He really had thought of everything.
By the time the first peals sounded from the harbourmaster’s bell calling midnight, all the preparations were in place. At the five corners of the pentagram the man-tallow candles had been lit, thin plumes of acrid smoke rising to join the sickly-sweet haze of incense hanging above them. At its centre, a section of the counter of the ruined bar had been set out as a makeshift altar with the unconscious boy bound and spread-eagled on top of it. Beside it, Gunther stood stoking a burning brazier, chanting the words of the final ritual.
Then, as the bell pealed its last, he heard the door to the room open and saw the blond-haired figure of Samael arrive with cloak flowing behind him in a gentlemanly flourish.
Careful not to allow his eyes to meet the daemon’s gaze, Gunther continued his chant. From the corner of his eye he saw Samael advancing towards him. Coming to the binding circle the daemon stopped, raising his hand to press palm-outwards on the invisible barrier before him, testing its power.
“A binding circle? Impressive, Gunther, if ultimately pointless. After all, you can hardly stay within your circle forever, can you?” Then, hearing the sound of lapping water, the daemon finally looked behind him.
The trap had been surprisingly easy to build. Set to be triggered by a tripwire when the door to the room swung shut, a hidden mechanism had caused a gourd to tip, releasing a steady flow of water which, even now, fed a shallow circular channel encompassing the entire outer circumference of the room. Of course, the real power of the trap lay not in channel, but in the nature of the water that flowed through it.
“Holy water?” the daemon said, eyebrows raised in sardonic amusement. “It seems I am caught in the space between two impenetrable circles. Really, Gunther, you are full of surprises tonight. But tell me: now you have me where you want me, what do you intend to do with me next?”
On top of the counter, close to his right hand, one of Gunther’s pistols lay primed and powdered, needing only a bullet to give it lethal force. And, glowing white-hot within the flames of the brazier, the bullet was almost ready.
It had taken fifty years spent in the study of forbidden texts to learn how Samael’s bargains worked. Fifty years, in which he had slowly come to understand that when they had entered into their contract, Samael had lent him a tiny fragment of his own daemonic essence. A fragment so small that Samael would never miss it, but still powerful enough to stop Gunther from aging. Hence the time limit built into their bargain—as small as that fragment was, the daemon was not about to give up a part of himself forever. But at the same time, Gunther had learned this essence would not naturally flow back to Samael. It had to be taken.
And, if Gunther could kill Samael first, he could keep it forever.
Of course, killing a daemon was no easy thing. But, gifted with great wealth and a century in which to search for the answer, Gunther had finally discovered a method. In the brazier before him was a bullet forged from meteoric iron and covered in sigils which Gunther had paid a down-on-his-luck dwarf craftsman a small fortune to create. One of dozens of savants Gunther had paid to help him over the years without any of them ever knowing the true nature of his project. All of them working unknowingly towards the creation of a bullet ensorcelled to act as a bane to daemon flesh.
A bullet to kill a daemon.
Taking a pair of tongs, Gunther retrieved the glowing bullet from the fire and slotted it into the notch set in the side of the trocar. Even now, with his own life in the balance, he could not be sure whether it was possible to kill a creature like Samael forever. At the very least though, killing the daemon here and now would banish him back to the daemon realms for a thousand years—more than long enough for Gunther to find a more permanent solution. But before the bullet could be used, the ritual demanded that it be tempered in the heart’s-blood of a sacrificial victim. As to the nature of this victim, the terms of the ritual were very precise: Only someone possessed of a perfect and utter purity would do.
Abruptly, eyelids fluttering, the boy on the altar began to stir. But Gunther had come too far and risked too much to give in to squeamishness now. Besides, whether the boy died asleep or awake hardly mattered. Lifting the trocar above his head, Gunther stepped forward to complete the sacrifice. Only to see the boy’s features suddenly seem to shift and blur, growing bigger. In an instant the boy was gone.
Staring in amazement at the alabaster-skinned female figure that had replaced him, Gunther found himself strangely attracted to the swelling curve of her hips, the sharp-toothed seductiveness of her smile and the jagged perfection of her horns. Then, as the writhing goddess before him lashed out with a scythe-like claw, Gunther found the growing warmth of his desire displaced by a more primal sensation.
Pain.
Afterwards, watching the daemonette flaying the flesh from Gunther’s dead bones, Samael found himself wondering briefly if he should punish her for her excesses. He had so wanted to see that last look of despair in the man’s eyes when he realised his long life was finally over and torment awaited him. But, lost in her enjoyment, the daemonette had killed him too quickly. Though, on balance, Samael decided to let the matter pass—it must have been difficult for her, after all, to have had to walk beside the mortal all night without tearing him apart. And, besides, the daemonette’s purpose here was not yet done.
In her abandon, the daemonette had knocked over one of the pentagram’s candles, breaching the binding circle. Approaching the altar, Samael saw the trocar lying on the floor where Gunther had dropped it and he stooped to pick it up. Inside, the bullet was still hot, the magical energies released by Gunther’s ritual still waiting latent within it.
Turning towards the daemonette, Samael saw her pause in her mutilations to lick the blood, cat-like, from her talon. Looking into the amber irises of her eyes, Samael saw a perfect and utter purity, untainted by conscience or thoughts of compassion. Then, savouring that thought for a moment, he took the trocar and stabbed her in the chest.
“Why?” the daemonette asked him in Darktongue, her accent like the mewling of scalded cats.
“Because it would be a shame to let Gunther’s work go to waste,” he told her, pushing the blade deeper into her heart. “Especially when I spent so very long covertly guiding that dull-witted mortal on his quest.”
Strength fading, her heart’s-blood ichor flowing down the tube of the trocar to temper the bullet inside it, the daemonette looked at him in incomprehension. Then, the memories of thousands of years’ worth of sensations dying with her, her heart grew still.
Letting her body fall as he pulled the trocar from it, Samael was pleased to feel the stirring of painful energies emanating from within the bullet. In the end, the whole affair had come to a most satisfactory conclusion. After one-hundred-and-fifty years, the ritual—and the seventh boon—had finally been completed. The bullet was ready now. A bullet to kill a daemon.
One could never know when a thing like that might prove useful.
RATTENKRIEG
Robert Earl
The scratching had started again. Freda lay huddled in the darkness, cold sweat gluing her nightdress to her trembling body. In the light of the day it was a pretty thing, this nightdress. She’d chosen it because of the rabbit pattern sewn into the hem. Tonight, with the pattern hidden by darkness, it felt like a shroud.
Her knuckles were already bruised, but she carried on gnawing at them anyway, like a rat with a bone. Even when her sharp, little teeth tore through the skin and her mouth filled with the bitter, hot, copper taste of blood, she couldn’t stop.
Tonight there were more things to worry about than cuts and bruises. Horrible things.
Beneath the weight of her terror, Freda struggled to remember the words of a prayer, any prayer that might make the scratching stop. But she struggled in vain. All she could think of was the thing in the cupboard and how far away her father was.
Then the sound stopped. The pause lasted for a second, then a dozen, and then a
dozen more. Freda held her breath, willing the silence to last. At length she felt the first tiny flicker of relief and took her fist out of her mouth. Slowly, with as much courage as a warrior entering a dragon’s lair, she raised her head from beneath the covers and peered towards the cupboard.
A loud impact banged against its doors.
With a shriek, Freda leapt from her bed, ran from the room and raced down the stairs. Her feet pounded on the floorboards, like a drummer sounding the retreat, the noise of her flight making her run all the faster.
“Daddy!” she screamed, as she fled down the short hall to his study, the rabbits on her nightdress snapping about her heels.
“Daddy!” She flung open the heavy wooden door and burst inside. Magretta, the house maid, sprang up from her place on Freda’s father’s knee, her cheeks burning. The old man himself also seemed a little flushed.
But Freda didn’t care if they both had the flu. She just wanted to be with her daddy. With a leap she flung herself into his arms.
“What is it?” he asked, his tone a kaleidoscope of embarrassment, anger and concern. “Nightmares?” He stroked her hair, feeling the sweat that had turned her beautiful mane of golden hair into dank rats’ tails.
“You’re trembling,” he said.
“It was the thing in the cupboard again,” she whined, clinging to him.
He exchanged a glance with Magretta and shrugged. “Oh,” her father said, and sighed. “Well, let’s go and have a look, then.”
“No!”
“Yes. It’s just your imagination.”
Taking the lantern from the table, he swung her onto his hip and carried her back upstairs. He grimaced a little at her weight. She seemed to be getting bigger by the day now, and he was no longer a young man. But Freda was oblivious to the effort the climb cost him. She stared into the shadows ahead, her expression as grim as a convict climbing the gallows.
“Look,” her father said, lifting the lantern to chase the shadows back behind the tumbled mess of her bed. “No monsters.”
“The cupboard,” she whispered, edging around behind him.
With a grunt, he lowered her to the floor and walked over to the twin mahogany doors. He opened them with a theatrical flourish. Inside a wall of hanging clothes hid the camphor wood rear of the cupboard, and for a moment he thought about pulling them aside and pretending to find something behind them. But, with the suspicion that such a joke might backfire and the knowledge that Magretta was waiting for him downstairs, he decided against it.
“There, you see?” he said. “Just clothes. Very pretty clothes for a very pretty girl. And perhaps some mice, but you’re too big to be scared of little mice, aren’t you?”
Freda nodded doubtfully.
“Good girl. Now, hop into bed. I’ll leave the lamp and send Magretta up to check on you later.”
“Why not now?”
“Because she’s, ah, busy.”
With a little sigh, Freda climbed back into her bed. At least he was leaving her the light. Daddy lent down and kissed her on the forehead, his whiskers tickling her skin, then he turned and left her, closing the door behind him as she pulled the blankets up to her chin.
The thing in the cupboard waited until he had returned to his study before it started scratching again. It was soft but insistent, like the throbbing of a rotten tooth, but this time she fought against the fear. The lamp helped. Even though Daddy had turned it down it still bathed the room in a warm light that somehow seemed to hold the noise at bay.
“It’s just mice,” she whispered to herself as the scratching was replaced by a series of sharp, crunching sounds.
“Shoo!” she said loudly. To her immense relief, the noises stopped.
“You’re just mice,” she told the cupboard triumphantly. She raised her head farther up out of the eiderdown, like an archer peeing over a castle wall. The sweet, glorious silence remained unbroken and a sense of triumph began to steal over her.
For a while she savoured her triumph and drifted off towards sleep. It was almost a shame that she had frightened the mice away. They were funny and sweet. And she always impressed daddy by being such a brave girl when they appeared. Not like silly Magretta who screamed and jumped onto chairs. Maybe tomorrow night she would leave out some cheese and see if…
The cupboard door swung silently open. Freda stopped breathing.
“Daddy must have left the latch off,” she told herself. “He must have.”
But before she could finish the thought, the monsters rushed out. There weren’t just one of them but two, four, a dozen. They swarmed over Freda in a single great mass, their filthy, black hair scratching her smooth skin, their jagged claws gripping her arms and legs like sprung steel rat traps. Freda, almost insane with terror, opened her mouth to scream, to vomit out this paralyzing horror, but a slimy paw thrust itself into her mouth. She gagged at the taste of the rotten skin and was choking as they bound her with thongs of rough leather.
And all the while, the lamp burned upon the table, it’s light still and even. The monsters had stirred no more breeze than they had noise. Their tails thrashed excitedly above their writhing bodies like scaly whips.
Within seconds their work was done and they left as noiselessly as they had arrived, slipping through the hole they had so painstakingly chewed through the back of Freda’s cupboard.
So it was, that when Magretta came to check on her a few hours later, all that remained of the little girl was a torn scrap of her nightdress: an embroidered rabbit torn in two.
The shrine was so old that it looked more like a thing grown than a thing built. Centuries of winter storms and harvest suns had rounded off the sharp edges of its masonry, leaving its granite bulk as smooth and featureless as a river washed boulder.
The centuries had blanketed the shrine with ivy, the greenery growing as thick as an old man’s beard. Within its rustling depths were many families of birds, the creatures living out their entire span amongst the foliage. In ages past, some of the shrine’s keepers had scoured the ivy from the walls because of them. Perhaps they had feared that those whom they were sworn to protect might be disturbed by the constant irreverence of the birdsong.
But the present incumbent had no such delusions. The dead, he knew, were dead. It would take more than a few chattering sparrows to disturb their sleep.
Besides, he liked to watch the birds flitting about the graveyard. Some of them had even grown enough trust to perch on his hunched shoulders as he worked. They’d watch with cocked heads as he chopped wood, drew water, scythed down the grass that poked up like green fingers from between the graves that huddled around the shrine.
And they did huddle, these graves, clustering around the ancient building like lambs around an ewe, nervous lambs that could smell the scent of a wolf. It was a fanciful notion, but the shrine’s keeper knew it to be an accurate one. The black depths of the forest that lay beyond his walls were alive with those who sought to enslave the dead. Kings and citadels had fallen beneath the onslaught of these abominations. Armies had been slaughtered. Great walls crumbled to dust.
Yet where they had fallen the shrine had stood, the neatly trimmed hedges that enclosed it remaining inviolate. Morr, after all, was a powerful god.
The shrine’s keeper smiled contentedly at the thought and decided that he’d worked enough for one day. He stood up, pressed his bony thumbs into the knots that had formed in his back and returned to his chamber. There he swapped his scythe for a jug of water, a crust of bread and a handful of small, wrinkled apples.
He sat on one of the gravestones as he ate and watched the sun setting over the forest. He enjoyed the sight as he munched his way through the fruit and scattered his bread to the birds that had flocked to his side. In the light of the setting sun their plumage shone and their shadows were dagger sharp. The priest found himself smiling again.
Despite the pain and the suffering, this world was a beautiful place. It was understandable that some men clung to it
in defiance of their preordained span. Unforgivable, but understandable.
With a sigh, the old man glanced down at the liver spots on the back of his hands, the mottled skin there as creased as last month’s apples.
“It won’t be long before Morr greets me,” he told one of his fluttering friends. As if in silent confirmation, the sun dipped below the horizon and the breeze turned chilly.
As day turned to night, the priest dispersed the last of his bread and hobbled back to the shrine.
He’d been dreaming of wide, open grassland, an ocean of green, above which clouds as big as galleys sailed lazily past. In the distance, an old limestone wall stretched across the horizon. Sun-gilded lichen covered every inch of it, except for the single oak door. As he approached, the wood started to shake with the impact of a hard knocking. The sound was as loud as thunder and as relentiess as a funeral bell. It was also absolutely terrifying.
All the same, the keeper ground his teeth together and carried on marching towards the shaking door. A second later he was stood in front of it. His fingers closed around the handle and he pulled, swinging it effortlessly open to reveal…
With a suffocated scream the old man sat bolt upright on his cot, his skin washed with sweat and his bony chest heaving as he gasped for air.
Wide eyed in the darkness of his chamber, he ran his fingertips against the rough stone of the wall. He pulled the covers back and swung his feet onto the floor. The tiles were cold, cold enough to send a welcome chill of reality through his befuddled thoughts.
With a long, shuddering breath, he shook off the last scraps of the dream and ran a trembling hand across the damp skin of his scalp.
Although the dream had gone, the knocking continued. For a moment the priest sat and listened to it, as it rattled against his door with a desperate, knuckle scraping urgency. There was a mute terror in the sound, as though the visitor was living in a nightmare of his own and for a split second the shrine’s keeper considered ignoring the summons. But he extinguished that traitorous thought as soon as it appeared. Above all things, he was a priest of Morr. It was his duty to make sure that the dying didn’t slip away unshriven, and after sixty years of service his duty was as much a part of him as his bones.
Tales of the Old World Page 55
