His interest piqued, Rudi leaned against the waist-high rail, the wood under his hand worn smooth by time and the elements, and took his first leisurely look at the lands north of the Reik as they slipped past, little more than a bowshot away They didn’t seem too different from the marshes and moorland that he and Hanna had struggled over on the opposite side of the river, although his spirits lifted a little at the thought of all the water that lay between the two territories.
So long as Shenk’s business remained on the northern bank, he and Hanna should be relatively safe. If they showed any signs of veering over to the southern bank, they’d just have to stay below and hope for the best.
“Enjoying the view?” Shenk asked, appearing at his elbow. Aboard his vessel, he seemed more confident and businesslike, Rudi thought, a far cry from the nondescript little fellow he was when ashore. Even the faded blue coat he wore all the time, apparently as a mark of his authority, seemed to fit him a little better on deck. Determined to be courteous, Rudi nodded.
“It certainly beats walking,” he conceded. Shenk echoed the gesture.
“Or swimming,” he said. An awkward silence descended for a moment. “I just wanted you to know that there won’t be any need to jump ship this time around.”
“I’m sure there won’t,” Rudi said, his hand resting casually against the hilt of his sword for a moment. Shenk nodded curtly, apparently genuinely insulted by his visible lack of trust.
“I told you, I owe you one, and I always make good on my debts. If I’m honest, I hope I never see either of you again once we get to Altdorf, but until we do, you’ve no call to be looking over your shoulder. Are we clear?”
“Clear as a spring,” Rudi assured him, his confidence somehow boosted by the man’s bluntness, far more than it would have been by a show of strained politeness. Shenk seemed to relax a little too, as if reassured.
“Good.” He changed the subject. “How’s Hanna?”
“Still sleeping,” Rudi said, trying to sound casual. Shenk nodded sympathetically.
“Probably the best thing,” he said. “She must be all in.” A faint air of wonderment tinted his voice. “How she made that jump from the wharf, I’ll never know. You either, come to that.”
“Well that makes two of us,” Rudi assured him, hoping to steer the conversation to safer ground. Shenk nodded again. Then he shrugged.
“We’ll be putting in at Nocht’s Landing tonight. They have a healer there. Nothing fancy, just a herbalist really, but I can get him to take a look at her if you like.”
Rudi fought to keep his face neutral. Hanna and her mother had been simple village healers back in Kohlstadt, at least so far as anybody knew, but they’d been hiding the secret of their magical abilities from all their friends and neighbours. What if this herbalist was the same, and had the gift of witchsight, like Hanna? He’d know her for what she was instantly, and if he was simply a healer after all, he might still recognise the cause of Hanna’s malady. Either way, the risk was too great.
“Better to let her sleep, I think,” he said, trying to keep his tone light. “She’s also a healer, don’t forget. I think they’re a bit sensitive about being treated by someone else.”
“Well, you know her best,” Shenk conceded, “but if she hasn’t woken by nightfall you ought to think about it.”
“Perhaps I will,” Rudi said, hoping that nightfall was a long way off. His stomach growled suddenly, reminding him of how hungry he was, and he seized on the chance to change the subject gratefully. “Do you have any food on board?” The question seemed to amuse Shenk.
“We’ve got a hold full of it,” he said, “but you’re not eating the cargo.” He pointed to a barrel on the deck, just forwards of the cabin, almost as large as the one Rudi had hidden in the first time he’d been carried aboard the boat. “That’s full of apples. Help yourself, that’s what it’s there for. You missed lunch, I’m afraid.”
Glad of the excuse to terminate the conversation, Rudi left the captain to go about his business and wandered over to the apple barrel. It was still full, and as he lifted the lid the sweet smell of autumnal fruit rose up around him, causing him to salivate. He plucked a couple out, finding them still firm and barely wrinkled, despite having been picked at least a month before. One thing Marienburgers were skilled at, he reflected, was the preservation of food, something essential in a maritime nation whose ships plied the waters of the world sometimes for months at a stretch. He bit into one, feeling the sweet juice flooding into his mouth, and almost bumped into Ansbach, who had approached the barrel from the other side.
“Sorry. I didn’t see you there.” He held out the second apple. Ansbach ignored it.
“I’ll get my own.” The deckhand pushed past him, and selected a fruit from the barrel.
“Suit yourself,” Rudi said, stifling the impulse to let the lid fall on the man’s fingers, and went to check on Hanna.
CHAPTER FOUR
To Rudi’s carefully concealed concern, Hanna still hadn’t stirred by the time the Reikmaiden put into Nocht’s Landing, which turned out to be pretty much as he’d expected. A wooden wharf, barely long enough for the sturdy little riverboat to lie alongside, projected out into the river. A couple of skiffs bobbed next to it, the fishing nets folded under their seats probably the only things that made life out here on the fringes of the Wasteland even marginally possible. Beyond the timber structure a handful of huts, too modest to be dignified with a label as grand as cottage, stood, clustered around a larger building that clearly served the tiny community as a meeting place. Although it couldn’t have done enough business to qualify as a tavern, the smell of cooking food and the sound of chattering voices drifting from it were enough to inform Rudi that it was the next best thing, a mixture of social centre and communal dining room, like the ones he’d seen in the hamlets around Kohlstadt.
The scent of baking fish, tenuous as it was over the all-pervading odour of river mud and dung, which clung to the tiny settlement like a garment, hit him straight in the stomach, and began to remind him, in no uncertain terms, that he hadn’t eaten a proper meal since his supper with Rauke the previous evening. The boat’s cook had abandoned the galley, evidently intent on eating ashore with the rest of the crew, and if he didn’t want to spend another night subsisting on apples he’d have no option but to join them.
That would mean abandoning Hanna, at least for a short while. He hesitated, assessing the risks. He’d been through enough to know that there was no such thing as safety to be found anywhere in the world, just a temporary approximation of it, but she should be secure enough sleeping in the hold of the boat. One of the crew would be left on watch, and could call him if she woke. It was hardly as if he’d be difficult to find in a hamlet this size. To his quiet relief the deckhand in question was Berta, the only other woman on board, who seemed to have joined the crew in Marienburg, and who wasn’t regarding him with open suspicion like almost everyone else.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” she promised, tugging a woollen cap down over her cropped blonde hair. She was short and stocky, heavily muscled like a dwarf, and had evidently been around watercraft for a long time, judging by the calluses on her hands from hauling ropes. Pieter and Ansbach seemed to get on all right with her, and the cook, Yullis, probably did, at least when he could be prised out of his galley to double up as a deckhand, which he did whenever necessary. In his time as a watchman, Rudi had become quite adept at reading people, particularly if they were trying to conceal something, and Berta seemed honest enough. She seemed a little reserved around him, though, probably as a result of the stories she’d heard from the others.
“I appreciate that,” Rudi told her, with a friendly grin, “and I’m sure Hanna will too, when I tell her how kind you’ve been.”
“Yes, well, no need to ladle it on,” Berta said, although she seemed pleased at the courtesy nevertheless. “It’s not as if I’ll have much else to do.”
“Coming?” Shenk asked, pausi
ng at Rudi’s shoulder, and he nodded.
“Might as well,” he agreed. Busch, Ansbach and Yullis were already ashore, their silhouettes clearly visible in the gathering dusk as they made their way through the hamlet towards the community hall. Although he was too distant to make out any conversation, they seemed to be exchanging greetings with a few of the local inhabitants as they went. “I take it you’ve been here before.”
“I’ve been a lot of places,” Shenk said, as they made their way along the gangplank, “but we put in here every few months. Couple of other boats do too.”
Rudi looked at the motley collection of huts surrounding them, suddenly reminded of the one he’d grown up in, in the woods outside Kohlstadt. He hadn’t thought of it in a long time, he realised, and the notion was curiously depressing. Half a year ago, his world had been settled and secure, the most he’d had to worry about being whether his snares would be full and trying to master the bow his father had given him.
For a moment he considered asking Shenk what had happened to the weapon, which had been left behind along with everything else they’d owned when he and Hanna had fled the Reikmaiden a few months before, but decided not to bother. The captain would have sold or traded it at the first opportunity, and there was no point in bringing the matter up again. It was only a bow, after all, and he had another now. He didn’t need a tangible reminder of his adoptive father to keep his memory fresh.
That prompted a flood of new memories, of the night Gunther Walder had died, struck down by a beastman, as the monstrous creatures had slaughtered their way through the participants of what he could no longer deny had been a Chaotic ritual of some kind. He shook his head, trying to clear it. The more he learned about his history, the more confused he became. Gunther had been a good man, he knew that, but he’d thought the same thing about Magnus until the horrors of the previous night had opened his eyes. Perhaps his father had been an innocent dupe, taken in by the man’s charm and apparent goodwill.
“I’m surprised you find enough cargo in a place like this,” Rudi said, wrenching his thoughts back to the conversation, and hoping Shenk hadn’t noticed his momentary distraction.
“You’d be surprised,” Pieter said, grinning. Then he shut his mouth as the captain shot him a warning look. Of course, Rudi thought, an isolated spot like this would be the ideal place to transfer illicit cargoes between riverboats.
“It’s not a question of bulk,” Shenk explained. “All these settlements would be completely cut off without the river. There are always letters or messages to pick up, small items to barter and sell.”
“Like lamp oil, that sort of thing,” said Rudi.
“Exactly,” Shenk said, although whether he recognised the reference to the barrels that Rudi and Hanna had been hiding in when they’d been brought on board before, or was simply being polite enough to pretend that he hadn’t, Rudi couldn’t tell. “Putting in for the night’s always better than sailing on in the dark. As we’re here anyway, we might as well do a little business.”
The walk to the dining hall was a short one, but even so, Rudi had time to absorb his surroundings in some detail, aided by the frequent pauses that Shenk made to swap gossip with a few of the locals. Although small, the huts were all soundly built, presumably with timber shipped in along the river, since there were few trees to be seen apart from a handful of stunted specimens barely larger than bushes, and most had well-tended vegetable plots alongside them. A few even had chickens scratching about, although the other livestock, a handful of pigs and goats, seemed to have the run of the place, apparently left to wander at will. There was little chance of them getting lost, as the entire settlement was enclosed by a semicircular palisade, which probably accounted for the scarcity of trees in the immediate vicinity. Anything even remotely substantial had obviously been felled to form part of the defences, which began and ended abutting the river. Rudi was troubled for a moment by a nagging sense of familiarity, until the memory of the fortified stockade on the moors, where the Imperial soldiers that Gerhard had been with had made their camp, floated to the surface of his mind. The defensive arrangements were strikingly similar, and he mentioned as much.
“There are always dangers out here to be wary of,” Pieter said, and Rudi nodded, noticing that most of the men and several of the women appeared to be armed. One of the locals, a tall man who seemed to be some sort of leader among the little community, broke off his conversation with Shenk to nod a confirmation.
“There is that,” he agreed. “Mutants escaping from the city, for one thing, and I’ve heard tell of worse.” He didn’t seem at all inclined to elaborate. Shenk nodded too.
“They say all sorts of things came down from the north last year, and not all of them went home again.” Rudi felt his scalp begin to prickle, in spite of his instinctive cynicism. Tales he would have scoffed at in the comfortable tap room of the Dancing Pirate could seem all too plausible here, in the gathering dusk, surrounded by leagues of marsh and bog. He knew only too well the sort of things that lurked in the wilderness. He had killed a skaven with his bare hands, and seen a warband of beastmen far closer than most who’d lived to tell the tale.
“You’re not taking any chances, I see,” he said, nodding at the spear the speaker carried. The man, whose name, he gathered from the half-overheard conversation he’d been having with Shenk, was Ranulph, fell into step beside them.
“Not at the moment,” he said. “We lost someone this morning. Gofrey went out looking for herbs and didn’t come back.”
“Could he just have gone further than usual?” Shenk asked. “We were hoping to see him. There’s a sick girl on the boat.”
“Then she’ll just have to get better on her own,” Ranulph said. “We couldn’t find a trace of him, and it’s coming on to dark. If he’s not dead by now, he soon will be.”
“I’m a pretty good tracker,” Rudi said. The scent of the cooking fish called to him like one of the sirens the sailors of Marienburg prattled about in their traveller’s tales, but the thought of someone lost out in the marshes, prey to the horrors he’d seen, overrode it. “I might be able to find some trace of him, if we bring a couple of torches for light.”
“It’s not quite dark yet,” Shenk said, surprising Rudi with his unexpected support. Ranulph glanced at the reddening sky, and nodded suddenly.
“Worth a try,” he said. He whistled, and a couple of the villagers trotted over, bows slung across their backs. “This lad’s a tracker, so he says, and he’s willing to go after Gofrey. He’ll need some help.” The two men glanced at one another, clearly uneasy. “Get someone to go with you and carry a torch, and the minute the sun goes down you head back here. I’m not sending out another search party.”
“I’ll go,” Pieter said unexpectedly. Everyone looked at him, and he shrugged. “I like Gofrey. He cleared up that dose of the… you know.” Shenk nodded, with a trace of amusement. “It was more than the leeches in Marienburg were able to do. I owe him one.”
“Fair enough.” Ranulph watched while Pieter selected a brand from one of the neighbouring fires, and held it above his head, casting a circle of warm light around the little party. “See you later, I hope.”
Once they’d left the warmth and light of the compound behind them, Rudi began to doubt the wisdom of his sudden impulse to help. The young men with them, who hadn’t volunteered their names, kept arrows nocked, and looked around at the desolate marshes suspiciously. Thin tendrils of mist were beginning to rise from the boggy ground, making the going even more treacherous than it would otherwise have been, and Rudi placed his feet carefully, all too aware that a single misstep could have catastrophic consequences.
“He came this way,” one of the villagers volunteered. The light was greying, the floating patches of mist tinted gold by the westering sun, and Rudi was glad of the extra illumination afforded by the blazing torch that Pieter was carrying. It deepened the shadows of the tiny indentations in the ground left by the feet which had passe
d through ahead of them, and Rudi nodded.
“So did three other people, two men and a woman. They came back the same way. Your search party?”
“That’s right,” the villager confirmed, visibly surprised. “They couldn’t find anything on the path, so they came back around noon.”
“No sign of the other one turning back,” Rudi said. To his relief the trail left by the missing herbalist was clear enough, his tracking skills having remained Undiminished by his sojourn in the city. He pushed on as quickly as he dared, acutely conscious of the fading light around them. Conversation ebbed away as he kept his eyes on the ground ahead of him. Then he stopped, abruptly, confused.
“What is it?” Pieter asked.
“His footprints have disappeared,” Rudi said, stooping to examine the ground more closely. The marks left by the search party were still visible, both coming and going, and he wondered for a moment if they’d simply obliterated the ones he was interested in, but they were no more pronounced than before.
“You think he went under?” the other archer asked, exchanging a grim look with his companion. Rudi shook his head.
“There would have been more signs of disturbance in the mud if that had happened,” he explained. He moved back a few yards, until he’d found the prints he was looking for again, and cast around. To his relief the clear indentation of a booted heel was visible in a nearby tussock, a couple of feet from the track. He pointed. “He went that way.”
“That’s impossible,” the first bowman asserted. His companion nodded. “There’s no path there.”
“Nevertheless, it’s the way he went.” Rudi hopped across the mud to the mound of grass. Even in the fading light, he could see a faint footprint in the next one. He jumped across to that one too, and then a third. He glanced behind. “Come on, it’s easy.”
[Blood on the Reik 03] - Death's Legacy Page 4
