02 - Sacred Flesh

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  A series of tics cascaded across Kirchgeld’s face. “The hag’s tongue is as sharp as I said it would be.”

  The older guard took a step away from Ivo as his younger companion, an open-faced man with deep-set blue eyes, advanced on Franziskus.

  “No, her first,” said Ivo, tapping the elder Sigmarite’s armoured shoulder. “She’s the dangerous one.” The guardsman jerked away from Kirchgeld, silencing him with a scowl. The young Sigmarite bared his teeth and took hold of Franziskus’ belt, working the buckle open. He seized Franziskus’ scabbard as the belt loosened, handing it back to his superior.

  “At least tell us what we stand accused of,” said Angelika.

  “You know full well,” Ivo sing-songed.

  The young guard moved to Angelika and reached for her belt. She put her hands in front of her. “I’ll do it myself, thank you,” she said. The guard pulled a baton from his belt and slapped it into his glove. Angelika unhooked her belt and tossed it at her feet.

  “The boot, too,” Ivo said. “She’s got another in her left boot.”

  Angelika’s face tightened. She placed her foot in front of the young guard. His cheek twitched. “You want the knife, don’t you?” she asked him.

  He stared down at her boot.

  “You don’t want me to reach down for it, do you?” Angelika asked.

  “Listen to her!” Ivo fluted. “Even under threat of arms, she mocks you!”

  “Quiet yourself,” the elder Sigmarite told him. Then, to his subordinate: “Get the knife!”

  With his blue eyes trained guardedly on her, the young guard knelt before Angelika, patted the side of her boot, found the dagger, and teased it out. Angelika smiled hatefully at him. He stood, walked around her, and seized her by the back of her neck.

  “Recht, you’re an arguer of law,” she said, her tone only slightly strained. “Aren’t you going to ask them what crime we’ve committed?”

  “The girl,” Recht said, stepping forward. His fancy hat, with its lordly feather, had gone missing—another casualty of the climb, no doubt. Its absence left his balding pate exposed. Recht caught the senior guardsman’s attention and pointed over to Devorah’s sled. The sister faintly moaned. “This girl,” Recht said, “is desperately ill. We must get her to Mother Elsbeth without delay.”

  The guardsman wiped at his nose. “That’s not my responsibility.”

  “I tell you, she is dying,” replied Recht.

  The young Sigmarite removed his hand from the back of Angelika’s neck and took a cord from his belt. “Hands behind your back,” he said.

  “I’ll do as you ask,” Angelika said, “but tend to the girl.”

  The guardsman slapped Angelika on the back of the head. “You’ll do as we tell you, whether we help the girl or not.”

  Primus Lichtman stepped up to clamp his hand around the young guardsman’s wrist. “Now look here, you mannerless whelp!”

  The guard planted his free hand in Lichtman’s gut. The fur-clad pilgrim doubled over, jowls puffing out, veins dancing on his temples.

  Lichtman gasped up at him. “You bloodstained Sigmarites have no place here.”

  “No,” said Angelika.

  “Stop,” said Stefan Recht.

  Lichtman continued, even as the guard grabbed him by the throat: “You are usurpers. Get us a priestess. We demand to speak to a priestess.”

  “Stop it,” said Stefan.

  Ivo slipped away.

  “I’m sick of you spotty useless pilgrims!” the guard cried, tightening his grip on Lichtman’s throat. “And your constant screaming and whining!”

  He’d turned his back to Angelika, but the cord had not completely tied her hands. If she wanted to, she could wrap it around his neck, like a garrotte. She decided she didn’t want to. She checked the position of the other guard. He was wading toward her. Brother Lemoine rushed in from the side to importune him.

  “The girl,” Lemoine said, his pontificating finger crooked into the air before him. “Let the girl be saved.”

  The older guard shoved Lemoine aside. Angelika took the opportunity to reach for her dagger, which the young Sigmarite had stashed in his own belt, at the small of his back. As he struggled with Lichtman, she plucked it loose.

  “All of you, stop it!” the senior guardsman cried. “Stop what you’re doing!”

  Quickly, Angelika took the tip of her dagger and cut a notch in the cord.

  Lichtman made to free himself from his enemy’s grip on his throat by falling backwards, but merely brought the young guard sprawling down on top of him. The guard kneed him between the legs before laying down a flurry of slaps on his face and neck.

  Angelika dropped her dagger in the mud, a few feet from the fray.

  The old Sigmarite charged toward his junior. One of Lichtman’s fellows rushed in to intercept. The helmeted warrior downed him with a single head-butt and then stepped neatly over his body as it folded to the dirt. He grabbed his own man by the cloak, hauling him to his feet. Lichtman flailed his limbs, working to right himself. Both guards joined forces to kick him in the side until he curled into a quivering ball and begged for mercy.

  “You dropped that,” said Angelika, pointing to her knife.

  Grimacing, the young guardsman stooped to pick it up. Angelika turned, the cord still looped around her arms. She thrust her wrists out at him. “Go ahead,” she said. “Finish your work.” Panting, the young guard did so. Angelika had arranged the cord to conceal the cut from him.

  One of Lichtman’s companions knelt at the man’s side, examining him for injuries. He hissed at the guardsmen: “You’ll pay for this, when we finally speak to the priestesses.”

  Recht’s features puckered in chagrin. He turned on the young fellow. “Dolt! Do you seek to doom the girl with your damnable insolence?”

  Primus’ man stammered. Recht shook his fist at him, before turning to the senior warrior priest. “These men are recent acquaintances. I disavow their rude and violent behaviour.”

  The old guardsman sniffed at him.

  “I am Stefan Recht, an advocate of Averheim. You are…?”

  “Bernolt Steinhauer, hammer-brother of Sigmar. Also of Averheim.” He over-enunciated, to make his impatience clear.

  The junior finished tying Angelika and moved on to restrain Franziskus.

  “Then perhaps I know your commander.”

  “It is not impossible. Father Manfried is known to many.”

  “That would be Father Manfried Haupt, whose father built the cathedral in Averheim, soon to be consecrated without him?”

  “He is that Manfried Haupt, yes.”

  Recht patted the damp hair on top of his head. “I won’t tell you that he and I are intimates, but… Let us say that I know of his dilemma, and also that I know certain intriguing facts about those responsible for it.”

  “We have orders to take these two thieves into custody. Those orders are not flexible.”

  Recht swiped an arm in Angelika’s general direction. “What of it? They merely served as our guides on the way here. I disavow them and whatever they have done. But the girl…”

  The tip of the guardsman’s tongue ventured thoughtfully out between his pursed lips.

  Recht leaned in to softly press his case. “Father Haupt will have instructed you to grant special attention to persons of influence. I am sure those orders, too, are lacking in flexibility.”

  The man nodded.

  “Then you will see to it that this girl is taken directly to Mother Elsbeth, that she bypasses all other penitents, and that she is given all possible care. You will do it now, for both our sakes.”

  “Take her then!” the guardsman cried. Lemoine, Udo and Gerhold scurried to pick up her sled. “You deal with these two,” he instructed his junior, as he placed himself in front of Devorah’s bearers. He withdrew his baton from his belt and held it out, as a crowd-parter, leading the way around the corner of the abbey wall. Recht followed without looking back.

 
“I never thought I’d see the day,” Angelika said.

  “When Recht would betray us?” whispered Franziskus.

  “When an advocate would prove himself useful.”

  “Shut your holes,” the junior guardsman sulkily demanded. “I suppose now I have to decide where to put you.”

  Angelika smiled sweetly. “There’s no jail here? What kind of holy place is this?”

  The guardsman clenched his fist but chose not to hit a woman. He saw that Primus Lichtman still lay on the ground, a few feet away, clutching his gut, and went over to feint at him, as if prepared to kick him a few more times.

  Bernolt Steinhauer led the pallet-bearers, including Stefan, past the queue of penitents gathered inside the abbey courtyard. He marched toward the large tent in which Mother Elsbeth’s healings were staged. Its front flap was down, but that would not deter him. A leprous old woman, her expression dazed, wandered out of the line and into his path. He barked at her and her companions skittered out to reel her back in before the guardsman could push at her with his out-thrust baton.

  Bernolt disliked this place. The tent he disliked especially. He would never question the judgments of his blessed commander to commit the sin of pride, but the tent seemed to him a sign of the entire place stinking and not being worth a rounded ball of frozen horse dung. Surely an abbey worth defending would already possess a decent-sized indoor receiving hall? It would not require them to press one of their field tents into service.

  Bernolt bit down on his grumbles and forged on to the entrance. A figure muddled its way through the flap—Father Eugen. Eugen did not, at first, notice Bernolt; he was intent on making an announcement to the muttering, snaking queue. He cupped his hands around his mouth, bushy brows accenting his eyes like a pair of uneasy circumflexes.

  “Pardon me, my friends,” he said, his voice failing to rise above a conversational volume. “Many pardons!” Then he turned and saw Bernolt, then the sled, then its carriers, then the pale and feverish girl strapped to it. “Goodness,” he said. “Bernolt?”

  “This one must be taken to the healer right away,” Bernolt said.

  Eugen peered dolorously into the girl’s dying face. “No, I don’t think that will work.”

  “Tell me how it can be made to work, father.”

  Eugen scanned past the makeshift procession to the wall behind them. “The others here have been waiting a long time… Mother Elsbeth’s last audience was severely taxing.”

  With a precise jerk of his shoulder, Bernolt indicated Stefan Recht. “This one’s a fancy advocate. Says he can be of help to the cause. But only if we help the girl.”

  Stefan gave Father Eugen a curt wave, suggestive not only of respect, but knowledge and influence too.

  Eugen bit his lip. “I don’t know if she has another healing in her, just now.”

  A hoarse voice grated out from the middle of the queue: “You’re not taking her ahead of us, are you?”

  Steinhauer twisted back to brandish his baton. “This one’s dying, you mewling idiot! Can you say the same for yourself?”

  The crowd groaned an inarticulate protest.

  Stefan thrust himself in front of Eugen. “We beg you, my friend. If you can’t take her now, she’ll get no other chance.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Eugen muttered, clumsily parting the canvas flap. Steinhauer stepped up to open it wider and the four pilgrims carried in the sled.

  The tent was spackled with mildew and stank of urine and lamp oil. Near its far wall lay a bed, linen sheets draped messily from its elevated wooden pallet. Stains from various fluids blotched the sheets; a pile of even more greatly soiled bedding sat bunched in a corner. A circle of lanterns surrounded the bed, leaking smoke.

  A stringy old man, naked except for a precariously dangling loincloth, danced a tiny-stepped, exultant jig on the well-trampled mud floor. “They’re gone,” he delightedly cried, looking down at his slack and wrinkled flesh. “The tumours! The lesions! Gone! Gone! I am whole again!”

  A weary sister sidled up to the cured man, mindful of his recklessly swinging elbows. “You must go now,” she whispered.

  “Whole!” he cried.

  “Put on your robes and go,” she commanded.

  He stopped dancing and huffed peevishly. “I am grateful that my life is saved, but you still must accord me the respect my position demands.”

  She stalked over to the cured man’s attendants, took hold of the robes they held out for him, and thrust them into his arms. “Go,” she said. The man grumbled but quickly wrapped himself up.

  Then the priestess turned her attention to Bernolt and Eugen.

  “No,” she said.

  “You must,” said Bernolt.

  “No more until her next treatment.”

  “She’s dying,” said Eugen.

  The sister wiped at her eyes. “So is Mother Elsbeth!”

  No one spoke. Udo suppressed a cough. Stefan bent to lower Devorah’s pallet to the ground; the others followed suit.

  “No,” said the priestess.

  A frail voice came from the bed. “I will take her.”

  The priestess bowed her head. “Do not do it,” she said.

  “Bring her to me,” said the woman on the bed, raising herself tremblingly onto her elbows.

  Stefan Recht jerked backwards, recoiling into Udo Kramer, who stood behind him. Lemoine gasped.

  The woman could barely support the weight of her head; as she rested it on one sharp, bony shoulder, then on the other. It appeared oversized in comparison to her shrunken body. Rheumy eyes blinked dimly from dark pits beneath her brow. She opened her mouth in a tortured smile, showing jagged, decomposing teeth. An incisor dropped from her top gum and fell into the rancid bed sheets. “Please,” she hissed, “bring her quickly.”

  “Mother Elsbeth!” Lemoine gasped.

  Father Eugen took Bernolt Steinhauer by the shoulder. “Get Manfried,” he whispered. “Quickly.”

  Steinhauer loped from the tent.

  “Bring her here, I tell you,” croaked Mother Elsbeth. She picked at the back of her head, then examined what she’d caught between her fingers: a sheaf of brittle, colourless hair. She crackled it in her palm, turning it into dust.

  Recht twisted back, to see that Udo, Lemoine and Gerhold all stood frozen, the only difference between them the degrees to which their mouths swung agape. Mumbling disgustedly, he bent down to unlash Devorah from the sled, then folded her carefully in his arms. On unsteady feet he dragged her over to Mother Elsbeth’s bed. The healthiest-looking of the sisters moved to block his progress, but seeing Devorah’s face, relented. Sighing desolately, she helped to roll the unconscious girl closer to the dying high priestess. The death’s-head of Elsbeth’s features transfigured itself into a rictus of maternal anxiety. She coughed and another rotten, yellow tooth detached itself from her mouth, tumbling over her lips and into the linens. The holy woman opened her arms, pulling Devorah closer to her.

  Devorah’s eyelids fluttered.

  “My daughter,” croaked Elsbeth. “Don’t fret. You’re home now.” She enveloped the girl in twig-thin arms, rocking her as if she were an infant. “You are a special young one; I can feel that.”

  Devorah murmured and rolled onto her side, hugging herself tighter to the old woman’s feeble body.

  Recht stepped back from the bed, hands clasped in prayer.

  “You will need all I can give,” said Elsbeth, laying her palms on Devorah’s forehead. She pulled the front of her robe open.

  Recht meant to avert his eyes but could not.

  Open, puckering lesions broke the skin of the healer’s naked torso. The tell tale discolorations of leprosy spotted her body. Purple bruises mottled the flesh of her distended belly. Tumours, greyish and fist-sized, hung from her ribcage like extra teats.

  Recht put hand over mouth as understanding came. This was how Mother Elsbeth healed wounds and ailments of her suffering flock—by taking them on herself.

  Elsb
eth tightened her embrace on the girl. She shuddered. The healer’s already sallow skin grew paler. Her pupils dilated. Her pores opened, leaking turbid sweat. She and the girl convulsed together.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Grey light snuck through the weathered planks of the tiny shed, which, before being hastily pressed into service as a prison cell, had held only tools for the abbey’s meagre garden. Franziskus sat glumly, his back resting against a wall, the edges of his cloak protecting his posterior from the floorless shack’s cold ground. Angelika paced, the cord still around her wrists.

  “It’s been, what? Six hours now, at least? How long are you going to pretend that rope still binds you?” sighed Franziskus.

  “What?”

  “I know you cut it. I saw you.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So?”

  Angelika squatted beside him. “I’m still deciding,” she said. “If I untie myself and you, I’m fairly certain we can break through the walls of this shed.”

  “They are in poor repair,” Franziskus agreed.

  “But what then? There’s at least one brawny Sigmarite on the other side of that door.”

  “I think I heard two.”

  “Without weapons, we’re no use against even one guard,” calculated Angelika. “But let’s say we do get past them. What are our odds of getting down the mountain before they catch up with us?”

  “Unpleasant at best.”

  “Whatever it is they think we’ve done, we’re in the unusual position of not having done it. So, before trying the hard way, why not at least try to talk our way out?”

  Franziskus made a grumping noise.

  “Why so sceptical? I thought these Sigmarites would be just your sort. They’re the forces of good, aren’t they? The smiters of Chaos?”

  “Yes, but they are large men with warhammers. And I am a deserter, and you are… you do what you do. So let us not delude ourselves. Ivo may seem a heretic to some, but he’s still a churchman.”

  “Or claims to be.”

  “At any rate, they believed him over us.”

  “Another reason to stay. I’d like a few minutes alone with him.”