Zavant Page 8

  The pieces were splayed out across the board, with several minor pieces now missing, taken as the game progressed through gambit and counter-gambit. Konniger's game against his nameless opponent had been going on for months now, with no end in sight. Each time it was the same: his opponent's latest instructions arrived each month in the same mysterious way, and Konniger would move his rival's pieces accordingly. The sage-detective would ponder his response for a week or two, then Vido would be despatched to deliver Konniger's counter-move instructions to his faceless opponent. That this involved dropping a cipher-written note, along with a few copper coins, into the bowl of a blind beggar who daily staked out his place on the corner of Luitpoldt Strasse and the Volker Weg did not in any way strike Vido as being unusual or especially curious. When you worked in the service of Zavant Konniger, you quickly became used to being perpetually surrounded by riddles and mysteries.

  Yes, each time previously the procedure had been the same, but tonight the procedure had clearly changed.

  'It's as I thought,' muttered Konniger, making the required change to the position of one of his opponent's game pieces. 'Folly. Sheer folly! Emperor's Panther Knight four to Grand

  Theogonist six puts his Knight into immediate jeopardy and opens up a clear path through to his Emperor. In two moves, perhaps even just one if I employ any of the Luccini gambits, I'll have him in checkmate. Ridiculous, isn't it, Vido? A bla­tant tactical error, and clearly out of keeping with my opponent's high standard of play to date. What, then, are we to make of it?'

  Vido knew his cue when he heard it. He paused before responding, trying to clear his mind and think deductively as his master had taught him. 'Perhaps then it isn't the same person sending you the instructions? Perhaps your opponent has changed, and it is someone trying to fool you into thinking you are still dealing with the same person. Or perhaps...'

  Konniger's eyes flickered, his head nodding imperceptibly as he encouraged his manservant to continue on in his cur- rent line of reasoning.

  'Or perhaps it's because this mistake isn't a mistake at all!' Vido blurted out excitedly. 'Your opponent is someone who lakes care to conceal just about everything about himself. He wraps himself up in secrets and misdirection. If he wanted to send you a message, if he wanted to let you know something, he wouldn't do it in any kind of normal way. He wouldn't send anything that might seem like a message to anyone else not involved in your game!'

  Konniger smiled, obviously pleased with Vido's thinking, 'Exactly. A mistake that isn't a mistake, hiding a message that only its recipient would know to be a message at all. You're making progress, Vido. A few more years with me and I'll finally have overcome that thick crust of Moot-born idiocy that's the heritage of the halfling race and actually be on the way to turning you into something resembling a student of deductive reasoning! Now quick, go bring me my cloak and boots.'

  "We're going out somewhere?' asked Vido with a sinking heart as he watched Konniger hastily tidy away the parch­ment scrolls on his desk and place a vellum marker into the worn cloth pages of the book he had been working from.

  'Regretfully, my notes on the fifth and sixth chapters of Marco the Malicious's Considerations will have to be put aside for now. That old Tilean fraud has waited three cen­turies for someone to properly demolish his idiotic

  philosophical arguments, so I assume then that he can wait a day or two more yet.'

  Vido saw the lively glint in Konniger's eyes, and recognised all the familiar signs of his master's growing intellectual excitement. It had been some time since Konniger's quite unique skills had been tested in any real way, and, while Konniger claimed to prefer to devote his time to the schol­arly study of dusty, worm-eaten tomes and scrolls, Vido knew that his master was rarely more energised and enthused than when his mental abilities were engaged by the intellectual puzzles of the many supernatural and crimi­nal mysteries that so often came their way.

  Yes, we're going out, Vido. We've received a message, but what exactly was its meaning? I believe its urgency is clear in the blatancy of the mistake my opponent chose to make in our game, and in the unexpected break in the pattern of our arrangements. What does this urgency mean? What is my opponent trying to say to me? What could be more urgent and to the point than, "Come quickly. I need your help" per­haps?'

  Konniger took the cloak Vido handed to him and wrapped it around himself with a theatrical flourish, another tell-tale sign that the sage-detective was starting to greatly warm to the prospect of throwing himself headlong into another mystery.

  'Come, Vido. Let us go see if we cannot track down my nameless opponent and hear for ourselves what he has to say.'

  The hour was now fairly late - several hours after sundown in the summer months - but the streets of central Altdorf were still full of life. It had been a market day today, and the main streets and wide avenues thronged with the leftover dregs from the event. The taverns and alehouses were full too, drunken patrons spilling raucously out into the streets, and Vido had no doubt that inside many of them the locals would be more than happy to entertain the countryside yokels who had tarried too long after the end of market day, their purses stuffed with the copper and silver coin profits of the day's proceedings. No doubt the idiot bumpkins were having a splendid time in the company of their new, big city friends. However, come dawn, when the city gates were

  re-opened, it would be a very different story, as the survivors of the night's revelries emerged to make their lonely way home to distant towns and villages, the contents of their now empty purses freely dispersed amongst the city's hostelry owners, footpads, street girls, cutpurses, card sharks, conmen and other fraudsters.

  Some would never leave at all; their beaten and stripped bodies would eventually be found lying in some stinking alley by the City Watch, or hauled out of the river by some passing boatman. Others, possibly no less lucky, would awaken, dazed and hung-over, in some unfamiliar barrack room or flophouse to discover that one of their new-found friends' of the previous night had in fact been a professional recruiter and that they had been tricked into signing up for the Imperial army. Or, even worse, any of the mercenary free companies that roamed the territories of the Empire in search of employment and fresh recruits. For these unfortu­nates, press-ganged into the ranks of these bands of cut-throat mercenaries, the chances of ever seeing their homes and loved ones again were scarcely better than those of their compatriots who ended up lying dead in an alley or floating face-down in the waters of the River Reik.

  'Altdorf, seat of Imperial majesty, city of excitement and adventure,' Konniger sardonically murmured to himself as he made his way through the city streets, dispassionately observing the panoramic landscape of human greed and vice occurring all around him.

  Zavant cleaved an imperious course through the milling crowds like one of those legendary dwarf steam-driven sea fortress-vessels which Vido had once seen a picture of in one of his master's books. Passers-by moved quickly out of his way, either because they recognised him, or merely because they somehow sensed the aura of importance about him. The occasional passing City Watch patrol nodded in acknowledgement or doffed their caps to him in quiet respect. Konniger's services were frequently called upon by Altdorf s law enforcement guardians, and while his methods and brusque manner frequently brought him into conflict with the senior Watch commanders, he was popular with the ordinary Watchman on the street, many of whom regarded him with almost superstitious awe.

  Vido scurried along in his master's wake, nimbly dodging a path through the barging bodies and heavy-booted feet of the surrounding crush. The good citizens of Altdorf might clear a path for their city's renowned sage-detective, but his diminutive halfling manservant was quite another matter. Despite the difficulty, Vido kept pace with Konniger, continuing his self-appointed task of watching out for his master's back. His practiced thief s eye picked out the usual, familiar figures of cutpurses and footpads loitering at all the usual, familiar places, but he knew that there would be
no danger from that particular quarter. Altdorfs criminal fraternity knew Konniger better than almost any of the city's other residents, and knew far better than to ever try to rob or waylay him. Nevertheless, there was something here that alerted his thiefs natural intuition, and he hurried forward to Konniger's side.

  'Master-' he began.

  Yes, I know,' said Konniger, cutting him off, 'but well spot­ted anyway. Half a dozen of them, perhaps more. They've been following us since we left home. They're working in relay teams, mixing and matching between teams so we don't begin to recognise the same pairs of faces in the crowd around us. They're quick, I'll grant them that. And clever, too.'

  But not clever enough, thought Vido. Not clever enough to escape Konniger's acute notice. Did anything every truly escape the man's attention, Vido wondered?

  'A guard to make sure we don't change our minds, or a secret escort providing us with safe conduct to wherever we're going?' Vido asked.

  'A combination of both possibilities, I think', agreed Konniger, apparently completely untroubled by this latest development. 'It would seem that our mystery opponent is anxious indeed to see us this night.'

  They were across the Ostlander Bridge now, turning off the Volker Weg and heading down towards the riverside docks. Towards the Reikerbahn... With a heavy sinking feeling of growing dread, Vido realised that his suspicions about their ultimate destination were now proving to be increasingly likely.

  Leaving the main thoroughfares of the city and entering the Reikerbahn was like stepping from one world into another.

  Here, there was none of the hustle and bustle of the busy, well-lit and Watch-patrolled main streets; here, there was just mist-filled gloomy silence, broken only by the passage of fig­ures moving furtively through the winding alleyways on purposes best left unquestioned. Vido's feet splashed through puddles of water and mud but he managed to avoid the worst spots of putrid, open-lying filth that made up the ground surface of the Reikerbahn. Any cobbled streets here had been ripped up long ago to provide missile ammunition for the riots that met the City Watch's occasional attempts to clean out this nest of crime and sin. All around them he heard the sounds of human life at its most miserable and wretched - sobs and quiet, pitiful cries; mad, drunken laughter, abruptly cut off; urgent, fevered whispering from behind locked doors and shuttered windows - and he sensed too the feeling of many hidden eyes watching them from secret vantage points. Vido doubted whether even Konniger's seeming inviolability extended here into the heart of the rat's nest of the Reikerbahn. The whole area teemed with gangs of murderous footpads and the vilest kinds of rogues who would slit their own mother's throat for the price of a pot of ale, but no one tried to bar their way or in any way impede them.

  As that lurching feeling of dread grew ever stronger inside him, Vido realised that, clearly, they were expected and that someone had issued orders that they were to be allowed to pass by unharmed.

  Several more turns through the confusing maze of dark, winding streets - Vido suspected that Konniger must have pilfered his unfailing sense of direction from a dwarf tunnel runner - and they arrived at what the halfling had now long suspected was to be the destination of tonight's journey. Officially, it was Gablenz Strasse, although Vido sincerely doubted whether there was anyone in the entire city who actually called it that. Everyone, for as long as could be remembered, knew it by one name and one name only: Auftagskillers Strasse. Street of the Assassins.

  It was a narrow, unwelcoming-looking cul-de-sac, lined with several low-roofed, abandoned buildings that bore the marks of ancient fire damage. The seemed empty and aban­doned, although Vido knew plenty to suggest otherwise. The only visible sign of life in the street was a lit lamp hanging

  outside a ramshackle, decrepit townhouse building that slumped drunkenly against its fire-gutted neighbour. At any moment it looked as if it was about to tumble in a torrent of crumbling rubble down into the street itself. It took a second - and probably a third - glance to realise that this ruin was in fact an alehouse of sorts, and that, even more incredibly, it was apparently open for business. The dismal light from the solitary lamp flickered sullenly amidst the gloom, weakly illuminating the alehouse's faded and peeling name banner.

  The Averlander's Rest,' it said, although Vido winced at the thought of what would happen to any country bumpkin Averlander who actually made the doubtlessly fatal mistake of wandering through its doors in search of such promised rest and succour. Like the street itself, the alehouse had another unofficial but far more appropriate name familiar to generations of Altdorfers past and present.

  They called it the Murder Hole, and it was known through­out the length and breadth of the Empire and beyond as a place where those wishing to purchase assurance of the deaths of others could come and find what they were look­ing for.

  Vido hesitated at the entrance to the Street of Assassins. He has never been in the Murder Hole, but, from his time in the Altdorf thieves' guild he knew all about the place's evil rep­utation, about the things that went on in there, and the even worse things that were rumoured to take shape in some of its darker and more private back rooms.

  No, he had never wanted then to pass through the doors of the place, and even less desire to do so now.

  He visibly started as he felt something grip his shoulder, and looked up in surprise to see Konniger standing beside him, a reassuring hand placed on his shoulder. A rare smile of something approximating genuine human warmth momentarily creased the sage-detective's features.

  'When I sat down to do battle earlier this evening with Marco the Malicious, who would have imagined that a few short hours later we would both be standing here, about to enter one of the most wicked houses in all the Empire?'

  Konniger paused, and then added with a further smile, 'Have faith, Vido. No harm will come to us tonight. After all, we're here at someone's invitation, remember?'

  Three

  'Vesper Klasst. I believe he's expecting us.'

  Two words forming one name. Spoken aloud, the com­bined effect of those two words, of that one name, could hardly have been more marked had Konniger instead chosen to detonate one of the Imperial Gunnery School's fearsome new explosive cannon-fire devices here inside the Murder Hole. From his position at the bar in the ill-lit interior of the alehouse, Vido heard the commotion from behind where he and Konniger stood. There was the scraping of chairs on stone as the tavern's ill-kempt and vile-looking patrons leaped up from wherever they were sitting in response to Konniger's mentioning of that name. Vido heard the soft slither of knife blades being drawn from leather sheaths, and from somewhere in the upper tier balcony gallery above them came the unmistakable harsh metallic click of a cross­bow mechanism being cocked to fire.

  Konniger's hearing was acute, Vido knew. If Vido had heard this, then his master would have too. Despite this, the gendeman sage gave no indication of the mortal peril they

  were now in, and instead continued to wait patiently for the ruffian barman's reply.

  There's no one here by that name,' the man said slowly and deliberately through clenched teeth, glaring at Konniger. You're a fool to come in here, whoever you are, and an even bigger fool to even think about using that name out loud.'

  'Then perhaps I haven't made myself clear,' replied Konniger archly. 'I wish to see Vesper Klasst. You know the man I'm speaking of? The worst villain in all the Empire? The lowest, basest kind of gallows-scum who laughably styles himself as the so-called "Emperor of the Altdorf underworld"? A jumped-up, back-alley purse-snatcher pos­sessed with ridiculous delusions of grandeur?'

  The alehouse keeper snarled in fury, and reached for what­ever kind of weapon he kept handy on a shelf just below the bar-top. They would never find out what he had down there - a cudgel, probably, or perhaps even a loaded crossbow or gunpowder pistol - because it was at that moment that Konniger reached across the bar and sharply tapped the bar- keep at a certain point on the side of his neck. The effect was instantaneous: the man's eyes rol
led up into his head and he slumped to the floor as if felled by an invisible poleaxe.

  Vido spun round, pulling out his dagger as they turned to face the anger of the Murder Hole's patrons. There were an even dozen and a half of them he reckoned, all armed, the worst kind of cutthroat and Altdorf underworld scum. He reckoned he could probably put the point of his throwing dagger into the eye, throat or heart of one of them, and maybe have time to draw and hurl another dagger before they got to him. Konniger would probably also give a good account of himself. His master customarily eschewed the use of weapons, but those unarmed fighting tricks that he had learned from a travelling wise man from Cathay meant that he was capable of dealing out more than a few surprises, as the Murder Hole barkeep had just found out.

  Nevertheless, the odds were heavily against them. Even before he had run off to Altdorf to take up a life of thievery, Vido's family back home in the Moot had often warned that he would come to a bad end - either swinging from the end of a gallows' rope or stabbed to death in some back-alley brawl - and Vido was now forced to agree that they had

  apparently been right all along. He spin-flipped the dagger in his hand, throwing it up and smartly catching it by its blade point as he prepared to send it hurling hilt-deep into the body of one of the oncoming rogues. He drew his arm back, ready to throw.

  'Hold!'

  The angry, urgent shout made everything freeze in its tracks. There was a long, almost endless, moment of hesita­tion and then the Murder Hole patrons simply retreated and laded away into the murky gloom of the room. Vido's throw­ing arm still seemed frozen in place, the blade held there still quivering in hungry anticipation, eager to fly into the unpro­tected back of one of those retreating figures. Again Vido felt bis master's reassuring grip on his shoulder, the touch relax­ing the muscles of his arm, allowing him to at last lower his throwing arm. He breathed out for what seemed like the first lime in an age, and realised then that the quivering of his throwing blade had been caused by a nervous trembling that gripped his entire body.