[Warhammer] - The Laughter of Dark Gods

by David Pringle (ed) - (ebook by Undead)

  “Absolutely. Counterfeit. And to think of all I’ve done for you, the times I’ve…”

  “Shut up, Harald.” He spilled the contents of his purse across the nearest tabletop, and pulled his dagger, his hands trembling. An ominous foreboding tightened in the pit of his stomach as he drew the blade across the first coin.

  “Lead! The bitch!” The coins rattled and rolled beneath the blade as he stabbed and slashed at them, scarring the wood beneath. Every single one of them was counterfeit. After a while Harald stopped whining, and patted him sorrowfully on the shoulder.

  “We’ve been done, boy. Best just to face it.”

  “Not yet we haven’t.” By now Warble was riding on a wave of incandescent rage. “I still know where to find her.” He paused, counting to ten like his mother used to tell him to do. “It didn’t help. And I want you to find someone else for me.”

  Trailing Astra from the Swan was a snap. The fog seemed denser than ever, and as night fell the thoroughfares faded into shadow-sketched phantoms. Warble felt he could almost have walked alongside her undetected, but an intimate knowledge of the local geography meant he didn’t have to. Instead he hung back, doubling through gaps between buildings most folk didn’t even know were there, getting close enough to make sure it was still Astra ahead of him once every minute or so. Before long he tasted salt in the air, cutting through the usual city odours of rotting waste and bad cooking.

  The sandbar was one of the northernmost points of the city, facing the ocean; as Marienburg grew, commerce had shifted to the larger, more sheltered wharves further upstream, and the older, shallower basins had been allowed to silt up. Now hardly anyone used them, except for the deep-sea fishermen and a handful of smugglers.

  As the ill-matched pair moved further into the region of mouldering dereliction and signs of habitation became scarcer, Warble began to move a little more cautiously. He lost sight of Astra several times, but the tapping of her boot-heels gave her position away as effectively as if she’d been blowing a foghorn.

  The rustle of his own bare soles against the cobbles was almost inaudible, but he strained his ears anyway; the fog carried sound in strange directions, and the abandoned warehouses around them created peculiar echoes. Several times he stopped dead, listening, convinced he could hear other footsteps, until reason reasserted itself and allowed him to believe it was merely the sound of Astra’s progress rebounding from the rotting timber walls.

  A moment later, he froze. Astra was talking to someone, out of sight behind a crumbling wall, through the chinks of which a flicker of lamplight was visible. The voices were low, the words inaudible, but the cadence was familiar. After a moment he recognized the tones of the Norse sailor he’d met at the Apron.

  Negotiations didn’t seem to be going too well. The voices got louder for a moment, then the conversation ended in a single, choked-off scream.

  Warble edged forward, his palms tingling, and felt something warm, wet and sticky underfoot.

  The old wharf was deserted now, but he could hear the familiar rhythm of Astra’s boot-heels receding in the night. The sailor was lying a few feet away, steaming gently, so the halfling picked up the lantern and trotted across to examine him.

  One look was enough to make him wish he hadn’t. The man was very dead indeed, most of his intestines straggling across the cobbles.

  Warble dropped the lantern, which shattered on the ground, and spent an interesting minute or two trying to hold onto his lunch. Then he listened hard, locating the distant footsteps, and set out after the delinquent elf.

  He closed on her rapidly, his footfalls padding almost silently, while Astra’s grew louder with each successive step. Suddenly she stopped.

  Warble froze, certain she’d heard him. But he was wrong. Her voice was raised and for a moment was drowned entirely by a familiar gurgling laugh.

  The halfling edged forward again, keeping close to the shadows, feeling a peculiar sense of déjà vu. Gradually the scene ahead began to resolve itself.

  The light appeared first, brighter than the sailor’s lantern, seeping through the fog like oil in water. Gradually, as he moved closer, it sketched the outline of a derelict warehouse, leaking from the missing planks in the roof and walls. One of the gaps was about head height; Warble flattened himself against the rotting timbers, and peered through it.

  The building was well lit, but filthy, hissing torches hanging from brackets in the walls. Strange designs had been daubed on the woodwork in brownish red paint, and an intricately carved wooden chest stood on a raised dais at the far end. At first he thought the stringy things hanging from the beams were ropes of some kind; then he got a good look at them, realized the paint wasn’t paint, and this time his last meal won the race to escape before he could catch it. He was in deeper trouble than he’d ever thought possible.

  Everyone on the streets had heard stories of a secret temple to Khaine hidden somewhere in the city and, like Warble, had laughed at the absurdity of the idea even as they eyed the shadows with sudden unease. Now he knew the ridiculous rumours were true; but whether he’d survive to tell anyone was in serious doubt. Gripped by a horrified fascination, unable to tear himself away, he watched the drama unfolding within.

  Astra and Ferrara were arguing fiercely; encumbered by the statuette, she’d been unable to draw a weapon. Ferrara stood beyond her reach, a cocked crossbow in his hand, while his tiny companion sidled forward to take the rat. He’d discarded the hat, to reveal high, pointed ears embellished with gaudy ribbons.

  Under any other circumstances the sight of a clean snotling, let alone one so fancifully dressed, would have astonished Warble; tonight it seemed perfectly reasonable.

  “Believe me, dear lady, we’ve no wish to kill you. Certainly not here, har har, that would really go against the grain, would it not? But you must appreciate, we simply can’t allow you to use the stone against us.”

  “I’ll bathe in your blood, Ferrara. I’ll make your death seem an eternity of torment.” The words hissed from her hate-contorted visage, so strangled by rage they were barely coherent.

  Ferrara laughed.

  “Why, my dear Astra. I never knew you cared.” He blew her an exaggerated kiss. “And they say the witch elves have no sense of fun.”

  Screaming with a berserker’s fury, Astra sprang forward, swinging the statuette like a club. It struck the little snotling on the side of the head. With a sickening crunch of shattered bone, the diminutive catamite flew across the floor of the temple.

  “Leppo!” Ferrara fired as he screamed, the bolt catching Astra in mid-charge. She spun with the impact, the fletchings protruding from her chest, and staggered towards the altar. Ferrara flung the weapon after her and ran to the inert body of his companion. Large, greasy tears were running down his face as he cradled the tiny form. “You’ve killed him!”

  Astra said nothing, weaving from side to side as though drunk, intent only on reaching her goal. A few paces from it she began chanting, then swung the statue by the head to shatter the red stone against the surface of the altar.

  Ferrara was chanting too by now, his face suffused with gleeful malice, and the thunderstorm tension of magic began to crackle in the air.

  It was then that Warble became aware of the scuffling of footsteps around him in the fog, and rolled for cover into the shadows. Faint figures loomed in the mist, running for the building, their outlines distorted by the enveloping vapours. At least, that’s what Warble preferred to think. From the direction of the main doors came the clash of weapons, and the inchoate shrieking of damned souls locked in mortal combat. Of course, he thought numbly, neither antagonist would have gone to the temple alone.

  Mrs. Warble hadn’t raised any stupid kids, apart from his brother Tinfang, who was dead; Warble was up and running as soon as the coast was clear. Propelled by blind panic, he never noticed what direction he was taking, just so long as it was away from the warehouse, and had only the vaguest idea of how long it was before he col
lided with something warm and yielding that swore at him.

  “Sam! In here!” Lisette dragged him into a side alley, an instant before the night erupted around them. An eldritch glow suffused the darkness, punching through the muffling fog, and a demented howling rose to tear at the very roots of his sanity.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

  “I thought you might need some help.” Lisette held out a small flask. Warble gulped at it, finding a Bretonnian brandy that should really have been savoured under happier circumstances. “I made some enquiries. Your lady friend was lying about a theft from the Swan.”

  “I know,” he said. “Thanks for the drink.”

  “Pay me back later. So I had her followed, and asked some more questions. She’s a dark elf.”

  “I know that too. That’s a temple of Khaine back there.”

  “Really?” Her eyebrow twitched. “That explains a lot.” Warble didn’t ask what; if she wanted him to know, she’d have told him.

  “The whole rat thing was a blind,” he said. “Everyone was after the base it was mounted on. It’s some kind of magic stone.”

  “A bloodstone. Someone like your lady friend can use it to summon daemons.” Lisette nodded. “Go on.”

  “The fat man seemed to know what it was. He was trying to stop her from getting her hands on it.”

  “He would. There’s another cult active in the city. We don’t know much about it, but they’re just as bad for business. It seems they’re in some sort of feud with the Khaine one.”

  “They won’t be active for much longer,” Warble said. “They’re tearing each other to pieces back there.”

  “Good.” Gradually the magical light faded, to be replaced by the familiar red and yellow flicker of leaping flames. “I think we’ll let Captain Roland have the credit for mopping them up.”

  “What?” Warble turned, listening to the clatter of approaching footsteps, and when he glanced back she was gone.

  “Sam.” Gil appeared at the mouth of the alley a moment later, a squad of his watchmen behind him. Harald was somewhere in the middle of the group, clutching a battered pike from his shop, and puffing energetically. “We missed you at the Swan. What’s happening?”

  “It’s a long story.” Warble took another pull of Lisette’s brandy, and sagged gratefully against the supporting wall. “And I bet you thirty lead crowns you don’t believe a word of it.”

  Scanning, formatting and basic

  proofing by Undead.