Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Tim Willocks

Map

Dedication

Title Page

PART ONE:
This Fearful Slumber

CHAPTER ONE:
The Printer’s Daughters

CHAPTER TWO:
A Very Great Philosopher Indeed

CHAPTER THREE:
Swine

CHAPTER FOUR:
The Lady from the South

CHAPTER FIVE:
The Rat Girl

CHAPTER SIX:
The Gentle of Spirit

PART TWO:
Acts of Black Night, Abominable Deeds

CHAPTER SEVEN:
In the Vein

CHAPTER EIGHT:
Dogs on Fire

CHAPTER NINE:
Clementine

CHAPTER TEN:
Out of the Strong

PART THREE:
False Shadows For True Substances

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Cockaigne

CHAPTER TWELVE:
On the Vertex

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
Alice

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Burning Man

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
The Madman Has No Master

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
In the Land of God

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
More Shameful Than Murder

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
The Magdalene

CHAPTER NINETEEN:
The Birthing Room

CHAPTER TWENTY:
Pope Paul

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:
The Symbol

PART FOUR:
As Far From Help As Limbo Is From Bliss

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
The Minstrel

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:
Crimson Apron

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
The Yards

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE:
Mice

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX:
Sisters

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN:
The Blackness

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:
The Angel

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE:
The Juggler

PART FIVE:
Direful Slaughtering Death

CHAPTER THIRTY:
If This Be Paradise

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE:
The Judgement

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO:
A Very Particular God

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE:
Just Another Child

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR:
The Crucible

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE:
Short Weight for the Blind

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX:
The Hanged Man

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN:
Horses and Boys

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT:
Something of the Lore

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE:
The Quays At Saint-Landry

CHAPTER FORTY:
Ghosts of the Unrepentant Damned

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE:
The Devil’s Causeway

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO:
The Place of Dead Monkeys

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE:
For Whom My Tears Have Made Me Blind

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR:
Nameless Ways

EPILOGUE:
Environed With A Wilderness

Copyright

Paris, August 23rd, 1572.

What do you do when your wife disappears . . .

In the middle of the bloodiest massacre in European history . . .

And you know she is about to give birth to your only child?

Three wars of religion have turned Paris into a foetid cauldron of hatred, intrigue and corruption. The Royal Wedding, intended to heal the wounds, has served only to further poison the fanatics of either creed. But Carla could not have known that when she accepted an invitation to the ceremony.

When Mattias Tannhauser rides into town, on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve, his only intention is to find her and take her home. But as the massacre of tens of thousands of Huguenots begins, and the city plunges into anarchy, Carla is abducted by Grymonde, the grotesque gang leader of the Yards, and Tannhauser finds himself imprisoned in the Louvre, at the centre of a vicious conspiracy.

Wanted by the law, the assassins’ guild, and a militant army who call themselves the Pilgrims of Saint-Jacques, Tannhauser must rise to pitiless extremes even he has never known before. With no one to help him but a stable boy, he wades a river of blood without knowing what lies on the other side.

As he harrows Hell in search of his beloved

His destiny is changed forever by

The Twelve Children Of Paris . . .

Tim Willocks was born in Stalybridge, Cheshire, in 1957 and studied medicine at University College Hospital Medical School. He is the author of four previous novels:
Bad City Blues, Green River Rising, Bloodstained Kings
and
The Religion.

Bad City Blues

Green River Rising

Bloodstained Kings

The Religion

To my friend

DAVID COX

who walked every step of the way

NOW HE RODE
through a country gutted by war and bleeding in its aftermath, where the wageless soldiers of delinquent kings yet plied their trade, where kindness was folly and cruelty strength, where none dared claim his brother as his keeper.

He passed gallows trees where red-legged crows roosted black as their carrion, where knots of children in rags and tags returned his gaze in silence. He passed the roofless hulks of burned churches where shards of stained glass glimmered like abandoned treasure on the chancel floor. He passed settlements tenanted by gnawed bones, where the yellow eyes of wolves gleamed from the darkness. A blazing hayrick lit some yonder hill. In the moonlight the ashes of vineyards were white as tombstones.

He had covered more miles in fewer days than even he had thought possible. Yet here at last he was and there it stood. The walls quavered in the distance, warped by the August heat, and above them glowered a swag of ochre haze, as if the walls were not walls at all but, rather, the lip of some vast shaft sunk into the nether realms of the earth.

Such was his first impression of the Most Catholic City in Christendom.

The sight brought him little comfort. The forebodings that had driven him were undiminished. He had slept by the road and taken to the saddle in the cool before the dawn, yet every morning his destiny had risen before him. He felt it lying in wait, behind those Plutonian walls. In the city of Paris.

Mattias Tannhauser pressed on to the Saint-Jacques Gate.

The walls were thirty feet tall and studded with watchtowers as high again. The gatehouse like the walls was stained by time and the shitting of birds. As he crossed the drawbridge his eyes watered from the fumes of the putrid garbage filling the ditch. Through the blur, as if in a dream, two families tottered out between the enormous timber doors.

They were dressed in black and he took them for Huguenots. Or Calvinists, Lutherans, Protestants, or even Reformers. To the question of what to call them he had never found an answer that served all needs. Their new conception of how to live with God had hardly learned how to walk, yet their factions were already hard at each other’s throats. To Tannhauser, who had killed for God in the name of more than one creed, this came as no surprise at all.

The Huguenots, women and children too, staggered beneath a diversity of bags and bundles. Tannhauser wondered how much more they had left behind. The two men, who had the look of brothers, exchanged a glance of relief. A slender boy craned his neck and stared at Tannhauser. Tannhauser mustered a smile. The boy hid his face in his mother’s skirts and revealed a strawberry birthmark on his neck below the angle of his jaw. The mother saw him note it, and covered the mark with her hand.

Tannhauser pulled his mount aside to ease the pilgrims’ progress. The elder of the brothers, astonished by this courtesy, looked up. When he saw the Maltese Cross on Tannhauser’s black linen shirt, he dropped his face and hurried by. As his brood followed, the little boy looked back into Tannhauser’s eyes. His features lit up with a grin, and it was the gladdest sight Tannhauser had seen in many a day. The boy tripped and his mother caught his arm and dragged him across the bridge towards hazards unknown.

Tannhauser watched them go. They put him in mind of a flock of ducks. They were poorly equipped for the road, whose dangers were considerable, but at least, or so it seemed, they had escaped from Paris.