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Marks of Chaos

Page 49

by James Wallis


  “I speak for them.” Rhinehart’s voice was strong and calm, with a hint of nobility in its accent. “I speak for the town. Your business does not lie here. Pass around.”

  Huss drew breath. “No man controls the temples of Sigmar: not you, not the high priest, not the Grand Theogonist. We are men of Sigmar and we wish to give thanks and praise in this town’s holy place, and to bear witness to its sacred relics.” He hesitated, then sotto voce: “What relics does the temple have, Magnusson?”

  “Sigmar’s ring, the jawbone of Saint Florian and the head of the gryphon killed by Saint Karl the Unbowed.” His name-saint.

  “Sigmar’s ring, the jawbone of Saint Florian and the gryphon’s head of Karl the Unbowed,” Huss declared. Karl smiled at the man’s perfect timing; it was as if he had paused in reverence to the objects he was about to name.

  “Go around the town. You may not enter.”

  “You cannot deny entry to a priest of Sigmar. That is the law.”

  “You are an excommunicant, not a priest. Go around the town.”

  “You are no lawgiver, you are the mouthpiece for a false leader. If I hear it from the mayor or the high priest, I will go round. But not from you.”

  “I speak for them.”

  “And when the taxes rise, will you speak for them?” Huss boomed. “When the relics move to greater cathedrals, and the village shrines are closed, will you still speak for them? When the temple lies unrepaired because the gold has gone to Altdorf, will you still speak for them? And when your leader is exposed as the idolatrous sham he is, will they let you speak for them then? Stand aside, Erwin Rhinehart. Open the gates. The keepers of the true faith would enter.”

  The words were a slow explosion, a wave spreading outwards, leaving a strange shocked, fragile calm behind it. Karl felt their power, recognising the potency he had felt the first time he had met Huss, beside the makeshift altar at the camp south of Worlitz. He could sense the strength the crusaders took from their leader’s words, and could guess at the reaction on the other side of the wall: uncertainty, intimidation and fear.

  “Stay here,” Huss whispered. “When the gates open, bring the men forward at a walk.” He strode deliberately away towards the town, his warhammer held in both hands, each stride paced like a slow heartbeat.

  There was a flicker of movement from the wall. Karl could never say what drew his attention to it, but then what draws an owl’s eye to the scuttling fieldmouse amid a field of waving grass, or a pike to the shaded scales of a stickleback as it hides in the gravel at the bottom of a stream? He did not know, and it did not matter. But he saw it. Someone on the wall had moved. Someone had fired a crossbow.

  Karl flung himself forward, sensing the path of the quarrel through the air, knowing its target. No time for analysis, nor even thought or instinct: just the certainly of what he had to do. Huss was ahead. The bolt was in flight. He threw himself at the warrior-priest, knocking him forward and sideways, out of its path.

  Huss fell. Karl didn’t.

  The bolt took him just below the heart. In a split second he felt it strike the metal of the silver flask he carried there in his breast pocket, the engraved metal absorbing and cushioning the blow, and then he felt the shock as the steel penetrated through, and into his body.

  He dropped. The ground was cold and hard, and the impact twisted the bolt in the wound. He lay, shocked, unable to move. Somewhere there was shouting. Had Pabst or Kuster given the command to charge?

  A second later he felt strong arms around him, cradling him, lifting him up into the air. “An interesting strategy,” Huss said in his ear, “but I believe it has done the trick. Come on, Magnus’ son. It’s time you saw your father.”

  Karl let himself be carried, feeling the strength in the warrior-priest’s arms and the beating of his heart through his plated armour. Or was that his own heart? Was the warmth he felt his blood? Against him, Huss’ chest swelled.

  “Open the gates!” the priest shouted. “I carry a son of Grünburg! Open the gates and let him in!”

  He carried Karl down the road towards the town. Ahead of them, the wide oak gates swung open.

  There was a cart just inside the gates. Its boards were rough under Karl’s back as it jolted through the streets, Huss sitting beside him. From time to time he caught sight of the edge of a building, a facade looming over the street, and he guessed they were taking him to the temple of Shallya. It made sense: he needed healing. The Shallyan temple was small, with only one priest. Perhaps nobody would recognise him there. Perhaps his father need never know he was here. Huss had hinted that he knew who Karl was, but did he understand what danger Karl was in here?

  Huss’ hand was reassuring on his shoulder, the morning sun warm on his eyes, his blood warm across his chest, seeping down across his ribs, soaking through his clothes. He was dimly aware of Huss leaning forward to the driver, saying something, but the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels on cobbles drowned the words. A moment later the cart veered, changing direction.

  Huss bent down to him. “They were taking you to the Shallyan shrine,” he said, “but I told them that as a servant of Sigmar, your fate was in his hands. You strive to be a true warrior, but there is too much in your heart. Cleanse yourself at the temple.”

  Karl closed his eyes and lay back, accepting his fate.

  Priests and town guards carried him into the body of the temple, to the curtained-off area of marble benches at the back where the sick and the wounded would come to receive the priests’ care and the god’s blessings. Some of the priests were murmuring chants and prayers in low voices.

  Karl felt light-headed and weak. His arms and legs were growing heavy, and his fingers were cold and numb. He could barely move, and did not want to.

  Hands stripped away his clothes, cutting through straps, ties and buttons to expose his bare chest and its scars. He felt a knife at the bandage he wore around his neck, over his mutation, and thought: yes, cut it, witness my shame and finish my life, here in this holy place of my father. This is how it should be.

  “No,” Huss’ voice said. “Leave that. It is a symbol of his devotion.” The knife went away. Karl felt he should care, but did not know which way.

  Someone moved the bolt in the wound, testing its depth, and he felt fresh blood gout from the wound. Someone said, “Ready?” and someone else said, “Yes.” The prayers grew louder, Huss’ voice among them. Someone pulled, hard. The bolt resisted. Someone else took hold of it. Huss said, “On ‘Sigmar’: in excebis gloria Sigmar.”

  The bolt was torn free with fiery agony. Karl tried to double up in pain but hands on his shoulders and legs prevented him. The prayers reached a crescendo. Karl squeezed his eyes tight shut, inhaled hard, filling his lungs to keep from screaming. He felt weak, exhausted, but he knew that he would live.

  Someone pressed a bandage down over the wound. Someone said, “Don’t move.”

  Someone said, “That silver flask saved his life.”

  Someone said, “The spirits in it must have helped to keep the wound clean.”

  Someone said, “It’s as if the wound’s healing already. Praise Sigmar.”

  Someone stood beside him and said nothing at all.

  Karl opened his eyes. His father was staring down at him with a gaze full of love and horror.

  Someone held a cup of something sweet and salty to his lips. “Drink this,” Huss said, “to replace the blood you lost. Everyone else, leave him with Father Hoche. And I must speak with the mayor and the captain of the guard.” He held back the curtains and the priests left one by one. Karl was alone with his father.

  Neither of them spoke. Karl tried to move, feeling the cool temple air on his chest and the cloth dressing there, held down by the weight of blood it had absorbed. The priests’ chants and Sigmar’s power would have healed much of the damage; his body and its mutation would do the rest. Strange how two such opposed forces could work together in this way.

  His father made a noise. Karl turned
his head with an effort to look at him, grown so old since they had last seen each other. There were tears in his eyes.

  “You recognised the flask you gave me?” Karl asked.

  “I recognised you. How could I not?”

  “I am not so changed, then?”

  His father made no reply, but Karl knew the answer.

  “I have changed. Body and soul, and against my will. What they say of me is not true, but I am a different man to the son you raised. I travel with Luthor Huss, I fight against Chaos, but… Forget me, father. Your Karl lies dead in the Reikwald Forest. I merely bear his body.”

  “You know it is not true.” His father’s voice was a whisper. “I see it in your face. You are still my son.”

  “And you are still my father. But for both our sakes, you should forget me. Tell mother to forget me as well. Think of me as one dead.”

  The old priest’s eyes filled with tears and he turned away.

  “Mother?” Karl asked.

  “She died,” he said. “She died of grief within a fortnight of the first handbill being posted. She could not understand why you did not return, did not write or send word. And then she learned, and it killed her.”

  Karl was numb. The blood he had lost made him feel weak and distant, and there was an unreality to this conversation that made it hard to believe. His mother dead? She had been dead to him for months. Her physical death seemed to make no difference. This was not the time to consider her death or mourn for her. There would be time for such thoughts tomorrow.

  “And Marie?” Karl did not want to know, but he had to ask. “What of Marie?”

  “She left two days after your mother’s funeral. There was nothing for her here, the jilted fiancée of a traitor and a… a…”

  “Where did she go?”

  “She did not say. Nobody knows.”

  He hated to think of this woman he loved, because it hurt too much. She had fled out into the Empire, alone, terrified, her reputation destroyed, fearing that she might be infected too. She had been caught in the slipstream of his own fall, and had fallen too. And now she was out there somewhere.

  Would their paths cross? He hoped never. He could not bear it.

  “Karl,” his father said, “is it true? What the handbills say?”

  The question he had dreaded, and feared for so long. Now it was here, the answer seemed simple: the truth. “I was a member of the Untersuchung, that’s true. We were not Chaos worshippers, but those who ordered our destruction were. Now I hunt them and their kind, but they have powerful friends. Even among the witch hunters.” He looked at his father’s face, fearing disbelief but finding only trust.

  “Are you—mutated?” Magnus asked.

  Karl dropped his gaze, unable to meet his father’s gaze, the white hair, the waxy skin and frail features that he had brought about. “I am. It infests my body like weeds in a cornfield. Chaos has given me strength, but I use that power to fight against it. One day it will overwhelm me. Father, I—” He could barely admit it to himself, but this was his father. “I fear I am weakening.”

  “My son.” Magnus reached towards him. Karl tried to move away.

  “No! Don’t touch me! Please!”

  His father recoiled, his expression shocked.

  “You must not touch me,” Karl said. “I am a thing of Chaos, and I hate myself for it.” He paused. “Forget me, father. I am outside the law, but I am not beyond justice, I know. One day I will answer to it. But I pray not till my work is done. Father, you won’t give me away?”

  “He already has,” said a voice. The heavy velvet curtains ripped back and Erwin Rhinehart stood framed by their brocade edges, his sword drawn but held low. “Despite your scars, there is quite a family resemblance. I had only to see your father to realise who you were. Karl Hoche, you are under arrest. Don’t move.” He laughed. “And now we can take Huss for harbouring a known follower of Chaos. I should thank you for this.”

  Magnus made as if to stand aside, and Rhinehart gestured at him with his sword. “You too, Magnus. I heard you consorting with this abomination. Prove your loyalty to the father-church and I may not order you burned.” He tossed over a length of cord. “Tie his hands.”

  Karl looked up into his father’s pleading eyes. The old man did not know what to do; had probably not known since the witch hunters knocked on his door eighteen months ago asking where his son was. Like Karl, he must have played out this encounter in his head a thousand times and, like Karl, now that he was in the middle of its reality he still had no idea how to react.

  Karl lay on the marble slab, and watched as his father picked up the cord from the floor. He was weak, naked apart from a pair of breeches and a bandage, and weaponless. His sword and throwing-daggers lay in a pile of clothes on a side-bench yards away. His hands moved over the cold slab, seeking anything he could use.

  His fingers touched something. A little knife with a Hide blade, used for cutting clothes and opening veins, left tucked beside his thigh. He grasped it and with a titanic effort wrenched his body upright into a sitting position.

  Rhinehart laughed. Karl flung the knife—it wasn’t balanced for throwing and twisted awkwardly. Rhinehart swung his sword, striking it out of the air, and it clattered across the floor. But it had distracted him for a second, and in that second Karl was on his feet, grasping the blood-soaked cloth on his chest, unfurling it and twisting it. He felt dizzy and unstable. Sigmar help me, he prayed. All the gods. All the powers of the universe. Everything in me, help me. Help me save my father.

  From such good intentions are tragedies born.

  “Pathetic,” Rhinehart said.

  Karl whipped the end of the cloth at him. A flick of droplets sprayed across the room, landing red and wet across the white marble slabs.

  “Tainted blood,” Karl said. “Cursed blood. Chaos blood.” He whipped it again. Rhinehart looked shocked, turning to protect his face from the splatter.

  There was enough strength in Karl’s legs to run a few steps and he used it, launching himself across the room. Rhinehart raised his sword defensively and backed away. Karl charged him, flicking the cloth at his sword-hand. Rhinehart flinched his wrist and the blade away, and Karl was on top of him, pushing him back into the heavy curtain. Fabric ripped away and they plunged to the hard stone of the floor.

  Karl pressed the blood wet cloth into Rhinehart’s face, rubbing wide red smears across his skin. Rhinehart was scrabbling against him, lashing his head from side to side, trying to avoid the contamination, kicking and bucking. Karl’s weight held him down.

  The cloth was unfurling. Karl grabbed both ends of it, pulling it tight across Rhinehart’s face, so the witch hunter’s features pressed through it like a shrouded corpse. The man was breathing fast, making whimpering sounds, his movements panicked and desperate. It was easy to overpower him.

  Karl pressed his face against the sodden cloth so his mouth was next to Rhinehart’s ear. “My blood is on you,” he said. “My infectious blood. What would your colleagues do to you if they heard of this? Quarantine you? Purge you? Burn you? Stop wriggling.” He moved his legs so he sat astride the terrified witch hunter, his knees pinning the man’s arms to the floor. You are not a man like Theo Kratz, who would accept his fate as a servant of Sigmar and sing as they lit the bone-fire under him. “You are a pragmatist. You believe in the greater good, as I do, and you do not want to die yet.”

  Rhinehart struggled. Karl kneeled more heavily on his arms. “Stop it,” he said. “I am not going to kill you. I would not kill an innocent man, and I will not kill in the temple of Sigmar.

  “So I will let you live. Tell them what you want about me, but if you say even one word against my father I will write to Brother Karin and tell her exactly what happened here. She may hate me but she knows I am a truthful man.”

  Karl pulled the cloth tighter. It was pressing into the man’s throat. “Do you understand?”

  Rhinehart nodded, fast and frightened.

 
“I will bind you and gag you. When you are found, claim the blood is your own. Let the crusade leave town safely. After that, your course is your own again. But never forget this.”

  Rhinehart nodded again. Karl removed the blood-soaked cloth. Under it Rhinehart’s eyes were screaming white holes in the vivid crimson of his skin.

  “Father, throw me the cord,” Karl said without looking back. It landed beside him. He cut it in half and bound Rhinehart’s hands at the wrist and tight across the fingers.

  A gag. He looked around the room. His father stood back against the far wall, bewildered and helpless. There were his clothes, but he needed something better. Then he remembered he already carried a gag.

  He undid the bandage around his neck, took it off, and unfastened the leather ties on the wooden gag that kept his second mouth silent and still. Rhinehart’s eyes pressed further out of his head. The second mouth moved, flexing in its freedom, licking its lips.

  “You’re not going to put that in my—” he said, and Karl did. The wood was slimy with saliva, pock-marked with teeth-marks in the hard piece of beech Karl had used to fashion it. Rhinehart resisted it. Karl forced. It slipped between his teeth, and Karl tied the cords behind the witch hunter’s neck. Rhinehart closed his eyes tight. A tear, born of rage or fear, slipped from below his eyelid and slid across his skin, drawing a clear path through the drying blood.

  The witch hunters had infected him, Karl thought. This was only justice: an eye for an eye or a mouth for a mouth. He left Rhinehart helpless and squirming on the floor, stood up and turned to face his father.

  The old priest was staring at him, his mouth frantic with the syllables of subvocalised prayers and wardings. His father had looked scared before, but now he was terrified. Karl wanted so much to run to this man and hold him, reassure him that he was still his son, that whatever had changed it would always be true. But it wasn’t true. He was Karl Hoche the traitor-criminal, the Chaos thing, also known as Hans Frei, Leo Deistadt, Magnusson and many others, a man with so many identities that even he could not remember them all. The one identity he desperately wanted more than any other, his father’s son, was closed to him forever.

 

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