[Warhammer] - The Laughter of Dark Gods

by David Pringle (ed) - (ebook by Undead)

  Tomas clutched his stomach, nauseated by the idea that the corpse in front of him had once been his father. He took slow, deep breaths, trying to regain control. Part of him simply could not believe it; and so, again, he kneeled and compared the dawnstones.

  They were identical in every detail.

  In a sudden spasm of anger, he ripped the creature’s dawnstone loose and thrust it into his pocket. Nothing but revenge, he realized, could take away the outrage that he felt. Whatever person or entity had concocted this travesty should surely be made to pay in some way.

  He turned and started toward the exit from the cave, feeling a fierce new determination. Maybe he was being foolish; he was, after all, at the beginning of his manhood, and he had survived his first battle more by luck than skill. Nevertheless, he would go back and find Brodie, and ask the halfling for his help.

  To search for vengeance in the Sea of Claws would be an enormous undertaking. It would require courage, resources, trained warriors, and expert seamen… not to mention the services of a good ship’s cook.

  A GARDENER

  IN PARRAVON

  by Brian Craig

  This tale, said the story-teller, was told to me by a man of Parravon in far Bretonnia. He said he had no wish to add to the evil reputation which the city of his birth already had, but that he did not care to bear alone the burden of speculation as to whether his late friend, Armand Carriere, was as utterly and completely mad as everyone chose to believe.

  You have heard of Parravon, and know of it what everyone knows. You know that it lies beside the great river Grismarie in the foothills of the Grey Mountains. You know that it is a prosperous city, whose wealthy folk are numerous and much devoted to the arts, as all men are when they need not work for their living and must find some idler way to spend their time. You also know that the beautiful face which it presents in the daylight wears an ugly mask when darkness descends, and that strange and evil things are said to stalk its streets.

  The man who told this tale, whose name was Philippe Lebel, recommended that those who might have occasion to listen to it should also bear in mind certain other features of the town, which do not figure so large in its reputation, but which have some relevance to his story.

  Firstly, he asked that hearers of the tale should remember that the crags and crannies of the chalky cliffs which rise around the city provide nesting-sites for very many birds, including some which are seen nowhere else in the Old World. Eagles can often be seen about the taller peaks, and it is said that both firebirds and phoenixes have nested there. It is also said that some of the creatures which fly by night about these rookeries are neither birds nor bats, but other things with wings.

  Secondly, he asked that hearers of the tale should remember that among the arts of which the leisured classes of Parravon are fond, the construction of beautiful and exotic gardens has a special place, and that it is by no means extraordinary for men to devote their lives to the cultivation of rare and special flowers.

  Thirdly, he asked that hearers of the tale should remember that although the people of the town are apparently orthodox in their religion, following the familiar gods, other kinds of worship are conducted there in secret. There are druids in the neighbouring hills, whose mysterious ceremonies are attended by some of the humble folk of Parravon—and there are other gods, perhaps older still, whose veneration is forbidden throughout the Old World, whose true nature none know and few care to contemplate, but whose influence on the affairs of men is sometimes felt in incidents of a specially horrible nature, which may befall the incautious and the unlucky alike.

  Philippe Lebel had known Armand Carriere since boyhood, and yet had never really known him. Although their fathers were both respectable corn-chandlers, like enough in their habits and beliefs to pass for brothers, Philippe and Armand were very different.

  Where the former strove always to follow convention and to fit in with the society of his peers, the latter set himself apart, finding anything ordinary dull. He came to fancy himself an artist of sorts, though he was equally unskilled as painter, poet and gardener, and Philippe often thought that his friend’s “art” was simply an ability to see the world from a strange angle, from which it seemed more magical and more malign. He was certainly attracted by all matters unusual and arcane.

  With the aid of this tilted perception Armand might have become a spellcaster’s apprentice, but his parents would not hear of such a thing, and he excused himself from going against their wishes—and hence excising himself from his father’s will—by declaring that the wizards of Parravon were in any case a poor and shabby lot, far less powerful than they claimed.

  (Those of you who have travelled will know that this is a common opinion; familiar spellcasters, if measured by their accomplishments, always seem less able than they claim to be, and less fascinating than more distant wizards whose abilities can only be measured by rumour and reputation.)

  Young Carriere’s affectations offended his family, but he saved himself from total disgrace by working hard to master the arts of reading and writing, which his illiterate father commended on the grounds that they might prove very useful to a man in trade. Armand, alas, had no intention of employing these arts in such a vulgar manner; his aim was to entertain himself with books of a questionable character, and seek therein the secrets of arcane knowledge.

  The Carriere house was tall, and set upon the ridge of a small hill. Armand’s room was considered a poor one, set just beneath the eaves on the side of the house which never caught the sun. He liked it, though, because his was the only window which faced that way, looking upon the wilder part of the hill, which was thick with thorn-bushes.

  The only other building which overlooked that part of the ridge was a tower-house situated at its further edge, nested among dark trees alongside a high-hedged garden. Ever since boyhood Armand had believed that there was a mystery about that lonely house and its garden—whose hedges were so unnaturally high as to exclude the sun’s direct rays, save for a brief period around the hour of noon.

  While Armand studied his books and practised his script he would often sit by the window of his room, looking up occasionally to stare at the hedge. He knew that the plants which grew in the garden must be curious, partly because it was lighted for such a short time each day—and presumably contained only those flowers which could adapt to such a strange regime—but partly because the hedge was so clearly designed to keep prying eyes at bay. Once or twice when he had been a child he and Philippe had run the gauntlet of the thorn-bushes to reach the bounds of the garden (for there was no path between the two houses), but they had never been able to see what was within.

  What Armand could see, however, was a certain strange traffic between the garden and the cliffs where the birds of Parravon made their nests.

  Most of the gardeners of Paravon considered the birds their enemies, for they would come to peck the new-laid seeds, to spoil the pretty flowers with their droppings, and to devour the fruits which grew upon the bushes. The gardener of the tower-house seemed to be an exception, for there was never any indication of birds being shooed away, though they seemed to come in considerable numbers, especially in the hours when the garden was shadowed from the sun. At dusk, when the birds of Parravon were wont to wheel about the roofs, calling to one another stridently as they assembled in flocks before returning to their roosts, the birds which visited this particular garden would rise more sedately, one at a time, and drift away into the gathering gloom.

  The more Armand watched, the more he became convinced that far more birds flew down to the garden than ever flew up again.

  Armand called the attention of Philippe Lebel to this phenomenon on more than one occasion, but Philippe believed that his friend was trying to make a mystery out of nothing, and paid no attention. This disinterest served only to make Armand more determined to find a mystery, and he began to seek through the pages in his books for records of carnivorous plants which could trap birds. H
e found various travellers’ tales containing believable accounts of plants which trapped insects, and rather unbelievable accounts of plants which devoured men, but no trace of any rumour about plants which fed on birds.

  * * *

  Investigation of the hillside beyond the tower-house revealed that there was no proper road to its gate, but only a path. Armand began to linger at the bottom of that path, waiting to catch a glimpse of the owner of the house—whose name, his father had gruffly told him, was Gaspard Gruiller. When Armand had asked further questions his father had simply disclaimed any further knowledge, and had stated that honest men did not pry into their neighbours’ affairs.

  Armand soon ascertained that Gruiller emerged from his solitary lair only two or three times a week, carrying two large bags which he took to the marketplace and filled up with food. He began to study the man, from a distance, and twice followed him into the town to watch him go about this humdrum business. Gruiller was tall and bald, with eyes which were very dark yet seemed unnaturally keen and bright—but if he noticed that he was under observation by Armand he gave no sign of it.

  Armand asked several of the tradesmen who dealt with Gruiller what they knew of him, but none of them could tell what manner of man he was, or how he earned his coin, or to what gods he addressed his prayers. None of the tradesmen had a word to say against their customer, but on one occasion Armand saw a gypsy woman make a sign as he passed, which was supposed to ward off the evil eye.

  This might have meant nothing at all, for gypsy women are ever so anxious to ward off spells that they frequently make such signs without any reason or provocation, but Armand was nevertheless encouraged to believe that she might have a reason. He knew that gypsies were usually followers of the Old Faith, and wondered whether this Gaspard Gruiller might be known to the druids as a bad man—and perhaps a cleverer one than any of those who went about the city boasting of their prowess as spellcasters.

  On two or three occasions when he knew that Gruiller was not at home, Armand approached the lonely house, and peered through its windows. He tried to peer through the hedge, too, as he had done when he was a boy, but it was very thick as well as very tall, and he could see no more now than he ever had. He could hear something from the other side, though, and what he heard was a low rustling sound, which might have been the sound of birds fluttering their wings as they moved among the branches of bushes, or even the murmur of their voices as they clucked and chattered to one another. These sounds fed his curiosity so temptingly that he hungered to find out more, and this hunger grew in him by degrees, until he became determined that he would one day find a way to look into that garden, to see what went on there in the shady hours of the morning and the afternoon.

  It was unfortunately typical of his frame of mind that he never once considered taking a straightforward course, seeking to make the acquaintance of Gaspard Gruiller so that he might quite legitimately ask what plants the garden contained.

  Armand knew that he must get higher up if he was to see over the hedge of the enigmatic garden, and there was only one way to do this that was immediately obvious to him. There was no other room above his, but the house had a steeply-sloped roof of red tile, and a chimney-stack, which could offer him an extra twelve or thirteen feet of elevation if only he could scale it.

  Because this seemed a hazardous project, he called upon the help of his friend Philippe, asking him to secure a rope within his room and pay it out yard by yard while he climbed, so that if he fell the rope would save him from serious injury. Philippe agreed, reluctantly, and waited impatiently when Armand had clambered out, wondering what possible account he could give to the Carriere family should the escapade go wrong. But he need not have worried, because Armand soon came back through the window unharmed, in a state of some excitement.

  “What did you see?” asked Philippe, caught up for once in the tangled threads of the mystery.

  “I could not see so very much,” replied Armand, “but more than I have seen before. There is a trellis-work erection—perhaps a kind of summer-house, though I could only see the top of it—which is longer than it is broad, having the house at one end and an open space at the other. The trellis-work looks like the sort which is sometimes placed against the wall of a building to assist climbing roses and honeysuckle, but I could not tell whether there was a wall within. The roof of the trellis bears flowers of several different hues—huge flowers, with heads like trumpets. There are birds there, wandering about.”

  “And did you see these flowers seizing and devouring the unfortunate birds?” asked Philippe.

  “No, I did not,” admitted Armand. “But I have not seen the like of those flowers before, and I feel sure that there is something strange about them.”

  “Oh Armand,” said his friend, “are you not satisfied? Must you still insist that although what you have seen is by your own account most ordinary, what remains hidden from you must be something unparalleled in its strangeness?”

  “The birds are ordinary,” replied Armand, insistently. “But their situation is not. I have never seen the flowers before, nor have I seen such a structure to mount them. What pleasure could it give a gardener to place his best blossoms on the roof of a structure, where he could not see them?”

  “Ah,” said Philippe, “but he can see them, can he not, from the upper windows of his own house? And you have said yourself that the garden gets too little sun—is it not probable that the entire purpose of this structure is to lift the flowers up, so that they receive more?”

  If this speech was intended to set Armand’s mind at rest it failed, for Armand was no longer listening. Instead, he was standing by his window looking out in the direction of Gaspard Gruiller’s house.

  Philippe went to stand by him, to see what he was looking at, and saw that the shutters of the one window which faced this way—which had been closed only a few minutes before—had now been thrown back. There was a man standing at the window, just as Armand was standing at his, and he was staring at the Carriere house. Philippe drew back reflexively, but could not resist peeping around the angle of the window to see what would happen.

  After standing there for little more than a minute, Gruiller went away, leaving the shutters undone.

  “He must have seen you on the roof!” said Philippe.

  “I suppose he must,” replied Armand. “But what of it? A man may climb upon the roof of his own house, if he wants to!” Despite the bravado of his words, however, Armand’s face was pale, and frightened; it was as though all his excitement had been turned by that cool stare into anxiety.

  “And yet,” muttered Armand, hardly loud enough for his friend to hear the words. “There is some secret about that garden, and I would dearly love to know what it is. I feel an attraction to it, as though it had placed a spell on me.”

  “It is only a garden,” said Philippe, soothingly, “and by no means the only one in Parravon to contain special blooms whose owner strives to hide them from potential thieves.”

  That night, Armand closed the shutters of his window tightly, as he always did—as all men do in Parravon, if they have any sense. But in his sleep he had a very curious dream, in which there was a tapping at those shutters, and a fluttering sound of wings in hectic motion, and a sharp scraping sound as though a claw was dragged momentarily across the outer face of each shutter.

  Had he been really awake Armand would have clapped his hands to his ears and prayed for the morning to come, for he knew well enough that monsters were reputed to haunt the night in that city. But he was not awake, and in his dream he rose from his bed to go to the window, and threw back the shutters, so that he looked out boldly into the starlit night, as he had never dared to do before.

  He was startled by the eerie brightness of the light which the stars gave, and as he peered out into that imperfect gloom he saw black shadows moving within it—sinister night-flyers larger by far than those birds which filled the sky by day.

  Though he could not
follow these shadows as they wheeled and soared in the starry sky, he became convinced that it was around the roof of the tower-house that they gathered. And when he looked at the tower-house he saw that the window from which Gaspard Gruiller had looked out in the daytime was unshuttered, with a red light burning within it, and that someone stood there looking out, just as Armand was—perhaps Gruiller, perhaps another. And there was a strange scent in the air, like exotic perfume, which made him intoxicated as he breathed it in, and made him almost ready to believe that he could fly.

  The next day, when he tried to recall this dream, he could remember it up to that point, but not beyond—he did not know what had happened next, if anything further had happened at all. He told what he could remember to Philippe Lebel, and found himself quite carried away when he told it, so that he argued very fiercely that the night-flyers he had seen were too huge to be ordinary birds. They might, as he assured Philippe with rapt insistence, have been anything.

  “Well,” said Philippe, “what of it? In our dreams, we may see whatever we will. We meet more daemons there than we ever could in everyday life.”

  Armand did not take offence at this remark, but simply took his friend to the window, where the shutters had been thrown back to let in the daylight. He pulled one of them back until it was closed, and invited Philippe to crane his neck and inspect its outer surface. Then he opened that one and pulled the other back in order to allow a similar inspection.

  Philippe saw that there were three long scratches in the wood, extending across both shutters, and when he measured their span with his hand he shuddered to think what manner of claw it might have been which had made them.