Tales of the Old World (106 page)

“What words he spoke, or what dark daemons may have moved to do his bidding, I
cannot begin to understand. But his work was successful, and the ghost of my
wife now lives in my house, carrying within her the ghost of my unborn child.
And whenever Morrslieb is at its brightest in the night sky, she takes on
substance sufficient to allow her to caress me, and receive caresses in
return.”

* * *

Alpheus Kalispera bowed his head slightly, and said: “I had thought the
change in him was the effect of an affliction which he had in no way invited. I
was sure of it.”

“And are you sure now that it was not?” Barbier demanded, with sudden
passion. “Are you so certain, now that you know what you had not guessed before,
that he was marked by the evil of his deeds? I tell you that he worked no evil,
but exercised his knowledge only to help his friend. If it was judgment on his
necromancy which engraved the death-mask on his features, then it was a cruel
and stupid judgment, for he did not deserve it. If there was a debt to be paid,
then I should have paid it, and would have done so willingly!

“Have you no faith in your own beliefs, that you would lose them now because
of what I have told you? If that is so, I cry shame on you, Magister Kalispera!
The man you saw buried today was a man as good as any in the world, and whatever
disfigured him was no fault of his, but an undeserved misfortune.”

Kalispera laid his head back and stared off into infinity, before he finally
said: “I do not know what to believe.”

Barbier rose to his feet and looked down at the older man. “You had best make
up your mind,” he said harshly. “If you will not understand, you must at least
keep silent about what I have told you.”

The magister met his visitor’s gaze then, and felt a slight shock of fear—but then he remembered that this had once been his pupil, and Lanfranc’s friend,
and that there was no need to be afraid of him.

“Sit down, my lord,” he said tiredly. “This is no one’s business but our own.
I would not denounce you for what you have done, nor would I ever have denounced
my friend for helping you. But I cannot say that it was a good thing to do, for
it is the most unnatural thing of which I have ever heard.”

Barbier took his seat again, but did not relax. “Oh yes!” he said.
“Unnatural, to be sure. When a father is utterly without love or compassion—that is natural! When a father murders his son’s innocent bride—that is
natural! But when a son opposes his father’s will and undoes his father’s evil—why, that is surely repulsive in its defiance of the laws which the gods have
made!

“Tell me, my white-haired philosopher, is it natural for the fops and
philanderers of our good King’s court to parade themselves in silk and velvet?
Is it natural that they should live in gaudy luxury while the peasants who work
the soil to produce their wealth go hungry? Are their measured dances natural,
or the games which they play with quoits and skittles? Are their manners and
hypocrisies natural—or are these noblemen natural only when they ache and
bleed like common folk?

“Instruct me, magister, I implore you. Tell me, I pray, why men like you and I
should respect and revere what is natural, when everything we are and do is
artifice? Your own belief is that disease and illness are but natural shocks to
which our fragile flesh is heir, not supernatural punishments sent by the gods
or inflicted by the ill-wishing of witches. Lanfranc Chazal’s belief was that
knowledge of life and death is only knowledge of nature, and that magic is
merely control of nature, like other arts and crafts. You could not see a
difference between yourself and your lifelong friend this morning—can you
really see one now?”

For fully half a minute, Kalispera did not reply. And when he did, it was not
with an answer but with a question. “What will happen,” he asked, “when you die
in your turn, and go to the realm of the dead?”

Barbier laughed, very briefly. “I cannot tell,” he said. “If I have the power
to curse myself to be a spectre, then I will exert that power with my dying
breath, and will be all the closer to my love for sharing her insubstantiality
whenever Morrslieb is pale in the sky. And if I have not… then I must wait for
her release, as she would have waited for mine, had I not found a necromancer to
cast off the chains of nature!”

“And what if you fall in love again?” said the magister, in a low whisper.
“What if you should one day hope for a better child than the ghost of one
unborn?”

Barbier shook his head as though to rule the questions impertinent, but
Kalispera could see that the man was not untroubled by them. He was a man, after
all, and he knew that love is not always eternal, nor the call of duty entirely
impotent.

“What will happen when your father dies?” Kalispera said, speaking now as the
High Priest of Verena which he also was. “Will you inherit his title and his
estate? And if you do, will you be content to stay in Rondeau, or will you want
to show the world how a demesne’s affairs could be managed by a better man than
your father was? Ten years have passed since you came here as a student, I
think, fully seven of them since you left these cloisters—but what did you
truly learn, in the three years or the seven, which makes you sure that you are
finished and complete, as changeless as your love-deluded wife? What right did
you really have to demand of Lanfranc Chazal that which he did for you?”

Barbier was confused now, and taken aback. Whatever he had expected of the
old magister, it was not this. “He was my friend,” he said. “And a far better
father to me than my own parent ever was.”

“Aye,” Kalispera said sadly, “no doubt that was what he wanted to be. He was
my friend, too, but I did not need him as a father. When you combined your
catalogue of challenges, you might have asked whether it is natural for priests
and magisters to be celibate, so that the only sons they have are those of other
men.”

The younger man said nothing.

“Do you love your ghostly wife?” Kalispera asked abruptly.

“I do,” said Barbier boldly. “With all my heart.”

“And do you think that you can love her forever?”

“I do.”

Alpheus Kalispera shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Let us hope that your
boldness will not let you down, and that your heart is as constant as your
father’s, after its own very different fashion.”

Barbier bowed his head, and said: “Thank you for that, magister.” Then he
looked up again, and said: “I hope that you will not think any worse of your
friend, because of what I have told you. I did not mean to injure him in your
estimation.”

“You have not done that,” Kalispera assured him. “And I am grateful to know
that I am not the only man who will mourn him. If the only epitaph he will have
is that which is graven in the memories of other men, I am glad that there are
two of us to share the burden of the truth.”

“So am I,” Cesar Barbier said. “So am I.”

Kalispera got up from his seat and went to the window. He unlatched the
glazed lattice, and pushed it back to let in the cool night air. It was not so
very dark, for Mannslieb was full and Morrslieb, though by no means at its
brightest, was shining from another sector of the vault of heaven. The stars, as
always, were too many to be counted. The streets of the city were lit by tiny
flames which were similarly numberless, for in a city as munificent as Gisoreux
even the poor could afford candles to keep the dark at bay.

“Where is his spirit, do you think?” he asked of the younger man.

“Close at hand,” said Barbier softly, “or far away. Does it matter which?”

“It is said that the spirit of a necromancer is bound to its rotting hull,”
the magister said. “It is said that such a spirit cannot escape from the hell of
that decay, but can sometimes animate the body as a liche with glowing eyes,
which spreads terror wherever it goes, and leaves suffering in its train.”

“Do you think that he feared such an end?” Barbier asked, with such faint
anxiety that it seemed a mere politeness.

“No man truly knows what he has to fear when he dies,” Kalispera replied.
“Even a man like you, who has brought another back from the life beyond life. No
man truly knows.”

Alpheus Kalispera looked at his hands, then. They were gnarled and stiff, and
the pain in their swollen joints gave him little rest nowadays. Might it reduce
his pain, he wondered, to cut off those fingers which he did not really need? Or
was the pain a divine punishment after all, and not—as he had always
believed—a mere accident of happenstance?

He had, after all, given succour and sustenance to a secret necromancer!

“He was a good man,” Kalispera murmured, not for the first time. “He was a
good friend.”

“In truth he was,” Cesar Barbier said.

And though neither man could know the other’s thoughts, both shared at that
particular moment in time an identical hope. Each of them was praying, silently
and fervently, that whatever god or daemon now had charge of the spirit of
Lanfranc Chazal would hear their words, and echo their merciful disposition.

The sturdy oak door of the inn opened with a crash and for just a moment a
gust of what the weather outside had to offer—nothing but foul wind and rain—entered the Slaughtered Calf. It seemed hard to believe that it was early
spring. It was more like autumn or winter had a hold of these hills.

Grolst, the thickset, greasy-skinned innkeeper, looked up from wiping a
grimy, damp cloth around the inside of an a dirty glass. He cast an unwelcoming
grimace from beneath beetling brows at the figure standing in the shadows of the
doorway, the evening sky darkening behind him. The man ducked beneath the lintel
and closed the door behind him. The foul night’s wailing wind and lashing rain
became a muffled memory outside the thick stone walls once more. Leaning on a
tall, gnarled staff, the figure stepped into the pool of light cast by the
cartwheel candelabra.

Grolst surveyed the new arrival suspiciously. The frown on his ruddy face
remained. Although swathed in heavy wine-dark robes, the innkeeper could see
that beneath them the man was tall and lean, like a hunting dog. His appearance
was scruffy and unkempt. He appeared to be into his fifth decade, both his
bedraggled black hair, what there was of it on his balding pate, and his long
straggly beard greying to white. The skin on his face appeared taught, making
his hawkish features even more severe and pronounced.

On closer examination, Grolst could see that in places the grey-bearded man’s
robes were scorched black. There was also the glint of metal from objects hung
around his neck and from his robes. Grolst thought he even saw a gleaming bird’s
skull, a brass key, hanging from his belt—or maybe it was gold—and the hilt
of a sword protruding from beneath a fold in his cloak. The stranger’s staff
tapped against the floor as he approached the bar.

The red-robed stranger peered at the various dusty bottles and earthenware
containers displayed haphazardly on the crooked shelves behind the innkeeper.

“A glass of that… luska,” the man said grumpily, placing a pair of copper
coins on the bar top. “I hate the rain,” he added, addressing no one in
particular as he shook water from his cloak.

Grolst uncorked a grime-coated bottle and poured a measure of the clear
Ostland spirit into a small tumbler. He blinked as the potent alcoholic vapour
reached his nostrils. Luska was a fiery Ostlander distillation, not unlike the
vodka spirit so favoured by the Kislevites, and as it coursed down the drinker’s
throat it burnt hotter than a salamander’s tongue. It took a certain taste and a
fiery temperament in the drinker to even palate the spirit, let alone actually
enjoy it.

Perhaps the stranger had some connection to Kislev. From the few words that
he had spoken, his accent sounded as though it might come from the sheep-rearing
southern provinces of the Empire, but the man wore his moustaches long and
drooping, favoured here in the northern realms that bordered the harsh oblast of
Kislev, the kingdom of the Tzars. The stranger was well travelled, certainly.

He picked up his drink and took a seat at a table close to the fire blazing
in the hearth of the inn’s huge chimney breast. From the man’s dress Grolst
thought that he was most likely a scholar of some field of academic study or
other. From the way he travelled alone, without the need for a bodyguard, the
innkeeper decided that he probably had some other means of defence that he could
call upon in an emergency. Grolst looked at the staff again.

Viehdorf didn’t receive much in the way of passing travellers, making their
way down from the main road into the wooded hollow where the village nestled.
The Slaughtered Calf lay half way between the two amidst the crowding trees and
looming hills. Merchants, mercenaries, peddlers and pilgrims mostly preferred to
bed down in the larger Scharfen, half a league back in the direction of
Middenheim, or press on along the forest road until they reached the
stone-walled security of Felsmauern another half a league further along the road
towards Hergig.

The sign over the door hardly seemed appropriate for an establishment called
the Slaughtered Calf, although it betrayed the reason for the lack of passing
trade. The image of a beastman’s head depicted on the swaying inn-sign attested
to the fact that here, on the Middenland-Hochland border, the forested
hill-country was beastman territory. The deep forests hid their camps and
herdstone lairs. To stray from the roads in these parts was to invite a swift
demise.

Viehdorf was one of those pockets of civilisation clinging onto survival
amidst the chaos and barbarity of a land where, whatever the Emperor comfortable
in his palace in distant Altdorf might claim, savage nature was mistress—and a
cruel mistress she was indeed, red in tooth and claw. The village was a faint,
flickering candle-flame in the all-encompassing darkness of wild lands, where
the populace were prey to the uncaring seasons and the harshness of survival.