“Bloody beast is loud.” Karl wriggled a finger in his ear.
“Yeah,” I said but was fair sure he couldn’t hear me.
A pair of crimson-stained millstones churned together in the center of the room, grinding along endlessly, rumbling, tumbling, rolling nowhere. Along the left side were the pounders. One after another they rose and fell, thud, thud, thud, slamming into a wood-slab. The right half of the mill was amassed with stacked barrels and crates. A fair few were busted open. I figured the rest for empty given the current economic climate. But you never know.
I lead on, my back to the left wall, ducking machinery, shield angled always toward the far gloom. Karl switched grips, stalking along behind.
I paused halfway down along the wall. “You hear it?”
“What?” Karl said.
“From outside.” Something jarred against the regularity of the machinery.
I raised an eyebrow at the disengage lever along the wall.
Karl shook his head, No.
I nodded. Best not tip our hand. Any more than we already had.
Beyond the grind of millstone and river burble were voices. Many. Concerted. Chanting. The scourgers, I mouthed. A look to Karl’s eyes and he kenned it, too.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Ripping at his beard, scowling, Karl turned—
From beyond the churning millstones, a shadow broke, knocking over a barrel, bolting pell-mell for the far door.
“Oy!” Karl was on it instantly, me playing second hound, barking at his heels but gaining, my long shanks loping me onward, drawing even, passing him as the figure reached the far door. It was Rudiger. I could make out the empty socket, the gleam of skull where Karl’d shorn off half his face. How the hell—?
The chanting jogged something.
The Nazarene. He must’ve healed him. It had to be. They were in this together.
Whatever this was.
Nightmare teeth bared, Rudiger tore open the door and turned, ducking my cut by degrees and coiling to spring. Off-kilter, I righted, back-swung as his fist cracked my shield. The impact knocked me whirling back, but I spun, whipping out blindly, praying to Thor and Tyr and Jesus Christ, catching Rudiger below the shoulder. His grasping hand somersaulted high, a sordid sight, his eyes bulging incredulous wide.
Staggering back, Rudiger lurched for the open door, froze, and I caught him full bore in the chest with my shield, ramming him stumbling out into early dawn. His gore-stained claw scrabbled at the rim of my shield as I forced him back, driving him into the open, hooking one of his feet with my own, tripping him, sending him crashing to the mud.
But damn, was he fast.
On his arse in the mud, one limb missing, he sprang up almost before he’d touched. Yolanda poised from the roof to strike, he smashed into me, splitting my shield to kindling as I piled back, head smacking off the mill’s titan-wall. Stars exploded. Gasping from my knees I jabbed, hoping for another blind miracle when the fucker rose up and swatted Yolanda flipping from my grip.
Disaster. Imminent.
I dove aside as a crossbow bolt zipped from somewhere, burying itself in Rudiger’s back. He didn’t even blink. His red eyes blazed as he grasped Yolanda. “Did you kill her?” His voice was a rasp.
“Huh—?” I scrabbled crab-wise back. “Who?”
Another bolt buried in his side.
“You…” Rudiger winced, stalking after me. “You should have.”
Then he swung.
I flinched, raising my hands. Not much else to do with your arse in the mud, back against the wall, sword blaring for your head. Maybe lean into it, turn perpendicular, make it quick. Clean. Easy on the undertaker.
I’d have been dead but for Karl, charging through the door, catching Rudiger across the gut with a cut that would’ve given a seasoned oak a run for its money. Rudiger folded in half, a weird shrieking growl erupting as he twisted, tearing the thane-axe from Karl’s fists and flinging him aside.
As Rudiger’s corpse-blackened fingertips scrabbled at the axe, I staggered up and bashed him across the head with the remnants of my shield, dropping him to his knees. He turned, teeth gnashing as he dug at the embedded axe. Fixated. I raised the shield again, overhead, two-handed and brought it down. Smash! Again. Smash! Again. Smash!
Rudiger gurgled something, a lone hand raised to ward off encroaching inevitability.
Staggering, I swatted his hand aside and slammed the shield down again across his skull.
Rudiger collapsed into the mud, forehead shattered inward, teeth missing, mewling like a half-drowned kitten.
My shield had shattered under the onslaught, only the central boss still intact, playing the knuckleduster, the rest either gone or hanging on by twisted splinter. Broken, beaten, dazed, I dropped to a knee in the mud, reaching for Yolanda.
Only then did I realize we were surrounded.
…soon became apparent that it was one of the clan-holt’s fiendish slatterns who committed the fell deed.
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 26.
ACROSS THE ROAD, they waited. Between old mills, they watched, huddled shoulder to shoulder, a silent jury of a hundred, maybe more, some naked, some stripped to the waist, scrawls of scribbled scripture written in crusted blood, crowns of twisted thorn wrapped around skulls. Torches rippled in their mist. A denuded forest of crucifixes stood at their shoulders.
Central amongst them stood the Nazarene, his distended belly brown with grime and wiry hair. Over his shoulders, he bore a scourge, twisted leather thongs braided with jags of ragged glass and rusted iron.
Rudiger withdrew his hand, Yolanda in his fist, and aimed her point at the hollow of my throat.
I gripped the remnants of my shield.
“Here…” Rudiger’s voice a sibilant slur of spit-shattered tooth. “Please…” He flipped Yolanda, catching her by the blade, proffering her hilt. “Take it.”
“Come to me, brother!” The Nazarene bellowed.
I blinked.
He wasn’t talking to me.
He was talking to Rudiger.
The Nazarene strode onward, Lazarus leering by his side, hunched like some under-stuffed puppet. Others followed, the whole lot of them, emerging from alleyways, down the street, coming out of the woodwork, clambering over walls, converging from on all quarters. And from somewhere unseen, the high-pitched ever-present squeal of the Tome-Bearer, the chants following his lead.
“End it.” Karl drew a pair of hand axes.
“P-please…” Rudiger inched across the mud, prodding me with Yolanda’s hilt, his breathing ragged, desperate, raw. The haft of Karl’s thane-axe, its head still lodged in Rudiger’s guts, cut a furrow through the muck.
Fear blazed in his eyes. An odd sight in this horrid thing once a man and now something more, something less, something different, something wrong. Hair drangled down, plastered across the denuded bone of his face, his lidless eye bloodshot, nestled in its socket. “Please,” he grimaced, “you do it.”
Casting the last of my shield aside, I snatched Yolanda and stepped back, raising her overhead, the executioner’s stroke. I’d had enough practice, too much experience, and Yolanda’s edge was so sharp.
“Stay your hand, brother!” the Nazarene bellowed.
“What are you?” I hissed.
What teeth Rudiger still had grated. “Do it!”
“Tell me,” I said.
“I’m a dead man.”
“No shit.” My mind raced. “Who’s the she you meant?”
“The Grey-Lady.”
I adjusted my grip, licked my lips, swallowed. “And what’d she do?”
“Everything.” His head fell as he wept, shoulders bobbing.
“Where is she?”
“Hiding. Somewhere.” Rudiger sobbed. “Until the hunger takes her again. Now please—”
“Back off,” Karl snarled, stepping between me and the horde. “Do it, lad.”
; Rudiger drooled pink foam. “Please…”
“Brother!”
I exhaled and swung, my arms lead and dropping, precise as an automaton’s, no thought, no emotion, no wasted movement — schluck! Rudiger’s head plopped in the mud then so too did the rest of him.
The Nazarene halted shy of Rudiger’s corpse, the cant of his jaw set in firm disapproval. “You need not have done that. I would have spared you the pain.”
“Didn’t feel a thing,” I lied.
“The killing of a man burdens the soul of even the basest churl, brother.”
“I ain’t your brother. And I’m fair sure he wasn’t a man.”
The Nazarene studied me. “If not a man, then what?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“A rabid wolf to be put down?” The Nazarene’s eyes narrowed. “Aye.”
“You going to raise him like you did that leering pumpkin-headed fuck?” I sized up Lazarus. Getting killed hadn’t improved his looks. Or health. Or demeanor.
“You cut off his head,” the Nazarene explained.
“Yeah, well, sure…” I shrugged.
“He told the truth, though, it would seem.” The Nazarene scratched his prominent belly. It was only now, up close, that I saw the constellation of star-shaped scars peppering his chest and abdomen, as though someone’d gutted him with a spear. Over and over. “A child of Cain. Of Lilith. Marked. Know you the book of Lilith?”
“Sure, my grandma used to read me bedtime stories from it.”
“You jest of things best left unknown. Unsaid. Forgotten. Even so. She yet stalks this land.” The Nazarene tugged on the handle and head of his flail, draped across his shoulders. “This was his lair?” He glanced at the mill building.
“Yeah. There were … I don’t know.” I rubbed my chest. “A lot inside.”
“Bring out the dead, brothers!” the Nazarene bellowed. “Bring them all!”
Like a swarm of ants the horde streamed into the mill, piling in, body after body, fighting for purchase at the door. Others set about digging holes, scrabbling at the earth with bare hands, ripping at it with torn nails and bent, gnarly fingers.
“What are you going to do?” I gripped Yolanda.
“Shrive them. Consecrate them. Crucify them.”
The brethren began emerging, fighting out the door as they had to get in. One bore an arm. Another a leg. A pair struggled with a torso.
The Nazarene turned. “Grant them absolution!”
I watched as those bearing crosses laid them in the street and pounded nails into the disparate parts. Tying off a leg here, an arm there, forming a man-shaped monstrosity. A man’s head with another’s torso, one arm a woman’s, the other a child’s. It might’ve been funny if it weren’t so abominably fucking horrid.
“Yes! Yes!” The Nazarene’s arms rose toward the sky. “Now raise them on high! Raise them up to the Lord!”
The brethren levered the crosses upright, setting the butt ends into holes.
“And now, he!” The Nazarene stepped back and the brethren swarmed over Rudiger’s corpse, dragging it atop a hoary old crucifix. They set to pounding nails through his palms and feet, binding his hands with rope. One Jesus, a small wiry bloke with the forearms of a stonemason set to prying out Rudiger’s teeth with a claw-hammer.
“Might be our best shot.” Karl nodded at the Nazarene’s exposed back.
I blinked, watching them hammer a stake through Rudiger’s chest, pinning him to the cross. Karl wasn’t wrong. It could be done. But with Lazarus and a horde of the others watching the Nazarene’s back, watching us, closing in, salivating?
“We’d be next,” I said, turning tail and hoofing it the hell out of there.
…convened before the entire contingent, the clan-holt elder accused Sir Kragen of taking liberties with the clan-holt slattern, bereft of her consent.
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 27.
BY BOTH CUSTOM and law, the wine cellar was dark and dank and cold, my breath visible in the dim trickle of lantern light. Five long racks ran parallel, two along the walls, three down the middle. All bare. A few boxes of cheese and barrels marked ‘poppy oil’ stood stacked crooked in the corner. The cellar was larger than the keep warranted, but who was I to complain? About the emptiness, maybe, but there was a grand scheme I could only appreciate.
I knew someone was there before I turned. That feeling, that prickle of awareness dancing down my spine, tingling out to all quarters. Someone, standing there in the darkness, watching, waiting. But I needed a drink and so I bloody well took one.
Then I turned.
“Thirsty?” I offered the wine bottle. One of the last. Still young, untutored and raw, but it knew the trick. Slaying the nerves. Dulling the mind. Quashing the images, the visions. Visions of Rudiger, penitent in the muck, his teeth gleaming a jagged pink, rivulets of grey flesh dangling off.
A shadow stepped from between the racks. Von Madbury. I could tell by the way he was standing with that stick jammed so longitudinally up his arse. He stutter-stepped to a halt, stiffened, fixed his coat, if not his manners. “Krait.”
“In the flesh.” I could see him only in silhouette but knew he’d said my name with a sneer. Sometimes you can just hear it. Beyond, past the wine racks and crates, on the far wall, a stout, iron-banded door stood ajar. After a heartbeat, it slid shut surreptitiously as though by magic.
“Have you seen Sir Alaric?” I asked. In my mind’s eye, I saw him off in the dark, wreathed in the fume of smoke and impotence and death, attempting his own liquid trick.
I took another swig, still trying to drown back those bloody teeth.
“Thieving from the stores?” von Madbury harrumphed at the bottle firmly entrenched in my fist. “Theft from here costs you a hand.”
“Well, there goes my love-life.” It wasn’t true, I was near ambidextrous, but why sully a good jest with onerous facts?
“You’re disgusting.”
“Oh. Apologies.” I laid a hand to my chest. “Didn’t take you for the delicate type. Especially when your friend was scourging in that kid.”
“It can always be arranged.”
“Huh?” I straightened. “For me, you mean? Cause you weren’t clear. Or I’m drunk. Or maybe both.” I hefted the wine in salute. “Either way, I’ll pass. Besides, it’s all part of my contract with the King. Imbibeture in perpetuity. I believe that’s the language devised and agreed upon.”
“You’re a liar.”
“You got me.” I waggled a finger. “But it sounds good if you aren’t really listening, yeah?” I pointed towards the far door. “What’s back there?”
Von Madbury puffed up his chest. “Nothing concerns you.”
“Nothing?” I made a show of scratching my head. “Why go through all the trouble of putting a big bloody door there for nothing?”
“The dungeon,” von Madbury flexed his hands open and closed, “and oubliettes.”
“Oh?” I rubbed my belly and took a step. “I could do with a piss.”
“Piss upstairs.” Von Madbury shifted, blocking in my path.
“Keep a fastidious dungeon, eh?”
“Go piss somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere not here.”
I pointed toward the door. “But I want to piss there.”
Von Madbury reached surreptitiously behind his back. Just not surreptitiously enough. Tough doing anything on the sly with a word that big.
“Whoa.” I stepped back, hands raised. A funny thing it is, being a fucker. Sometimes you don’t want trouble, aren’t fit for it, like me, like then, with Rudiger’s teeth burning foremost in my mind, but you get into rhythms in life and do things by rote, like poking the bear, cause it’s just what you do. “Who’s back there?”
His lips pursed. “No one.”
“Your trousers are undone.” I pointed with the arse-end of the bottle. “Can see your ties dangling from here.”
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Von Madbury stiffened, wanting to look, to check, but knew he’d already tipped his hand.
“So…?” I cocked my head. “You marched down in the mid of night just to rub one out?”
His teeth ground together, muscles in his jaw working double-time.
“I admire your dedication.” I made a show of glancing around. “Clomping all the way down here. Some privacy, I suppose.” I rubbed my arms, bouncing on the balls of my feet. “A little cold, though, yeah?”
He tensed to lunge, draw his dagger, murder me in the dark.
“And the larder?” I waggled a finger. “I thought that soup tasted off. But to each his own. I knew a fella one time, an archer out of York, short fella, no front teeth, couldn’t consummate the act unless he had his pet dog, name was Rufus — or was that the archer…?”
Von Madbury let his dagger hang behind him where I couldn’t see. But I knew he’d drawn it cause so had I. And he’d seen it, too.
Question was, did either of us want to die down here?
Cause it was fair likely. A dagger duel? Down here? Drunk? Jesus. Everyone’s growing holes. And then some. “Mayhap it’s that whore you brought along with you?” Von Madbury puffed up, scowling, liking the sound of his own voice.
“Karl, you mean?”
But von Madbury hadn’t heard me, and if he had, he kept right on at it. “Your sweet lady. Mayhap she’s in there now, begging for it. Aching for it.”
“You ain’t her type.”
“Oh, I’m a fit for all types.”
“Yeah. You’ve a real way with women.” I gripped my dagger. “And I hear you sniffing around again and the only thing you’ll be a fit for’s a hole in the ground.”
“Tough talk.” Von Madbury took a step forward.
And so did I.
“Dietrick, please…” came a muffled voice from the darkness beyond the dungeon-door.
Von Madbury paused.
I squinted past.
The door stood ajar.
“You in there,” I called. “You want to walk out of there and not have to do anything you’ve no mind doing, come on out. I’ll stand by you.”
The Last Benediction in Steel Page 17
