02 - Sacred Flesh

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  Angelika turned and looked behind her. They were all on their hands and knees: Gerhold, Stefan, Udo, Waldemar. They appeared to her as shambling, amorphous dots on a vast and angry field of ice. Behind them, Franziskus and Lemoine fought to pull a sled, to which Devorah was lashed. They’d found the sled with a dead noblewoman and a large guard dog that was also dead stuck fast to its wooden slats. It had taken some chipping and kicking to get them off it, to make a transport for their sick young sister. Devorah was unconscious, and had been that way since the marrow-chilling morning hours. Now she sweated feverishly, and her face was flushed. Her head jerked tortuously from left to right. Stefan and Waldemar had been told to keep themselves below the sled, but they’d abandoned their rear guard positions to scramble on the glaciated slope along with everyone else.

  Angelika calculated the slope’s angle: thirty degrees, perhaps. Thirty-five? Her lungs burned. She could not see the top of the mountain. Somewhere up there, it terminated in some sort of ledge or plateau, but all she could see before her was filthy, trampled snow, gouged and pitted by the efforts of hundreds of scrabbling pilgrims. Nor was it possible to turn and look back to see where they’d come from, there was just more ice, receding into a curtain of fog. They were nowhere, hurting, and eking their way up into more nowhere.

  She could see no other pilgrims but her own. Past the boundaries of the fog, there were voices and shouts. Grunts of pain, perhaps, or of defeat. But no one else to see.

  Blood, half-coagulated, half-frozen, coated the tips of each of her fingers; she could no longer see her nails. Angelika punched them into the glacier’s outer crust, a layer of crystalline snow like dead and sloughed-off skin. After making a handhold in the crust, she hoisted herself upwards. Then she did the same again. And again. Her fingers had enough feeling in them for a new jolt of dull pain to throb up through her arms each time she made a new handhold. The others would follow her path, using her handholds, so their hands would not suffer as much as hers. She paused to pant and wheeze. Many other pilgrims had already made this trek, she reminded herself. Surely they could not all have perished and slid down the mountainside. Yes, she had found many bodies, some of them lucratively kitted out—but not that many. Someone had to be surviving this trip. She would survive, too. It was true that the others were impelled forward by faith, by their moronic belief in the importance of this mountain and the woman who lived atop it. That was not true of Angelika. She had something better. Her own faith. Faith in herself.

  And as soon as she got down from this stinking mountain she would promise herself never to go up another one ever again.

  Abruptly she realised that she’d dropped down onto the ice. She pushed herself up, brushing frozen crystals from her cheek. She stretched her arms out. She dug her fingers into the crust. She made another handhold. She pulled her body upwards. Her thin chest heaved, exchanging one lungful of chill, unsatisfactory air for another. She pulled herself up. She thrust her arms out. She stuck her fingers into the ice. Made another handhold. Hauled her body up.

  What am I doing this for, she asked herself.

  For money, she answered.

  For little bags of gold I don’t even spend, squirreled away in dozens of tiny holes, dug all across this misbegotten wilderness.

  Angelika questioned the validity of her goals.

  Then she pushed.

  Stretched. Dug. Pulled. Heaved. Pulled. Pushed. Gasped. Pain. Hauled.

  Pushed.

  Stretched.

  Dug.

  Pulled.

  Hurt.

  Heaved.

  Fought.

  Pushed.

  Gasped.

  Pain.

  Wheezed.

  She’d rested her face in the ice again. She jolted up. She wrenched around. She sat on her behind. Let it freeze for a while, she thought. Let it match the rest of her.

  “How is everyone down there?” she called.

  She wasn’t sure whether she’d really said it. Yes, her lips were working up and down, and she was vocalising the thought, but was there enough air to make the actual sound?

  Apparently so.

  The others stopped. They waved. They pulled, pushed, hauled, hurt, wheezed, gasped.

  Franziskus called. His mouth moved. She heard the sounds he made, but she had to furrow her brow hard to understand what they were.

  “She is fading,” he appeared to be saying.

  She. The sister. Devorah. She was fading.

  Well, good for her.

  Miracle she made it this far.

  Isn’t that what they all want, when all is said and done? To die on this holy slope?

  Angelika turned back to the unending carpet of ice. Dug in another handhold. Grimaced.

  She hurt, hauled, wheezed. The handhold was icy and her bloody lungs were rasping.

  Angelika realised she was hallucinating.

  All the whiteness had become warm and good, and she no longer strained. Her muscles no longer felt strain and pain; the snow had become a balm.

  And she was floating somewhere, somewhere good. Space and her relation to the physical world no longer mattered. It was just whiteness, and that’s all there was to it. There was no need to trouble her mind any more than that. Just whiteness.

  And there beside her, glowing, clean, swaddled in robes of purest white linen, and radiant from the inside, was the old officer, Thomas Krieger. There was no sign of his wounds.

  “You’re angry with me,” she said.

  “No I’m not,” he replied softly.

  “You have good reason to be. I didn’t swear to protect the others, as you wished.”

  Krieger shrugged. It was beautiful, the way he did it. “You made no promise, so you broke no promise.”

  “I’ve let so many die,” she said. She ticked off the list on perfect, bloodless fingers. “The prioress. Jurg. Rausch. The widow Kloster. Ludwig.”

  “You promised nothing.”

  “And now Richart and Ivo—they’re both dead, aren’t they?”

  “If you say so.”

  “And Altman—murdered. And yet I am no closer to naming his killer.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “What does it matter?” she repeated, suspicion seeping into her tone. This was not what the real Krieger would say, if he sent his shade to visit her.

  The false Krieger chattered blithely on. “Chances are, whoever killed Altman was among those who have themselves since died. Ludwig, let us say. Or Rausch.”

  “I’m in a delirium, aren’t I?” Angelika said, accusingly. “Brought on by thin air and exertion.”

  “You were right to make me no promises, Angelika. Promises lead only to disappointment.”

  “You’re just my own starved mind, telling itself what it wishes to hear.”

  “When next you get the chance to make a foolish promise, do exactly what you did with me. Refuse. Give away nothing.”

  She treated the imaginary Krieger to a series of her favourite obscenities. He blurred, became indistinct, then there was nothing at all. Not even the whiteness.

  It’s me who’s dying now, Angelika realised.

  She shook herself.

  She found she could not move.

  She shook herself harder. Shook her head. Shook her hands. Put them in front of her weary eyes. The tips of the fingers were bloody again. That was a good sign at least. She shuddered.

  Whiteness faded, gave way to greyness.

  She came to. Franziskus loomed over her. He was jostling her up and down, commanding her to awaken. She lay on her back in the snow. She bolted up—so quickly that her forehead smacked right into his. The dreary sky and the dirty white mountain swam and buckled hazily before her, until her vision sharpened and resolved itself. Franziskus took her by the shoulders. Tiny diamond beads of frozen water had taken up housekeeping amid the feathery white hairs of his invisible, boyish moustache.

  “You collapsed,” he said.

  “I did no such thing,” she
replied, brushing snow from the arms of her jacket. He pushed his face, made florid by the frosty wind, so close to hers that it entirely occupied her field of vision. A bump was already rising on his forehead, where she had smacked him.

  “The sister,” she said. “Is she—?”

  Franziskus gestured to the sled. Devorah’s chest moved in time to her shallow breathing.

  A frozen spike of dark hair dangled down to tickle Angelika’s forehead. Franziskus brushed it out of the way for her. She rewarded him with the slightest of smiles.

  “You know we’ll get off this frozen rock alive, don’t you?” she asked him.

  He nodded.

  “The two of us, I mean,” she said.

  He stole a glance at Devorah. “More than just us,” he said.

  A bellow arose from below. Angelika did not know whom it was coming from, until she saw him charging up the glacier: Waldemar, face crimson, eyes screaming back in his head. “Get away from her!” the summoner cried. “Get away!”

  Franziskus, still crouching, spun, hand ready on his sabre hilt. Flecks of froth fell from Waldemar’s howling mouth. “It’s the sister you love!” Waldemar shrieked, making startlingly quick progress up the slope, grasping hands held out before his face. “Angelika is mine! Move away from her, or I’ll—”

  He tripped on a large, buried object and flipped face-first into the ice. He rose up, snow caking his beard, making him seem even wilder and madder than before. He stepped over the obstacle, then fell—backwards this time—as it gave way beneath him, rolling down, taking him with it. Waldemar frantically whirled his arms, but he could not regain his balance. He slid, yowling, then disappeared from view in a cloud of displaced snow particles.

  Angelika stood and moved carefully down the slope, until she could again see the summoner. He lay flat on his back, a widening nimbus of deep red blood suffusing the snow and ice around the back of his head. Dizzily at first, Angelika ventured toward him. He’d slid about ten yards, until a sharp jut of rock had stopped him short, piercing his skull. Angelika knew he was dead before she reached his side. She shouted up to the others: “He went mad and now he’s dead. Keep going. I’ll catch up.” She stooped over him. “So you loved me, did you?” she asked him. With dully aching fingers, she reached into his pockets, relieved him of his purse, and teased fat gold rings from his swollen hands.

  She followed his tracks up the slope. As she had suspected: the object that had tripped him up was a corpse, frozen to the side of the mountain. It was a young woman, younger than Devorah, though with coarser features. She brushed snow crystals aside. The corpse’s eyes were open and frozen to the core; it occurred to Angelika that if she were to tap them with the tip of her dagger, they would make a chinking sound. Between stone-solid fingers, the young dead girl clutched a string of silver prayer beads, complete with a jewelled dove. Angelika cracked the hand with the pommel of her dagger, breaking the fingers off. She teased the beads from the shattered hand, dropped it into her purse and then hustled to catch up with the others.

  Soon she was ahead of them. A peculiar energy, from a source she could not name, suffused her. But it did not last. And the ice went on for hours.

  The putrid green of a distant Chaos-storm tinged the clouds as ice gave way to a patch of rock. The angle of the slope flattened out. Other pilgrims huddled before a fire, sheltered by a shallow natural alcove. They waved and called out in praise to Shallya. There were half a dozen of them, men and women, wrapped in furs. They warmed uninjured hands at a fire. Leather gloves hung from their belts. Coiled ropes lay at their feet, along with chains and spikes and hammers—all the proper equipment for a long climb on ice.

  Angelika stumbled alongside Recht and hissed. “Why didn’t we have this?”

  Recht shook his head. “Clearly they were better informed than we. We knew the journey would be difficult, but we scarcely imagined…”

  “Idiots,” Angelika muttered.

  Seeing Devorah’s condition, the climbers rushed to her sled and dragged it, scraping on the rock, towards the fire. They poured a hot cup for her from a steel teapot, but she remained unconscious, even when Franziskus laid his warming hands directly on her soft, pale cheeks.

  “She’s not long for this world,” said one of the fur-clad pilgrims, a tall man with pinched eyes and a long, leathery face.

  “No time to waste,” said another, a round-faced, flat-nosed fellow with a reedy voice. Their accents marked them out as northerners. “We must get her up the rest of the way, so Mother Elsbeth can cure her.”

  Without further discussion, they doused their fire with their fresh-brewed tea then efficiently assembled their climbing gear. “You’ve done the hard part already,” said the leather-faced man, thrusting a hearty hand to Stefan. He introduced himself as Primus Lichtman. He did not bother to name his companions. “Coming up the ice without suitable clothing and no gear whatsoever. The lot of you are quite insane,” he cheerfully observed.

  “I wish I could disagree,” said Angelika.

  He pressed his squinty eyes even further shut, clasped his hands together, and addressed the sky. “Bless you, oh goddess Shallya, that you have brought these unfortunates to us, that we may extend the benefits of our superior planning to others needier than ourselves, and thereby prove our love to you, that our prayers of mercy toward all may be strengthened, and the rancid hosts of Chaos be thus turned back and dashed upon the shoals of all-encompassing love.”

  This place, Angelika thought, is blessed with more than its share of entirely mad persons.

  But the happy, healthy pilgrims did as they promised, wrapping Devorah’s skid in a cocoon of ropes, as the others jaunted ahead up the rock, happily pounding in spikes and laying in a preparatory network of ropes and chains. “This last expanse won’t be difficult at all,” Primus Lichtman reassured them. “There is a great hustle-bustle of importuning persons up around the shrine, and we have been waiting for a pressing cause to join it.”

  “Yes,” said Angelika, still wondering what trick these well-fed pilgrims meant to play. Would they dash her and her charges down the side of the mountain and then venture down to collect their valuables? She kept her hand as near her knife as decorum allowed. “I reckon there’s no greater cesspool of contagion and disease within a thousand leagues of here. All those sufferers of the mange and shingles, and Chaos plague no doubt, all packed together around the gates of a tiny abbey…” The leathery face of Primus Lichtman lost some of its deep-brown colour. Angelika’s mood improved immensely.

  Like a swarm of eager, helpful rodents, the pilgrims clambered back down the rocks, having fashioned a makeshift pulley system to ferry Devorah’s pallet up the rocky summit. Contentedly brushing both Franziskus and Lemoine out of the way, they moved to the young sister’s side. They attached her to their rope system and heaved her up, harmonising their rhythm with a breathy chant. Using their rope-and-chain handholds to drag herself up the stony slope, Angelika followed the blissful pilgrims, and was followed in turn by Franziskus, Lemoine, Stefan Recht, Friar Gerhold and the merchant, Udo Kramer. She braced herself, waiting for Primus’ men to slash the ropes, and send Devorah’s sled crashing down on them, but they did no such thing. Instead, they disappeared over a lip of rock, taking the girl with them. Angelika tensed, imagining any number of cruel scenes. But Primus and the double-chinned man quickly returned, standing on the ledge, their uncallused hands beckoning her on. They reached out for her and pulled her up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Angelika stood before a throng of pilgrims that crowded the worn, pitted walls of an old, drab abbey. She couldn’t see a front gate and asked Primus to explain. He pointed to her left, where the sound of shouting and chanting suggested an even greater mob of penitents around the corner.

  “We came up the side way,” he said. “There are natural terraces around the front,” he said, proud of himself.

  “There are terraces?”

  Primus nodded.

  “On t
he mountain? Stairs on the mountain?”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “And we came up the side?”

  Primus became grave. “We scouted those terraces and found them suspiciously hospitable. In the scaling of mountains, there is no killer more ruthless than simple complacency.”

  A familiar voice fluted ominously in the distance. “That’s them! That’s her!”

  Angelika clenched her teeth.

  It was Ivo Kirchgeld, flanked by two guardsmen, who clanked towards her in the full armour and martial regalia of Sigmarite warrior priests. Ivo pointed his forefinger at her face. “I knew it was fruitless waiting for them at the front. If there was a sneaky way to come, they’d find it!”

  Franziskus placed a restraining hand on her knife-arm. The gesture was redundant; Angelika had already figured the odds. Two large, fully-armoured, doubtlessly well-trained men against one slim woman. Even if she weren’t exhausted, she’d never be fool enough to start a tangle with fighters like these.

  “Hands above your heads!” the older of the two guards commanded, addressing both her and Franziskus.

  Ivo Kirchgeld rocked back on his heels. “Yes, that’s it. The two of them. Don’t mind the others, they’re harmless dupes. I was the only one to see these two for the impious villains they are.”

  “Hands above your heads!” the elder Sigmarite repeated, animating a complex network of wrinkles and creases. Angelika slowly moved her hands out from her sides, crooking them slightly above her head. Franziskus did the same.

  “It is true that there are dupes present, but they have been misidentified,” said Angelika, meeting the lead soldier’s glare. “I don’t know what tale this jackanapes has peddled to you, or what he hopes to gain by it, but you can be sure that it and the truth are only coincidentally acquainted.”