“My Lady…” he repeated breathlessly as she laid a perfect hand on his shoulder and stooped down to brush cold lips across his brow. She smiled again, revealing teeth as white and hard as bones and lowered her lips to kiss his neck.
“My Lady!” he said a third time, his voice suddenly full of fire as he sprang backwards. With an evil hiss of steel against leather, his sword was free of its scabbard, the burnished metal of the blade dull despite the divine light that surrounded the goddess. Then, before the enormity of the knight’s actions could penetrate through Claude’s shock, he watched his master slice his sword backhanded across the smooth, cream-coloured flesh of her neck.
It was a killing stroke. The blade spat out a bright plume of blood as it sawed effortlessly through the cords and tendons of her neck, almost decapitating her where she stood.
Claude watched as she crumpled backwards into the mud and filth of the forest floor. After a moment he walked numbly over to where the body lay and gazed down stonily at the ruined flesh that had once lived, once breathed… had once been a goddess. Now it was no more than meat cooling on the forest floor.
And bad meat at that. He watched as the flowing silk of its hair withered and died, shrinking back into a malformed skull. Already the supple grace of her frame had collapsed into something ruined and hunched, the skeleton twisted out of shape by who-knew-what dark sorcery?
Claude shivered and hugged himself as the fair pigment of her skin darkened and mottled, turning into a sickly grey leather before his very eyes. Even worse was the thing’s face. How could those evil and wizened features have resembled anything even the least bit fair? Only the colour of the eyes remained unchanged, but the green now seemed rotten and cancerous and so very cold.
He remembered the expression she had worn. He remembered how beautiful it had been, how alluring. Suddenly, for the first time since the brooding of his first battle, Claude’s stomach clenched itself into a fist that doubled him up with nausea. With hardly a backwards glance he stumbled away into the undergrowth, leaving Sir Gilles still standing pale and trembling over his foe.
The next morning they crested the pass above Celliers for the last time. Below them the valley was laid out like a map. Claude turned in his saddle to take a last look at the village, the forest, the smoke from the great bonfire upon which the beast’s body had been burned so gleefully the night before.
Where had it come from, he wondered for the dozenth, the hundredth time. Had it been made, or born, or ensorcelled by Chaos? And how long had it lived here, silently haunting the edges and dark places of this land before hunger drove it in to the village and the addictive taste of man-flesh?
Claude found his gaze shifting from the valley floor to the distant rock spires that were the heart of the Massif Orcal. Beyond them, peering from between the granite peaks, towering clouds waited blue and heavy with the year’s first snow.
The old retainer shivered and thankfully turned his back on them. By the time they caught up with him he would be back beside the great fireplace of Castle Moreaux, a horn of spiced wine steaming in his hand.
Only one thing still bothered him. It hung in a leather bag from Sir Gilles’ saddle, a diminutive, evil smelling lump that still sweated a disgusting grey slime. It had no scales, this head, no savage teeth or needle-sharp fangs. Its jaws were weak, lacking even the knots of muscle any man might boast. In fact when it had been cleaned the thing would be scarcely bigger than two clenched fists.
“Well, sire,” Claude began, knowing that he would have to broach the subject before they went much further. “I’m sure we’ll be able to pick up that boulder of an orc’s head tomorrow afternoon. I lashed it to a lone pine tree for the birds to clean. It should look good mounted in the great hall, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?” the knight asked, turning in his saddle to regard his servant. “I have my trophy here.”
“Yes, of course. Your real trophy. But for the family gibbet…”
“This is for the family gibbet. This thing is the beast that tested my faith to the utmost. It is this that will hang amongst the rest of my family’s great trophies.”
Claude, sensing the strength of purpose that lay behind his master’s words, sighed as he realised it would be pointless to continue.
“How… how could you be so sure that thing wasn’t the Lady?” he dared to ask, changing the subject.
Sir Gilles smiled wistfully for a moment before he replied.
“The eyes,” he said at length. “In the old tales she is always dark, a real Bretonnian woman. Brown hair. Brown eyes.”
“Tales, yes,” Claude nodded. “But when your brother saw her she had green eyes. As green as your mother’s, he said.”
“Yes,” Sir Gilles nodded, “I know.”
Then, for no apparent reason, he began to laugh until his sides shook and tears glinted in his eyes.
Claude lapsed back into silence and shook his head. Knights! He would never understand them.
PORTRAIT OF MY
UNDYING LADY
Gordon Rennie
“A commission, you say? What kind of commission?” Giovanni Gottio leaned across the table, wine slopping from the cheap copper goblet in his hand. It would soon be replenished, he knew, in just the same way as his new-found friend sitting opposite had been steadily refilling Giovanni’s goblet all night.
“A portrait,” answered his new-found friend. “In oils. My employer will pay you well for your time.”
Giovanni snorted, spilling more wine. Absent-mindedly he dabbed one grimy finger in the spilled mess, painting imaginary brush strokes on the rough surface of the bar table. Faces. Faces had always been his speciality. Strangely, though, he had been sitting with the man for hours, drinking his wine and spending his money, but if the stranger got up and left this minute, Giovanni would have been unable to say what exactly he looked like. His was more a blurred impressionistic sketch of a face—eyes cold and cruel, mouth weak and arrogant—than any kind of finished work. The most memorable thing about him in Giovanni’s mind was the way the emerald ring on his finger caught and held even the dim candlelight of this grimy back street taverna.
“Haven’t you heard?” Giovanni slurred, becoming gradually aware that he was far more drunk than he should be this early in the night, even after those three pitchers of wine the stranger had bought for him. “The great Gottio doesn’t do portraits anymore. He is an artist, and artists are supposed to show truth in their work. The trouble is, people don’t want the truth. They don’t like it. That fool Lorenzo Lupo certainly didn’t, when he commissioned the great Gottio to paint a portrait of his wife.”
Giovanni realised he was shouting now, that he was drawing sniggering glances from the other regular patrons of the taverna. Not caring, he reached out to angrily refill his goblet once more.
“Did you see it, my portrait of that famed beauty, the wife of the Merchant Prince of Luccini? Not many people did, for her husband had it destroyed as quickly as he could. Still, those few that did see it said that it captured the woman perfectly, not just in its reflection of her exquisite beauty but even more so in the way it brought out all the charm, grace and personality of the hungry mountain wolf that lurked beneath that fair skin.”
Giovanni drained his goblet and slammed it down, stumbling as he got up to leave. This drunk after only three pitchers, he thought. The great Gottio truly has lost his touch…
“So, thank you for your hospitality, sir, but the great Gottio no longer paints portraits anymore. He paints only the truth, a quality which would sadly seem to be in little fashion amongst this world’s lords and masters.”
Mocking laughter followed him out of the taverna. Outside, he staggered along the alleyway, leaning against a wall for support. Shallya’s mercy. That cheap Pavonan wine certainly had a kick to it!
A welcome night breeze sprang up, carrying with it the strong scent of the fruit orchards that grew on the slopes of the Trantine Hills overlooking the cit
y, and Giovanni took several deep breaths, trying to clear his head. From behind, he heard quick, decisive footsteps following him out of the taverna; clearly his new-found friend wasn’t a man prepared to take “no” for an answer.
Giovanni turned to greet his persistent new friend for the night, but instead of the ingratiating smile he expected, he saw a snarl of anger. A hand reached out, grasping him by the throat and lifting him off his feet. Claws sprang out where there had only been fingernails before, and Giovanni felt their sharp edges dig into the skin of his exposed throat. The hand held him there for long seconds as he struggled, unable to draw breath, never mind cry for help. And then it suddenly released him. Senses dimming, Giovanni fell to the ground, only half-conscious as his supposed friend effortlessly dragged him through the shadows towards a nearby waiting coach. There was the sound of a coach door opening, and a face as bright and terrible in its unearthly beauty as that of the Chaos moon of Morrslieb looked down at him as Giovanni finally slipped into unconsciousness.
“No matter, Mariato,” he heard it speak in a voice as cold as glacial ice. “This way will do just as well…”
Giovanni awakened, immediately recognising in the pain throbbing behind his eyes the all-too-familiar signs of the previous night’s excesses. Mind still numbed by the copious quantities of wine he had no doubt cheerfully downed, it took him several seconds to register the fact that this was not the hovel-like garret that the recent downturn in his fortunes had reduced him to calling home. Nor were his clothes—a shirt of finest Cathay silk and breeches of pure Estalian calfskin—the same threadbare and patchy garments that he had put on the previous morning.
Previous morning? he thought suddenly realising that it was still night, a silver sliver of the waxing Morrslieb moon visible through the barred window above his bed. He ran a hand to his face, feeling the rough stubble of what felt like two days’ beard growth that had not been there earlier. Shallya’s mercy. How long had he been unconscious?
There was a rattle of keys at the only door into the room. Giovanni tensed, ready to… what, he wondered. Fight? Overpower his gaolers and try to escape? Half a head smaller than his average countryman—the stature, or more precisely lack of it, of the inhabitants of the Tilean peninsula was the basis of many jokes amongst the other nations of the Old World—and with something of a paunch that the long months of penury since his fall from grace had still so far mostly failed to diminish. Giovanni knew that he was hardly the stuff that dashing dogs of war mercenary hero legends were made of. The only wound he had ever suffered was a broken nose inflicted during a heated taverna dispute with some fop of a Bretonnian poet over the favours of a young and curvaceous follower of the arts. The only blade he had ever wielded was a small knife used to sharpen the charcoal pencil nubs he sketched with.
The heavy door swung open, revealing two black-robed figures standing in the corridor outside. Faceless under their hooded robes, it was impossible to determine anything about them. A hand, pale and skeletal thin, appeared from within the folds of one of the robes, gesturing for the artist to rise and come with them. Shrugging with an attempted air of casual nonchalance that he wished he truly felt, Giovanni did as commanded.
He found himself in a wide, stone-walled corridor, falling into step between his faceless gaolers. Stars shone through breaks in the wood-raftered ceiling, and, glancing up, Giovanni saw the shattered ruins of a burned-out upper storey above him. The floor at his feet had been hurriedly swept clean, with piles of rubble and ancient fire debris piled up at its sides, and Giovanni could just make out blackened and faded frescoes under the grime and soot on the corridor walls. They showed nymphs and satyrs at play and were of a pastoral style that went out of fashion over a century ago. The night breeze drifted in through the breaks in the ruined ceiling, and Giovanni caught the faint but familiar scent of distant fruit groves.
With a shock of recognition, he realised that he was probably in one of the abandoned villas that dotted the countryside hills above Trantio. There were many such ruins, Giovanni knew, for in safer and more prosperous times it had been the fashion amongst the city’s wealthy merchant families to build such palaces in the surrounding countryside, as both an ostentatious display of wealth and a retreat from the squalor of the city. A downturn in mercantile fortunes and the steadily increasing numbers of greenskin savages stealing over the Apuccini Mountains had brought an abrupt end to the such rural idylls, and the survivors abandoned their countryside retreats and fled back to the comfort of their counting houses and the safety of high and well-guarded city walls. Since then, the abandoned villas had become notorious as lairs for the predators that hid out in the wilderness areas beyond the limits of the Trantine city guard’s horseback patrols.
Predators such as bandit gangs, or orc warbands, or—Or what? Giovanni wondered with a shudder, his lively artist’s imagination painting a series of vivid nightmare images of all the things bad enough to scare bandits and even orcs away from such a place.
Something rustled at Giovanni’s feet and he jumped back as a large rat scampered out of a hole in the floor and ran across the corridor, running right over the top of his booted feet. There was a blur of movement from behind him, followed instantly by a harsh squeal of pain and an abrupt wet tearing sound. Giovanni turned, catching a glimpse of the scene beneath the hooded cloaks behind him—long skeletal fingers crammed something squealing and still alive between jaws distended horribly wide open—before a warning hiss from his other gaoler urged him to keep moving. Suitably inspired, Giovanni’s imagination mentally erased the previous portfolio of nightmare images and began work on a new gallery of even greater horrors.
The corridor ended in an open doorway, soft light spilling out from the open doorway there. Urged on by a low angry grunt from one of the gaoler creatures, Giovanni gingerly stepped forward into the room beyond.
The chamber was how he imagined the villa would have looked in its heyday. It was opulently furnished, and his gaze passed over a tempting platter of fruit and a crystal decanter of wine laid out on a nearby table—did his captors seek to trick him into poisoning himself after having him at their mercy for at least a day as he lay insensible in his cell, he wondered?—and also the oddly disquieting sight of a painting easel with a blank canvas upon it. But it was the paintings on the walls all around that drew his immediate attention.
There were a full dozen of them, and they were by far the greatest collection of art that Giovanni had ever seen.
There he recognised the brushwork of the legendary da Venzio, whose monumental frescoes decorating the ceiling of the great Temple of Shallya in Remas were still one of the great wonders of the Old World. And beside it was a canvas bearing the distinctive Chaos-tainted style of the mad Estalian genius Dari, whose work had been condemned as heretical two hundred years ago and was still banned throughout the Empire to this day. Hanging on the wall opposite the Dari was a work bearing all the hallmarks of the work of Frau Litti. There were only eight known Litti paintings still in existence, all of them in the possession of the richest merchant princes of Tilea who competed with each other in bitterly fought bidding wars to purchase only the rarest and most exquisite works of art. If this really was a ninth and until now unknown Litti, then its potential value was truly incalculable.
Giovanni’s senses continued to reel at the wealth of artistic riches that surrounded him. Over here a work by Bardovo, whose epic depiction of Marco Columbo’s discovery of Lustria spawned a whole school of lesser talented imitators. Beside it hung a canvas bearing the disturbing scratch-mark signature of the mysterious Il Ratzo, who some historians now whispered may not even have been fully human.
It was only then, as he reached out to touch the da Venzio canvas, his fingers reverently tracing the maestro’s brushstroke patterns, that an even greater and more profound realisation about all the paintings collected here occurred to him.
They were all portraits, and they were all of the same subject: an alabaster-skinned
noblewoman of striking but glacial beauty.
Giovanni gazed from portrait to portrait, his eyes confirming what his mind would not yet accept. No matter the artist, no matter the difference in their individual styles, each had painted the same subject, and from life too, if the telltale details in each painting were to be believed. Here he saw the same glint of forbidden promise in the dark pools of her eyes, there the same hint of unspoken secrets behind the faint mocking smile on her lips. But while each artist had found the same qualities in their subject, each also found in her something different. In da Venzio’s portrait she was a beguiling angel of darkness, his painting a blasphemous twin piece to the images of the blessed goddess of mercy on the temple ceiling in Remas. Bardovo’s work showed her as a lonely spectral figure standing against a backdrop of a corpse-strewn battlefield.
How could this be, Giovanni wondered? Da Venzio had lived three hundred years ago, Bardovo more than a thousand and Frau Litti and one or two others even longer than that.
A faint breeze passed through the air of the room, sending flickering shadows over the faces of the portraits as it disturbed the flames of the many candles which lit the chamber.
“How could artists that lived centuries apart all come to have painted the same subject?” said a voice from somewhere close behind Giovanni, completing the thought that his mind dared not yet ask itself.
He turned to face the figure reclining on the couch behind him, a figure who had not been there moments ago, he was sure. She was even more beautiful in person, he thought. More beautiful and more terrible than any portrait—even one by the great da Venzio himself—could ever do full justice to. Her eyes were endless pools of mystery that drank in everything, surrendering nothing in return. Her blood-red lips were full and of the same colour as the burning scarlet rubies which hung at her plunging neckline, revealing flawless skin that glowed like soft moonlight, skin that had not felt the kiss of sunlight in centuries.
Tales of the Old World Page 51
