Hammers of Ulric, page 4
At the heart of the fight, Vandam, the fiercest of all, glory singing in his veins, destroyed beast after beast, three times the number of any of them. He was still slaughtering the monsters as their spears cut him down.
In the tumult, Ganz saw the great bull-man, the pack leader, the beast that had slain Jurgen. He charged forward, but his hammer was dragged down by the weight of creatures on him. The bull-man swung to strike at him.
The haft of Gruber’s hammer blocked the axe. Gruber, yelling the war cry, rode in on his commander’s right hand, guarding his flank. Ganz pulled his weapon clear and, before the massive bull-head could swing again, drove its snout back into its skull in an explosion of blood.
‘In the name of Ulric!’ Ganz screamed, rejoicing. The heavens thundered their applause.
Smoke rose from the storm-swept field, smoke and the steam from the blood. The Wolf Templars dismounted one by one amidst the carnage and kneeled in the mud to offer thanks to the raging sky. Fierce rain washed the blood off their armour as prayer cleansed their spirits. Of the beastman horde, not one had survived.
Ganz walked quietly to view the fallen.
Von Glick, at Aric’s feet. Ganz was sure Aric was guarding the old man’s body more than he was guarding the fluttering banner.
Vandam, skewered four times with crude lances, twisted at the top of a mound of dead.
‘He has found his glory,’ Morgenstern said. ‘He’s transferred to that better company. Ulric’s own.’
‘May the wolves guard his brave soul,’ said Ganz.
Across the bloody, torn-up field, Dorff began to whistle a tune that resembled a battle hymn. Anspach caught it up and began to sing, making a shape and melody out of Dorff’s notes. Einholt joined him, soft and low. It was a mourning song, of victory and loss, one of old Jurgen’s favourites. Within three bars of it, all the other voices had joined the song.
They came back into Middenheim three days later. It was raining then too.
Mitterfruhl was almost on them all, but the High Priest came away from the preparations at the Temple, drawn by the excited whispers. He and his entourage were waiting for them in the Temple Square as White Company rode in, eleven riders, proud behind the fluttering banner of Vess, three noble dead lashed to their steeds.
Ranked in honour behind the motionless priest, Red, Grey, Gold and Silver Companies, the fighting packs who, with White, made up the Templar force, raised their voices in a throaty cheer.
Ganz, tall on his horse, gazed down at the High Priest.
‘White Company has returned to the Temple, lord,’ he said, ‘and the heart has returned to White Company.’
THE DEAD AMONG US
The God of Death stared down on me as I prepared the corpse for burial. His hooded eyes were not visible but I could feel his gaze on my hands as they moved over the cold body before me, and he saw that the work was good. The atmosphere in the vaulted room beneath the temple was quiet and damp, smelling faintly of mildew, ashes and of the thousands of the dead of Middenheim who had passed through here on their last journey.
I chanted the words of the ritual under my breath, my mind aware of nothing but their rhythm and the power they held, my hands moving in the sacred patterns of the ceremony. I had done this many times before. The body before me was nothing but a carcass, its soul already blessed and freed and fled to the afterlife. My job now was to seal the corpse, to make sure that no other entity could move in and take possession of this empty shell.
A footfall on the stone steps intruded upon my concentration and broke the spell. Morr was no longer watching; the carving of the patron deity above the altar was just a carving again. The footsteps stopped for a moment, then came on down into the Factorum. The tall, well-aged frame of Brother Gilbertus blocked out the faint light for a moment as he passed through the doorway. I knew it would be him.
‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said plainly. ‘You are. That’s the third Funeral Rite incantation you’ve interrupted this month, brother, and as penance you will take my place to perform it. This body goes out to be buried in the forest at noon today, so I suggest you start the ritual as soon as you’ve finished telling me why you’re here.’
He didn’t protest. Instead he said, ‘They’ve found a body.’
‘If you hadn’t noticed, brother, this is the temple of Morr, who is the God of Death. We are priests of Morr. Bodies are what we deal with. One more corpse is hardly a reason to barge into the Factorum while another priest is performing a ceremony. Clearly your apprenticeship in Talabheim has taught you little. I may have to give you more lessons.’
He stared at me blankly, my sarcastic tone unnoticed or not understood. I stared back at his greying forelock and the furrows of age around his eyes, and thought for a moment how old he was to be a new priest. But then I had joined the temple late in life as well. Many did.
‘It’s a woman,’ he said. ‘Murdered. I thought you’d want to know.’
I blinked. ‘Where?’
‘Through the heart. With a knife.’
‘Where in the city, dolt?’
‘Oh. The alleyway behind the Drowned Rat, in the Ostwald.’
‘I’m going out.’ I pulled off my ritual robes and flung them into the corner of the room. ‘Start that Funeral Rite now and you will be finished by the time I get back.’
A cold Jahrdrung wind whistled over the slated rooftops and between the bleak stone buildings of Middenheim. If there had been any leaves on the few trees that grew on the heights of this rock, the pinnacle in the air that men called the City of the White Wolf, they would have been ripped off and hurled into the sky. But it was the last days of winter, the festival of Mitterfruhl was not passed, and the spring buds were not yet beginning to show. There would be no new life here for some time.
The wind cut through my thin robe as I strode up across Morrspark, the frosted grass crunching under my feet, and out into the streets, which grew narrower and less well-kept as they led south-west into the Ostwald district, crowded with early morning bustle. It was bitterly cold. I cursed myself for not putting on a cloak before leaving the temple, but haste was more important than my comfort. Rumours and falsehoods spread fast in a city as compact and tight-knit as Middenheim, and where an unexplained death was concerned, anybody speaking ill of the dead would only hinder my work.
The alley behind the Drowned Rat was narrow and sloping, stinking and crowded. A couple of members of the city watch were trying to keep onlookers away and not doing a good job of it, but the gawpers drew back slightly as I approached. The dark robes of a priest of Morr will do that, and it’s not out of respect. Nobody likes being reminded of their own mortality.
As the crowd moved apart to let me pass, I saw the bald pate of Watch Captain Schtutt standing beside the corpse. He looked up, saw me and smiled in recognition, his face creased by middle-age and good living. We’d known each other for years, but I didn’t smile back. He started to say something by way of a greeting, but I had already crouched down by the body.
It was a woman – or it had been. Probably turned twenty; probably beautiful. Dark brown hair with a wave to it. Something about her face said she had Norse blood, although with one eye and most of a cheek missing it was hard to tell for sure. She had the most delicate ears. Her clothes, gaudy but cheap, had been slashed all ways with a blade of some kind – a hunting knife or dagger, I guessed – before the fatal blow had slipped between her ribs and into her heart. This had been a competent murder, and someone had tried hard to make it look like something less polished. Her left arm was missing, and someone had thrown a rough brown blanket over an object a couple of feet from her. Blood from the cobbles had begun to seep into its fabric.
She wasn’t Filomena. Filomena had been blonde.
I remembered where I was, and looked up at Schtutt. ‘What’s under the blanket?’
He muttered, ‘Don’t lift it,’ and there was something nervous in his voice. Then he turned to the pack of vultures and gossip-seekers and spoke loudly: ‘All right, bugger off, the lot of you. Nothing more to see. Constable, get them out of here. Give the priest of Morr room to do his magic.’
I wasn’t planning any magic but the suggestion of it, together with the taint of death in this narrow place, was enough to clear most of the crowd away quickly. Good old Schtutt.
He looked down at me for a second, his expression filled with some stress I couldn’t identify, then bent down and raised one corner of the blanket. Underneath was something not human: a limb, maybe four feet long. It had no hand or bones, but large cup-like suckers along the underside. It smelled of decay and something bitter and sharp, like wormwood and stale wine.
It startled me. I felt Schtutt’s gaze on my back, and that of the other watchmen too. Were they looking at the thing under the blanket, or watching to see how I’d react to it? I realised I was breathing fast, and steadied myself. Deep breath. Priests of Morr don’t panic. They must not. They cannot be seen to.
‘Right,’ I said, and stood up. Be firm. Decisive. ‘We need a cart to get all this back to the temple. High-sided if possible.’
‘I saw a soil-collector’s wagon on the way here,’ one of the watch suggested.
‘That’ll suit. Go and fetch it.’ I waited until he had gone, then gestured down at the blanket. ‘How many saw this?’
‘Two or three.’
‘Make sure they don’t talk about it. Harass them, put the fear of Ulric in them, anything short of cutting out their tongues. The last thing we need is a panic about a mutant in the city.’
‘Mutant,’ Schtutt said. His voice was flat, like an echo. It was as if he hadn’t dared to use the word until I’d spoken it out loud, confirming his worst fears. A tentacled limb? Well, it hadn’t been hacked from a bog-octopus or a kraken from the Sea of Claws, not in an alley in the Ostwald. But now he’d said the word, I had to stop him saying it again where people might hear him.
‘There’ll need to be a full investigation. A dissection. If it is a… well, we’ll burn it quietly. For the sake of Ulric, don’t go talking about mutants around the city. Even among the watch. Keep it to yourselves. But circulate the girl’s description: age, height, dress, everything except the arm.’ I rubbed my hands; they were freezing. ‘We’ve got to get the body back to the temple so I can start. Where’s that bloody wagon?’
It arrived, and the body was loaded unceremoniously into the cart, the soil-collectors not too happy about having their work interrupted. Nobody wanted to touch the thing under the blanket. Eventually I bundled it up in its covering and dropped it beside the corpse, in the back of the stinking wagon, then stood back so I could wipe my hands on my thin robe where Schtutt wouldn’t see me do it.
The drayman flicked his whip, the elderly horse strained at the traces and the cart rumbled slowly down the filthy cobbles of the slum-streets towards the open space of Morrspark and the temple at its centre. Schtutt and I walked behind it.
‘Any idea who she was?’ I said.
‘Apart from being–’ Schtutt caught my glare. ‘No, we don’t. She was dressed like a tavern wench or maybe a night-girl, but she couldn’t have got work with an arm like that. Although maybe she disguised it with magic. She could have lured someone into the alley, dropped the disguise, and then he killed her out of horror.
‘Or maybe it was a cult killing. They say there’s powerful cults of Chaos-worshippers in the city. We do find sacrifices. Cats, mostly.’ He shivered. ‘If I thought there was going to be trouble with Chaos, I’d take my family and leave Middenheim. Go north. My brother has an estate about thirty miles away. Would thirty miles be far enough, you think? To escape the Dark?’
I didn’t reply. I was following my own thoughts. Schtutt seemed happy to continue talking without a reply.
‘We shouldn’t have to wait for them to act. We should track them down and burn them. Burn their homes too. To the ground,’ he said, and there was a certain relish in his voice. ‘Get some witch hunters to come and investigate. Remember those two who came up from Altdorf? Seventeen Chaos-worshippers found and burnt in three days. That’s the sort of men we need. Eh? Dieter?’
That broke my concentration. Nobody called me Dieter these days – not in eight years, not since I’d entered the Temple. I looked across at him, meeting his gaze in silence. After a moment he looked away.
‘Ulric’s beard,’ he muttered. ‘You’re not the man you were. What have they done to you in that temple of ghouls?’
I could think of a hundred replies but none of them fitted the moment, so I said nothing. Silence is the first thing a priest of Morr learns. I had learnt that lesson well. A wordless void stretched between us, until Schtutt filled it.
‘Why do you do it?’ he asked. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. I remember when you were one of the best merchants in Middenheim. Everyone came to you for everything. You weren’t just rich, you were–’
‘I was loved.’ Schtutt went silent. I continued, ‘Loved by my wife and son, who vanished. You know that. Everyone knows. They were never found. I spent hundreds of crowns, thousands, looking for them. And I neglected my trading, and my business failed so I gave it away, and I joined the Temple of Morr and became a priest.’
‘But why, Dieter?’ That name again. Not mine, not now. ‘You can’t find them there.’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later their souls will come to Morr, and be received by his hands, and I will know it. It’s the only certainty I have any more. It was the not knowing that was killing me.’
‘Is that why you do it?’ he asked. ‘Investigating the unexplained deaths? In case it’s them?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it just passes the time.’
But I knew I was lying.
The cart trundled across the hard earth of Morrspark, still too solid for burials, and stopped outside the temple. The dark stone of the building and the bare branches of the high trees around it were silhouetted against a sky that was grey and heavy with snow yet to come, like outstretched hands offering a closed box to an unseen god.
Schtutt and his deputy carried the body down the stone steps into the vaulted gloom of the Factorum while I followed, the blanket and its unpleasant contents in my arms. There was no sign of Gilbertus, or the corpse he had been preparing for burial. Good.
The girl’s body was laid on one of the grey granite slabs, and I placed the tentacle next to it, still wrapped in its blanket. The stench of the soil-wagon clung to the corpse’s clothes, but there was another odour, bitter and unpleasant.
In the quiet and the semi-darkness she could almost have been any beautiful woman lying asleep. I stared at her still form. Who was she? Why had she been killed so deliberately, so coldly, and the deed disguised to look like something else? Did she have a powerful enemy, or was she dead for another reason? Was she more important dead than alive? The arm…
Schtutt shuffled his feet and coughed. I could sense his uneasiness. The bodies on the other slabs could have had something to do with it.
‘We’d best be going,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said abruptly. I wanted to be alone with the body, to try to get some feel for who or what had killed her. It’s not that I like dead people. I don’t. I just prefer them to the living.
‘We’ll need an official report,’ he said. ‘If it’s mutant business the Graf will have to be told. You’ll dissect her today?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘First we do the rituals to rest her soul.’
No, not ‘we’. I would do the rituals personally.
‘Then we do the dissection – for the records, and for the Graf’s precious paperwork. Then, if we can’t find a next of kin, she gets a pauper’s funeral.’
‘Off the Cliff of Sighs?’ Schtutt asked, shock in his voice. ‘But surely mutants must be burnt? To cleanse them?’
‘Did I say she was a mutant?’ I asked.
‘What?’
I grasped the section of tentacle that had lain beside the corpse, and shoved it at him. It felt cold and rubbery in my hand, and damp. Schtutt recoiled like a slapped dog.
‘Smell it,’ I said.
‘What!’
‘Smell it.’ He sniffed at it, cautiously, then looked at me.
‘Well?’ I asked.
‘It’s… sour. Bitter. Like something stale.’
‘Vinegar.’ I put down the unclean flesh. ‘I don’t know where that came from, but I do know it wasn’t attached to anyone who was alive this morning. The damn thing’s been pickled.’
Schtutt and his man went eventually, promising that they’d try to find out who the girl had been. I almost asked them not to. The last way you’re going to learn anything about a death in the Ostwald, with its twisting alleys and shadowy deals, is to have heavy-booted watchmen asking questions with all the subtlety of an unwashed ogre. Even if they got an answer it wouldn’t do any good. I still wanted to find out who the girl was, but the more I thought about this, the more I suspected that it was her death, not herself, that was important. Someone had wanted to convince people that there were mutants in the city, and they would have managed it if the investigation had been left to the likes of Schtutt.
He wasn’t a bad man, I reflected as I prepared the ritual. We’d known each other quite well in the days before I joined the temple: he’d been a young merchant trying to muscle in on trade franchises held by families much older and more powerful than his. He hadn’t done well, but he hadn’t given up, I’ll say that for him. Then the Sparsam family had framed him for evading taxes, and part of his punishment had been a month with the city watch. And that was that: he found his niche in life there, and he was a much better watch captain than he’d been a merchant. Which didn’t mean he was much of a watch captain.
