Hammer and Bolter: Issue 23 Read online

  ‘Speak up,’ said Gilead. ‘I’m sure your insults didn’t reach the ears of our hosts.’

  Laban turned to Fithvael, colouring slightly.

  ‘There is much to learn,’ he muttered.

  ‘You’ll learn it all, in due course. Give it time,’ said Fithvael.

  ‘“Give it time” will only waste my time and put us all in danger,’ said Gilead. ‘Better teach him to shut his mouth. Make that your first lesson, and learn it quickly.’

  Laban scowled, but did not speak again.

  Gilead suddenly disappeared through an arched gap in the wall to their left, over an earth step and into a narrow yard with a ramshackle lean-to roof against the wall of the adjacent building.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Laban.

  A human head appeared through a hole in the wall above the makeshift roof. Backlit, it was impossible to determine the human’s sex.

  ‘Business?’ it asked in a voice which offered no further indication as to the owner’s gender.

  ‘A room. One bed. Three meals,’ said Gilead, raising neither his head nor his voice.

  The little door that covered the hole in the wall closed abruptly.

  ‘So we all eat, but only one of us sleeps?’ asked Laban.

  ‘You can sleep,’ said Gilead. ‘But if the horses are taken, you’ll have to find more, and you won’t find them here.’

  ‘Where’s the ostler?’ asked Laban. ‘The stable boy? The stable for that matter?’

  ‘What do you suppose that to be?’ asked Gilead, gesturing towards the lean-to roof on the opposite wall. Laban walked over to the wall, stepping under the roof that protruded from it like some semi-permanent awning. He toyed with a wrought-iron tether-ring driven into the wall at waist height and pulled at a sagging bag of old, damp straw. Having disturbed it, he stepped back, away from the unpleasant mouldy smell that emanated from it.

  ‘You’ll find something more wholesome for them to eat, too,’ said Gilead, handing Laban the reins to his palfrey. ‘You can use the straw for a mattress if you so desire but, from that odour, I suspect an infestation, so I wouldn’t recommend it.’

  ‘What of the bed?’ asked Laban.

  ‘For my cousin and faithful companion,’ said Gilead. ‘Have you no respect for your elders and betters?’

  ‘I only wondered why we should not all benefit from rest,’ said Laban.

  ‘Rest does not benefit the restless,’ said Gilead. ‘There will be time to sleep when I must and an eternity of rest when I’m dead. For now, there is work to be done, and it is better done by night.’

  ‘Food first,’ said Fithvael, giving the broad war steed a reassuring slap on the rump to encourage it into the makeshift stable.

  Laban strode over to the old elf’s side, throwing his cloak over his shoulder.

  ‘Not you,’ said Gilead. ‘I’ll have yours sent out.’ He turned back through the arch, followed by Fithvael, and ducked through a low door three or four yards further along the wall.

  Laban was left in the small, grubby yard with no one for company but the horses and no light or heat to speak of. He decided that deprivation was something he must be bound to get used to if Gilead was to be his master, but he would not thank him for it.

  Gilead stepped into the darkened room. Some light bled in between the badly-drawn drapes; not moonlight, but the light of a hundred lamps and candles lit in the various chambers of the university to enable the most serious of scholars, or the least able, to study long into the night. The university buildings were never truly dark and light escaped from windows and doorways, around ill-fitting doors, or those left ajar, and between partially-drawn curtains or from windows that were left naked. Gilead did not need the light to know how the furniture was arranged in the two small rooms, for nothing had moved, but he was grateful for the chance to see the piles of books and papers that had sprung up all around the little study and adjoining bed-chamber in time to step over or around them. The room had been free of obstacles the last time he had been in it, but that was fifty years ago and men are wont to accumulate things, as if ownership of objects made their lives somehow richer.

  There was so much about humankind that Gilead did not understand, nor did he wish to.

  The elf was familiar with the university buildings, and with these rooms in particular. He had been stealthy in his approach and had entered the quadrangle without being noticed. He had kept to the shadows and moved silently, close to the high stone walls, standing under one or other of the oriel windows on those occasions when someone appeared from a doorway to cross the quad or duck into a stairwell.

  Gilead had taken the narrow, spiral staircase in the north corner of the quad, and walked the length of the corridor on the third floor of the building. It was a more circuitous route than taking the imposing, carved-wooden staircase in the East Hall, erected long ago to commemorate the death of the last grand master of the scholars’ guild. The East Hall was kept very well-lit because it was the main thoroughfare through the building. It was always full of people moving around the university or simply gathering to talk and exchange ideas. On Gilead’s last visit, which had also been his first, Mondelblatt, the newly invested Professor of Ethnological and Corporeal Physick, had taken him to his rooms by the more private route, not wanting to be caught red-handed with one of the elder race and, as a consequence, be found out for the liar and cheat that the elf knew him to be.

  Gilead had not forgotten the building, the layout of which was as clear in his mind as if he had visited yesterday, but he had forgotten how it, and the man he had undertaken to visit once more, had made him feel. The whole place made his flesh crawl.

  He hadn’t originally sought to frighten Mondelblatt, for he needed something from the man, but once at the university, Gilead felt no compunction, breaking silently into the professor’s rooms by night so that he should be the first thing the so-called scholar saw when he awoke with a start.

  Mondelblatt’s eyes widened as he twitched awake, and Gilead thrust his hand over the man’s mouth.

  Mondelblatt blinked hard, and stared at Gilead. His mouth relaxed under the elf’s hand and Gilead was confident that the professor would not cry out.

  Mondelblatt shook as he sat up, then turned and placed his feet on the floor. Gilead looked down to see gnarled, purplish flesh, the second toe on the left hooked over its neighbour. He saw how thin the man’s skin was, and how frail his hands as he reached for a walking stick that was propped against the nightstand.

  The hair that stuck out in tufts from under a yellowing linen nightcap was sparse and white and the professor’s eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy.

  ‘Is it you?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘Have you come for me?’

  ‘I’ve come to talk to you, old man,’ said Gilead.

  ‘It talks,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Just as I knew it would.’

  He turned to Gilead, standing in front of him barefoot, one hand on his cane and the other resting lightly on the elf’s torso, close to his waist.

  ‘I knew when my time came, it would be you,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I am ready.’

  Mondelblatt took his hand from Gilead’s torso and looked at it.

  ‘Your flesh is solid… and warm. What are you?’

  ‘You know what I am, old man. Who I am,’ said Gilead.

  ‘You are death,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘come to rescue me from this hell-hole. I knew how you’d come to me. I knew I’d never be forgiven for the elf. I have waited a long time. Decades of fear and loathing, and now it is as nothing to me.’

  ‘What?’ asked Gilead. ‘Of what do you speak, old man?’

  ‘I am not afraid. I am ready. It is right,’ said Mondelblatt.

  Gilead looked down at the shrivelled human, and then around them. He took the old man by his slender, wrinkled wrists and urged him, gently, to sit on the edge of the bed. Then
he took a taper and lit the lamp on the nightstand. Next to a pile of books stood a pitcher of water, a tall beaker and a pair of round, wire-rimmed eye-glasses.

  Gilead picked up the glasses and put them gently in Mondelblatt’s hands, folded, inert in his lap. Mondelblatt did not move for a minute or two. He simply sat on the edge of the bed, spectacles in his hands.

  Gilead stood in front of the old man, next to the nightstand so that the lamp shed a good deal of its yellow light on him.

  ‘Put them on,’ said Gilead. ‘Take a proper look at me.’

  ‘What need I of spectacles?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘I know what you look like, and if you were a being of my imagination or a spectre sent by Morr himself, you would still look the same to me.’

  ‘You speak of death as if it were nothing,’ said Gilead. ‘Only the living do that.’

  ‘Then who are you?’ asked Mondelblatt, still calm but fussing with his spectacles to unweave the arms and bring them up to his eyes.

  ‘I am who you believe me to be,’ said Gilead. ‘But I do not bring death.’

  ‘Then what do you bring?’ asked the old man, who had risen again from his bed, his glasses on the end of his nose, and was peering up into Gilead’s face, distorted by the shadows cast by the lamplight below.

  ‘Only questions, and no one else to go to with them,’ said Gilead.

  ‘I can answer questions,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I used you, I lied my way into this job and, in the end, I learnt a very great deal from it.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Gilead. ‘You feared I would return, and do you harm?’

  ‘I feared I would be exposed as a cheat and a liar. I feared being found out, and the only cure for that kind of fear is to begin again, to learn everything and to prove I could earn my scholar’s robes.’

  ‘And have you, old man?’ asked Gilead.

  ‘More so than you would ever believe of an old liar,’ said Mondelblatt.

  Gilead had shared his stories with Fithvael, and his thoughts, too. The Rat King had been driven insane by his longevity, by the slowing of his manic life, and had died as a consequence, but not before what little brain he had turned to mush. The Vampire Count had tried to warn him too, and that had to be worth something.

  Nuln seemed like the obvious place to come, despite Fithvael’s misgivings, but he didn’t have the answers that Gilead was looking for either.

  Gilead did not yet trust Laban, and someone ought to stay with the horses lest they be stolen, so when Gilead went out into the night to find Mondelblatt, he and Fithvael left the tiny inn together. Fithvael took his own route in a wide circle around the university district. He skirted the schools, the quads and the buildings that made up the classrooms, lecture theatres and the lodgings of the students. The oldest buildings stood low and squat towards the middle of the quarter and Fithvael made careful mental notes of where they stood in relation to one another, which direction they faced, how they were adorned and ornamented and how alive they were with the activities of the inhabitants.

  Fithvael did not trust Mondelblatt, but he understood Gilead’s need to see the old wretch. It was Fithvael’s job to ensure that no harm or ill-will befell his friend. Fithvael walked round and around for an hour, then two. Students and masters came and went, some with books and scrolls under their arms, one or two with flasks or bottles and several with hot, paper-wrapped foodstuffs bought at the pie shop on the south-east corner of the district, closest to the student lodgings.

  Fithvael spent several minutes standing against the pie-shop wall, cast in shadow by the tall, apparently windowless building across the alley. Gilead was taking his time, and Fithvael, while not actually hungry, was looking for an excuse to do something, to interact with someone, to learn some titbit of information while he was out and about.

  He wondered why Gilead had hired a bed at all, since Fithvael had slept in it for less than three hours and saw no chance of getting back to it any time soon.

  Two young men ducked out of the narrow doorway, bringing with them the smell of greasy pasties, the pastry clearly made with animal fats regardless of whether it contained meat or not. Fithvael saw the grease spots on the paper that wrapped at least two rancid-smelling savouries, and possibly more, and the ink on the long-fingered hand that held them. The first boy to emerge was almost as tall and almost as lean as an elf, and Fithvael surmised that the surfeit of pies must have been bought with the view to fattening the fellow up, for his friend, the young man carrying more than enough books for two to study, was quite fat enough already. Fithvael cast his gaze across the lit doorway and could clearly count three chins on the shorter, more rotund of the two humans.

  ‘Have you heard what they’re saying about old Mondelblatt?’ the tall, lean boy asked the other.

  Fithvael’s ears pricked and he took a step closer to the end of the alley.

  ‘Hear about it?’ asked the rotund student. ‘I was there!’

  ‘Did it happen the way they’re telling it?’ asked the lean boy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the other. ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘That he’s insane,’ said the lean boy. ‘They say he was babbling about dust.’

  ‘Sand,’ said the fat boy. ‘He lectured on sand for three hours, and even then he wouldn’t have stopped if Doctor Kitzinger hadn’t flounced in to claim the hall for his next lecture. Mondelblatt had run over by an hour, but he looked as if he’d barely begun on the subject.’

  ‘Are you sure it was sand?’ asked the lean boy. ‘Not dust?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the fat boy. ‘Didn’t I tell you I was there? Of course it was sand! Dust indeed. Who lectures about dust for three hours?’

  ‘Who lectures on sand for three hours?’ asked the lean boy.

  ‘And his eyes were sparkly the whole time,’ said the fat boy. ‘You’ve never seen the like.’

  The boys would soon be out of Fithvael’s hearing, but he had heard enough. He turned in the alley and headed north, back through the precincts of the university, in search of Gilead.

  ‘Dry as a bone it is,’ said Mondelblatt. He chafed at the neckline of his nightshirt, which didn’t seem to Gilead to be restricting in any way. ‘A man could choke, it’s so dry.’

  Gilead poured a tall beaker of water from the pitcher on the nightstand. He’d poured two already and watched Mondelblatt drink them, but nothing seemed to quench the old man’s thirst.

  ‘What of the skaven? What of the objects the Rat King collected?’ he asked the old professor. ‘Where did they come from? What do they signify?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘They have no meaning. That’s not what you came for, and you don’t trust me. Without trust, without everything, I can tell you nothing. I know there is more.’

  Gilead stood and turned away as the old man downed the beaker of water that the elf had poured for him. Mondelblatt’s nightcap fell from his head as he leaned back to drain the glass. Gilead noticed how thin and ragged his neck was, and how hard his throat worked to swallow the liquid. He also noticed that there was very little hair under the cap, not much more than he had seen around its perimeter, and that the old man’s head shone whitely and was dappled with liver spots.

  ‘How old you seem,’ said Gilead.

  ‘You don’t,’ said Mondelblatt. He reached out to place his beaker on the nightstand, but it was further than an arm’s length away, and he was too old and weary to get up, so he simply held it between his hands.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so old,’ said Gilead.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I am… I forget how old. It was my birthday… No, I am not old, not terribly.’

  ‘Then why?’ asked Gilead.

  ‘Can you not see that I am parched?’ asked Mondelblatt, throwing the beaker at Gilead in exasperation.

  Gilead took a step back, but said nothing.
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  ‘If you will not tell me the whole of it, I cannot… I will not help you,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I thought once to owe you much, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be held to ransom. I knew nothing then, and what I knew I cheated and stole for, but those days are gone, and I am a scholar. I am a scholar I tell you, and as honourable as the next man… more honourable!’

  Professor Mondelblatt was becoming agitated and Gilead wondered if the man was quite sane. On the other hand, the elf was holding something back. He was holding something back because he couldn’t quite bring himself to trust the human.

  Perhaps it was time. Perhaps it was Mondelblatt’s time. Fifty years had passed easily and quickly enough for the elf, but that was a life to a human, and Gilead began to wonder if he had misjudged the professor. The elf had sought him out, after all, not the other way round.

  ‘Not here,’ said Gilead.

  ‘Then where?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘And while you tell me, pour me some water. I’m more than parched!’

  Gilead held Mondelblatt’s beaker of water, which the old man gulped from periodically while he dressed, and finally, after the old man had trickled a thimbleful of urine into his empty chamber pot, the two left the professor’s rooms and made their way back along the corridor and down the little spiral staircase.

  Gilead looked left and right at the bottom of the stairs, then placed a firm hand on Mondelblatt’s wrist, indicating that he should stay where he was.

  ‘Gilead,’ said a voice behind him as the elf turned in the entrance to the stairwell.

  ‘Fithvael?’ asked Gilead. ‘Why came you here?’

  ‘A rumour,’ said Fithvael. ‘Nothing more, but we must return to our lodgings and discuss our progress. I fear things are not as you would wish.’

  Both the elves heard a shuffling gait to their right and turned to look, stepping back beneath one of the large oriel windows that ran along the lengths of the east and west walls, facing into the quadrangle.

  Mondelblatt stood for a moment in the light of the doorway, turning slowly in an odd, skipping dance.