Still weeping silently, Fischer helped Skellan release them.
Sigmar alone knew how long the poor wretches had been trapped in the catacombs waiting to be fed to the ghouls. The confinement had done nothing for their minds. They mumbled and talked to themselves and stared straight through their rescuers as they tried to shepherd them back upstairs.
They refused to go outside into the street. They started screaming hysterically and beating at their faces with their hands and scuttled back into the darkest part of the tower, pressing themselves desperately against the wall as though trying to disappear into it.
It took Skellan a moment to understand. “They’ve been down there so long… they are afraid of the sunlight.”
CHAPTER THREE
A Knife in the Dark
LEICHEBERG, SYLVANIA
Spring, 2009
Sebastian Aigner was a phantom.
A ghost.
He wasn’t real—or at least that was how it was beginning to feel to Jon Skellan after three weeks in Leicheberg. They were close, he knew, close enough for Aigner to feel them breathing down the back of his neck, but the closer they got to Aigner the more elusive the man became. They were always a step or two behind him.
Gathering any kind of reliable information had proven to be a nightmare. Every avenue turned out to be a blind one.
If the usual slew of information traffickers knew anything, they weren’t talking. Greasing the bureaucratic palms wasn’t helping either. The magistrates had nothing to say.
Aigner might just as well not exist.
The few hints and whispers Skellan and Fischer did manage to scare up quickly faded into nothing. The man had friends and those friends were influential enough to help him disappear. That in itself worried Skellan. Gossip spread. It was in people’s nature to talk. Rumours developed a life of their own. The blanket of ignorance surrounding Sebastian Aigner was unnatural.
A lesser man might have given up the ghost and let Aigner simply vanish into thin air, but not Jon Skellan. Aigner was his obsession. The all-consuming need for revenge drove him. Aigner had led the band of looters who had murdered his wife, and for that there could be no forgiveness. Without forgiveness it was impossible to forget. Thoughts of Sebastian Aigner ate away at Jon Skellan night and day.
For three weeks they had been spreading the word, making it known that they would pay good currency for information about Aigner or the Risen Dead. They made no effort to hide their whereabouts. They wanted people to know where to find them when their tongues loosened by need or greed.
Fischer took a healthy swig of ale and slammed the empty tankard down on the beer-soaked table. He let out a rumbling belch and backhanded the froth from his mouth.
“I needed that!” Fischer made a big show of enjoying his drink.
“I’m sure you did,” Skellan said.
The Traitor’s Head was full with its usual mismatched clientele. Skellan didn’t drink. At the beginning of the night he ordered a goblet of mulled wine then nursed the same drink until it was kicking-out time. He sipped at it occasionally, but Fischer was far from certain the alcohol ever touched his lips.
An open fire crackled in the hearth, the sap still trapped in the wood snapping and popping under the heat. A vagabond fresh from the road warmed his grubby hands by the fire.
The serving girl bustled between tables, platters of roasted fowl and stringy vegetables balanced precariously in her hands. Her blonde hair was plaited in a neat tail that coiled down to her ample breasts. The smile on her face was strained. She put two plates in front of Skellan and Fischer.
“Amos wants to see you,” she said, leaning in as she took Skellan’s money from him. Amos was the owner of the Traitor’s Head. It could of course mean anything, but Skellan chose to read it as a sign their luck was changing.
“Thank you, my dear.”
“Don’t thank me, I’ll be glad when you are gone. You boys are bad for business,” the girl said bluntly. “Skulking in shadows and making people uncomfortable with all of your questions. Sooner we’re rid of you the better.”
Business in the tavern was slow. Between them they could have counted the number of drinkers on their hands and had a few fingers to spare. They were the only diners. The lack of trade was painfully obvious, as was the reason for it. The occasional furtive glance of the drinkers at the bar toward the witch hunters made sure of that. It wasn’t uncommon for folk to fear them. In smaller hamlets where superstition ruled over common sense their arrival often led to unnecessary deaths, girls stoned or burnt for witchcraft as the accusations flew. Cities like Leicheberg were different, but not so much different. Very few places welcomed witch hunters.
The tavern door banged open, and a giant of a man came in out of the night. He kicked the dirt off his boots and dusted the road out of his hair. He had a lute strung across his back. He looked round the taproom, nodded to a fellow at the far end of the bar, and walked briskly over to shake hands with Amos who was already drawing him an ale from the cask. The stranger’s familiarity with the patrons and the tavern keeper put Skellan at ease.
“Deitmar!” Amos bellowed, the folds of fat around his three chins wobbling with excitement. “As I live and breathe!”
The troubadour bowed theatrically, making a grand sweeping gesture out of removing his travelling cloak. He draped it over a barstool. “Amos Keller, you are a sight for sore eyes! A beer, make it cold, and where is that delightful daughter of yours? Aimee? Aimee, come out here and give your uncle Deitmar a hug, lass!” He swept the serving girl up in a huge bear hug and span her round so that her toes barely touched the floor. Putting her down again he planted a kiss on her forehead. “Damn, it is good to see you again, girl.”
Skellan watched the reunion with a hint of jealousy.
“It’s been too long,” she said, and it was obvious that she meant it.
Again Skellan felt a pang of envy at the easy acceptance the troubadour got; he was welcomed with open arms. It was a long time since anyone had welcomed either Skellan or Fischer so warmly.
“Seven years,” he said aloud, not realising he had spoken.
“What?” Fischer pressed, leaning in.
“I was just thinking out loud,” he said. “It is seven years since anyone welcomed us home like that.”
“Makes you think about what you’re missing, doesn’t it? Seeing people happy.”
“Aye, it does. Makes you realise what was stolen from you.”
“That’s another way of putting it.”
“It’s the truth, no matter how you dress it up,” Skellan said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the newcomer. “It was us that died that day, you know. Not just the girls. Aigner killed us. He took our lives away as surely as if he had stuck a sword in our guts. We aren’t the men we would have been.”
“No, we aren’t,” Fischer agreed. “But that might not be such a bad thing, Jon. In the last seven years we have changed a lot of people’s lives, and I honestly believe most of those changes have been for the better. That wouldn’t have happened without… without…”
“I know,” Skellan said. “That wouldn’t have happened without Lizbet and Leyna dying. I know that but that doesn’t make it feel any better.”
The troubadour sank into a threadbare velvet seat by the fire. He put his feet up on the small three-legged wooden footstool and began tuning his instrument, running his fingers through a series of off-key scales. He tightened the strings until he was happy with the music he made. Some of the drinkers turned to face the fire. A travelling singer was a rare treat in these parts.
“Now who in their right mind would travel to this godforsaken piece of the underworld?” Skellan wondered. The troubadour was well dressed for a traveller but not lavishly so; his clothes weren’t heavily patched and the colours were still vibrant. He obviously didn’t lack for coin which made even less sense. For a musician of any kind of skill there was money aplenty to be made in Talabheim, Middenheim, Altdorf, Nuln, Aver
heim and the Moot, and the other towns and cities of the Empire. The man could obviously play—the way his fingers moved through the warming up exercises proved he could more than ably carry a tune. “Someone with no choice in the matter,” he answered his own question with the only solution that made any sense: the man was gathering information for someone. It was the perfect disguise for a spy.
Skellan thought through the possibilities: the troubadour was an agent, either of the Empire, perhaps the Ottilia or the Grand Theogonist, the two were always trying to gain the advantage over each other; or on the other side of the conflict there was the enigmatic Vlad von Carstein, the Count of Sylvania. The man was a mystery but few spoke against him because the atrocities of Otto van Drak’s reign of blood and fear were still fresh in their minds. The man could, of course, be playing both sides. It was not impossible.
Skellan smiled to himself. Deitmar the wandering troubadour was someone worth talking to in this city of madmen and crooks.
The musician began to play, a rousing shanty to get the blood flowing. The drinkers banged their wooden tankards on the bar and stamped their feet appreciatively.
Skellan slipped away from his table, caught Amos Keller’s eye, and gestured for him to follow somewhere quieter. The big man moved down the bar. He left the tankard he was towelling out on the counter and ducked through the door that led to the snug, a quiet part of the bar where men with money could pay for solitude.
“Your girl said you wanted me?” Skellan said, stepping into the room behind Amos. He had no idea what to expect from the encounter but for some reason he wasn’t expecting good news. The troubadour’s music picked up pace. The riot of sound swelled as the drinkers got into the spirit of things, banging their fists and stamping their feet ever more enthusiastically. No doubt Fischer was hammering his clenched fist on the tabletop and singing along at the top of his lungs.
“I ain’t gonna beat around the bush. You and your friend are bad news. Real bad news. I put up with you because I feel sorry for you, but this morning things went past feeling sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fella came in here, told me I had two choices, number one was turf you out on your ear, the other was empty the place tonight, and leave the door open so some of his boys could come in and take care of you. You’ve made yourself some enemies, lad, and they want you out of their hair.”
“Did you recognise the man?”
“Aye, I did, but I ain’t about to tell you who it was, I don’t want to end up in the river in the morning, if you get my meaning.”
“So, you’re asking us to leave I take it?”
“Got no choice, but I can tell you this much for nothing. The fella you are hunting, Aigner, he ain’t been in Leicheberg for weeks.”
Skellan grabbed the barkeeper by the throat and pulled him close enough to taste the sour smell of his breath on his tongue. “Are you sure?”
“Certain. He disappeared a few days before you boys arrived. He paid good money to keep folks quiet. He didn’t want you following him.”
“And you knew all along?” Skellan’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper. His eyes blazed with righteous fury. “He bought your silence? How much was it worth, Amos? What value do you place on my wife’s life? Tell me! How much was she worth to you?” He was shaking. The troubadour’s music was loud enough to drown out his shouting in the taproom.
“Ten silver,” he said. “And the promise often more where they came from for each week I kept you here. That’s what the fella was here for, he came to pay Aigner’s debt.”
After seven years of hunting the man, to be so close only to be lied to, cheated out of his revenge. It was too much. Skellan erupted: “Give me one good reason not to kill you, right here, right now. One reason, Amos. Give me one reason.”
Beads of perspiration dribbled down the corpulent barkeeper’s face. His fat lips trembled. His huge arms, like ham-hocks, had turned to jelly.
“One reason,” Skellan repeated. Why I shouldn’t snap you in half right now?”
“Aimee.” Amos barely managed to say his daughter’s name.
Skellan let him go. That was the difference between the hunter and his prey. Skellan was still a human being. He still cared about family and love and people, even if he was alone in the world.
He closed his eyes. “Are they coming tonight?”
“Yes… an hour after lights out. I’m sorry. I didn’t want this. I was frightened. They… They’re going to kill you.”
“Well, they are going to try.” Skellan opened his eyes again. The red mist of fury had fallen away. He was thinking now, planning how best to stay alive to see dawn.
“Aren’t you going to run?”
Skellan shook his head. “No point, they attack here when I am expecting it, or they ambush me on the road when I am not. This way the odds are stacked slightly back in my favour. This is what I want you to do, act normally. You haven’t spoken to me tonight. All right? Come lights out get Aimee and go sleep in the stables. I can’t promise it will be safe but it has to be safer than your rooms.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The less you know, the better,” Skellan said, rather more harshly than he had intended. He softened. “It is safer for you and Aimee that way.”
“I don’t want any killing, not under my roof. That’s why I warned you, to give you a chance to run before they arrived.”
“And I appreciate it, Amos. I do. But it is too late for that. Now we are playing last man standing and I intend to win.”
The barkeeper wiped the sweat from his brow with the same towel that he had been using to dry the pitcher with before. “You’re every bit as crazy as Aigner said you were…” For the first time there was a genuine cold-to-the-marrow fear in Amos Keller’s voice as the stories of Jon Skellan’s relentless hunt came back to him: the slaughter of Aigner’s friends, the ritualised burning, the cold-blooded nature of the assassin. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have let you rot here trying to pry your answers from closed mouths until the Wiederauferstanden were ready to send your soul to Morr and gotten fat off the proceeds… But oh no, not stupid old Amos Keller… had to go and feel sympathy for the murdering lunatic in his lounge and try to warn him. Stupid, stupid fool, Amos, you should have just kept your nose out of it and let folks get on with killing each other.”
“Are you quite done?” Skellan asked, obviously amused by the barkeeper’s rambling admonition of himself. “People are going to be getting thirsty. Go do what you do. If you see one of my so-called assassins I want you to warn me. It will go badly for you if you don’t. Do you understand? I want you to send me a drink over. I won’t be ordering another one tonight, so any drink arriving at my table is a sign that a would-be murderer has entered the bar.”
Amos nodded reluctantly.
“Now, I am going back through to sit with my friend and listen to the music. I suggest you put a smile on your face. It shouldn’t be so hard to do. Think about it this way, in the morning we’ll be gone one way or another.”
Skellan pressed a silver coin into the barkeeper’s fleshy hand. “In advance, for that drink.” It was enough to pay for twenty drinks, with change. Amos took the money without a word. He pocketed it and left.
Skellan followed him through to the taproom a few minutes later.
The final few strains of a bawdy tale of a frisky tavern wench and a lusty sailor petered out to a round of enthusiastic applause. He slid into his seat. Fischer looked at him quizzically but he didn’t answer. The next song was a ballad. The troubadour introduced it as “The Lay of Fair Isabella”. It was quite unlike anything he had sung so far. His fingers played lovingly over the lute’s strings, conjuring something of beauty from them.
Skellan closed his eyes and simply appreciated the music.
It was a love song of sorts.
A tragedy.
The troubadour’s voice ached as he sang of the fair lady Isabella’s sickness, her p
orcelain skin waxen as she faded in the arms of her love, beseeching him to save her even as she withered away to where death was the only answer.
The words washed over him and began to lose meaning, simply folding into each other. Deitmar’s voice was mesmeric. He held the bar-room of drinkers rapt with his velvet tones. They hung on his every word as he played them like an expert puppeteer.
The nature of the music shifted, lowering an octave conspiratorially. Skellan opened his eyes. It was another trick of course, the troubadour manipulating them into thinking he was imparting some dark secret, but it worked, Skellan sat forward and listened intently as Deitmar whispered, barely above a breath, no rhyme or reason to his words:
“When in the long dark night of the risen dead
Callous Morr crept unto fair Isabella’s bed
The lament lingered bitter on his lips
Even as he stooped low to kiss
Her broken soul
That one so fair should fall so foul
To waste away before her time
Fragile flesh and brittle bone
The treacherous remains
While love lay dying!
And then, with a flourish, the music and the dying lady returned to vibrant life, resurrected by Deitmar’s beautiful song. Two images caught Skellan’s attention. Surely it was no coincidence that the troubadour mentioned the Risen Dead and the wasting sickness in the same breath.
“We need to talk to him before the night’s out,” he said, leaning over to talk in hushed tones to Fischer. The other man nodded; obviously he had caught the oblique reference as well. “And before the trouble starts’
That caused Stefan Fischer to raise an eyebrow.
“Seems we’ve been played for fools, I’ll explain it later.”
Fischer nodded.
The troubadour played nine more songs before taking a break to soothe his voice with a goblet of Amos’ mulled wine. Skellan and Fischer moved to sit beside him at the fireside.
“If you’ve no objections?” Skellan said, sitting himself.
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