Hammer and Bolter: Issue 21 Read online

  Gilead turned his narrow form with his right side, his bloody side, facing the Count, and came in with only his sword, thrusting, parrying and driving onward, forcing the Count to back away across the arena, ensuring that he rely on his right leg, attacking the left shoulder, the weak point.

  The Count defended well, parrying hard and rallying for a counter-attack, but a third forward thrust forced him back onto his right leg, and he felt the stiffness of his left shoulder. He must do something to force Gilead to fight on his other side. He tried to turn, but his right leg would not hold, so he shuffled clumsily, and dropped his sword below waist height. Gilead came in fast and strong, flicking the Count’s shorter blade out of his left hand, and catching it by its basket hilt on his sword.

  There was a sharp breath sound from the edge of the arena, over Gilead’s shoulder to his right, as Laban gasped. The elf thought his young cousin might even applaud, and it made his lip curl slightly as if in a smile. He raised his sword and flicked the Count’s secondary blade over his shoulder for Laban to hold for him.

  ‘We call it the plague,’ said Gilead, turning the tip of his sword in small circles at arm’s length, pointing it high at the Count’s head. ‘What know you of it?’

  The Count took hold of his sword in a double-handed grip and began to swing it in a great circle from the ground at his right boot-toe to high above his left shoulder. The momentum behind the swing was vast, and the blade arced towards Gilead’s shoulder, making the air sing.

  Gilead stepped lightly away from the swing and then brought his own sword down on the Count’s at the bottom of its arc, while driving in at neck level with his dagger. Gilead drove the point of his short blade down inside the Count’s collar bone at an angle, but the small amount of flesh there was dense and leathery, and penetration was not deep enough to do fatal damage.

  ‘It matters not,’ said the Count, sliding off Gilead’s knife and backing away, rolling the hilt of his sword between his hands, and preparing for a new onslaught. ‘The amulet is buried for all time. It no longer carries its mortal threat.’ With that the Count feinted, and then lunged forward on his strong left leg, attacking low, plunging his blade into Gilead’s thigh. There was a short, sharp spurt of blood, and for a moment, the Count looked painfully disappointed, if, indeed any expression could be read on his undead face.

  His disappointment was short-lived. Had Gilead been human and his femoral artery had been as exposed as a man’s was, he might have met his death, but an elf’s artery is protected deep in his thigh in a fine, but virtually impenetrable sheath of cartilage and bone. The damage was superficial.

  The Count had made the mistake of taking a step back, thinking that he had bested his opponent, and Gilead quickly drove his advantage, attacking high to the left again, exposing the weakness in the Count’s shoulder.

  As Gilead forced the Count backwards, defending wildly, his sword beginning to weigh heavy, even in his experienced hands, the elf spoke again.

  ‘What if it is not buried?’ he asked.

  ‘Not buried?’ asked the Count. ‘The Rat King forsook the jewel? Broke faith with his master?’

  The Count staggered backwards, blocking another vicious onslaught of paired blades. His hamstring gave way, and he found himself on one knee, leaning away from the blades that must surely finish him.

  Laban took a step closer to the Count, watching him carefully, looking for any trick he might still deploy against his cousin. Gilead took a step back from his fallen adversary and thrust his shorter blade into his cousin’s hand.

  ‘But…’ began Laban.

  ‘We fight on equal terms,’ said Gilead.

  He offered the Vampire Count his hand, and helped him to his feet. His hand was cool and dry and smooth. The grip was strong and firm and the knuckles stood proud, but Gilead felt no revulsion touching it; it was less horrifying than touching the sweaty, flaccid palm of a terrified human.

  Gilead swung the Count to his feet and stood back. They had been in close combat for some time, neither had proven stronger than the other. They were at an impasse, except that the Count clearly had information that would be useful to Gilead, and he wanted to tease it out of the undead knight.

  Keeping his eyes firmly on the Count, and his blade high, held firmly in his right hand, Gilead teased the fingers of his left hand into his boot and withdrew the stone. He flicked it into the air, and watched as the Vampire Count followed its trajectory with his staring red eyes.

  He did not catch it, but let it fall in the dust before him.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Gilead.

  ‘I know not,’ said the Count, adjusting his two-handed grip to one hand, as his eyes flicked back and forth between the amulet and Gilead’s stare.

  ‘The Rat King wore it around his neck on a hair ribbon,’ said Gilead. ‘It wove a spell around him, and around his people. It altered the very rock that his great hall was hewn from.’

  ‘Then it is everything his master claimed it must be,’ said the Count. He rocked his weight from one foot to the other, as if limbering up to defend himself from the coming attack, but Gilead stayed where he was, his sword up, but his feet firmly planted.

  ‘You talk of a master? Another great skaven king? A ratman more powerful than the holder of the charm?’ There was a sneer in Gilead’s voice, as if he didn’t believe the Vampire Count, as if this might be some kind of trick, some form of dissembling. ‘I think not. Are you the master, then, come to claim your prize?’

  ‘There is no prize,’ said the Count, his gaze dropping and staying low. ‘I followed power, and yet…’

  ‘And yet?’ asked Gilead, growing impatient, raising his blade in jerking movements, an inch at a time, menacing.

  ‘I followed power that I might die, and yet…’ said the Count. His voice was fading, as if he were remembering. ‘I wished to honour my liege lord, and more liege lady. I wished only to perform one noble act before I died at the hand of the greatest warrior to ever meet with me in mortal combat.’

  ‘What noble act?’ asked Gilead.

  ‘The noble act that you performed in my stead,’ answered the Count. ‘You were taken, and it mattered not, for I knew that you would best the skaven thugs, that you would outwit and outfight them. I knew that you would recognise the amulet for the evil that it might do, for the plague that it has spread through the skaven horde, and I knew that you would destroy it, or return it. I could not restore the world, as you could. I have not the honour nor the nobility I once had.’

  ‘Return it?’ asked Gilead.

  The two warriors were circling each other again. They paced out the arena, watching one another. Laban and Fithvael stood on either side of the space, watching, unable to intervene, but silently praying for Gilead’s life. The battle had been hard-fought in flashes of brilliant swordsmanship, punctuated by long periods of walking and watching, circling and preparing.

  Then they were both at the centre of the arena; once more, blades screaming against each other in a flurry of attacks and counter-attacks, of lunges, thrusts, ripostes and parries. One leg of the Count’s breeches was cut away, almost entirely as Gilead turned and drew his sword violently upward and outward, missing his target by the depth of the cloth and leather it was clad in. The Count was faster than Gilead had anticipated without his armour, and nimble too.

  Gilead’s reach was longer, so he was at the advantage on the attack, but the Count’s defence was impenetrable. When Gilead did penetrate, the Count’s hide was tough; he did not bleed, and he appeared to feel no pain.

  Gilead had a graze on his chin, as if he had shaved badly, his hair was partly shorn away and his shirt was irreparable. The blood in his thigh had clotted quickly, and a clean scab had formed almost instantaneously, or so it seemed to the Count. Other creatures bled long and profusely, even the smaller mammals had served as a decent meal for him, but this elf did not bleed. He could not find his veins and exploit their weaknesses.

  Laban had thought to help
, to do something, and made to throw his cousin his second blade, but Fithvael, ever watchful, caught the boy’s eye, and slowly shook his head. Laban’s eyes flicked back to the fight; the astonishment on his face made Fithvael turn in the direction that he was looking.

  Suddenly, Gilead was no longer visible in one place. He was high and low, wide and fast, close, and then away again. Laban could see the Vampire Count swinging his weapon, always too slowly, never in the right direction. Gilead’s sword had a new momentum. He took a piece of flesh out of an upper arm, carved a hole in a shoulder, hacked away a cheek, and thrust right through the gut.

  Gilead was shadow-fast. The world and everything in it seemed to stand still. He could not only see every move the Count would make before he made it, he could counter it and exploit it. The Count was good, his instincts sound, so this would be no easy kill, but Gilead knew, at last, that he would kill the unnatural being.

  Laban sat heavily on his backside. He had not seen a shadow-fast elf before. He had known it was part of his family legend, had heard the tales, the old myths, but he had never seen it, and had never thought to see it as long as he lived. He pinched himself, wondering if he was dreaming, at the same time, trying to catch sight of the whirlwind that was his cousin.

  The only light was from twin moons suspended high in the sky above. There were few clouds, and nothing more than a breeze in the air, but, in the darkness, Laban could hardly see Fithvael on the other side of the arena, and could see only the glints and flashes of Gilead’s blade. He wondered if the Count could see anything.

  And then it stopped.

  The Count and Gilead stood as close as two beings can stand one to the other. Laban noted that he could see no blood on the Count’s clothes, and then remembered that the Count did not bleed. The young elf got to his feet and took a careful step closer to his cousin. He almost tripped over the Count’s sword, sticking out of the earth at a low angle, close to his feet.

  Laban took the sword by its hilt and freed it from the earth. He held it high in the air that Fithvael might see it, but the old elf was already drawing close.

  Gilead had the blade of his sword hard against the Vampire Count’s throat, ready to sever the creature’s head from his body.

  ‘Do it,’ said the Count, his cold, red eyes, staring into Gilead’s, willing him to end his miserable existence. ‘Raise a pyre for me, that I may not return. Dismember and decapitate my corpse, leave no chance that I might escape this fate.

  ‘I will do all of those things,’ said Gilead. ‘It will be my honour to serve you in death, but first, tell me what I need to know.’

  ‘What need you of my knowledge?’ asked the Vampire Count. ‘My tale is apocryphal at best. Trust me not, for I fear, to trust me will do you nothing but harm.’

  ‘I have nothing else,’ said Gilead. ‘Tell me simply, tell me truly, only that which you know. Embellish nothing. Give me only your truth.’

  ‘It was always the skaven,’ said the Vampire Count. ‘They spread the plague, but it only resides in them, uses them, and disables them. It originates elsewhere, in the hearts and minds of the southern places, in the lost souls of the sands, in the broken people of the stone sarcophagi, and in their golden leaders.’

  Gilead’s hold on the Vampire Count strengthened as the creature began to lose all sense of itself in the bliss that was its demise.

  ‘Kill me,’ it said. ‘Kill me now. I have nothing more for you. Nothing more to say.’

  Gilead gestured to Laban, beckoning him to bring the sword.

  When he was close, Gilead let go his grasp on the Count, and, in that same movement, took the warrior’s sword from his cousin and pressed it into his adversary’s hands.

  Then Gilead swung, bringing the hilt of his sword from his left shoulder, throwing the blade in a gleaming arc. By the time the hilt of the sword, still held in both hands, was resting against his right shoulder, the Vampire Count’s body was falling.

  Gilead had felt the flex in the blade of his sword as it cut through leather and petrified sinew and on through empty veins and a calcified trachea. Then he felt the jarring sensation in his arms as the blade hit something that it could not strike through. The vertebrae still holding the Vampire Count upright were harder than the steel of his sword, and would not be divided by it in one swing.

  The Count’s head did not separate from his body, but lolled like some grotesque doll’s head, bloodlessly. The legs buckled beneath the Count, the right first, tilting his torso awkwardly to one side as his head bounced for a moment at the extremity of his spine.

  Gilead turned and walked away. He handed his sword to Fithvael and approached the hedgerow, which he began to rip away with his hands, quickly gathering large amounts of dry twisting twigs and lengths of half-dead wood.

  ‘We must build a pyre,’ said Gilead. ‘We must honour our dead, and when we have held vigil and seen the bones scattered, we turn south.’

  Dead Man’s Party

  Josh Reynolds

  It was Spring Tide, and Marienburg was awash in revelry of both the sublime and more boisterous sort. Poles bearing caged seagulls were hoisted aloft as the celebration unfolded. Cornets and other instruments were played, mostly badly, by over-enthusiastic revellers. Buckets of seawater were sloshed about on the unwary as priests and pilgrims bellowed out the more profane hymns to Manann, popular among sailors.

  Steel spheres containing handfuls of incense and hot coals were draped from every available protrusion, and clouds of exotic spices drifted across the streets, battling for dominance with the normal urban stew of the canals. Children threw dried flakes of seaweed and coral into the waters of the Central Canal as the great altar-barge of Manann hove to, the high priest roaring his praises and shaking his gull-pole until the bird’s raucous squawks threatened to drown out his own.

  Every citizen was either in the streets or in the taverns, or heading from one to the other. Or so it seemed to Erkhart Dubnitz, knight of the Most Holy Order of Manann-in-Marienburg, as he stiff-armed a red-faced drunk into the canal in order to clear a path for his charge. ‘Right this way, Meneer Lomax,’ he said obsequiously, bowing and sweeping an armour-plated arm out just in time to catch a bucket-bearing priest in the belly. The seawater sloshed across the cobbles and Dubnitz’s charge chuckled.

  ‘At least the stones are getting a good scouring, hey?’ Bernard Lomax said, rheumy eyes taking in the celebration with a weary air as he leaned on his narwhal-horn cane. He was dressed archaically, in the fashion of his youth, and his clothes showed signs of having been repaired, rather than replaced. Lomax was old, and age weighed heavily on his thin form. He had the heft of a Nehekharan mummy in his twilight years but none of the joie de vivre, as the Bretonnian saying went.

  ‘Are you enjoying yourself, Meneer Lomax?’ Piet Van Taal said. Like Dubnitz, Piet was a knight of the most holy, and only occasionally violent, Order of Manann. In contrast to Dubnitz’s barrel-chested heft, he was a lean whip of a man with the stamp of one of the lower rungs of Marienburg’s aristocracy on his features. Like Dubnitz, he wore a coat of chainmail beneath an emerald surcoat bearing the trident-and-crown emblem of Manann, god of the seas.

  ‘Who can enjoy themselves with the stench and the noise?’ Lomax said, coughing into a clenched fist. ‘Is this what you do for fun?’

  ‘Not quite, no,’ Dubnitz said quickly. ‘Normally our carousing takes place indoors, away from the hurly-burly.’ He spun and punched a celebrant who’d been about to place a wreath of eel-skins and shark fins around his neck.

  ‘That sounds good,’ Lomax said, watching the wreath clatter across the cobbles.

  Piet looked at Dubnitz over the top of Lomax’s head and mouthed, ‘The Scalded Gull?’

  Dubnitz nodded. He laid a leather gauntlet on Lomax’s shoulder. ‘Right this way, Meneer Lomax. We’ll have you quaffing in no time.’

  ‘Are you taking me to a dive? Is it filthy?’

  ‘The filthiest,’ Dubnitz assured him.
r />   ‘Will there be loose women?’

  ‘The loosest,’ Piet said.

  ‘It sounds delightful,’ Lomax murmured, clasping his trembling hands together. ‘Lead on Sir Knights! I have a half-century’s worth of abstinence to make up for.’

  The knights led him through the crowd into the back alleys that stretched out from the Central Canal, where the noise of the Spring Tide celebration grew muted and the natural odoriferousness of Marienburg reasserted itself. The Scalded Gull clung to a little-used stable on Fishhook Lane like an unsightly growth. It was an overlarge shed, with wide windows and a door that was less an obstacle than a curtain. It wasn’t crowded, for which Dubnitz muttered a silent prayer of thanks to Manann.

  The barman grunted an unintelligible greeting and Dubnitz raised three fingers and gestured to a table in the back corner that sat beneath the hide of giant rat that had been stretched across the wall and nailed in place. Lomax looked curiously at the hide as they sat. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It thought it was a man,’ Dubnitz said. ‘Now it’s a conversation piece. We cleaned out a nest of the pestiferous beasts a few years back in the area, now all of the local swill-sellers let the Order drink for free.’

  The drinks arrived and the two knights emptied their mugs in moments, slamming them down almost simultaneously. Lomax blinked at the speed. He hesitated, his fingers gripping his own mug as he looked into the foam as if it hid secrets. Then he jerked it convulsively to his lips and knocked it back. Dubnitz waved his hand, signalling for another round. Lomax went momentarily cross-eyed and coughed. ‘It has been some time since I had anything stronger than turnip juice,’ he said. He licked his lips. ‘I quite liked it.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Dubnitz said, and he was. He examined the old man. Lomax was a man of means. He was also a miser with money to spare. Money which he’d promised to the Order of Manann, money which they desperately needed, if the hollow echoing sound of the tithe coffers was anything to go by. All Lomax had asked in return was one night, just one night of carousing and stupidity, to make up for a lifetime of thrift and denial, because misers like Lomax didn’t make charitable donations without strings attached.