by ich du
Reiner shook his head. 'No. We daren't. Not until the stone's found.'
'We could twist it out of her,' said Franka coldly. 'And then kill her. She deserves that and more.'
'Aye, we could,' said Reiner. 'But this close to freedom, I don't care to be torturing and killing the wives of cousins of countesses. It would be just like Manfred to free us from his poison only to turn us over to the hangman for crimes done in his service.'
'But, captain-' said Pavel, but he was interrupted by voices coming from the hall.
'Stand downwind, curse you,' came Augustus's bellow. 'Y'reek like a beggar's kip.'
'And so might you,' Rumpolt whined. 'If I'd pushed you.'
The door opened and Jergen ducked in, a pained expression on his usually stolid features. He was followed by Augustus and Rumpolt. The young handgunner was covered in wet brown slime, and the room was filled with an overpowering faecal stench. The Blackhearts retched and covered their faces.
'What in Sigmar's name?' asked Reiner, coughing.
'The clumsy infant fell in the sewer,' said Augustus, laughing.
'You pushed me!' bleated Rumpolt.
'I tried to catch you, fool!'
'Shut up, the both of you,' cried Reiner, standing. 'Rumpolt, go wash yourself in the trough! Curse you, why did you come up here in the first place?'
'Because I knew he was going to lie about-'
'Never mind! Just go!' shouted Reiner. 'Run.'
Rumpolt pouted, but turned and hurried back out the door.
Gert made a face. 'Augh! Sigmar's death. He's left footprints!'
'Come on,' said Reiner. 'Let's adjourn to the dining room. I'm not cleaning that up.'
When they had resettled themselves around an oval dining table two floors down, Reiner turned to Augustus. 'So, anything below?'
Augustus shook his head. 'Nothing. No secret ways into the house. No holes. No hidden vaults or crypts. We even fished in the channel, which was when moon-cow fell in. He didn't find anything.'
The others chuckled.
'I found no hidden doors inside either,' said Dieter.
Reiner sighed. 'Curse the woman. Where has she hidden it? We'll have to check the lords she sent notes to, though I doubt she'd be so incautious.'
'You blame her and not her husband?' asked Darius. 'He seemed a devious little brat.'
Reiner smiled. 'You don't know the Lady Magda as some of us do. She is more devious than ten Rodicks. In fact, it is she more than anyone who's to blame for us being under Manfred's thumb. If she hadn't filled Manfred's younger brother Albrecht with evil ambition, he wouldn't have recruited us to fetch that cursed banner for him, and we wouldn't have run to Manfred asking for protection.'
'And Manfred wouldn't have done his brother one better by poisoning us,' said Franka bitterly.
Hals spat over his shoulder. 'I knew she was a bad'un, even before she turned on us at the convent.'
'You didn't!' said Pavel. 'Or we would have heard you go on about it all the way there. You were as fooled as the rest-'
'The convent!' cried Reiner, interrupting him. 'Sigmar bless you, pikeman. The Shallyan convent!'
Everyone turned and looked at him, confused.
Reiner tipped back in his chair. 'Lady Magda doesn't appear to have told anyone in Talabheim that she was once a sister of Shallya. She no longer wears the robes - not even a dove-wing necklace. None would think she had any connection to the faith. None but us.' He turned to Augustus. 'Kolbein, this is your city. Where is the temple of Shallya?'
Augustus frowned. 'Er, there's the sanitarium and the big temple in the City of the Gods, and some kind of mission down in the Tallows. Don't know any other.'
Reiner nodded. 'Well, the Tallows are overrun, yes? It would have to be the big temple then.' He stood. 'Come. Let us go speak to the sisters before the walls pass along our words and all of Talabheim joins us.'
The others rose with a scraping of chairs and turned towards the door, but just then Rumpolt appeared in it, panting. He was dripping wet, his boots leaking streams of water.
'Why did you move? Were you hiding from me?' he asked accusingly.
'Don't be an ass, Rumpolt,' said Reiner. 'Now turn about. We're going.'
Rumpolt sidled aside to let the others through. 'You needn't be mean about it,' he muttered.
THE BLACKHEARTS HURRIED through the broad, deserted avenues of the City of the Gods, passing temples and shrines to Taal, Sigmar, Myrmidia and Ulric, and then up the wide marble steps of the Shallyan temple, a low, modest building of white stone almost hidden in the looming shadow of the gleaming marble sanatorium attached to it. They ran under the carving of outstretched dove's wings above the lintel, and into the cool stone interior. But the usual air of soothing calm one expected in the Lady of Mercy's temple was distinctly absent. Grey-robed sisters ran this way and that, and cries and moans came from the corridors beyond the main chapel.
The temple's abbess ran toward them, wimple trembling in agitation. 'Thank Shallya you've come!' she said. 'They have overwhelmed our guards and are breaking into...' She paused. 'But you are not the city guard. I sent Sister Kirsten...'
'We are not the guard, Mother,' said Reiner. 'But we will help. Who is attacking you?'
'Hooded men,' said the abbess, pointing to a door in the left wall. 'They came up through a hole in the floor of the catacombs. They break into the vault as we speak.'
'Wait here for the guard,' said Reiner. 'We will see what we can do.' 'Shallya bless you, my son.' said the abbess as they raced across the chapel.
The door led to a stairway that wound down to the catacombs. Screams and crashes echoed up to them as they clattered down it.
'Someone's got in ahead of us.' growled Hals.
'But how did they know?' asked Reiner, taking a torch from a bracket and starting down the stairs. 'I don't understand it.'
Reiner tripped over the corpse of a sister at the base of the stairs. More dead sisters were strewn about the corridor, as well as three dead guards, swords clutched tight in their bloody hands. The Blackhearts leapt the bodies as they hurried forward. Rats scurried into the shadows at their approach.
A heavy door lay torn from its hinges. The Blackhearts looked through it into the temple's vault. Statues and paintings and piles of books and scroll tubes cluttered it. A sister wept in a corner, her grey cassock spattered with red. Blood made interesting patterns as it flowed across the decorative tile floor away from three bodies. Two were guards. The third was a hooded figure in brown robes with a burlap bag covering his face. Reiner shivered as he saw it, and prayed it wasn't what he thought it was.
The wounded sister groaned and pointed behind the Blackhearts. 'Stop them! They've stolen Lady Magda's gift!'
'Eh?' said Reiner. 'What gift?'
'A beautiful statue of Shallya, taller than a man. She only bequeathed it to us yesterday and already it's gone!'
Reiner exchanged looks with Pavel and Hals. 'Poor Lady Magda.' he said.
'There!' called Franka, pointing to a cross-corridor.
The Blackhearts ran to the intersection. Down the right corridor, a cluster of hooded figures was manoeuvring a heavy object through a door.
'Come on, lads.' said Reiner.
They charged down the corridor, swords out. The hooded men redoubled their speed. Jergen sprinted ahead, but before he could reach them, the thieves had squeezed the white statue through the door and slammed it in his face. Reiner heard bolts slide home as he skidded to a stop.
'Bash it in!' he cried.
Gert drew his hatchet and started chopping at the sturdy panels while Jergen stabbed it with the tip of his sword and began prying away splinters.
'Silly fools.' said Dieter. 'Let me.'
He pushed forward and knelt by the keyhole, taking a ring of strangely shaped tools from his pouch. Gert and Jergen watched as he pushed his picks into the hole and twisted. Almost before he had begun he had finished, and pulled the door open. 'There,' he said.
The Blackhearts rushed into the room. Rats skittered into the shadows. It was a store room, filled with medical supplies and trundle beds. A rough hole yawned in the floor, surrounded by heaps of cracked flagstones and moist earth. A length of heavy hawser dropped down into it. Reiner and the others ran to it and looked down. The sluggish flow of the sewer channel glimmered in the light of Reiner's torch. The reek of sewage was mixed with a rank animal musk.
Franka recoiled at the smell, trembling. 'Myrmidia's shield, no. Not again.'
The others cursed and wrinkled their noses.
'Maybe it's only rats,' said Pavel, but it didn't sound like he believed it.
'Aye. Like Magda had in her cellar,' said Reiner grimly. 'Come on. Down we go.'
They took more torches from the hall, then climbed down the rope one at a time, Jergen first, and looked up and down the dark, curving tunnel. The waystone thieves were out of sight.
'This way,' said Dieter, examining the floor.
They ran in the direction he indicated and after a short while saw flutters of movement far ahead of them as the thieves ran under a sunlit grate.
'How fast they move,' said Rumpolt, panting. 'We couldn't carry it half that fast.'
'They are twice as many,' said Augustus.
The Blackhearts hurried on, trying to keep up with the fleeing figures, but the thieves carried no torches so it was hard to tell how far ahead they were.
'How do they see?' asked Darius. 'It's black as pitch down here.'
Reiner kept his theories to himself.
After a long stretch where they saw no sign of the robed men, Dieter skidded to a stop.
'Wait!' he barked, turning and studying the ground. 'They've turned.'
The rest watched him as he trotted back along the ledge, frowning. He stopped at one of the granite slabs that bridged the channel. 'Crossed over.'
The Blackhearts followed as he stepped across and turned down a side corridor, then paused a dozen yards in, scratching his head. 'Tracks stop here. They... ah!' He began to examine the wall closely, running his hands lightly over the crumbling bricks. 'There must be...' he mumbled to himself, then, 'Aye, here's the... So where...? Ha!'
With a grin of triumph Dieter pulled a brick from its place high on the wall and reached into the gap, digging about with his fingers. A muted clatter of gears came from under their feet, and a section of the wall sank inward a few inches. Dieter pushed on the wall. It swung in, revealing a cobweb-choked corridor that sloped away from them into darkness. The dust on the floor had been lately disturbed by many feet. Reiner didn't care for the smallness of the prints, nor their unusual outline.
The Blackhearts hurried on, following Dieter's lead through another confusing maze of cellars, forgotten catacombs, collapsed tunnels and buried temples. From time to time Reiner thought he heard the scurrying of feet in front of them, but it was difficult to be certain above all their own gasping and creaking. He continued to look ahead, though it was impossible to see beyond the light of their torches.
After half an hour, they entered the strangest place Reiner had yet seen in Talabheim's underground. It appeared to be a city street, complete with tall tenements and shops on either side and cobbles underfoot, except that the ground was tilted at such a drastic angle that it was difficult to walk, and that the third floors of all the buildings disappeared into a hard-packed earth ceiling above. It looked as if the street had been dug out after some great avalanche of mud had buried it. Slanting shafts of weak sunlight shot down from narrow chimneys bored in the roof. Burning torches jammed into broken brick walls and the smell of meat smoke spoke of current habitation, but the Blackhearts saw no one as Dieter led them around corners and down side streets, his head down like a wolfhound on the hunt.
As Dieter turned down an alley, Reiner put a hand on his shoulder, for there was movement in the darkness at the end of it. The thieves were lowering the statue of Shallya into a gaping rift in the alley floor. Shallya's shoulders disappeared as they watched. It looked like the goddess was sinking in a sea of earth.
'Now's our chance, lads,' said Reiner. 'On them!'
As the Blackhearts raced forwards, Franka hopped onto a pile of rubble and loosed a shaft at the thieves. One squealed and fell with an arrow in its chest. The rest looked up and the statue dropped abruptly through the rift. Reiner felt a thud of impact through his feet. The thieves crowded into the ragged hole after her, their long robes flapping.
Jergen caught the last few and slashed left and right. They pitched into the hole, their severed limbs spinning down after them. Reiner looked down into the rift. It was as black as the void. The Blackhearts gathered around him, staring down warily.
'Captain,' said Franka, behind them.
Reiner and the others turned. Franka crouched over the thief she had slain with her arrow. She held its burlap leper's mask in her hand.
The thief had the head of a rat.
TEN
This is Not My Home
'A RATMAN!' SAID Pavel.
Hals spit over his shoulder.
'Not again,' said Gert.
Reiner groaned. He had known it in his heart since he had smelled the rat stench in the cellar of the Shallyan temple, but having his fears confirmed made him sick.
'Don't be daft,' said Augustus. 'Ratmen are a myth. They don't exist.'
'Well, this one don't,' said Hals. 'Not any more. Nice shooting, lass.'
Rumpolt backed away, making the sign of the hammer. Dieter crossed his fingers. Darius stepped closer, eyes glittering.
'Vindication!' he said. 'The professors said the outlawed books I read were wrong, the scribblings of a warped brain. Another example of their close-minded, reactionary ignorance.' He looked up at Reiner. 'Can we take it with us?'
'We've other things to worry about at the moment, scholar,' said Reiner, looking down into the hole.
'You're not going down there?' wailed Rumpolt. 'There were twenty of the things at least.'
'Oh, there'll be more than that, laddie,' said Hals. 'Hundreds.'
'Thousands,' said Pavel.
'But have we a choice?' asked Augustus. 'We have to recover the stone. The elf will kill us if we don't.'
'And the ratmen will kill us if we do,' said Franka.
'The executioner's joke,' laughed Gert, and put on a highbrow accent. 'Will you have the noose or the axe, m'lord?'
A rattle of pebbles made them look up. Creeping into the alley from both ends was a throng of mutants. Reiner grimaced. These were more deformed than the poor broken men they had fought yesterday. There were many with extra limbs or eyes. Some were only barely recognisable as human. One walked on stork-like legs that sprouted from his back, while his human legs dangled, shrivelled and useless below him. A little girl with an angelic face had tree-stump arms and legs, crusted in rocky scabs. A woman whose face had no features groped forward with hands that had eyes on each fingertip. A man limped forward on stubs of legs that ended in ever-bleeding orifices. He wore the remains of a Talabheim guardsman's uniform.
But no matter how pathetic the mutants appeared, their eyes shone with hunger and hatred, and they clutched bones, stones, clubs and swords in their twisted hands.
'Kill them!' said a gaunt giant with translucent skin. 'Kill them before they bring soldiers and kill us all.' Reiner could see the man's tongue working through his glassine teeth.
The mutants howled and charged. The Blackhearts turned out to face them, slashing wildly. Reiner chopped through the stork-man's spindly bird-shanks like they were matchwood and he fell. Hals buried his spear in a man whose entire body seemed one giant boil. He popped, splashing pus everywhere.
'Into the hole!' shrieked Rumpolt. 'Into the hole! It's our only chance!'
'No!' bellowed Reiner. 'And be trapped twixt these fiends and the rats? Are you mad?' He looked around, then pointed to the back of a looming tenement. 'Through that door!'
Gert threw his bulk against a rotten wood door, caving it in, and the Blackhe
arts backed through, keeping the horrors at bay with swift spear and sword work.
Inside was a filthy, plaster-walled hall, knee-deep in rubbish, which opened out into a small central court - little more than an air shaft - ringed at each floor by balconies that accessed the apartments. An open stairwell rose into the earth ceiling on the far side, a door to the street beyond it. More mutants goggled down at them from the upper floors before flinching back out of sight.
'Dieter.' called Reiner. 'Can you lead us back out of this hell hole?'
'Aye.' said the thief. 'If we can get through these... things.'
'Wait, captain.' said Franka. 'There's a wind coming down. Fresh air.'
Reiner raised his head and sniffed. Blowing down from the stairwell was a faint breeze with a distinct hint of outdoors on it.
'Up then!' he said.
They struggled across the court, elbowing through mounds of smashed furniture, broken crockery, rotting vegetables, rotting corpses, and pig bones. As the Blackhearts left the hallway the mutants spread out, clambering over the rubbish and trying to surround them. Reiner drove his sword through the neck - at least he thought it was its neck - of a thing whose entire skin was a carpet of writhing pink tendrils. Augustus speared a boy with batwing membranes between arms and ribs. Rumpolt tripped over the corpse of an old woman as he swung his handgun wildly by the barrel. Franka stabbed the transparent man in the groin and he fell back wailing and gushing blood that looked like water.
'Now up!' shouted Reiner. 'But 'ware above!'
He pushed Jergen forward and the swordsman took the lead, two steps at a time. The others ran up after him, Hals, Pavel and Augustus coming last and walking backwards, spears levelled.
A man with veins on the outside of his skin shouted up to the storeys above. 'Don't let 'em get away! They'll bring the guards! Stop them!'
Mutated hands reached through the rails to grab legs and ankles. Reiner and the others stomped and slashed, leaving severed hands and tentacles twitching in their wake. A cresting wave of horrors clambered and leaped over the banister. Gert caught one in mid air and hurled it down into his fellows, a length of railing crashing to the floor below in a rain of tinder and falling mutants. More came from above, but only in ones and twos, and Jergen's flashing sword quickly dispatched them.
