Warhammer - [Genevieve 03] - Beasts in Velvet

by Jack Yeovil (epub)

  'This is Baron Johann von Mecklenberg, the Elector of Sudenland,' said the officer.

  Harald didn't bow and scrape. It wasn't his style.

  'How is Dickon?' he asked.

  'What?'

  'Dickon. Is he still captain of the Dock Watch?'

  The youth was astounded.

  'You've got the copper smell, boy. It can't be mistaken.'

  'I'm Helmut Elsaesser. And I am from the Dock Watch.'

  Harald didn't like the feeling that he was being called upon to demonstrate his skills, like a conjurer at a children's party.

  'You have sharp eyes, thief-taker,' said the baron.

  Harald nodded, agreeing with him.

  'Dickon is still captain.'

  'I'm sure he's the best money can buy.'

  The boy laughed. He was all right.

  The baron looked around the warehouse. Goods were piled up, with chalk marks on the boxes to indicate their eventual destination. Room and board came with the job. A cot in a cupboard and three company meals a day. You could call it a life.

  'You used to be with the watch?'

  'Yes, baron. Used to be.'

  Harald's boots would pass. He looked up at his visitors. They had brought a little of the fog with them. Outside, it would be cold, difficult. Ideal weather for cutpurses, pimps, pickpockets and ruffians. Bad weather for coppers.

  'I understand you resigned.'

  Harald spat out a short laugh.

  'That's what you heard.'

  Elsaesser was passing a document from hand to hand.

  'They say you were the best copper in Altdorf.'

  'I'd heard that too.'

  'But not recently.'

  Harald sat down. A pot of tea was stewing on the small table.

  'I'm in the mercantile business now. I've retired to make my fortune.'

  'By unblocking sewers?'

  'And catching pilferers, and stock-taking and sweeping the place out if I have to.'

  Without being asked, the baron sat down at the table. Elsaesser stayed upright, like a dutiful footman. He was clutching his document as if it were a charm blessed of Verena. Harald saw the Imperial seal. He wasn't impressed. He'd seen it before.

  'Quite a descent in the world.'

  'You could look at it that way, baron. A man should make the best of his circumstances. Whatever they are.'

  He had been with the Reik and Talabec Trading Company for three years now and he couldn't think of the first names of the merchants who employed him.

  'I've heard stories about your resignation.'

  'You can take your pick of them.'

  'What's your story?'

  Harald didn't see why he should go through all this again. But it was expected of him.

  'I killed a man. Several, in fact. But one in particular.'

  'Ulli von Tasseninck.'

  Harald remembered. The weight of the knife in his hand. The arc of the throw. The satisfying thud of impact.

  'You knew him, elector. I'm not surprised.'

  'The nephew of Grand Prince Hals von Tasseninck, Elector of Ostland.'

  'Yes, a distinguished family.'

  The young man, a corpse already, taking five more steps then crumpling onto the flagstones. It had been a neat job. No blood spilled.

  'And a powerful one.'

  'Show me an elector who is not powerful. You should know.'

  Harald poured himself a mug of tea. He did not offer any to his visitors.

  'Couldn't you have used a little more tact? Ulli was headstrong, yes, but he was born to the green velvet.'

  Harald felt his bile rising and gulped down tea to calm his stomach.

  'Baron, I saw a naked man chasing a girl, with his cock in one hand and a meatcleaver in the other Well, I guess I forgot to enquire as to his lineage×'

  Ulli had left his green velvet courtier's cloak draped over a statue of Verena, presumably hoping to blind the goddess of justice. Harald had wiped his knife on the cloak and thrown the garment over the dead man.

  'The girl was Ulli's property, was she not? A bonded slave?'

  Harald shrugged. 'It was dark in that temple. I didn't see the brand of ownership burned into her back.'

  The baron had no answer. Harald knew that the man approved of his actions. Most people approved of him. That didn't help much. What people×especially those in green velvet×thought, and what they did were two separate courses.

  'She was thirteen years old,' Harald said, 'and your friend had been using her since she was eight.'

  Dark points appeared in the baron's eyes. 'Ulli von Tasseninck was not my friend.'

  'Did you know that the Grand Prince endowed a college in his name at the University? There's a statue of him outside it, looking like a saint, brandishing the spear of learning. The Ulli von Tasseninck School of Religious Studies.'

  A slash of a smile split the baron's neatly trimmed beard.

  'Actually, the statue was damaged recently. Someone smashed its head and replaced it with a pumpkin lantern.'

  'That's a crime.'

  'You wouldn't know anything about it.'

  'I hate crime.'

  'I thought so.'

  Steam rose from Harald's tea. He understood the baron a little better now. He was a good man, too.

  They were all good men. A dying breed.

  'What happened to the girl? You bought her/didn't you?'

  Harald remembered. She could hardly speak and would hide under a table whenever anyone new came into the room. When he had asked her what her name was, she had not known what he had meant. When he had explained that her name was what everybody called her, she smiled and said, 'Bitch.'

  'No, I freed her.'

  'I understood that cost you a lot.'

  'Everything I had. My house, my savings, my horse, everything. Even my job. That was Grand Prince Hals's price.'

  The baron nodded.

  'I kept something back, though,' Harald said. 'Most of the weapons came with the commission. They belong to the watch. But this,' he patted his knife, 'is mine, bought with my own crowns.'

  'Fine workmanship. Magnin the steelsmith?'

  Harald nodded.

  'I have one of his swords.'

  Harald took out the knife and looked at his face in the polished steel. His reflection curved with the blade.

  'She's married,' Harald said. 'Ulli's plaything. She married a chandler and got fat. She has hundreds of babies.'

  'All named after you?'

  'No, none of them. We don't see each other. She has too many memories.'

  He kissed his blade, feeling the stone cold hardness against his lips.

  'So, you have a steel mistress?'

  'You could call it that,' he said, slipping his knife away. 'But it's just a good tool.'

  'You were married, weren't you?' It was the first thing Elsaesser had said in a while.

  Harald's stomach boiled again.

  'I was. My wife died.'

  'I'm sorry to hear that,' said the baron. 'Plague?'

  His gut felt as if lashworms were eating through it.

  'Hooks,' he said. 'Or Fish. They never found out.'

  'That was back during the Waterfront War,' Elsaesser explained to the baron. 'Just before it petered out. It was strange. One day, both gangs were at each other's throats. Then, the fighting stopped. The war chiefs of the Hooks and the Fish just disappeared.'

  Harald remembered the faces looking up at him from under the water, disappearing as the weights on their boots pulled them down.

  'Another unsolved case,' he said. 'Dickon has a barrelful of them.'

  'I've met Dickon.'

  'Then you know what kind of a copper he is. Money at the end of the week and anything for a quiet life.'

  The baron held out his hand and Elsaesser put the document in it.

  'This is an Imperial warrant, Mister Kleindeinst.'

  The baron laid it carefully on the table, squaring the corners.

  'For what?' />
  'For anything you say. Immediately, it's an order reconfirming you in your old position.'

  'Dickon will love that.'

  'You won't be under Dickon. You'll report to me and I'm answerable only to the Emperor.'

  Harald's stomach was calming down but there was a tightness in his belly replacing the ache. He could almost taste the desire. This warehouse was a grave and he could feel the earth shifting as he struggled out of it.

  'Then, these are sealed orders giving you the authority to go anywhere, question anyone, do anything'

  There was a great deal of darkness in the baron's eyes. Harald felt as if he were looking into a knife-mirror again.

  'And, finally, this is a warrant of arrest for a certain criminal,' said Elsaesser.

  'A warrant of arrest,' explained the baron, 'or, if necessary, a warrant of execution.'

  Harald picked up the document and sniffed it.

  'This isn't real, is it?'

  'No,' said the baron, 'but that will be our secret.'

  'Boy,' Harald said to Elsaesser. 'Get a chair and sit down. Do you want tea?'

  Elsaesser brought two cups from a shelf. Harald poured drinks for his visitors.

  'I suppose I had better enjoy this,' he said, drinking again. 'This was the only perk of the job, imported tea from Kislev. And I don't work here any more.'

  The document was in his shirt pocket, above his heart.

  'I brought this,' Elsaesser said, pulling out a small, cloth-wrapped packet. 'It was in a desk at the Luitpoldstrasse Station.'

  He unwrapped the object and let it fall on the table. The copper badge hadn't changed. It bore the watch code number for the Luitpoldstrasse District, 317, and his own service serial number, 89. Harald picked it up and felt it in his hand. His stomach wasn't bothering him now. It was as if he had regained the use of a crippled limb. He slipped the badge into his pocket.

  'What do you know about the Beast?' asked the baron.

  'Seven,' Harald said, imagining them laid out in a row. 'Seven so far.'

  'And there will be more.'

  'Yes. He can't stop. A womanslayer is the worst kind of criminal there is.'

  'Can you catch him?'

  The baron was serious now. Harald felt the weight of the badge in his pocket. For a small scrap of metal, it felt awfully heavy.

  'You know,' he said, putting his boot up on the table, 'this is why they call me 'Filthy Harald'.'

  The baron looked at Elsaesser, puzzled. 'I don't understand.'

  'Every filthy job, baron. That's when people come to me. That's what I get. Every filthy job.'

  IV

  She had missed the main service at the temple, but attended a late evening ceremony. There were no pews. Worshippers at the Temple of Sigmar were expected to stand up, or to kneel on the hard stones. After her day, she decided on kneeling, although that meant a chill seeped into her knees and crept up through her body. Contact with the ground brought her closer to the god anyway, as she picked up the residue of the many devout prayers that had been offered in this small chapel. There were ignoble, ungodly thoughts too×even ignoble, ungodly prayers×but Rosanna was used to weeding them out and allowing herself to sink into the centuries of pious converse with the patron deity of the Empire.

  They had kept her down at the Luitpoldstrasse Station well into the evening, sorting through odd items of clothing left over from the victims. And bits of irrelevant rubbish found lying around at the scenes of the killings. She was not a necromancer; she could not communicate with the dead and quiz them about their last moments. She was a psychometrist, picking up images and impressions from inanimate objects, usually strong emotions that had been associated with people who had been in contact with the things she scried from.

  It had been a ghastly task, living through seven deaths, and all she had picked up was a tangle of confusion and spilled blood. She thought the Beast was a madman with a knife, but could not rule out the persistent suggestion that he was an altered creature. Through the pain, she only had the vaguest impressions of staring eyes. And she kept seeing green velvet.

  But almost as bad as the shocking detritus left by violent death were the aching impressions she picked up of the lives the women had lived before their murders. Hunger, cold, poverty, lifelong abuse, joyless love. One woman had had maybe seventeen children, none surviving. Another had been introduced to weirdroot in infancy by her father, and had not spent a day outside her dreams for the rest of her life. The Beast would eventually go from the docks, but the misery would remain, unchanged.

  She prayed to Sigmar, trying to cleanse herself of the deaths of seven women. In the centre of the octagonal chapel, looking up at the stylised image of the warhammer above the altar, she tried to reach out to the god who had been a man. Sometimes, her gift brought her epiphanies. But she was never sure of them, never sure that she had not merely tapped into the shared delusions of three thousand years of devout souls rather than reached the gods themselves.

  Most people did not see enough, but Rosanna Ophuls frequently saw too much. It was worse, ultimately, than seeing nothing.

  The graveyard shift cleric concluded the service and she stood up. Her only fellow communicants were an old woman who attended every service available at the Temple, from the earliest in the morning to the latest at night, and Tilo, a distracted-looking novice with ink on his fingers and a terrible stutter. She rubbed her knees and tried to get some warmth into them.

  'R-R-R-Ro'

  'Yes,' she said, not waiting for him to finish.

  He was going to ask her out to a coffee house. She could pick it up from his mind. His forehead was bright red and his hair, even in his early twenties, was thinning. His scalp glowed scarlet.

  She felt kindly towards him.

  'I'm sorry, Tilo. I've been summoned by the Lector.'

  'Muh-muh-muh'

  Maybe some other time?

  'Maybe, Tilo.'

  His lips twitched in a smile.

  'Excuse me.'

  She stepped past him, through the doorway of the chapel. Tilo seemed to stumble slightly and pressed against her.

  Inside her brain, a bubble of Tilo's mind exploded.

  she was looking down at herself, naked and tied to a bed, flames licking upwards from her flesh. Her face was painted and she was grinning like an empty-eyed weirdroot imbecile. Her breasts and hips were as exaggerated as those of dwarf goddess carvings. She was covered in a thin film of some perfumed oil and it was burning without pain. Her body rippled as she writhed against her bonds, lifting her back off the bed in an arch, invisible clouds of warmth and musk radiating from her hot centre. She was begging for something, words dribbling out of her mouth

  She pushed away from the novice, breaking the contact.

  In his eyes, she read his horror.

  'You saw,' he said, not stuttering, 'you saw!'

  He ran away, his robe flapping about his legs.

  There was a fountain outside the chapel. She pushed her face into the jet of water and tried to wash Tilo out of her.

  'I am not a pretty girl,' she told herself, lying. 'What other people see is not me.'

  She rubbed cold water into her face. She never wore rouge, tried to cover her long, red hair with a scarf. She did not lead men like Tilo on. And yet, wherever she went, she could feel men's eyes following her. All women experienced much the same thing, she supposed, but not all women could feel what she felt, could feel the dirty tendrils of men's desires slinking into her mind.

  'Rosanna,' a voice said.

  She stood up, her face dripping. The front of her dress was wet and clung.

  Siemen Ruhaak, an initiate of the Order of the Torch, stood in the corridor, his hood up. The Order of the Torch was the cult's administrative arm. Ruhaak was always fetching people for audiences. The novices were afraid of him, because he always appeared when they were due for a scolding. Rosanna always felt slightly sorry for him, seeing the doubts that writhed beneath his sternness. If the
Lector, Mikael Hasselstein, was a Knight of the Cult of Sigmar, then Siemen Ruhaak was his squire.

  'Am I late?' she asked.

  Ruhaak shook his head. 'I was just coming for you.'

  'Is the Lector ready to see me?'

  'Yes. He has just returned from a palace function. I would appreciate it if you did not disturb him overmuch. He seems distracted. He has so many things to consider.'

  Rosanna couldn't quite understand. She couldn't even scry what Ruhaak was getting at. Something vague was troubling the man and he didn't even know what it was.

  Ruhaak knew more about her than Tilo. As they walked through the passages towards the Lector's office, she noticed that he was careful not to touch her. He even held the sleeves of his robe tightly against his side to avoid a casual, accidental brushing.

  There were two kinds of men: those who wanted her and those who were afraid of her.

  Outside the Lector's office, two Knights of the Fiery Heart stood to attention, in full armour. Hasselstein did not usually bother with such precautions, but in a crisis he almost always called for the cult's military wing. For a powerful man×in Altdorf, Hasselstein was second only to the Grand Theogonist Yorri XV in the hierarchy of the cult×the Lector was remarkably easy to spook.

  The knights stood aside and Ruhaak opened the door for her. She bowed her head as she entered the office. The door was closed behind her and she was with Mikael Hasselstein, the Emperor's confessor. Ruhaak had not come in with her.

  She had talked with Hasselstein before, but never alone. Mostly, she saw him in the distance as he was about the business of the cult and of the Empire. Usually, he was getting into or out of a carriage, holding up his expensive robes. She knew he was convinced that Mornan Tybalt, the Master of the Imperial Counting House, was his deadly rival and was always embroiled in scheme and counter-scheme to gain the most favour with Karl-Franz. Hasselstein spent more time at the palace than the Temple and spoke eloquently about the need for the cult to remain at the centre of the court's political life. Sigmar had a hammer but the Lector fought with a quill and a ledger.

  She looked up.

  The Lector was lying on a couch with his boots off. He wore his cleric's robes, but open like a coat. Underneath, he was in a courtier's finery. He looked a little ill. The office was large but cluttered. There was an indifferent portrait of the Emperor up on one wall, given pride of place. An antique screen in the Nipponese style, decorated with images of Sigmar wielding his hammer, was set up before the slit windows. The room was lit with a single candelabrum. Rosanna got the impression that the Lector had just extinguished most of the lamps to save his eyes from hurt. The desk was piled high with books and papers, and an array of seals was set out on the blotter, neatly ordered by size and function of etiquette.