[Angelika Fleischer 02] - Sacred Flesh

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  “I should have gone down for him,” Manfried said, referring to Father Eugen.

  “Sigisbold and Volkert have gone down to receive him. They’ll rope themselves to him and get him up fine.”

  “We should spar,” Manfried said to his underling.

  “Wait,” the acolyte replied. “I think I hear them.”

  Manfried walked quickly to the plateau’s edge. Two more of his men stood at the top of the steps, ready to repel uninvited visitors. They had never been called on to do so: the real work of prevention was done by a team of men below. Manfried saw his men straighten their postures as he approached and was pleased. He treated them to a benevolent smile.

  Looking down onto the precarious steps, he saw Eugen, roped between dark-eyed Sigisbold and blond-haired Volkert. Eugen’s big bony face widened with pleasure. He waved up, huffing out a jolly greeting, rendered inaudible by his lack of breath. Sweat dotted his broad forehead, his wide, thick nose and his jutting chin. Further perspiration poured down from Eugen’s dark mass of wiry curls. “Ho, Manfried!” he said, pausing to refill his lungs and crack his knuckles. “When our colleagues decide to exile a man, they don’t do it in half measures, do they?”

  Manfried frowned. Eugen sometimes spoke too freely in front of the rank and file. “I see the climb has not dampened your humour,” he said, doing his best to seem unperturbed.

  Sigisbold stepped up onto the lip of the plateau and turned to hold a hand out to Eugen, who grabbed it firmly and allowed himself to be hauled up onto level ground. He tottered dizzily over to Manfried, arms out. Manfried embraced him. He clapped Eugen on the back. Eugen returned the gesture with a weakened attempt at a bear hug.

  “My head swims,” he said. “It’s like I am back at school, drunk on ale again.”

  Manfried put his arm around Eugen, steadying him. “Shallya is merciful, but at this shrine she parcels out air like a miser’s gold.”

  “I can see why one might have visions here. Me, I’m having a vision of a chair. Soft and well-stuffed.”

  Manfried ushered him into the courtyard. “A soft chair will have to remain a vision. The sisters’ taste in furnishings ranges from austere to punishing.”

  Eugen stopped in the middle of the courtyard to breathe and to take in the sight of the abbey. “So this is the famous abbey at Heiligerberg,” he said, moving his eyebrows up as far as they would go. They resembled blackened caterpillars.

  “Not so grand as one would imagine, is it?” Manfried said.

  “It doesn’t need to be. Look at those,” said the older man, gesturing around him to the mountain spires surrounding Heiligerberg. “The wise architect never competes with nature.”

  “You’re quoting my grandfather to me, aren’t you?”

  Eugen smiled.

  Manfried looked back to confirm that his men had dropped out of earshot. “So how did you fare?” he asked.

  Eugen shook his head. “It is difficult.”

  Manfried clenched his fists. “Those miserable sons of bastards. They know it is I who should preside over that cathedral.”

  Father Eugen patted Manfried’s shoulder. “Your grandfather was my mentor, and your father, my dearest friend. Daily I pray for you to realise their great project.”

  Manfried came to an iron bound wooden door. He paused with his fingers wrapped around the handle. “But I must learn to conceal my sense of entitlement. I know, I know. I was foolish. Every day I spend in this frozen hole, I’m reminded of my folly. Acutely so.” Manfried wrenched the door open and ushered Eugen into the tiny cell he’d claimed as his working and living quarters. He left the door open, to let the light in. Mother Elsbeth and her grimy sisters might have preferred to creep about in the dark, but he wanted all the brightness he could get. He reached for a badly made wooden chair and set it out for Eugen to sit on. Eugen instead stepped to the tiny, mildew-spotted panel of a window and gazed out at the mountains. Manfried perched on the edge of his hard and narrow bed. “I run through my litany of obvious mistakes and wonder how I could possibly have made them. I was arrogant. I failed to cultivate allies. I would not flatter, or bob my head, or humour their stupidities.”

  “Careful. You don’t want to sound like Luthor Huss.”

  Huss! The very name set Manfried’s chest to tightening. It was the name that had heralded his downfall. “Don’t tell me that contemptible insect remains uncrushed.”

  “Afraid so. He’s making worse trouble every day. His followers now openly proclaim their allegiance to him. They come to services and shout out catcalls during sermon. Go into the streets and you’ll hear ordinary folk talk of the schism in the Sigmarite church.”

  Luthor Huss was an apostate, a renegade priest who, after arriving at the sudden and startling conclusion that self-interest and money played a role in politics, had gone on to perpetrate an escalating series of outrages against the church of Sigmar, culminating in a symbolic attack on the new head of the church, the Grand Theogonist, Esmer. He’d smashed down the doors of the cathedral at Nuln and nailed an effigy of the holy father into their shattered remnants. Now he wandered the countryside, smiting the minions of Chaos, inveighing against the alleged corruption of the church fathers, and accruing to his side a raggedy band of followers, every one of them a frothy-mouthed flagellant or screaming heretic.

  Manfried Haupt had never been within a hundred miles of Huss, but the man had laid him low just the same. The archlector of Averheim had demanded that his priests convene to draft a condemnation of Huss and all his Hussites, which each of them were to sign. Manfried had merely proposed that certain incendiary phrases in the document be reduced slightly in temperature. Let’s not, he’d argued, cause hard feelings among those elements of the lay folk who ignorantly harboured sympathies for the apostate. Instead, let’s win them back with openness and understanding.

  Manfried could still hear the naive words spilling from his mouth. Idiotically, he’d told those grey-faced men the truth: that Huss posed a greater threat than they realised. He’d even gone so far as to proclaim that certain grievances against the church, exploited so dangerously by the megalomaniac Huss, were real, and needed to be remedied.

  The grim silence that followed his speech still haunted his nightmares. He might as well have pulled out a second effigy and nailed it to the archlector’s forehead. All the priests he’d slighted over the years, all the envious seat-fillers who feared his ambition and hated his talent, saw their opportunity—and seized it. They went to the archlector. They whispered into his ear. They twisted Manfried’s words. Before he knew it, he’d been tarred, if not as an outright supporter of Huss, as an appeaser. And when the Grand Theogonist issued a bill demanding that the leaders of the church search out and discipline potential schismatics within their ranks, the pointing finger fell on him. The lector sent him from Averheim to conduct a roving ministry in the outlands. Manfried would always remember the self-satisfied look on the lector’s face as the new assignment was meted out to him.

  Manfried stood and opened a tiny chest of drawers, out of which he plucked a bottle of fine Estalian brandy. “One of my men went down among the pilgrims and acquired this. I saved it to drink with you, Eugen.” With a pocketknife, he sawed away the layer of hard wax that covered the cork.

  Eugen rubbed his hands together in sublime anticipation. “I wish I’d done more to deserve it. I spoke to Father Drechsler. He says some of those who spoke against you now regret the severity of your punishment.”

  Manfried poured the brandy into a clay cup and handed it to Eugen. “They’re finding it hard to wring my donors’ purses, I bet.”

  “Yes, offerings are down. The pews aren’t so full, either, now that you’re no longer giving sermons.” Eugen sipped luxuriously from the cup, closing his eyes and breathing deep, to show his appreciation of the vintage. “And with Chaos nibbling at the Empire’s edges, the city defenders have been complaining about your absence. They want you there to help lead the fight if hordes of beastmen
come pouring into the city, lusting for blood. It doesn’t help that you took all of the toughest young warrior priests with you when you went.”

  “Then we have leverage.”

  “You’d think so, but all anyone can think about is the schism. I was sure Drechsler would stand up for you, but even the suggestion of it terrified him. The archlector is looking for more scapegoats to present to the Grand Theogonist. They fear they’ll end up here in exile, too, if they speak on your behalf. Or worse. There might be priest-burnings before this mess sorts itself out.”

  Manfried put cup to lip and disinterestedly sampled the brandy. “And what of these Chaos manifestations?”

  “The city’s abuzz with omens and rumours. The chapel at Friedendorf collapsed in a billow of choking green smoke; cultists are to blame, they say. A young girl, distantly related to the elector, vanished from her family’s manor, and was found on the street a week later, bled dry.”

  “I heard the story from a pilgrim but said it couldn’t be true.”

  Eugen bent close and spoke quietly. “The worst part of it was —the girl was still alive. With not a drop of blood in her. She spoke in a terrible tongue, and thrashed and writhed for days before expiring. Oh, and beastmen were found inside the main grain warehouse. Forty tons of tainted grain had to be taken outside the city walls and set ablaze.”

  “I should be back in the city fighting this,” Manfried intoned. “What of the war?”

  “Chaos armies gather in the north. News is never reliable when it comes from so far away, but word is that they’re on the verge of overrunning Kislev. Or perhaps they’ve taken Kislev already and are already on the Empire’s northern borders.”

  “Maybe I should take my men up there, to join the fight. If I came back to Averheim dripping with martial glory, the lector wouldn’t dare deny me.”

  “We’re on the opposite end of the Empire. To get there would take months.”

  Manfried slammed his cup on the side table. “There must be something!” Eugen jumped back, startled. Manfried sat back on his bed, burying his head in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I’m losing my mind in this place.”

  Eugen sat beside him. “We’ll find a way, Manfried.”

  “Sigmar’s testing my strength, isn’t he?”

  “That could be it,” he said.

  Manfried stood. He grabbed his hammer. “Let’s go out and you can watch me spar with some of the boys.”

  “If we’re going back out in that cold, I need some more of this.” Eugen reached for the brandy, filling his cup to the brim.

  “That’s the thing of it,” said Manfried. “Sigmar’s testing me and I must be patient. He’ll show me the way.” Leaving his cell, he smacked the door with his hammer. Eugen paused to look at the dent, took a careful sip of brandy and followed his protégé across the courtyard, holding the cup at arm’s length, so as not to spill any.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Angelika led the group along a winding trail where two ridges of exposed grey rock met. The ground was uneven and hard on the feet, even Angelika had difficulty navigating it. The ridges caught the wind, squeezed it until it howled, before blasting it into the travellers’ faces. Angelika turned her back to the wind and saw her charges struggling behind her, grit whipped down from the rocks and into their squinting eyes. They now struggled along with little complaint; Angelika reckoned that she’d finally broken their spirits. A day and a half had passed since they’d buried Jurg Muller. Altman’s murderer had done nothing to reveal himself.

  A laboured panting rose up just behind her. She turned to see Waldemar Silber, the summoner, picking his way through the rocks, an expression of pressing business on his elevated brow. She increased her pace just a little. He called out to her.

  “Yes?” she said, her gaze still fixed on the treacherous pathway of rock before her.

  “I would have a word with you!” Silber’s tone had a peremptory note of command in it.

  “Yes?” she repeated, easing back to her previous speed.

  “Please wait up,” he said.

  Satisfied that she’d shown him who was in charge, she stopped just long enough for him to come up alongside her. The rock sloped down wickedly, and she kept firm possession of the flattest portion of it. Waldemar had to walk on angled ankles as she pressed on.

  “Yes?” said Angelika.

  “Hurm,” said Waldemar. “Yes.”

  Angelika could have put him at his ease by giving him an opening to speak. She could have said, “What is it, Waldemar?” Even a blunt, “Out with it, Waldemar, I haven’t got all day,” would have got him started. She did not, however, wish to encourage him.

  “Hurm,” said Waldemar.

  She skipped sideways to avoid a slick application of bright green moss on the stone beneath her feet.

  “The point of the matter is this.” Waldemar paused. “Or rather… because it is said with your best interests squarely at heart, you must agree not to be offended by anything I am about to say.”

  “Now why on earth would I do that?”

  “Hurm,” said the summoner. “You are a wary creature, I’ll say that.”

  “How charmingly condescending of you, Waldemar.”

  He sputtered and seemed to lick a bitter taste off his lips. “The nub of the question is as follows. You are not the sort of woman I am accustomed to meeting.”

  “Your social circle is not packed full with corpse robbers?”

  “That statement encapsulates the issue in the shell of a nut. You clearly possess bravery, resourcefulness, and, indeed, physical magnetism, yet…”

  Angelika blew a big disgusted breath of air through her teeth.

  “Are you proposing to me, Waldemar Silber?”

  His fine-soled shoes hit a patch of slippery moss; he jittered and nervously stopped himself from toppling headlong into the rocks. His face was still flushed deep crimson long after he’d recovered his balance. “You mock me, fraulein,” he finally said.

  “Yet you wonder what a creature of my obvious charms is doing, living on her own out in the wilderness, touching corpses, pawning jewellery, and performing all manner of other unwomanly acts?”

  “You have cultivated a scathing wit, Angelika Fleischer, to protect yourself against the villains you meet. But I, Angelika Fleischer, am no villain. Far from it.” He reached out to clomp his hand onto her shoulder, but she evaded his gesture.

  “You are proposing to me.”

  “I would not impose on you that way, after so brief an acquaintance. But it is clear that you need protection. The shielding embrace of a respectable home. An income, so that you need never again… pollute yourself in this appalling way.”

  Angelika laughed. “You want me as your mistress?”

  “Perhaps a more debonair man could express it more deftly. Negotiations of the heart have never progressed smoothly for me.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “You repeat your mockery, but I will ignore it. Our journey together will be short—there is little time to squander on preliminaries. You want jewels? Jewels I can give you. Gold? It is but a petty thing. Safety? Any new situation would be safer than this.” He looked back at the others—Prioress Heilwig in particular. Her attention was devoted entirely to her struggle to remain upright on the uneven rocks. He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs to bursting.

  “In your position,” he said, “you’d be a fool to turn me away.” He leaned in close to her. “Before I laid eyes on you, I thought there’d never be another woman to bring heat to my loins.” He snaked his arm out to snatch her wrist. She applied his momentum against him, taking his arm with both of her hands, thrusting it out to knock him off balance. At the same time she brought him to his knees with his elbow wrapped around his throat. She stood behind him, choking him with his own arm. Franziskus sprinted toward her, but she signalled him to stay. She had the situation well in hand.

  She hissed into the summoner’s ear. “The only thing I might be
planning to bring to your loins is the toe of my boot.” She let that one sink in for a while, then added, “Is that ambiguous to you in any way?”

  Waldemar did his best to shake his head. She let him go. He tumbled to the rocks; she kept on going. Silber waited until several pilgrims had passed him by—none of them looking him in the face—before getting up and slapping dirt from his trousers. He had deserved this. He had been his usual clumsy self—worse, in fact. He would have to improve his discourse immeasurably, if he wanted to tame this particular tigress.

  The trail got tougher. Angelika checked on the pilgrims behind her. The prioress had slipped down the sloping trail, twisting her ankle again. Devorah caught her before she fell. The group stopped to gather around Heilwig. The physic pushed his way through them. Heilwig, held by Devorah and Gerhold the friar, stuck her foot out for Rausch to examine.

  Franziskus left his position at the rear of the procession to confer with Angelika. She peered up into the mountains. She’d been hoping to speed the pilgrims to their destination by taking a hard but relatively direct route. Now she’d have to admit she was wrong. She felt a roiling in her gut.

  Angelika suppressed the urge to argue and picked her way through the rocks to join the others. She gave them a choice—continue on through this difficult route, or to take a longer journey through less punishing terrain. The easier way won quick support.