03 - Death's Legacy

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Mathilde opened her mouth as if she was about to argue the point, and then caught sight of the blade lunging at Fritz’s unprotected back. Rudi tried to complete the blocking movement he’d already begun, but stumbled as his shins met the ruffian he’d just downed. The man clutched at his leg, trying to trip him, and Rudi cut down again with his sword, not even bothering to look. There was a meaty thud somewhere around knee height, and the grip around his calf was abruptly released.

  Prevented from parrying the blow aimed at Fritz, he watched Mathilde leap towards the knifeman, time slowing and stretching, as it so often seemed to in combat. He even had time to notice that the bustling streets had quieted, a few of the passers-by pausing to watch the spectacle as they had in Carroburg, although most of them continued to go about their business regardless of the fracas, giving it little more than a cursory glance.

  “Look out!” Mathilde called, but Fritz’s attention was wholly on the fight he was having with the swordsman, and he barely acknowledged her warning shout. Before Rudi’s horrified gaze, the dagger struck squarely home, and then rebounded, the point snapping off with a faint metallic ring. A gleam of metal became visible beneath the ragged new tear in Fritz’s immaculate jacket, and with a sigh of relief, Rudi recalled the concealed mail shirt that Mathilde had been wearing during the brawl in the gambling den when they’d first met her and von Eckstein. Obviously, the nobleman believed in equipping his employees with a little discreet protection as a matter of course.

  Before the knifeman could recover, Mathilde was on him, striking him down with a furious blow that cleaved deep into his shoulder. As the wounded man tried to crawl away, she kicked him hard in the face, her expression murderously vengeful.

  “Not so tough face-to-face, are you, you backstabbing little runt.” Her blade rose and fell again, and the thug expired with a single choked-off scream of mortal terror.

  Rudi turned to face the last ruffian, who was already backing away, and took a step towards him, raising his blade. That was enough. The man turned and fled, weaving through the growing crowd of onlookers at an impressive turn of speed. His comrade with the belly wound followed, rather more slowly and erratically, leaving a trail of spattered blood behind him. Unless he found a healer or a chirurgeon pretty soon, Rudi thought, he wasn’t going very far. Fritz seemed to be gaining the upper hand against their leader, although his handling of the sword still seemed a little less elegant and instinctive than Mathilde’s or Rudi’s own, so Rudi left him to it while he hurdled the body of his fallen opponent and turned towards Hanna again.

  “You talk a good fight for a hedge wizard,” the shadow mage said, “but you’re in way over your head, little girl. You’ve got no idea what you’re dealing with.”

  “Neither have you,” Hanna said. Before Rudi could intervene, a ball of seething red flame winked into existence in the air ahead of her, and streaked towards the black-clad wizard. Before he could react it struck him full in the chest, and he went down shrieking, a neat, charred hole punched almost the whole way through his torso. For a moment Rudi thought he could see the man’s spine from the wrong side, and shuddered with instinctive revulsion. Then the fellow expired in a miasma of burning flesh and smouldering cloth.

  “Hanna!” he gasped in horror, anticipating an outbreak of hysteria among the crowd like the one they’d fled from in Carroburg. To his astonishment, however, none of the passers-by reacted at all, other than to step around the gently smoking corpse with carefully composed expressions of fastidious distaste. Hanna shrugged.

  “He didn’t leave me any choice,” she said, her tone making it perfectly clear that any doubts Rudi might have harboured on that score would be best kept to himself.

  “Come on.” He looked around grimly, prepared to fight his way clear of the inevitable lynch mob, but the crowd remained strangely passive. For a moment, he found himself wondering if they were all under some kind of enchantment.

  “You got that thing off your head, then,” Fritz said, taking advantage of his opponent’s momentary distraction to get in under his guard. There was a brief scraping of metal on metal, and the gang leader’s sword clattered to the ordure-slick cobbles underfoot. Fritz rested the tip of his blade against the man’s throat. “Leave. Now,” he said, slowly and distinctly. With a squeak of relief, and the sudden smell of soiled britches, the would-be assassin complied. Fritz sheathed his sword, and beamed happily at Mathilde. “How did I do?” he asked proudly.

  “Not too bad,” the woman said. “You’re still dropping your point a little, but you’re definitely getting the hang of that disarming move.”

  “Which way?” Rudi asked urgently. He glanced around at the curiously passive crowd, eager to be gone before they came to their senses. None of them seemed remotely interested in what had just happened, except for an enterprising halfling who was already removing the dead wizard’s purse from his belt. “We have to get out of here. The last time Hanna did something like that, we nearly got lynched.”

  “Calm down,” Mathilde said, with evident amusement, although she was covertly eyeing Hanna with a faintly wary air. “This is Altdorf, not some scabby village in the middle of nowhere. There’s a lot of wizards round here.” Rudi felt his jaw go slack.

  “I suppose we’d better get on, though,” Fritz conceded, clearly determined to follow his girlfriend’s lead. “Like you said, we can’t keep the boss waiting forever.” He linked arms with Mathilde again, and shot a slightly forced grin at Rudi. “Close your mouth, Rudi, you look like a provincial.” Nettled, Rudi snapped his jaw shut, his temper hardly improved by Hanna’s barely stifled giggle. “I thought you were used to Hanna doing magic stuff.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You were studying at the college in Marienburg, weren’t you?” Mathilde said, the barest trace of relief seeping into her voice. “Fritz told me he’d seen you there a couple of times.” She began to lead the way through the maze of streets with all the assurance she’d shown before, and Rudi began to relax. Before more than a few moments had passed, the street where the slain wizard still lay had passed from sight, and he truly felt he couldn’t have found his way back to it if he’d tried. Hanna nodded.

  “That’s right.” Her hand crept towards her satchel, without her apparently having been aware of the gesture. “I’ve got my papers here with me.”

  “Just as well,” Mathilde said. “Altdorf is crawling with witch hunters as well as wizards. You’d be surprised how many witches think they can hide here, by blending in with the college-trained wizards.”

  “And can they?” Rudi asked, trying to sound casual. Mathilde shrugged.

  “I doubt it. If the witch hunters don’t get them, the Knights Panther probably do. They both seem pretty busy, anyway.” She shrugged again. “On the other hand, the only ones we ever hear about are the ones that get burned. For all I know, there are dozens of them running loose in the streets.”

  “So why have you come all this way?” Fritz asked. “I’d have thought you’d want to stay put in Marienburg, at least till you got properly trained by Baron Hendryk.”

  “I thought I’d do better with one of the colleges here,” Hanna said shortly. By this time, to Rudi’s great and unspoken relief, they’d left the maze of narrow streets behind them and emerged onto a wider thoroughfare, so they could all walk abreast. The buildings around them didn’t seem all that different, though, being the same mixture of shops and houses that had closed in on them the moment they’d left the docks. Fritz glanced longingly at a few of the more expensive-looking taverns as they passed, but the brawl in the alleyway had clearly focused Mathilde’s mind on the errand at hand, and she kept walking with an evident air of purpose. Fritz nodded sympathetically, as if he understood, and voiced his thoughts with his usual lack of tact.

  “Things not work out with Kris, then? Shame, I kind of liked him.” Hanna’s jaw tightened. Parting from the young Marienburger had been a severe blow for her, perhaps almost as bad as being forced to take her chance
s with the witch hunters again, and Rudi squeezed her hand sympathetically. To his pleased surprise, she returned the pressure for a moment before pulling away from his grip.

  “Kris is fine, thank you. I’ll be writing to him as soon as I’m settled here.”

  “Oh, good,” Fritz said, with every sign of sincerity, and Rudi tried not to acknowledge the pang of disappointment he felt at the girl’s words.

  “Here we are,” Mathilde said suddenly, turning down an alleyway between two shops. One seemed to be selling nothing but hats, while the one on the adjacent plot had a display of well-crafted furniture in a variety of different woods. Like all the other businesses they’d passed, the upper storeys of the buildings appeared to be given over to living accommodation.

  As he turned the corner, Rudi’s scalp began to prickle. The alleyway was reasonably wide, just wide enough so as to accommodate a horse-drawn cart, but it came to an abrupt end a few yards ahead of them in a pair of stout timber gates that barred any further progress. They were walking into a confined space, which his instincts told him felt like a trap, and he began to reach surreptitiously for the hilt of his sword. True, he had no reason to anticipate treachery from Fritz or Mathilde, but Magnus had appeared to be a friend too, right up to the moment he’d revealed himself to be an insane Chaos cultist with designs on his life.

  Mathilde just kept on walking, however, and a moment later, his hand fell away from the weapon again. A small door, just large enough for a single person to walk through, stood in the middle of one of the stout timber gates. As she approached it, the redheaded bodyguard reached out to rap loudly on the wood with the hilt of her dagger.

  “Who’s there?” Within seconds, a tiny panel had opened at head height, and a face appeared behind a metal grille. Rudi could see very little of the man from where he stood, but then he hadn’t needed to in order to pick up on the note of suspicion in the gatekeeper’s voice.

  “It’s me, Oderic.” Mathilde sighed, and stepped back a pace to allow the sentry to get a good look at her. She gestured to her fiancé. “And this is Fritz, the one I’ve been telling you about.”

  “Ah.” The guard seemed unimpressed. “What about them others? I wasn’t told you’d be bringing others.”

  “That’s Rudi and Hanna. The boss knows them from Marienburg. They were on the same boat as Fritz.”

  Fritz nodded.

  “Thank Sigmar they were, too, otherwise the boss’ package wouldn’t have got here at all.”

  “So stop fiddling about and open the gate,” Mathilde finished, “before the Fog Walkers catch up with us and have another go.” The hatch banged shut, and a moment later Rudi heard the clatter of bolts being drawn.

  Despite the evident solidity of the timberwork, the small wicket opened smoothly and silently. Rudi tensed, but the gatekeeper made no overtly threatening move, and after a moment, he followed Mathilde and Fritz through the narrow gap. He half turned as he entered the space beyond, to make sure that Hanna was following safely. By doing so, he was unaware of his surroundings until the gate had banged shut behind them, and the girl had stepped forward to join the rest of the group. As her eyes moved past him, they widened in astonishment, and he turned to see what had surprised her so much.

  “I had no idea places like this existed in a city,” she said. Mathilde looked smug.

  “They don’t in Marienburg. They haven’t got the space, but there are one or two in Altdorf.” Rudi felt the breath catch in his throat.

  In truth, he thought, as his initial impression of a vast open space receded, to be replaced by a more sober assessment of the wide formal garden in front of him, von Eckstein’s estate wasn’t that large. It was no more than an acre or so, but here, surrounded by buildings in a city where space was at a premium, it exuded an air of wealth and power so strong that he could almost taste it.

  Wide lawns, still dusted with frost in places where the sun had yet to fall, led the eye naturally through artfully-placed flowerbeds and shrubberies, for the most part denuded of foliage by the early winter chill, towards the house that occupied the centre of this peculiar clearing among the forest of stone surrounding it. A handful of mature trees offered the promise of shade in the summer, and Rudi’s lifelong affinity for wooded spaces told him that they were spaced a little too precisely to have grown there naturally. They were as much a crafted feature of the hidden parkland as the small ornamental structures scattered around the place, and he marvelled at the patience of whoever had first planted them. They’d clearly had an eye for future generations, never expecting to see the full effect of their work in their own lifetime.

  Tiny figures in the distance pottered about, tending to the few winter-flowering plants in the beds, raking the gravel paths smooth, and trimming the open lawns with scythes.

  “The gardeners,” Mathilde explained, following the direction of his gaze. “There are about a dozen of them, I think.”

  “You think?” Hanna echoed, sounding faintly incredulous. Mathilde shrugged. “They come and go. Halflings mostly, so they all look alike to me.” She laughed. “From this distance, anyway.”

  “You should see it in the summer,” Oderic volunteered. The gatekeeper had turned out to be a white-haired man in late middle age, with a faintly perceptible limp and an ugly scar across his face, which someone or something had evidently laid open with a sword many years back. He wore a mail shirt and carried a loaded crossbow with a casual air that showed he knew how to use it, and Rudi had no doubt that he would be equally adept with the sword hanging from his belt. Now that they were inside, he seemed more comfortable with the unexpected visitors, although he didn’t put the weapon down. “Come the spring, you’ll really see something. It doesn’t start to come into its own until mid-year turn.”

  “Later than that, surely,” Rudi said. He’d spent all his life in the open air, and had never seen real spring growth until the following month of ploughtide. After all, that was why the festival that separated the months was known as “Startgrowth”. Oderic smiled, an expression that Rudi was beginning to associate with Altdorfers proclaiming the wonders of their city to a country bumpkin.

  “The gardeners round here have a little help,” he said. Mathilde nodded.

  “The boss has friends in the Jade College.”

  “He knows a senior wizard?” Hanna asked hopefully. Mathilde nodded again.

  “The boss knows pretty much everyone worth knowing. He’s got contacts in several of the colleges.” She shrugged. “I guess he owes you a favour. Maybe he can give you an introduction.” The expression on Hanna’s face pierced Rudi like a sword thrust: hope, joy, and the falling away of a burden that he sensed she’d been carrying since their fateful meeting with Gerhard on the moors of the Wasteland. For a moment, the impulse to take her in his arms and reassure her that everything was going to turn out all right was almost irresistible. He fought it down nevertheless. She would resent what she’d take as a patronising gesture, he knew, and besides, it was obviously still Kris that she wanted, not him. To distract himself, he pointed towards the house, which stood squarely in the distance at the end of an immaculate gravel drive.

  “I bet that view impresses his visitors whatever time of the year it is,” he said.

  Oderic and Mathilde exchanged amused glances.

  “Visitors come in at the front,” Oderic said. “This is just the servants’ gate.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sure enough, the drive ended in a courtyard surrounded by kitchens and stable blocks, artfully concealed behind a tall evergreen hedge. The walk took several minutes, the small group of travellers loitering a little as they made their way up to the house, and Rudi was able to take in his unexpected surroundings in greater detail.

  It was, not unnaturally, the house that took up most of his attention, as tall as most of the others he’d seen since his arrival in Altdorf, towering four storeys above the sprawling gardens that surrounded it. Constructed of warm red brick, over which climbing plants
grew in a pleasing profusion that artfully mimicked the random patterns of nature, its roof line was punctuated by dormer windows that hinted at a fifth layer of rooms within. Seeing the direction of his gaze, Mathilde nodded.

  “Servants’ quarters,” she said, and looked at Fritz. “Don’t worry. We’ve got a suite on the second floor, next to the boss’. No point trying to watch his back if it’s going to take us ten minutes to find it.”

  “So, who’s looking after him now?” Rudi asked, trying not to sound too sarcastic. “Or do you think he’s safe enough in his own home?”

  To his surprise, Mathilde laughed.

  “You don’t think we’re the only guards he’s got, do you?” She pointed to a couple of the gardeners, who now Rudi’s attention had been drawn to them, seemed to be taking a surreptitious interest in the party walking up the driveway rather than the bush they were supposed to be pruning. “We’re just the ones he wants people to notice.”

  “Except when you’re collecting valuable packages, presumably,” Hanna said dryly.

  Mathilde nodded, clearly enjoying some kind of private joke.

  “That’s right,” she said, with a wink at Fritz.

  “I thought so.” Hanna nodded too, as if sharing the joke. “Is that why Fritz left it behind on the boat?”

  “What?” Mathilde stopped moving, and stared at her, showing the first signs of surprise that Rudi had seen her display since they left the docks. “How do you know that?”

  “How do you think?” Hanna asked, a trifle smugly. Clearly, the novelty of being able to reveal her abilities openly was proving more than a little seductive. Determined not to seem impressed, in the manner Rudi was beginning to suspect was something of a citywide affectation, Mathilde shrugged.

  “Oh, that.” She linked arms with Fritz again, and resumed her stroll towards the house. “Well, it worked, didn’t it? The creep in the cape was fooled.”