by David Guymer
From the Kaisergarden entrance, just to the left of the road that he and Otto had taken, the picket of halberdiers waved through a black coach. A chill passed through him. No, not just any black coach. It was the exact same black coach that he had seen before. The white bear pennons fluttered in the storm of noise like topgallants in a gale. Feeling a nervous itch crawling up from his chest, Felix watched the coach pull into a roped-off enclosure. Dozens of other coaches were parked there, worthies attended by Altdorfer soldiery and by gruff-looking heavies in an array of heraldic surcoats. The horses nuzzled each other and whickered their own reassurances against the commotion. Felix recognised the heraldries of Nuln, Stirland and Ostermark – mainly because of the amount of time he had spent in and around the guardhouses and gaols of those states over the years – but most he did not recognise.
The driver jumped down from the box to open the passenger door, but Felix could not see who emerged for all of the rippling banneroles and halberds in the way. He cursed, then shuddered, that feeling again, and crossed his arms under his cloak.
An animal scream from behind made him start.
Felix turned, shivering off his unease, to find a gang of young bravos had clambered onto Otto’s wagon. They shook it and screamed like Arabyan monkeys. One of them danced with bottle in hand from the box. They all wore the red and blue ribbons of the newly enlisted around their sleeves and, doubtless encouraged by the free spirits of a grateful city’s innkeepers, were all uproariously drunk. While Felix felt no great enchantment towards Otto’s property, the men were clearly spooking the horses. The farther of the two threw its mane as it fought against the tracer in a vain bid to back into the chassis of the coach. The nearer horse merely trembled, wide-eyed and staring, as if it had just smelled a wolf. Out of habit, Felix swept his cloak over his left shoulder to free his sword arm. Even after all this time, Karaghul’s absence just felt wrong. He shook his head ruefully. There was nothing like a sword to de-cloud sotted minds, but he doubted this situation called for it. He started forward.
At least he had meant to.
The crowd roared, oblivious to the revelation that his feet were rooted to the ground as though glued to the cobbles. Felix gasped as he tried again and failed. Grabbing one leg in both hands by the knee, he tried to pull but it did not move an inch. He was sweating now despite the cold, yet absurdly grateful that his arms at least had done as he had asked. He had felt them as they touched his thigh. His legs were fine.
They simply would not move.
A piercing laugh made him look up. One of the young men had tripped over his own ankles and fallen off the top of the coach, to the great mirth of his comrades. Felix grit his teeth and tried to push himself through whatever was preventing him. It was not so much that he failed as that his legs refused to try. Shaking the muscle of his thigh under one hand, he fought down a rising panic. It could not be that gang of drunks. What in Sigmar’s name was going on!
‘Forget wagon, Jaeger,’ came a guttural, but deliberately precise voice from the crowd behind him, right where the poor horse directed its terror. ‘Only give yourself nose-bleed. And maybe attract soldiers. Not want attract soldiers, yhah?’
Unconsciously, Felix’s gaze found the troop of state swordsmen that had unnerved him so just moments before. ‘Do I not?’
‘No,’ said the hidden man. ‘I not come all this way to harm, Empire man.’
For some unfathomable reason, Felix laughed. Why did he find that so difficult to believe? Bracing himself for the effort of turning, he was surprised to find it easy. He barely even had to think about it before his feet were shuffling him around to greet a short man in brightly coloured fleece breeches and coat and a hemp cloak. His eyes were narrowed, his skin walnut-hard and of a hue that looked mildly jaundiced but for the absence of any other obvious symptoms. His bowed gait indicated a man more accustomed to riding than to walking. Now Felix placed the odd accent; as plainly Kislevite as the drooping moustache on the man’s face and the mink-flapped chapka on his head. He was one of the Ungol nomads that subsisted on the northern oblast and the Troll Country.
Had subsisted.
Felix tried to raise a hand in greeting, found he could not. He grimaced. ‘Do I know you?’
‘You are Jaeger, yhah? You are – how you say in Empire – friend of my friend.’
Some friend, Felix thought, struggling increasingly desperately to move an arm, a leg, anything; but all he seemed capable of controlling was his eyes and his mouth. Only the certain knowledge that he was utterly under this strange man’s power kept his tone civil as he asked, ‘Who?’
‘My lady, you remember?’ The Ungol smiled, teeth starkly white against his tan skin. Something was coming. Felix could sense the darkness of it spread through the subliminal unease of the crowd. Behind him, the horse whinnied in terror. It was a wiser beast than the fools around it gave credit for. A sense of recognition thrilled through the will that bound Felix’s body, like dogs with prey and excited by the approach of their master. What was worse, Felix thought he recognised it too. He stopped fighting, surrendering to that itch that had crept from his chest and now hid like a spider at the back of his mind.
It could not be…
The Ungol stepped aside and dropped to one knee. ‘I present my lady: the Boyarina Magdova Straghov.’
The crowd seemed to fade, the brightly clothed Ungol receding into it, and Felix was dreaming again. At least that was his best explanation for it.
She looked exactly as Felix remembered her, a sleeveless jerkin worn over a white linen shirt, leather britches cinched at the waist with a studded belt, long legs encased to the knee within fur-edged riding boots. A long cavalry sabre was sheathed in a leather scabbard at her hip. The only incongruity was the black widow’s veil and long leather gloves that she wore to shade her skin from the sun, but despite the layers between them, Felix could still make out the pale skin, the high cheekbones, and those wide, almond eyes.
‘You are not going to scream, are you, Felix?’ said Ulrika, breaking the spell. ‘It would not be very attractive.’ She glided nearer, then brushed back his overlong fringe with the back of her hand as if to see him better. Felix’s skin tingled at her touch. Belatedly, the thought arose that he should tell her to stop, but then her fingers nipped something in his hair. He felt a pinch. Then she yanked sharply back.
‘Ow!’
Ulrika presented the pale strand tweezered between forefinger and thumb. Her eyes sparkled with amusement. ‘A grey hair, Felix?’
‘Keep it,’ said Felix. ‘I’ve plenty more.’ He rubbed the sore spot on his head, realising only then that he was free to move again. He held his hand out, gave the fingers an experimental flex. The last time he had seen Ulrika had been in Nuln over two years ago, before his and Kat’s paths had crossed.
If she had had this kind of power then, she had kept it to herself.
‘I apologise for the entrance,’ she said, setting her hands on her hips and angling her jaw proudly upwards. Without meaning to, Felix smiled. He had seen that posture all too often when they fought – and Sigmar had they fought – with Ulrika acting every inch the spoiled boyar’s daughter who could think no wrong. ‘But you were the one about to fight six men half his age.’
‘Half our age,’ Felix corrected. ‘And I could still have taken them, thank you very much.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
Felix watched her for a moment, trying to determine if she was teasing him, sorely tempted to remind her who had ended up with their backside on the floor more often than not when the two of them had sparred. He looked again at his hand and tested the fingers once more. Of course, that had been then. He shook his head with a sigh.
‘It’s good to see you, Ulrika. Truly. But you could have just called for me at my house like a normal person.’
‘I wanted to speak with you alone,’ said Ulrika, indicating
the screaming crowds packed in all around them, the drunkards still jeering at those below from atop Otto’s coach. ‘I thought a public place would be best, and–’ her husky voice took on a nasal quality ‘-every guttersnipe in the altstadt knows there’s a pfennig for anyone bringing word of Helborg’s appearances.’
Felix chuckled at the surprisingly passable imitation of his brother. Then an odd chill stole it away. Ulrika had never met Otto… at least not to his knowledge.
With a smile, Ulrika tucked a copper coin into Felix’s cloak where it was creased at the collar and laid her hand on his chest. His heart kicked. ‘I need you to stop looking at me like you have just seen a vampire in the middle of Wilhemplatz.’ She moved in, nodding to his left and to his right and breathing kisses on his cheeks in the Bretonnian manner. ‘People see a war widow and her lover, and I have learned that it pays to keep up appearances.’
Felix swallowed. The gauze of her veil brushed his unshaven chin. He barely dared breathe lest he smell her. Glancing over his shoulders as she indicated, he saw a wall of bodies, a blur of blind noise. No one was paying either of them the slightest attention that Felix could make out, but then he hadn’t a vampire’s senses. Or their paranoia.
While his head was turned, Ulrika came the rest of the way, leaning her body into his and wrapping her arms around his neck. Felix’s pulse quickened but to his impotent shame he did nothing to resist her. It had been a long time. She was colder than she had been, harder, and eerily still where a heart had once beat, and yet her body’s every contour and curve was as he remembered. Even the scent of her hair was familiar.
‘Marriage has made you prudish, Felix.’ Ulrika took his hand in a grip that was – in every way – irresistible and clasped it to her hip. Felix smiled nervously, apologetically, though he wasn’t sure for what. A tremor took up in his hands. Desire? Guilt? He tried not to look at the wedding ring that nuzzled against Ulrika’s hip. He looked away, closed his eyes, cupped his other hand behind Ulrika’s shoulder and told himself that it was all just an act.
‘There,’ Ulrika whispered. ‘That was not so bad now, was it?’
‘What do you want?’ said Felix, eyes still closed, trying not to think about the lips separated from his by nothing but a thin layer of fabric. He tried to think of the fangs those lips hid, but it didn’t help. ‘Please tell me that your dropping by during the largest Chaos incursion since Magnus’s time is just a coincidence.’
‘Try the largest since Snorri Whitebeard’s time,’ said Ulrika, clutching him as though to impress upon him something of deadly import. ‘It is already far worse in the north than you can conceive.’
Felix nodded, found himself stroking her veiled head without realising it. ‘I heard what became of Kislev. I’m so sorry. What with Sylvania, it all just happened so quickly–’
Ulrika waved away his platitudes with a shake of the head. ‘It does not matter, as my father would have said were he alive.’ She pushed him back just slightly, enough only to encourage Felix to open his eyes and look into hers. ‘I have come about Max.’
‘Max?’
‘Yes.’ Ulrika dropped her gaze. ‘The Auric Bastion is still weak at Alderfen, and despite the best efforts of Max and his brethren it is under constant attack. It took me two weeks to get here, Felix. That is how long it has been since Max fell.’
Felix felt the bottom fall out of his chest. Max could not be dead. There were certain people in this world that Felix had, without quite realising it, come to believe were invulnerable. Gotrek was one, and Max was another. The idea of him falling in some dismal corner of Ostermark while Felix drank himself stupid and dreamt that he was there just twisted the knife.
‘He fell, yes, to a mounted raid, along with every other priest and wizard the marauders could lay their hands on before being driven back into Kislev, but he is not dead. Don’t ask me how I know that, but I am convinced he was taken alive for a reason. It is difficult even for me to get news from north of the Auric Bastion, but a new warlord establishes himself in Praag and has been scouring Kislev of sorcerers for months. He calls himself the Troll King. That, I believe, is where Max and his fellows have been taken, and I want you to help me get him back.’
Felix had to keep his mouth shut to avoid saying ‘yes’ right away. She was offering him everything he had been yearning for, everything that had been missing since he and Gotrek had gone their separate ways. His ever-reliable inner cynic told him that, of course, Ulrika would know that. He would not be surprised if she could recite the contents of every fabricated war report he had ever written for the criers and knew the name of every sewerjack with whom he relived his glory days and where to find the taverns in which he would blast his mind with cheap schnapps afterwards. Max and Gotrek were the heroes. Felix was just a failed poet with a magic sword. He wasn’t the same man who had left his life at the drop of a drunken pledge to a Trollslayer and spent the next two decades gallivanting through horrors that most men would prefer to pretend could not exist. He had responsibilities now, and aches in places that he would prefer to pretend could not exist. Otto would not take him back again if he ran off now, and Kat…
The autumn light that reflected off the ring on his second finger struck him like a bucket of cold water.
‘I can’t go with you.’
‘Max risked his life to save mine from the plague, do you remember? And after that he raced across half of the Old World to rescue me from Adolphus Krieger.’
‘As did I,’ said Felix, defensively.
‘As did you,’ Ulrika echoed. ‘Do you value Max’s life that much less than mine?’
The words stung as they had been meant to. Felix felt a flickering ember of resentment amongst the confusion of passions. Had the choice been solely his he would have left Altdorf with Max from the outset. Had it been up to him he would probably be dead in a field somewhere in Ostermark by now. For some reason that thought did not trouble him. In his heart of hearts, he knew that he was never meant for any other kind of end.
‘If your positions were reversed I would tell him the same.’
‘Is it your work?’ Her face was a mask, but her voice sneered. ‘Do you know how pathetic your odes to the green fields of Reikland and the goodness of Emperor Karl Franz look in Hergig or Bechafen? Do you know the lengths they must go to to maintain an army that can still fight, the bargains they have been forced to make? Even I now have the field rank of general in the state of Ostermark. Do you think they care what I am as much as what I can bring to the field? Do you think they even want to know?’
When Felix did not react, she went on. ‘Is it your hunt for the rat that killed your father, then?’
Felix did tighten his grip on her shoulder at that. An image of his father brutalised and killed in his bed flashed through his mind. Part of him had been glad when the flagellants had burned that house down.
‘You will find nothing. The skaven have abandoned their northern holdings for some ploy in the south. I do not know what or where, so don’t ask.’ Her mocking tone became gentle. ‘You’re meant for better things than skulking around sewers and trying to hide the stink from your wife. Help me. Help Max.’
‘I told you, I can’t. And not for those reasons.’
‘Ah yes, the lovely Katerina Jaeger. You’re a living cliché, you know, taking a girl young enough to be your daughter.’
‘Young enough to be our daughter,’ Felix cut in reflexively, and immediately winced at how those words sounded out loud.
Ulrika looked away coyly, but Felix could see that she was smiling. ‘The world does not work like one of those dreadful Detlef Sierck plays you used to recite for me. The damsel does not recover simply because she has her prince.’ She shook her head and slowly peeled herself from his embrace. ‘You will not find a physician in Altdorf wise enough in forbidden lore to undo Kemmler’s necromancy, but I…’
Felix’s entire
ribcage constricted and froze. She could cure Kat! Or was she just offering him what he wanted to hear?
‘Are you promising me something?’
‘Find me in the Black Rose on Leopold Avenue tonight,’ said Ulrika, signalling to her man that she was ready to go. Felix blinked, as though tricked by some cunning sleight of hand, as the Ungol and his brightly coloured fleece coat reappeared in his vision. ‘And it must be tonight. I will be gone by dawn. I am already two weeks behind Max’s captors and it is a long road back to Badenhof.’
Felix looked to the ground and smiled. In other circumstances he might even have laughed. Ulrika had thought of everything that might sway him, boxed it neatly for him and tied it off with a sweet little bow. He sighed. Fine, he’d take a peek.
‘Badenhof?’
The Ungol drew a sealed letter from his coat. He displayed the wax Jaeger and Sons seal for a moment, and then slid it back into the fleece pocket.
‘It appears that your nephew, Gustav, has been having difficulties with the local lord and requests the experience of his knavish uncle in resolving them. Join me tonight, Felix, and I will ensure that Otto receives this letter. And the message that you departed at once to help him. Neither he nor Katerina will suspect.’
‘I… I still don’t know. I’d have to be sure that Kat is looked after.’
Ulrika closed her eyes and was still. It might have been a sigh, but of course Ulrika’s lungs had not expelled air in over twenty years. ‘And if she could be made strong again, so she could look after herself?’
‘What are you suggesting?’
Ulrika smiled and made to withdraw. ‘Max saved her life as well, Felix. I am suggesting that she might want her own say in this decision.’
Ulrika strode through the crowd, bodies sighing from her path like grass before a night wind.
Until only recently, she would have been able to move amongst the flock as one of them, but now her passage was marked by goose bumps and shudders, hammers stutteringly drawn across chests to ward against the evil eye. Chaos was waxing, Shyish, the Wind of Death, was in flux, and Ulrika’s own powers continued to grow. Even the simple townsfolk around her could sense the presence of the other in their midst. Until only recently, that growing disconnect between her and her remembered humanity would have troubled her. Now, her own senses could pierce the beating hearts of every one of these people. She saw the warmth that fled their veins and turned their fingers blue and, though they had only the dimmest perception of her presence amongst them, she could smell the fear on their breath.