Hammer and Bolter 24 Page 5

  ‘Well that saves us finding errands for the boy to run, today,’ said the skinny limbed guard.

  ‘Don’t think it saves you from doing your job, mind,’ said the boss, ‘just because the best of our conscience is absent.’

  ‘He’s not absent,’ said the fat guard, looking up for the first time in several minutes, ‘he’s on a mission.’

  The horses were tended to and everyone else was fed by Gianna, who was beginning to think of the elves and the old man as a sort of surrogate family. No group of men had ever kept her company for so long, nor been so polite as this one was, and, besides, they’d kept her father occupied and out of her hair for several hours in a row. It didn’t seem to matter to her that she hadn’t slept and she’d barely rested. She’d been treated with nothing but respect, and it was all she’d ever longed for.

  As they finished their breakfast, Fithvael pointed up the staircase.

  ‘Who carved the newel posts for the stairs?’ he asked Gianna, as if it were an idle enough question.

  ‘What’s a newel post?’ asked Gianna.

  ‘It’s a hundred years old,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘this little room, or two hundred, perhaps. You forget how short our human lives are, elf.’

  ‘So you don’t know who carved the wood for the tavern?’ asked Fithvael.

  ‘Know them?’ asked Gianna. ‘Only that they were ancestors. ‘Six generations... No... Seven. How does it work? Six greats. My six greats-grandad was the first tavern keeper here. Well, not here. His first tavern was a hole in the wall, a shack, a shanty, but it was right on this spot. It was on the outskirts of the city, then, a backwater. He had this place built when my five greats-grandad joined the family business. They needed a cellar for brewing by then. That’s when they did the upstairs.

  ‘Not much more than a hundred years, then’ said Mondelblatt.

  ‘Nine generations,’ said Fithvael, ‘in a hundred years. Isn’t that a lot, even for humans?’

  ‘Something over a hundred years, or so,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘How old are you girl?’ he asked, catching Gianna lightly by the hand.

  ‘Old enough,’ said Gianna.

  ‘It’s not a trick,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘just an innocent question.’

  ‘Fourteen,’ said Gianna, flushing slightly.

  ‘How old’s your father?’ asked Mondelblatt.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Gianna. ‘Don’t care. Old.’

  ‘Your mother?’ asked Mondelblatt.

  ‘Died when she was twenty,’ said Gianna.

  ‘Poor child,’ said Fithvael, ‘not to remember your mother.’

  ‘I remember her very well,’ said Gianna. ‘Why wouldn’t I? I was nearly seven when she died of the scarlet fever, and my brothers and sisters with her.’

  ‘You don’t have children?’ asked Mondelblatt.

  ‘Not all the time I can shift my arse fast enough not to get caught, I don’t,’ said Gianna, matter-of-fact and not ill-humoured.

  ‘Academically speaking,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘we measure a city generation in the Empire in fifteen year increments. Nine generations makes one hundred and thirty-five years; closer to a hundred years than two.’

  ‘Where were you one hundred and thirty-five years ago, te Tuin?’ asked Fithvael.

  The elves eyes met, neither one needing a reminder of where they had been together, and what they had endured during their decades of questing and adventuring. Time was nothing to them. They felt things as deeply now as they had five decades ago, or eight or twelve. Time changed nothing.

  Gianna laughed a nervous laugh, but stopped when she saw the expressions on the elves’ faces.

  ‘Strange ain’t they?’ she said, changing the subject and breaking the spell. ‘I can’t say I ever noticed them before.’ She stepped over to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and ran her hand over the carvings in the wood with their hundred or so years of wear and patina.

  ‘That’s local,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘religious, Sigmarite. It’s a ward of sorts, not common now, but brought in from the countryside, from the superstitions of the innocent folk coming to the city and changing their fortunes for better or worse, but forever. That’s the one, though, higher up,’ he said, craning his neck and pointing towards the top up the staircase.

  Gianna skipped up the steps to examine what was carved there. She ran her hand over it and peered at it. Then she traced the edges of it with a finger.

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it’s been here my whole life and I’ve never looked at it before.’

  ‘Humans aren’t subtle creatures,’ said Gilead, ‘but not to know your surroundings is crass even by the standards of your own species.’

  ‘Don’t berate the child,’ said Fithvael, rising from his seat at the table and following Gianna up the stairs.

  ‘Let me see, child, what is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen its like,’ said Gianna, tracing its edges with her fingertips.

  ‘I know what it is,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘and I can show you where there’s another like it, and then another, and a hundred more in Nuln, and then I can show you other things just as odd, and just as portentous.’

  ‘It’s a portent?’ asked Gianna, her eyes widening in her startled face and her hand snatching away from the carving as if it could somehow do her harm.

  ‘Everything is a portent,’ said Fithvael, trying to placate the scared child. ‘A portent is a useful thing. Without them we wouldn’t know what to fear or guard against.’

  The elf looked at the carving and turned to Gilead.

  ‘It is what you described,’ he said. ‘It is what you saw below the ground, in the Rat King’s lair. It was in your vision.’

  ‘The beetle,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘One of the myriad. You saw an oil slick of throbbing wing cases, and you heard the clacking of carapaces and the clicking of exoskeletons. The air thrummed with them, if I am not mistaken.’

  ‘It’s a bug?’ asked Gianna. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in these parts, not in Nuln, not ever.’

  ‘They’re not from around here,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘You’d have to travel south for many a day to find such a creature, or any of his cousins. You’d have to travel into the very heart of the dead lands of the deserts.’

  ‘What’s deserts?’

  ‘Empty places where nothing green grows, where there is no rain, only the heat of the day and the cold of the night, only the sun or the moons. Empty skies where there are no clouds, and where, if the air moves, it takes the sand with it. Empty places where there is nothing but sand in all its incarnations, where there is nothing but dry dust and death and heat and sand.’

  ‘And bugs,’ said Gianna.

  ‘And bugs,’ said Mondelblatt, snapping out of his odd reverie.

  ‘Why is it here, then?’ asked Gianna, ‘if it doesn’t belong?’

  ‘They were here before,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I knew that they would return. I knew, when the plagues came, and I expanded my studies; I knew when I transcribed the language of their symbols; I knew when you told me of the artifacts you had seen; I knew that they would come back; I knew that they would seek to change the Empire forever. All this, I knew.’

  ‘What don’t you know, old man?’ asked Gilead. ‘Why do you hesitate?’

  ‘I am sure, only now,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘why you were sent to me.’

  ‘I was not sent,’ said Gilead. ‘I came to you for answers. I came because you are the only man I know who might be able to explain what I experienced, what it means, and how it relates to the plague. I do not trust you. I do not truly believe that you have the answers, but I had to try. My people too, are dying.’

  ‘I do not have the answers,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I do not have the answers, and yet, I do have the answers.’

  ‘Riddle us no riddles, old man,’ said Fithvael. ‘You’re frightening the girl.’

  ‘It is simple,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘The answer stands before you. Or
rather, he sits. Gilead te Tuin Tor Anrok is the answer.’

  ‘Then you had better tell us what the question is,’ said Fithvael.

  The cart rolled soundlessly over the cobbles in the backstreets of Nuln, save for the low shushing of sand displacing beneath its wheels. The figures propelling the vehicle along its course bowed their heads and shuffled their linen-covered feet, driven by their master. His hood shrouded his face, but he adjusted it, once or twice, with bandaged hands so that he could tip his head back or tilt it to one side and peer up at an eave or mullion, or down at a foundation stone or a curb. He saw what he was looking for everywhere, and he followed where the carved symbols and hieroglyphs led.

  For the first half a mile, as they wove a way into the southern quarters of the walled city, the trio encountered no one. They skirted the slums of the Faulestadt region, and the small-scale industrial areas that were little occupied in these times of strife. The tanneries were all but abandoned, since few cattle had survived the plague, and those that remained were too valuable for their milk to be stripped of their leather. The same applied to the hardy goats, which had faired a little better than their bovine cousins. One or two leather workers managed to eke out their trade by repurposing old leather goods, turning worn wineskins into satchels and old saddle leather into sheaths and scabbards, but much of the district was deserted.

  On the corner of Aver Street, as the cart turned towards the docklands and the Great Bridge, a child, sitting on a curbstone, chewing at a stub of meat that his grandmother had dried three winters since, (being a wise woman of old, country habits), heard an odd shushing sound, and turned his head. The wheels of the wagon passed inches from his feet, spraying a wake of fine sand over them, the grit reaching his face and the tough, sinewy morsel in his hand.

  The child breathed in as the cart drew away, only to find that he could not breathe out. His hand spasmed as he panicked, and he dropped the precious scrap of meat, which landed in a pool of sand at his feet. He reached for his throat and tried to cough. Then he tried to wretch. His fingers felt hard and bony against the flesh of his throat, and then the skin of his neck felt dry and papery under his petrified hands. His eyes widened, and were too dry for him to be able to blink closed again. His gums receded in an instant, his teeth looking like pegs in the face of a dried-up old corpse. He did not slump or sag. He simply fell, sideways. There was no softness left in his body, all the suppleness had been sucked out of him, dried up, desiccated. His clothes hung off his dead body, a body that looked as if it had perished a thousand years before and had been locked in a dry, airless vault for all eternity.

  No one knew the child. No one claimed the corpse. It was an abomination. Its mother didn’t recognise it, though she hunted for days for her lost son.

  A rumour soon spread about the tiny, papery corpse. The local people whispered speculation about the course the plague must now be taking, but they did so in hushed tones, not wanting to believe that such a terrible fate might befall them. Better to live with the everyday inconveniences heaped one upon another over the years since the plague had begun to spread across the Empire, and better to ignore the atrocities that no one understood or could adequately explain.

  The religious prayed, and the superstitious touched their talismans of good fortune, and all turned their backs on others’ misfortunes, grateful that the worst had befallen someone else.

  That was how the cart passed unnoticed through the poorer districts of Nuln. It passed unnoticed because it was safer not to heed its existence. The city-folk of Nuln kept themselves to themselves, turning away, even from their neighbours and cousins, when there was nothing left to believe in and no one left to trust.

  No one but Surn Strallan took any note of the cart with its figures of burden pushing it through the narrow streets, or its guide looking for a path to follow. The vehicle was distinctive and easy to spot at a junction of streets from more than a hundred yards away. Strallan did not want to get close. The sand bothered him. Where was the sand coming from? There was no sand in Nuln. There was dirt and filth and cobbles and hard-packed earth, and, when the river was low there was the clay and silt of the exposed mudflats, but there was no sand.

  Strallan ducked and wove, running ahead to a cross street, so that he could sit on a curbstone and watch the cart coming towards him. He sat facing the cart, looking between its wheels at the street beneath. There was no sight of any sand trickling from one of the vessels on the back of the wagon. There was no sign of a sack of sand that might have been punctured. There was no sign of a barrel, or even a wineskin that might have been filled with the stuff. And yet, as the wheels turned they ground into sand, cutting through it and spreading a wake of it behind them. Sand collected in the gutters of the streets of Nuln, and against the curbstones.

  Surn Strallan wondered, if he had brushed it all up and collected it in a sack, just how much sand he would have, and reckoned, after following the cart for an hour, that it would be too much sand for one man to carry on his back.

  As the cart approached him, Strallan hopped back to his feet and ducked down another alley, winding a path north, parallel to Aver Street. He was sure that the vehicle was heading towards the bridge, and planned to reach it first. Sometimes, it’s better to follow from in front.

  He turned his head to the right as he heard a strange intake of breath, and he almost fell over an old man, tapping his way along the narrow, uneven pavement, with a stick that was so tall he had to hold it a third of the way down its length.

  ‘I’ve never seen such a terrible thing,’ said the old man, to no one in particular, ‘and I hope I never shall again. Such a strange creature, such a peculiar sight.’

  ‘What was it, old man?’ asked Surn. ‘What did you see?’

  He looked out past the old man’s shoulder and saw the cart rumbling towards him, towards the bridge.

  ‘The body of I don’t know what, an ancient child corpse, or a shrunken thing, wrinkled and weathered, and older than time, lying on its side in the gutter. How did such a thing come to be there? What will the plague bring to our doors next?’

  Strallan shuddered, but did not answer the old man, who wasn’t looking at him, and hadn’t really been talking to him in any case; he’d simply needed to say what was on his mind, and the boy happened to offer a convenient ear.

  ‘What will the plague bring, indeed?’ asked Strallan, ducking out of the old man’s path and onto the southern docks as the cart approached within ten or a dozen yards of his position.

  ‘When will it come?’ asked Fithvael. ‘What form will it take? How will we know the evil when it arrives in Nuln?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I do not know, and I do not know. Gilead is here, and that is enough. If the elf is here, the other will come, and when it comes, Gilead will find it and destroy it.’

  ‘You know where to look,’ said Gilead. ‘I am not the answer. The answers are to be found in your texts and scholarly works. If you have become the professor that you claim to be, if you stopped lying and began to earn the career and the reputation that you stole and cheated for, then you must know where to find the answers. You must know what references will lead you to the key to this plague, and to unravelling the mysteries that surround it.’

  Gilead rose from his chair and gestured to Fithvael.

  ‘We leave for the university,’ he said.

  ‘All of us?’ asked Gianna.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Fithvael, kindly. ‘Keep this place locked and safe for us to return to, feed your father and rest awhile, and we will return.’

  ‘Promise nothing,’ Gilead told his old companion, sternly.

  ‘We will return,’ said Fithvael, looking directly at Gianna.

  She tugged free the cloth that hung from her apron string and wrapped it tightly around the remains of the black bread and cheese rind on the table, and she stoppered a half-full jug of ale.

  ‘There’s nothing to eat at the university. The students are al
l so thin. Take this,’ she said, ‘and you’ll have to come back to return the cloth and the jug.

  Fithvael took them from her, and smiled. Mondelblatt stood awkwardly, and then sat down again, heavily. He had been sitting for several hours, and, while he did not need a very great deal of sleep, staying in one position for any length of time rather seized up his joints.

  Fithvael stepped in and took the old man’s arm, as Mondelblatt planted his stick more firmly between the flags and made a second, more successful attempt to rise.

  ‘Perhaps we should take the palfrey, after all,’ said Fithvael.

  ‘No,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘if anyone should see me riding into the university the staff will begin to whisper, and once the gossip starts, the city will be agog. Besides, someone must cover a great deal of ground in the city, mapping the signs.’

  ‘The bugs,’ said Gianna.

  ‘We cannot send Laban,’ said Gilead. ‘The boy is far too conspicuous.’

  ‘I think he has learnt his lesson,’ said Fithvael. ‘He seeks only to do his master’s bidding, and his master is nothing if not demanding.’

  Gilead said nothing.

  ‘Or, I could do it, if you prefer,’ said Fithvael.

  ‘I do,’ said Gilead.

  ‘What am I to look for, old man?’ asked Fithvael.

  Mondelblatt sniggered slightly, and Fithvael frowned at him.

  ‘You called me old,’ said the professor, ‘and yet you must be three times my age.’

  ‘Older than that,’ said Fithvael, ‘but only by comparison to your race.’

  ‘Older than that, and wiser too,’ said Mondelblatt. He was rummaging around in the deep pockets of the academic gown that he wore, and soon pulled out the stub of a pencil and a notebook made of ancient, woven paper, stitched together at the spine.