by C. L. Werner
‘You can’t get us all,’ snarled one of the Tileans.
‘Maybe not,’ agreed Brunner. ‘But I can get at least two more of you before you reach me. Who’s it going to be?’ The bounty hunter uttered a short, mocking laugh as he saw the mercenaries falter, and doubt and indecision worked their way onto their faces. ‘I should warn you, I coat my bolts in garlic. A trick I learned from you noodle-slurpers. That way if the bolt doesn’t finish you, poison will.’
The mercenaries were all but cowed now, their grips on their weapons becoming lax.
‘You’re professionals,’ Brunner said. ‘You understand that no matter what, I’ll splatter your boss’s brains all over this place. If he dies, the paydays dry up.’
‘Listen to him!’ pleaded Abdul-Qaadir, staring into the yawning barrel of the gun. ‘Don’t try anything stupid!’
Suddenly the Arabyan was finding himself regretting hiring men who were not the greatest thinkers. A clear-headed man would understand that there was no way to help him except to obey the bounty hunter. But what lunacy might the idiots he had hired contemplate?
‘All of you,’ Brunner snapped. ‘Outside! I have a few questions I need your boss to answer. Then you can all get back to your swindling, stealing and smuggling.’
‘Do as he says!’ urged Abdul-Qaadir when he noted his men were hesitating. With muttered oaths and murderous looks, the guards filed out of the warehouse, into the street.
‘I thought they would never leave,’ Brunner said, training his attention on the prisoner. ‘I have a few questions for you,’ he said in a dry, icy whisper. ‘And trust me, you won’t like it if I have to ask you twice.’
Abdul-Qaadir swallowed the lump in his throat. He brushed sweat from his brow. ‘You could ask me for the keys to my daughters’ chastity belts and they would be yours!’ affirmed the Arabyan, his voice cracking with fear. He could well imagine that if Brunner were to discharge his weapon, there would be nothing left of him above his beard.
‘Good,’ the bounty hunter said. ‘We’re going to get along quite nicely.’ The icy menace returned to his voice and he pressed the tip of the gun barrel against the Arabyan’s hawkish nose. ‘Tell me, what do you know about mummies?’
The Black Boar was even busier than it had been when Brunner was first contacted by Ortez. The bounty hunter stalked through the crowd of merchants from Marienburg, mercenaries from Reikland and sailors from Kislev. He made his way to the bar, and grabbed the sleeve of the balding barman.
‘Where is Mahrun?’ he asked, speaking so that he could be heard over the din of Reikspiel spoken in a dozen contrasting dialects. The barman nodded towards a door set towards the rear wall of the tavern. Brunner turned and strode toward the back room.
He did not knock before pushing the oak door aside. The room was small and dark. It smelled of beer and the unwashed. A few miserable specimens of humanity shuffled out of the bounty hunter’s way as he entered. They watched him pass with furtive, frightened looks. These were wretches, the slovenly displaced Imperials who had been stranded in Miragliano when their money dried up or their luck ran out. The owner of the Black Boar allowed such men to spend what few coins they could beg or steal, but he did not want them cluttering up the main room. He also found it useful to keep a few such men on hand in case some ship’s captain was looking for a few bodies to increase his crew. Men such as these would never rise again from their squalor and misery; they were marking time until they passed beyond the gates of Morr.
There was only one man among these whom the tavern keeper took genuine pity on. That man was Mahrun. Brunner found him seated on a wobbly, warped chair, staring despondently into a dented tin stein. He wore a shabby brown robe similar to the one Brunner had worn on his visit to Abdul-Qaadir. The man’s blond hair was long, scraggly and filthy, his beard unkempt and matted. Brunner walked over to the wretch, staring down into the man’s rheumy, drunken eyes.
‘Mahrun,’ the bounty hunter said. He produced a pair of copper coins from his belt, and held them tantalisingly before the drunk. ‘Would you like these?’ Mahrun snatched at the coins, but his clumsy reach was easily avoided by the bounty hunter. ‘You have to earn them,’ Brunner stated.
‘What can I do?’ the wretch asked, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘What use am I?’
‘None at all,’ the bounty hunter replied. ‘But maybe you have something that is worth buying? Let’s get your things and have a look.’
Mahrun slunk from the back room, and crept out into the main hall. He made his way through the kitchens and into the storeroom where the taverneer was hiding his few possessions. The taverneer was trying to protect them from Mahrun’s impulses, but the wretch had discovered where they had been hidden. It was not stealing, for however low he sank, there were things Mahrun would not do, even in his most drunken stupor. The things he retrieved really did belong to him; they were relics from another life.
Brunner watched the drunk return, cradling a bundle wrapped in black cloth. The man set down the bundle, and spread out his belongings like a bazaar merchant displaying his wares. The bounty hunter glanced over the objects, and nodded his head as he saw a funnel-shaped cylinder of wood resting beside the mouldy old Sigmarite prayer book.
Gotz Mahrun had once been a warrior-priest in the service of Sigmar, tasked to a band of templars that was charged with rooting out a nest of vampires from a haunted fortress in Averland. Whatever had happened in that blighted place, Mahrun’s companions had died. Apparently, the warrior-priest’s courage and faith had not stood up to the unnatural horror of the undead.
Mahrun had fled, eventually ending up in Miragliano. He had become a broken shell of a man, plagued by inner daemons of guilt and self-loathing.
The more valuable of Mahrun’s possessions—the silver buttons of his black priest’s habit, the silver Sigmarite hammer that had once hung from a slender chain about his neck, the massive steel hammer he had been taught to wield upon the enemies of the Empire—had long ago been transformed into beer by the wretched priest. All that was left were objects that had no great material value—unless one had a specific use for them.
‘The stick,’ Brunner said. ‘I’ll buy that.’ He tossed the copper coins down to Mahrun. The wretch grabbed the money, and stuffed it into the top of his tunic. Then he reverently handed the long wooden stake to Brunner.
‘It is hawthorn,’ Mahrun explained. His thumb twitched, brushing one of the inscriptions that had been carved into the stake. ‘Blessed by the temple. Invocations to Sigmar carved into the wood. A very potent weapon,’ Mahrun’s voice slipped into a hollow whisper, ‘against them.’ The man slumped down onto the floor, tears streaming from his eyes. ‘Would that I had had the courage to use it. Would that I had been worthy of serving mighty Sigmar.’
Brunner left the wretch to wallow in self-pity. He considered the weapon for a moment, then thrust it into his belt and made his way out of the den of lost humanity.
Abdul-Qaadir had been very forthcoming with information; Brunner had only been forced to cuff the man with the steel barrel of his pistol three or four times. Through his split, bleeding lip, the Arabyan had informed Brunner that he had sold the mummy to a Tilean, a man named Carandini. Another slap of the steel and Abdul-Qaadir had admitted to Brunner that Carandini was reputed to be a practitioner of the dark arts, a black magician who had turned to the black marketeer in the past to provide him with unspeakable, abominable things.
The confirmation that the mummy of Nehb-ka-menthu had indeed fallen into the hands of a necromancer did not discourage Brunner, but it did make him cautious. He knew that it was best to fight magic with magic, and while he might no longer honour the gods, he knew that they were not without their own magic. He always felt it was better to err on the side of caution. Mahrun’s wooden stake would provide him with a little extra insurance.
The house in which the necromancer could apparently be found was in one of the easternmost districts of Miragliano. The land had begun to s
ink here, the entire island was slowly crumbling away to join the marshes beyond the city walls. It was a dilapidated district, abandoned, and all but deserted. The canals had become so choked with mud and overgrown with weeds, that they were no longer navigable. The network of dubiously maintained bridges had to be crossed to move about the district. Only the thick walls that surrounded the area had been kept up. Their bases had been shored up with rocks, boulders, gravel and rubble, to prevent them from sinking, and to preserve the integrity of Miragliano’s outer defences.
Brunner walked through the derelict neighbourhood. Fallen tiles from rotting roofs crunched beneath his feet as he strode the broken cobblestone streets and decaying bridges. The only sign of human life he encountered was a work crew removing the heavy statue of a cavalry hero from the forlorn remains of a piazza. They were obviously salvaging the work of art before the swamp could consume it. The Tileans were rather odd when it comes to art, thought Brunner.
Although human life had forsaken the district, it was not without other denizens. A family of red-feathered shrikes had established a gruesome nest in the broken window of a dilapidated palazzo, numerous frogs and insects impaled on the broken splinters of the window’s shutters. Great brown rats scuttled along the edge of the street, descendants of that plague of vermin that brought the red pox to Miragliano centuries before. A solitary vulture, its scrawny neck fringed by a circle of white down, pecked at a rotten cadaver that swayed from the only visible guard tower in the district.
The bounty hunter made his way through the silent streets. Even the sound of water lapping at the edges of the stone-lined canals was missing from this blighted area. On every side, doorways yawned, their ornately decorated panels looted long ago, like the glass that had once filled the empty windows above them.
Brunner paid the desolation scant notice. He was not interested in the lost glory of this neighbourhood, much less in the sorry abandonment it languished in. He was intent on finding the red-roofed three-storey building that Abdul-Qaadir had informed him served as the lair of the necromancer Carandini.
It was nearly an hour before Brunner found the house. The abandoned district was a confusing maze of streets, and some sections were unreachable now that the canals had become a muddy quagmire. This was a part of the old city that had never been reconstructed by Prince Cosimo to match the orderly planning of the great Leonardo da Miragliano. The bounty hunter was annoyed by the delay and determined that when the job was finished, he would be paying a visit to a certain Arabyan black marketeer and discussing his skill at giving directions.
Brunner checked his pistol, then unslung the curious skaven crossbow from his back. Examining the magazine that held the crossbow’s bolts, he slid it into place on the weapon. Patting the large wooden stake thrust through his belt, Brunner set out for the warped, leaning building.
As the bounty hunter worked his way along the street, he took advantage of every shadow and doorway so that his arrival might not be detected. But he did not see the pair of green eyes watching him from the mouth of an alleyway. The lithe feline watched the bounty hunter for a while, then turned and strolled away, obeying some summons only the ears of an immortal cat could hear.
Brunner mounted the steps that led to the second floor of the ramshackle palazzo. It was a broad, sprawling building that leaned towards the necromancer’s lair—the second floor balcony that rose above the portico almost touched the red-roofed building. The bounty hunter peered through the doorway of the room that opened onto the balcony. Seeing no sign of activity in the house across the narrow street, he swiftly made his way through the empty room and onto the balcony. A moment later, he climbed on top of the stone railing. Brunner did not even glance at the empty street below as he stepped across the gap between the two balconies. His left foot touched the wooden railing of the far balcony and he shifted his weight, letting his body fall into place after his foot. His quarry might reasonably be expected to have taken pains to guard against intrusion from the doors and windows on the street, but it had been the bounty hunter’s experience that very few men took the same precautions against intrusion from above. Many were the second-storey burglars whom he had hunted down in the thieves’ quarters of the Old World’s cities, men who had gained entry to the supposedly well-protected domains of their victims with almost contemptuous ease.
No, the necromancer might have placed traps or spells to guard the lower floors, but it appeared he had fallen into the same trap that many a wealthy merchant had come to regret.
The bounty hunter peered into the darkened room off the balcony. It was not quite as empty as the one opposite. Piles of rubbish and heaps of mouldering clothing littered the room. Brunner kicked at one of the rubbish piles, noting with indifference the rotting head which rolled free, disturbing the enormous rat that had been gnawing at the carrion. Brunner kicked a second rubbish pile, to reveal a number of human bones. Apparently the necromancer employed this room as a repository for the refuse from his studies.
As he strode across the room, one of the piles of rubbish rose awkwardly to its feet. The shape that confronted Brunner was only partially human, made all the more hideous for its rapidly diminishing kinship to the race of man. Its skin was pallid. Ugly green boils were scattered across its flesh, and a loathsome, mouldy-looking rash covered half its face and neck. The head was misshapen, like a melon crushed out of symmetry by a strongman’s grip. Scraggly scraps of hair dangled from a diseased scalp. The face was devoid of humanity, a rotten stump of nose perched atop a wide fang-filled mouth. Scraps of clothing clung to the creature’s lean frame, and it was caked in filth and gore.
More horrible though was the activity Brunner had interrupted. As the monster’s eyes glared at Brunner from the pits of its face, it dropped the decaying arm it had been chewing on and wiped the back of one of its clawed hands across its bloodstained mouth. The bounty hunter could hear the ghoul’s wasted belly growl with hunger as it took a step towards him.
The bounty hunter had heard of such beings before, putrid corpse-eaters that were sometimes kept by necromancers as labourers and protectors. They were not truly dead, these soulless wretches, rather they were insane, morbid men whose unspeakable choice of nourishment had destroyed their own humanity. They were little more than beasts, and no more intelligent than a clever dog. But with its poison-dripping claws, a ghoul had very little need of more than animal cunning.
The ghoul took another step forward, a low moan escaping its bloodied mouth. Brunner could see the muscles tensing in the creature’s emaciated frame as it prepared to pounce. The bounty hunter had no desire to test the quality of his armour on the ghoul’s venomous claws, nor could he risk the commotion of a full-fledged fight. With lightning reflexes, Brunner pointed his crossbow pistol at the slavering corpse-eater and sent a bolt smashing through its left eye.
The ghoul gave a single gasp as its eye exploded, then fell to the floor, twitching for several moments as life faded from its brain. The bounty hunter replaced his weapon. He hoped that the sound of the creatures fall was no greater than the creature might make on its own, and that it would go unnoticed by its master.
Brunner stalked from the room, pausing in the open doorway. Like most of the buildings in this district, the doors had been salvaged long ago, leaving behind empty frames. He craned his helmed head around the corner, pistol at the ready. He sincerely hoped that the necromancer would not expect an intruder to set upon him from above. But with dabblers in the dark arts, Brunner had found that it paid to take nothing for granted.
He cautiously emerged into the hallway and began a systematic search of the upper rooms. Many of them were empty, but he found two that bore signs of habitation. One of these had even had a bed and a wardrobe.
Descending a rotting staircase, and testing every step before putting his weight on it, Brunner began to examine the rooms of the lower floor. He paused before a heavy wooden door to the left of the base of the stairs. He closed a gloved hand about the k
nob, trying to open the portal. With a scraping sound, the warped door moved, freeing itself from the equally distorted wood of the jamb.
The bounty hunter tensed, listening for any sound that suggested he had disturbed something in the house. After a moment, he pushed the door open fully, pistol held at the ready. The room was dark, lit only by a dingy light filtering through dust-choked windows. Several inches of water pooled over the floor, and the broken remains of chairs and tables lay amid the brackish, stagnant water.
A mottled orange and green salamander slid away from the dry area near the door and swam off into the dark waters.
Brunner left the room and pulled the door closed. Even a necromancer would not use rooms in such a state. He looked about him, studying the hallway. There was evidence of seepage now that he looked for it: the walls were warped and discoloured several inches above the floor. Just as he began to turn to retrace his steps and examine the third floor of the house, he noted something peculiar. The height of the water damage was noticeably less further west along the hall. Clearly the ground upon which the house had been situated had begun to shift, causing the once level ground to tilt. Not enough to be readily visible perhaps, but enough to cause the intrusive moisture to remain in the eastern section where the depression was greater.
The bounty hunter made his way along the corridor, opening the few rotting doors to inspect the rooms beyond. He knew that the subjects of a necromancer’s science were bodies—heavy, fragile corpses stolen from graves and gibbets. If the villain were able, he would have set up his laboratory in one of the lower rooms, rather than hauling heavy specimens up flights of treacherous stairs. And the laboratory would be where he would find the mummy of Nehb-ka-menthu.
It was the third door Brunner opened that led to the laboratory. It was a large low-ceilinged chamber, the height of the room being further diminished by a secondary flooring of old doors, shutters and other pieces of scavenged wood—a precaution against the wetness, no doubt, as the old floor had been rotted away by the creeping damp. A number of shelves lined the walls, their upper ranks laden with scrolls, books and what looked like pieces of alchemical apparatus, while the lower ones were bare. Hanging from the support beams were a number of gruesome paintings, their subjects various necrotic bodies in assorted degrees of dissection and decay, charts to lead the necromancer in his studies. Two partially decomposed bodies rested against the north wall of the room, like a pair of logs, so stiff and rigid were their dead shapes.
