He was interrupted by an already familiar sound. Two men pushed through the tavern’s swing gates, stepping onto the planking outside. They spoke in low murmurs, but he recognised the magistrate’s drawl. He crept closer, hoping to make out more. He thought Lymax had spoken Sergeant Kramer’s name.
‘–break for you, old man, them turning up just when they did.’
‘You don’t say.’ The second voice – a little louder than the first, slurred by drink – belonged to Old Man Jerebeus.
Lymax sucked air between his teeth. ‘Five of them, though – and more dangerous, to look at them, than any we’ve dealt with before.’
‘Ah, they aren’t so tough as they pretend. One down already, one more by dawn. That leaves only three – and two of them hurt, at that.’
‘I guess so.’
‘You know I was ready to take my turn. Still am. I’ve lived a good, long life. I can’t say I’m not glad of a few more months, though – to prepare. You know what it feels like, Gideon? It feels like the Emperor still watches over us, after all.’
Lymax sighed, heavily. ‘I wish I could feel that too.’
The pair moved away, and Stürm didn’t catch the old man’s rejoinder. He considered whether to follow them, in case he could learn more. He was startled by a sudden voice behind him: ‘Are you lost?’ He whirled around.
The young girl in the red tunic stood a few feet from him. Her eyes were bright circles of light in the gloom. Stürm didn’t know how he had failed to hear her creeping up on him. He must have been more tired than he thought. He had to quieten her before she gave him away.
He took a step towards the girl. She flinched and backed away from him. Stürm dropped to his haunches, so as not to tower over her, and forced his facial muscles into an unaccustomed smile. ‘Your name is Alyce, isn’t it?’
Alyce nodded.
‘My name is Guardsman… My name is Max – and yes, you’re right, I am lost. My friends and I were fighting, uh, wood sprites in the forest. Do you know what they are? Have you seen them? Have you seen them in the village?’
‘The monsters can’t come into Solace,’ Alyce declared – thankfully now in hushed tones matching Stürm’s own.
‘Is that because your men protect you? With their guns?’
‘Your gun is different to theirs. It’s very shiny. I haven’t seen a gun like that before. Can I hold it?’
‘No. It’s dangerous if you don’t know how to use it.’
‘I’m old enough to use a gun.’
‘Do you have other weapons? How do the grown-ups defend you? How do they keep the aeldari at bay? Alyce, tell me.’
He was being too insistent, making the girl flinch from him again. Before he could stop her, she bolted, racing out in front of the tavern. ‘Magistrate Lymax!’ she cried. Stürm ground his teeth in chagrin. He thought about running, but this too was not the Mordian way. He straightened up and marched after Alyce instead.
He found her with her fingers wrapped around the magistrate’s thick belt. As he walked into view, her blue eyes reaffixed themselves to him. Lymax had both hands on his shotgun and was frowning. ‘Guardsman… Stürm, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as if nothing was wrong. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten her. I saw her outside, alone, and was worried for her.’
‘And what brings you outside, alone?’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’ That much was true. ‘My mind was racing. I thought some air might clear it.’
Lymax nodded. ‘There’s no cause for concern,’ he reassured the clinging Alyce. ‘No one wants to hurt you. No one can hurt you in Solace. Why don’t you run along now? Go and find Deputy–’
‘I want to stay with you,’ said Alyce, stubbornly.
‘Now, Alyce, please. I just have a couple of things I have to deal with. I’ll follow you on in a minute or two. I promise.’
Alyce detached herself from the magistrate and scuttled away, giving Stürm a wide berth as she passed him. She ran towards the store. He wanted to look, to see if she went down the alleyway – but Lymax was bearing down on him, his features still tight with suspicion.
‘Don’t her parents wonder where she is?’ asked Stürm.
‘Alyce’s mother died in childbirth,’ said Lymax, gruffly. ‘She’d had the fever for weeks, but held on for the baby’s sake. We’d lost her father only weeks before. He rode out on a hunting expedition and never returned. We all take a hand in caring for young Alyce. She is family to all of us in Solace.’
‘For some of us, the only family we have,’ agreed a cordial voice. Old Man Jerebeus tottered up to the pair, insinuating himself into the conversation.
‘I was wondering–’ Stürm began, but Lymax interrupted him.
‘Your sergeant talked about an early start tomorrow. You should sleep.’
‘Where is Sergeant Kramer?’ asked Stürm.
‘In the doktor’s office, all freshly bandaged up. Your other friend is with him too. Both were spark out when last I looked in on them.’
That was a lie. Zoransky had been charged with watching Kramer. He would never have allowed himself to fall asleep. Stürm kept his expression neutral, however. The last thing he wanted was a gun battle, which would be heard across the village. Not yet. Not until he knew what he was facing.
He didn’t have to fake a yawn, only let it happen. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right. I should try to rest.’ He took his leave of Lymax and Jerebeus, heading back to the rear of the tavern. The whole way, he felt their eyes on his back, and he listened intently for the sound of a gun being drawn. He unlatched the rear door, opened it and swung it shut again. He waited until he heard footsteps moving away.
When Lymax had talked of the doktor’s office, he had made an involuntary movement. His head had jerked in a particular direction. Stürm crept from shadow to shadow again, following that pointer. He left the narrow alleyway and the sounds of the gathering crowd behind him.
At the village’s edge, he found a two-storey building with a sign that read ‘Physician’.
There were no lights inside and no sounds of movement, so he forced the door as quietly as he could. It splintered open with little resistance. Stürm readied his lasgun and stepped into the darkness beyond, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
He was in a narrow hallway. He made out doorways to his left and a wooden staircase ahead of him. Checking the downstairs rooms, he found an office and a parlour, both empty. He climbed the stairs, his eyes scouring the shadows that darkened his path. His stomach felt tight. The creak of every wooden step beneath his feet sounded like the screech of an alarm.
There were three more rooms upstairs. In the first of them, Stürm discerned the outlines of a bed with a chair alongside it – and a large, crumpled shape on the floor. His nostrils twitched at the mingled scents of gunpowder and blood. Fearing the worst, he crossed quickly to the window. He yanked its shutters open, flooding the room with reddish moonlight.
Guardsman Zoransky was dead.
Stürm turned the body over. Its armour-reinforced overcoat had been blasted to shreds. He teased a bullet out of the bloody mess of Zoransky’s chest, aching with regret for having sent the big soldier to this fate. He took a deep breath, reining in his feelings. Feelings were the ruin of discipline, and Stürm had work to do. Of Sergeant Kramer, there was no sign. There was more blood on the bed, however, and its sheets were tangled and torn. His comrades had put up a fight.
He hissed into the comm-bead at his collar. ‘Ven Eisen. Do you read me?’
A creaking floorboard behind him alerted him to danger.
A man appeared in the doorway, well dressed and clean-shaven, with a pair of small, round spectacles. He was bringing a pistol to bear. Stürm snapped up his lasgun and fired first, shooting for the heart. The would-be assassin gasped and reeled backwards. He fired one b
ullet, at the ceiling – then crashed through a banister rail at the top of the stairs.
Stürm raced from the bedroom and descended the stairs four at a time, seeing no point in stealth now that the world had erupted into noise. He yelled Ven Eisen’s name into his comm-bead, but there was no response. He had to get back to the tavern.
The assassin lay sprawled in the hallway. The elusive doktor, Stürm wondered? It hardly mattered. Broken bone protruded through the side of the corpse’s neck. The shack door caught on its dead weight, and Stürm had to kick it out of his way.
He raced into the crisp night air, keeping his head down: a sensible precaution, as two more bullets thudded into the wall behind him. ‘Hold it right there!’ a gruff voice rang out, belatedly. Ignoring it, he dived behind a cluster of rainwater barrels and strafed the shadows around him with las-beams.
Suddenly, villagers were coming at him from every direction, some with pistols drawn, others wielding makeshift clubs or pitchforks or knives. Stürm loosed off five more shots into the advancing mass. He struck three men, maybe four, but the rest fell upon him, shouting and screaming and clawing and battering at him. Above their cries and the drumbeat of his own heart, he heard another voice, a familiar one: ‘Don’t shoot him. Do you hear me? If we take him alive, we buy ourselves another month.’
The crowd wrenched away his lasgun, punching and kicking until his grip on it was loosened. A dozen hands latched on to his uniform, hauling him to his feet. An old woman spat on him as they dragged him to meet the man who had called out.
Old Man Jerebeus stood straight-backed, eyes agleam with malice. He seemed perfectly sober now. ‘You should have slept – you and your friend in there.’ He nodded towards the physician’s shack. ‘We just wanted to get tonight over with and deal with the rest of you later, but you forced our–’
Stürm lunged at him, with a roar of effort. He took his captors by surprise, wrenching himself free of them. He knew for sure now that Jerebeus was the Emperor’s enemy – and this would likely be his only chance to slay him.
His fingers almost reached the old man’s throat. Then, something – a pistol butt, he would later assume – cracked the back of his skull, dislodging his cap. For a second, he deluded himself that willpower would keep him upright. Then a rain of fists drove him to the ground, and the stars above him seemed to pinwheel and explode.
The next thing his senses registered was the clanging of a heavy iron gate.
Stürm opened his eyes and instinctively lifted his head. A flash of pain blinded him and teased a groan out of his throat. His lasgun was gone, as was his combat knife. He felt a rush of shame, leavened with fear for his comrades, and he pushed himself up into a sitting position. Bedsprings creaked under his weight.
‘I thought you’d be out for the night. I’m starting to wonder if you off-world types ever sleep at all.’
He was in a square cell that smelled faintly of cleaning agents. It was bordered by wooden walls on two sides and bars on the others. A crude symbol, meaningless to him, had been etched into the stone floor in blood. Someone had tried to scrub it away, but only partially succeeded. A tiny window above the bed was barred too. Stürm guessed that he was in the building he had seen before, beside the store. The gaolhouse. Through the bars to his left was a second cell, furnished like this one with a basic bunk and a chamber pot, otherwise empty.
Behind the bars in front of him was Magistrate Gideon Lymax. He was backlit by a candle sitting in a brass holder on a desk, casting his face into shadow. He had just locked the cell gate with a key: one of many, attached to a jangling ring. He tossed it casually to an older, grizzled man, who sat with his heels up on the desk.
‘How long have I been unconscious?’ asked Stürm.
Lymax shrugged. ‘Not too long. Long enough.’
‘Give me one hour,’ he had said to Ven Eisen.
‘Don’t expect your friends to come rescue you,’ said Lymax, as if he had read Stürm’s mind. ‘We had to take them prisoner too. You gave us no option, in the end. I thought it best to hold you separate from one another.’
‘Those of us you haven’t killed,’ Stürm spat.
‘The big fellow, you mean? Zoransky? That wasn’t meant to… He should have known when to stop fighting. He should have known when he was beaten.’
‘We are Mordian Iron Guard,’ Stürm growled. ‘We are never beaten.’
‘Begging your pardon, that’s not how it looks from over here.’
‘What did you do to Sergeant Kramer? Where is he?’
Lymax’s gaze dropped to his boots. It seemed he felt some shame for his actions, despite everything. ‘He wouldn’t have survived long, in any case. His wound was infected. We don’t have the medicines to treat him.’
‘What did you do to him?’ Stürm demanded again.
‘This village is more than our home,’ said Lymax. ‘Solace is our shelter. Here, we are protected. You’ve seen the monsters. You know what they can do. They’re waiting for us out there, in the forest. For a hundred years, they have been waiting.’
He had ignored Stürm’s question. Did that mean Kramer was dead? Stürm balled his fists, suppressing his righteous anger. It would do no good to scream at Lymax. As calmly as he could, his voice trembling a little, he asked, ‘How are you protected?’
‘They cannot reach us here,’ said the magistrate.
‘Why not? Some kind of weapon?’
‘They can’t set foot across the village limits.’
‘What happens if they do?’
Lymax turned away, and Stürm thought he would say no more. In a hoarse voice, however, he confessed: ‘I only saw it happen the one time. A female wood sprite. She made it as far as the tavern. We stepped out to meet her, those who could muster the nerve for it. We thought this was it, the final showdown. Only, then…’
His words ran dry. Stürm prompted him, impatiently. ‘Then what?’
‘Something, some force, set about her. I was standing just ten feet from her as she was pounded into the ground. I heard her bones snapping one by one. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I felt… My heart was pounding fit to burst out of my chest, and there were voices screaming in my ears, screaming for blood.’
Stürm swallowed down a rising tide of bile. ‘“Some force”, you said.’
‘Some invisible force.’
‘You must know what you are describing.’
‘That I do. Our protector. Our shield.’
‘You must know what that–’
Lymax turned back to Stürm, and now his eyes were defiantly ablaze. ‘The Emperor doesn’t see us way out here, or chooses not to. Our ancestors faced slaughter. What choice had they? What choice have we, but to honour the deal they made?’
‘You could choose to die with honour,’ argued Stürm.
‘At last count, this village houses one hundred and fourteen souls. My duty is to them. We have a deal – and it is a good deal, if hard to bear some days. We are protected in Solace – but yes, there is a price. There is always a price.’
Stürm had miscalculated. He had thought he could reason with the magistrate. He knew now that he was beyond reaching.
Lymax tipped his broad-brimmed hat, his old cordial self returning like a well-worn mask. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ he drawled, ‘I have business to attend to. I’ll leave you in the hands of my trusted deputy here. Until the morning.’
He turned and strode out of the building. In the silence that followed, the deputy rocked back on his chair. He rummaged a bottle out of the desk and poured himself a drink, which he sucked through his ratty grey beard. He lit up a lho-leaf stick, filling the room with pungent smoke. He barely glanced at his prisoner at all. Stürm doubted there was much point in talking to him either.
He had to do something. He had a shrewd idea of what Lymax’s ‘business’ must be, and he had to s
top it. He levered himself to his feet, and was overcome by dizziness. He paced the cell to get his blood circulating again. He tore the threadbare sheets from his bed, and set about plaiting and knotting them together.
At this point, he imagined he had the deputy’s attention. He kept his back to him, as he fashioned his sheets into a noose. He heard a scrape from the deputy’s chair. He cast his makeshift rope over a ceiling rafter, as footsteps hurried up to the cell gate. He looped the rope around his bed frame and knotted it.
The deputy pounded his fist on the bars. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I refuse to sit here waiting to die,’ said Stürm. He stepped up onto the bed.
‘But you aren’t dying tonight. You could still have months yet. If you do as you’re told and accept the way things are, you could even have a comfortable–’
‘The Golden Throne I will,’ spat Stürm, reaching for the dangling noose.
The deputy drew his pistol. ‘Now, you step down from there.’
‘Go ahead,’ Stürm challenged him. ‘Shoot me. That way, I die resisting the Emperor’s enemies. That way, I die with honour – on my own terms, not on yours. My soul remains undefiled by whatever dark powers you have conjured here.’ He slipped the noose over his head.
The deputy gave a start and fumbled with his jangling key ring. He thrust a key into the lock, cursing as it wouldn’t turn.
Stürm tightened the noose around his own neck. As his gaoler found the right key at last, unlocked the gate and burst into the cell, he took a powerful leap from the bed. The slipknot he had tied around the frame unravelled. He cannoned into the deputy and sent him reeling backwards into the bars.
Stürm pressed his attack with two punches to the head, one more to the stomach. Dazed and winded, his victim slid gracelessly to the floor. Stürm snatched his weapon from him. He only wished there had been a more honourable way.
Inferno Volume 2 - Guy Haley Page 21
