youngsters so small they could barely understand it, and there was no doubt at all that if the Phantom was within the walls of the town, then the challenge must have been delivered. The citizens waited, thrilled by excitement, to see what would happen next.
In the meantime, M. Voltigeur had not been idle. As a magistrate of the town he had in the normal course of affairs a guardsman to stand outside his front door, and now he obtained three more from the governor, so that the guard at the front might be doubled and one of equal strength placed at the back of the house.