“Perhaps he wasn’t the target after all,” Johansen said.
Grenner looked at him with eyes smarting from the cold. “If he wasn’t then it stops being our problem.”
“He left the inn. Perhaps he was in on the scheme.” Johansen paused, peering ahead. “Hang on. They’ve started early.”
In the Konigplatz market-traders were setting out their stalls, but Johansen’s attention was on the crew of workmen among the emperors’ statues at the centre of the square. He tapped Grenner on the shoulder, but Grenner was looking elsewhere.
“You go. Shout if you need help,” he said and walked away. Johansen shrugged, rubbed tiredness from his eyes and walked across to the crew of masons and apprentices, working with shovels and picks, digging a trench among the forest of plinths. One stopped and watched him approach, arms folded, his thin red hair a dash of colour against his sombre clothes and the dullness of the morning.
“Cold day for working,” Johansen said, raising a hand in greeting. “You the foreman?”
The man nodded, lips tight and eyes guarded.
“You’re starting early,” Johansen said.
“Aye.” The mason’s northern accent was thick as porridge. “Work’s got to be done by t’night.”
Johansen nodded, looking at the work crew. “Are all your men members of the stonemasons’ guild?” he asked. “They don’t like it when—”
“Affiliate members. From Wolfenburg,” the foreman said. “It’s rush work. Base subsidence. No local masons to do it.”
“You’ve got a guild certificate?”
“Not here.” The foreman turned his head, his eyes suspicious. “Who’s asking? Are you from the masons? Checking on us?”
“Just a concerned citizen,” Johansen said, and walked across the square to where Grenner was.
Grenner rapped the side of the cask on the cart. “All the way from Bretonnia?” he asked. “Why? We make wine in the Empire.”
The diminutive wineseller looked mock-shocked. “Not like zis!” he exclaimed. “Zis, she is grown under zer sun of Bordeleaux, the vines viz no frost, no fungus—ze finest wine, rich and complex, a subtle bouquet viz afternotes of cherries and oak…”
Grenner held up a hand to stop him. “I meant transport’s expensive. How can you make money on one cartload?”
The Bretonnian shook his head sadly. “Monsieur, I do not know eizzer. My buyer, who supplies ze houses of Bretonnians in Altdorf, I find ’e is dead of the plague since four months. I cannot find my customers, so I must sell in ze market like a—a—a peddler.”
Grenner nodded, studying the casks, turning thoughts over in his mind. There had been trouble with Bretonnians the summer before, and rumours said there might be more trouble next year. Not to mention the business with Schmidt. He thumped one of the barrels and it shook solidly. “Open it. I want to check.”
“Check?” The merchant looked puzzled. “Check what?”
“That there’s wine inside, not something else.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Just open it.”
“But zat would ruin ze wine!” The short man’s hands were raised beseechingly. There was silence for a moment. “Maybe I draw you off a cup?” he suggested.
Grenner shrugged acceptance, and the Bretonnian filled a metal beaker from the spigot at the base of the barrel. The liquid flowed deep and red. Grenner took it, sniffed and swigged, looked contemplative.
“Well?” The little man’s eyebrows raised into questions.
Grenner looked at him. “You say this is the finest wine in Bretonnia?”
“Oui, m’sieur.”
“Stick to making cheese and seducing married women. This stuffs swill.” He put down the cup, to greet Johansen as he walked over. “You get anything?”
“Non-guild workers doing repairs.”
“Suspicious?”
Johansen scratched his unshaved chin. “Maybe. If the work’s urgent there may be no guild men available, given the time of year. But the order must have come from the city council, and the local guilds get all those contracts.”
Grenner pushed open the door of the Black Goat. “The Konigsplatz will be packed with people this evening. If the statues are unsafe and there aren’t any local masons to do the work, then…” He let the sentence trail off as he slumped into a seat by his regular table. Johansen pulled out a chair and sat.
“What did you get?” he asked.
“Bretonnian with a flimsy story, selling what he said was expensive wine from a market-stall. Big barrels of the stuff.”
“Barrels, right. Did you see the wine?”
“I tried a cup. It tasted like fruity tar. Ho, Frau Kolner, how are you this morning?”
“As concerned about the size of your bar-bill as I was last night,” the landlady said. “Don’t settle yourselves. I have a letter for you.”
Johansen reached out but she gave it to Grenner, who smirked at his colleague as he snapped the seal and unfolded the paper.
“What is it?” Johansen asked.
“Hoffmann. He guessed we’d come back here. Breakfast is cancelled, we’re to get back on the streets. Hunger sharpens the mind, he says.”
“Sarcastic old sod.”
“There’s more. We report to him at noon. Alchemics should have analysed the explosion by then. And meanwhile he’s got us an interview with the Elector.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“So much for your appointment with your tailor.” Johansen swiped a half-finished mug of beer from a neighbouring table and swigged it. “Let’s go.”
Grand Prince Valmir von Raukov, the Elector Count of Ostland, sat upright in his four-poster bed. A tray lay beside him, hot breakfast scents rising from it: sausages and kippers. In a chair on the other side of the bed a tall man in the grand prince’s house uniform sat, not saying a word, his hand never leaving the pommel of his sword.
“Can you think of anyone who’d want you dead, your Highness?” Grenner asked from where he and Johansen stood at the end of the bed. He knew how scruffy and tired they must look compared to the opulence of the prince’s bedroom. They ought to be in dress uniform, scrubbed and shaved, answering questions instead of asking them.
“Of course people want me dead. I’m an Elector, for Sigmar’s sake. It’s not my job to be liked. You know that.” The prince regarded them from under bushy eyebrows and chewed bacon. “No, nobody has threatened me lately beyond the usual cranks—correct, Alexis?” The man in the chair nodded, his eyes never leaving the Palisades officers.
“So you know of no reason why—”
The prince raised a hand. “Captain, if I knew anything useful I would tell you now. I’m not oblivious to danger, I have people like Alexis who monitor my enemies’ activities. If we knew anything we would tell you.”
Grenner stared ahead, but in the corner of his eye he saw Alexis move, shifting position. Perhaps, he thought, he’s uncomfortable at his master’s words. He wanted to ask more, but knew better than to pose heavy-handed questions of an Elector.
“Perhaps,” the prince continued, “what you should be asking is why the Seven Stars was blown up if I wasn’t there? The assassins would surely have checked I was in the building before they set the fuse.”
“Why would they have thought you would be there?” Grenner asked.
“Because that is my habit,” the prince said. “I usually stay till morning. Last night I returned home early because I received word my wife was ill. Yet they blew up the inn all the same. Captain, either I wasn’t the intended victim, or the bombers had an informant who misled them, by accident or on purpose. There’s the next piece of your puzzle.”
“Thank you, your highness. We’ll look into it.” Grenner felt disdain but masked it. He hated it when officials did his job for him, particularly when they did it better. “Can you tell us who your companion was?”
The prince shrugged. “Her privacy makes few odds now. Her name was Anasta
sia Kuster. I met her in the Street of a Hundred Taverns a few months ago, when I was—I was dressed plainly, let’s just say that. She’s an honest girl, works in a glove-shop. A little scatterbrained but works hard. She’s originally from Ostland, a northerner like myself. When I’m in Altdorf we meet once or twice a week.”
“Might your wife have had something to do with the explosion?”
“My wife?” The prince snorted. “If I die, she loses everything: her title, her status, her palace, her income, the lot. She’s terrified by the thought of my death. Her relatives too, they all ride on my coat-tails. None of them would do anything to harm me.”
“Hell has no fury like a scorned woman,” Johansen said.
“Scorned? She doesn’t love me. We married because it was politically advantageous to link our families. If I want warmth and emotion and life in a woman, I’ll go to—I went to Anastasia.”
“Yet you returned home because your wife was ill,” Grenner said.
“She is heavy with my son. It would not have been seemly for the boy to be born while I was away from the house.”
“Are you sure it’s a boy, your highness?” Johansen said. Grenner flinched. It was a flip remark, inappropriate and irreverent. Such things were dangerous.
The prince regarded them from under heavy brows, and did not smile. “It had better be.” His tone was cold.
Grenner’s heart dropped. Lower ranks should know their place, and Johansen’s remark had crossed the line. They’d get no more useful information here. “Thank you for your time, your highness,” he said. “We will report anything—”
The prince’s cough stopped him. “Not so fast. I have questions too. Were any bodies recovered?”
Grenner snapped back to attention. “No, sir. The place was an inferno. It’s almost certain that everybody was cremated in seconds.”
“Not everybody,” the prince said. “The inn’s cellarman survived.”
“What?” said Grenner. “We weren’t told.”
Across the room, Alexis sat forward in his chair. “Hans Kellerman was in the stableyard,” he said. “The blast blew him twenty feet and broke his every bone.”
“He’s alive?” Johansen asked.
“No, he died three hours later. But I was able to ask him some questions first. The Shallyan priests had given him herbs to numb the pain and he was almost coherent.”
“What did he say?”
Alexis glanced at the prince, who gave a slight nod. He turned back. “A few things. He told me there were four other people staying in the inn, but nobody of consequence. Just before the explosion he heard someone leave the inn, but didn’t see who. And one of the cellar keys had gone missing a few days earlier, and he suspected Anastasia, who had taken things bef—”
The prince coughed and Alexis stopped talking abruptly, sliding back in his chair under his master’s glare. The prince turned to the Palisades officers.
“That will be all,” he said.
“Thank you for your time, your highness,” Grenner said, bowed and backed out of the room, Johansen beside him. He made sure they were twenty feet down the empty corridor before speaking. “I hate dealing with nobs,” he said. “Humourless sods.”
“This one not as stuck-up as most, though,” Johansen said. “What do you reckon? Did he get his mistress up the spout, she was blackmailing him, and he hired someone to blow up the inn to get rid of her?”
“I know you can be thick as a brick sometimes,” Grenner said, “and that may explain why you never get anywhere with Frau Kolner, but did you really not notice?”
“Notice what?”
Grenner let out a sigh. “He didn’t kill her. He was in love with her.”
“You should have pushed him for more information about the girl.”
Grenner turned on him. “Don’t tell me how to ask questions. That’s my job. You almost got us thrown out of an audience with an Elector with your ridiculous…” He stopped, pressing a hand against his eyes. “Sorry. Sorry, Karl. I didn’t mean that. It’s just… I’m tired and stressed.”
Johansen put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “That goes for both of us. And it’ll get worse before it gets better. Still, come midnight we’ll be laughing about this and toasting the new year, eh?”
“I bloody hope so.” Grenner said dryly. “Right. How many glove-shops are there in Altdorf?”
There were six, but they got lucky with the second one. Anastasia hadn’t come to work that day, the glove-maker’s wife told them, and hadn’t sent word that she was ill. But it had happened before, and besides it was Hexensnacht, so they weren’t worried. Grenner turned on his charm and got the girl’s address in two minutes.
“Fast work,” Johansen observed as they left the shop.
“New personal best,” Grenner said. Inside he felt distant, distracted, as if there was a layer of wool between his thoughts and his actions. The bright cold sunlight made him feel cold, reminding him of too much beer and not enough rest the night before. His feet were heavy. He hoped there’d be no need for fast reactions or swordplay today.
The girl’s lodgings were close to the city’s north wall, decorated with the fripperies a rich lover buys for his fancy, or a girl not used to luxury buys for herself. Anastasia wasn’t there and the bed had not been slept in. They searched the place with a swift thoroughness born of long practice.
“She was an Ulrican,” Johansen said, holding up a silver wolf-head. “Interesting. She could read, too,” Grenner said, holding up a ragged, leather-bound book. He leafed through the pages. “Any good?”
“Hardly Detlef Sierck. What’s that?” A piece of paper fluttered down from between the pages. Grenner picked it up. “Address.”
“One she wanted to hide.”
“Wouldn’t she memorise it?”
“The prince said she was scatterbrained.”
“Oh yeah.” Grenner peered at the scrawled writing. “It’s in the docks. Warehouse district.”
“Probably a glove wholesaler, knowing your luck.”
“My luck?” Grenner looked askance. “Explain that to me on the way there, Herr Not-been-kissed-for-a-month.”
The warehouse on Weidendamm was old but the lock on its wide doors was new. Grenner tested its inner workings with a bent piece of metal while Johansen kept watch. Technically, as Palisades officers, they could enter and search any building, but dockers’ understanding of the finer points of the law was often shockingly bad.
“So we’re here because we found this address in the effects of an Elector’s mistress, right?” Johansen said.
“Right.”
“Why do we think this is a good lead?”
Grenner stopped his picking and looked up. “It’s our only lead. Plus we’re seeing Hoffmann in an hour and he’ll want to know what we’ve been doing.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Shut up. I’m concentrating.”
“We could claim addled wits from lack of sleep.”
“Shut up.”
“Face it, this is half-arsed.”
Grenner stood up, put the lockpick back in his pocket, and kicked the door hard. The wood around the lock splintered and the door swung inwards.
“Subtle,” Johansen said.
“Subtlety is over-rated. Come on.”
The air inside was cold and dark and their breath hung in the faint shafts of sunlight. The floor underfoot was hard earth. A figure lay slumped and twisted a few feet in front of the door. The rest of the warehouse was bare.
Grenner went to the body. “Girl. Twenties. Pretty. Last night’s party frock. Neck broken. Want to bet she’s Anastasia?”
Johansen peered at the dead girl’s face. “Does she remind you of anyone?”
“No,” Grenner said, squinting. “Who were you thinking of?”
“I don’t know.” Johansen studied the corpse for a moment, then squatted and ran his hands over the ground, gathering a thin powder onto his fingertips. He sniffed them. “Gu
npowder,” he said. “There’s the imprint of a barrel in the earth too.”
“Just one?”
Johansen blinked, letting his eyes adjust till he could make out the faint outlines on the floor. “Eight. No, twelve. More if they were stacked.”
“How many of that size would have blown up the Seven Stars?” Grenner asked. “Three at most.”
“Damn!” He stood and prowled. “So… assume the prince’s mistress is feeding information to the assassins. Maybe she knows their motive, probably not. Last night she has a lucky escape and realises that they’d kill her too if necessary. So she comes to confront them… why?”
“Scatterbrained,” Johansen said.
“They do kill her. So they were here between the explosion and now, probably clearing the warehouse. But we still don’t know who they are.”
“My money’s on Ulrican fanatics. We could look for witnesses,” Johansen suggested.
“It’s the docks. Nobody ever admits seeing anything here.” Grenner thumped the wall. “It’s going to be a city records job, get a clerk to dig out the old ledgers and find who owns this place. The cargo records too, where it came from.”
“I’m more worried about where it’s gone. Cart tracks here.” Johansen pointed to the floor.
“Cart. Barrels,” Grenner said. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“A good way to get gunpowder into an inn cellar. You?”
“I was thinking about a Bretonnian wineseller.”
Johansen stood, brushing dirt from his knees. “We’re late for Hoffmann. And I’m hungry for lunch.”
Grenner took a length of twine from his pocket to tie the warehouse doors shut. “Lunch? Some of us are still starving for breakfast.”
From the window of General Hoffmann’s room on the top floor of the Palisades building, the thin plumes of smoke still rising from the site of the Seven Stars were faint dark columns against the cold blue sky. Hoffmann stared out over the city, his back to his two agents.
Tales of the Old World Page 28
