His decision made, Gunther opened the coach door, stepping to one side to let the woman’s body fall past him. Being careful not to get any more blood on his clothes, he retrieved his belongings from inside the coach before stepping outside once more to take one of the night-lanterns hanging from the coach’s side and fashion a makeshift carrying handle for it from a piece of cloth. Ready at last, he turned to the boy. For better or worse, if they were to reach their destination in good time tonight, they would have to walk.
Or one of them would at least.
‘Get onto my shoulders, boy,’ Gunther said. ‘We are going to play piggy-on-my-back.’
Silently, the boy did as he was told. Getting to his feet with the boy clinging to his shoulders, Gunther started on a brisk walk headed southwards. At best estimation they were at least a mile and a half from their destination. He would have to walk fast: the confrontation with the pimp and the others had cost him too much time already. No matter what else happened tonight, all his preparations needed to be ready by midnight.
If not, there would be hell to pay.
HE WAS SWEATING by the time he got to the docks. And when he reached the outside of the burnt-out tavern in an alleyway just off a deserted wharf, the weight of the boy on his shoulders seemed to have grown so much it was as though he had an adult perched upon his back. Relieved to have arrived at his destination at last, Gunther sank down to his knees to let the boy climb off. Then, rising to his feet and pleased to see no sign of life anywhere along the alley, he made his way toward the tavern with the boy behind him.
It had a history, this place. In its heyday the Six Crowns had been the nexus for much that was illicit and illegal in Marienburg; a place where deals could be struck and bargains made with no questions asked. Most recently, it had served as de facto headquarters for the Vanderhecht Organisation, a ruthless gang of smugglers whose leader had lived a double life as one of the most respected merchants in the city. But Hugo Vanderhecht was dead, killed by a bounty hunter after fleeing to the marshes, while the Six Crowns had been gutted a year ago in an unexplained fire, rumoured to have been set by the gang’s second-in-command in an attempt to hide his identity from the Watch. Still, it hardly mattered to Gunther who had set the fire. Whoever had done it, he owed them a debt of thanks. His work tonight needed privacy, and the derelict, ramshackle building before him would suit his purpose admirably.
Besides, he had his own history with this place. Years ago, it had served as the backdrop to an event which had changed the course of his life. And now that life had come full circle and brought him to the Six Crowns once more.
Advancing towards the fire-blackened doorway, Gunther found himself briefly troubled by thoughts of his own mortality. Something of the tavern’s current state, the crumbling plaster of its walls and the gaping heat-warped windows, brought to mind unpleasant echoes. For a moment he felt the weight of every one of his years bearing down upon him, greater even than the weight of the silent boy who now walked beside him. Perhaps it was nostalgia, or the last spasms of conscience of the man he had once been, but he suddenly felt a sadness he had not known in years. Then, shaking his head to clear it, he put sentiment behind him and pushed the door aside to enter the tavern.
‘Come on, boy,’ Gunther said, seeing the child hanging back at the threshold. ‘There is nothing here to harm you.’
Once past its deceptively ruined outer shell, the tavern’s interior was surprisingly intact. Picking carefully through a hallway choked with fallen timbers and ash-strewn debris, Gunther made his way towards what had once been the smaller of the inn’s two public barrooms. Then, checking to see the boy was still behind him, he stepped inside the room, lifting his lantern to inspect the surroundings.
It was exactly as he left it. Thanks to several hours’ worth of heavy labour when he had visited the tavern earlier in the evening, Gunther had cleared the floor of the barroom of its dust and detritus. Happy to see no sign of the room having been disturbed since, Gunther crossed the floor to the ruined bar. Then, stepping behind it, he stooped to pull away some of the fractured casks beneath, revealing the shape of the small wooden chest he had hidden there earlier. Relieved to see it undamaged and its lock intact, he lifted it onto the bar. As he took the key from the thong around his neck, Gunther noticed the boy leaning on the bar, craning his neck expectantly to watch the chest being opened. Pausing, Gunther put his hand inside his cloak to retrieve one of the small cloth purses hanging from his belt before, pulling open the drawstring, he took a bag of waxed paper from within it.
‘Here, boy,’ he said, giving it to the child. ‘Inside there are dried apricots and sugared almonds. You may have as many as you want, so long as you sit in the corner there and keep quiet.’
Accepting the offering, the boy jumped down from the bar, hastening to sit cross-legged in a distant corner and begin eating the sweets. For a moment Gunther watched him. Then, satisfied the boy was occupied, he twisted the key in the lock and opened the chest, checking a mental inventory as he arranged the contents on the bar beside him. It was all here: brazier, mortar, pestle, verbena leaves, mandrake root, man-tallow candles, wyrdstone fragments, vials of beastman urine and two dozen other things besides. Coming to the bottom of the chest, Gunther lifted out a long object wrapped in cloth, before pulling the edges of the cloth aside to reveal the bladed iron tube of the trocar. Staring at the thumb’s-width notch set halfway along its length, his hand strayed unconsciously to the small, round object nestling safely within a hidden pocket inside his vest. For a moment he cupped it in his hand, feeling the comfortable weight and hardness of it through the cloth. He had everything he needed. Now, it was simply a matter of putting his plan in motion.
Opening a jar containing the crushed fingerbones of a martyred Sigmarite saint, Gunther put them in the bowl of the mortar, adding a quantity of chalk and powdered dragon tooth before grinding it together with the pestle. Then, being careful to leave no gaps, he used the mixture to draw a circle of binding on the floor around the bar. To give the circle power he would have to chant the warding spell. But that would come later. He must see to the tripwires first, then draw a pentagram within the binding circle, centred on the bar. After that, there were candles to be lit, incenses to be burned, an altar to be arranged. A dozen different tasks awaited him before he could begin the ritual, and a single moment’s carelessness in any of them would spell disaster. But he was confident, all the same. He had prepared for this night’s work for decades. Years spent carefully considering all that might go amiss, shaping and reshaping his design, planning everything down to the smallest detail. But he had needed to; the stakes were high. So high, not one man in ten thousand times would have ever dared risk what he would tonight. But no matter the risks, no matter the dangers, the prize would be worth it. Come what may, tonight he would play a devil’s gambit. And he would play to win.
DIMLY, THROUGH THE walls of the tavern, Gunther heard a bell tolling in the distance. The harbourmaster was calling time. Ten bells. Two hours to midnight. He would have to work fast. As he hurried to the contents of the chest once more to resume his preparations, Gunther was struck by the irony of it. The course of the life he had set upon in the backroom of the Six Crowns when Marienburg was still part of the Empire would be decided in the selfsame tavern in two hours time. Despite all the groundwork and the decades of planning, all his life came down to in the end was a mere two hours. No, not even that. Like all men, ultimately the course of his life would be decided in a single moment - a moment for him that would come when the bell tolled midnight. But he could hardly complain. Where most men stumbled blindly towards the defining instants of their lives, he had been forewarned of his decades ago. It was not as though the moment had caught him unawares; he had been gifted with many years in which to make ready. Years more than three times past the normal span of man. Exactly one hundred and fifty years, to be precise.
IT WAS BUSY in the Six Crowns that night and, as he edged his way thro
ugh a crowd of hard-faced men towards the bar, it came as no surprise to Gunther to see that the tavern’s reputation as a den of thieves and cutthroats seemed well-deserved. He saw men who wore the scars of branding, others with clipped ears or penal tattoos, even a man with a rope scar around his neck. More than half the men there had been marked in one way or another by the city fathers’ justice. Though, to Gunther’s mind, that was all to the good. His business here tonight was a private matter. And, whatever their other vices, criminals at least could usually be relied upon to keep themselves to themselves.
Coming to the bar at last, Gunther signalled to the barman, dropping a guilder on the counter by way of enticement.
‘Can I help you, mein herr?’ the barman asked, lifting the coin to his mouth to test it with his teeth.
‘I am here to meet someone,’ Gunther told him. ‘In the backroom. It has all been arranged.’
Saying nothing, the barman looked Gunther up and down with ill-disguised suspicion. Then, right hand wandering beneath the bar before him, he spoke once more.
‘You were given a token?’ he asked, eyes dark with distrust.
Fumbling in his vest, Gunther produced another coin, a six-sided silver one that had been delivered to his house by messenger three days earlier, and handed it to the barman. Rather than bite this one, the barman stood studying it in his hand, looking first at the embossed motif of a serpent coiled around a piece of fruit on one side, before turning it over to see Six Crowns arranged in a circle on the reverse.
‘Six crowns, mein herr,’ the barman said, offering a hard, humourless smile as he handed the coin back to him. ‘Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?’
Lifting the hinged flap at the end of the counter, the barman nodded for Gunther to step behind the bar. Then, leading him through a curtained doorway, he ushered him into a hallway stacked on either side with empty beer casks and crates of bottles, before pointing towards a door at its end.
‘The backroom is down there, mein herr,’ the barman said. ‘No need to knock. You are expected.’
With that, he was gone, stepping back behind the curtain towards the bar and his patrons. Alone now, Gunther found himself strangely paralysed by the weight of his own expectations. He could hardly believe it could be so simple. Where he had expected blood sacrifice or elaborate rituals, there was only a short walk down an ordinary corridor towards a perfectly nondescript door. A door through which, he hoped, lay the answer to an ambition he had pursued for more than twenty years.
Summoning his will at last, Gunther advanced down the corridor and lifted his hand to the doorknob. Doing his best to keep it from shaking, he pushed the door open.
‘You must be Gunther,’ a smoothly spoken voice said from within the room. ‘Please, come in. I assure you, there is nothing here to harm you.’
Stepping inside the dingy backroom, Gunther found his expectations confounded for the second time in as many minutes. Ahead of him at a table at the centre of the room sat a blond-haired man in the clothes of a gentleman, a sardonic smile twitching at the corner of his lips as he raised a wineglass in languid greeting.
‘You were expecting horns, perhaps?’ the figure said as though reading his thoughts. ‘Cloven hooves? A barbed tail, even? I hope you are not disappointed. Given the unfortunate tendency of mortals to soil themselves when confronted with my true form, I thought it better to dress down for our meeting. Frankly, the floor of this room seemed filthy enough already.’
The smile on his lips grew even broader. Stunned, his mind reeling, Gunther gawped at him for a moment, before stammering a reply.
‘You are the Silver Tongue, Daemon Prince and First among the Infernal Legions of the god Slaanesh?’ he said, voice cracking as he said the last word aloud.
‘Generally, I prefer the name Samael,’ the other purred. ‘But really, Gunther, you know all this already. Otherwise you would never have come here to meet me.’
‘You know my name?’ Gunther asked, regretting how foolish the question made him sound the second it left his lips.
‘Of course I do, Gunther,’ Samael replied, sliding an opened bottle of wine and spare wineglass across the table towards him. ‘When a man comes to bargain with me, I make it a point to learn all I can of him. But we can discuss that later. First though, I suggest you take a chair and try to re-gather your wits. Oh, and help yourself to the wine. Whatever its other faults, this tavern possesses a surprisingly inoffensive cellar.’
Sitting down warily to face the daemon, Gunther picked up the bottle, only to pause halfway through filling his glass at the thought of a sudden, fearful premonition.
‘You may drink freely, my friend,’ the daemon said, seeming to read his thoughts again. ‘Even if I had the slightest intention of killing you tonight, I need hardly resort to anything so tiresome as poison.’
Feeling vaguely embarrassed, Gunther finished filling the glass, then took a healthy draught of what soon proved to be an agreeable, if not quite vintage, red Bordeleaux. Despite his best efforts to hide it, he was sure his nervousness was entirely obvious to the creature before him. Just as it was similarly obvious to him that the daemon’s pleasant appearance - the easy charm, handsome good looks and fashionable frills and ribbons of his clothing - were no more than a mask. No matter how convivial his host, Gunther did not for a minute doubt that he was in presence of an ancient evil. With that thought there came a rising tide of barely suppressed panic as suddenly he was struck by the sheer enormity of what he had come here to do tonight. But this was no time for second thoughts. For better or worse, he had set himself on this course willingly. And even here, in the face of damnation, he would not waver.
‘Now, where were we?’ the daemon mused, apparently convinced Gunther had settled himself enough to begin their business. ‘Ah yes. I was commenting on how well I know you. And I do know you, Gunther, better than anyone else in the world, I’d wager. For example, unlike your mercantile peers, I know you have spent the last twenty years of your life obtaining and studying a wide variety of magical, alchemical and heretical texts. You have read the works of Van Hal, von Juntz, Krischan Donn, Ralfs, even the tedious prose of the Ratmen-obsessed Leiber. And all of it with the aim of achieving a single burning ambition. But it was only recently, after a visit to Marienburg’s Unseen Library to read Hollseher’s Liber Malefic, that you finally discovered a means by which to achieve your aim. Now, you have come here to me in the hope that I can give you what your books could not. Well, happily, I can help you, Gunther. But there are rules in these matters. And, if you want me to grant your wish, you must first speak the words of it aloud.’
It was true, all of it. But, before he moved his mouth to frame the words, Gunther reminded himself he must be wary. It went without saying that the daemon would try to trick him. But in the end, the selling of a man’s soul was a business matter like any other. If he was to get what he wanted in return, Gunther must simply be careful when it came to negotiating the contract.
‘I want you to make it so that I will not age and will live forever,’ Gunther said.
For a moment, the daemon stared at him in amusement, the smile at the corner of his lips growing several notches wider. In the days leading up to the meeting Gunther had practised this scene in his mind many times, but despite all those rehearsals he had never expected to hear the answer Samael gave him now.
‘No,’ the daemon said with a smile.
Gunther sat open-mouthed, gaping at the smug daemon in disbelief. He had come to sell his soul - how could Samael refuse him?
‘You must try and see it from my point of view, Gunther,’ Samael said, fingers pressed together in a curiously human gesture. ‘What use is it, after all, for a daemon to be pledged the soul of a man who is going to live forever? How would I ever collect the debt? No, I am sorry, my friend, but I am afraid I must reject your proposal.’
Stunned, Gunther sat in uneasy and despairing silence. Twenty years, he thought. Twenty years, and I am no closer to m
y objective.
‘Of course, I do have a counter-proposal,’ the daemon said mildly, as though unaware of the effect his words had on Gunther’s desperate heart. ‘Absolute immortality may be out of the question. But there seems no reason I couldn’t keep you from aging and grant you longevity enough to extend your life beyond the normal span of man. And in return all I ask for - aside from your soul, of course - is that you perform a limited number of tasks on my behalf. Shall we say seven? Give me seven boons, Gunther, and I will give you a part of your wish at least.’
‘Seven boons?’ Gunther said, still barely able to comprehend how quickly his horizons had been diminished. ‘And who is to decide what the nature of these boons will be?’
‘I will,’ the daemon replied. ‘I promise you they will all be well within the scope of your abilities. Nor would I insult your intelligence by demanding that you give me all seven boons at once. You need only perform one boon now and I will stop you from aging and guarantee you another twenty years of life. Then, when those twenty years are done, you will perform a second boon in return for another twenty years, and so on, until all the boons are done. Think of it, Gunther, perform all seven boons and you can have another one hundred and forty years of life without aging a single day. Naturally, our agreement would not extend to protecting you from disease or violent death - even my powers are not limitless in that regard. But really, I think I am being fair enough already. As I’m sure you’ll agree, one-hundred-and-forty years is a long time for a daemon to wait to claim his due.’
Letting his words hang in the air a moment, the daemon sipped his wine as Gunther wrestled with a thousand silent thoughts and fears. Then, seeing Gunther’s discomfort, the daemon leaned forward once more with the smile of a huntsman who knows his trap is sprung.
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