Marks of Chaos

by James Wallis

  “I cut its throat.”

  “You got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then,” Max said, “we should wait till Rolf gets back, so he can carry it. Nils is either dead already, or he’ll survive.”

  Karl nodded, his face deliberately grim. “If he’s dead,” he said, “his jerkin’s mine.”

  That night he lay on the hard bed and stared up at the holes in the thatch. Nils didn’t answer my question, he thought, I did. Chaos is in me deeper than I had thought. It has my body, and now it is starting to grip my mind with these thoughts of wild death. That’s why I dream of blood and fire.

  I must resist it as long as I can, and I must know when I can hold it back no longer. I must be strong in body, mind and soul, but I cannot be strong forever. Chaos has twisted me, and I must learn to twist the power it has given me for my own ends. We have to play the hand of cards that fate deals us in this life. Only a coward throws in his hand before the game is won or lost, though if you find yourself playing with cheats, only a fool continues without cheating against them.

  But how does a man cheat Chaos? It was like cheating a mountain, setting one’s shoulder against a river, stabbing the sun in the back. It was a thing that gods and the heroes of legend might have done, but he was just a man. Less than a man.

  No. That was his old voice, like an echo from the past. If he learned to use what Chaos had given him he could be at least equal to other men, or even more. He healed faster than he had as a man. He felt his senses were more alert, more acute. Other changes might follow. For now, it was enough that he knew the path he had to follow.

  He drifted into sleep.

  Hours later he suddenly woke. There had been a voice. Something had said a word or a sentence. It had sounded like the speaker was in his hut. Without moving his head, his eyes searched the shadows for an intruder. Nothing.

  Perhaps someone was outside the door, trying to attract his attention. He had told them he didn’t sleep, and it was possible they still believed it. Maybe it had been an owl. Or a dream. He didn’t think he’d been dreaming.

  “Is anyone there?” he whispered.

  “Sssainie-unn thare? Unn-thare?” said the voice in his ear.

  Not his ear. His neck.

  He could feel the lips of his second mouth move as they tried to enunciate the syllables. Like a baby, he thought wildly, and reached up to clasp a hand over it, to silence its babbling. He felt hot breath, and then the wet sensuousness of the tip of a tongue licking the palm of his hand. There was no sense of taste from it and, more horrifying, no sense of control. He could not make this tongue move, and he could not stop it.

  The mouth was possessed. It could breathe and speak.

  He kept his hand over it, stifling its words. He could feel it moving under his palm. Then it bit him, hard.

  He gasped in pain, threw off the blanket and tore a long strip of cloth from it, winding it around his neck several times and tucking it around itself to muffle any more sound or movement. Then he slumped back onto the bed. His mind was whirling so fast his thoughts were dizzying.

  At first light he ran to the stream. Leaning over the calm edge of the pool he pulled the lips of his second mouth apart and stared at the reflection. The angle was bad but he could see it had sharp pointed teeth, like a fox’s. He stared at it for a long time, until he became aware of someone coming up behind him. It was Max.

  “I heard you talking in your sleep last night,” Max said.

  “I don’t sleep,” said Karl. Max gave a sarcastic smile and walked off to the fire-pit.

  * * *

  The spring sunlight was too bright, sparkling off the surface of the Reik, hurting Karl’s eyes and distracting his focus. He tried to concentrate his mind, but Rolf’s great arm wrapped around his neck did not make it easy. He tightened his own grip on Max, pressing the knife against the coarse skin of the man’s throat. The mutant leader inhaled sharply and pressed his head back against Karl’s face. How could a man who washed himself in the stream every day smell so rank?

  Across the patch of muddy ground stood Luise and Hermann. She was holding the reins of a horse, whose rider sprawled in a bloody heap a few feet away. Hermann was holding his broken arm and whimpering.

  It had all gone terribly wrong.

  Spring had come but the warmer weather had not brought more food and there had been long weeks of hunger in the camp. In desperation Max had decided to go back to the river path in the hope of ambushing a traveller. After three days of lying in wait they had got lucky: a uniformed man on a horse, riding south. Karl, hidden in the undergrowth, recognised him as an Imperial messenger, carrying letters from the court or the generals in Altdorf to the outlying regions of the Empire.

  The man had not dismounted, but had ridden cautiously around where Hermann lay face-down and corpse-like in the mud, looking at the body. The horse had stepped on Hermann’s arm and it had broken with a crunch. The youth had screamed. The ambushers had rushed from their hides, the horse had reared and unseated its rider, and Karl had sensed his opportunity, and lunged for Max.

  It had gone wrong.

  Really, his hand had been forced. The mood of the camp had been different since Nils’s death. Partly it was the void created by the absence of a member of a small community, but there had been no one to lead the mutants’ prayers to ‘Seench’, nobody to make up consoling gibberish about the Lords of Chaos to explain bad luck or dreams. The life of the group had lost a dimension.

  He knew the others suspected him of killing Nils. He was still the new arrival, the unknown quantity, and Max would not have missed a chance to divide the mutants further, separating Karl from the others by making him a threat. But in the last few days things had come to a head. The lack of food endangered Max’s position as leader, and there was only one person who had the strength of character to take over: Karl. Even though he didn’t want that, Max still saw him as a problem.

  Two days ago he had heard Max talking to Rolf. I’m sure Karl killed Nils, he’d said. I’m sure he wants us all dead, he’d said. If you find yourself alone with him, kill him, he’d said. After all, he’d added as an afterthought, we need the meat.

  Now Karl stood sandwiched between Rolf, who had him in a stranglehold, and Max, who was at his mercy. It was a stalemate, and all three men knew it. If Karl felt Rolf’s arm tightening then he would slash Max’s throat in an instant. If he moved, either to kill Max or to get away, then Rolf would break his neck.

  The three of them could stand there forever, in balance, except that Karl could feel warm blood running down his leg. He hoped it was from the stab-wound he’d put in Max’s back. He hoped it meant Max was bleeding to death; but then if Max died Rolf would kill him too. It looked like the only one whose life was assured was Rolf.

  Luise and Hermann kept their distance. The sun bathed them all in golden light.

  It was all over bar the talking, he thought.

  Max started. “Have you gone mad?” he asked. “What the hell was that for?”

  “Yeah, you bastard, what was that for?” Hermann echoed. Rolf grunted. Karl thought fast, knowing that his chance of dividing the others, using Max’s own tactic against him, was weakening every second. If he hesitated too long they would regroup against him.

  “I saw you going for Rolf, you bastard,” he said.

  “What?” said Max.

  Karl paused, working out his words. Give them some truth, tell them their suspicions were right, then build the lie on that, he told himself. He swallowed and took a breath. “I know you all think I killed Nils,” he said. “Well, I did.”

  Rolf’s arm jerked tighter round his neck. Luise gasped. Karl knew he had to continue or he was dead. “I did it on Max’s orders,” he said, “just like Max ordered Nils to kill me the first night I was here.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Max demanded. Karl dug the point of the knife into his skin and he shut up. Rolf’s arm relaxed slightly, enough for him to b
reath. The big man wanted to hear what he had to say. That was something.

  “He knew Nils had been having visions from Tze… from Seench, predicting doom for the camp if he remained in charge,” he said. “He was scared Nils would tell the rest of you. Nils told me, but I trusted Max more than I trusted Nils. And look at the result.”

  Max struggled. “This is nonsense. It’s a trick! Not a word is true!” he shouted. Karl kept him in a tight grip. Behind him he could feel Rolf shifting.

  “Max told me not to tell anyone, so I didn’t. I didn’t know then how he likes to set us against each other, to keep himself on top of the heap,” Karl said. “Then two days ago he gave me another order. He told me to kill Rolf.”

  Rolf growled and his arm round Karl’s neck tightened. Karl had no idea if the huge man was believing him or preparing to kill him.

  “He was afraid Rolf would become a monster and kill us all,” he said, and then in a flash of inspiration: “And he said we needed the meat.” Max’s line to Rolf.

  There was hubbub. “The meat?” Luise demanded. Rolf was growling. Max was shouting, “I didn’t, I did not!” but nobody was listening. Hermann watched with narrowed eyes. Karl waited. The person whose reaction he wanted to see was the one person he couldn’t. The thoughts would be working their way through Rolf’s mind, linking to his conversation with Max. Would the two ideas knit together, the fact and the lie? Would Rolf think what Karl wanted him to think: that Max had set the two of them against each other, not caring who killed who?

  Karl waited a second, and another, and delivered his last shot. “Because he’s not going to eat his woman, is he?” he said. “Or his son?”

  Hermann’s eyes snapped open wide and he took a step forward. Right reaction, wrong person, Karl thought, and then he felt Rolf’s arm pull away from his neck. The huge man roared with anger and his hand with its huge meaty fingers reached around Karl to grab Max by the hair and lift him into the air. Karl released his grip on Max’s neck and ducked away.

  “I didn’t! I swear I didn’t! By Seench! I swear!” Max was shouting, scrabbling at the air, grabbing at Rolf’s hand as his feet swung. Rolf’s face, now that Karl could see it, was set firm with fury. He had been right: they all knew Max’s manipulative ways. They had been ready to believe anything that affirmed their suspicions, and his lies had played to their fears.

  Hermann was running forward, shouting something incoherent, his broken arm hanging loose, his other two waving wildly.

  Almost in slow motion, Rolf reached up with his left hand, gripped Max’s shoulder and twisted.

  Many years before Karl had heard the two-inch mooring-rope of a hundred-foot Reik river-barge snap as the boat was torn from its dock in a storm. Max’s neck breaking sounded like that.

  Luise screamed. Rolf dropped the body and it crumpled on the ground, limp and thin. The man-bear stood straight, looking down at his work. Hermann collided with him. “Uff,” Rolf said and pushed the youth away. It was only then that Karl saw the knife in the boy’s middle hand. It was red with blood.

  Rolf saw it too, now. Hermann thrust again, but Rolf swatted him out of the way before the knife touched him, the strength of the flat of his hand throwing the youth away. He fell and lay still. Luise ran to him.

  Rolf looked down at the wound in his stomach, the blood emerging in lazy pulses, running over his hairy skin and falling to the ground. He looked across at Karl, and there was pain and puzzlement on his strange, stretched face. He growled, low and rumbling. Karl looked back, fighting to keep his expression blank. He said nothing.

  Rolf started to gesture at him, his hands spelling out the incomprehensible words of his manual language. Then he looked at Karl, his eyes pleading.

  “I don’t understand you,” Karl said. “None of us can.”

  Rolf’s gaze dropped to the body of Max, twisted and still in the mud. Tears welled in his eyes. He dropped to his knees beside the corpse of the only man who could have translated his grief, closed his eyes, threw back his head and howled his rage, pain and sorrow at the sky.

  Karl stood beside him, lifted his dagger and drove it down into Rolf’s right eye, putting all his strength behind it. He felt it pierce tissue and punch through bone, and he forced it down, deep into the bear-man’s brain, up to the hilt. Then he twisted it.

  Rolf still howled as his body fell forward but the sound was dying, fading to a sigh, an exhalation, a last breath. The ground shook slightly as the huge body hit it, the mass of muscle trembling, then lying still. Karl studied it for a moment. Hermann’s dropped dagger was lying close by, and he picked it up.

  No point in trying to retrieve his own; it was stuck against the bone and pinned under hundreds of pounds of dead mutant.

  Luise crouched beside the unmoving body of Hermann. Her huge eyes were wet with tears, the moisture running down her face as she looked up at Karl.

  “He’s not dead,” she said.

  Karl said nothing.

  “Help me,” she said.

  “That seems unlikely,” he said.

  The words seemed to have no effect for a few seconds, then she brushed her hair out of her eyes. It was the only time he had seen it out of place. “Are you going to kill us all?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Karl.

  “Why?” Her tears were drying, her bizarre, exaggerated beauty flowing back across her face like thick oil poured on water.

  “Call it my mission,” he said.

  “But we helped you,” she said. “We gave you shelter, food…”

  “You left me to die, in this spot,” he said, “and by doing it you saved me from myself. Do not think I am not grateful. I will repay you by doing everything I can to destroy the forces that made you what you are.”

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a long moment and then turned back to Hermann, laying a hand on his forehead. “Max wasn’t his father,” she said. “I don’t know why you said that.”

  “He wanted a father,” he said, “and he wanted it to be Max. He could count: he was six, you’d been here six years. He thought you were keeping the truth from him for some reason. I just told him what he wanted to hear.”

  “How did you know all that?” she asked.

  Karl stared at her, his face hard. How could any mother know her child so little? “Our worst insults are the ones we fear the most,” he said. “There was a reason he called everyone a bastard.”

  Killing Luise and Hermann was not pleasant, and he did not enjoy it. Once they were dead he checked the messenger and found his neck broken by his fall. His horse had wandered a few hundred yards down the path and was cropping grass. He found it, led it back and tethered it to a tree. It found more grass and cropped on, unconcerned by the presence of so much death.

  He opened its saddlebags, drew out the letters the messenger had been carrying, and broke their seals. As he finished reading each one, he crumpled it and tossed it into the river, letting the current bear its news downstream, back to the capital. Most of them were pointless and a few were tedious: matters of church intrigue or court orders. A couple were in code. A couple were personal, not to say intimate. He read them all. He had forgotten the pleasure the written word could bring.

  Of the stack, only one caught his interest. The Second Nuln Lancers were instructed to ride north with all speed, in defence of the Empire against an army of Chaos forces said to be travelling south. They were to travel to the Eiskalt valley, thirty miles south of Wolfenburg, and rendezvous with the main force of the army led by Duke Heller.

  Karl smiled, folded the letter and tucked it in the pocket of his jerkin.

  He stripped his clothes from the corpses—his shirt from Hermann, his boots from Max—and put them on. Apart from the knife, which he left lodged in Rolf’s eye, he had recovered almost everything he had taken from Altdorf. It seemed like a lifetime ago. In a way, it was. The time he had spent here had taught him much. There were still things he needed to finish, loose ends to tie up, but now he had every
thing he needed to do that.

  Everything? He thought for a moment in the afternoon sunlight, then strode back into the forest, walking the trail he had grown to know, back to the empty camp, the smouldering embers of the untended fire, the pathetic scrap of land that Max had seen as the future of the community.

  Karl did not stop to contemplate it, or recall memories of the last few months. He walked to Luise’s hut and ducked inside, emerging a moment later with the saddlebags he had brought from Altdorf. He unbuckled the fastener and drew out Braubach’s journal from the dark leather where it had sat untouched since the mutants had taken it from him. He held its familiar weight in his hand and felt calm for the first time in many days. Then he walked back to the river, untied the horse and mounted it, turned up the collar of his cloak to hide the mark of Chaos on his neck, and rode away towards the north and Wolfenburg. Duke Heller’s army was there, and answers.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bloody Things

  Karl reined in his horse and stared out across the flood-plain. Below him, in the distance, the silver-grey trail of the Eiskalt River snaked across the landscape, bounded by hills in the distance on either side. Over millennia the spring floods had washed down the contours of the land, depositing silt from the Middle Mountains to the river Talabec, creating a valley floor of dark, rich soil that stretched from the foothills around the city of Wolfenberg thirty miles north all the way to Talabheim more than a hundred miles south. In the last few days of his ride he had passed prosperous villages fortified behind stockades, their fields green with the shoots of young wheat, barley, rye and oats. There would be a good harvest this year.

  But not around here. This was where the civilisation of the Empire met the wilderness of the Forest of Shadows. The floor and sides of the valley were thickly forested by a green blanket of oaks, beech, ash and firs, still in their spring leaves. The wide band of the Eiskalt cut through it like a highway, dotted with sandbanks and islands. There was little traffic on the river; the places it connected had nothing to say to each other.