03 - Death's Legacy Read online

  “Good point,” Rudi said, suspecting he ought to feel a little more sympathy for the boatman whose livelihood was beginning to drift slowly upstream with the swelling tide, but unable to summon any. Someone would probably find it and sell it back to him anyway. That was how things were in Marienburg. The abandoned craft was moving surprisingly quickly, and only a handful of the steps above them bore a thin coating of weeds and mud, indicating that they were still below the high water mark.

  As he turned his head to watch the drifting boat he could see the first flush of red marking the sky beyond the rooftops of the Rijkspoort, the easternmost ward of the city, where the mighty river entered its precincts. The sight galvanised him: they had even less time to reach safety than he’d feared. “We’d better get moving.”

  “Right,” Hanna agreed. Cautiously, they made their way to the top of the steps, finding a row of warehouses facing the waterfront. Even at this hour several of them appeared to be busy, but none of the carters or stevedores spared them so much as a glance, engrossed as they were in their own concerns. “Which way?”

  “East,” Rudi said, as decisively as he could. His only previous trip to the candle wharf, where the Reikmaiden was berthed, had been the previous afternoon to arrange passage with Shenk, but he remembered enough about the layout of Luydenhoek to know that they were still too far to the west. Once they got closer, with any luck, he’d be able to recognise a landmark. He was still a skilled tracker, he reminded himself, even in an urban environment so different from the forest he’d grown up in, and his old instincts hadn’t let him down yet.

  He led the way through the bustling streets, trying not to worry about the way the crowds were thickening all the time, and how the thin grey light was growing brighter. It was hard to be sure beneath the snow clouds, but he had an uneasy feeling deep in his gut that the sun had risen already, and that the riverboat would be under way by now. He forced the thought away irritably. The last thing they needed was to be sapping their confidence with unfounded speculation.

  “Down here.” With a thrill of relief, he recognised a tavern, the Mermaid, where he’d bargained with Shenk the previous afternoon. The wharf he sought was only a few streets away, and he hurried them along as best he could, trying not to slip on the freezing slush beneath their feet.

  As they made their way through the growing press of bodies, packages, and barrows flowing into the streets, Rudi kept turning his head, looking out for the distinctive headgear of the Caps, but luck, or one of the gods, was still with them. The thoroughfares were almost as crowded as they were during the day, and the growing throng afforded them greater concealment than ever before. Despite his apprehension, he saw no sign of a floppy black hat, and no shouted challenge echoed from the walls around him.

  They rounded the final corner onto the wharf itself, and he narrowed his eyes against a sudden flurry of wind-driven snow. He blinked his vision clear.

  “She’s still there!” He pointed. The familiar silhouette of the Reikmaiden was clearly visible between two other vessels about hallway along the wharf. Hanna nodded grimly.

  “Not for long,” she said. With a thrill of horror, Rudi realised she was right. Pieter, the deckhand who’d befriended him the first time they’d sought refuge aboard, was loosening the hawser securing the riverboat to the dock. A moment later the thick rope splashed into the water, and Pieter began hauling it in, apparently heedless of the chill the icy water had imparted to it. Maybe his hands were numb already. The gangplank Rudi had boarded the boat by, the previous afternoon, was missing too, and even as he watched, the gap between the riverboat’s hull and the wharf widened perceptibly.

  “Hey! Wait!” Rudi called, breaking into a run, Hanna pacing him easily as he did so. Pieter’s head came up, and he shouted something. A moment later, Shenk appeared at his shoulder, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at the approaching fugitives. As they got closer, Rudi could see the captain shrug. Clearly, returning to the wharf would be impossible, even if the Reikmaiden’s master felt so inclined, and he seriously doubted that.

  “Jump for it,” Hanna said, accelerating past him at a pace that left Rudi gaping, her cloak flapping like a banner in the wind from the river. Rudi ran as hard as he could, forcing his weary muscles into one final effort, ignoring the burning sensation in his chest as the freezing air gouged its way deep into his lungs. Hanna flung herself into the air, seeming to hang suspended for a moment above the chill grey water, and then crashed to the deck of the riverboat, where she lay unmoving. Almost before he realised it, Rudi’s foot was thrusting against the edge of the dock, and he followed, willing himself to make it across the widening gap.

  Time seemed to slow, as it had done the day before when he’d made his desperate leap from the jetty behind the lawyer’s office to escape Theo and Bruno. With a strange sense of déjà vu, he took in Shenk’s startled expression, uncannily similar to the one on the face of the bargee whose vessel he’d bounded across on his way to safety. Then, the breath was driven from his lungs as the rail of the Reikmaiden slammed into his midriff. He clutched at the worn wood, finding himself slipping on the powdering of snow that crested it, and began to topple backwards into the river.

  “Welcome aboard.” To his surprise Shenk grabbed him just as his grip was about to fail, and yanked him over the rail. Rudi slithered onto the deck, retching and gasping. “I see you decided to come this morning after all.” The captain’s voice was mildly curious, but nothing more. When they’d spoken the previous day, Rudi had asked about passage the next time the boat put in at Marienburg, almost a month away.

  “Things got complicated,” Rudi gasped, turning to look at Hanna. She was unconscious, her face pale, and a trickle of blood was running from her nose. To his relief, and complete lack of surprise, the chip of stone around her neck was no longer glowing, apparently as inert as the rock it resembled.

  “Hmm.” Shenk nodded. “I guessed that.” He turned to Pieter. “Better get her below before she freezes.” He turned back to Rudi. “You too. I’ve fished healthier-looking corpses out of this river, in my time.”

  Too numbed to argue, Rudi simply nodded, but remained on his guard nevertheless. Shenk had seemed solicitous enough the last time he and Hanna had been aboard his boat, but he’d been ready to betray them at the first opportunity. Keeping his hand close to the hilt of his sword, he followed the deckhand down into the warmth of the hold.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Somewhat to Rudi’s surprise, it seemed as if Shenk intended to go through with his end of the deal, at least for now. The captain had carried Hanna down to the hold himself, under Rudi’s watchful eye, and waited while Pieter slung the hammocks that the two fugitives had slept in the last time they’d been aboard. At least, Rudi assumed they were the same ones; they certainly looked similar enough. Dropping his pack and his bow on one of the barrels beneath the arcs of cloth, he reached out to take his companion.

  “Better let me do it,” Shenk advised. “I’m more used to this sort of thing.” A fact he proved a moment later by hoisting the unconscious girl into the sailcloth cocoon with a swift economy of motion, which Rudi had to admit he could never have duplicated in his current condition. Noticing Rudi’s expression, the captain smiled sardonically. “Usually it’s drunken deckhands,” he explained. “Noisier, heavier, and…” his expression changed, “actually, not a lot less fragrant. What have you been doing, rolling in a midden?”

  “We got in a fight. We fell down,” Rudi said. The streets of Marienburg weren’t exactly clean at the best of times, and the blighted quarter where they’d faced Magnus’ mutants had been awash with filth. Only now did Rudi begin to appreciate quite how permeated with it he and Hanna had become. The smell was so familiar that he’d forgotten it was there. Reminded of it again, he found the sickly sweet stench of it almost comforting. Shenk nodded, as if that sounded reasonable.

  “I’ll get Pieter to bring you some water,” he said.

  After the captain and the
deckhand had departed, leaving behind them a bucket of chill water, a washcloth, and a plate of bread and cheese, Rudi stripped off his clothes and removed as much of the grime as he could before freezing. After donning a clean shirt and britches from his pack he felt warmer, and turned his attention to the food. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if it had been drugged, but it smelled no different from any other lump of slightly overripe cheese he’d ever eaten, and he wolfed it down eagerly. If anything, the slight hint of incipient putrefaction only sharpened his appetite. Shenk, he was sure, would be just as straightforward in any future betrayal as he’d been in the past, and starving himself wouldn’t help anybody if his suspicions turned out to be correct.

  Leaving part of the food uneaten, in case Hanna should wake, he clambered into his own hammock, after a cursory glance at the sleeping girl. She looked peaceful enough, as far as he could tell, although he was only too aware that his knowledge of such things was limited. Consoling himself with the notion that the only cure for magical over-exertion he’d ever seen was rest, and that both she and Alwyn had recovered before, Rudi settled himself as best he could and tried to sleep.

  When he woke, the day was well advanced, judging by the angle of the sunbeams slanting down into the hold, and Rudi felt ravenous again. He rolled out of his hammock, instinctively checking that his weapons were where he’d left them. To his mingled surprise and relief they were, although someone had clearly been in the hold while he slept, because the bucket of filthy water had been replaced by a fresh supply. His purse was still inside his shirt, and the dagger he carried concealed in his boot nestled against his shin as usual. Nevertheless, he felt a certain sense of relief once his sword belt was buckled again. Sleeping with it was impossible in the cramped confines of the hammock, as he’d discovered the hard way, but he’d become so used to its presence that without it he felt curiously incomplete.

  Hanna was still sleeping, snoring gently, and he felt reluctant to disturb her, but, struck by a pang of unexpected solicitude, he wrung out the washcloth and tried to sponge the worst of the accumulated grime from her face. He half hoped and half feared that he’d wake her in the process, but she simply slept on, as uncaring as an infant.

  At length, feeling he could do nothing more for the young sorceress beyond letting her recover in her own time as best she could, Rudi ventured up the wooden stairs to the deck.

  “Oh, you’re up then.” The statement was flat, devoid of any concern, and Rudi was sure he could detect an undercurrent of barely-suppressed hostility in it. Rudi squinted his eyes against the afternoon sun, relishing the scent of fresh, clean air, the first he’d smelled since entering the city so many months before.

  “Good afternoon, Herr Busch,” he replied. The first mate of the Reikmaiden was looking at him appraisingly. The last time they’d faced each other had been in a brutal brawl on the moonlit deck, and Rudi had come within a hair of killing the man, although Busch might not have realised that at the time.

  Recalling that instant, he found it hard to believe the intensity of the dark desire to do harm that had so nearly overtaken him, but he had felt it on other occasions too, and had grown wary of it. He’d taken several lives since that night, both human and monstrous, and had learned to control the impulse to some extent. Generally, he used the energy that the surge of aggression gave him to win a fight, before overcoming the urge to finish his vanquished opponent by an act of will. Each time he did so, though, something deep inside him felt cheated, and on the occasions when he’d had no option but to strike the killing blow, the dark presence in the depths of his mind had exulted in the deed.

  Rudi returned the man’s stare, levelly. If Busch thought he could be intimidated, after all he’d seen and done in the last few months, he was sadly mistaken. Both he and Hanna were very different from the callow youths who’d fled the village of Kohlstadt last summer. Busch must have seen something of that change in Rudi’s bearing, because rather than push the point, he simply nodded.

  “Seen worse,” he allowed grudgingly, as if admitting as much was a huge concession. He’d take his lead from Shenk, Rudi knew, and so long as the captain was prepared to tolerate his unexpected guests the rest of the crew would accept their presence. “Going far with us?”

  “Altdorf,” Rudi replied, chafing inwardly at the stilted nature of the conversation.

  Busch nodded, as if he hadn’t already known. Shenk would have told everyone on board the nature of the deal he’d struck with Rudi, he was sure of that. Rudi had found him in a smuggler’s den that the watch was raiding, and concealed his presence, more for the fear of being denounced as a fugitive from Imperial justice than anything else. Nevertheless, the captain seemed to feel that he was in his debt, and had agreed to provide safe passage to the Imperial capital in return. Assuming he wasn’t just after the price on their heads again, of course, although that didn’t seem all that likely. If he’d known the true nature of the charges against the two fugitives, Rudi was sure that he’d never have allowed them on board in the first place.

  Rudi glanced around the deck. Pieter looked up from his work for a moment to smile a greeting that looked quite genuine, but for the most part, the rest of the crew ignored his presence. The only other exception was Ansbach, who’d also come off badly in the fight on the deck, and who glowered at him with unconcealed hostility.

  “Is that where your cargo’s for?”

  “Most of it,” Busch said, “apart from a stop-off in Carroburg.” He ran a hand through his close-cropped hair, a mannerism Rudi remembered from his last trip aboard the Reikmaiden. “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing,” Rudi assured him with a shrug. Given the circumstances of his unexpected meeting with Shenk back in Marienburg, which had led to their unlikely alliance, at least some of the cargo aboard the riverboat would no doubt have been of considerable interest to his erstwhile colleagues. That was none of his business, though, and he dismissed the matter from his mind. If anything, he was hoping that his suspicions were correct. If Shenk was up to something illegal he’d be as eager to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities as Hanna and himself. “I just wondered if we’d be stopping much on the way, that’s all.”

  “Nowhere else you’d have heard of,” Busch assured him.

  Rudi remembered there were innumerable landing stages along both banks of the river, serving hamlets barely large enough to deserve the name of villages. Boats like the Reikmaiden called at them frequently, bringing the necessities of life that were too bulky to transport economically in any other way. The coaching inn where he and Hanna had first met Krieger’s mercenary band had been served by one such jetty, which was where their paths had first crossed Shenk’s.

  That thought was a sobering one. The news of Gerhard’s arrest warrant, issued at the time he and Hanna had fled from Kohlstadt, would have had time to travel along the length of the coach road paralleling the southern bank of the river, and every stop they made on that side would carry the risk of discovery. Carroburg, he vaguely remembered, was on the northern bank of the Reik, so they wouldn’t have so much to worry about there.

  According to the tavern gossip he’d heard in Marienburg, it was still swamped with refugees from the recent wars in the north, so the chances of anyone noticing two more itinerants passing through would be minimal, even if news of the hunt for them had crossed the vast expanse of water separating the province of Middenland from the Reikland, where he’d spent the whole of his life apart from his handful of months in Marienburg.

  Leaving the mate to his work, much to the man’s visible relief, Rudi strode to the rail and looked out over the water. The snow had gone, replaced by the pale sunshine of early winter. As they moved up the Reik, away from the coast, Rudi knew, it would get a little warmer for a time, the biting westerly winds from the Sea of Claws mellowing a little as they met the bulk of the land.

  The respite would only be a temporary one, however. He could still smell the frost on the breeze, and he k
new, with all the assurance of a life spent outdoors, that the winter to come would be a hard one. The sunshine, though bright, carried little warmth with it. However, inured to the cold by a lifetime’s experience, he found it exhilarating rather than debilitating.

  Just as it had the first time he’d found himself aboard the riverboat, the sheer magnitude of the Reik left him almost breathless. Silver-flecked water surrounded the sturdy little vessel, stretching off in every direction almost as far as the eye could see. Upstream and down, nothing broke its gently undulating surface apart from the distant sails of boats like their own, too far off to make out any other details.

  The far bank hovered almost at the limits of his vision, too distant to reveal anything other than faint irregularities of colour that hinted at variations in the terrain, hovering like a low cloudbank between the water and the sky. He strained his eyes nevertheless, trying to pick out any landmarks that he might have seen on the perilous journey towards the safety he and Hanna had hoped to find in the city they’d so precipitously fled. There was nothing, just the dull monotony of the moors and marshes that gave the Wasteland its name.

  Orientated, he glanced back at the stern, failing to catch even a glimpse of Marienburg. He’d half expected to see the mighty span of the Hoogbrug, or the ramparts of the Vloedmuur still visible in the distance, but all he could see was the placid wake left by the Reikmaiden as she forged through the water. The widening V disappeared to starboard, merging eventually with the ripples raised by the wind on the river and the passage of other boats. To his left a faint, continuous wave spent itself on the northern shoreline, panting behind the vessel that had created it, like a dog on a leash.