Tales of the Old World (67 page)

“My Lady…” he repeated breathlessly as she laid a perfect hand on his
shoulder and stooped down to brush cold lips across his brow. She smiled again,
revealing teeth as white and hard as bones and lowered her lips to kiss his
neck.

“My Lady!”
he said a third time, his voice suddenly full of fire as he
sprang backwards. With an evil hiss of steel against leather, his sword was free
of its scabbard, the burnished metal of the blade dull despite the divine light
that surrounded the goddess. Then, before the enormity of the knight’s actions
could penetrate through Claude’s shock, he watched his master slice his sword
backhanded across the smooth, cream-coloured flesh of her neck.

It was a killing stroke. The blade spat out a bright plume of blood as it
sawed effortlessly through the cords and tendons of her neck, almost
decapitating her where she stood.

Claude watched as she crumpled backwards into the mud and filth of the forest
floor. After a moment he walked numbly over to where the body lay and gazed down
stonily at the ruined flesh that had once lived, once breathed… had once been a
goddess. Now it was no more than meat cooling on the forest floor.

And bad meat at that. He watched as the flowing silk of its hair withered and
died, shrinking back into a malformed skull. Already the supple grace of her
frame had collapsed into something ruined and hunched, the skeleton twisted out
of shape by who-knew-what dark sorcery?

Claude shivered and hugged himself as the fair pigment of her skin darkened
and mottled, turning into a sickly grey leather before his very eyes. Even worse
was the thing’s face. How could those evil and wizened features have resembled
anything even the least bit fair? Only the colour of the eyes remained
unchanged, but the green now seemed rotten and cancerous and so very cold.

He remembered the expression she had worn. He remembered how beautiful it had
been, how alluring. Suddenly, for the first time since the brooding of his first
battle, Claude’s stomach clenched itself into a fist that doubled him up with
nausea. With hardly a backwards glance he stumbled away into the undergrowth,
leaving Sir Gilles still standing pale and trembling over his foe.

The next morning they crested the pass above Celliers for the last time.
Below them the valley was laid out like a map. Claude turned in his saddle to
take a last look at the village, the forest, the smoke from the great bonfire
upon which the beast’s body had been burned so gleefully the night before.

Where had it come from, he wondered for the dozenth, the hundredth time. Had
it been made, or born, or ensorcelled by Chaos? And how long had it lived here,
silently haunting the edges and dark places of this land before hunger drove it
in to the village and the addictive taste of man-flesh?

Claude found his gaze shifting from the valley floor to the distant rock
spires that were the heart of the Massif Orcal. Beyond them, peering from
between the granite peaks, towering clouds waited blue and heavy with the year’s
first snow.

The old retainer shivered and thankfully turned his back on them. By the time
they caught up with him he would be back beside the great fireplace of Castle
Moreaux, a horn of spiced wine steaming in his hand.

Only one thing still bothered him. It hung in a leather bag from Sir Gilles’
saddle, a diminutive, evil smelling lump that still sweated a disgusting grey
slime. It had no scales, this head, no savage teeth or needle-sharp fangs. Its
jaws were weak, lacking even the knots of muscle any man might boast. In fact
when it had been cleaned the thing would be scarcely bigger than two clenched
fists.

“Well, sire,” Claude began, knowing that he would have to broach the subject
before they went much further. “I’m sure we’ll be able to pick up that boulder
of an orc’s head tomorrow afternoon. I lashed it to a lone pine tree for the
birds to clean. It should look good mounted in the great hall, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?” the knight asked, turning in his saddle to regard his
servant. “I have my trophy here.”

“Yes, of course. Your real trophy. But for the family gibbet…”

“This is for the family gibbet. This thing is the beast that tested my faith
to the utmost. It is this that will hang amongst the rest of my family’s great
trophies.”

Claude, sensing the strength of purpose that lay behind his master’s words,
sighed as he realised it would be pointless to continue.

“How… how could you be so sure that thing wasn’t the Lady?” he dared to ask,
changing the subject.

Sir Gilles smiled wistfully for a moment before he replied.

“The eyes,” he said at length. “In the old tales she is always dark, a real
Bretonnian woman. Brown hair. Brown eyes.”

“Tales, yes,” Claude nodded. “But when your brother saw her she had green
eyes. As green as your mother’s, he said.”

“Yes,” Sir Gilles nodded, “I know.”

Then, for no apparent reason, he began to laugh until his sides shook and
tears glinted in his eyes.

Claude lapsed back into silence and shook his head.
Knights!
He would
never understand them.

“A commission, you say? What kind of commission?” Giovanni Gottio leaned
across the table, wine slopping from the cheap copper goblet in his hand. It
would soon be replenished, he knew, in just the same way as his new-found friend
sitting opposite had been steadily refilling Giovanni’s goblet all night.

“A portrait,” answered his new-found friend. “In oils. My employer will pay
you well for your time.”

Giovanni snorted, spilling more wine. Absent-mindedly he dabbed one grimy
finger in the spilled mess, painting imaginary brush strokes on the rough
surface of the bar table. Faces. Faces had always been his speciality.
Strangely, though, he had been sitting with the man for hours, drinking his wine
and spending his money, but if the stranger got up and left this minute,
Giovanni would have been unable to say what exactly he looked like. His was more
a blurred impressionistic sketch of a face—eyes cold and cruel, mouth weak and
arrogant—than any kind of finished work. The most memorable thing about him in
Giovanni’s mind was the way the emerald ring on his finger caught and held even
the dim candlelight of this grimy back street taverna.

“Haven’t you heard?” Giovanni slurred, becoming gradually aware that he was
far more drunk than he should be this early in the night, even after those three
pitchers of wine the stranger had bought for him. “The great Gottio doesn’t do
portraits anymore. He is an artist, and artists are supposed to show truth in
their work. The trouble is, people don’t want the truth. They don’t like it.
That fool Lorenzo Lupo certainly didn’t, when he commissioned the great Gottio
to paint a portrait of his wife.”

Giovanni realised he was shouting now, that he was drawing sniggering glances
from the other regular patrons of the taverna. Not caring, he reached out to
angrily refill his goblet once more.

“Did you see it, my portrait of that famed beauty, the wife of the Merchant
Prince of Luccini? Not many people did, for her husband had it destroyed as
quickly as he could. Still, those few that did see it said that it captured the
woman perfectly, not just in its reflection of her exquisite beauty but even
more so in the way it brought out all the charm, grace and personality of the
hungry mountain wolf that lurked beneath that fair skin.”

Giovanni drained his goblet and slammed it down, stumbling as he got up to
leave. This drunk after only three pitchers, he thought. The great Gottio truly
has lost his touch…

“So, thank you for your hospitality, sir, but the great Gottio no longer
paints portraits anymore. He paints only the truth, a quality which would sadly
seem to be in little fashion amongst this world’s lords and masters.”

Mocking laughter followed him out of the taverna. Outside, he staggered along
the alleyway, leaning against a wall for support. Shallya’s mercy. That cheap
Pavonan wine certainly had a kick to it!

A welcome night breeze sprang up, carrying with it the strong scent of the
fruit orchards that grew on the slopes of the Trantine Hills overlooking the
city, and Giovanni took several deep breaths, trying to clear his head. From
behind, he heard quick, decisive footsteps following him out of the taverna;
clearly his new-found friend wasn’t a man prepared to take “no” for an answer.

Giovanni turned to greet his persistent new friend for the night, but instead
of the ingratiating smile he expected, he saw a snarl of anger. A hand reached
out, grasping him by the throat and lifting him off his feet. Claws sprang out
where there had only been fingernails before, and Giovanni felt their sharp
edges dig into the skin of his exposed throat. The hand held him there for long
seconds as he struggled, unable to draw breath, never mind cry for help. And
then it suddenly released him. Senses dimming, Giovanni fell to the ground, only
half-conscious as his supposed friend effortlessly dragged him through the
shadows towards a nearby waiting coach. There was the sound of a coach door
opening, and a face as bright and terrible in its unearthly beauty as that of
the Chaos moon of Morrslieb looked down at him as Giovanni finally slipped into
unconsciousness.

“No matter, Mariato,” he heard it speak in a voice as cold as glacial ice.
“This way will do just as well…”

Giovanni awakened, immediately recognising in the pain throbbing behind his
eyes the all-too-familiar signs of the previous night’s excesses. Mind still
numbed by the copious quantities of wine he had no doubt cheerfully downed, it
took him several seconds to register the fact that this was not the hovel-like
garret that the recent downturn in his fortunes had reduced him to calling home.
Nor were his clothes—a shirt of finest Cathay silk and breeches of pure
Estalian calfskin—the same threadbare and patchy garments that he had put on
the previous morning.

Previous morning? he thought suddenly realising that it was still night, a
silver sliver of the waxing Morrslieb moon visible through the barred window
above his bed. He ran a hand to his face, feeling the rough stubble of what felt
like two days’ beard growth that had not been there earlier. Shallya’s mercy.
How long had he been unconscious?

There was a rattle of keys at the only door into the room. Giovanni tensed,
ready to… what, he wondered. Fight? Overpower his gaolers and try to escape?
Half a head smaller than his average countryman—the stature, or more precisely
lack of it, of the inhabitants of the Tilean peninsula was the basis of many
jokes amongst the other nations of the Old World—and with something of a
paunch that the long months of penury since his fall from grace had still so far
mostly failed to diminish. Giovanni knew that he was hardly the stuff that
dashing dogs of war mercenary hero legends were made of. The only wound he had
ever suffered was a broken nose inflicted during a heated taverna dispute with
some fop of a Bretonnian poet over the favours of a young and curvaceous
follower of the arts. The only blade he had ever wielded was a small knife used
to sharpen the charcoal pencil nubs he sketched with.

The heavy door swung open, revealing two black-robed figures standing in the
corridor outside. Faceless under their hooded robes, it was impossible to
determine anything about them. A hand, pale and skeletal thin, appeared from
within the folds of one of the robes, gesturing for the artist to rise and come
with them. Shrugging with an attempted air of casual nonchalance that he wished
he truly felt, Giovanni did as commanded.

He found himself in a wide, stone-walled corridor, falling into step between
his faceless gaolers. Stars shone through breaks in the wood-raftered ceiling,
and, glancing up, Giovanni saw the shattered ruins of a burned-out upper storey
above him. The floor at his feet had been hurriedly swept clean, with piles of
rubble and ancient fire debris piled up at its sides, and Giovanni could just
make out blackened and faded frescoes under the grime and soot on the corridor
walls. They showed nymphs and satyrs at play and were of a pastoral style that
went out of fashion over a century ago. The night breeze drifted in through the
breaks in the ruined ceiling, and Giovanni caught the faint but familiar scent
of distant fruit groves.

With a shock of recognition, he realised that he was probably in one of the
abandoned villas that dotted the countryside hills above Trantio. There were
many such ruins, Giovanni knew, for in safer and more prosperous times it had
been the fashion amongst the city’s wealthy merchant families to build such
palaces in the surrounding countryside, as both an ostentatious display of
wealth and a retreat from the squalor of the city. A downturn in mercantile
fortunes and the steadily increasing numbers of greenskin savages stealing over
the Apuccini Mountains had brought an abrupt end to the such rural idylls, and
the survivors abandoned their countryside retreats and fled back to the comfort
of their counting houses and the safety of high and well-guarded city walls.
Since then, the abandoned villas had become notorious as lairs for the predators
that hid out in the wilderness areas beyond the limits of the Trantine city
guard’s horseback patrols.

Predators such as bandit gangs, or orc warbands, or—Or
what?
Giovanni
wondered with a shudder, his lively artist’s imagination painting a series of
vivid nightmare images of all the things bad enough to scare bandits and even
orcs away from such a place.

Something rustled at Giovanni’s feet and he jumped back as a large rat
scampered out of a hole in the floor and ran across the corridor, running right
over the top of his booted feet. There was a blur of movement from behind him,
followed instantly by a harsh squeal of pain and an abrupt wet tearing sound.
Giovanni turned, catching a glimpse of the scene beneath the hooded cloaks
behind him—long skeletal fingers crammed something squealing and still alive
between jaws distended horribly wide open—before a warning hiss from his other
gaoler urged him to keep moving. Suitably inspired, Giovanni’s imagination
mentally erased the previous portfolio of nightmare images and began work on a
new gallery of even greater horrors.