Hammers of ulric, p.26
Hammers of Ulric, page 26
The hooded worshippers stopped mid-chant, jumped up and began to turn. A second later, the Wolves, Panthers, and Shorack’s mercenaries were on them.
Aric charged the firelight, hammer whirling in his hand. It all became a blur. Lorcha was beside him, his longsword hissing through the air.
The puppet thing, ablaze like a torch, was still shrieking and trying to pull itself out of the fire.
The hooded chanters spun to meet them, throwing aside black velvet capes to reveal fierce men in mail-armour, brandishing swords and war-axes. Their screaming faces and their armour were plastered with blood and daubed markings.
Aric’s whirring hammer smashed through the face of the first enemy he came upon. The hammerhead tore out the lower jaw, sending the pink, glistening hunk away like a blood-tailed comet, winking with exposed white bone. The next one was on him, and he blocked with his hammer-haft, stopping the axe-blow. Kicking low and hard, Aric dropped the attacker and then rolled in to crush his head flat between hammer and violet tiles.
Gruber waded in, breaking a neck out of true with his hammer, then spinning to face the next sword that came at him. Einholt was beside him, cleaving a ribcage with a sidewards strike. Von Volk broke his sword on his first clash with an enemy blade, and then savagely ripped the life out of his aggressor with the broken length, before throwing him aside and snatching up his axe. In von Volk’s practised hands, it dug deep into the skull of the next foe within arm-reach.
Lowenhertz smashed a chanter backwards off his feet with a deft underswing that splintered a snarling face.
Machan struck at them, his sword whispering. Blood sprayed from the wounds he cut. Then he was scissored by two enemy blades. He dropped, screaming, in two, blood-venting pieces.
Hadrick had, by then, enough time to reload, and he slammed his bolt into the forehead of one of Machan’s killers. A second later, he was carried back, shrieking, and pinned to a pillar by a foe whose lance had impaled him. Guldo decapitated the foe and pulled the lance out, allowing Hadrick to fall. But he was already dead.
Aric was nearly at the sacred jaws, but then he took a rip across the shoulder and went down on one knee. Gruber and Lowenhertz were hemmed in by fierce hand-to-hand on all sides. The top of Guldo’s head was axed off and he fell, stone dead. Von Volk swung his axe up between the legs of a foe-man and split him to the sternum. But his captured axe was wedged and he tried in vain to pull it free.
Shorack raised his hand and with a gesture, at once slight yet full of unknowable power, wilted one of the chanters into fatty, smoking residue. The sounds and stinks of burning metal and flesh choked the air. The sorcerer shook slightly and took one step back as if to steady himself. Then he spun and destroyed the cultist closing on Gruber with nothing more than the clenching of his hand in the air. For a moment, Lowenhertz noted through the ferocious melee, the old Shorack was back with them, imposing, confident, capable, chilling.
Aric broke an opponent’s hip and a ribcage. He turned. He saw. The burning, shrieking thing in the fire was getting up again, blackened and smouldering and tarry.
It looked at them through cindered eye-slits. It fixed its gaze on Shorack. It spoke through a mouth thick with fat blisters and crackling flesh.
‘Die,’ it said, its voice that of a dead thing.
Shorack screamed as if his insides were boiling. Gruber reached for him, but the magician was wrenched into the air by things none of them could see but all could feel. Cold forces of air, eddies of icy wind. Einholt smashed an axe-man aside and reached out to grab Shorack’s trailing cloak. He realised with fear that he was seeing the effects of Shorack’s invisible world for real now.
The magician spun up, away, out of his reach, thrashing and bedevilled by the harsh grip of unseen things. His green cloak, his clothes, one boot, all shredded off him and fluttered away. Weals and bloody rips scourged his flesh. Almost stripped bare, drenched in blood, half-butchered, Shorack slammed up into the vaulted roof. Bones snapped. It looked as if he had fallen upwards and hit the ceiling as if it was the ground. An immense, invisible force pressed him there, spread-eagled on his back. Blood pooled across the roof around him instead of pouring to the actual floor.
His ruined face, a mask of blood, glared down at Gruber and Einholt looking up from below. It was all the other Wolves, the Panthers and the remaining Tilean, Lorcha, could do to keep their attentions and eyes on the battle at hand. There was something mesmerising about Shorack’s gruesome, inexorable demise.
Shorack looked down into the frantic face of Gruber. A moment before his eyes burst and his skull collapsed against the roof, he spoke. Eight words, forced out of a blood-filled mouth, the last act of his life, a monumental act of will power.
‘Break. The. Charm. Without. The. Signifiers. It. Cannot.’
Eight words. A ninth, maybe a tenth, would have completed the whole, but the meaning was enough for Gruber.
An invisible force exploded Shorack’s carcass across the roof in a shower of blood and meat. It coated the ceiling for a moment and then rained down on them all, leaving a pungent mist of blood vapour in the air.
Gruber was already moving, his hammer raised. Coated in Shorack’s blood, he found two of the enemy turning to block him, axes raised. Gruber swung the warhammer round in a complete, whickering circle, both hands gripping the leather loop at the end of the haft, twisting his bodyweight to counterbalance the swing. Two skulls broke like earthenware before the swing was done.
Then he was clear, amongst the stone blocks set around the fireplace, each one bearing its precious icon. He knew he was within the weave of a great dark sorcery now, something invisible that laced itself between the signifiers. His skin prickled with static, his hair stood on end, and there was a smell that clawed at his sinuses. A smell of sweet corruption, like a week-old corpse. Magic, he knew, and would never forget. Black magic. Death magic.
He thought of Ganz, on the dangerous ride back from Linz, how he had driven the wraith-things back by destroying their precious talon. He knew he had to do the same… again… now… here. A signifier must be destroyed to break the charm. And he knew, clearly and coldly at last, what Al-Azir had really meant.
They cannot be recovered. They are lost to you for ever. Gruber of the Wolf, I pity you. But I admire your courage. Eh! Even though you will lose what is dear to you.
There was no choice. It was set, Gruber was sure, in the intricate and unchangeable workings of the stars. He had time for one blow and he knew, as a Wolf of the Temple of Ulric, where, in fairness, that blow should fall.
The Jaws of the Wolf, so holy, so precious, cut by Artur himself, glittered on the block before him.
He raised his hammer.
Something ripped into his back and agony lanced through him. Gruber screamed. Talons raked down his back from shoulders to waist, shredding off cloak, hauberk and undershirt and slicing deep cuts in his flesh. He stumbled to his knees. The blackened puppet-thing rose up behind him, its curled, skeletal fingers like hooks, red with his blood. It twitched, deathless eyes glittering, and smashed Gruber to the floor with a sideswipe. Blood poured down the side of Gruber’s head where the swipe had struck. For the rest of his life, his left ear would be a rag of flesh, like a flower with the petals torn off.
Gasping, Gruber looked up at the monster that lurched and jiggled over him. Its long, angular limbs twitched and spasmed like a badly-worked marionette. Or no, thought Gruber, his pain lending his mind frightening clarity. Like something half-finished. Like a mockery of a man, a skeleton that remembers how to move but hasn’t the flesh or the sinew or the practice to do it well. Backlit by the firelight, that was all it seemed to be: a large human skeleton, clad in shreds of tomb-dry skin and scraps of burnt bandage, twitching and jerking as it tried to behave like a man again. Tried to be a man again.
Only the eyes were whole: coral-pink fires of livid fury. It gazed down at him. Its bare, sooty teeth clacked open, tearing the dry, blistered flesh of its long-withered mouth.
‘Die,’ it said.
‘Die yourself!’ snarled Einholt, storming in from the side and smashing the dreadful thing into the air with an expert swing of his hammer. Twisting, the puppet-thing tumbled away into the darkness beyond the fire.
Einholt glanced down at Gruber once, but he didn’t hesitate. It seemed the veteran Wolf had wit enough to arrive at the same conclusions as Gruber. Einholt swung around, hammer lifted over the block, resembling for all who saw, the great god who first wrought the Fauschlag. Then the Jaws of the Wolf, the precious icon of the Wolf Order, disintegrated into a million flying fragments under his hammerhead.
And then… nothing.
There was no great explosion, no fiery flash, no sound, no fury. The cellar just went cold. The walls stopped breathing. The reek of magic vanished and the static charge in the air dissolved. The fire went out.
Blackness. Cold. Damp. The smell of blood, and of death.
Flints scraped together and a small light pierced the gloom. A lamp was lit. Carrying it, Lorcha moved into the circle of blocks, retrieved the small velvet pouch and put it in his jerkin.
‘It is made right,’ he said to the others in the darkness around him, his accent thick with Tilean vowels. ‘I will inform the Conclave.’
A moment later, and he and his lamp were gone.
Aric lit a taper from his pack and raised its small yellow light aloft. Lowenhertz did the same, lighting the last of the lamp-oil he carried. Faint light filtered into the gore-soaked chamber. Urgently, they took kindling from a stack behind the fireplace and made torches. Einholt helped Gruber from the floor.
‘Ulric love you, Brother Einholt,’ Gruber said, embracing him.
‘May Ulric forgive me too,’ Einholt replied.
By the kindling light, they gathered the trophies into sacks, Aric reverently handing the panther claw bracelet to von Volk.
The Panther took it and nodded to Aric. ‘Ulric watch over you for what you have done here. Your sacrifice will be known to all of my order.’
‘And perhaps our orders may not be such rivals from this time,’ Gruber suggested as he limped over. ‘Panther blood has been spilled to achieve this too.’
He and von Volk clasped hands silently.
‘We have everything,’ Einholt said. He and Aric carried sacking full of the most precious things in the city. ‘I suggest it’s time to get out of here. Our light won’t last long and there are citizens of Middenheim who will be relieved to get these trinkets back.’
Lowenhertz loomed behind them, a torch raised. His face was pale and determined in the half-light. ‘There’s… there’s no sign of it. The thing Einholt struck. It’s destroyed or–’
‘Escaped,’ Gruber finished.
CONFESSION
The air above Middenheim was cold and still. Below, winds found their way in and out of every byway and alley, whining through gaps in the stones and sucking over damp cobbles. Autumn had come.
The street braziers were built higher, their flames licking against the stone walls, making their black surfaces matt with soot, their fires burning till dawn. Dusk came early now and for many the working day was foreshortened. Citizens were keeping shorter hours, preparing for the harshness of the winter to come, when many would die of the cold and the numerous winter ills and ailments that befell the towering city’s population year in and year out.
But for some, the autumn season simply meant they began and ended their working days in darkness. One such was Kruza. He went about his work sleekly, picking his final mark of the day. The last of the merchants were leaving the city in torch-bearing gaggles, among them a rotund middle-aged man with a florid flare of red across his high, round cheeks and magnificent bulbous nose. His pockets looked heavy and, tucked half into the breast of a long, embroidered coat which would not fasten across the fatty mound of his chest, the strings and clasp of a pouch were clearly visible. Kruza spotted him coming out of one of the better alehouses at the edge of Freiburg and followed him into the north end of the Altquartier slums.
Kruza strode easily on past his mark, whose own rolling gait and small steps made slower progress down the steep cobbles. The cut-purse paused for a moment and then turned back the way he had come, checking the position of the purse in the merchant’s coat as he passed him, very close. The mark took no heed.
Kruza had marked his target and was ready to make his move when he saw something ahead of him. He flicked his eyes up and away from his intended victim, just in time to see the hem of a long, grey cloak disappear into the doorway of a tavern on the opposite side of the narrow street.
Kruza paused, then took a few more hesitant steps. When he turned back to his mark, the man was disappearing down and round into a sloping side-way. Kruza began to follow the merchant again, trying to concentrate, reminding himself of his quota.
But he could feel the hunting eyes behind him now.
He turned sharply on his heels and this time the pair of cloaked figures, for there were two of them now, barely had time to duck out of sight.
In an instant, Kruza forgot his mark and ducked into the shadows himself. He held the cold palms of his hands flat together before his face, as if in prayer – to Ranald, maybe, the trickster thief-god. No, to any god who would listen. His hands were suddenly clammy with sweat. He felt a bead form on his forehead and find the groove of the long scar down the side of his face. It trickled down the scar to his jaw. It hung there for a moment, then it was joined by another droplet of sweat. The two fell as one from his chin.
He had watched for this moment for months, prepared for it over and over, but now it had finally come, he was not ready. He could never be ready for the return of the grey men who bore the gleaming tail-eating snake sigil. They had got Wheezer and now they would get him.
Kruza stepped out into the middle of the narrow street, looking about him, not for a place to hide, nor for support from others, but to get the lay of the land. He had a sick feeling that there was justice in them coming for him. They had taken Wheezer, and he had been an innocent. His soul wasn’t soiled like Kruza’s. Of course they would come for him, a hundred times as fierce.
There was only one way to deal with this. He had run before and Wheezer had paid the price. This time he would stand and fight. And if he died, then he would no longer have the boy’s doom on his conscience. His hand on the pommel of his short-sword, Kruza stood with his feet braced on the cobble-ridges and his shoulders thrown back. He let out a huge shout – of challenge, of remorse, of warning. Those who heard it could not tell what it meant, only that they should stay away. Kruza heard doors bang and the shutters close on windows all around. Then silence.
The men in grey cloaks heard the cry too as they stood in the next alley, shielded from sight.
‘A brave boy, this cut-purse of yours,’ the taller, leaner figure said in a low, sardonic voice. ‘He means to come to us!’
The shorter, heavily-built second figure turned lightly on his feet and stepped into the deserted street, pulling his companion after him. They stood, thirty paces from the braced figure of the cornered cut-purse, whose scream was still echoing around the close buildings and losing itself in the labyrinth of the Altquartier’s streets and alleys.
The taller of the grey figures put a hand beneath his cloak, reaching for his weapon. His heavier companion raised his hands to the hood which cloaked his face in cloth and shadow, and opened his mouth to call out.
But Kruza flew across the thirty paces between himself and the grey men before any had a chance to speak. His short-sword was raised above him in a two-handed grip. He meant to bring it down hard, and fight to the death, even if it was his own. His bloodshot eyes, with their lids peeled well back, showed white all round the black holes of his massively dilated pupils. Another yell began to find its way past his gritted teeth.
Then came the impact.
Kruza barely held on to his short-sword as it bounced and twitched in his hands from the hammer blow which had swung from nowhere to knock it from his grasp.
He swung again in a crude, wobbling arc which was parried hard by a deft hammer-haft, sending tiny shards of steel and wood flying with the intensity of the blow.
Kruza’s next swing came in low, but not deep enough. It tore a huge rent in the flowing grey of the taller figure’s cloak.
The figure jerked away and threw his head back, freeing it from the shadowy cowl of the cloak’s hood. Kruza saw a face with pink-flushed skin and dark eyes that gleamed back at him. There was no sign of the papery skin and pallid thinness of the other grey men. This man was flesh and blood – and ready to fight for all he was worth.
A hammer came in again, swung by the shorter grey man. Kruza blocked it ferociously and sliced in with his sword. The shorter man dodged it. He, too, had removed his hood and had shrugged off half of the cloak. Around his body, Kruza could see the pelt.
He had seen that skin before. His mind raced as he swung his sword again at the fur-wrapped torso. As he cut deeply through the hide, missing the man beneath, Kruza thought of that other man. Weeks back, at the Baiting Pit! The man with his parcel of armour wrapped in a hide, just like this one. The masked gladiator!
Kruza looked into Drakken’s face, confused. The White Wolf. Lenya’s White Wolf! Was he one of the grey men?
Kruza’s nostrils flared wide as he sucked in air to control his panic. Spittle coated his lips and his teeth were clenched, allowing no more sounds to escape his body. There were two hammers whooshing through the air around him in a show of Wolf Temple strength. Or was it the strength of the grey men? He did not know.
His short-sword found only air with its next strike. Then, turning and striking again, he felt flesh rip at the end of his sword. Before he could savour it, he was on the ground, doubled over, shocked and winded by a solid blow to the centre of his chest.
