by C. L. Werner
‘You must take it straight away,’ Corvino said, thrusting a rolled slip of parchment into the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t let anything stop you. It is very important,’ he emphasised, tousling the boy’s short black hair with his pale hand. ‘After all, you wouldn’t want the inquisitor to be angry with you.’ With the warning spoken, Corvino dismissed the boy, watching as his messenger raced along the hall. Nearly every soldier in the palace was hunting for Alfredo; they wouldn’t pay a lone youth too much notice. The awful terror that the Temple of Solkan inspired in the common people of Remas would ensure that even if he were questioned, the boy would say nothing of Corvino’s letter to Inquisitor Bocca.
The fool smiled, whistling a funeral dirge in a disrespectfully jaunty fashion. As he strode toward the chapel, the bells on his staff jingling with his every step, Corvino considered how very quickly everything was falling into line. Poor Mandalari. If the idiot had just taken his advice, the general might have died in a more pleasant manner. A simple knife across the throat, or perhaps a dagger in his heart. But the man simply had to try and threaten Juliana despite everything his valued spy Corvino had warned him of. That had made things a bit less professional between them.
Corvino had already decided that Mandalari had to die, of course. He needed to have some victim for ‘Alfredo’s’ murderous rampage and the general had been the obvious choice. The failed attack on Manfred Zelten had only firmed Corvino’s decision, the crude attempt to blackmail Princess Juliana had made that decision personal. Of course, the general had long ago outlived his usefulness to Corvino’s plans. He no longer needed the general’s contacts and wealth to support his own ambitions. Everything was prepared now, all the pieces in their places. All except for one, the fool corrected himself.
Corvino opened the heavy oak door, stepping into the dark, musty chapel. The room was only dimly lit by the flickering candles set about the altar. Corvino watched for a few moments as the black-robed priest moved around the carcass strewn atop the altar, old piles of rag and canvas sopping up the blood dripping from Mandalari’s ruined head. The priest of Morr was muttering the secret incantations of his order, those sacred mixtures of words and tones that would place Scurio into contact with the soul of the slain man. As he chanted and circled the altar, Corvino could see the priest casting a mixture of grave dust and salt upon the body. There were few people who had the nerve to stand by and watch a priest of Morr conducting his strange, sinister rituals. It was almost like watching a necromancer working his spells. As the fool stood just within the doorway, he could feel the room growing cold, as though all the warmth and life was being drained to power Scurio’s incantation. It was little wonder then that the guards who had brought Mandalari’s body here had not lingered to watch Scurio work his magic.
The fool could see the black-robed priest suddenly stop in his circling of the altar. The candles flickered as their fires began to dim. Scurio stood stock still, staring down at what once was Mandalari’s face. A faint, pale light seemed to be glowing from the corpse. Corvino’s smile broadened as he imagined what the old general might have to tell the priest. Somehow, however, he didn’t think the dead man’s knowledge would be leaving the chapel. Indeed, as fascinating as Scurio’s ritual was, Corvino had little time to waste.
A sharp shrill note echoed through the chapel as Corvino whistled through his fingers. As soon as the sound intruded upon the ceremony, the blue corpse-light vanished, the chill began to lessen and the candles returned to their normal level of illumination. Corvino saw the black-robed figure of Scurio hurry around the altar and come toward him. The fool grinned as he saw the look of fear and disgust in the priest’s eyes.
‘A splendid performance,’ Corvino congratulated Scurio, clapping his hands softly. ‘You should have been a tragedian instead of,’ he paused to allow his face to slip into a mask of mockery and derision, ‘what you are.’
‘Why did you kill him?’ Scurio demanded in a low, harsh whisper, the calm, rigid demeanour of a priest of Morr absent from his voice now.
‘I had nothing better to do with my evening,’ the fool replied. ‘I don’t understand why you are so upset, I didn’t leave nearly so much a mess as you, my friend.’ Corvino put a warning emphasis on his last words.
Scurio looked at the marble floor, fighting against the remorse and guilt welling up within him. Corvino left him to his self-reproach for a moment, then spoke again.
‘I have news that should lift your spirits,’ again, he put a twisted emphasis on the word. ‘All is in readiness for the ritual.’ Scurio looked up, his face lifted into an expression of rapturous joy.
‘When?’ he asked, hands closing about Corvino’s arms. ‘When is it to be? When am I to be free of this daemon that torments me?’ Corvino brushed the priest’s hands from his body.
‘Soon,’ the fool said. ‘This very night! Would you like to go there now?’ Corvino listened for a moment to the pleading, grovelling entreaties streaming from Scurio’s lips, then held his hand up, motioning the man to be silent. ‘I thought you might feel that way. Follow me.’
The fool strode from the chapel, down the marble halls, watching as Prince Gambini’s soldiers continued their search, smiling at their fool’s errand. These men would never see Alfredo Gambini, not on this side of the veil, in any event.
Alfredo Gambini was already where he needed to be, as were all the other pieces in the puzzle Corvino had carefully put together. But the cornerstone of that enigma, the key to the entire plot, that piece of the puzzle, Corvino would put into its place himself.
The fool looked over his shoulder at the dark-garbed priest following after him. Poor Scurio, he thought, he can’t even begin to understand what an important man he is.
Brunner strode toward the gate leading out onto the Great Reman Bridge from the Gambini palazzo, Horst and Schtafel close behind. Brunner had informed Zelten of his suspicions, and had asked that he be given the use of the mercenary’s two soldiers. Zelten himself had insisted on remaining behind, ostensibly just in case Brunner was wrong, but the bounty hunter suspected that concern for the safety of his beloved Juliana was more to blame for the Reiklander’s reluctance to leave the palazzo.
‘And why aren’t we helping search the palazzo for the killer?’ Schtafel asked in a snide voice. ‘I know there was a reason, but it seems too slippery to keep hold of.’ The crossbowman’s flippant attitude faded as Brunner rounded on him, fixing him with his icy stare.
‘Because if he has half a mind,’ the bounty hunter said, ‘he isn’t in there. He had enough time to slip away before anybody thought to go looking for him?’
‘But how does that help us?’ Horst questioned. ‘I mean, how do we know where to even start looking for him?’
‘I’ve been trying to fit things together ever since I arrived in this mixed-up city,’ Brunner said. ‘I have a feeling that Alfredo may have some connection to the thing that attacked me outside the Pink Rose.’ The bounty hunter drummed his fingers on the grip of his pistol. ‘I think it might not have been mere coincidence that the creature I fought was lurking near the brothel.’
‘So that’s where we start our search?’ Horst asked.
‘That’s where we start,’ the bounty hunter stated. ‘I have a feeling that where we wind up won’t be anywhere so pleasant as Madam Rosa’s establishment.’
IX
For many centuries it had stood, just within the innermost wall of Remas, overlooking the cliffs and the sea below. The great Temple of Morr had served the funerary rites of the people of Remas for as long as the citizens could remember, consecrating the bodies of the deceased before dumping them over the wall and into the sea. It was said that the spirits of the dead would guide fish back towards the city, that it was by this custom that the fishing fleets of the city prospered, that their nets were always full. None considered that perhaps the fish were drawn by the free meals each funeral provided them.
There had been times in the past, often when Remas found i
tself at war with the southern city-state of Luccini, where the Great Mausoleum of Morr was located, when the priesthood of Morr had fallen out of favour in the city. But in the last decades, with the hold of the Temple of Solkan tightening about the city, the worship of the other gods, even of Morr, had become dangerous. Zealous militia in the white robes of Solkan had set fire to the temple, killing most of the priests. In the aftermath of the atrocity, which was publicly condemned by the priests of Solkan, the funeral rites of Remas had been taken over by the Solkanites, altering the rituals to include cremation before casting the ashes into the sea, thereby preventing any impurity in the flesh from tainting the waters which supported the life of the city. The Temple of Morr was never repaired, but was abandoned and forgotten, left to rot beside the wall. Those priests of Morr who escaped the purge sought sanctuary with the houses of the rich and powerful, men who would gladly continue the old traditions if only to flaunt their disdain before the inquisitors.
But if the priesthood of Morr no longer had any use for their temple, there were others who did. Over the course of long years of furtive excavation and laborious nocturnal construction, another temple had been built within the cellars of the first.
It was this undertemple that was now alive and vibrant. Several scores of people danced and cavorted within a massive chamber, hundreds of feet long, its ceiling formed by the stones of the floor fifty feet above their heads. Heavy stone columns flanked the chamber, arching overhead into supports from which dangled colourful pennants and streamers of fur and feather and silk. Upon some of these had been daubed profane symbols, upon others had been painted the outlines of human figures in all manner of poses and lascivious activities. Great bronze pots, filled with oil, were spaced about the chamber, casting a diabolic light about the capering congregation.
The celebrants wore long white robes, their faces masked in parody of the servants of Solkan. But where the robes of the Solkanites covered them almost completely, those of the cultists were loose, slit down the front and sides to expose the sweating bodies beneath. The masks were not just of wood, but of leather and fur and paper, adorned with sequins and feathers and lace. Each suggested an emotion, but all were more passionate and wanton than the faces of stern judgement the Solkanites hid behind. Amidst the dancing celebrants there were some who wove their way among them swinging large censers. From some of these instruments exuded the fumes of an exotic perfume, from others came the stench of animal dung, for fair or foul, both odours excited the cultists equally. From one side of the undertemple, a drummer and a pipe player set a raucous, discordant tune snaking about the columns, exciting the senses of the Slaanesh coven still further.
At the very centre of the chamber, upon a great altar of blackened, burned wood, stood the profane shrine to the power which the gathered throng prayed to. It was a great statue carved from the same light, white wood the Temple of Solkan constructed the masks of its devotees from. But this was no stern-faced god of vengeance: it was something else entirely. Standing nearly eight feet tall, it was the lithe figure of a woman, her belly swollen with life, her hips tilted in sensuous suggestion, wooden breasts drooping about her chest. Yet the head of this vision of depraved lust was not that of a beautiful seductress, but the bovine face of a cow, pointed antelope horns arcing from its brow. It was the Mother of Mystery, a foul relic carved by a madman in Tobaro five hundred years earlier. Now it once more stood before those who gazed upon it with adoration, wantonness, and despair.
Standing before the statue was a man, his face bared before the inhuman idol. He lifted the butchered portions of a human body, smearing the blood from each scrap about the statue’s feet before tossing the meat to the closest of the capering cultists. Like wild beasts, the Chaos worshippers fell upon the discarded offerings, savaging the meat with their teeth, eager to savour the taste of their loathsome repast.
Alfredo Gambini did not linger to watch the ghoulish display, but turned back toward the shrine, continuing to make his offering to the Dark Prince of Chaos, drawing yet another scrap of flesh from the heavy brown sack.
Into the celebrant throng, a tall, sinister figure strode, clad in a costume of red and black checks, the bells upon his staff jingling with every step. Corvino paid no attention to the startled, curious looks the cultists gave him and the man following at his heels. The fool had eyes only for the shrine at the centre of the undertemple and the cult leader standing before it.
Alfredo Gambini met the fool’s stare, then looked past him at the nervous Scurio. The leader smiled. ‘I understood that you had a new initiate to the circle,’ he chuckled. ‘But I did not imagine you would bring us a priest!’
‘Is all in readiness?’ Corvino demanded, his tone short and hurried. ‘You have completed the ritual?’
‘Fear not,’ Alfredo assured the fool. ‘All is in readiness for his initiation. I have just completed the offering to the Mother of Mystery which you were gracious enough to provide me with.’
It was Corvino’s turn to smile now, his face spreading into a corpse-like rictus. He ignored the cultists who drifted forward to remove Scurio’s black priest’s habit from his body, his eyes instead locked upon those of the cult leader. Despite all the hideous rites he had presided over, despite calling daemons from the very pits of the Realm of Chaos, Alfredo felt his pulse quicken as he met the fool’s insane gaze.
‘Excellent,’ Corvino laughed. ‘Now it is time for the game to truly begin!’
Three sets of eyes watched the wanton ceremony of self-indulgence unfold within the great hall beneath the abandoned Temple of Morr. The observers were concealed behind one of the huge stone urns scattered about the undertemple, a sickly sweet perfume rising from the urns’ smouldering contents. None of the men placed much trust in the defensibility of their position should they be discovered. Fortunately, the cultists seemed entirely lost in their own perverse acts, so there was little risk of discovery from that quarter.
‘Now, if temple was a bit more like this, they might have made a Sigmarite out of me,’ joked Schtafel, though there was little humour in his voice. Horst ignored the marksman’s irreverent comment and stared at the bounty hunter.
‘Looks like you were right,’ the bearded warrior growled, stabbing a finger outward, pointing at the altar. ‘That’s Alfredo Gambini lording over this sacrilege.’
Brunner just nodded his head. It had actually taken surprisingly little time for them to find this place, for all that it was supposed to be a secret. The bounty hunter had been certain that there were devotees of Slaanesh in the city, and that Alfredo Gambini was in all likelihood one of them. He also knew that such degenerates were constantly seeking ever deeper levels of depravity to experience, craving new sensations to expose themselves to with the same consuming passion of a weirdroot addict.
He guessed that such human fiends would not be unknown to a place like the Pink Rose, in fact, he supposed that they would be rather notorious. Madam Rosa had been extremely forthcoming when Brunner had told her what sort of individual he was looking for. Exposing the patron to the Temple of Solkan might have given her house a bad name, turning him over to the bounty hunter seemed a more respectable venture, especially since the man wouldn’t be saying anything afterwards. A bit of gold smoothed over the lingering traces of reluctance on her part to point Brunner in the right direction.
The bounty hunter had found the man in an upstairs room, ‘fortifying’ himself before a meeting of his decadent cult. For a man whose doctrine would have him look forward to pain as just another experience to be savoured, it had taken the bounty hunter surprisingly little time to drag the location of the cult’s meeting place from the man’s bleeding lips.
One thing Brunner had neglected to ask the man before he had allowed Schtafel to finish him, had been how many were in his vile little congregation. The bounty hunter had never guessed that there might be so many. Even with the threat of a gruesome execution at the hands of the Solkanites, the lure of Slaanesh was still
attractive to the people of Remas.
Brunner looked over at his two comrades.
‘Now that we know he’s here,’ Brunner said, ‘I think it’s time we sent for reinforcements.’ Schtafel eagerly nodded his head at the suggestion, but Horst just continued to glare at the Chaos worshippers, a burning frenzy growing in his eyes. Brunner tugged at his arm. ‘Even if you think you’re Magnus reborn, there’s too many for you,’ he informed the warrior. Then he saw two new figures stride into the unhallowed ritual.
Brunner watched in silence as Corvino led the dark-robed Scurio to the altar. The fool traded words with Alfredo Gambini for a moment, as several cultists detached themselves from the celebration and busied themselves with stripping Scurio of his robe. As they did so, Brunner became stock still, his vision narrowing to include nothing except his view of the priest’s back.
There, in black ink, the long, sinuous length of a fat-bodied serpent had been applied to Scurio’s flesh. The mark of the killer from Pavona. The serpent was the hooded adder of Araby’s great deserts, the style of tattoo clearly the crude and painful needle-work of that southern land.
Brunner watched as the cultists continued to tug Scurio from his robes. The bounty hunter lifted his pistol from its holster.
‘What are you doing?’ hissed Schtafel, eyes wide with alarm.
‘Change of plans,’ Brunner told him. ‘We’re staying.’ Horst Brendle looked over at the bounty hunter and grinned a murderous smile.
Then the undertemple exploded into confusion and carnage.
Inquisitor Bocca stormed into the chamber, his gigantic sword gripped in one hand, the severed heads of the two cultists who had been left as sentries in the ruin above dangling by the hair from his other fist. Around him, dozens of temple militia swarmed into the vast hall. Bocca tossed his gruesome trophies into the midst of the shocked cultists as they faced the intruders.
