by Nathan Long
She crossed to the wardrobe and opened it. It was stuffed with beautiful dresses, coats and cloaks, while the floor of it was heaped with delicate little shoes. Ulrika swept these aside and looked at the wood panel beneath. It had neither seam nor latch. It looked entirely solid. She rapped on it. It even felt solid. She tried to extend her new senses and feel for the illusion that masked the lock, but could only see a few black shimmerings that vanished as soon as she looked at them. She didn’t yet have enough control over her witch sight to see through such things.
She sighed and looked towards the door. She could wait for the countess to return from comforting Herr Aldrich, but she was too impatient. She wanted to know now.
With a grunt she raised her hand, then struck down sharply with the heel of it. The panel cracked lengthwise. She struck it again and broke it in two. She pulled up the pieces and looked below it. In a shallow drawer lay a pile of letters, journals and jewellery. Ulrika was going to sift through them when she saw, right on the top, a small folded piece of vellum with ‘Frau Alfina Aldrich’ written upon it in a neat, clerky hand. She picked it up and unfolded it. Inside, in the same hand, was written a short note.
Five hundred gold crowns to the house with the black door near the corner of Messingstrasse and Hoff by midnight tomorrow, or you shall be revealed, just as your sisters were.
Ulrika stared at the note. Who would be stupid enough to attempt to blackmail a vampire? The answer came quickly. One who had the power to rip them limb from limb if they refused to pay. Another question followed. Why? Why would someone with such power stoop to simple blackmail?
Just then, Ulrika heard footsteps in the hall outside. She stood and closed the wardrobe. The door to the hall opened and Gabriella stepped in, then shut it behind her and stood there for a moment, her eyes closed.
‘Are you all right, mistress?’ asked Ulrika.
Gabriella shivered, then smiled wanly. ‘It was at least mercifully short, and I believe our position here is now secure.’ She squared her shoulders and stepped further into the room, tugging at her lacings. ‘And you, my dear? Are you recovered from the excitement of the evening?’
‘I am fine, thank you,’ said Ulrika. ‘But look, I’ve found something.’ She crossed eagerly to Gabriella and held out the note. ‘It was in the wardrobe.’
Gabriella took it and read it, then pursed her lips. ‘Blackmail? I would not have thought that likely. Still, it gives us something to go on.’ She looked up at Ulrika and smiled. ‘You have done well. Tomorrow, you shall go to this address and see what you can find. But for now–’ She sighed and turned away to continue undressing. ‘If you would be kind enough to draw some hot water, I am in desperate need of a bath.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BEHIND THE BLACK DOOR
Ulrika was donning her riding clothes the next night, in preparation for finding the address of the blackmail note, when there was a knock on the door to the countess’s apartments. Little Imma, up and around at last, answered it. It was the butler.
‘Inform your mistress that there is a Lord von Waldenhof to see her in the parlour,’ he said. His impassive face looked no different than it ever had, but still seemed to register disapproval.
Gabriella, who was writing at Alfina’s old writing desk, looked up sharply. She stood and crossed to the door, waving Imma away.
‘Is Herr Aldrich in?’ she asked.
‘No, m’lady,’ said the butler. ‘He is out on guild business.’
‘Then tell the gentleman I will come down,’ she said.
The butler’s lip twitched at that, but he merely bowed. ‘Yes, m’lady.’
Gabriella waited until Imma had closed the door before she cursed. ‘Damned idiot! What does he think he’s up to?’ She turned to Ulrika. ‘Finish dressing. I’ll need a chaperone to keep things proper.’
Ulrika hesitated. ‘Should I change into my dresses?’
Gabriella shook her head. ‘There is no time. I must get him out as quickly as possible. Fool!’
Ulrika quickly pulled on her doublet and belted on her sabre as Gabriella paced and muttered under her breath. At last she was ready and she and Gabriella exited the apartments and descended through the dark house.
Rodrik rose unsteadily from an armchair as Gabriella and Ulrika entered the parlour, a tastefully dull room with heavy woodwork and dour portraits of wealthy guildmasters glaring from the walls.
‘Mistress,’ Rodrik said, and bowed stiffly to Gabriella. Ulrika could smell the wine on him from the door.
‘This had better be of the utmost importance, sir knight,’ said Gabriella, stopping before him. ‘For I can think of no other reason why you would come to this place without being called for.’
Rodrik drew himself up and threw back his mane of blond hair. ‘It is indeed important, mistress,’ he said. ‘I have come to request that you move to other lodgings.’
Gabriella’s eyes widened. ‘That?’ she said. ‘You came to say only that? You endanger my standing here to make the same whining demand you have made too many times before? How dare you!’
‘I am your champion, m’lady!’ Rodrik said through closed teeth. ‘I am sworn to protect you! How may I do it if we are separated? If you are unable to find a way to bring me into this house, then you must find some other situation where I may be at your side!’’
‘Must?’ snapped Gabriella. ‘You say to me must? Am I sworn to obey you, sir, or are you sworn to obey me? Answer me!’
Rodrik flushed as he realised he had gone too far. ‘Forgive me, mistress, it is only an excess of concern that compels me to say these things.’
Gabriella glared at him for a moment, then sighed. ‘You are forgiven, but you must go, and quickly. I believe I have brought him around, but if you are discovered here before I speak of you to him, our host will baulk, thinking I plot behind his back. Wait only a little longer and all will be well.’
‘Tonight, then?’ asked Rodrik, sullen. ‘Tomorrow?’
Gabriella exploded. ‘When I say! At my will, and not a moment before! By the queen, I begin to wonder if it is not an excess of jealousy that compels you! Now, go! Leave us!’
Rodrik’s face turned crimson at this, but he only bowed. ‘Your servant, mistress,’ he said.
He started for the parlour door, but then Gabriella looked up and stepped after him. ‘Wait,’ she said.
He turned, his face pathetically hopeful. ‘Mistress?’
‘As you are here, I have orders for you,’ she said.
‘I am yours to command,’ Rodrik replied, bowing.
‘I am gratified to hear it,’ said Gabriella. ‘Go then to Hermione and tell her we have found proof that Mathilda is not behind the slaying of our sisters. A blackmail note was found, threatening to expose Alfina as a vampire if she didn’t pay a ransom. I am sending Ulrika to the address to see what she can find. Tell Hermione I hope to have news before morning.’
Rodrik stiffened. ‘You make me a messenger, and send this… girl-child to do a man’s work? Mistress, I am your knight! I should be finding this killer!’
Gabriella’s jaw clenched. ‘Did you not just say that you were mine to command?’ she asked.
‘Yes, mistress, but–’
‘But, what?’ the countess insisted. ‘Either you are, or you are not. Which is it?’
Rodrik hung his head, glaring at the floor and saying nothing. Ulrika looked on him with loathing. For all his knightly bearing, he was nothing but a petulant child. But was it his fault? It was Gabriella’s feeding that had made him this way. He was no different than Imma or Quentin. Drawing their blood made needy infants of them all.
Gabriella stepped up to Rodrik, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Dearest Rodrik. I understand your wish to serve me, but as before, the night’s work is not… knight’s work.’ She laughed lightly at her pun. ‘It is scout’s work, hunting and sniffing out trails. A
nd for that, Ulrika is a better choice.’ She nudged him playfully. ‘You don’t have her nose, now do you?’
Rodrik remained looking at the floor, refusing to rise to her humour, but at last he nodded. ‘I… I will go to Lady Hermione, mistress. Forgive me.’
And with that he strode to the door without a backwards glance.
Gabriella stared after him, pensive, then turned to Ulrika. ‘Take this as a lesson for when you have swains of your own,’ she said. ‘Their love turns quickly sour if they are too long denied a chance to prove their devotion.’ She frowned. ‘I shall have to give Rodrik a battle soon, to soothe his wounded pride.’ She beckoned for Ulrika to follow her. ‘Come. It is time you were going, too.’
Ulrika followed her through the house to the carriage yard door, then paused as Gabriella opened it for her.
‘Mistress,’ she said, troubled. ‘The blackmail note is not proof of Mathilda’s innocence. It might have been her who wrote it.’
Gabriella smiled and patted Ulrika’s cheek. ‘I know that. But I must tell Hermione something that will keep her claws in. I only hope she is not as smart as you.’ She pushed her towards the door. ‘Now go. And bring back some real proof.’
Ulrika bowed. ‘I will do my best, mistress.’
The intersection Ulrika was looking for was somewhere within the neighbourhood the locals called Shantytown. Ulrika remembered from stories Felix had told her that parts of the area had been burned to the ground during the skaven invasion that he and Gotrek had helped fight a few years previously. The scars were still visible. All around her as she walked through the narrow muddy streets, she saw houses and tenements that still bore telltale black smudges above their windows and doors, while other places were makeshift patchworks of new construction and old – brick layered below plaster layered below raw planks. Some buildings were hardly more than tents, flapping canvas stretched between the charred timbers of a collapsed front wall to try to keep out the bitter winter wind, and some were nothing but piles of blackened spars, untouched since the burning.
She found Messingstrasse first, and followed its winding course deeper into the grubby neighbourhood. It was a dirty dog-run of a street, heaped with rubbish and crawling with rats, and lined on both sides with disreputable-looking businesses and dingy taverns, from which spilled laughter and vulgar songs and the sad stench of impoverished humanity. A few streets on, she was surprised to find that she recognised some of the buildings and streets, though she would have sworn she’d never been there before. Then she remembered – her headlong flight across the city the morning she had raced the sun back to Aldrich’s house – it had started near here. The open sewer grate had been somewhere close by!
A thrill went up her spine. The sewer grate and the blackmail address in the same vicinity? Things were coming together.
Only two streets later, Messingstrasse crossed Hoff in a knee-deep mud-pit of an intersection, and she slowed her pace. Four- and five-storey tenements were jammed together shoulder to shoulder above the streets like gawkers crowding around an accident. It was dark below them, even though both moons were in the sky, for they rose so high the light could not find the ground.
Ulrika welcomed the dark. It would keep spying eyes from seeing her as she crept around looking for the building with the black door – unless, of course, they were eyes like her own, which was not impossible. Despite Mathilda’s protestations, the she-wolf could still be the killer, or could have sent some undead servant to do her dirty work. It could even, she supposed, be Madam Dagmar, hiding a savage, devious nature beneath her demure, deferential exterior, though somehow she doubted it.
Ulrika tilted her head at a door, trying to determine if it was black or grey or dark red. Though she could see perfectly well in the dark, night colours remained as muddy as they had when she had lived. She sighed and turned to look across the street. There it was! The door to the building two down from the intersection on Hoff was unquestionably black – shades darker than any other nearby. It also had a white ‘X’ painted on it.
Plague. The X was the sign of the plague. Ulrika shrank back instinctively, but then caught herself. What did she have to fear from human sickness? She was already dead. She started forwards, then paused again. Plague might be the least danger of the place. Best to have a look all around before walking straight in through the front door. She turned her steps and went down Messingstrasse until she came to the alley that ran behind the buildings that faced Hoff. These were all tenements, and had no yards, so the alley was a mere slot, with walls that rose up four storeys on either side, and blacker even than the intersection out front.
Ulrika crept down it as quietly as she could, eyes wide and ears cocked. She could hear voices and sense heartbeats all around her, and smell stale cooking and staler bodies. It was early evening, and the people inside the buildings were still at their leisure – singing, fighting, weeping and making love. But as she reached the back of the building with the black door the human sounds and smells faded into the distance.
She looked at the back door. It too was painted black with a white X, and the windows above it were all boarded up. She could smell the sickness that had been there, and the reek of bodies long ago dead and desiccated, as well as that of the vermin that had fed on them, but nothing else. The place was desolate, abandoned to disease and never reoccupied. She stepped to the door and put an ear to it, then froze. Not quite desolate. From somewhere within she could hear the sound of cautious movement, and a single beating heart.
She paused. She had little to fear from one living man, but still she should be cautious. It might be the fat little warlock again. He might vanish before she could grab him, or hurl some spell at her. She examined the door closely. The lock had been torn out, and it had been done recently. The splintered wood around the hole was still white and fresh. She pressed against it. It swung open, creaking on its hinges. She stopped it, then slipped through the gap and eased it shut behind her.
Her foot touched something as she turned to look around, and she found she was standing amidst a loose pile of withered corpses, all clustered around the door as if they had died clawing at it to get out. The poor beggars, she thought. Locked in to die.
She was in a narrow corridor that ran straight to the front of the building. It had several doors on either side and a stairwell halfway down on the left. At the far end, around the front door, she could see another clump of corpses, no more successful in escaping than their comrades at the back. She could also see fresh footprints in the years-thick layer of dust that lay over everything. There were several sets. Some in boots, some barefoot, and one that sent a thrill up her spine – a woman’s print, neat and small, with a pointed toe.
A rustle from above reminded her that one of those sets of prints was very fresh indeed. Whoever it was, they were one floor up, and moving cautiously. Ulrika listened harder. The steps, though stealthy, were heavy, and had the dull thud of boots. A man, then, and not small. She drew her sabre and crept forwards as lightly as she could. The boards creaked anyway, but only faintly. The sounds and the heartbeat above her did not signal any alarm.
The doors she passed on her way to the stairs were open, and revealed the final purpose of the house. Each small room was lined with rows of low cots, and on every cot, wrapped in dirty sheets, lay a body that was now more skeleton than corpse. Between the cots, and collapsed on top of them, were other bodies, wearing the white robes of sisters of Shallya, who had apparently succumbed to the plague while still at their duties. Ulrika wondered if they had volunteered to be locked in with their patients, or had fallen ill while treating others and been abandoned like the rest. She didn’t know, but found herself touched by the nobility of women who would continue to help others after they had been condemned to the same death.
She turned into the stairwell and looked up towards the first floor. Yellow light and moving shadows on the walls told her that the pers
on above had a lantern. Then the light cut off sharply and the footsteps grew muffled. The person had entered a room. Good.
Ulrika cat-footed it swiftly up the stairs, keeping close to the wall where the treads would creak least, and gained the landing. A door led into the first-floor corridor, while the stairs continued to zigzag up to further floors. She crouched at the corridor door, listening.
The footsteps were getting louder again, and the corridor getting brighter. Her quarry was exiting the room he had gone into. She edged back into the darkness of the stairwell, waiting for him to go into another room, but he did not. The light swung closer. He was coming down the corridor.
She edged back further, stepping up onto the first step of the flight that rose to the next floor, and gripped her sabre tightly, prepared to spring.
The light and the footsteps paused just outside the stairwell, and Ulrika could hear the man turning this way and that, as if weighing options. She inhaled as his scent came to her, then froze as she recognised it. The templar witch hunter! The one from the sewers!
She took an involuntary step back. What should she do? Should she flee? Should she kill him? Should she question him?
The witch hunter stepped into the stairwell, raising his lantern to start up the next flight, then stopped dead, staring at Ulrika, who crouched upon them.
‘You,’ he said.
Ulrika swallowed. ‘Templar Holmann,’ she said. ‘We meet again.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE RAVEN AND THE ROSE
Holmann stepped back warily, a frown furrowing his forehead. ‘What are you doing here, Fraulein Magdova?’ he asked.
Ulrika stood and lowered her sword. It seemed she wasn’t going to kill him. ‘The same as you, I would think,’ she said. ‘Following up on our hunt from the other night.’
He continued frowning. ‘I find you once again in the dark without a lantern,’ he said. ‘It is most strange.’
Ulrika’s hand clenched around her sabre. ‘I… I had a candle, but I snuffed it when I saw your light. I thought you might be a villain, and didn’t want to give away my position.’ She smiled. ‘I… I was about to jump you just now.’
