4 City of Strife (3 page)

“And you said you were trying to avoid being drawn into sin.” She smiled. “I was good-looking in those days.”

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“By your voice I thought maybe you were a churchman,” she said. “One of those visiting scholars who are always coming to the Prelate’s court. I thought maybe you were one of the ones who liked to break their vows of chastity.”

“So the idea of sinning with a priest excited you . . .”

“You know it did . . . but that was just the first look I took at you. A second told me you were no priest. Too dark, too fierce, too dangerous.”

“There’s plenty of priests who fight, Lila. Your own Prelate for one. In his youth he put both his neighbouring barons to the sword and took their lands for the Holy Sun’s church.”

She got up and moved away from the bed, stood studying him in the mirror, as she adjusted her hair. She looked over at his gear, the saddle-bags, the sword. She looked at the amulets hanging over the bedposts.

“You know the last time, after you left, they found a dead body up in the Cathedral.” She spoke a little too casually and Kormak was immediately on his guard. He kept his face bland. “Really.”

“They found several actually. A prominent churchman. The architect of the Cathedral. Two well known local merchants.”

“All dead?”

She looked at him cold-faced, tilted her head to one side as she judged him. “They were all beheaded. As neat as if the Council’s executioner had done it. As if they had been found guilty of some crime. Whoever killed them did everything but stick their heads on a spike over the gates for the peasants to gawp at.”

He would have done that too if he’d had the time. He kept his face bland. She paused for a second, took another drink. “Another merchant vanished, was never found. He left town in hurry, apparently very scared. The same night you left, actually.”

Kormak remembered that man all too well. His name had been Venn. He had dabbled in the darkest of sorceries. It had taken a month to catch him. A lot of people had died.

He pushed himself up from the bed and walked over to her. “Why are you telling me this?”

She turned half away from him, avoiding looking up into his face. “You did tell me you might have to leave town quickly. You never told me why.”

“The contract I was waiting for came through. There was war along the Valkyrian border.”

“Aye, there was,” she said, like someone who wanted very badly to believe. Her jaw quivered for a moment and then she took a step away from him. “The thing about those bodies was it was all so neat. There were no wounds on them. So they say.”

“Taking a man’s head off usually means you don’t need to stab him,” said Kormak.

“What sort of man can do that though?” she said. “Who could trap four armed men and behead them? And how—they were all big, powerful men. A couple of them had proved they could fight. Marcus had killed three men in duels.”

“Again, why are you telling me this? It’s interesting, I admit, but it’s old news.”

“It was a nine-day wonder,” she said. “Everybody talked about it. They thought there might be a madman loose but no one else was killed. Then the other rumours started. That the dead men had been in a cult of some sort, that dead girls were found in a secret room in the Cathedral foundation—you remember the young girls who went missing, don’t you?”

Kormak nodded. He remembered finding the girls’ mutilated bodies all too well. He sometimes saw their faces in his darker dreams. He forced the frown from his face.

“There was all sorts of talk, that a dark consecration had been taking place, that the dead men had been making sacrifices to the Shadow. And then suddenly it was all hushed up. It became one of those things that nobody wanted to talk about. The priests all started preaching from the pulpit about tellers of tales and gossips. Somebody, somewhere very high up had decided to sweep the whole thing under the carpet or so it seemed to me.”

He put an arm around her waist. She shivered and leaned back against him. “You’ve obviously given this matter a lot of thought.” He kept his voice very flat.

She gave a bitter laugh. “Am I boring you?”

“I can think of more interesting things than talk.” He tilted her head and kissed her on the mouth. She started to respond then pushed him away. “No,” she said. “No.”

She moved back over to the bed, drew her legs up beneath her. “You want to know something,” she said.

“What?”

“I wondered about it. I wondered about you. When you left town the killings stopped. No more dead girls. No more headless corpses. The city went back to being normal or as normal as it ever is, anyway.”

“You think I killed those girls?” She flinched at the cold anger in his voice and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you killed the girls. You were here with me the night Azara Kendal went missing, and the night Dorothea Spanders was lost as well. And the first of them vanished months before you came to town.”

He moved over, lay down beside her. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment. Her long hair tickled his flesh. She looked up at him with frank brown eyes. “After you left, I started asking questions.”

He stared at her. She stroked the tattoo on his chest, running her finger along the dragon’s folded wings. “I asked about tattoos and dragons. I heard some interesting stories.”

“Tell me one.”

“A merchant from Saladar told me about an order of knights, sworn to oppose the Shadow, who bore such tattoos. He told me the order had fallen into darkness and become a cult of paid assassins.”

“You believe him?”

“Another man, a soldier . . . like yourself maybe . . . told me of a society sworn to fight the Old Ones. Their badge was a dwarf-forged blade. They grew rich and fat and extorted money even from the Kings of Men and eventually the kings turned against them and banished them. He said they still fight the Old Ones for money. And sometimes they even fight for the Old Ones when paid.”

Kormak wondered at the way stories mutated as they travelled. He supposed it was inevitable the way merchants gossiped and bards exaggerated.

“A wizard told me that the dragon was the sign of the Order of the Dawn, an organisation feared by all his kind. That they were implacable enemies of magic, hated mages like cats hate rats.”

“You think I am one of these men, these wizard haters?”

“You carry a very old sword. You have as many amulets as a wandering holy man. You look to be in your forties and you move like a man of twenty. And you have a lot of strange scars. What am I supposed to think?”

He looked at her steadily. Anger twisted her face. “Are you going to deny any of this?”

“Would it help if I did?”

“I don’t know. I do know this though . . . five years ago terrible things were happening here and when you went they stopped as if somebody had pulled a lever. And now, today, the city is going to hell in a hand-basket and suddenly you are here again, out of nowhere, in my bed.”

He put his arms around her. She seemed to want to say something more. “And?” he said as gently as he could.

“And I am afraid . . .” She reached out and pulled him hungrily to her before he could say anything more.

IN THE MORNING, they went down to the kitchen. The cooks were already up. Several of them had been so for hours, baking. The smell of fresh bread reached Kormak’s nostrils and made his mouth water.

Lila went into the pantry and produced a jug of milk, poured some into a bowl then went to another cupboard and put the bowl down. Kormak looked down. There was a small, very sick looking kitten in the basket. Its ear was torn and one of its eyes was milky. It meowed feebly, rolled over and started lapping the milk.

Lila tickled it under the chin but it ignored her and looked at him beseechingly. “Typical,” Kormak said.

“That’s right, you don’t like cats, do you?” Lila said. “I remember now.”

Kormak shrugged. “I neither like nor dislike them.”

“That’s what people say when they really don’t like them.”

“You have an interesting approach to understanding people,” Kormak said.

“There’s not so many about these days. They mostly seem to have vanished. Cats, kittens, all of them.”

Kormak felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. “Is that right?”

“Storytellers in the market say they have all gone to the Moon for the winter. I don’t think so.”

“Where do you think they have gone?”

“Not the Moon.”

One of the cooks looked up and said, “And not into any of my pies no matter what anyone says.”

Lila went over to the man, clapped him on the shoulder and said, “No one is accusing you of anything.”

The big doughy faced man smiled and then just as suddenly looked angry. “Somebody is killing them though.”

“What?” Kormak asked.

“For a couple of months there, every full moon, dead cats were showing up everywhere. Some were skinned. Some were skeletons. Some were found on middens. Some looked as if they were half eaten.”

Lila nodded. “Bounce’s mother had just had a litter. Last full moon, they vanished. I found Bounce in a hole in the yard wall, mangled he was, bleeding, as if he had been in a fight, his fur all ripped and bloody. I thought he was going to die.”

“He might well have,” said the cook. “If the mistress had not tended to him with her own hands.”

“I felt sorry for him,” Lila said. “He lost his brothers and sisters and his mother all at the same time.”

The cat was moving around now. Kormak could see that he was limping. He started feeling a certain sympathy for the battered little beast but he did not let it show on his face. “What would do that?”

“I don’t know,” said the cook. “But there’s those that have taken to skinning and eating cats. They’re a bunch of hungry, thieving bastards down in the Rat’s Maze. They’ll eat anything so they will.”

Kormak remembered the taunt Bors had lobbed at little Jan; cat-eater. “When did all this start happening? I don’t remember any of this when I was last here.”

“Skinned cats were found all over the slums since the end of last summer, or so I hear,” said Lila. “Some say its worshippers of the Rat King.” She made an Elder Sign over her breast. “Some say its some new Shadow cult making sacrifices.”

“Some say it’s the rats themselves, there’s more of them around,” said the cook.

“There would be with less cats to keep them down.” Kormak sat down to eat. He chewed his bread thoughtfully. The kitten moved over to where he was and began to tug at the leg of his britches. Kormak picked it up gently and moved it away. The kitten came back and started tugging away again.

“Bounce likes you,” said Lila.

“Cats usually do, for some reason,” said Kormak. He pulled his cloak around him, looked up at the position of the sun in the sky. “I’d best be off.”

Lila looked suddenly worried. “You have business to attend to?”

He shook his head. “I am going to the shrine of Saint Verma to ask for a penance. I have a few sins to atone for.”

Kormak stepped out of the courtyard of the Gilded Lion. More snow had fallen overnight. It had piled up in drifts against the outside wall and made large soft banks beside merchant’s stalls in the square. It weighed down the awnings over the storefronts of shops and clung to the fur collars of the prominent citizens as they went about their business in the chill morning light.

He paused at a stand where a vendor was roasting sausages over a metal grill and bought one, more for the warmth than because he was hungry. The vendor handed it to him on a slice of bread. Kormak leaned against the trellis at the side of the man’s stall and studied his surroundings. A bunch of beggars were already seeking alms from passers-by. Monks from a dozen different orders stood on corners and spoke to those who would listen. The cold was not going to stop them preaching their sermons of the Sun’s salvation.

There were a lot of armed men about. Some wore the tabards of the city guard. Many wore golden jerkins with the sign of the Sun and Scales on them. Still others wore greyish jerkins with the sign of the Moon and Flute. There were other signs, including a white unicorn on a dark blue background and a golden bear, but the first two were by far the most common. The men in gold and grey looked at each other like they were spoiling for a fight. Some of them looked like they’d already been in a number of scraps.

Near the soldiers, like auxiliaries attached to an army, were bands of men and boys with either yellow or grey scarves wrapped around their biceps. They always seemed to move in the wake of the armoured men, yellow scarves standing near the men with golden jerkins, grey scarves near the men with grey jerkins. Each group regarded the other warily and with some hostility.

Kormak dredged his memories from the last time he had been in Vermstadt. “Sun and Scales—that’s the sign of the Oldbergs, isn’t it?”

The vendor looked at him suspiciously. Kormak took a bite of the sausage. Warm grease spurted in his mouth. The meat slid down his throat. “Good sausage,” he said. “I always heard Vermstadt was famous for them.”

The vendor nodded and said, “You’re not from around here are you?”

“From up by the Aquilean border,” Kormak said. “Just killing the snowy season before it’s time to take up the blade again. Thought I would visit the Temple of Saint Verma and seek some release from my sins.”

“I’m surprised you’ve not taken up work with Oldbergs or the Krugmans,” said the vendor. “They’re both hiring mercenaries or so I am always hearing.”

“I’m just here to make some offerings to Saint Verma,” said Kormak. “I’m not looking to fight. I’ll get enough of that come spring.”

“From what I’ve heard the big houses are signing fighting men like it’s going out of fashion and they can both afford to pay good money. If you live long enough to spend it.”

“You don’t say? There’s been trouble.”

The sausage vendor laughed bitterly. “Yes. They’ve been at each other’s throats for months. There’s been riots, knifings, brawls, a bunch of deaths. Too many bloody deaths. The Watch have barely been able to keep a lid on it. They’ve been hiring wizards too. It’s them I blame for the monsters in the Maze and mostly likely the Silent Man too.”