CHAPTER SEVEN

 

 

“What was that thing?” Rudi asked, the first time he was sure that he and Hanna were alone and unlikely to be overheard. The Reikmaiden was tied up at another of the riverside settlements, on a wharf identical to most of the others he’d seen on their progress up the river, and the familiar huddle of huts surrounded it. The only difference was that this one was deep in the heart of the forest, its inhabitants apparently scratching a living by logging, and the presence of the trees so close at hand lifted his spirits more than he would have believed possible. Impatient to go ashore, he’d returned to their improvised quarters in the boat’s hold to stow his bow and arrows, and found Hanna sitting pensively in her hammock, her legs swinging. She shrugged.

“A talisman: nothing special, just a basic enchantment on an old symbol of Mannan. You can buy something similar anywhere there are wizards with time on their hands and a hole in their purses. Crude, but they do the job they’re made for.”

“What job is that?” Rudi asked again. Hanna hopped out of the hammock.

“There are all sorts. Ones like that detect the aura of magic,” she said. Rudi felt his blood run cold.

“You mean they were witch hunters?” That didn’t make sense. There had been no sign of Gerhard or any of his associates on the vessel that had attacked them, and surely witch hunters would have ordered the Reikmaiden to heave to before boarding, relying on the authority of their office to enforce compliance, rather than simply attacking without warning. Hanna shook her head.

“I don’t think so. They were looking for something hidden among the cargo.” She pointed. “There’s a hollow space in that bulkhead there, behind the fish barrels. There’s something magical inside it; powerful, too.”

“How do you know?” Rudi asked, and Hanna looked at him scornfully.

“I’ve got the sight, remember?”

Rudi recalled how she’d been able to recognise Alwyn and Kris as fellow mages the first time she’d seen them, and read the marks on the enchanted cards in Tilman’s gambling den. “I noticed it as soon as I woke up in here.”

“So that’s what Shenk’s up to,” Rudi said. He’d been certain that the riverboat captain was smuggling something, ever since their encounter in the rooming house the Black Caps had been raiding back in Marienburg, and this seemed to confirm it. “Do you think he knows his contraband is magical?”

“I doubt it.” Hanna shrugged. “You saw how skittish he was with that gewgaw I threw over the side. He wouldn’t go within a league of what’s hidden back there if he knew how powerful it is.” Her tone became speculative. “Unless he’s being paid an enormous amount of money for shifting it, of course.”

“Maybe.” Rudi felt the good mood that the scent of the surrounding woodlands had kindled in him begin to evaporate, displaced by a formless sense of unease. Once again he was surrounded by secrets, which could get him killed without even knowing the reason why, or finding the answers to the questions that continued to plague him. He’d had enough of that back in Marienburg. “I’ll talk to him if I get the chance, see what I can find out.”

“Be careful,” Hanna counselled. “You might not like what you uncover.”

Rudi nodded, certain that she was right.

“So it was just bad luck, the thing flaring up when you got close to it,” he said.

Hanna echoed the gesture. “That’s right. It picked up on my aura instead of that thing behind the barrels. Luckily, I was close enough to shut him up before he cried witch on me.”

“No one seems to have noticed, anyway,” Rudi said, while a small part of his mind watched appalled at the casual way they were both accepting the killing of another human being as a regrettable necessity. “Pieter was well out of it the whole time, and Berta thinks you saved the boat from a hell-raising necromancer.”

“Good,” Hanna said. “That avoids any more difficulties.”

Her matter-of-fact tone sent another shiver down Rudi’s spine. Would she really have been willing to murder their friends to keep her secret if she’d had to? He forced the thought away. Life on the run was changing both of them, he knew, but he couldn’t believe that Hanna would kill in cold blood simply because it was expedient. She looked at him, an odd expression on her face. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Rudi assured her, hoping that it was true.

 

Night had fallen completely by the time Rudi returned to the deck, and flaring torches lit the wharf, picking out golden highlights from the rippling darkness beneath the gangplank. It was the first time Rudi had seen such a display at any of the riverside settlements the boat had put in at, and after a moment’s thought he recognised the resinous branches in the crudely-made sconces as by-products of the local timber trade.

“That’s right,” Shenk confirmed when he voiced the thought aloud. “Nothing gets wasted out here.” He glanced at Rudi. “Finally put your toy away?” Rudi nodded. The pleasantry had been delivered in a tone, which, if no warmer than before, seemed a little more relaxed than Shenk had been around him hitherto.

“I don’t think I’ll be needing it now,” he said. Despite the fact that the pirates, if that was what they really were, had clearly been driven off, he’d kept his bow handy until the Reikmaiden was safely tied up at the quay. No one aboard had objected. After the ease with which he’d apparently dispatched the majority of their attackers, the crew had taken to watching him with wary respect, and even Busch and Ansbach spoke to him with a little more warmth in their voices. “Not tonight, anyway.”

“We’ll have seen the last of them,” Shenk said. “Scum like that won’t risk another savaging. They’ll wait for an easier target to come along.”

“Maybe,” Rudi said, following the riverboat captain to the gangplank. “If they really were pirates, of course.”

“What else would they be?” Shenk asked. Rudi shrugged.

“Fog Walkers?” he suggested, using the common nickname for the covert agents of the ruling council of Marienburg. He couldn’t be sure in the guttering light cast by the torches on the wharf, but for a moment he thought a flicker of surprise and apprehension appeared on the captain’s face. Then it was gone, and Shenk’s expression became studiedly neutral.

“You’ve got an imagination, I’ll say that,” he said. Rudi shrugged.

“If you say so. But if they were just ordinary pirates, why didn’t we hear of them at any of the settlements we’ve put into? News like that travels fast.” Shenk shrugged.

“Maybe we were just the first boat they jumped,” he suggested.

“Perhaps we were.” Rudi led the way onto the gangplank. As he gained the rough timbers of the wharf, his gait changed a little, his sense of balance thrown subtly off-kilter by the motionlessness of the solid footing. Shenk followed. “Do river pirates usually have guns?”

“First time I’ve ever seen it,” Shenk admitted. Firearms were rare and precious, and to find so many in the hands of mere bandits would be almost unprecedented. He caught Rudi by the upper arm, and swung him round so the two of them were standing close together under the orange glow of a crudely made torch. In the sudden silence, Rudi could hear the hissing of it, and smell the unmistakable odour of burning resin. He tensed, wondering if Shenk was going to attack him, and then relaxed, dismissing the thought. After seeing his fighting abilities, that was the last thing the little man would do. The captain glanced around, certain that no one else was within earshot, and lowered his voice. “Why would the Fog Walkers be interested in my boat?”

Rudi shrugged.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he said honestly, “so long as it doesn’t stop Hanna and me from getting to Altdorf. I might take a guess, though.”

“I see.” Shenk nodded. “And your guess would be?” Rudi shrugged.

“I found you in a rooming house owned by a notorious smuggler, whose business had attracted a lot of official attention. Enough attention for the authorities to risk annoying the elves to close down, which they wouldn’t do just to claw back a bit of evaded duty on a cargo of wine or cheese. The next thing I know, you’re heading back upriver.”

“We go up and down the river all the time,” Shenk said. “That’s why they call it a river boat.”

“True,” Rudi said. “But I was a Cap for long enough to develop a nasty suspicious mind, especially when there was an Imperial agent in town, who I know for a fact the Walkers were taking an interest in.”

“Do you now?” Shenk’s voice was guarded. “And how would a simple watchman know something like that?”

“A friend of mine works for him,” Rudi said, “and Sam Warble asked me to find something out about what he was up to.” As he’d expected, Shenk nodded at the name of the halfling information broker. Everyone in Marienburg with a secret to sell or protect knew Sam.

“He told you he was working for the Fog Walkers,” Shenk said.

Rudi shrugged again. “Not in so many words,” he said. “But the way he didn’t tell me was pretty convincing.”

“I see.” The riverboat captain’s face and voice had turned grim. “What conclusion does your nasty suspicious mind draw from all this?”

“That I don’t want to draw any conclusions,” Rudi said. “Boats like yours carry messages and packets all the time, don’t they?”

“Yes.” Shenk nodded. “And what’s in them is none of my business.”

“Even if delivering them looks like getting you killed?” Rudi asked.

“Especially then,” Shenk said. He might have been about to say something else, but was interrupted by a bail from the gangplank. Ansbach and Berta were clattering onto the wharf, apparently in high spirits.

“Skipper, Rudi.” Ansbach looked at Rudi with more warmth than he’d ever done, albeit tempered with an air of wariness, like someone putting out a hand to pat a dog he thought might bite. “We’re off to the Floating Log for a celebration drink. Reckon we owe you at least one for this afternoon’s work. Coming?”

“Thanks,” Rudi said, surprised almost as much by the man’s relative affability as the news that the settlement was apparently prosperous enough to support an inn. “This place has a real tavern?”

“Not as such,” Shenk said, clearly relieved at the change of subject. “But they do have ale, and some stuff that’ll make you go blind, but takes paint off really well.” He glanced back at the gangplank. “Where’s Kurt?”

“Staying on board with Yullis,” Berta said. “He thought doubling the watches would be a good idea, at least as far as Carroburg.” Shenk nodded.

“Can’t hurt,” he said, with a sideways glance at Rudi. Evidently the mate, at least, was also aware that the real target of the raid had been whatever lay hidden in the hold. “Where’s Hanna?”

“She’s staying aboard too,” Rudi told him. “She doesn’t want to leave Pieter until she’s sure he’ll be all right.”

“That’s good of her,” Shenk said. Then he nodded, relieved. “Probably just as well, this isn’t really the sort of place for a young lady.”

Berta snorted. “Sounds like the right place for me, then,” she said.

 

* * *

 

On closer inspection, Rudi had to concede that Shenk was right. The logging camp was populated almost entirely by men, and the few exceptions were clearly either there with a husband, or intent on making money from the lumberjacks in one of the traditional ancillary professions. From their manner of dress, or lack of it, most of the younger ones were evidently not cooks or laundresses. Hanna would undoubtedly have attracted unwelcome attention, and Rudi tried not to picture the likely consequences.

In contrast to the rude huts Rudi had been used to seeing in the settlements they’d stopped at before, the buildings seemed sturdier, constructed for the most part of logs or freshly-sawn timber. They seemed extravagantly large, too, until Shenk explained that most of them were communal dormitory blocks, or warehouses for the supplies that the flourishing community needed. Everything, it seemed, came in by boat, either casual visitors like the Reikmaiden, or the regularly-scheduled barges that arrived every week or so, laden with tools and food, and departed weighed down with timber.

“There’s still a bit of room for some private enterprise, though,” Shenk assured Rudi.

Rudi wasn’t surprised. He was beginning to suspect that the riverboat captain could find a profit pretty much anywhere.

“I think we’re attracting some attention,” he said. Several of the men they’d passed were armed, carrying bows or spears, and most of them glanced in his direction, their expressions far from friendly. Shenk waved.

“It’s your sword,” he explained. “Most people around here don’t carry one.”

Berta snorted with amusement. “Why bother when you’ve got a big chopper to play with?” she said, sniggering at her own wit.

“Good point,” Rudi said, and studied the guards again with open curiosity. The wall enclosing the encampment was higher than the others he’d seen along the river, almost as large as the one that surrounded Kohlstadt, the village he’d grown up in, and a stout timber gate protected the stockade. “So what are they carrying weapons for?”

Ansbach laughed. “It’s a forest out there,” he explained. “Who knows what’s lurking in it? Beastmen, goblins, covens of witches, you name it.”

“Trees?” Rudi suggested. “Rabbits?” He grinned, draining the remark of any perceived belligerence. “I grew up in a forest. It’s not as bad as all that.”

“Not south of the river, maybe,” Ansbach conceded, with an obvious effort to be civil, “but this side’s Middenland. The greatest battle of the war was fought at Middenheim, and not all the Chaos scum went north again afterwards. Anything might have gone to ground in the Drakwald.”

“You’re right about that.” Rudi nodded his agreement, and Ansbach looked surprised for a moment. “We even saw beastmen in the Reikland last summer.” Suddenly conscious that he’d said too much about his past, and that Shenk was looking at him with a curiously speculative expression, he searched for a change of subject. A burst of raucous laughter attracted his attention at just the right moment, and he turned his head to look at the strange structure in the middle of the makeshift village. “Is that it?”

“Looks like it to me,” Berta confirmed, picking up her pace. The tavern looked more like a tent than a building, although the floor was composed of planks, none of them were quite the same size or shape as any of its neighbours, and three of the walls were made of reasonably straight tree branches and off-cuts from the saw pits. Evidently, whoever owned it had scavenged whatever scrap timber they could to put the place together. The roof was a sheet of canvas, which could be extended to the ground on the open side to keep out the wind and rain.

Conscious of the way his breath misted in front of him, Rudi found himself wondering why it had been left open on a night that his woodsman’s instincts told him would probably bring frost.

As the little party of mariners reached it, however, he had his answer. A blast of body heat, mingled with the smells of sweat, sour ale, old vomit and flatulence, rolled out over him, sparking incongruous memories of some of the less salubrious establishments of Marienburg he’d visited on official business. The ramshackle tavern was packed with men, for the most part muscular, and almost all drunk. The noise was almost as bad as the smell, and Ansbach had to raise his voice as he pushed his way to the bar and dropped a few coins onto it.

“Four ales!” he shouted, and turned back to Rudi and Shenk. An expression of puzzlement crossed his features. “Where’s Berta?”

“Over there.” Shenk pointed to a table in the middle of the throng, where his missing deckhand was joining in enthusiastically with some kind of drinking game. Ansbach shrugged.

“Oh well.” He drained one of the mugs in a couple of swallows, and distributed the other three. “Pity to waste it.” After a cautious sip, Rudi decided he was right. It wasn’t the best drink he’d ever tasted, but it was far more palatable than he’d feared. He swallowed appreciatively.

“Not bad,” he said. “Thanks.”

Ansbach coloured a little, and took a swallow of his own drink. “Well, I reckon I owed you,” he said awkwardly. “We’d probably all have been fish bait if it hadn’t been for you.” Rudi shrugged.

“Well, I couldn’t let that happen. It’s a long walk to Altdorf.” He grinned, pleasantly surprised to see a matching smile on Ansbach’s face. “Fancy another?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” Ansbach grinned a little more widely, and drained his tankard. “Same again for you, skipper?”

“You two enjoy yourselves,” Shenk said, his eyes scanning the throng, and sparking with sudden recognition. “I’ve got a bit of business to attend to.” He raised a hand in greeting, and slipped through the crowd of lumberjacks. A moment later Rudi saw him chatting to a man dressed rather better than the labourers, who he assumed must therefore be someone in authority.

“Looks like it’s just us then,” Ansbach said.

 

To his vague surprise, Rudi found the evening remarkably enjoyable. It had been a long time since he’d been able to savour the simple pleasures of socialising, and as the night wore on and the amount of ale they’d both consumed increased, Ansbach mellowed far more than he would have believed possible. The deckhand had a couple of acquaintances among the woodsmen, whose names Rudi never quite caught, but whose stories of life among the timber made him feel comfortably nostalgic for his former life in the woods around Kohlstadt, and who seemed gratifyingly pleased to have found a kindred spirit. Eventually, they went off to bed, and Rudi rose to his feet, swaying slightly, his head pleasantly clouded with the effects of the alcohol he’d drunk.

“We’d best be getting back too,” he suggested. Ansbach stood as well, a trifle unsteadily, and nodded.

“Reckon you’re right,” he said at last. The makeshift taproom was much quieter now, most of the drinkers left snoring quietly to themselves, their heads pillowed on forearms folded neatly on the ale-puddled tabletops or vomit-puddled floor, and only a few diehards continuing to besiege the bar. Now that Rudi could see it more clearly, it turned out to be another assemblage of crudely nailed-together planking. “Looks like it’s just us left.”

“Looks like,” Rudi agreed. He glanced around, looking for their companions, but Shenk had long since disappeared, and Berta had vanished too, leaving most of the participants of her drinking game snoring quietly in a heap of tangled limbs. “How do we get back to the wharf from here?”

“That’s easy.” Ansbach led the way outside, and pointed. “It’s down that way.” He stepped into the shadows. “Hang on a minute. Just need to make an offering to Mannan, if you know what I mean.” Stepping away from the relieved sigh and the sudden cloud of acrid-smelling steam that followed it, Rudi let his gaze wander around the logging camp. As he’d expected, the frost was hard, sharp pinpoints of starlight speckling the sky, and the silver disc of Mannslieb, the major moon, was crisply delineated like a hole in the sky. He amused himself for a moment looking for the shape of the rabbit in the softly glowing orb, as he had done as a child, and returned his gaze to the buildings surrounding them. Shards of frost glittered on every surface, painting the world silver, and he was able to see almost as well as he would have done in daylight. His breath puffed into little clouds that reflected the sheen of moonlight with every exhalation, and the bitter cold began to clear his head, although the alcohol he’d drunk insulated him from its worst effects.

As he waited for Ansbach to conclude his devotions, another glint of reflected moonlight caught his eye, and he turned, trying to find the source of it. For a moment he failed to see it again, and then there it was: a hard-edged glitter deep within the shadows cast by a nearby warehouse.

Something was moving, an indistinct mass, and then his night vision, which for so long had been muted by the ubiquitous lamps and torches of the city streets, reasserted itself. There had been no aids to vision growing up in the woods, and using them would surely have scared off the game he’d been after anyway, so for most of his life he’d been adept at distinguishing shapes in the darkness. This was a human figure, he was suddenly sure, wrapped in a cloak of some dark material. Why would anyone be hanging about outside on a freezing cold night like this?

His nascent suspicions flared up in earnest as a burst of raucous laughter echoed across the empty space, and the mysterious figure shrank back deeper into the shadows, as if fearful of discovery. Berta stumbled across the gap between two buildings, an arm each around the shoulders of a pair of lumberjacks, all three of them clearly in high spirits. A moment later, they disappeared, and the banging of a door cut off the second verse of a song about a goblin and a goat, which Rudi remembered being a perennial favourite among the drunk and disorderly cases he’d swept off the streets of Marienburg on a more or less nightly basis.

“Can you see that?” he asked, aware suddenly that Ansbach had just joined him. The deckhand shook his head, and tottered another pace forwards, unbalanced for a moment by the violent movement.

“See what?” he asked, and then his face cleared. “Oh, you mean the skipper?” Shenk was walking down the middle of the thoroughfare leading back towards the wharf, with the air of a man whose business had just been satisfactorily concluded, and who was looking forward to reaching his bunk. The shadow moved again, the glitter of moonlight striking out from it once more, and Rudi had no doubt at all that what he was seeing was the reflection of an unsheathed blade.

“Shenk! Look out!” He began to run, his sword hissing from its scabbard as he did so. Ansbach stayed rooted to the spot for a moment, his expression one of stupefied bafflement. Then he stumbled in Rudi’s wake, a good dozen paces behind the young forester, the gap widening with every misplaced step. He drew his knife from his belt regardless, flourishing it with drunken bravado, and a complete lack of comprehension.

“I’m right behind you!” he bellowed. “Anyone messes with you, they mess with me!” Rudi was by no means sure that this was reassuring, but it seemed to give the lurker in the shadows pause. A hooded head snapped round in the direction of the commotion, rapidly assessed the relative positions of Rudi, Ansbach, and his intended target, and made a swift decision predicated entirely on self-preservation. There was a sudden blur of motion, and the shard of moonlight left his hand, hurtling straight for Rudi’s chest.

As it had on so many previous occasions, time seemed to slow and stretch. Instinctively, without thinking, Rudi snapped his blade up into a guard position, parrying as if against a sword thrust, and the flung dagger rebounded into the darkness with a clang of clashing steel. He had what felt like several minutes to watch it spin away, shining like a silver comet, and to take in the assassin’s panic-stricken reaction to the failure of his attack. He wondered if a second knife was about to follow the first, but the anonymous figure simply turned and ran.

“Oh no you don’t!” Shenk tackled his would-be assailant with vigour and a degree of resolution that would have surprised Rudi before today, but the assassin was far more skilled in brawling than the riverboat captain. The black-clad figure slipped out of the boatman’s grip easily, with a vicious backhanded strike to the face. Shenk went down, and the assassin turned, clearly intent on finishing him. Rudi was just within sword’s reach of the man, and aimed a cut at his head, as intent on distracting him as on inflicting any actual damage, ripping through the cloth of the hood. It parted, revealing a glimpse of a nondescript face, indistinguishable at first sight from any of the lumberjacks inhabiting the settlement. Nevertheless, its owner turned away, continuing to conceal his identity as best he could.

“Hang on, skipper! We’re coming!” Ansbach roared, and the assassin hesitated again. With what sounded to Rudi like a sigh of irritation, the man suddenly turned and bent over, lashing out with a booted foot, which connected solidly with the side of the young forester’s head. Rudi staggered back, dazed and surprised by the unconventional attack. By the time he’d recovered, a second or two later, the black-clad figure was fleeing for the nearest patch of concealing shadow.

“That’s right, run!” Ansbach bellowed, flushed with victory. Shenk staggered slowly to his feet, the blood streaming from his nose appearing black in the silvery moonlight.

“Are you all right?” he asked. Rudi nodded.

“Fine. I just wasn’t expecting Bretonnian foot-boxing tricks.” Shenk raised an eyebrow, and pinched the bridge of his nose to stem the bleeding. “I rousted a few cheese-breaths in the watch,” Rudi explained. “First time I came across one who knew savartay, he nearly took my head off. How are you feeling?”

“I’ll live.” The captain watched curiously as Rudi stared at the ground. “What are you looking for?”

Rudi sighed in frustration. “Tracks, but it’s hopeless.” He’d been hoping the assassin had left enough traces to follow, but the frost-hardened ground was too solid to dent with fresh footprints, and the thin film of glistening rime had been disturbed by pretty much everybody in the settlement. After a few yards the scuffmarks in the glowing white surface vanished, swallowed by the maelstrom of footprints left by the bed-bound revellers from the Floating Log. “What are you going to do now?” Shenk shrugged.

“Talk to Hanna, for a start,” he said, “and think very hard about asking for a bonus when we get to Altdorf.”