by ich du
'Do not worry, my mangy dove,' the shadow laughed. 'Your dubious honour is safe with me.' Nicoletta wept a tear of terror as the malformed hand caressed her cheek and slowly slid down her face, lingering on her chin for a moment, before falling to her chest. 'I have pressing concerns this night, and no time to squander.' The hand on her chest knocked Nicoletta backwards, causing her to crash on the floor beside her bed. 'More's the pity,' the shadow hissed with a touch of regret.
Nicoletta started to pick herself up from the floor when the intruder closed upon her once more, pulling her head upwards by the long locks of dark hair. His fingers twisted inside bunches of Nicoletta's hair, forcing her to stare into the ghastly eyes.
'Tell me what I need to know, my mangy dove, and I shall be about my business.' The hand gave a hard yank, bringing a sharp gasp of pain from Nicoletta. You do want to be a good little whore and tell me all I want to know, don't you?' The shadow paused, relaxing his grip so the girl could nod her head.
'Good,' the shadow hissed and bubbled. 'That will save us much unpleasantness. You do, of course, know a man named Bruno Brega?' Nicoletta's eyes widened with fear when she heard the gruesome creature speak the name of her beloved, the very man whose well-being had so discomfited her. 'I need to find him. There are people very interested in his whereabouts. People with very deep purses. Tell me, my mangy dove, where is your admirer?'
Nicoletta felt a surge of dread welling up inside her not for herself, but for the man she loved. This greater fear coursed through her, steeling her and providing her with a paltry simulacrum of courage. She croaked a response to the pitiless deeps of the stranger's cat-like eyes.
'I... I do n-not know... any such man!' The hand in her hair pulled back hard. She cried out in pain.
'So,' the shadow's loathsome voice rasped with mock regret. 'I see we must do this in a more time-consuming manner.' Her captor reached beneath the folds of his cloak and drew out a small metal tube, no larger than her knife. One end of the tube was angled and sharp, like the point of a scribe's pen. The entire implement was hollow like a flute.
The intruder crouched over Nicoletta, twisting her head around so far it almost snapped her neck. He stared into the woman's terrified orbs. Her mouth opened again, but the hand clutching the metal tube pressed itself against her lips, stifling her words. A trio of short sounds issued from the shadow, like the gentle reprimand of a disappointed parent.
'I lied, of course, my mangy dove,' the shadow rasped. 'No matter what lies you chose to tell me, we would have come to this. Perhaps you even have a mind to tell me the truth, now.' He laughed once more. 'I shall know soon enough what there is in that pretty little head.'
With a swift motion, the intruder stabbed the metal tube into Nicoletta's skull. There was a dull crunch as the implement broke through bone. The woman's body spasmed in the shadow's grasp, but the iron grip held her firm. The shadow's distorted hand pawed at its face for a moment, pulling the scarf away.
Its lips hovered over the metal tube and then the shadow began to drink the dying woman's memories.
ON THE LANDWARD side of Miragliano vast marshlands stretched for many leagues - shallow lakes of tall marsh grass interrupted by small islands of more stable ground. Scows and barges were the means of transport here. Enterprising merchants collected the fresh water of the marsh to sell to the thirsty citizens of the city. Beyond the many leagues of the marshlands were gently sloping hills and meadows, vast cultivated fields of grains and vegetables, orchards of fruit trees, rambling vineyards and great spreads of pasture for cattle and sheep. This was Miragliano's breadbasket, protected by forts garrisoned by the soldiers of Prince Borgio himself, who was strategist enough to understand that a hungry army would win none of Miragliano's many wars.
But soon after the last fort had been passed, the cultivated lands faded. Here the landscape grew more desolate, stands of thin-boled trees grew in unmanaged, confused clusters, brush crept ever nearer to the few roads and paths, threatening to consume them. The rolling hills sheltered deep shadowy hollows, places where the hot Tilean sun could not reach. This ungoverned region was home only to a few hardy trappers and woodsmen, hunters and foresters who wrenched their livelihood from the wilds. Packs of beastmen roamed these places; small tribes of orcs and goblins eked out a miserable and tenuous existence preying upon the weakest of the merchant caravans that dared to brave the ill-kept roads. Bands of human predators lurked alongside the monsters - outlaws and deserters from the numerous mercenary companies employed by the many merchant princes. Wise was the traveller who trusted no man he encountered in these lonely wilds.
Five men stood in a small circle before the ruins of an old, ramshackle hunter's cabin. On the ground between them, a sixth man lay, arms and legs spread to either side of his body. He was secured to wooden stakes by thick loops of rope. The standing men all sported similar dark clothing, piecemeal armour and a motley array of weapons. They each wore an expression of cruelty and avarice.
The darkly handsome Tilean features of the man on the ground were ashen with fear. He knew these men, and he knew he had every reason to be afraid.
'Come now, Bruno,' a giant of a man grunted through his thick black beard. 'Tell us where you hid the gold, so we can just kill you and have done with it.' The huge man's dirty hand fell to one of the dozen knives criss-crossing his massive belly on a worn leather bandoleer. 'Otherwise I'll have to cut you some. I'd like that, but I can guarantee you won't enjoy it!'
'I told you before,' the man stretched between the stakes spoke from his bruised face. 'He didn't pay me! The bastard tried to kill me after I delivered it to him!'
'Don't lie to us!' spat a thin man whose nose was scarred with a knife wound. 'You should have played square with us, Brega!' He kicked the prostrate man in the ribs, bringing forth a groan of pain. 'Not so smart after all, eh? Cheatin' us is the last thing you shoulda done!'
'I should have let them hang you in Tobaro when I had the chance, Sollima!' snarled Brega, struggling against his bonds. The thin Sollima rewarded the captive's efforts with another boot into his ribs.
'Are we gonna beat him to death or find out where he hid the gold?' growled another of the men - a tall man wearing a studded leather tunic and an old battered helmet.
'You heard him, Bruno,' said the giant with the collection of knives. 'Do you tell us where the gold is, or do we beat you to death?'
'The Dark Gods rot your flesh, Nuccio! There is no gold!' Brega lifted his head from the ground to roar at his captors.
'As you like, Bruno,' the hulking Nuccio replied, drawing a knife from his bandoleer. 'Two of you hold him down. It takes a steady hand to peel flesh from bone.'
Two of the men descended upon Brega, grabbing hold of his body and forcing him to lie still. Brega spat a glob of phlegm into the face of Nuccio as the butcher leaned over him. The giant paused a moment, wiping the spit from his beard, then a grim smile grew across his features. This was going to be fun.
'Ranald's cloak, who is that?' exclaimed the thin Sollima in a whiny tone. Nuccio looked up, the knife now inches from Brega's face.
An armoured shape strode into the clearing, its chest encased in metal, and its face hidden by the blackened steel of an Imperialstyle sallet helm. A cloak of grey cloth was draped about the man's right arm. His left arm rested casually against the hilt of the sword sheathed at his side.
The five ruffians glared at the lone warrior.
'I hate to intrude upon your entertainment,' the warrior said in a voice as cold as steel, 'but I need your playmate.'
'A poor jest.' grunted Nuccio, as he rose to tower above his fellow smugglers. Each of the men was now fingering the hilts of their weapons. The prisoner was momentarily forgotten. 'And one that is going to cost you.' Nuccio nodded to two of his comrades who began to stalk away to the right, while the others began to circle to the left. 'If you have a god, pray to him.' Nuccio took a step forward, drawing a fat-bladed sword.
The warrior did not w
ait for the man to close in on him, nor did he wait for the other ruffians who were tightening the circle around him. Throwing back his cloak, he revealed the curious crossbow gripped in his gloved hand. It was a strange device of inhuman construction, with a box-like mechanism set on top of it. Before Nuccio could more than register the fact that the interloper held a weapon in his hand, the steel bow string had snapped three times in rapid succession. The first bolt smashed into the large man's breastbone. The second tore through his windpipe. The third broke his teeth before burying itself in the rear of his mouth. The brutish thug silently toppled backward, like a felled tree.
Brunner turned from the slain Nuccio, and trained the skavenmade weapon on the rogues to his left. The men were staring in open-mouthed horror at the carnage the bounty hunter had delivered upon their leader. As soon as they realised that Brunner's weapon was now trained on them, the two thieves turned and ran. Brunner could hear their comrades to his right already crashing through the brush and brambles.
The bounty hunter cradled his weapon in his arms. The murderous bow was indeed a fair payment for his infiltration of the dungeons of Karl-Franz. He was grateful to the sinister little ratman he had met in the Dancing Fox.
Brega emitted a muffled groan. Brunner strode forward, and stared down at the man pinned beneath the giant Nuccio. He coughed, the dead weight of Nuccio crushing the air from his lungs. Brunner smiled down at the trapped man, then rolled the hulking body to one side.
'The grace of all the gods be yours, stranger.' gasped Brega after he had recovered his breath. 'I thought I was carrion for certain.' Brega tugged at the bindings lashed about his left arm, as if to alert his saviour to his predicament. But his saviour had other matters to attend to. The bounty hunter turned from the prisoner and crouched over Nuccio's corpse.
Brega craned his neck as far as he could to see what the killer was doing. He soon wished that he hadn't. Brunner was leaning on the slain ruffian's chest, a flat wedge-like device gripped in his gloved hand. Brega watched in horror as the man quickly pried the three crossbow bolts from Nuccio's body. He raised each bolt to his visor as he pried them from the corpse. The one dug out of Nuccio's chest was discarded into the dust. The others he put back into the boxlike magazine of the crossbow. Then the bounty hunter's hand fell upon the pommel of the massive knife sheathed between pistol and sword on his belt. Brunner freed the blade, its serrated edge gleaming in the light, then he leaned back over Nuccio's body.
Eventually the bounty hunter rose, dropping his dripping trophy into a small sack. Then he turned and strode over to Brega's bound figure once more.
'My name is Brunner, and this is your unlucky day,' his icy voice rasped. Brega cried out just as the man's gloved hand smashed into his face, but the smuggler was unconscious before the sound could fully be uttered.
BRUNO BREGA AWOKE slowly, moaning in pain. His first thought was infuriation that he should be feeling pain. The priests always said that there was no suffering in Morr's realm, only eternal rest and silence. He tried to raise a hand to feel the lump he sensed bulging from his forehead where the bounty hunter had smashed him, but the bindings prevented him from doing so. For a moment, the smuggler was puzzled he was clearly no longer stretched out on the ground between the stakes. As he opened his eyes, Brega realised that he was lying across the back of a horse, his wrists and ankles bound together underneath the animal's belly. The motion he had sensed was now clear to him: he was being carried like a sack of goods by a pack animal. He tried to twist his wrists inside his bindings, but they were held securely.
Brega wondered if his luck could desert him any more completely. Everything had gone wrong for him since he had stolen the old clay pot from Altdorf. It was clearly an artefact of immense antiquity, some relic from the vast deserts of Araby. Even Brega had heard the old legends brought back by the crusaders about the daemons of the desert, the mythical djinn, who were imprisoned in sorcerous vessels long ago, so that they might be enslaved by the most reckless and power-mad of Araby's mystics. When he had first seen the old clay pot, he had sensed its disturbing air of unnaturalness, and wondered what might lie within it. One of his fellow smugglers, well versed in antiquities, had claimed that the picture writing on the pot was older than the scratch-script of Araby, from before the birth of the Empire even. He had seen such picture writing before, in the curio shops of Luccini and Miragliano, where relics looted from the Land of the Dead sometimes found their way.
Other hands had stolen the jar from a private collection, but Brega and his band of smugglers had been given the duty of getting the ancient artefact out of the Empire. There was a man in the Tilean city-state of Remas who was prepared to pay a small fortune for the object. The agent of the Tilean had given Brega and his men a most handsome advance.
The journey, however, had gone badly. On the Reik, as they were making their way towards Marienburg, the smugglers had been attacked by river pirates of a most despicable cast. They were led by a bearded madman, a devotee of the terrible Blood God. Several of Brega's mob died before their vessel finally eluded the pirates. Ironically they had taken protection from the imposing cannon of the infamous Reiksfang prison as the running battle drew close to its walls.
Further along the River Reik, a winged thing - some nightmare horror - had fallen upon their decks, wantonly slaughtering men before it was disposed of, and its foul corpse pushed overboard. In Marienburg, Brega's ship had joined a small flotilla that was making its way to the southern ports of Tilea. This was the first good omen since leaving Altdorf, but it did not take long for the tide of ill fortune to catch up with them again. Norse raiders struck the fleet shortly after it left Marienburg, and seven ships were left burning as the fleet fled the fury of the Northmen. Off the shores of Bretonnia, some ghastly sea beast had plucked seven crewmen from the deck of the ship nearest Brega's. Rounding the horn of Estalia, a thick fog had enshrouded the fleet. When the fog eventually lifted, the leading ship began to sail back towards the west, and its deck was not manned by human shapes...
Brega was certain that they would never reach Remas. He had even considered tossing the pot into the sea, certain that it was accursed. But the prospect of the gold awaiting him at the end of the journey stayed him. In the end, they did reach Remas, and Brega immediately set about meeting their mysterious employer. They met in a darkened back room of a dockside tavern. Brega could not get a decent look at the Tilean, such were the shadows in the chamber. He had presented the man with the clay jar, at which the Tilean had laughed - an unnerving, insane sound. Brega rose from the table, shocked by the mad laughter, just as the Tilean leapt to his feet, drawing a sword. Brega drew his own sword then, prepared to teach the cackling madman to honour his contracts.
The villain had rounded the table, emerging into the feeble light that filtered into the room from the gaps between the planks of the door. Brega could see that the man was dressed well, a fashionable black cloak fell from his shoulders and a gaudy gold buckle gleamed from his belt. Of the man's face, however, he could see nothing, for it was covered by a glistening red mask, such as might be worn to a masque ball, shaped like a fang-mouthed skull. From the deep pits of the grotesque mask's sockets, crazed eyes blazed with maniacal emotion - exhilaration mixed with bloodlust to form a psychopathic frenzy. Brega had not seen such insanity, even in the eyes of Chaos-worshipping pirates.
For a brief second Brega was able to study his duplicitous employer. But as he rounded the table, the man had brought his sword slashing toward Brega who barely managed to turn it aside with his own weapon. The madman's stroke had not been skilful; it was too wild and bloodthirsty to belong to any school of swordsmanship. But what it lacked in skill, it made up for in strength. As Brega met the man's blow, his body shuddered with the force. The madman's sabre deflected toward the table, and crunched through it like a hot knife through cheese. As the table fell apart, and his attacker recovered from his failed strike, Brega brought his own sword upward to a guarding positio
n. It was then that he saw how deeply the lunatic's hit had bitten into his own blade. There was a deep notch in the smuggler's sword, so deep that barely an inch of steel held the two halves together.
Dread bubbled up within the smuggler. Even a madman should not have such strength; no mere human foe could call upon such immense power. Brega cast his ruined sword into the face of the ruby mask and turned, fleeing from the tiny dark room and the bloodthirsty horror that lusted after his life.
For what seemed like hours, the smuggler fled through the streets of Remas, trying to lose his maniacal pursuer. There was something evil in that jar, he was sure, and he had unwittingly delivered it to someone who would put it to some dreadful purpose.
In a heroic tale, Brega would have tried to find and undo the terrible evil he had unwittingly brought to the city, but he was too sensible to be a hero. He stole a horse and fled Remas at the first opportunity. He had ridden first for Miragliano and the company of his mistress, retrieving a small cache of money he had left in her care. Then he had ridden for this old hideout, to recover still more loot. But he had been too slow. Nuccio and some of his former comrades had been waiting for him, mistaking the reason for his flight from Remas. They were determined to get their share of the money that Brega had never collected.
Now he was free of his murderous comrades, but he had traded them for someone worse. Brega had never set eyes upon the bounty killer called Brunner, but he had heard enough tales whispered about him in thieves' dens across the Old World to know that he did not want to.
BREGA LOOKED ABOUT him. He could see the grim figure of the bounty hunter, mounted upon a massive bay horse, scabbards dangling from the steed's harness. Behind the bay was a smaller grey packhorse, laden down with numerous sacks and equipment, and a few small wooden kegs. A rope connected the packhorse's bridle to the bounty hunter's steed, and another rope connected Brega's mount to the packhorse.