Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  I found her drawing water from the well. She saw me and dropped her bucket, ducking behind the barn. I followed as quickly as I could and this time managed to say that I meant her no harm. She knew what I knew from the way I looked at her; it is always in the eyes. She went inside the barn and I stepped in after her, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, divided by slices of light between the planks. I smelt hay and her.

  The wolf’s attack took me by surprise and I was lucky to have straw to fall on. She was on me and I remembered clearly enough the fate of an exposed neck to those jaws. But I am not a gormless shepherd boy. I brought my knee up into the creature’s chest and gained my feet in time to meet another leaping assault. This time I pivoted on one foot and lashed out with the other. The manoeuvre cost me my balance and I once again tasted the hay but my boot connected with the wolf’s ear and sent it sprawling. I leapt up, spitting dust and faced her again. She shook her muzzle, trying to dislodge the straw and a burr which had stuck there and I laughed.

  “It seems we both have reason to regret this battle already.” I sounded more confident than I felt but such deceptions are my meat and drink. While we studied each other I was unclasping my cloak and searching the room for a weapon. “Must we fight until one of us, most likely my good self, is cold meat?” There was a pitchfork holding up the thatch, wedged between two beams above my head. My pleading was having little effect and she lowered her head and crept forward into optimal pouncing range.

  I watched her eyes; it is always in the eyes. Hers were yellow and savage, pools of amber malice, but there was a softness as well. I looked harder and almost fell into her trap. There was no softness, a sham designed to distract her sentimental opponent, accurately assessed by her predator’s gaze. I recovered as she sprang. She was nearly quick enough, nearly, but I have been a killer longer than her.

  I leapt upward, throwing my cloak in front of me and reaching for the pitchfork above my head. She flew head-first into the billowing wool and hit the ground awkwardly. As she skidded across the straw, I yanked down on the pitchfork and it came free. I crashed to the floor in a hail of straw and roof beams. The bundle of cloak and wolf thrashed about and I dealt it a heavy stabbing blow with the butt of the pitchfork. I stepped to the side as a section of the roof sagged dangerously and reversed the pitchfork, pointing the four tines accusingly at my cloak. The bundle therein was now a lot smaller and I released a breath which I did not know I had been holding in when I saw the girl’s head emerge from one of the arm-holes. I made sure she remained covered in the cloak. My taste is usually restricted to women of more years and greater curves but I could not deny a certain attraction in this case. Nevertheless, I am nothing if not a gentleman killer. We crouched together in a shaft of sunlight in the corner of the barn, she rubbing a bruise on her shoulder and me working the straw from between my teeth.

  Our conversation was short but enough to satisfy me that she was more afraid of her condition than any number of shepherds or farmers. I suggested she might wander farther afield on her night-inspired rampages, or perhaps wreak havoc among the deer of the forest. It seemed she had little control and I vowed to help her. We decided to make it possible for her to leave the village behind, and live somewhere a little more remote. Why? I left the village asking myself this question, suddenly unhappy, uneasy even, with the glib phrases I had made to myself about a killer knowing a killer. Certainly there was that. Perhaps I saw a little of my younger self in her savagery and I wished to help her over the hurdle from random savage into refined artist of death. Perhaps I loved her, though I doubt that. I am not so deeply sentimental.

  Whatever the reason, I had determined to help her and would have proceeded along the simple course we had devised, returning then to my employer’s task. Except that things did not happen that way, holy father. Another character enters on the scene of this little tale of mine, revered Kaslain, and writes a chapter whose authorship I will rue until my death.

  That character and that author is you.

  Kaslain stood quickly, his heavy robe dropping from his knees to brush the flagstones. The killer on the divan looked at him.

  “I have watched you as I told the tale and you knew from the beginning that it was your story, yet you listened. I had counted on your vanity, as sure a thing as any.” He smiled, mouth like a wolfs.

  The arch-lector began a brisk walk towards the chamber door, the walk of a man who craves haste but dares not reveal his need. He stopped in response to a noise from behind him and whipped his head around. The man was no longer on the couch. In fact, the priest could not see him at all. A large stain of blood marked that he had lain there and a soft red pillow of flesh, a kidney!

  Kaslain stared at it trying to understand. His mind groped in an unfriendly darkness. The kidney was too small to be a man’s—a goat’s? How many times had he sacrificed a young goat to Sigmar on this holy day or that? He remembered the squeal of the squirming animal and the blood, always so much blood…

  The understanding of the ruse came upon Kaslain slowly but powerfully, not to be denied. His face twisted in alarm and he spun around. The assassin stood between him and the velvet bell-pull which would summon his guards. He had divested himself of his bloody cloak and stood, whole and hearty, his face sporting a victor’s smile. Kaslain lunged for the door and the killer dropped low, lashing out with the toe of his boot and catching the priest in the knee. The aged lector met the flagstones heavily and rolled beneath the gilt velvet curtains.

  The Thousand Faces of Magritta stepped forward and gave the curtains an authoritative yank. They fell, collecting in a heap above the struggling priest. The assassin rolled the priest with his boot, several times, until he was cocooned in velvet. He gave the region containing Kaslain’s head a solid kick and the muffled cries ceased altogether. He then straddled the velvet grub and sat heavily. For a second, bizarrely, he adopted the posture of a knight on horseback, hands on imaginary reigns and rocked his hips to the imaginary rhythms of an absent charger. This seemed to amuse him for a short moment but then his face turned serious. He reached into his boot, removing a short stiletto. The Tilean Wasp leant forward with this sting and began to cut a small window in the velvet wrapping. Eventually he exposed the arch-lector’s distressed face and made a warning gesture with the blade, telling the priest that he would end his life at the slightest cry for help.

  “Your impatience is disappointing, Kaslain, and now you will not hear the end of my story. A story which you wrote parts of yourself, although I am writing this chapter, the last chapter in which you appear. I told you that I must confess how I had killed a priest. You are that priest, though I no longer have time to tell you why you must die.”

  Magnus changed eyes at the keyhole but otherwise stayed firmly in place, his back bent, his damp palms flat against the wooden doors. He watched the man sit on the arch-lector and angle his knife. He watched as the man slid it into the priest’s neck, muffling the victim’s scream with a handful of curtain. He watched the man turn and stretch his neck while he looked about for his escape route.

  Magnus had seen and heard it all and had not been able to interfere. He hadn’t been able to move, until now. But when he began to move he found himself moving the wrong way, his hands on the handle of the inner chamber rather than his feet fleeing down the marble hall. He watched, as if he were still an observer, his hand as it turned the handle. He drew breath when he saw the chamber within as if he had expected that the keyhole might have been showing a different reality to the one which now greeted him.

  The assassin sprang to his feet. He moved towards Magnus, measuring his steps, all the time looking at the boy as if he were judging the distance between them so he might spring. After confirming Magnus was alone he gently closed the door and rested his back against it.

  Magnus stared at the double line of blood on the curtain where the killer had cleaned his blade, until his concentration was absorbed by need to force air in and out of his lungs. />
  “The boy with the bucket?”

  “Yes. Yes, but…”

  “But you are more than that? Yes I am sure. We are each more than we seem.” A pause. “You are not injured.”

  “So it seems.”

  A breath. “What will you do now?”

  “I will finish my story. Isn’t that why you came in here?”

  Events did not follow my script. The players had their own motives and each proved to be his own author. Even my own script might have been written by another. How often had I been distracted from my work in such a way?

  Hugo had a cousin who was a priest of Sigmar. He came, a young wisp of a man with straw for hair and a child’s chin. He announced that he would watch the animals by night and he would catch this killer. He had all the eagerness of a soldier before his first battle but he had something else also, the bearing of an officer, though he had no troops. We were his troops and he strode among us imagining that we bowed and saluted.

  The shepherds laughed at him, having had little to laugh at in the past weeks. Hugo made an announcement to the effect that his own authority was extended to his young cousin for as long as the priest chose to stay with us at the estate. The priest smiled a tight smile and gave a stiff nod.

  He stationed himself in the field on the third night of his stay. He had brought a tome which he consulted before he took up his vigil, then he donned his white robe and strode into the night.

  During this time I had not been idle. I had held two further conversations with the girl and each time she had agreed she would leave that night. Each morning I had discovered her, working in the field as if we had never spoken. I do not know for sure why she stayed, killing lambs all the while, but perhaps it was because she had found in me some kinship, some kindness which she would not willingly abandon.

  We are complicated creatures and although I do not like interruptions to my plans I cannot say that I was not gratified to have her stay. I was unconcerned about the priest and here it was that I made my mistake—not that he was any danger to anybody, but it was his death which ultimately defeated my strategy.

  They brought his body back, damp with dew and bent out of shape. No one had seen the boy die, the shepherds now being far too scared to share the night with the sheep, but the jaw marks left little doubt as to his killer. After that, events moved with an undeniable momentum. The count used his influence to contact Arch-Lector Kaslain in Nuln and appeal to the same sense of pomp and occasion which I was later to employ myself.

  Kaslain came south with soldiers and witch hunters and they found her, as I knew they would. The soldiers went among the villagers with clubs and burning irons. Kaslain did not frighten me, though his performance had the desired effect on the peasants and staff at the manor. They bowed and scraped to his face and made furtive warding gestures to his back.

  Though their methods were crude, they were effective enough and before Kaslain had spent two nights in the manor he had her. I would have killed him then, but I was more concerned in trying to save her. Helplessness is not a condition I am accustomed to or one which I accept lightly.

  Our last conversation had been held in the same barn as our first. I was angry, fearful for her safety and frustrated by her stubbornness. She reacted badly to my anger and the meeting did not go well. I wish now it had been otherwise. I have never been skilled at recognising the actions of fate nor at accepting its whims. I tried to convince her in any way I could think of to leave but I knew it was for me that she stayed.

  They came and found her and stuck her with their spears. She took three soldiers with her as I watched from among the crowd of villagers, head bowed and hooded. Her mother was there too, a woman with thin skin which showed the pattern of the blood as it flowed about her face. I never got to know her name. They lashed her to a stake and burned her at sunset. My helpless fingers dug into my wrist and I made a quiet vow.

  The tattered body took some hours to burn and produced an oily smoke, which caused the onlookers to cough and shield their eyes. Kaslain spoke a prayer to Sigmar, an obscene stave full of polite hatred and self-satisfied gall, standing with one foot on the ashen skull. I killed a soldier that night, I don’t know his name; it is not a deed of which I am proud. I took him as he slept and mixed my tears with his blood.

  In the morning I gathered her ashes in a sack from the ruined barn and commended them to the forest.

  Magnus realised that the assassin had finished speaking and he lifted his head. The killer was wiping his cheek with a corner of the velvet curtain, cleaning away what might perhaps have been a tear. He stood and looked directly into Magnus’ eyes. The stare was not comfortable.

  “So that is my tale,” said the Tilean Wasp. “Here lies perhaps my greatest kill and I feel little satisfaction. You are almost a priest: can you tell me why?”

  Magnus chose his words carefully, grinding his sweating fingers against each other. “I do not wish, sir, to be one of your kills, even one of the least. I have seen what happens to those who hear your confessions.” Dawn clawed at the crack beneath the door. “Perhaps, however, I may venture, you have seen a little of what others see in death, or perhaps you know that you cannot but kill, even if you would rather love?”

  A moment of contemplation, the time it might take for a tear to fall from an eye to the flagstones if there was such a tear, no more.

  “Nonsense,” the assassin said plainly. “I go now to pursue my lucrative trade, leaving you as the only one to have seen me as I am and live.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I may. You ask a lot of questions, boy.”

  “I… I have another. What of the count? He still lives.”

  “I go to visit him now. What shall my rase be this time?”

  “Sir, how am I to counsel you in these matters, one who can even disguise himself as himself?”

  Hugo beat upon the Count of Pfeildorf’s door with fat knuckles. Two men were standing there in the late morning, the stone chamber which attended the count’s inner door consumed by their combined bulk. Hugo’s girth was natural but the other figure wore the hooded robes of a priest of Sigmar, and judging by their ornate finery an important one at that.

  “Awaken, sir!” the wheedling voice pleaded, Hugo a man trapped between two superiors whose wishes were in conflict. “I would not disturb you, sir, so early in the day, but I’m sure you would wish to receive so esteemed a visitor.”

  The answer from within a bark of an inquiry.

  “Who is it, sir? Why Kaslain, the Arch-Lector.”

  THE BLESSED ONES

  Rani Kellock

  Sigmar, stop your hammering! Jurgen Kuhnslieb thought, as the throbbing pain in his head intensified. He winced and shielded his face as the inn door creaked open, admitting a bright lance of sunlight which seemed to pierce his very eyeballs. Grimacing, Jurgen gestured to the barkeep, who turned and studied him with a dour expression.

  “My usual,” Jurgen said; it was more of a groan than a sentence. The barkeep looked unimpressed. The customer slumped before him—with his shabby slept-in clothes, his cropped black hair and dark, blood-shot eyes set into a keen, blowsy face—already owed money and did not look to be paying up any time soon.

  “You’ve not paid your tab from last night,” the barkeep rambled.

  “Come on,” Jurgen moaned, straggling vainly through his hangover to muster some charm, “just one. For your favourite customer.” The barkeep looked away. “Look, I’ll have the money in a few days. There’s this man coming in from Altdorf…”

  Jurgen trailed off as the barkeep turned away in disinterest.

  Sigmar! Jurgen thought; another place in Nuln he couldn’t get served. If this kept up, he’d soon end up barred from every establishment in the city. If only that last job hadn’t gone so terribly wrong—Heinrick and Eberhardt betrayed and slaughtered, and Rolf good only for begging since he was caught by Pharsos’ men—they would all have been rich, at least for a little while. And Jurgen wouldn�
��t be slinking around in dives like this trying to avoid Hultz the Red-Eyed, the small time crime-baron who seemed to think the whole mess had somehow been his fault; probably for no better reason that he was the only one who had survived the bungled job with all his appendages intact. Then there was the other matter: a few gambling debts which had, well, got out of hand.

  No wonder Jurgen was rapidly becoming very unpopular in this city.

  Jurgen became aware that a particular kind of silence had descended on the inn, of a sort usually reserved for the presence of the city watch, or strangers who were obviously out of place. Jurgen resisted the impulse to turn around, not wishing to attract attention.

  A young man, the apparent cause of the hush, sauntered up to the bar next to Jurgen and gestured imperiously to the barkeep. He was dressed in fine clothes, and clearly in the wrong part of town.

  “Tell me, do you know a man name of Jurgen?” the newcomer addressed the barkeep. His manner was languid, but his dark eyes held an intensity that to Jurgen did not bode well. The barkeep risked a glance at Jurgen, who shook his head almost imperceptibly, but the young man caught the exchange and he span like a cat to face Jurgen.

  “No need for alarm, sir,” the man smirked, his eyes coming to rest on Jurgen’s left hand as it inched towards the knife concealed beneath his jacket. Jurgen paused, waiting for the stranger’s next move. “I’ve sought you out in order to offer you employment.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jurgen said, taking the opportunity to size up the stranger. His dark eyes were set into a handsome, though somewhat pallid face; one which—by both appearance and demeanour—indicated a kinship to one of Nuln’s noble families. His head was crowned by neat fair hair which fell loose over his shoulders, which Jurgen noted were somewhat stooped.

  “I have come here on behalf of my master, who wishes you to… acquire a certain item for him.” The man studied Jurgen, his voice low. “A very special item.”