"By all the powers, Mr Warble, you are a fellow of mettle and no mistake. Your reputation seems less than exaggerated, indeed it does. Har har har."
"Glad to hear it," he said, keeping the blade up. The little figure to the right chimed in with a nervous, high-pitched giggle, and Warble shifted his weight ready for a kick to the chin. If he took him fast enough...
"Leppo, my dear fellow, please put that away." The fat man har-hared again, and patted him on the head. "You're quite spoiling Mr Warble's digestion, and we really can't have that."
The little figure nodded vigorously, giggled to itself again, and sheathed the knife. Warble hesitated for a moment, then put his own away, sure he could take these clowns if he had to.
"That's much better, har har." The fat man extended a hand wrapped in a velvet glove, and Warble shook it carefully. It felt like a small, furtive cushion. "Allow me to introduce myself. Erasmus Ferrara, antiquarian of note, if not notoriety, har har har. My associate and I have been most keen to make your acquaintance."
"Likewise," he said. Ferrara nodded, and poured out more treacle.
"Of course, my dear fellow, of course. A man of your sagacity and resource must have become aware of our own interest in the rodent very early on. Almost from the moment of our arrival, perhaps."
"Perhaps," Warble said. He didn't like the man; an air of almost palpable decadence hung around him, from his elaborately coiffured hair to the exquisitely worked embroidery of his overstrained shirt. "And perhaps you'd like to come to the point?"
That was a mistake. He had to ride out another paroxysm of gurgling laughter, echoed for the most part by the tittering of the fat man's tiny companion.
"By Sigmar's hammer, sir, you're a sharp one and no mistake. A man of business, sir, a man after my own heart. No beating about the bush for you, Mr Warble, but straight to the point, sir, straight to the point. Har har har." Warble began to think about getting him to the point of his dagger. "The point, Mr Warble, is that we'd like to engage your services."
"I've already got a client," he said. Ferrara nodded.
"Of course, my dear fellow, of course you have. The lovely Astra, no doubt. And no doubt she spun you a fine yarn."
"I can't discuss my clients, or their business," Warble said. Ferrara chortled for a while, like a pot preparing to boil over.
"Of course not, my dear sir. You're a fellow of principle, and I admire that in a man, indeed I do. But perhaps our interests coincide. Did she tell you what the rodent was worth?"
"A great deal to her," Warble said. They must have known that much already. Ferrara nodded.
"And suppose I were to offer you an equal share, should the creature fall into your hands before dear Astra seeks you out again?"
"What would I want with half a brass statue?" he asked. The fat man shook his head, tears of laughter squeezing themselves from between his eyelids.
"Brass, my dear fellow. She really told you it was made of brass?" Then he choked on his own hilarity, and couldn't speak again for what seemed like forever.
"Perhaps you'd like to share the joke," Warble snapped, feeling heartily sick of the pair of them. "What do you think it's made of?"
"Why, gold, my dear sir, solid gold." Ferrara finally managed to get himself under control. "The figure is worth an absolute fortune."
Suddenly a lot of things started to make sense.
"Tell me about it."
"Gladly, my dear sir. Gladly." Ferrara paused for breath. "But I can only offer you a third of the spoils. Poor Leppo would be most put out." The tiny figure bared its teeth, and hissed its agreement. Warble nodded.
"Fair enough."
"The statue was found in the Blighted Marshes of Tilea, close to the city of Miragliano, about four hunded years ago. Unfortunately, before its origins could be determined, the creature was stolen by unknown miscreants. Its whereabouts remained a mystery for centuries."
"Until now."
"Quite, my dear sir, quite. About fifteen years ago, in fact, when I stumbled across a reference to it in some old records in Tobaro. I won't bore you with the details, har har, but suffice it to say that I have been energetically pursuing it ever since, from city to city across the face of the known world. And now, it seems, the rat has gone to ground here, in Marienburg."
"Fascinating," Warble said. "And where does Astra fit in to all this?"
"Why, my dear fellow, precisely where you would expect her to." Ferrara chuckled again. "My young friend and I are by no means the only ones searching for this reclusive rodent. By now the city would be crawling with our rivals, were it not for this fortuitous fog."
"I see." Warble nodded slowly.
"Indeed you do, my dear sir, indeed you do. It's apparent we've given you much to think about. Har har." Ferrara turned, and took his tiny companion by the hand. "We'll speak again, sir, when you've had time to consider where your best interests lie. Come, Leppo. Time, I think, to fortify the inner man."
They vanished as quickly as they'd appeared, leaving a trail of turbulence in the muffling fog. A moment later a faint burst of oleagenous laughter erupted briefly, before fading away towards the Shoemaker's Square.
Warble turned slowly, and made his way thoughtfully back to the Apron.
Entering the familiar taproom felt like coming home. In a way it was; he'd spent a lot of time there over the years, and knew every pattern of grain in the tabletops. Warble sank into his usual seat with a deep sigh of contentment; simply being able to sit down at a table with his feet still touching the floor, and see over it without asking for a cushion, were luxuries most folk could never fully appreciate. He waved a weary hand for the menu.
"You are looking I think for the rat statue, yah?"
Warble leapt to his feet, twisting aside, and sent the chair flying. The clatter seemed to fill the room in the sudden silence, and he had a brief, embarrassed glimpse of all the faces staring in his direction before his eyes reached the belt buckle of the blonde giant standing behind him. After a moment the conversations resumed.
"Sorry. Did I startle you?"
"Just a bit," Warble said, tucking his dagger away. It wasn't a giant at all, now he came to look at him properly, just a very big human. His build and accent marked him out as a Norscan, probably from one of the merchant ships in the harbour. "What do you know about the rat?"
"I know who has it." He grinned. "And who wants it. Tell the lady to meet me tonight, at the sandbar. She knows where."
"I see." Warble nodded slowly. "And that's it? No demands? No threats?"
"What is the need for them?" The grin stretched. "Either she buys, or the fat man does. An honest trade, yah?"
"Yah," Warble said.
To his immense lack of surprise, Astra's room at the Swan showed no signs at all of recent burglary. Like all of them, it was clean, spacious and well-furnished; Warble could have lived for a week on what they charged for a night's lodging. Astra greeted him with a show of fluttering nervousness that might have taken him in the night before, but which seemed to him now to be an obvious and shallow charade.
"Well," she asked breathlessly. "Have you got it?"
"Not yet." Warble hesitated. "But I may have a line on who does."
"Who?" She grabbed his arm, her fingers digging painfully into the muscle fibres. Warble twisted free, and stepped back a pace.
"In a minute," he said. "First I want some answers."
"About what?" She regained her self control with a visible effort, and sat down on the bed. Her eyes, level with Warble's now, were wide and ingenuous. "Look, I'm sorry I got excited. But you know how important it is to me..."
"And to a lot of other people," Warble said. "I've been talking to the fat man."
Her lips drew back from her teeth, and she hissed like an angry cat. The halfling stepped back another pace, feeling his blood chill.
"What did he tell you?"
"That the statue's solid gold," he said. He was in too deep to back out now. "And that you never
had your hands on it either."
"He's lying. Surely you can see that." She was forcing herself to remain calm. Her voice was conciliatory, but her fingers were twitching as though they were already embedded in his guts.
"That had crossed my mind," he admitted. "But so are you. This inn's protected; nobody steals from it. But you wouldn't have known that, would you?"
"No. You're right." Astra hesitated. "The truth is, the rat is valuable. Not as valuable as Ferrara said, but worth a lot to a collector. Both of us have contacts back in Tilea who'd pay through the nose to get their hands on it."
"Go on," Warble said. "You still haven't explained why you came to me."
"It turned up in Norsca, about six months ago. The owner agreed to meet both of us in Marienburg, and sell to the highest bidder." "Let me guess. He just happened to have a fatal accident on the way." Astra nodded.
"A perfectly genuine one, believe it or not. But the statue disappeared; the ship's captain thought it was worthless, and let one of the crew take it when he signed off."
Warble considered the story. It made perfect sense, and he still didn't believe a word of it. He nodded, slowly.
"Suppose I'd gone back to Ferrara?"
"Once he'd got his hands on it, you'd never have made it out of the door."
That much he did believe. The only thing he was sure of by now was that he wanted nothing more to do with the whole business.
"I've got a message from your sailor," he said at last. Astra tensed, her eyes fixed on his face.
"I'm listening."
"Not so fast," Warble said. "I don't work for nothing, remember?"
"All right." Her voice made the frost outside seem positively cosy. "Let's negotiate. How much do you want?"
"Eight crowns. I told you, I charge for expenses."
An interesting range of expressions flickered across her face, ending in what looked like genuine amusement.
"Eight crowns." She excavated them from her purse, like an indulgent adult distributing sweets. "You're an intriguing fellow, Sam. Why not try to cut yourself in?"
"We had an agreement," he said.
At least he thought they did. His sense of wellbeing, not unmixed with relief at the thought of never seeing any of these people again, lasted no longer than the walk back to the Apron. He'd barely set foot in the place when Harald leapt up from a table by the door, intercepting him neatly on his way to the bar.
"Is this your idea of a joke? Cheating a poor, harmless old man?" He waved something under the halfling's nose, spluttering incoherently. Warble grabbed it on the third or fourth pass.
"What are you on about now?" he snapped, then got a good, long look at it. It was one of the coins he'd given the old man that morning, the crisp, yellow surface scarred by a deep, silver rut. Sudden understanding punched him in the gut. "Holy Ranald, that's lead!"
"Absolutely. Counterfeit. And to think of all I've done for you, the times I've..."
"Shut up, Harald." He spilled the contents of his purse across the nearest tabletop, and pulled his dagger, his hands trembling. An ominous foreboding tightened in the pit of his stomach as he drew the blade across the first coin.
"Lead! The bitch!" The coins rattled and rolled beneath the blade as he stabbed and slashed at them, scarring the wood beneath. Every single one of them was counterfeit. After a while Harald stopped whining, and patted him sorrowfully on the shoulder.
"We've been done, boy. Best just to face it."
"Not yet we haven't." By now Warble was riding on a wave of incandescent rage. "I still know where to find her." He paused, counting to ten like his mother used to tell him to do. It didn't help. "And I want you to find someone else for me."
Trailing Astra from the Swan was a snap. The fog seemed denser than ever, and as night fell the thoroughfares faded into shadow-sketched phantoms. Warble felt he could almost have walked alongside her undetected, but an intimate knowledge of the local geography meant he didn't have to. Instead he hung back, doubling through gaps between buildings most folk didn't even know were there, getting close enough to make sure it was still Astra ahead of him once every minute or so. Before long he tasted salt in the air, cutting through the usual city odours of rotting waste and bad cooking.
The sandbar was one of the northernmost points of the city, facing the ocean; as Marienburg grew, commerce had shifted to the larger, more sheltered wharves further upstream, and the older, shallower basins had been allowed to silt up. Now hardly anyone used them, except for the deep-sea fishermen and a handful of smugglers.
As the ill-matched pair moved further into the region of mouldering dereliction, and signs of habitation became scarcer, Warble began to move a little more cautiously. He lost sight of Astra several times, but the tapping of her boot-heels gave her position away as effectively as if she'd been blowing a foghorn.
The rustle of his own bare soles against the cobbles was almost inaudible, but he strained his ears anyway; the fog carried sound in strange directions, and the abandoned warehouses around them created peculiar echoes. Several times he stopped dead, listening, convinced he could hear other footsteps, until reason reasserted itself and allowed him to believe it was merely the sound of Astra's progress rebounding from the rotting timber walls.
A moment later, he froze. Astra was talking to someone, out of sight behind a crumbling wall, through the chinks of which a flicker of lamplight was visible. The voices were low, the words inaudible, but the cadence was familiar; after a moment he recognized the tones of the Norscan sailor he'd met at the Apron.
Negotiations didn't seem to be going too well. The voices got louder for a moment, then the conversation ended in a single, choked-off scream.
Warble edged forward, his palms tingling, and felt something warm, wet and sticky underfoot. The old wharf was deserted now, but he could hear the familiar rhythm of Astra's boot-heels receding in the night. The sailor was lying a few feet away, steaming gently, so the halfling picked up the lantern and trotted across to examine him.
One look was enough to make him wish he hadn't. The man was very dead indeed, most of his intestines straggling across the cobbles.
Warble dropped the lantern, which shattered on the ground, and spent an interesting minute or two trying to hold on to his lunch. Then he listened hard, locating the distant footsteps, and set out after the delinquent elf.
He closed on her rapidly, his footfalls padding almost silently, while Astra's grew louder with each successive step. Suddenly she stopped.
Warble froze, certain she'd heard him. But he was wrong. Her voice was raised, and for a moment was drowned entirely by a familiar gurgling laugh.
The halfling edged forward again, keeping close to the shadows, feeling a peculiar sense of deja vu. Gradually the scene ahead began to resolve itself.
The light appeared first, brighter than the sailor's lantern, seeping through the fog like oil in water. Gradually, as he moved closer, it sketched the outline of a derelict warehouse, leaking from the missing planks in the roof and walls. One of the gaps was about head height; Warble flattened himself against the rotting timbers, and peered through it.
The building was well lit, but filthy, hissing torches hanging from brackets in the walls. Strange designs had been daubed on the woodwork in brownish red paint, and an intricately carved wooden chest stood on a raised dais at the far end. At first he thought the stringy things hanging from the beams were ropes of some kind; then he got a good look at them, realized the paint wasn't paint, and this time his last meal won the race to escape before he could catch it. He was in deeper trouble than he'd ever thought possible.
Everyone on the streets had heard stories of a secret temple to Khaine hidden somewhere in the city, and, like Warble, had laughed at the absurdity of the idea even as they eyed the shadows with sudden unease. Now he knew the ridiculous rumours were true; but whether he'd survive to tell anyone was in serious doubt. Gripped by a horrified fascination, unable to tear himself away, he watched the dr
ama unfolding within.
Astra and Ferrara were arguing fiercely; encumbered by the statuette, she'd been unable to draw a weapon. Ferrara stood beyond her reach, a cocked crossbow in his hand, while his tiny companion sidled forward to take the rat. He'd discarded the hat, to reveal high, pointed ears embellished with gaudy ribbons.
Under any other circumstances the sight of a clean snotling, let alone one so fancifully dressed, would have astonished Warble; tonight it seemed perfectly reasonable.
"Believe me, dear lady, we've no wish to kill you. Certainly not here, har har, that would really go against the grain, would it not? But you must appreciate, we simply can't allow you to use the stone against us."
"I'll bathe in your blood, Ferrara. I'll make your death seem an eternity of torment." The words hissed from her hate-contorted visage, so strangled by rage they were barely coherent. Ferrara laughed.
"Why, my dear Astra. I never knew you cared." He blew her an exaggerated kiss. "And they say the Witch Elves have no sense of fun."
Screaming with a beserker's fury, Astra sprang forward, swinging the statuette like a club. It struck the little snotling on the side of the head. With a sickening crunch of shattered bone, the diminutive catamite flew across the floor of the temple.
"Leppo!" Ferrara fired as he screamed, the bolt catching Astra in mid charge. She spun with the impact, the fletchings protruding from her chest, and staggered towards the altar. Ferrara flung the weapon after her, and ran to the inert body of his companion. Large, greasy tears were running down his face as he cradled the tiny form. "You've killed him!"
Astra said nothing, weaving from side to side as though drunk, intent only on reaching her goal. A few paces from it she began chanting, then swung the statue by the head to shatter the red stone against the surface of the altar.
Ferrara was chanting too by now, his face suffused with gleeful malice, and the thunderstorm tension of magic began to crackle in the air.
It was then that Warble became aware of the scuffling of footsteps around him in the fog, and rolled for cover into the shadows. Faint figures loomed in the mist, running for the building, their outlines distorted by the enveloping vapours. At least, that's what Warble preferred to think. From the direction of the main doors came the clash of weapons, and the incohate shrieking of damned souls locked in mortal combat. Of course, he thought numbly, neither antagonist would have gone to the temple alone.