02 - Sacred Flesh

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  Eugen was the one to skitter up to the pulpit to get the Theogonist his book. He tripped back to his holiness and proffered the hefty volume. Esmer snatched it from his hands, wetted the tips of his fingers with his tongue, and flipped to the relevant page.

  Manfried tackled Angelika, halfway to the catacomb door. She broke her fall with outstretched hands and rolled from the path of an onrushing fist. She kicked herself free, slashed her dagger across Manfried’s forehead, and ran through the nearest doorway. She saw that she’d retreated into the entrance to a cathedral tower. She tried to duck out again—fleeing upwards was always pointless—but Manfried kept on her. She ducked a hammer blow. It loosened stones from the tower archway. He backed her up the stairs.

  “Why thwart me in this way?” he cried, smashing down at the steps in front of her, forcing her to leap back and up. “How do you profit from this, gutter wretch?”

  That’s it, she thought. Keep talking. Use up your breath.

  “You think you are free to do what you want?” His wayward blow brought a banner down from the staircase wall and it fell onto him, giving her the time to turn and bound up several sets of stairs, increasing the distance between them. She turned and was ready by the time he’d untangled himself.

  He panted. “You are an outlaw. Perhaps your kind is, unlike the rest of us, truly free.”

  She backed up the stairs. He paced her.

  “But you cannot free Mother Elsbeth.”

  Five stairs. She breathed. He breathed.

  “She has a destiny.”

  Six stairs.

  “A responsibility, even in death.”

  More stairs. Her backing up, him coming inexorably forward.

  “She will meet it here.”

  More stairs. More.

  “Even if I must smack open your skull, to prevent you from troubling her any further.” Manfried roared and surged up at her. Twisting lengths of railing bounded the staircase as it spiralled up the tower. Angelica put a hand on each and tried to push herself up over him as he came at her, so she could get back on the other side of him. But he reached out to butt her with his hammer, knocking her against a wall. She fell against a stair. She felt a heavy blow land on her—a punch or kick, but not a hammer strike. He lifted her into the air.

  Below, Esmer read from the book, chanting the rites of abjuration. Stricken by Sigmar’s power, the creature lurched across the cathedral floor, gripping another column, tearing it from its moorings. A ripple traversed the arched ceiling above it. A dozen Sigmarite gunners dropped to one knee and fired; a dozen shots hit the creature’s generous target of a belly.

  Further below, Ivo attacked and wheedled. “Just surrender and get out of my way!” he told Franziskus, who had a leg bent behind him. He was struggling to bash aside Ivo’s raining slashes. “Hear that? I’m losing my diversion!”

  Ivo’s head turned a bit, to indicate the action on the cathedral floor above him. Franziskus took advantage: he directed a snapping blow to the wrist of Kirchgeld’s sword-arm, then whisked the rapier from the false pardoner’s twitching fingers. Ivo dashed to grab it up, but Franziskus leapt into his path and got the tip of his sabre under his enemy’s throat.

  “No,” Ivo pouted.

  “Yes,” said Franziskus.

  “But Franziskus, old comrade.” Ivo held out his palms, placating. “I know you. You’re too sweet and honourable to injure an unarmed man. Aren’t you?”

  Franziskus paused, relaxing his arm just slightly. Above him, the monster rallied, and the cathedral chorused with the final shrieks of dying men. Ivo attempted a mollifying smile.

  Franziskus speared his sabre through Ivo Kirchgeld’s throat, steadying it with both hands while he convulsed and died.

  Manfried, on the tower steps, pressed Angelika against a stained-glass depiction of Sigmar’s coronation day. Angelika kicked and writhed, but Manfried was too strong. He had one hand around her throat and the other firmly clamped on the top of her head. “I’m going to snap your neck,” he told her. “But first, you godless, interfering slut, you will acknowledge the supremacy of Sigmar!” His spittle sprayed across her upper lip. One of his eyes, injured by her slash to his face, had clamshelled closed.

  Through one of the window’s few fully translucent panes, Angelika saw Ivo’s creature, leaking inky blood. It made one last lurch across the cathedral floor, bashing through the pews as if they were toothpicks. Esmer, sceptre raised, advanced on it, completing his holy imprecation.

  Angelika pointed a hand around her throat, indicating her readiness to speak the surrendering words Manfried demanded of her. He moved his hand down to her tunic, which he grabbed up in a great bunch.

  She spat in his face. “I scrape to neither god nor man!”

  He reached back for his warhammer.

  The creature smashed into the base of the tower, tearing it from its foundations. As the tower buckled beneath them, Manfried was thrown into Angelika, pressing her into the window. Its frame twisted, exploding the stained glass portrait of Sigmar behind them to a thousand shards. Both Angelika and Manfried were cast out into the empty air above the cathedral floor. They fell, a wave of stone and mortar cresting behind them.

  Manfried landed on the floor amid his slaughtered men. He hit shoulder-first, pulverising bone and pulping muscle. He had time to glimpse the decapitated head of Gisbert, or Giselbrecht, or Gismar, or whatever his name was, beside him. A shadow appeared over him; it was the rain of stone. Tons of granite hit the flooring, pummelling Manfried Haupt. They flattened his helmeted skull, and mixed his gore and tissue to those of his subordinates.

  Angelika hit Mother Elsbeth’s coffin with sufficient velocity to crack open its crystal casing, dislodging its lid. Her body struck it, then rolled to the other side, and fell onto its back. Her neck was broken, her organs ruptured, her lungs and oesophagus pierced by sharpened stakes of shattered rib bone. A spring of arterial blood welled up through her mouth. Angelika felt no pain; she only knew that she could not move, even to close her eyes.

  Franziskus, climbed up through the wreckage of the basement, howling her name. He ran heedlessly past the jaws of the expiring Chaos beast, which was already dissolving into a black, foetid dew.

  Angelika could tell she was dying; she saw the shades of those she’d disappointed around her. All the pilgrims were there, crouching, peering down curiously into her ruined face. Waldemar, the summoner, blinked away tears of thwarted passion. Rausch, the physic, reached into his spectral bag of medicines and bone-saws. A mournful Friar Gerhold shook his head and closed its clasp. The Widow Kloster shoved both aside to get a better look. Prioress Heilwig took her by the collar and dragged her back, where the gnarled salt, Ludwig Seeman, held her grudgingly by the shoulders. Jurg Muller’s ghost, with an unwelcome arm slung around Stefan Recht, leered sardonically down at her, as if this was all a big joke, and an expected result, besides. Udo Kramer, still clutching his neck-wound, hovered at an abashed distance. The bailiff, Altman, had also separated from the others. His fatty face stiffening, he headed for the doorway to the catacombs, some urgent business on his mind.

  Closest to Angelika, the old campaigner, Thomas Krieger, crouched.

  “I forgive you,” he said.

  “I don’t need your forgiveness,” she said, through ghostly lips.

  Krieger’s ghost shook its head indulgently.

  A light sprang up, blinding and white. The dead pilgrims parted. Mother Elsbeth shuffled toward her; it was she who radiated the light. Angelika squinted, but still she could see the holy woman, now looking young and fresh, all her wounds washed away, coming at her.

  “Come with us now,” Elsbeth said. “We’ll take you to Shallya.”

  “I scrape to neither god nor man,” Angelika said.

  Elsbeth reached out her perfect hand for Angelika’s broken one.

  Franziskus skidded through blood and ichor, leaping over fallen stones, to get to Angelika.

  Mother Elsbeth’s corpse had been
pushed over onto its side by the force of Angelika’s fall. A wrinkled, deeply gashed hand dangled from the sarcophagus, over Angelika. She reached up to touch it.

  Angelika’s body shook. She died.

  Franziskus reached her side. He took her up in his arms. He rocked her and bawled unashamedly. Franziskus felt a compulsion to let her go so he set her down gently on the floor, in her pooling blood, and wept.

  Devorah, hidden behind the altar, peered out, features rigid. Her lips became a hard, horizontal line.

  A second spasm bucked Angelika’s corpse. Her ribs withdrew from her lungs and guts, and moved back to their designated places. They knitted back together; the punctures they’d left behind sealed up. Her torn heart rethreaded itself; her liver and spleen ceased their haemorrhaging. Blood reversed its flow, pulling muscles back to their previous tautness. A convulsive fist of breath unfolded itself inside her. Angelika coughed, shook, shuddered and lived.

  Eugen tentatively approached the holy woman’s coffin. While the corpse was busy healing Angelika, an inner light had shone from its chest. Now the body blackened, and wisps of sweet-smelling smoke curled from the sarcophagus.

  Franziskus wrapped his arms around Angelika, but she squirmed her way loose. Pain descended. Before she passed out, she looked for the ghosts; they had all gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was a crisp early summer morning in the hamlet of Ruhgsdorf when, in the absence of a priest of Morr, Lemoine performed the final rites of memoriam over an unmarked hummock of grass, where Mother Elsbeth’s body, its severed hand included, had just been interred. Ruhgsdorf was nothing more than a small cluster of buildings around an old mill. But its hills rolled, its birds chirped, and its grass was green. There were worse places for one’s bones to moulder, Angelika thought.

  She stood uneasily by the graveside. The last thing she wanted to hear was more praying and god talk, but without a good look at the final resting spot, she could not be sure that she’d won.

  Franziskus was glued to her side, ready for her to succumb to a fainting spell and heave herself, helpless, into his arms. This had been a danger during the first few months of her recuperation, but no longer. She now felt whole again, or reasonably so. Her lodgings and nursing had been underwritten by the Sigmarite lectoric of Averheim; it was her opinion that the irony inherent in the arrangement had greatly hastened her recovery.

  Lemoine concluded his prayers and stepped away from the grave. He carefully folded the liturgical stole he’d worn around his neck. He was clad in the simple muslin tunic and cotton leggings of an ordinary peasant. He had given up the cloth; this would be his last act as an ecclesiast.

  He put his arm around Devorah. She had likewise given up her robes and wimple. Her peasant garb clung tightly to her, scooping flatteringly at the bodice. Lemoine kissed her temple. She hugged him tight. They walked in silence to a small farmhouse.

  Richart lingered by the graveside, propped up by his crutch. His right boot concealed a false foot of oak, but he had yet to grow proficient in its use. He caught Franziskus’ eye and gestured to the departing lovers.

  “You can’t win every battle,” Richart told him.

  “Better him than me,” Franziskus replied.

  “I’ve some brandy in the house.” Richart had been granted use of a small plot of nearby land owned by the temple, so he could keep an eye on Elsbeth’s grave and see that no one pillaged it. Eugen, the new lector, had deemed this a wise course of action. He and the Theogonist had been in staunch agreement—to keep the body in a Sigmarite temple would be profoundly ill-fated, whether or not Manfried’s cathedral was ever rebuilt. Since he was crippled, Richart would be unable to work the land, so he’d extended an offer to the former monk and former sister, to join him.

  “I’ve an itch to keep moving,” said Angelika. Franziskus and Richart embraced. Her forbidding posture warded off any similar maudlin gestures.

  A quarter of an hour later, Angelika and Franziskus walked by themselves, along a road.

  “So,” said Angelika, breaking a silence. “During the pilgrimage, did you see any hint at all that Devorah lusted for Lemoine?”

  “Not one,” replied Franziskus, his tone carefully neutral. “But then much of the time we were looking for a murderer. One can’t notice everything.”

  “She changed horses quickly, didn’t she?” Angelika got no answer. “It was funny, wasn’t it? When he reappeared, claiming to be back to his rightful senses and retreated from the dread error of flagellation. I told him he’d never shown much in the way of rightful senses before and ought not to bother now.”

  Franziskus seemed cheerless.

  “And no sign of any miraculous healing powers,” Angelika continued, her tone unusually buoyant. “That’s a great relief to her, I’m sure.”

  “Gifts from the mercy goddess ought not to be refused. Perhaps, though, there is some young novice at Heiligerberg who has become the new vessel of Shallya’s compassion.”

  “If there is, you can bet they’ll keep it secret. They’ll be glad to be rid of all those pilgrims.”

  “You’ll go on saying impious things all day long, if I continue to engage you.”

  A russet-coloured cow regarded them blandly from a pasture, then returned to its chewing.

  “She could have been yours, you know,” said Angelika. “If you’d pressed your case, during my convalescence.”

  “A man who must press his case is not truly wanted.”

  “And her leap into Lemoine’s bed—that just confirms that you were right all along?”

  “I wish them well.”

  “I think she was just trying to make you jealous, and is too proud to back down.”

  “You have, I see, completely recovered your jaundiced view of humankind.”

  “I bet, even now, if you went back and bent your knee, and spoke fine aristocratic couplets into her ticklish little ear…”

  Franziskus shrugged. “I have a new topic for us to discuss as we travel. Where are we headed, incidentally?”

  “Where do you think the next battlefield will be?”

  “My new topic is this: as someone would sooner be spat on than receive divine blessing, how did it feel to—”

  “It’s still you she wants, Franziskus.”

  “How does it feel to be the recipient of a miracle?”

  Angelika paused. She reached for her purse and clanked it. It was heavy. “This is the miracle. That I get to finish one of our little enterprises with more gold than when I started.”

  “You reached out for her hand, Angelika.”

  “My vision was clouded. I thought the hand I reached for was yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “So next time, don’t be so blurry.” She sped up. “In my final moments, I don’t want to be grabbing any old stranger.”

  He moved in front of her, jogging backwards. “Jesting aside, Angelika. What was it like? What did you see?”

  “Nothing,” she said, marching smartly. “Our senses were all addled by that creature’s presence.”

  They came to a bigger road; it gave them the choice of going either north, or south. She picked a direction at whim. Franziskus followed.

  “It never happened,” Angelika concluded. “None of it.”

  Scanning, formatting and

  basic proofing by Flandrel,

  additional formatting and

  basic proofing by Undead.