02 - Sacred Flesh

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  “You can’t expect me to hold my tongue, if you persist in saying things like that.”

  “I had a duty to Shallya to refuse her.”

  Angelika paused to adjust the dagger in her right boot. It was a little sleeker than the ones she was used to, and kept slipping out of place.

  “And also,” said Franziskus, “I think she may be manipulative. And of a changeable nature. I’m not sure I even like her.”

  “Some of my most satisfying times have been with men I didn’t even—”

  “Maybe, when I have been at this life as long as you have, I’ll have succeeded in making myself heartless, too.”

  Angelika laughed. Franziskus’ expression darkened.

  They found two ordinary, working slaughterhouses before they located the one they sought, at the end of a street of decaying buildings. It was a low-slung structure with a bowed roof, plaster falling from its walls in pancake-sized chips.

  “Notice something different?” asked Angelika.

  “What?”

  “To be specific, the lack of something? Listen.”

  Franziskus listened. “The winds have died down.”

  “Right. The howling has stopped. And if there was any truth to Lemoine’s story, and these cultists of Ivo’s brought them into being…”

  They circumnavigated the building, squeezing through a tiny space between it and the decaying tenement next door. Behind it they found a back door, unpainted and scored by woodworms.

  “Do we talk our way in, or fight?” Franziskus whispered.

  “A moot question, I think.” Angelika put an ear to the door. “I hear no one.”

  Franziskus kicked the door in; it fell satisfyingly to pieces beneath his boot.

  Sun streamed into a large stone chamber, stacked high with sheets of quarried granite. The fallen door displaced clouds of fine, sandy dust that rose to fill Franziskus lungs. He doubled over, coughing and shielding his eyes. Angelika waited for the dust to die down and stepped into the room, moving to a workbench loosely strewn with stone-cutting tools. She picked up a mason’s chisel.

  “Not the equipment you expect to find in an abattoir,” she said.

  Franziskus tried vainly to lift one of the stone slabs stacked near the doorway. “You recognise these stones, don’t you?”

  “They are identical to those on Manfried’s cathedral.” Angelika crossed the room, to a wooden shelf structured like a wine rack, with half a dozen long, narrow openings on each of a dozen shelves. Inside about a third of the openings sat either scroll cases, or large, rolled-up sheets of parchment. She pulled out one of the sheets, untying a small piece of dirty twine. When unfurled, the parchment contained a crude sketch of an architectural plan.

  “A section of the cathedral?” Franziskus asked.

  “I’m no builder, but I’d lay a hundred crowns on it.” Angelika squinted at the parchment, turning it sideways.

  “So Manfried had a nest of Chaos worshippers helping to finish his family’s cathedral?”

  “Not knowingly, I’m sure. These maggots live by trickery.”

  “What do the cultists mean to accomplish?”

  “What do they ever mean to accomplish?” Angelika tossed aside the parchment she had in her hand and popped open the nearest scroll case. “Think like a slavering, slack-jawed minion of Chaos. What prize would be so important that you’d get off your robe-wearing posterior and give up all your chanting and blood sacrificing in order to undertake genuine, backbreaking labour?”

  “A chance to sabotage the cathedral. A secret entrance, perhaps?”

  “My money’s on a secret tunnel into the basement.” Angelika pitched another plan over her shoulder. “Curse it, this one’s just a staircase.” Franziskus joined in the search, plucking another tube of parchment from the rack.

  Flies, buzzing and iridescent, zigzagged in through the open doorway.

  Angelika took hold of the most striking scroll case: an ivory tusk carved with orgiastic figures. She unscrewed its cap. It was empty. “And I’ll bet you a second hundred crowns that this case used to hold the plan we’re looking for—the one that shows their secret entrance.”

  “Why would they leave an empty case?”

  A small swarm of flies had materialised, each member butting its mindless insect head incessantly against a small wooden door in the room’s furthest corner. Angelika nodded once; Franziskus stepped over to it and shoved it open.

  It opened into a small, shadow-strewn chamber. Murdered bodies lay strewn about it. Other flies, already inside the room, were hard at work, flitting from corpse to corpse, laying their eggs. Their colleagues hummed in to join them.

  The dead numbered seven in all, five men and two women, all robed in coarse burlap decorated with strange sigils, which Franziskus and Angelika both took to be occult signs. Many had been torn apart by gunshots but most had been finished with sword blows to the head and neck. Under their bodies, Angelika could see a pentagram incised in the floorboards.

  A pile of skulls—mostly of cattle, but with a few humans, and even that of a man-sized rodents, thrown in for good measure—sat atop a crude wooden altar. Franziskus made the sign of Sigmar and hesitantly approached it. Angelika marched right up.

  A length of thin copper chain dangled from the altar, fastened to its surface with an eye hook. Angelika examined its last link, which was broken. She took a close look at the darkened oak panel that served as the altar’s top. She pointed, showing Franziskus the dark brown dots that spattered its surface. “Dried blood,” she said.

  Franziskus’ complexion betrayed his nausea. “I shudder to imagine how many sacrifices have taken place here.”

  “But look at this spot in the middle—there is not a speck on it.” Angelika indicated a rectangular shape, about three feet wide by one foot high. “Something used to sit here, while the blood sprayed.”

  “The space is shaped like a book,” said Franziskus.

  “Ivo Kirchgeld did this. He knew about the cultists and their secret entrance. He came here and dispatched them, stole the map to their tunnel and a book from their unholy altar.”

  They contemplated the implications of this. Flies feasted.

  “Franziskus,” she said, “I think this bodes ill.”

  As they rushed from the abattoir, Devorah stood, a good mile away from them, in the cathedral square. She wore a simple shift she’d borrowed from the tavern keeper. Devorah nervously patted it down, straightening a line of fabric that bulged across her curving hips. She looked up at the line of Sigmarite warriors arrayed on the temple’s great staircase. She pulled her fists tight and swallowed her fear. Stepping quickly, she glided over uneven cobblestones to shudder open the heavy wrought-iron gate leading to the cathedral grounds. Its creaks brought her the immediate attention of the soldiers above.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Father Eugen’s eyebrows knitted themselves together. He rubbed his hands as if he were cold. He shifted his head from side to side. Then he patted the top of his head, pushing down a thick mat of dark, wire-brush hair. “Well truly,” he said. “Truly indeed.”

  He stood before Devorah, inside the cathedral, on the lacquered wooden tiles of a private chapel built for a wealthy family: the Abendroths. They would take possession of it after the consecration ceremony. The pater- and materfamilias of the Abendroth family would get to meet the Grand Theogonist, when he arrived. But for now the chapel was empty and it was as good a place as any for Eugen to speak to the young girl. She sat on an oaken pew, gazing up at a colossal marble statue of a grimacing Sigmar, his crushing hammer held aloft. A wretched minion of Chaos was planted beneath the tread of his relentless boot. Stained glass in the tall windows above placed diffuse patches of coloured light on the girl’s white garment.

  “Well truly,” Eugen repeated. The girl’s eyes glittered at him. They made him wonder what it might have been like, to have trodden a different path, to have had a daughter.

  She’d started talking again,
he realised. “So you will act to help me—Mother Elsbeth, I mean.”

  Eugen had left too long a pause. “Ah,” he said. “Ah. You do make a number of persuasive points.”

  She leaned close to him. “It is not the usual thing, is it, for temples to Sigmar to contain the bodies of devotees to Shallya?”

  Eugen swayed back a step. “No, indeed, it is not usual. Though I can see the justification for it. All the gods of life and virtue are on the same side, after all, arrayed against Chaos. And if Elsbeth’s weary bones can act as a bulwark—”

  Devorah took hold of his oversized hands. Her porcelain skin was too soft and delicate for Eugen’s liking. He could see why poor young Manfried had been stricken by the girl’s beauty and purity. His protégé was a young man, his veins charged with warrior blood. A creature like this could easily, without even trying, wrench him from duty’s path.

  “But it is not usual,” she pressed, “and moreover, Mother Elsbeth herself forbade this. By installing her in this temple, against her will, might you not turn her blessing into a curse?”

  Eugen backed into an exquisitely carved rail of gleaming rosewood. “Yes, yes, that point struck me as telling, when you made it before,” he said. “I will argue it with all possible vehemence when next I speak to Manfried.”

  She clutched his forearms, backing him completely into the railing. “You mustn’t!” she wailed. “You must do this on your own, without telling him!”

  Eugen’s spine stiffened. “Young woman,” he said, “I may have trained Manfried, and I am lucky to say I still have his ear. But he is my commander; not I, his.”

  Devorah inched closer. “Your care for your student reverberates in every word you say about him. You must know he’s headed for perdition! Madness and pride eat at him, as a flame slowly licks a log of wood into ash and charcoal. You must do your best to steer him straight again!” Finally she backed away from him; Eugen sat on the front pew and sank his head into his hands.

  “You speak with insight,” he glumly moaned. “You have indeed inherited her grace’s voice.”

  “Don’t say that,” she whispered. She wiped her eyes. Then her chin jutted out, as she recaptured her composure. “You know, it isn’t safe for me to be here. And the two guides who brought my party to Heiligerberg—Angelika and Franziskus.”

  “The ones who helped Elsbeth to die.”

  Devorah let the tears pour down. She took to her knees before the curly-haired priest. “I was with them for weeks. They are unpredictable, resourceful, ruthless. And they intend to take her grace—by violence if need be. You must avert this and have her smuggled out peacefully.” She swept an arm to indicate the cavernous nave of the great cathedral, its elephantine columns, its gilded archways. “Otherwise blood will be spilled here, I am sure of it. And even a warrior like Sigmar cannot want this, not in his own holy house, just as it is to be consecrated!”

  She waited to see the effect of her speech on Eugen, but he seemed stunned by it, which was not the precise result she’d hoped for. Then she realised that he was gazing behind her. She turned, but not in time.

  Manfried seized her from behind, gripping each of her wrists in a big, bony hand. He bent down, touching his weathered cheekbone against the side of her face.

  “I thought you’d come here to plead for your predecessor,” he said, “though I never imagined you’d show the perfidy to try to set my truest friend against me.”

  Eugen rose, his face flushed.

  Manfried turned, minutely examining Devorah’s face, as if searching for imperfections. “Nothing worth taking comes without struggle,” he said, “but you will be brought to heel. And made to heal.” He paused to savour his own wordplay.

  Eugen became intensely interested in the condition of his shoes.

  “Whether or not either of you likes it, you and Mother Elsbeth are indispensable assets in our war against Chaos,” Manfried said. “You will fight that battle here, in my spiritual fortress, under my command. Do you comprehend me, girl?”

  Still on her knees, she grinned up at him, with a smile twisted at the corners. “I have quit,” she told him.

  “What?”

  “I have sullied myself.”

  Manfried seized her by the elbow and hauled her up to face him. “What do you mean?”

  “High priestesses of Shallya must love only the goddess,” she said. “Need I spell it out?”

  Manfried raised a hand to smack her, but he caught Eugen giving him a reproachful look. He turned away from her. “With the blond mercenary?” he asked. He held up a hand to forestall her answer. “No. I am better off not knowing.” He whistled up his guards. “Find a place to store this one,” he said. “We’ll see later if we can’t return her to her original, useful condition.”

  From the north of the city came the lowing of distant horns. On the streets of Averheim, the people looked up. For the first time since the arrival of the Chaos winds, ordinary citizens had found it safe to venture past the thresholds of their homes and hovels. Housemaids scuttled through the streets on errands for their masters. Merchants took the shutters off storefronts. Farmers drove pigs and sheep through cobbled streets, to meet their butchers. Drunkards found their way to jugs of ale. Now all were stilled as the horns grew slowly closer, soon to be joined by the rattling of martial drums. Averheimers traded questioning glances; what did this portend, exactly? Mothers pulled children nearer. Men checked their belts, taking comfort in the nearness of their weapons.

  Barefooted children came pounding through the street, calling out the news. “The Theogonist is here!” The shout went up, travelling from balcony to balcony, from window to window. “The Theogonist has come!”

  “Our prayers are answered,” some breathed.

  “Finally,” other tongues wagged. “He should have got here sooner, when there was still a Chaos plague to banish.”

  The procession lumbered carefully across the main bridge over the River Aver, and into town, where it trundled majestically down the city’s central thoroughfare. It was a messy column of men, beasts and conveyances. At its head rode a lector on a mule, holding aloft the pieces of a mended shield, as Sigmar’s bearer, Tobias the Humble, had done nearly twenty-five hundred years before, at the Battle of Unberogen Hill. In the lector’s wake hovered an agitated young squire, equipped with a long-handled silver shovel for the immediate scooping of any mule droppings that should happen to fall at his pointy-shoed feet. Then followed a full company of Sigmarite warrior priests, three hundred men in all, their armour polished, their hammers proudly poised above their heads, ready to smite any Chaos creatures that might lurch their way. Behind the priests came the banner-bearers, waving flags commemorating the great victories of divine Sigmar, and of the most famous inheritors of his mantle. Then the trumpeters marched, bow-legged, blowing into their serpentine instruments, each a monstrosity of brass modelled after the famed and magical horn of Sigismund. Then the drummers, then a covey of older priests, too feeble to fight, swinging censers, wafting blessed smoke to billow down Averheim’s streets. Behind them came the squires and altar boys, young men in training to become tomorrow’s warrior priests, if there was to be a tomorrow. They wore white tunics and dark red stoles; they scattered rose-petals on the paving stones. Some chanted in eerie countertenor voices.

  Giant wooden wheels, bound in ancient lead, rolled forth, crushing the rose petals laid out before them. Now came the most awesome component of the procession: the Imperial war altar. Pulled by a pair of barded, caparisoned warhorses, thick of haunch and wild of eye, it creaked and rolled, axles groaning to support its four crunching wheels. At the back of the cart loomed a bronze statue of a screaming griffin; it held a mammoth warhammer clutched in its inhuman claws, and a spectacular cape of feathered wings rose up behind it. In the centre of the cart sat the stone altar where Sigmar, when still a mortal, was pronounced king, and later crowned Emperor. It stood but a few feet high, solid and grey, sculpted with arches and relief figures, mark
ed out in fresh red paint.

  The people of Averheim lined the edges of its great central laneway, pushing and jostling for a glimpse of the ineffable artefact. Fathers told sons that they would never again see an object so important. Sons squinted to understand why the altar mattered; then gazed upon it, and understood.

  “Hmp,” said Angelika, as she watched the procession enter the square and circle around to the cathedral gates. “It’s not even made of gold.”

  Franziskus elbowed her in the ribs. They were part of a quickly assembled throng. “Easy on the blasphemy,” he whispered into her ear.

  “That’s the Grand Theogonist?” She sounded unimpressed.

  On the lip of the cart, shoulders staunchly level, jaw grimly set, glowered a man of average height, weighed down by a solid seventy pounds of ceremonial garb. A crescent collar rose like a halo behind his round, white-haired head. A phoenix breastplate spread its wings across his chest, the tips of its jade wings obscuring the lower reaches of his face. Emerald robes, their hems burning with brocaded flames, flowed all around him, shaping his form into a cone. With a quivering arm, he thrust skyward a titanic sceptre, its pale wooden haft bearing the blessed name of Sigmar.

  Angelika sidestepped a young, dirty-faced girl who intended to push her way between her legs. A fat burgher shoved her back. A hand appeared on her shoulder.

  She looked back, then down a bit. It was Richart Pfeffer. “Someone wants a word with you,” he said.

  Manfried Haupt stood on the cathedral steps. Arrayed around him were his erstwhile rivals, men who’d engineered his banishment. Fat-jowled Father Erwin had informed on him to the Theogonist, when he had been foolish enough to waver on the issue of heresy. Father Varl, thin-lipped and petty, who had never tired of drawing unfavourable comparisons between Manfried and his father and grandfather. Dear old Father Wechsler, his mouth wide as a toad’s, had not acted against Manfried, but then again, he hadn’t been of much positive use, either. And, at his very right hand, Manfried’s chief rival, the corpulent, brandy-breathed Father Ragen, suffered and grumped. Ragen had been behind all of it. He had very nearly had himself installed as lector of this cathedral. But then he had not brought a relic so fresh and potent as the body of Mother Elsbeth. He had not secured any relics at all. And now he was doomed to a career of submission to Manfried’s boot. Manfried smiled at him: Ragen blinked blearily in return. Manfried had a detailed list of humiliating tasks prepared for Ragen and his cronies.