by James Wallis
“Catch anyone?” Karl asked.
“Not the one they wanted.”
“Who would that be?”
“Karl Hoche. The mutant soldier that killed the Lord Protector last year.”
He’d expected to hear his own name, but it still chilled him.
“Who?” he said.
The bar-tender reached under the counter and pulled out a piece of yellow paper, with bold blackface type on it. He passed it over. Karl nodded thanks that he didn’t feel.
“So they didn’t catch him?” he asked.
“No, but they got a wizard.”
Karl grunted an inquisitive response.
“Renegade from the colleges. Been with Luthor Huss, they said.”
Karl chewed the pickled vegetable and vinegar filled his mouth. So they had come for him, and had found Oswald. A subterfuge and a betrayal, or had some local been observant? He had known that Altdorf was dangerous for both of them but he’d still decided to play the bravo, swaggering into the face of danger, and now he’d lost the room, his sword, his equipment and money, and his advisor and friend. Back on the crusade he’d dismissed Pabst because he had a death-wish, and now his own foolishness had condemned Oswald to a quick trial and the bone-fires.
The piece of paper was fresh-printed, one corner discoloured by a beer stain. It had his name on it, and a reward of three hundred crowns. Normally Karl would feel flattered by the increase in his value; now it just made him tired. The list of aliases had gained three names, including Magnusson, and the words “Called by some the Chaos Hunter”. That was new, and he had no idea what it meant “Horse-thief had been appended to the list of crimes. At the bottom, in large type, a new line had been added: “At night his eyes are seen to glow red like a daemon.”
How had they known that?
He swilled the rest of the beer around his mouth, thinking. He had too many enemies here, many of them powerful. Dagobert’s advice from a few minutes earlier came back to him. He was fairly sure where that enemy of his enemy lay in terms of friendship, but at this moment he felt very lonely, very stupid, and very much in need of someone who would take away some of the ache he felt in his body and his mind, or at least help him forget them for a while.
He dropped the cucumber into the empty tankard, walked through the open door onto the street outside, checked a moment to see if he was being watched or followed, and walked away, northwards, back towards The Black Goat.
* * *
She was waiting for him in the back bar, alone at a table, a jug of wine and two cups in front of her. The place was half-full but dark, lit by candles, and the others were obscured by the gloom and low conversation. Karl found himself reminded of the atmosphere in the abandoned temple of Manaan, and wondered how many of the people in the room had been at that meeting too. He glimpsed one Reikland dress uniform and carefully kept his back to the wearer as he moved across the room towards her. She smiled as he drew near.
“You came,” she said. “How was your business?”
“Dirty and dishonourable,” he said, “but done.”
“Profitable?” she asked. “They say profits are without honour.”
“Informative.”
“But it’s concluded for tonight?” she said and her eyes glinted, full of hope.
“For tonight,” he said. “Now we should eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow is our diet of worms.”
She laughed and lifted the bottle to pour. He put a finger on its lip and pushed it back upright. “Not here,” he said. “Somewhere private, where we can talk.”
Her eyes caught his. They were not Marie’s eyes. Marie’s had been sloe-dark and deep enough to drown in; Emilie’s were bright and alive with light; Marie’s had been wide while Emilie’s were rounder, long-lashed and heavy-lidded. They were not Marie’s eyes, but he was no longer the man who had loved Marie. Emilie was not Marie, but she would do for tonight.
They went to her room, she leading up the inn’s narrow staircase and down its long corridors, and he following, carrying the bottle and cups. She would pause and look back and they would exchange long glances, enjoying the slow burn of anticipation. They both knew where the evening would lead, Karl thought, and saw no point in rushing to the destination when the trip still had many pleasures to offer.
She took a candle from a sconce on the wall and pushed open a door. The room inside was warm and dark, the embers of a fire glowing in the grate. He put down the wine on a side-table just inside the door. The bed was a four-poster, the bolsters and mattress embroidered and rich, a mirror glinting on a dresser on the other side of the room. Then she was on him, her arms around him, and he held her and bent to meet her frantic kisses. It was meaningless, pointless, fruitless. It was wonderful. It reminded him of being human.
“Show me,” she whispered. “Show me your gift.”
He tried not to freeze. He had already crossed boundaries to get to this point; what were one or two more? He needed information. He needed to unwind. She was a very beautiful woman. He reached up and unfastened his collar, untying the thongs of the gag and pulling it free. The mouth did not move or burble; it lay still. She gazed at it, dark eyes and red lips wide, then lifted herself on tiptoe and kissed it with hard passion.
He could feel her lips and tongue caress his mutation, and he wanted to be sick because it felt so good, so sensuous, so organic and so unnatural. He felt the thing’s set of sharp teeth part and her tongue flick inside, darting against the tip of its tongue, feeling it respond of its own volition and instinct, pressing back against her mouth, its movements growing more urgent. Emilie moaned, deep in her throat. This vile perversion was not what he wanted. Revulsion overcame him and he pushed her away from him. She fell onto the bed and stared up at him, wiping her mouth. She did not look displeased.
“Easy there,” she said.
“My thoughts too. We have all night. Why hurry?” He crossed to the table with the wine and filled the cups. “I want to get to know you,” he said.
“And I want to know you,” she said. “What else has Tzeentch given to you? Tell me. Or show me.” There was a coquettish note to her voice. “I want to see. I want to taste.”
“I have surprises,” passing her a cup of wine, “but a conjuror saves his best tricks for last.”
Her eyes glittered. “Oh good,” she said and drank deeply.
“So tell me,” he said. “You came from Middenheim, but not with Herr Doktor Kunstler?”
She nodded. “Not from Middenheim. The city’s still too dangerous for him to go back even ten years on. He lives outside Jagerhausen these days. I’ve been working with him for the last year, making preparations for this.”
A year? Huss’ mission to find the reborn Sigmar was less than four months old. How had the cults of Chaos known about the rebirth of the god for so long? But asking the question would expose his ignorance, and there were more important things he needed to learn. He sat in a chair in the shadows on the far side of the room and looked at the girl on the bed. She moved a hand over her cleavage suggestively.
“So you’re here to advise him?” he asked.
“Too many questions,” she said.
“We could trade answers.”
She sighed. “Are you afraid I’m an infiltrator for the Slaaneshi or one of the other cults? We can talk when we’re too tired to do anything else.”
“For every answer I will show you a gift,” he said slowly. It was all he could think of, short of tying her up and beating information out of her, but he did not want to burn his cover yet, and there were too many unknowns: she might have magic, and there were almost certainly other cultists in the inn. They had all night, and she was a very attractive woman.
“Then I am not Kunstler’s advisor,” she said. “I’m not going to be in Altdorf for long. My place is with the crusade.”
“The crusade? Huss’ crusade?”
She leered at him, licking her lips in a movement that was frankly lascivious, and he realised s
he was part of the group that Kunstler had described in the temple, whose purpose was to twist the mind of the man Huss had proclaimed as Sigmar, bringing him round to the ways of Chaos. He had assumed they would use drugs or sorcerous rituals to do it. Now he understood: they were using a man-trap of a different sort.
“Now show me,” she said.
He took off his silvered glasses, and to him the room was as bright as daylight. Her face was filled with awe and delight.
“What can you see with them?” she said. “Wonders? Horrors?”
“I see everything,” he said, “but slowly. When do you leave the city?”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “So you see, there is little time to waste.”
“And Kunstler? He’s staying here?”
“Are you always like this? Don’t you ever relax?” she asked. “Very well: he’s not staying here, but he’s in the city, with his friends at the College of Gold Magic. Now what do I get for that?”
He unbuttoned his shirt and pointed to the scar on his chest. “I was shot here, a mortal wound, and did not die,” he said.
She leaned forward. “I can’t see it,” she said. “Come here and let me see.”
Karl stood and crossed the room to stand beside the bed.
“Closer,” she said, and he sat beside her.
“Closer still,” she said, and he lay down. She reached out and touched the pucker of skin that marked where the crossbow bolt had hit him, caressing it with a fingertip, as if it was a nipple.
“And the power of Tzeentch saved you?” she asked.
“What do I get for my answer?” he asked.
She said nothing, but ran her finger up the lacing of her corset to the ribboned bow at the top, and slowly pulled its end. The knot slipped undone, and she began to unlace.
I lie here, Karl thought. I tell her a lie: that Tzeentch saved me. It is easy enough, and what she wants to hear. He watched her nimble fingers, remembering the temple in Grünburg, remembering the prayers of his father that had healed his wound. To lie about such a thing, denying a holy truth, struck as deep at his soul as the bolt had at his heart.
He lay back, thinking of his father, of Rhinehart’s sudden entrance, of the way he had regained his strength, thrown the knife and leaped across the room, of what had followed. Of his father’s face, witnessing his son’s brutality. And suddenly, with a sensation like a punch in the stomach, he remembered what he had spoken in his thoughts. The action of a moment, a desperate man’s willingness to do anything to protect his father. Almost a prayer. Too close to a prayer.
All the gods. All the powers. That was what he had called on, back there in the vestry of his father’s temple. Everything in me, help me. Help me save my father.
Emilie had paused, her fingers still, the laces lying in long twists on the counterpane, the sides of her corset held closed by two remaining loops and its own weight against the pale skin of her curvaceous breasts beneath. She looked up at him, and in her eyes he saw the reflection of his curse glowing back at him like a predator, a great cat, a vile beast that does not know its own nature.
“Yes, the power of Tzeentch saved me,” he said.
She smiled. The laces slipped through the last eyelets, the corset fell away, and she stretched out her arms around him and led him to her gifts.
The room was still. They lay together, enjoying the pleasure of touch. How long had it been since he had been this close to another person, Karl wondered. There had been the beastman that had almost crushed him to death. Before that it had been months, maybe even years. No. Luthor Huss had held him, had carried him into Grünburg in his arms. But even that lacked the simplicity and pure pleasure of this moment.
He could not relax. His thoughts would not let him.
Was Chaos his master? Must he finally acknowledge that? Had he come so far, fighting off the mutation-inspired rages and fits, now to find the truth about himself in the arms of a woman? This, he thought, was not the time or the place for revelations or personal journeys of self-discovery. He would think about it later. For now, all that was important was Emilie.
It occurred to him that all she had needed to do to make him accept that he was a pawn of Chaos was to smile and unfasten her garments. Him, who had fought Chaos in his own mind for almost two years. Faced with that kind of persuasive power, Sigmar didn’t stand a chance.
Something occurred to him. He leaned over Emilie’s body to retrieve a cup of wine from the nightstand, and took a swig.
“Emilie?” he said. “A question.”
“Another?” she asked. “You think too much. What is it?”
“Was Herr Scharlach at the meeting last night?”
“Who?” She shifted her body under him.
“Herr Scharlach. From Nuln.”
“That’s what I thought you said.” She stretched, reaching her arms around him, holding him tightly to her. No, only one arm was holding him. The other one had a knife at his throat. Her eyes were wild with anger, with the fury of a woman who realises she has been fooled. Too late he remembered that the Cloaked Brothers had told him Herr Scharlach did not exist.
“Who are you?” she hissed.
“Ask Herr Heilemann,” Karl said.
“I’m asking the questions this time, arsehole,” she said, and dug the knife in. “Who are you?”
“Karl Hoche.”
“What are you doing here?”
He punched her in the side of the head. The knife skidded across his throat in a shallow cut. He clutched at it with one hand to staunch the blood, using the other to push her away as he rolled sideways, off the bed, falling to the floor in a squat. She launched herself after him but he was out of her range, springing to his feet. No weapon to hand.
He glanced at Emilie as she crouched, poised to jump on the mattress of the bed where they had been lying a few seconds ago, and then he kicked hard at the nearest post supporting the bed’s heavy fabric canopy. Cheap pine splintered, the post broke and the top of the bed collapsed on her in a whomp of fabric and a cloud of dust. Karl threw himself on top of it, holding it down. She was not struggling underneath. After several moments he got up, brushing dust and plaster off himself. She still wasn’t moving.
He shifted the wooden frame off her. It had knocked her out and she would have terrible bruises for the next few day, but apart from that he guessed none of the damage would be permanent. Muttering a grateful thanks to the builders who had made these old inns with such thick sound-deadening walls, he used her clothes and strips of sheets to tie her up and gag her, strapping her wrists to the remaining poles of the four-poster bed. He watched her as he dressed, but she did not come round. Then he made a cursory search of the room but found only a few clothes.
Part of him wanted to kill her. She was an agent of Chaos and she had seduced him, proved that she was stronger than he was. He had sworn to destroy all such things. But he did not kill her.
Part of him wanted to let her go. Intimacy, feelings, the comfort of being with someone who did not recoil with revulsion at his touch, these were rare things for him now. He did not know if he would ever feel them again. But he did not let her go. She was more useful alive than dead. She could be of help. If he could work out how.
His situation felt more desperate than it had in months. He was in great danger, at the heart of the capital, surrounded by Chaos cultists who knew his identity and wanted him dead, warrants for his arrest posted all over the city, playing cat-and-mouse games with witch hunters… His companion had been arrested a few hours ago and his first reaction had been to fall into bed with one of his enemies. He must be mad.
And he was endangering others too. Oswald was as good as dead. Huss and Sigmar were in peril, about to be assailed by the Purple Hand—and, if he guessed right, the forces of other cults as well, all trying to divert the flow of events in their favour, to shape the stream of history. His father—he could only guess as to his fate.
He could not do it all himself. He needed allies and f
riends. Or if not friends then at least enemies of his enemies.
At least now he knew where he stood and had some pieces of the puzzle he could barter with others. The ritual he had witnessed this evening, plus the information he had learned from her, Hen Doktor Kunstler and Dagobert of the Cloaked Brothers, the true identity of Herr Stahl: this was all information he could barter and trade, or use himself. He glanced down at the unconscious woman tied to the bed. And Emilie as well. She had a role in all this, but he did not know what.
For that matter, he did not know what his own role in this was to be.
He could not stay here. He would leave her here and find somewhere else to spend the night. He did not need to sleep, but he needed to think, to work through the next few days, to listen to drunken gossip and remind himself that he preferred the company of ordinary men, even if they would turn him over to the watch or the witch hunters if they knew who he was. He needed their presence, that edge of danger, to keep his mind sharp and focused. He had plans to make, and letters to write.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Contact
Brother Karin,
For the last year I have done your job for you, hunting down the enemies of the Empire and bringing Sigmar’s swift justice to them. You, it seems, have done little but pursue your vendetta against me. That was stupid. Understandable, given your hatred for me and your allegiance to Khorne, but stupid.
I have warned you about the forces of Chaos. I have warned you of the gathering clouds and the linking of things that should not be joined. I have warned you of the Convocation of Darkness. You have done nothing. That was particularly stupid.
I learn that the supporters of Khorne have withdrawn from the Convocation. I do not know if you had any part of that decision, but it was the wrong choice. You would have learned that your enemies in the cults of Tzeentch are planning something bigger than the Empire-ending battle you and your foul god foresee. They are the schemers, the designers and the architects, and if you do not act now then you will let them win.
I, a lone crusader, have stood against you for a year and I am still here to taunt you. What chance do you have against the Cult of the Purple Hand, whose members have infiltrated the Order of Sigmar even more successfully than you?