WOLF IN THE FOLD
By Ben Chessell


THE LIGHT IN the temple at night had been reduced to two iron braziers in deference to lean times. The stone pillars leapt into the resulting darkness, supporting a vaulted roof of pure midnight. An insistent drip of water had found its way through the tiles above and hissed into one of the braziers, as regular and relentless as a torturer's whip.
''Magnus, named for The Pious'', straightened from where he was squatting to cover his sandals with his robe, his sole meagre defence against the cold, and resumed scrubbing the altar. Chores were performed at night by the boys. Sigmar's altar must never be touched by an untrained hand and yet it must shine like a looking glass come morning. Magnus wondered if his namesake had ever considered this paradox, or indeed polished the altar. Certainly the Arch-Lector did not do so now, cocooned in his velvet sheets with a concubine like as not, his privacy enforced by gates and blades.
The knock on the huge doors caused Magnus to drop his bucket and spill water and sand on the piecemeal image of a rampant Heldenhammer which adorned the knave of the Nuln temple. The mosaic, picked out in tiles of blue, white and gold, made little sense to a viewer as close as Magnus. Six tiles comprised the hero's nose which only took on a convincing curvature with some distance and a fair amount of latitude on the behalf of the observer. Biting a curse sufficient to have him expelled from the seminary, Magnus circumnavigated his pond and made his way down the aisle, inhabiting for a moment the scoured footsteps of countless processions of now-dead priests. The knock was repeated: three sharp cracks made with a heavy object. Magnus conjured the image of the leaden pommel of a sword until he remembered the hammer, cast in bronze, that was fixed to the left-hand door.
The boy straightened his shoulders before he drew back the heavy bolt. A wet cloak knocked him to the cold floor. The body rolled off him and lay still as the storm beat its way into the temple. Magnus struggled to his feet and put all his weight against the door.
By the time he had forced the bolt into place, the man had dragged himself to one of the huge pillars and was leaning against its massive carved base. He was a tall man, with all detail of form muffled by the sodden cloak, perhaps more than one, which he wore like a shroud. His breathing was heavy and Magnus could see the man was not well. Both of his hands grasped his stomach as if he had eaten very poorly and in the second pond made on the floor of the temple that night Magnus saw curling fronds of blood.
The man spoke, with obvious difficulty, his voice fine wine in a rough wooden mug. 'Kaslain.' The name of the arch-lector.
Arch-Lector Kaslain sleeps, as do all the priests. 'Might I find you a cot in which you could rest until they awaken?' Magnus was a good student and his lessons served him well on this occasion.
The man straightened himself a little and a flash of pain stained his features.
'I doubt,' a nobleman's voice, Magnus was sure now, 'I will see the dawn.' The boy could not deny that, from the size of the stream of blood, which was nosing its way to a drain beneath the altar, the man was unlikely to wake from sleep.
'Perhaps,' Magnus took a step forward so the man could hear him without straining, 'I might wake one of the other priests to give you audience?'
The expression might have been a smile. 'My last words, the confession of the sins of my life, are fit only for the ears of the arch-lector.'
Magnus searched for the textbook reply but was interrupted.
'Perhaps it might help you, boy, if I told you who I was. You have heard, I presume, of Hadrian Samoracci?' The guarded but blank stare by way of reply convinced the man that he had not.
The man sighed and a licked a fleck of blood from the corner of his lip. The taste wasn't enough to carve an expression from the hard muscles of the man's face. He continued, the names coming out with the measured curiosity of a man more used to hearing them than speaking them: 'The Tilean Wasp? The Thousand Faces from Magritta? The Coffin Builder? There are other names.'
'Ah, recognition. You are he?'
'I am.' A pause. 'And I wish, before I go kicking and screaming into Morr's blessed company, to purify my soul of the stains which are upon it. Can you be sure any lesser priest is so enamoured of your god that he can grant me that absolution? And, boy, are you the one to deny the arch-lector the greatest confession your cult has taken in his lifetime?'
There is a certain dignity, lent to a man, even a dying man, who asks questions which cannot be answered. Magnus walked quickly from the knave of the chapel and followed a route which he knew well but seldom traversed.
One must pause for thought, to find resolve for action, before waking the arch-lector of the Temple of Sigmar at Nuln. Magnus waited for several long moments with his small fist cocked before the door. The distance it had to cross was hardly the length of his forearm but any distance crossed for the first time is a journey in darkness. Magnus had to knock twice before a voice came from inside.
'Your holiness, a man is here.' The reply was predictably scathing and Magnus waited politely for it to play itself out. 'Your worship, it is a man of great import who asks for you by name. Even now his heartblood spills on the temple floor.' Over-poetic, perhaps, but Kaslain had a penchant for that kind of language in his sermons and Magnus took a gamble. The next response would decide the issue.
'Who is this man?'
Victory. Of a kind.

TWO LESSER PRIESTS came to carry the Tilean Wasp to Kaslain's chamber. The killer had drawn his hood over his face and Magnus's imagination couldn't help but conjure up the expression on the face which had looked on death so many times as he now went to face it.
As the almost funereal procession passed Magnus, the dark head lolled towards him and the faceless hole studied him. Magnus found something pressing to examine in the pattern of the marble. He had looked at this pattern many times, head bowed in prayer, and imagined grape vines, clouds, fish netting. Now he saw veins, like the pale cheeks of an elderly man.
Left to himself in the dying hours of the night, Magnus began to sponge the man's blood from the stones. Some had stained the mortar and Magnus scrubbed hard, removing most of it. His last act before retiring at dawn - he would be allowed to sleep until mid-morning devotions - was to open the temple doors to greet the rising sun. He stepped out onto the wide stone platform and fastened the doors to the walls by means of their hooks. Solid oaken doors.
Magnus was about to enter the temple and go to his few allowed hours of sleep when he was stopped by what he saw on the doors. The bronze hammers, usually fixed to each door had been removed, taken for polishing so Sigmar's temple would show no tarnish. He remembered the sound of the stranger's insistent banging on the door. He dropped the sponge and walked carefully back down the corridor to the Arch-Lector's private chambers.

KASLAIN PREPARED HIMSELF, but not as he would for any common final confession. The cult of Sigmar often received last testaments from dying men, promising them Sigmar's blessings on their journey to the land of Morr.
The ceremony was relatively simple but often the man receiving the blessing had travelled too far on that journey to understand much of what was said. Sometimes he had something he needed to say, a long-held secret which had ceased to be important to anybody but its bearer: an evil deed, perhaps, a disloyal act or a petty criminal doing. Whatever the exact nature of the event, each man amputated the memory and gave it into the keeping of the priest so the doing would not accompany him into the next life.
Kaslain had heard many sordid and foul acts recounted to him in this manner but they seldom made an impression on the ageing priest. He had too many such tales of his own to be impressed by the petty wrongdoings of some mud-spattered farmer or bloodstained soldier.
This man he prepared to see, however, was neither of those. What reckonings had he to make with Sigmar? Kaslain, dressed in his ceremonial garb and ready to receive his dying visitor, reviewed what he knew about the man.
The Tilean Wasp, so called because of a supposed mastery of the vile arts of brewing and administering poisons. The Wolf in the Fold, or the Thousand Faces of Magritta - he had these names apparently because of an ability to disguise himself with consummate skill and infiltrate his victim's camp.
For this he was perhaps most famous and there were numerous stories of his duping this guard or that official. The stories were often recounted as humorous rhymes, idle entertainment, and each ended with a corpulent public official having his throat cut or his belly stuck. One could make jokes out of the death of fattened bureaucrats as few cared for them, but Kaslain knew the truth was more grisly than such tales allowed.
Another name this man had acquired was the Coffin Builder, because of the sheer volume of murders attributed to him in a career which spanned almost twenty years. Everything known about this assassin was premised with ''perhaps'' or ''supposedly'' and almost nothing was held to be indisputable fact. No one knew his real name and nobody could recognise his face for what it was.
That, thought the priest, was about to change.
The boys carried the man into Kaslain's private suite and laid him on a divan. The couch had been covered with a canvas curtain to protect it from the blood which stained the boy's white robes and bare arms in generous brushstrokes.
Kaslain, not normally one for humorous comment, was unusually buoyant, commenting that the two boys were perhaps alone in having received wounds from the Tilean Wasp and lived to tell the tale. There was little laughter as the boys retreated and Kaslain pushed the heavy door closed.
The man spoke before the last echoes of iron and wood had been swallowed by the woollen mats and velvet curtains. 'Father, I have come to make my peace.' The voice had a sheathed edge about it.
Kaslain steadied his own voice. 'You can find here what you seek.'
'I know it to be true. It cannot be given by any man. You alone, father, can give me peace.' The man's words were chosen carefully.
'You are a man surrounded by much evil but perhaps we need not speak of it all. What would you have my ears hear and my heart absolve?' Kaslain repeated the ritualised phrases with no greater conviction than was usual, but his body was taut.
'Father, I wish to tell you of how I came to kill a priest.'
Kaslain's intake of breath was audible and abrasive, the extra air stabbing at his lungs. A priest! He would have to deal very carefully with the dying legend on the divan.
The legend coughed and opened his eyes. The blood staining his shaven chin underlined the eyes which stared at Kaslain. So devoid were they of any feeling that Kaslain thought the man was already dead. The priest froze in mid-gesture, as if his slightest movement might push the assassin over the edge before the all-important absolution.
The man called the Thousand Faces of Magritta struggled onto one elbow and looked straight at his audience. 'My name is Hadrian Samoracci.'
Kaslain raised an eyebrow. If the man was who he said he was, that made him the son and heir of one of the powerful merchant-noble families of northern Tilea.
'My name is Hadrian Samoracci and I have been twice bereft. The first time was long ago and does not concern the matter of which I crave absolution, except in so much as it made me what I am today. The second time, however, the second time occurred in the autumn which is only now dying. Dying as I am.'

AT FIRST I thought her to be a farmer's daughter. A simple farmer's daughter covered with earth, testament to her daily exertions in the field. She had hair the colour of the chaff she spread before the swine on the manor estate of the man who owned her. I saw her beside the road as I rode up to the manor for the first time and she fixed me with a stare which I did not understand - though I understand it now. Like knows like. Like knows like, and now she is dead. Such is the way of things and few think much about it. Just as the hawk preys on the hare and it is never the other way about, so the peasant works for the lord...
But I have not come here to waste my last breath on politics, and in truth, she was no hare. I have come here to use my last breath on the things that matter, at least to me. I have come here to spend my last breath talking of love and death.
I am a seller of death, almost a merchant you might say, or an artisan, or even a whore whose body is her only ware. I am all these things. My work takes me to strange places and I often have cause to touch the lives of the noble, wealthy and fortunate. Few men pay gold for the blood of a cobbler or silver to have a blacksmith's apprentice quietly drowned in the Reik.
The Count of Pfeildorf, a pole-cat of a man, maintained a manor house outside of the town of that name, for which he had nominal responsibility. A man had found me, found one of my men in Nuln and got a message to me: twelve ingots of Black Mountains gold for the death of the count. The gold safely in my vault, for I never extend the privilege of credit, I travelled to Pfeildorf, adopting the guise of a trapper of wolves - a subject I knew very little about, though I was to learn more.
Once in Pfeildorf, I took up residence in a boarding house of roaches and wenches and went to work. It was a simple enough matter to steal a horse and ride out to the estate each night. The count's personal security was extensive - a pole-cat but a paranoid one. His underlings were more accessible, however.
The count's chief man, castellan and gamekeeper, was a greasy pudding named Hugo. The count's flocks strayed on the hillside while Hugo plotted to increase his consumption of Bretonnian cakes, or pursued some similar activity.
For four nights I crept close to the flock, stealing a lamb. I would wrap the struggling creature in my cloak and carry it away so its noise wouldn't wake the dogs. Here my plan almost faltered for I could not bring myself to slaughter the animals with their fleece still yellow from their birthing. They were guilty of nothing. All my victims are guilty of something. Whatever you may say, you choose to be a killer's victim.
I left the lambs in my rank room where they consumed the straw mattress and soiled the floor, similar behaviour to most of the patrons of the establishment. Each morning I stood on a crate in the market and plied my new trade. A wolf trapper I was, on the trail of a rogue female, a killer from the north, a huge brute of a creature which had taken halflings from out of their houses. I made the creature into a fearsome scourge for the whole district. Many farmer's woes were no doubt erroneously blamed on this fictitious blight and some even sought to hire me to rid them of it. My fee was correspondingly high, high enough that the poor shepherds could not afford my services. You may imagine that I found the work tiring but there is an easy calm in playing out my strategies and I find great delight in the invention of tantalising detail.
Eventually it happened. Hugo waddled into the square escorted by one of the count's men. The duo approached me and, after a brief haggle over the price, which I pointedly refused to drop, engaged me to kill the wolf which had been taking their lambs.
I was given lodging in the servant's quarters on the estate, a pallet on an earthen floor. I have slept in worse places and I have lain between silken sheets. My unique profession has given me the opportunity to learn about the way others live their lives, miserable and bleak, often before I take those very lives. Take them and break them. But I am not without compassion, as you will see. As I have said, I saw the girl as I rode in and her face stayed with me, though I did not know why.
My plan was simple: to range the estate making a show of setting snares during the day and to scout by night, and decide on the best way in which to gain entrance to the count's wing. I was to be there three days, no more. Once I have devised a plan I do not like to be distracted. Thus it was that I was angered by Hugo's rousing me early on the second morning and demanding that I explain the two missing lambs, taken the night before. All of my snares lay empty and yet the animals were gone. Hurrying because I feared my mock snares would not stand close examination, I dressed and followed the track up to the flock just as the count was being served fig and pheasant breakfast in his feather bed.
I have some skill in reading prints in the ground and what I saw surprised me. In the mud near the stream where the flock drank I found signs of the abduction: here were drag marks to indicate the demise of the lambs, here a little wool caught on a thorn, here the prints of the shepherds arriving late on the scene - and everywhere were the indentations of a large wolf. The wind, already cold along the stream bed developed a cutting chill. I followed the prints until they crossed and re-crossed the stream; a smart wolf, this killer I had supposedly created. A smart wolf manifested from thin air and imagination. I could do little but wait for the night which is usually my friend.
I am not a man who frightens easily, nor one who is used to fear. As the night settled over me, as it fell gently to earth and blanketed the greens in a cobweb shroud, a bead of sweat found the scar at the base of my neck and settled there. Most foolish of all, this man, this killer who is scared of nothing, was frightened of a beast of his own creation. After a brief discussion with the shepherds, who informed me they had had this wolf problem for some months, and who, gratifyingly, were more scared than I was, I positioned myself in the low branches of a large oak which spread itself over the flock like a priest blessing the multitudes.
There was no question of my falling asleep. Such vigils are common in my profession and besides, the perch was religiously uncomfortable. I watched as the moon traversed the sky, describing a pearly slice through the low western horizon. Morning was only a few hours hence and I had long ceased jumping at the shadows of the dogs, shaggy brown brutes from kennels in Averheim. It was one of these mutts who saw her first, however, or more likely smelt her. Even though she came from downwind, we could all smell her stench. It was a smell I have smelled before, many times. When a man is about to die, when he knows he stares death in the face, he has a certain smell. It is in his breath, or comes from his skin, I don't know, I am no physician. I smelt that smell that night on the wind. When I looked down from my perch she was there.
I have seen wolves before, but only in cages, rolling, barred wagons in the streets or in fairgrounds: 'Come bait the ferocious wolf, feed a mad killer with yer own hand!' She was a killer all right, but far from being mad. She moved with determination and poise. I slithered lower in the tree, silent as she, hunters both. Her approach put me downwind of her and I was almost overpowered by the stench of death which was her musk. As in an old Kislev folk tale, I had made a lariat from heavy twine and I balanced on the low bough, watching her. She was fascinating, huge certainly, but agile and sure-footed. I imagined her yellow eyes as I watched the muscles shift beneath her flanks.
She moved quietly towards the flock. One of the dogs found the source of the smell and loped over. The well-trained mongrel bared its teeth and crouched on its forequarters, a language that the she-wolf would surely understand. As soon as she turned I was ready to spring my trap. She did not sway from her purpose, however, ignoring the dog's threat, and I detected something strange in her gait. She was hungry like a wolf, certainly, but she did not crouch low as a hunter would, walking rather at her full height past the snarling dog.
This was too much for the mongrel which threw itself at her throat, a studded collar wrapped about his own. She turned, acknowledging the brutal assault. With a flick of her neck, which might equally have been contemptuous or desperate, she flipped the attacking dog and snapped its spine against the hard ground. Her unfortunate assailant yelped and rolled away trying to straighten a body which would never be right. I say ''contemptuous or desperate'' because I could not read this strange creature, I had not the language. I should have sprung then and there but I waited, crouching in the darkness, in what could equally have been curiosity or fear.
The shepherds came then, with the other dogs. No doubt they wondered why I had done nothing, had not sprung my trap. Three young, strong men of Averland, armed with stout staves picked clean of bark during long, all-night vigils. Two more dogs, angry and frightened after the scream of their pack-mate. They would drive her off, perhaps before she took a lamb; anything else was unthinkable.
At the last minute I knew it would not be so, something in the way she moved, something in the unreadable curve of her ribs. I almost shouted a warning, but then I am no stranger to death, and these men were nothing to me. Besides, they outnumbered her. I have, I must confess, a sentimental attachment to the underdog, the lone wolf.
What followed was a lesson for a killer in killing. Again she waited until the last instant, turning as the two dogs came crashing in with their heavy skulls set in a charge. She rolled to the side and opened a gash on the flanks of the closest one with her bottom jaw, sending her victim in a scything skid down the stream bank. Before the other dog could recover she was on her feet and charging herself. She ducked under its guard and clamped her maw about its neck, spinning the animal in the air and crashing it sideways into a rock. The dog coughed once and lay still. The shepherds paused, fear and anger competing for their countenances. Anger won, as it so often does with younger men. They gripped their sticks tightly and strode in. The lariat hung loose in my hand.
She turned to look at the men and to my surprise she cowed. She looked away and lowered her tail, which flickered like a flame above her hind legs. The men rushed her and I read the signs an only instant before her ruse was revealed. The first shepherd was on his back with her paws on his chest before the second caught his brother's hand with a wild blow of his stick. The brother screamed and dropped his weapon. He brought his hand to his mouth as if the benediction of his lips might heal the shattered bones. The second shepherd turned in time to see their companion's throat rent by the wolf.
She was magnificent. I stood as I might in a theatre, watching the players enact a drama of such intensity that I dared not shift lest I disturb their concentration. The other two stood together, defensive now, not believing what they knew to be true. She circled them once, slowly, and then rushed in, felling them with an axe-like blow of her head. The three rolled on the ground and wrestled but there could be only one outcome. Eventually she shook herself free of the corpses and spun her coat like a hound who has come in from the rain. I watched, knowing somehow that there was more to see.
The wolf had hurt her hind left paw and she limped to the base of my tree. My breath was caged in my chest and I strained to keep it there. She sat against the roots and shook her coat again. The moon passed for a moment behind a cloud, or so it seemed, and suddenly I was looking at a woman, or perhaps a girl. A naked girl at the base of the tree, her shoulders slick with blood, her left foot stretched up to her face where she licked a cut on the soft skin beneath. I had stayed silent thus far but on this transformation I let the night air escape from my lungs in a rush and gasped for some to replace it. The girl's head snapped up and our eyes met, as they had met before. I understood her gaze then, as I had not before. A killer looked at a killer. Like knew like.
In an instant she rolled and before I could say anything, least of all that I intended no violence to one so magnificent, she was gone. She sped across the field, once again lupine, once again perfect. I crept back to the manor slowly, avoiding the blackest shadows, shaking my head as if to dislodge the images of the night from my memory. When I awoke late the next morning, however, they remained as clear as the day which greeted me.

AFTER THAT MY elegant plan had to be postponed and the count's security was doubled. They found the bodies of the three shepherds and the prints in the ground were clear enough that even fat Hugo could read them.
'Werewolf,' he said, grimacing as if he had put his toe into a bath too cold to sit in.
What angered me as I stood there, not far from the tree in which I had perched the night before, was the man's demeanour. An assumption of superiority over something he could never hope to understand. From that moment I decided I was on her side: wild, frightened, perfect killer over fat, tame gamekeeper. After we held a solemn meeting about the best way in which to trap the ferocious beast - my contributions were fatuous and deliberately impractical - I went to seek her.
The farmers and workers on the count's estate lived in a village outside of the walled manor, a collection of huts and thatched cottages huddled around the mill as if they wanted to take up as small an amount of the count's fertile fields as was possible. I felt eyes regard me from dark windows as I walked up, stopping periodically to beat the sticking mud from my boots with a switch of hedgerow. She was not hard to find. I asked a few questions, not to be denied, this man from the manor. The answers I got were not co-operative but the villagers said more than they meant.
I found her drawing water from the well. She saw me and dropped her bucket, ducking behind the barn. I followed as quickly as I could and this time managed to say that I meant her no harm. She knew what I knew from the way I looked at her; it is always in the eyes. She went inside the barn and I stepped in after her, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, divided by slices of light between the planks. I smelt hay and her.
The wolf's attack took me by surprise and I was lucky to have straw to fall on. She was on me and I remembered clearly enough the fate of an exposed neck to those jaws. But I am not a gormless shepherd boy. I brought my knee up into the creature's chest and gained my feet in time to meet another leaping assault. This time I pivoted on one foot and lashed out with the other. The manoeuvre cost me my balance and I once again tasted the hay but my boot connected with the wolf's ear and sent it sprawling. I leapt up, spitting dust and faced her again. She shook her muzzle, trying to dislodge the straw and a burr which had stuck there and I laughed.
'It seems we both have reason to regret this battle already.' I sounded more confident than I felt but such deceptions are my meat and drink. While we studied each other I was unclasping my cloak and searching the room for a weapon. 'Must we fight until one of us, most likely my good self, is cold meat?' There was a pitchfork holding up the thatch, wedged between two beams above my head. My pleading was having little effect and she lowered her head and crept forward into optimal pouncing range.
I watched her eyes; it is always in the eyes. Hers were yellow and savage, pools of amber malice, but there was a softness as well. I looked harder and almost fell into her trap. There was no softness, a sham designed to distract her sentimental opponent, accurately assessed by her predator's gaze. I recovered as she sprang. She was nearly quick enough, nearly, but I have been a killer longer than her.
I leapt upward, throwing my cloak in front of me and reaching for the pitchfork above my head. She flew head-first into the billowing wool and hit the ground awkwardly. As she skidded across the straw, I yanked down on the pitchfork and it came free. I crashed to the floor in a hail of straw and roof beams. The bundle of cloak and wolf thrashed about and I dealt it a heavy stabbing blow with the butt of the pitchfork. I stepped to the side as a section of the roof sagged dangerously and reversed the pitchfork, pointing the four tines accusingly at my cloak. The bundle therein was now a lot smaller and I released a breath which I did not know I had been holding in when I saw the girl's head emerge from one of the arm-holes. I made sure she remained covered in the cloak. My taste is usually restricted to women of more years and greater curves but I could not deny a certain attraction in this case. Nevertheless, I am nothing if not a gentleman killer. We crouched together in a shaft of sunlight in the corner of the barn, she rubbing a bruise on her shoulder and me working the straw from between my teeth.
Our conversation was short but enough to satisfy me that she was more afraid of her condition than any number of shepherds or farmers. I suggested she might wander farther afield on her night-inspired rampages, or perhaps wreak havoc among the deer of the forest. It seemed she had little control and I vowed to help her. We decided to make it possible for her to leave the village behind, and live somewhere a little more remote. Why? I left the village asking myself this question, suddenly unhappy, uneasy even, with the glib phrases I had made to myself about a killer knowing a killer. Certainly there was that. Perhaps I saw a little of my younger self in her savagery and I wished to help her over the hurdle from random savage into refined artist of death. Perhaps I loved her, though I doubt that. I am not so deeply sentimental.
Whatever the reason, I had determined to help her and would have proceeded along the simple course we had devised, returning then to my employer's task. Except that things did not happen that way, holy father. Another character enters on the scene of this little tale of mine, revered Kaslain, and writes a chapter whose authorship I will rue until my death.
That character and that author is you.

KASLAIN STOOD QUICKLY, his heavy robe dropping from his knees to brush the flagstones. The killer on the divan looked at him.
'I have watched you as I told the tale and you knew from the beginning that it was your story, yet you listened. I had counted on your vanity, as sure a thing as any.' He smiled, mouth like a wolfs.
The arch-lector began a brisk walk towards the chamber door, the walk of a man who craves haste but dares not reveal his need. He stopped in response to a noise from behind him and whipped his head around. The man was no longer on the couch. In fact, the priest could not see him at all. A large stain of blood marked that he had lain there and a soft red pillow of flesh, a kidney!
Kaslain stared at it trying to understand. His mind groped in an unfriendly darkness. The kidney was too small to be a man's - a goat's? How many times had he sacrificed a young goat to Sigmar on this holy day or that? He remembered the squeal of the squirming animal and the blood, always so much blood...
The understanding of the ruse came upon Kaslain slowly but powerfully, not to be denied. His face twisted in alarm and he spun around. The assassin stood between him and the velvet bell-pull which would summon his guards. He had divested himself of his bloody cloak and stood, whole and hearty, his face sporting a victor's smile. Kaslain lunged for the door and the killer dropped low, lashing out with the toe of his boot and catching the priest in the knee. The aged lector met the flagstones heavily and rolled beneath the gilt velvet curtains.
The Thousand Faces of Magritta stepped forward and gave the curtains an authoritative yank. They fell, collecting in a heap above the struggling priest. The assassin rolled the priest with his boot, several times, until he was cocooned in velvet. He gave the region containing Kaslain's head a solid kick and the muffled cries ceased altogether. He then straddled the velvet grub and sat heavily. For a second, bizarrely, he adopted the posture of a knight on horseback, hands on imaginary reigns and rocked his hips to the imaginary rhythms of an absent charger. This seemed to amuse him for a short moment but then his face turned serious. He reached into his boot, removing a short stiletto. The Tilean Wasp leant forward with this sting and began to cut a small window in the velvet wrapping. Eventually he exposed the arch-lector's distressed face and made a warning gesture with the blade, telling the priest that he would end his life at the slightest cry for help.
'Your impatience is disappointing, Kaslain, and now you will not hear the end of my story. A story which you wrote parts of yourself, although I am writing this chapter, the last chapter in which you appear. I told you that I must confess how I had killed a priest. You are that priest, though I no longer have time to tell you why you must die.'

MAGNUS CHANGED EYES at the keyhole but otherwise stayed firmly in place, his back bent, his damp palms flat against the wooden doors. He watched the man sit on the arch-lector and angle his knife. He watched as the man slid it into the priest's neck, muffling the victim's scream with a handful of curtain. He watched the man turn and stretch his neck while he looked about for his escape route.
Magnus had seen and heard it all and had not been able to interfere. He hadn't been able to move, until now. But when he began to move he found himself moving the wrong way, his hands on the handle of the inner chamber rather than his feet fleeing down the marble hall. He watched, as if he were still an observer, his hand as it turned the handle. He drew breath when he saw the chamber within as if he had expected that the keyhole might have been showing a different reality to the one which now greeted him.
The assassin sprang to his feet. He moved towards Magnus, measuring his steps, all the time looking at the boy as if he were judging the distance between them so he might spring. After confirming Magnus was alone he gently closed the door and rested his back against it.
Magnus stared at the double line of blood on the curtain where the killer had cleaned his blade, until his concentration was absorbed by need to force air in and out of his lungs.
'The boy with the bucket?'
'Yes. Yes, but...'
'But you are more than that? Yes I am sure. We are each more than we seem.' A pause. 'You are not injured.'
'So it seems.'
A breath. 'What will you do now?'
'I will finish my story. Isn't that why you came in here?'

EVENTS DID NOT follow my script. The players had their own motives and each proved to be his own author. Even my own script might have been written by another. How often had I been distracted from my work in such a way?
Hugo had a cousin who was a priest of Sigmar. He came, a young wisp of a man with straw for hair and a child's chin. He announced that he would watch the animals by night and he would catch this killer. He had all the eagerness of a soldier before his first battle but he had something else also, the bearing of an officer, though he had no troops. We were his troops and he strode among us imagining that we bowed and saluted.
The shepherds laughed at him, having had little to laugh at in the past weeks. Hugo made an announcement to the effect that his own authority was extended to his young cousin for as long as the priest chose to stay with us at the estate. The priest smiled a tight smile and gave a stiff nod.
He stationed himself in the field on the third night of his stay. He had brought a tome which he consulted before he took up his vigil, then he donned his white robe and strode into the night.
During this time I had not been idle. I had held two further conversations with the girl and each time she had agreed she would leave that night. Each morning I had discovered her, working in the field as if we had never spoken. I do not know for sure why she stayed, killing lambs all the while, but perhaps it was because she had found in me some kinship, some kindness which she would not willingly abandon.
We are complicated creatures and although I do not like interruptions to my plans I cannot say that I was not gratified to have her stay. I was unconcerned about the priest and here it was that I made my mistake - not that he was any danger to anybody, but it was his death which ultimately defeated my strategy.
They brought his body back, damp with dew and bent out of shape. No one had seen the boy die, the shepherds now being far too scared to share the night with the sheep, but the jaw marks left little doubt as to his killer. After that, events moved with an undeniable momentum. The count used his influence to contact Arch-Lector Kaslain in Nuln and appeal to the same sense of pomp and occasion which I was later to employ myself.
Kaslain came south with soldiers and witch hunters and they found her, as I knew they would. The soldiers went among the villagers with clubs and burning irons. Kaslain did not frighten me, though his performance had the desired effect on the peasants and staff at the manor. They bowed and scraped to his face and made furtive warding gestures to his back.
Though their methods were crude, they were effective enough and before Kaslain had spent two nights in the manor he had her. I would have killed him then, but I was more concerned in trying to save her. Helplessness is not a condition I am accustomed to or one which I accept lightly.
Our last conversation had been held in the same barn as our first. I was angry, fearful for her safety and frustrated by her stubbornness. She reacted badly to my anger and the meeting did not go well. I wish now it had been otherwise. I have never been skilled at recognising the actions of fate nor at accepting its whims. I tried to convince her in any way I could think of to leave but I knew it was for me that she stayed.
They came and found her and stuck her with their spears. She took three soldiers with her as I watched from among the crowd of villagers, head bowed and hooded. Her mother was there too, a woman with thin skin which showed the pattern of the blood as it flowed about her face. I never got to know her name. They lashed her to a stake and burned her at sunset. My helpless fingers dug into my wrist and I made a quiet vow.
The tattered body took some hours to burn and produced an oily smoke, which caused the onlookers to cough and shield their eyes. Kaslain spoke a prayer to Sigmar, an obscene stave full of polite hatted and self-satisfied gall, standing with one foot on the ashen skull. I killed a soldier that night, I don't know his name; it is not a deed of which I am proud. I took him as he slept and mixed my tears with his blood.
In the morning I gathered her ashes in a sack from the ruined barn and commended them to the forest.

MAGNUS REALISED THAT the assassin had finished speaking and he lifted his head. The killer was wiping his cheek with a corner of the velvet curtain, cleaning away what might perhaps have been a tear. He stood and looked directly into Magnus's eyes. The stare was not comfortable.
'So that is my tale,' said the Tilean Wasp. 'Here lies perhaps my greatest kill and I feel little satisfaction. You are almost a priest: can you tell me why?'
Magnus chose his words carefully, grinding his sweating fingers against each other. 'I do not wish, sir, to be one of your kills, even one of the least. I have seen what happens to those who hear your confessions.' Dawn clawed at the crack beneath the door. 'Perhaps, however, I may venture, you have seen a little of what others see in death, or perhaps you know that you cannot but kill, even if you would rather love?'
A moment of contemplation, the time it might take for a tear to fall from an eye to the flagstones if there was such a tear, no more.
'Nonsense,' the assassin said plainly. 'I go now to pursue my lucrative trade, leaving you as the only one to have seen me as I am and live.'
'Why?'
'Because I may. You ask a lot of questions, boy.'
'I... I have another. What of the count? He still lives.'
'I go to visit him now. What shall my rase be this time?'
'Sir, how am I to counsel you in these matters, one who can even disguise himself as himself?'

HUGO BEAT UPON the Count of Pfeildorf's door with fat knuckles. Two men were standing there in the late morning, the stone chamber which attended the count's inner door consumed by their combined bulk. Hugo's girth was natural but the other figure wore the hooded robes of a priest of Sigmar, and judging by their ornate finery an important one at that.
'Awaken, sir!' the wheedling voice pleaded, Hugo a man trapped between two superiors whose wishes were in conflict. 'I would not disturb you, sir, so early in the day, but I'm sure you would wish to receive so esteemed a visitor.'
The answer from within a bark of an inquiry.
'Who is it, sir? Why Kaslain, the Arch-Lector.'