Konstantin nodded. “As ever, Rilke, you are wise.” He stood to address Stefan
and Bruno. “You
will
serve Sigmarsgeist,” he pronounced, “by one means or
another. Your deaths are postponed for as long as you may labour in our
service.” He sat, and the shadow of sadness passed across his features once
again. “Do not think I pass this judgement lightly,” he said. “Nor should you
think that my judgement is a mercy.” He signalled to the guards for the
prisoners to be led away.
“Before your penance is served, you may be wishing for death as your
deliverance.”
Anaise sat patiently by Bea’s side, waiting for the girl’s sobs to subside.
Bea cried unashamedly. Days of conflict and confusion had come to a head inside
of her, and now the dam had burst. She felt miserable and powerless. Since they
had found her, tending the wounded guard, she had spent all but a few hours
confined within Anaise’s quarters. She was not a prisoner, Anaise had explained,
yet neither was Bea any longer free to go as and where she chose. If not guilty
of the crime, then she had at the very least been tainted by it. Anaise had made
it very clear how she had intervened in person to spare Bea from Konstantin’s
rage. Now Anaise was her protector, and, to all intents, her custodian, too.
After what seemed to her like an age, Bea lifted her face and looked around.
They were sitting facing the ring of stones that lined the ancient well—the
Well of Sadness, Anaise had called it. The name seemed particularly appropriate
to Bea now.
Even through the numbing grief, she could feel the energy radiating from the
well, like the heat from a great fire. She shuddered. She was not ready for this
yet.
“Why have we come here?” she asked.
Anaise ran her hand through Bea’s hair, brushing the strands back from her
tear-streaked face. “There is nowhere safer than here,” she whispered,
soothingly. “This is the one place Konstantin will dare not come. This is my
place alone.”
“Konstantin is searching for me?”
“He does not understand you,” Anaise said. “He doesn’t understand us.”
Bea uttered a cry, a nervous, fearful half-laugh. “I don’t think I understand,
either,” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happening. And I don’t understand
why you are choosing to protect me.”
Anaise plaited Bea’s hair between her fingers. “Because I do understand you,”
she said at length. “You were confused. Your loyalties were torn. You felt you
owed a debt to Stefan and Bruno, that’s why you helped them. But you also wanted to do the right thing. That’s why you stayed to tend to the wounded
guard.” She smiled, and drew back. “It’s all right. I understand.”
Bea shook her head, uncertainly. Everything made sense, and yet no sense. She
thought hard about what she needed to say. “Stefan and Bruno are good men,” she
declared. “I know that their souls are pure.”
“But why did they kill a man, and grievously wound another?” Anaise asked,
gently. “Can you explain that?”
Bea shrugged. The tears started to well up inside her again. She did not
know, yet she sensed that something was wrong, something that she could not yet
explain. It was there in the fabric of Sigmarsgeist itself, the unceasing,
barely controlled growth of the citadel each day. And it was there in the energy
that swelled, like restless waves upon a sea all around her. But the explanation
was still beyond her reach.
“They are good men,” was all she could say.
“You say that, but—” Anaise paused, and inclined her head, looking deeper into
Bea’s eyes. “Wait—there is something else, isn’t there? You hold a place in
your heart for one of them.” She hesitated, put a finger to her lips. “Is it—Bruno?”
Bea averted her eyes, and gave the slightest of nods. She felt her eyes
prickling with tears again. Anaise drew an arm around her shoulder to comfort
her.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She reached for
a glass, and placed it into Bea’s hand. “Here,” she said. “Drink some of this.”
Bea lifted the glass to her lips, and sipped. The clear liquid burned in her
throat. “Merciful Shallya,” she exclaimed, coughing. Her head felt light,
faintly
giddy. “What is it?”
Anaise laughed, and took the glass from her. “At least it brought some colour
to your poor face,” she said. “Just a simple herbal elixir,” she explained. “All
the way from Talabheim. Come, drink a little more. It’ll put the fire back in
your heart.”
Bea looked at the glass with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, her
troubles momentarily forgotten. “But I thought—” she began. “I thought you
said—”
“That such things were not allowed in Sigmarsgeist?” There was a note of
mockery in Anaise’s suddenly stern tone.
“Quite right. We must set an example for our people, to guide them along the
true path.” She raised the glass to her lips, and drained it in one draught.
“This is different, though,” she continued. “Besides, there is no wrong in
acknowledging our desires.” She refilled the glass from the stone flask at her
side. “So long as it is only to understand them.”
She offered the glass back to Bea. “We must set examples, Bea,” she said.
“That does not mean we must be enslaved by them.” She smiled. “Konstantin might
not agree with me,” she said. “But you can share my secrets.” She stood, and
lifted Bea to her feet. “You shall be a part of all of them.”
“I should leave,” Bea said, hurriedly. “It is not right for me to stay here.”
She tried to shrug Anaise aside, but the Guide was in no mood to let her go.
“Where will you run to, Bea?” Anaise asked. “To Bruno, to join him in his
miserable cell? You won’t be of help to him that way, be assured of that.” She
turned the girl’s face towards her own. “Or to Konstantin, perhaps? I hope you
wouldn’t be so foolish. I can only do so much to ensure your safety.” She
reached to Bea’s cheek, tracing the line of her tears with one finger. “Once
things are quieter, it will be safer for you,” she said. “Until then you should
rest here. With me.”
“What do you want of me?” Bea asked. “What can I have that is so valuable to
you?”
By way of answer, Anaise steered Bea towards the centre of the room. As her
eyes fell upon the shadowed hollow of the Well of Sadness, Bea felt herself
begin to fall, as though the ground beneath her feet had suddenly dropped away.
She walked—or glided, so it seemed—towards the well as if drawn by
irresistible gravity. She stopped herself, just short of the edge, and stood
clutching at the low stone wall for support.
“I’m not ready for this,” she stammered. “I’m not strong enough. The drink
has made me confused—”
“The magic is summoning you,” Anaise insisted, brushing her protests aside.
“It is
your
strength that it has recognised. The waters of Tal Dur, Bea.
They are waiting to be found once more. They wait for you to release their power.” She drew her on,
insistent. “It is your calling, Bea. Your gift. It is your duty to heed that
call.”
For all her fear, Bea found herself staring down into the depths of the
ancient well. The shaft dropped away into darkness, an empty, arid void. And
yet, as she looked down, Bea felt the brush of air light against her face. A
slight fluttering breeze, as if, far below, something stirred. And she thought
that, just for a moment, she heard a sound, the sound of water; single drops
falling upon the parched earth. A needle-thin trickle of cool water snaking
across the base of the dead well.
She pulled her face away. At once the sound was gone, and the air resolved
once more to stillness. She felt light-headed, giddy from much more than the sip
of liquor.
“I must have imagined it,” she said to Anaise. “I thought for a moment I
heard something.”
“There is nothing false in your imagining,” Anaise replied. “All that you saw
and heard will come to pass.” She smiled. “Tal Dur is waiting for us, Bea.
Waiting for you to find the key.”
They were not to be taken down to the cells, not yet at least. Konstantin had
decreed that their punishment was to be hard labour in the service of
Sigmarsgeist. And the punishment was to begin at once.
Stefan and Bruno were led from the High Council to an outer yard of the
palace, where they joined a gang of perhaps twenty or thirty other men. Some
were in pairs or small groups, but most stood or sat upon the ground on their
own, lost in some dream, or some private misery of their own. Few if any were
speaking, and none seemed to notice the newcomers’ arrival amongst them.
Stefan cast his eyes around, trying to fathom whether these might be allies
or enemies that they now found themselves amongst. There was no clear answer to
that question that he could see. All of the gathered prisoners looked human,
with no obvious marks of mutation upon them. But whether they were men who had
marched beneath the dark flag, or simply villagers who had found themselves on the wrong side of the
Red Guard, there was no way of telling.
But they were all quite unlike the healthy, vigorous volunteers Stefan had
seen on their arrival in the city. To a man, the crowd in the courtyard were
ragged and filthy, bowed down from days of toil. Their clothes hung in tatters,
coated in dust or a dark brown grime. And they reeked, their unwashed bodies
ripe with the stench of long labour, deep below ground. They looked and smelt
like nothing Stefan had seen in Sigmarsgeist before, until now.
The guards moved Stefan and Bruno forward, prodding them with their swords,
herding them further into the confined space of the courtyard. Soon they were
jostling for space amongst the ragged mob. A figure bumped against Stefan; a
lank-haired man approaching middle years, but sturdily built. He still had the
hawk-like look of the hunter about him, despite having clearly taken a beating
from someone only recently. He eyed Stefan and Bruno warily He might not have
been a man to trust, but Stefan sensed no particular evil in him, either. He
doubted such a man had ever been part of any Chaos army.
“How did you come here?” Stefan asked the man. “Were you taken in Mielstadt?”
“Mielstadt?” the man turned the word about in his mind, then looked at Stefan
as though he were deranged. “What would I be doing in a scum-hole like
Mielstadt?” he demanded of Stefan, irritably. “No,” he went on. “I’m only here
because of a misunderstanding. They owe me money. I captured one of the beasts,
brought it all the way here.” He tugged urgently at Stefan’s sleeve. “They’ve
made a mistake,” he insisted. “You tell them for me. I brought them—”
Stefan heard the crack of a whip, and felt the sharp sting of the lash
against his face.
“Enough talk,” the guard shouted out. “From now on you can hold your tongues,
the lot of you. Save your energy for the walls. Now, get moving.”
Stefan reached out to catch hold of the other man, suddenly anxious to know
who or what he claimed to have brought to Sigmarsgeist. But he was gone, lost in
the river of souls beginning their weary progress through the courtyard.
Stefan scanned the rest of the group. The prisoners were certainly not all
followers of Chaos, but that didn’t mean that none of them were. His eye fell
upon three Norscans, walking apart from the main group, heaping guttural curses
upon anyone who came within earshot. For a moment he wondered if it could be
true—perhaps a number of the mutants and their Norscan allies really had found
their way to Mielstadt. There was a part of Stefan that perhaps wanted to
believe that. But his heart and his head were in one accord. Wherever these
Norscans had come from, it was not Mielstadt, nor any other wretched village
that the Red Guard had chosen to wreak their revenge upon. Baecker was lying,
and therefore Konstantin, too. He began to wonder if all of Sigmarsgeist was not
a lie.
One of the Norscans—a flaxen-haired man with a bull-like stature—he
recognised from the gang of prisoners being marched through the streets as
Stefan and the others had taken their first tour of the citadel. The Norscan
looked at Stefan and seemed to recognise him too. He gestured, unmistakably,
drawing a line across his throat with one finger. A shouted command from a guard
brought him back from his thoughts. A gate at the end of the courtyard had been
opened, and the prisoners were lining up ready to file out. At their head, a
single White Guard stood ready to deliver their instructions.
“Today you will have the honour of working upon the citadel walls,” he
announced. “Building the fortifications that will one day protect us from the
dark flood of Chaos.” He stared out at the crowd of prisoners, seeking out any
who would make eye contact. Bruno tightened his fists into balls, his face taut
with rage.
“By all the gods, Stefan,” he declared. “Now, truly, we see the other face of
Sigmarsgeist.”
Stefan shook his head, slowly. How different things had come to look, and in
so short a space of time. The line of men began to trudge slowly towards the
gate. A line that would have looked not much different from any other of the bands of workers they had watched during their first days in Sigmarsgeist.
Nothing, and yet everything, was changed.
“There’s no middle road with these people,” he declared. “You side with them,
or against them. Truly, my friend, we’ve moved to the other side of that line.”
“We’ve got to escape,” Bruno muttered. “We must find Bea. Pray to the goddess
that she’s all right.”
Stefan looked round at the guards, sizing up their number and the weapons
they carried. “Little enough chance of that at the moment,” he replied. “They’d
cut us down like dogs before we got ten paces. The opportunity will come,” he
assured Bruno. “But we’re going to have to bide our time.”
The procession moved through the open portal and out into the streets. It was
the first time in days that he had seen the outer reaches of citadel. Time
enough, apparently, for Sigmarsgeist to change beyond all belief. Stefan’s first
thought was that the citadel had somehow shrunk become smaller. Everywhere there
seemed to be so much less space, so many more people. He quickly realised that,
on the contrary, Sigmarsgeist had continued to grow, and grow at such a rate
that the very buildings at its heart seemed to be competing with each other,
jostling for precious space. Every inch of land was now given over to brick and
stone, and not so much as a blade of grass had been left to grow between the
tall buildings that now sprouted up on all sides.