Warhammer - [Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  And then there was always underground, but Sigmar alone knew how many of the denizens of the once fair city had taken to living like rats underground in the sewers believing themselves safe. Out of sight out of mind was not, as far as Felix knew, relevant when it came to fleeing the hordes of death.

  It was, he decided, far from impregnable. But then, it wasn’t supposed to be a fortress. It relied upon manpower to keep even the most ardent thief out, which was an act of hubris Felix was sure that the chancellor of the Imperial counting house would come to regret over the coming days.

  There would be patrolling guards, and alarms; that was a given considering the nature of the building. The question was what the alarms would do. A literal alarm would summon help but given the paranoia of the extremely rich he half-expected some kind of lethal payback for having the temerity to rob the Imperial counting house.

  He needed someone on the inside.

  Unfortunately time was against the kind of subtlety that kind of infiltration required. His hands were proverbially tied. He needed to get in without taking the time for the niceties of the con. The job would be lacking the element of finesse a good caper had but it would be efficient and no one would get hurt. That was important. Thugs used brute force; a decent thief used his brain and left the brawn at home. The alarms, Felix rationalised, would be located around the sewers, and the ground and first floors. If he had been designing the security that is what he would have done. There were very few good second storey thieves working the city nowadays. It was an art long forgotten. Coarse crimes like muggings and pickpocketing were the vogue. The skill had gone out of the grift. People weren’t prepared to work for their money. They wanted it easy and quick.

  Not Felix Mann though, he belonged to the old school. He was a gentleman thief. A connoisseur of crime. He was a throwback, one of the last of the true grifters. His skill lay in making his society believe he didn’t exist. In Middenheim he was known as Reinard Kohl. In Talabheim he was Florian Schneider. In Bogenhafen his name was Ahren Leher. In Kemperbad he was Stefan Meyer, and in Marienburg, Ralf Bekker.

  In any given city in the Old World he had countless names and countless dowagers and wealthy widows eating out of the palm of his hand, showering him with trinkets for favours, desperate for even a few minutes of his attention. He made them feel special, reminded them what it felt like to be young, to be loved. He broke their hearts but in doing so he gave them something back, pride, a sense of self-worth, his gift was making them fall in love with themselves once more, and he made a pretty penny in the process. Wealthy merchants wined and dined him believing him to be of their ilk. His successes were the talk of every town, and his lies so big everyone just had to believe them.

  Carrion birds had settled along the crenellated roof of the barracks. Their beady eyes unnerved him.

  He needed to think.

  Any weaknesses for him to exploit would more likely than not be on the second and third storeys. There had to be a way in. Had to be.

  He walked slowly back towards the Domplatz district trying to clear his mind.

  It was like one of those elaborate Cathayan finger traps, the more he worried and pulled at the problem the more the small details sprang out to snare him, which of course had him wrestling all the details which stubbornly refused to be solved. The secret was to draw his fingers out slowly and smoothly. Or in other words to empty his mind; think about something else.

  The problem was if he wasn’t thinking about the job, the reality of the undead army crowding the Meadows Gate swamped his mind and the instinct to run became overwhelming. As with so many others, the fact that the Grand Theogonist had disappeared into the vaults of the great cathedral did nothing to comfort him. The priest had told the congregation he was retreating to pray for wisdom and enlightenment in this dark time.

  The crowds were still gathered before the great doors of the cathedral, waiting patiently for their spiritual father to emerge.

  Felix was sure the man had retreated into the bowels of Altdorf and used the complex warren of catacombs and the sewers to escape the city. Without his robes of office few would recognise the man. It certainly wasn’t impossible that he might have made his way as far as Reiksport unmolested and taken a ship from there to anywhere in the known world.

  It was, after all, what he would have done.

  He had expected to find a few stragglers still camped outside of the octagonal cathedral. Hundreds had converged on the place of worship: penitents, worshippers, the fearful and the desperate. To his left a group of women who looked as though they had just crawled out of the sewers knelt in huddled prayer.

  There was an almost hysterical reaction from the crowd as the doors of the cathedral began to open, and then a huge sigh of disappointment as they saw it was the lector, not the Grand Theogonist himself who emerged. The man was older by a few years and had the bearing of a scholar and the body to match. His face, however, was plain and open; a face you could instinctively trust. He moved stiffly, as though each step cost him heavily. The hubbub grew.

  He gestured for silence.

  A gentle murmur whispered through the crowd. He was going to address them. Felix could read the excitement in the rows of faces. As one they all thought the same thing: surely this meant Sigmar had spoken! An air of anticipation rippled through the onlookers. Felix caught it and moved closer, curious to hear what the lector had to say.

  The lector coughed, clearing his throat.

  “Three days gone our benevolent brother descended into the vaults to pray for guidance. He abstained food and water believing his faith in the lord our god would sustain him. He emerged this morning with the words we have longed to hear: beloved Sigmar has granted our holy father wisdom. With this knowledge our soldiers can slay the beast! He has given us the key to our survival!” The lector raised his hands in benediction.

  A huge cheer rang out as people hugged each other, believing themselves saved.

  Felix grinned. It was difficult not to be carried away by the lector’s enthusiasm. Now he understood why it was the lector addressing the crowd and not Wilhelm himself. Wilhelm’s sharp nose and narrow eyes were harder than the lector’s, less forgiving, but then he had seen things the lector could not even imagine in the darkest corners of his heart. The lector breaking the news of Sigmar’s intervention was a stroke of genius. Felix’s grin spread. He knew a good grift when he saw one. This was no case of divine intervention; on the contrary, it was a divine con. But that was the magic of the best grifts, convincing the rubes to believe the impossible. The bigger the lies, the more outrageous the lies, the more desperate the masses were to be gulled by them, especially if there was a little divinity thrown into the mix. This was a new angle for him to think about.

  A ripple of movement in the shadows behind the lector caught his eye.

  He was about to dismiss it when he saw it again, ten feet away from where he had first seen it: a crease in the shadows, a slight blurring of the wall as something passed in front of it. He wouldn’t have been able to see it if he hadn’t been looking for it, but now he knew what to look for it was not particularly difficult to follow. He knew what it was: the first layer of the divine grift peeling away before his very eyes. There was someone in the shadows, creeping away from the cathedral. He wasn’t sure how the deceit worked, a glamour perhaps?

  Curiosity piqued, he followed, keeping close to the shadows cast by the scant moonlight. The peculiar light anomaly moved slowly. He matched its pace, dampening the sound of his footsteps on the cobbles. He knew what he was doing was stupid. It was none of his business. The Sigmarites could pull the scam to end all scams for all he cared. He’d be gone in forty-eight hours. But he was curious. It was what made him a good thief. He didn’t take things at face value. He didn’t swallow the easy lie. There was a grift going down here and curiosity be damned, he wanted to know what it was all about.

  “Killed the cat, though didn’t it?” Felix muttered, disgusted with himself as,
in the darkness of an alleyway two streets over from the Sigmar cathedral, the figure of a tall, thin man took shape within the shimmering dark. The stranger peeled back the hood of his cloak and stopped mid-step. He had obviously heard Felix. He turned and stared directly at him. Felix winced. They were barely fifteen feet apart. Felix had been careless, gotten too close. He had been so caught up in trying to unravel the sting that he had walked right into one of the central players. He tried to look casually lost, like an innocent passer-by but it was a pointless ruse. They both knew why he was there.

  The look the stranger gave Felix sent a shiver soul deep. It was the man’s eyes. They were ancient, knowing, and so, so cold. They stripped away the layers of lies and identity and delved deep into the core of who he was. They knew him.

  “You would do well to forget you ever saw me,” the stranger said, and strode away into the everlasting night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Answered Prayers

  ALTDORF

  Winter, 2051

  CURSING HIMSELF FOR a fool Felix Mann retreated to his house in the Obereik district.

  His heart was hammering. His hands were trembling. The encounter had shaken him badly.

  He couldn’t get over the way the man’s eyes had dissected his soul. That was exactly what it had felt like: as though the man had taken a chirurgeon’s blade to his very sense of self and stripped it with brutal efficacy, slice after bloody slice.

  “Forty-eight hours,” he promised himself. Forty-eight hours. One last job and it would all be over. He looked up at the sky, as though hoping to see validation of his vow in the stars but all he saw was the damned darkness. It was far from reassuring even though he knew, rationally, that it wasn’t a natural night, this seemingly endless dark. The sun was blocked, it hadn’t disappeared. Von Carstein hadn’t spirited it away. He wasn’t that powerful. It was up there somewhere blazing with radiant intensity. A few miles away, he was sure, it was bright beautiful daylight. It surprised him how much he missed it. He felt its absence in his blood. It wasn’t as though he was a stranger to the night. He lived in the dark. As much as anywhere in this godforsaken city it was his home but it was different now. He couldn’t trust it anymore. It held secrets.

  The man had used it to cloak himself, moving virtually invisibly through the city. That, more than anything else, scared the thief. He didn’t like things he couldn’t explain and grift or not he knew he was standing on the fringe of a very dangerous game. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the stakes but he knew the smart money was on running for the hills. He who turns and runs away lives to fight another day, and all of that.

  “Forty-eight hours,” he promised himself again, knowing full well he wasn’t going anywhere until the counting house job was done.

  A new, horrific dimension was added to von Carstein’s bombing of the city during his walk home. Limbs, arms, hands, whole legs, feet, rotten and gangrenous, rancid with plague and other sickness, were catapulted into the city along with the flaming skulls. Felix picked a path through the detritus of human flesh, wondering how long they would be left there to fester, and how long it would take for the disease to spread.

  He shot the bolts on the door, locking himself in, but even knowing he was secure, he couldn’t sleep. He lay for an hour in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, thinking.

  The man hadn’t been human, he realised with something akin to dread settling in the pit of his stomach. It was the eyes. They gave him away. There had been no trace of humanity in them, only the ruthless cunning of a killer. Felix held his face in his hands. The Sigmarite priests were treating with the enemy; that was how desperate things had become, that was how much trouble he was in.

  “Forty-eight hours,” he said again, knowing that he didn’t have forty-eight hours. Time was a luxury he could ill afford.

  He pushed himself out of bed and paced around the room restlessly. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one little bit. Circumstance was manipulating him into going faster than he felt comfortable. Rushing a job meant taking risks, taking risks meant making mistakes. The question wasn’t if he was going to make mistakes, it was if he was going to get away with them.

  A great thief wasn’t defined by skill alone, a great thief was lucky. The greatest thieves of all time rode their luck like a dockside doxy.

  “To hell with it,” Felix Mann said. He dressed quickly, in dark colours, but not blacks. He avoided black because the darkness wasn’t pure, black stood out against it more than deep homespun browns and forest greens. He knelt, sliding two long thin dirks into their sheaths in his boots. He felt beneath the mattress for the canvas wrap and pulled it out. The case was a little smaller than his hand and it contained the tools of his trade. Felix unwrapped the canvas, checking through each pick and sawtoothed metal file methodically before wrapping the small canvas case back up and securing it to his belt. A second canvas wrap contained three coils of copper wire, wax and tallow as well as the fixings for tinder.

  He smeared an oil-based salve across his face, the components of the salve rendering his skin dark, in patches deep brown, in others almost olive green with hints of a purer black around the eyes, and tied his hair back with a thin strip of black leather. He greased the toes of his supple leather boots in sticky tar. Next he blacked up any exposed skin he could see in the full length body mirror, including the backs of his hands, smoothing the salve up past his wrists and well under the cuffs of his shirt so that even when he stretched and the fabric rode up there would be no telltale white skin to betray him. His palms he left white. He pulled on a supple pair of leather gloves, stretching his fingers deep into them. He drew a series of deep breaths, regulating his breathing.

  He was tense.

  Every muscle felt uncomfortably tight.

  He ran through a series of relaxation exercises, working from his fingertips inwards. He concentrated on the flow of blood through his body, using it to draw the tension out like a panacea.

  He left the house, but not by the door.

  He took to the thieves’ highway, travelling across the rooftops of the city, keeping low, and sticking to the lower buildings so that he wouldn’t be exposed to the guards on the city walls. He couldn’t risk a light, which meant he had to go more slowly than he might have liked, giving his eyes time to adjust.

  The fourth bell after midnight tolled sonorously through the dark city, echoing down the abandoned streets. A light drizzle began as Felix traversed the rooftops along the banks of the dry gulch that had only a few days earlier been the Reik River. Without water to drive it the huge mill wheels were no longer turning. He hunkered down on the slate roof of the old stone mill house. The drizzle made the slates treacherous. It also wet the tar on his toes. He prayed fervently that they would be sticky enough when he needed them. Coupled with the web of clothes lines and forgotten laundry that criss-crossed the rooftops the slick tiles were a hazard he could have lived without. Occasional lights bobbed by below, carried by watchmen. The light broke the shadows. He waited patiently for the torchbearers and lantern carriers to move on. Now he had committed himself to the job his sense of overwhelming urgency had gone.

  He moved on, ducking under a hemp rope that had been stretched between two chimneybreasts and hunkered down again beside a third, using it to keep him out of sight of the archers on the city wall while he scanned the nearby rooftops, picking out the best path between where he was and the Imperial counting house.

  The boarded-up windows of many of the surrounding houses made his job so much easier. No prying eyes to worry about and more than a few wrought metal balconies that could be borrowed if the rooftop traverse was interrupted. He picked his path and started to move, keeping low by habit even though there wasn’t a moon to silhouette him. Peripheral vision had a way of noticing movement that direct line of sight would often miss. There was no point in taking risks he didn’t have to.

  Felix moved almost entirely on instinct; he had been a thief long enough to know
when to trust his gut feelings about something. He scuttled forward, right up to the edge of an overhanging eave. The next building was a three-storey house, but both the second and third floors had wide wrought iron balconies. Neither, thankfully, was cluttered with plant pots or other potentially noisy bric-a-brac and shutters had been secured over the large windows. The gap between the buildings was ten feet at most, but it was a jump that he really didn’t want to make. Felix backed away from the edge and moved carefully along the roof until he had convinced himself there was no alternative. He moved back into place, taking a moment to judge the jump.

  It was far from easy.

  The second floor balcony interfered with what otherwise would have been a fairly straightforward jump and catch because any kind of impact with his lower legs could easily dislodge his grip on the railings above.

  It was a long way down.

  He took two steps back, and with a short run-up launched himself off the roof. For one sickening second Felix thought he had misjudged the distance then his wrists slammed into the metal filigree of the upper balcony as his legs continued to swing. He barely managed to catch a hold with one hand, fingers slipping down the iron spike as he hung there precariously, dangling high above the street. He kicked his legs, giving his body the momentum he needed to reach up and grab a firm hold on the trelliswork and hand over hand haul himself up onto the balcony. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

  The balcony overlooked a baker’s dozen of flat roofs, one of them crowding close to the rough-hewn walls of the barracks across the street from the Imperial counting house. The shadow of the counting house hulked just beyond it. One glance was enough to confirm that the rooftop security was minimal. He clambered up to stand on the balcony’s handrail and reached up to grab the guttering, praying silently that it was secure enough to bear his weight for the few seconds he needed. The metal drainage pipe groaned and began to pull away from the wall as he scrambled up it, the tar on his toes sticking and giving Felix the purchase he needed to drag himself up onto the roof.