THE REIKERBAHN BUTCHER
or
The Case of the Scarlet Cell

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Redacted by order of the Grand Theogonist.



WHAT THEY NEEDED, Varra decided, was a nice war or plague outbreak to get things moving again.
   Things had been too slow recently. Business was bad all over. There hadn't been a decent war worthy enough of the name in months, and many of the establishments on Altdorf's legendary - or infamous, depending on which way you looked at it - Street of a Thousand Taverns had either had to lower their prices, or, worse still, relax their door policies and start allowing in the likes of halflings, dwarfs, Averlanders and even Bretonnians to tempt in enough customers to make up for the current chronic lack of free-spending, heavy-drinking mercenaries.
   The owners of the Imperial capital's bars and hostelries weren't the only ones to be feeling the pinch, of course. Things were bad down on the Reikerbahn too, Varra had heard. The gambling dens, whorehouses, weirdroot galleries and bawdy parlours there were also suffering from the lack of customers, and many a footpad and cutpurse would be finding the pickings scarce, with so few marks to go round in the ill-lit alleys and back ways of Altdorf's most crime-ridden district. Things were getting so bad in the Reikerbahn, they said, that the rogues would soon have to fall back on robbing each other.
   Not that things were any better for those in the fortune-telling business either, Varra sighed to herself Hers was a trade that did well enough when times were good, but often very well indeed when times were bad. Plague, war, famine, disorder, chaos. These were things that all brought fear and uncertainty into the minds of the inhabitants of the Empire, and, when people were afraid and uncertain, they wanted assurances of what the future was going to offer them.
   Yes, a nice little war or outbreak of plague to get business moving again, that was what the situation was crying out for. Nothing too major, of course. Maybe just another border dispute with the Bretonnians or a greenskin attack through Blackfire Pass. A Chaos incursion from the north would have been ideal, far enough away from Altdorf not to be of any real danger, but troubling enough to get people nervous and help shake some of the silver out of their purses.
   Or maybe she should get herself a gimmick. It certainly worked for that flashy Tilean bitch four doors down, Varra thought bitterly. She put kohl round her eyes, smeared brown unguent on her face, put on a half-veil and a ridiculous Araby accent, called herself Seraphina, Seer of the Desert Sands, and the customers and, more importantly, their gold and silver, just seemed to pour in. In Varra's younger days, before her looks went, her breasts sagged and the crow's feet appeared around her eyes, she had always been willing to oblige those who still believed the old mercenary superstition that it was good luck to bed a fortune teller before setting off to battle, but even that extra money-making opportunity wasn't open to her any longer.
   Soon, she knew, she would probably have to give up her prime spot here on Street of the Fortune Tellers, and accept her eventual fate down in the Reikerbahn, selling fortunes and lucky charms for a few miserable coppers a time to drunken river-barge sailors and the down-on-their luck denizens of the Imperial capital's poorest and most infamous district.
   The rattling of the beaded curtains at the entrance to her premises and the sound of soft footsteps in the corridor outside told her she would be able to put off that fate for at least one more day yet. She had a customer, and now it was time to get down to work. She hurriedly threw another handful of herbs, cut with just a pinch of powdered weirdroot, into the incense burner on the rug in front of her, adding to the thick, smoky, scented ambience in the place that customers always seemed to expect. She pulled the cowl of her cape up and bent her head down, pretending to be deep in mystical contemplation, as the customer entered the room.
   'Take a seat, my friend,' she said, deliberately not looking up, indicating the patched and threadbare silk cushion in front of her. 'Help yourself to a mug of good Reikland wine, if it so pleases you. Three silvers to find out what the fates have in store for you and those dearest to you.'
   A jug of cheap, heavily-watered wine and a dirty clay mug lay on the rug by the silk cushion, a small dish beside them. As everyone knew, it was customary to leave a copper or two in payment for the wine. In the fortune-telling business, especially during lean times like these, every little extra helped.
   The customer remained standing. The sound of their heavy, ragged breathing filled the small room. A chill of genuine premonition dread suddenly flashed through Varra's mind. She looked into the face of her last customer of the night, and opened her mouth to scream.
   Something bright flashed through the air, but it wasn't silver.
   Something red spilled across the rug, but it wasn't wine.

'THIS WAY, HERR Konniger,' said the sergeant at arms of the Altdorf city watch solicitously, indicating the way through the press of curious onlookers. City watchmen formed dual lines on either side, pushing back the crowd that had gathered outside the fortune teller's premises.
   'Make way!' bellowed the sergeant to the crowd, in a manner considerably less solicitous. 'Make way for Herr Konniger. Make way for the great gentleman sage!'
   Casually swung cudgel blows pushed back those onlookers not initially deterred by the watchman's commands. A few people on the fringes of the crowd broke away, running off to spread the big news that would soon bring even more bloodthirsty vultures flocking to the murder scene. If Zavant Konniger, the famous sage-detective of Altdorf, had been brought in to investigate, then it must be something notably gruesome indeed.
   Konniger glanced at the excited faces of the crowd. 'The good citizens of Altdorf,' he mused aloud, to no one in particular. 'I've been to the tomb-cities of the Land of the Dead and encountered carrion creatures there that were less ghoul-hungry than the inhabitants of our fair city.'
   He pushed through the beaded curtain entrance to the room beyond. Vido, his halfling man servant, trailed along in his wake, scowling at their surroundings. There were streets like this in every city in the Old World, and Vido could never understand why. Humans were always in such an inexplicable hurry to find out what the future held in store for them. In Vido's experience, especially since he entered Konniger's service, the future just contained all sorts of nasty, gruesome unpleasantness, and Vido was in no hurry to find out what any of it might be.
   Live for the moment and only worry about all the bad stuff when it finally turned up on your doorstep, that was the only way to look at things, as far as Vido was concerned.
   They entered the short corridor beyond the curtain. Konniger sniffed the air with his impressive eagle beak of a nose. Vido smelled it too. The smell of stale wine and cheap incense, but with something else underlying it: the heavy tang of blood and raw meat, serving as a warning of what lay in the chamber beyond.
   The warning still wasn't enough to fully prepare Vido for what was waiting there for them.
   The corpse of the fortune teller lay sprawled on the floor, her robes ripped apart, exposing her body and the violations that had been inflicted on it. She had been gutted from groin to throat, her ribcage brutally pulled apart, her vital organs torn out of her. Some of them lay on the ground, trampled either by the feet of the killer or, more probably, by the boots of however many blundering watchmen had been in and out of the place before Konniger's arrival. The remains of other organs were stuck to the walls, smeared there amongst the thick, dried splatters of blood that had resulted from the killer's butcher work on the body of his victim.
   The woman's face was a mask of gore. The mouth was wrenched open in a silent scream. The lower jaw had been almost completely torn away, and a single, shuddering glance told Vido the tongue inside was gone. More than that, he didn't care to look at.
   Konniger kneeled down beside the body, gently laying a hand on the woman's face. At first, Vido thought he was inspecting the ravaged ruins of her face for clues, but then he heard Konniger murmuring words under his breath, and realised his master was intoning a well-known prayer of comfort for the souls of the violently-slain. Before he had become Altdorf's renowned sage-detective, Zavant Konniger had a priest in the service of the Church of Sigmar.
   'More light, Vido, if you please.'
   Vido searched in his doublet pockets for a tinderbox, striking a flame from it to light one of the lamps lying on the floor. He held it up, spilling out light to better illuminate the most horrific details of the crime scene. Konniger went to work, poking and prying amongst the wounds on the corpse. The compassion of the one-time priest of Sigmar was gone, replaced by the clinical and keenly analytical mind of the sage-detective.
   'Hmmm. The tongue's gone, of course. That much is obvious. No immediate sign of it amongst the other removed offal and fleshy detritus.'
   More poking. More prodding. 'Ahh… the eyes are gone, too. Be sure to make a note of that, Vido.'
   Vido did as instructed, glad of the distraction. He breathed heavily through his mouth, trying to avoid the abattoir stench that filled the small room. The breakfast of ham, eggs and toasted muffins he'd happily consumed only an hour ago rumbled uneasily in his stomach. On past experience in helping his master in his investigations, Vido knew they might be here for hours yet. He could only hope his restless breakfast would remain in place for the same length of time.
   Then, abruptly, Konniger rose to his feet, making the traditional hammer sign blessing of Sigmar over the corpse, a clear signal that his inspection was now over.
   'Come, Vido. Our work here is finished. Time to report back to our potential new patron.'
   Vido followed his master out, practically running for the door and the promise of the reasonably clean Altdorf air outside.
   Konniger paused in the corridor, looking at his manservant. 'A dead fortune teller, her eyes and tongue missing. What does that suggest to you?'
   Knowing what was expected of him, Vido stumbled for an answer. Very little of his apparent cluelessness had to be feigned.
   'Uuuh…'
   'It suggests perhaps a killer who is more than some mad or random butcher,' continued Konniger, answering his own question, as was his habit. 'It suggests purpose, Vido. A fortune-teller sees the future with her eyes, and speaks of that future with her tongue. Do you see now where this could be leading us?'
   Vido nodded dumbly, not having a clue what his master was talking about, and all too willing to forget the whole business of missing eyes and tongues.
   They were outside now, moving through a crowd that had increased in size in the time since they had been inside. There were more watchmen there too, several of them pushing and cudgelling the mob aside to clear a path through for the two of them. An excited murmur rose at the appearance of Konniger, adding to the crowd's bloodthirsty speculation on the exact details of whatever terrible fate they thought might have befallen the old fortune-teller.
   'The Reikerbahn Butcher,' hissed a voice in the crowd. 'Sigmar protect us, it's the work of the Butcher! He's come back from the grave to kill us all!'
   This piece of speculation caused the murmurs of the crowd to increase accordingly, and brought a new note of fear into their collective voice. Konniger shot a reproachful look at the watchman sergeant. One of his men, or perhaps this fat fool himself, had clearly told someone in the crowd something of what had happened to the fortune-teller, and the collective imagination of the mob would embellish the grisly details to its own morbid satisfaction.
   'Continue your investigation, sergeant, and send word to the Temple of Morr for the body to be collected and the usual funerary rites conducted. Tell your superiors they will have my thoughts on the matter before the end of the day.'
   The man nodded enthusiastically, barely able to contain his delight at not being saddled with the problems of investigating such a ghoulish, and frankly unprofitable, case. After all, Vido asked himself, how were the brave patrolmen of the Altdorf city watch supposed to collect their usual quota of bribes and extortion dues if they were all out hunting for the murderer of some useless old hag of a fortune-teller?
   Konniger pushed past the man, ignoring his salute, and arrived at the decorated carriage that had first brought them to the Street of the Fortune Tellers. Their new patron, a well-to-do merchant called Gustav von Hassen, stood there waiting for them, delicately holding a perfumed silk handkerchief to his nose. Vido wasn't sure if this was intended to ward off the mystic smell of death, or merely just the odour of his fellow but less prosperous Altdorfers.
   'You have viewed the cadaver, Herr Konniger?' asked von Hassen, anxiously. 'You have agreed to my offer and will take up the case on behalf of the Vigilance Committee?'
   Konniger breezed past the merchant, climbing into von Hassen's carriage as if it were the sage-detective's own property. Vido nimbly scrambled in after him. 'Take me back to my quarters,' Konniger instructed. 'There are certain research materials there I must now refer to before we proceed any further with the investigation.'
   So compelling was Konniger's manner that von Hassen's coachman carried out the command immediately, almost leaving his master stranded in the street behind the departing coach. Von Hassen climbed in, accompanied by the ever-silent figure of the handsome and pale-skinned young man who had been with him ever since he had first turned up at Konniger's home earlier that morning. 'My nephew, Sigmund,' was how the merchant had first introduced the youth, although Vido presumed the blood-tie must be on Frau von Hassen's side of the family, since there was absolutely no trace of a family resemblance between the younger man and the corpulent, ruddy-faced merchant.
   If Vido had any thoughts on any other basis of a relationship between von Hassen and this ''Sigmund'', then he wisely kept them to himself.
   'Research materials?' asked von Hassen, eagerly. 'Then you already have some notion of what kind of a fiend you may be dealing with here?'
   'Perhaps,' said Konniger. 'But I need to know more information first. Information which, to save a great deal of time and inconvenience, I was hoping you would be able to provide me with, Herr von Hassen.'
   The merchant swallowed nervously. 'Me, Herr Konniger?'
   Konniger smiled. 'Indeed. For instance, although I have heard nothing concerning such events, I am almost certain that this has not been the first such murder in the city over the last few weeks, just as I am almost certain that you, my dear Herr von Hassen, can already tell me what I need to know about these other secret killings.'
   The merchant swallowed again. Konniger smiled in satisfaction and sat back in his silk-cushioned seat. And listened, as the merchant began to talk.

KONNIGER AND VIDO had been away from Altdorf, visiting the Tilean city of Trantio, investigating the events that Konniger's biographers would later call The Case of the Screaming Statuary, when it all began several months ago. Despite his absence from the city, though, letters sent to Tilea from several of his most trusted information sources in Altdorf had kept him abreast of events back in the Imperial capital. He had a passing acquaintance with some of the events von Hassen talked about, but allowed the merchant to talk without interruption, keen to hear a version of those same events from the lips of one of their chief participants.
   'Tell me about the so-called ''Reikerbahn Butcher'' and the formation of this Citizens' Vigilance Committee of yours,' he had instructed the merchant.
   Von Hassen, eager to talk about the events that had catapulted him to his current position of almost universal popularity in the city, had been all too happy to comply.
   The Reikerbahn Butcher had been the name given to a mysterious madman who had cut a bloody swathe of murder through the poorest districts of Altdorf. Beggars, streetwalkers, drunks and petty criminals had made up the bulk of his victims, and, while his murderous exploits hadn't been exclusively confined to the Reikerbahn, it was the dark, rogue-haunted streets and alleys of that notorious waterfront district that had given him his name.
   Despite the Butcher's alarmingly high tally of victims, the city watch had been noticeably slow in their attempts to stop his murder spree. After all, whispered the watchmen in their precinct houses and the city's aristocratic overlords in their mansions and palaces, what real crime was being committed if some blood-crazed madman chose to relieve the city of the unwanted burden of some of its gallows-scum population, just as long as he confined his activities to the lower end of the city's social scale?
   As the murders continued, though, public anger intensified, and von Hassen and his now-famous Citizens' Vigilance Committee entered the picture. In a show of public-spirited altruism more or less unheard of from a member of the city's wealthy mercantile class, the man had petitioned his friends and business acquaintances and raised enough funds to form his Committee. Official permission was sought and the right people bribed. Generous rewards for information leading to the capture of the killer were posted. Weapon-carrying patrols of volunteer citizens were recruited, their task to walk the streets of the Reikerbahn at night and apprehend the Butcher at his bloody work. The Committee even went to the lengths, von Hassen whispered in the closest confidence to Konniger and Vido, of coming to a very private arrangement with none other than Vesper Klasst. Klasst was Altdorf's chief crimelord, a man whose grip on power over the city surpassed even that of Emperor Karl Franz itself, many people said. The Reikerbahn was the crimelord's personal fiefdom, and very little happened there that didn't eventually reach his ears.
   In the end, though, it had been one of the ordinary Vigilance Committee patrols that had brought about the Butcher's downfall. Alerted to the sound of screams, they had raced into a side street and caught the killer with his latest victim. The Butcher, an insanely strong madman, had turned on his would-be appre-henders and killed or maimed three of them with his bare hands before escaping into the Reikerbahn's maze of alleyways. The alarm had been raised, though, and more Vigilance patrols had closed in on the area from all sides, sealing it off from any chance of further escape. The Butcher had been caught while trying to bend the thick iron bars of a sewer gate, and, according to those who inspected the gate later, had succeeded in bending them almost two feet apart before the Vigilance patrols caught up with him.
   Apprehended, beaten half to death by the cudgels and staves of the Vigilance patrol volunteers, he was dragged in chains to Mundsen Keep, the city's chief gaol. The authorities' intentions, to reassure an angry population that they were after all doing something, was to mount a very public trial and then an even more public execution. All such plans ended after they realised just what it was they had captured.
   This was the part Konniger had been most interested in hearing, and he leaned forward to listen more closely as von Hassen's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, an evident note of fear creeping into the merchant's tone.
   The Butcher had barely been human, von Hassen told them. His broken bones had fully healed in a few short days. His teeth were like fangs, his maw like that of a beast than a man. His hands too were more like the claws of an animal, with long, black nails made of a material that could have been iron. He was never heard to speak anything remotely recognisable as a human word, and answered all his interrogators in bestial grunts and snarls. When the gaolers had stripped away the filthy rags he wore as clothing, they had found patterned marks all over his body, symbols that had been cut or even burned and branded into his skin. A priest of Sigmar was called in, and quickly confirmed what everyone else had now suspected but did not dare say aloud. The Butcher was a servant of the Ruinous Powers, his crimes revealed as some form of insane devotion to the gods of Chaos.
   No, there would be no public trial or execution for the madman, for, after his true nature was revealed, he was swiftly handed over to the untender mercies of the witch hunters.
   The witch hunters had gone to work on him with their whips and flensing knives, branding irons and thumb-screws, with all the torture devices and cruelly ingenious pain-inflicting methods at their disposal. They had broken his body many times over, but his damned soul retained its strength, and the lowermost levels of Mundsen Keep rang with the echoes of savage laughter that were all the Butcher's interrogators received back in answer to their relentless barrage of questions and demands to their victim that he repent and confess his sins.
   Finally, the Butcher's inhuman resilience had exhausted even the witch hunters' appetite for the inflicting of pain, and he had been condemned to death by the usual method decreed for those of his kind: to be burnt at the stake, his ashes collected and cursed then scattered to the winds or dumped into the cleansing waters of the River Reik.

'AND YOU ARE certain the witch hunters' sentence was carried out?' asked Konniger. 'I heard his name mentioned just as we were leaving the Street of the Fortune Tellers. Some of our fellow citizens seemed to have a worrying belief in the possibility of his return.'
   Von Hassen smiled. 'I consider myself to be a man of the people, Herr Konniger, but I know just as well as you do that an educated man shouldn't give too much credence to the superstitious mutterings of an Altdorf mob.'
   He paused for a moment, bringing out a small silver hipflask from a pocket of his richly-embroidered coat. Vido was keen for a taste of something strong and suitably fortifying to wash away the taste and memory of the air inside the fortune-teller's quarters. Von Hassen, however, took a swig from the hipflask and then replaced it back in his pocket without offering any of the rest of them a draught. Vido's sensitive nose caught a brief but exotic whiff of the hipflask's contents, but was unable to place the scent anywhere amongst his halfling's customary prodigious knowledge of the Empire's many different kinds of strong spirits and liqueurs.
   'No, believe me, Herr Konniger. The Butcher is surely dead. We of the Citizens' Vigilance Committee were denied all access to the beast after he had been identified as a servant of the Ruinous Powers,' said von Hassen, making the traditional sign of the hammer blessing at his mention of the Lords of Chaos. 'But certain stories still filtered out from Mundsen Keep about what was happening in there, and we were sent official word by the witch hunters that the madman had been executed.'
   'And this was how long ago?' asked Konniger.
   'Two months or so ago, or perhaps a little longer.'
   'And yet your Committee haven't disbanded after the original purpose of its formation was achieved?'
   'The patrols were ended and their licences to bear arms on the city streets rescinded immediately after the Butcher's capture,' explained von Hassen. 'Myself and several others still felt, however, that there was still some need for an organisation such as the Citizens' Vigilance Committee. Altdorf is a large and often dangerous place, and the resources and fortitude of the city watch are sometimes found to be…. well, perhaps ''limited'' might be the best term to use.'
   Vido barely suppressed a laugh. If by ''limited'', the merchant meant lazy, brutal, corrupt and sometimes almost as much a threat to the citizens of Altdorf as the footpads, robbers, cutpurses and murderers the watch were supposed to be protecting them from, then, yes, ''limited'' was indeed the very best word to use.
   'And the murder of one impoverished old fortune-teller is enough to draw the Committee's attention and make it vote to go to the not inconsiderable expense of engaging my services?' asked Konniger, with an air of mock innocence.
   Von Hassen fidgeted with the jewelled rings on his fingers. Vido had noticed them earlier, the former thief in him immediately doing an estimate of their approximate total worth. Whatever manner of trade the merchant was engaged in, business was clearly prospering at present. The wealth on show on just one of those fingers would probably cover a month or more of Konniger's standard fee arrangements.
   'As you've already ascertained, Herr Konniger,' answered von Hassen, 'this has not been the first such murder in the city, although it's the first one that will be spoken of openly. I'm afraid I can't tell you how I came by the information - certain vital and secret confidences are involved - but I know for a fact that there have been four other such murders in the city over the last month. You're aware of the recent death of Archlector Heiggler, for example?'
   'Of course. He died alone and at bed-prayer in his private quarters in the cathedral palace. His heart gave out, according to the Church's official Proclamation of Mourning,' answered Konniger.
   Von Hassen licked his lips, his voice dropping to a quiet whisper again. 'The archbishop died in the House of Sighs, in the bed of one of the employees of that establishment. They were both found together, brutally slain. The archbishop's heart had been torn out and taken by the killer.'
   Konniger nodded in understanding. The House of Sighs was one of Altdorf's most exclusive bordellos. Coincidentally, on the same day the archbishop's death had been announced, the city watch, assisted by priests and even Templars from the Church of Sigmar, had mounted a crusading raid on the House of Sighs, declaring the place to be a danger to the moral dignity of the good citizens of Altdorf. The establishment's owner, the formidable Fraulein Heidi Flampt, and her employees, had been herded into caged wagons and transported away to imprisonment in some far distant nunnery, where they would be rigorously educated in the righteous and moral ways of the Faithful of Sigmar. The good citizens of Altdorf, some of whom would surely have sampled the pleasures of the House of Sighs for themselves at some time or other, had sent them on their way, lining the streets and hurling jeering insults and handfuls of mud and dung at them as the wagons rumbled past.
   'The Church has always been adept at keeping its own house in order,' noted Konniger neutrally. 'And the other deaths?'
   Von Hassen nervously licked his lips again. 'Three of them, all within the space of a week and a half. All of them occurring within the walls of the Colleges of Magic.'
   Vido almost fell off his seat at this piece of news. Altdorf's famous Colleges of Magic contained the greatest repositories of magical lore in all the Old World, and were generally held to be the most impregnable locations in the whole city, far more secure than even the Imperial Palace itself. Mere men guarded the walls and gates of the Emperor's residence, but other, far stranger and more dangerous guardians kept watch over the boundaries of the Colleges of Magic.
   The inhabitants of the Reikerbahn's thieves' dens lay awake at night dreaming of the untold riches and priceless sorcerous items stored within the colleges' treasure houses. Many optimistic and foolhardy thieves had tried their luck over the years. None of them, as far as Vido knew, had ever succeeded. Or been heard of again, frankly. Their fates were something best not thought of, although Vido had heard certain stories about sorcerous experiments conducted on those unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the magicians there, with the outside world and the guardians of the city's law and order none the wiser about some of the darker things that went on behind the closed doors of the Colleges of Magic.
   The idea that some nameless killer could have penetrated the Colleges' invisible defences not once but on three separate occasions in so short a period of time was almost unthinkable.
   'Yes, three deaths,' repeated von Hassen. 'Three of the Colleges' most senior practitioners. In all three cases, no magical alarms were tripped, no hint of the killer's passage in or out of the buildings was detected.'
   'And the manner of the victims' deaths?'
   'Similar to that of the archbishop and the remains of that poor fortune-teller,' confirmed von Hassen, his voice dropping even further, to the level of a horrified whisper. 'Torn to shreds and inhumanly violated. In at least one of the cases, the victim's skull was pulled apart, and the brains inside removed. Consumed, I was told, according to some of the evidence found at the scene.'
   Konniger calmly took in all this information. 'Even supposing all this were true, it seems strange that the College masters would do nothing to defend themselves and their kind from this mysterious enemy.'
   'They do nothing, because they can do nothing,' replied the merchant, staring at Konniger with an eager intensity. 'With all their magical abilities, they are powerless to stop or even identify the killer. Go to the Colleges of Magic, Herr Konniger. Knock on their doors and enquire about the whereabouts of the college masters. You will be told they are indisposed and are unable to receive you at present. The truth is, they are afraid. Those who have not fled the city have retreated into their innermost lairs, surrounding themselves with the most powerful magical defences their abilities can command. They will not come out again, and those who have already fled will not return, until they are all assured that the threat to them has passed.'
   Von Hassen broke off, taking comfort again in the contents of his silver flask. Outside, the city rolled past. They were crossing the Reik now at the Ostlander Bridge, just about to climb the cobbled slope of the Volker Weg towards Konniger's town-house home.
   'You see, of course, the pattern that is developing now, Herr Konniger?'
   The answer was immediate. 'A holy man of the Church of Sigmar, three senior members of the Colleges of Magic and now a devotee from the Street of Fortune-Tellers. If everything you have told me is true, then someone is killing magic-users in Altdorf.'
   'Then you understand exactly,' said von Hassen with a smile of satisfaction. 'The Church and the Colleges can take care of their own, of course, but who will protect the ordinary Altdorfer from this killer? Last week it was the members of the Colleges of Magic the fiend was stalking. Today, it was a humble fortune-teller. Tomorrow, it might be an even more humble herbalist or charm-seller, or, after that, the ordinary people who buy such things. It is like the case of the Reikerbahn Butcher, Herr Konniger. How many of our humblest and most defenceless citizens must die before the authorities finally sit up and take notice?'
   'You argue a powerful case, Herr von Hassen,' said Konniger, as the coach drew up outside his home. 'Consider the services of myself and my manservant to be at your Committee's disposal. I will begin my investigations immediately.'

THEY STOOD IN the street and watched as the coach drove away.
   'An interesting man, our new patron. Tell me, Vido, does he strike you at all as a very likely champion of the people?'
   Vido shrugged. 'Not going by all the sparklers on those fingers. You could feed every beggar and street-waif in Altdorf for a lifetime, and hire enough mercenaries to clean out the Reikerbahn in a night, with the fortune he was wearing today.'
   Konniger nodded, keeping his own opinion to himself. 'Ah, yes, the rings. What did you notice about them?'
   Vido thought about it for a moment. He had a thief's customary good memory for the sight of wealth that had been flashed before his eyes. Added to that was the extra memory recall skills Konniger had taught him. Concentrating, Vido tried to remember what he had seen on the merchant's fingers.
   'A big gold ring with an amethyst stone on the left index finger… next to it, a pair of plain platinum bands, although one of them had a dragon's head on it, with maybe ruby chips set in as eyes… on the left index finger, there was a silver band inlaid with gold scrolling, and with a cluster of jade stones set in it… something similar on the right index figure, except the one there had one of those big, fancy Araby fire-rubies set in it…'
   Konniger nodded in approval. 'Very good, Vido, but now think again. Except this time, don't tell me what you see. Instead, tell me what you don't see.'
   Anyone else might have been confused by the suggestion, but Vido had been with Konniger for long enough to make some sense of his riddles. The halfling closed his eyes, concentrating, his mind trying to remember what his eyes had already seen. Suddenly, it came to him.
   'His right ring finger, his signet ring finger. There was nothing on it! It was the only one of his fingers not wearing a ring!'
   Konniger smiled. 'Better and better. Now, if you didn't see a ring there, then what else did you see?'
   Vido thought about it again, concentrating harder, using all the memory recall tricks his master had laboured long to teach him. Proper observation is vital, Konniger had always said, but what was the point in observing every minute detail if you were later unable to remember what it was you had seen?
   'There was no ring, but there was the mark of the ring there, on the flesh of his finger. The mark of something he must wear a lot, except he didn't have it on today.'
   They were through the main door of the house now, Konniger shrugging off his cape and, as was his daily habit, throwing it over the arbalester bust of Magnus the Pious that stood on a teakwood bookcase in the hallway. Later, when Konniger had retired to his study, Vido would retrieve it, brush it down and return it to its usual hanging place.
   The sage-detective was already halfway up the stairs and heading towards his study before Vido had time to take off his own cloak. 'Excellent observation, Vido,' he called back down to his manservant, pausing on the staircase. 'But observation is only the servant of deduction. Tell me, what would a man like Herr Gustav von Hassen normally be expected to wear on that finger?'
   'A signet ring, probably,' Vido decided. 'Something flashy with his family crest on it, that he'd probably had specially made for him. Or maybe something to show which one of the Imperial merchants guilds he was affiliated to.'
   'Yes,' nodded Konniger. 'Something to show where his loyalties lay, whether it be to family or guild. He does wear such a ring, but, for whatever reasons of his own, he had taken it off before meeting us today. Think about that, Vido, and remember to be on your guard in his presence, should we meet with him again.'
   With that, Konniger was gone, retreating towards his study.
   'It'll be midday in an hour or so, sir. Will you be requiring lunch in your study?' called up Vido.
   The answer came back down to him. 'Just a light lunch, I think. A little meat and bread, and some wine. Nothing too heavy, since we'll be back out later this evening.'
   'Anywhere special?' Vido tried to sound enthusiastic, knowing just how often Konniger's cases led them to the most squalid or most forbidden regions of Altdorf.
   'Someplace where you should feel right at home, Vido,' came the reply, an unmistakable note of amusement in the sage-detective's voice. 'We'll be making a brief stopover in a place near the Kaiserplatz, but, after that, we're off to Mundsen Keep.'

THE KILLER WAS pleased with its latest acquisitions. Added to the others it had collected, it had increased its power immeasurably in the last few days. The heart of the holy man, the minds of the three spellcasting weaklings, and now the eyes and tongue of the fortune-teller witch, and the blood and souls of all of them. Each one added to its growing strength, added to the power of its new body, as it took the souls of its victims and made their power its own. Soon, no weakling spellcaster would be able to harm it. Its new skin was black and iron-hard, able to harmlessly deflect the power of most magics cast against it. The brains of the three magicians, scooped out and eaten raw and bloody, had given it this new ability, just as the consumed blood, soul and heart of the holy man would protect it from the spells of the witch hunters and their brethren amongst the priesthood of the hated man-god Sigmar. The items it had taken from the witch protected it from the mystic gaze of her kind. No spellcaster or prayer-mumbler could see it with their sorcerous farsight, or speak any words of divination about it.
   There were many kinds of spellcasters in the city, of course, and other items it could take from them, but patience was not a quality its patron lord looked favourably upon, and the blood-hungry thing that the killer shared its new body with gnawed angrily on the stuff of its soul, demanding it hurry up and complete its mission of vengeance.
   Dimly, the killer could still remember a time when it had still been human. It had been a soldier or mercenary, although what its name had been, or what lord or cause it might once had served, was now long forgotten. There had been a battle in some far-off cold and northern place. It had fought well. Too well, as such things are judged by mere humans. A battle-madness had taken possession of him, and he had fought with an insane strength and fury, killing all around him, friend and foe alike. Finally, only he and his inhuman foes had remained alive on the battlefield. They attacked, cutting him down, losing another dozen or more of their number in the process. They had spared his life, though, if ''spared'' could ever be the way to describe what they had done to him next. The favour of the Blood Lord was with this one, they fearfully whispered amongst themselves after witnessing the unholy fury of his battle-madness, and so they had set about the bloody business of making him one of their own.
   They had tied him down and gone to work on him with all the boundlessly cruel imagination of their kind. They cut away his manhood and hammered iron spikes into the ends of his fingers, transforming his hands into the claws of a beast. They had smashed out his teeth and replaced them with fangs pulled from the mouths of their own dead. They had wrenched apart his jaws and mutilated his face, stitching it back together to resemble their own bestial features. He had screamed for mercy, pleaded for death, but neither had been forthcoming. They had cut and burned the symbols of their god into the flesh of his body. Then, when they had finished, they had let him go, releasing him to find whatever fate the Blood Lord had decreed for his new follower.
   He had wandered south, to this place, the great city on the banks of the Reik, drawn by some secret call. Once here, he had gone about his business, carrying out what he believed to be his duty to his new patron god. They had caught him eventually, of course, imprisoning and torturing him, but he understood now that this further ordeal had all been part of Lord Khorne's plan for him.
   They had broken his body, but his soul belonged to Lord Khorne, and that they could never take. Lying on his cell floor on the night before his appointed execution, his smashed and useless limbs bound in chains, he had prayed to the Master of the Skull Throne. His lord had been listening, and had responded to his chosen follower's prayer.
   The voice, more cold than the dank flagstones it seemed to seep forth from, had spoken to him from out of the darkness of the lightless cell. It told him what he must do, telling him the full horror of the ordeal he must undergo next, but also telling him of the glories that would soon be his forever afterwards.
   He had done as Lord Khorne had commanded, undergoing the ordeal, joining with the other, willingly submitting to the agonies of his bloody baptism of rebirth.
   He had been human once, and then something less than human. Now he was something different again, something far greater and more terrible than any mere human. The favour of Lord Khorne was with him indeed. He was now set on the path to true daemonhood. All he had to do to take his first significant steps on that path was deal with the coven of the Blood God's most hated enemies that were hidden in the city, the same coven responsible for his own capture and imprisonment.
   With his new farsight senses gained from the eyes of the fortuneteller witch, he could sense their presence in the city. Hiding in their mansions and counting-houses, weaving their foolish plots and schemes against his lord.
   The knowledge of their presence awoke the anger of the thing inside the killer. It screamed in silent rage, pushing against the restraints of its new and unfamiliar flesh-bound prison. The killer quelled its screams with a single, harsh command. His control over the other was getting better and better, another sign that Lord Khorne's favour was with him.
   Patiently, the killer bent himself to the task at hand, sharpening his new finger-blades against the flesh-shorn skull of one of the weaklings who had inhabited the house that had now become his new lair.

MUNDSEN LUNTZ WAS neither a happy nor a popular man. He was not a popular man, because, for the last twenty-two years, he had been assistant chief gaoler at Mundsen Keep. Mundsen was not his real first name, of course, but that was what everyone called him, to his face, at least. Mundsen greatly suspected they called him other, less polite, things behind his back. No one liked a gaoler, Mundsen knew. They were, like watchmen, witch hunters and Imperial tax collectors, a seemingly necessary evil of life. And, although he didn't know it, the fact that Mundsen had the charm, wit, intellect and, most crucially, the personal hygiene of a sewer rat, was also an important reason for his unpopularity with his fellow Altdorfers.
   He wasn't a happy man either. By his reckoning, he'd spent longer in Mundsen Keep than just about every prisoner in the place, and, unlike any of them, had little chance of escape or remission. Like the condemned prisoners kept in the lowest levels, or the lifers in their west tower, he was stuck in that place for the rest of his life. No, gaoler-work was all he knew and all he was good at, so that was what he was stuck doing.
   There were compensations, of course. Bribery and corruption were a way of life in any Old World jailhouse, and Mundsen Keep was certainly no exception. The families of prisoners often bribed gaolers to give their incarcerated loved ones better treatment, more food or even clean water. For a small price, messages could be smuggled in and out of the Keep, so that bankrupt merchants and imprisoned ganglords alike could carry on their business uninterrupted while being detained at his Imperial Majesty's pleasure. For a larger price, certain doors could be left unlocked and gaolers bribed to be looking the other way at certain crucial moments, making a prisoner's escape all that more easy. For a larger price still, deaths could be arranged within the walls of the Keep, although that was a service that Mundsen Luntz no longer offered to even his most select customers, not since that time when…
   'Ah, Herr Luntz. Just the man we were looking for.'
   Luntz swallowed his mouthful of ale the wrong way at the sound of that voice. He fell off his stool, coughing and spluttering. Noticeably, none of the other patrons in the bar rushed to help him stopping from choking to death. The Stout Cudgel, situated near the central city watch building just off the Kaiserplatz, was popular with watchmen, which more or less ensured that no one else ever went there. Even here, though, amongst his fellow members of Altdorf's law enforcement community, Luntz wasn't a popular figure. Too many times had the watchmen here caught some villain and delivered them into Luntz's care, only to see the same criminal inexplicably back on the streets weeks or even days later.
   Luntz looked up, already knowing what he was going to see. The stern features of Zavant Konniger stared back down at him. That wretched little gallows-scum manservant of Herr High-and-Mighty Konniger lurked in the background, smirking.
   'H-herr Konniger!' spluttered Luntz, climbing back to his feet, doing his best to ignore the sniggers of amusement from the tables around him. Konniger was known here, and nodded a few polite greetings to some of the regulars. There were still plenty of good men amongst the city watch, men who provided Konniger with information, or who occasionally did him services in return for any unofficial help or advice he might have given them in the past.
   'No need to be alarmed,' said Konniger. 'At least, not this time. All I want from you is a small favour.'
   The occupants of the other tables deliberately turned their attention away as Konniger settled himself on the seat beside Luntz. A mug of wine and a plate of bread and sausage appeared as if by magic on the table in front of the sage-detective. The owner of The Stout Cudgel was a former sergeant in the city watch, and owed the life of one of his daughters to the success of one of Konniger's investigations. Konniger politely sampled the food and drink, nodding in thanks at his host.
   Luntz almost started choking again. 'A favour, Herr Konniger?'
   'Consider it a return favour, Luntz, if that helps matters any. For helping you keep your job, and maybe for keeping you from becoming an inmate in your own prison.'
   Luntz blanched at the memory. Two years ago, one of the sage-detective's cases had centred on Mundsen Keep. As a sideline of the main investigation, Konniger had uncovered the full extent of Luntz's extra-curricular financial activities within the prison.
   'I told you before, Herr Konniger. I don't do that kind of stuff any more. I'm a changed man. I—'
   Konniger held up a hand, commanding silence. 'I'm not interested in the miracle of your supposed reformed character, Luntz. What I am interested in is the execution of the criminal called the Reikerbahn Butcher, two months ago.'
   The colour drained out of the gaoler's face. A not inconsiderable feat, thought Vido, watching with interest, considering how red-faced the fat, smelly idiot was normally.
   Luntz's voice dropped to a horrified whisper. 'The scarlet cell! You know about that?'
   Konniger smiled. 'Not as much as I'd like to. That's why you're going to tell me all about it. And show it to me too, if possible.'
   'But it ain't possible, Herr Konniger. Outsiders ain't allowed into the Keep, not without a letter of permission from Governor Krantz. And when the witch hunters ordered the cell sealed up, they said—'
   'Vido, do you still have that letter? The one I was drafting to the city authorities? The one concerning some of the matters I uncovered during our last visit to Mundsen Keep?'
   'I've got it right here, sir,' answered Vido making a show of fumbling about in a pocket containing nothing other than his tinderbox, a few coins and an extra throwing knife. 'If you want to check it and sign it now, I can deliver it in person to the Alderman's office or the city watch first thing tomorrow morning.'
   'Maybe another time, Vido,' said Konniger innocently, as Lutz's shoulders slumped in resigned defeat.
   Konniger gestured to the owner. 'Good man, Luntz. I see now your claims of being a reformed character perhaps aren't so exaggerated, after all. We'll have another drink together, and maybe some of this delicious sausage, and you'll tell us everything that happened two months ago. And then, when we're finished, you'll take us to Mundsen Keep and show us this famous scarlet cell of yours.'

MUNDSEN KEEP. IT squatted on the outskirts of the city, beyond the main city wall, like a shunned and unwanted exile. Vido had been there before with Konniger, but never relished the prospect of another visit to the place. As a one-time expert thief and cutpurse, the twin spectres of Mundsen Keep and the public gallows in the Kaiserplatz had loomed large in Vido's life for many years, and it was still difficult for him to shake off his instinctive fear of the place.
   The Keep was everything every thief in Altdorf always thought it was. Dark, dank, riddled with disease and vermin, its stone hallways echoing with the sounds of human misery. The lowest levels, where special category prisoners like the Reikerbahn Butcher were kept, was the worst of all. Mundsen Keep was originally built on the remains of a drained marsh, a fact that became readily apparent once you descended into its warren of underground cells and passages.
   The walls there were streaked with thick layers of slime, moss and lichen, some of them weirdly phosphorescent. Some of the passages were flooded with almost a foot of fetid water, and rats swam frantically about the feet of the visitors as they waded though it. Water dripped from the ceiling down onto their heads, splashing onto the hoods of their cloaks, hissing when it met the guttering flame of the torch carried by Luntz. Vido thought things couldn't get any more unpleasant, but he was wrong.
   It wasn't water dripping from the walls and ceiling of the scarlet cell. It was blood.
   The door had been sealed with holy blessing scrolls and stern warnings marked with the brand of the Imperial witch hunters. All these Konniger had ripped aside with casual disregard, gesturing for Luntz to open the door's heavy iron lock. The gaoler had unwillingly shuffled forward, fumbling with the thick band of keys he wore attached to his belt, nervously fumbling even more as he found the correct key and slid it into the rusted lock. He had muttered the half-remembered, mispronounced words of a Sigmarite prayer of protection as he opened the lock. He had pushed the iron-reinforced door open and stepped aside sharply, holding a filthy rag over his mouth and nose, as if even breathing in the air of the room beyond was enough to infect him with some Chaos-inspired contaminant.
   Konniger picked up a damp torch from the metal sconce beside the door, lit it from the torch carried by Luntz and entered the cell. The gaoler remained standing in the doorway, afraid to even cross the threshold of the place.
   The air inside the cell was cold, unnaturally and bitterly so. There was something else in the air too, some invisible taint that pervaded through everything in the chamber. Vido drew his cloak around himself while suppressing an involuntary shudder, and followed his master into the room.
   Blood dripped from the ceiling. Blood, still wet, coated the walls and floors. Konniger dabbed a finger in it and cautiously sniffed at it.
   'Human,' he surmised. 'Make a note of that, Vido. Even in this dank climate, two months after the event, it should have long ago congealed and dried up. Definite sign of extra-natural activity, wouldn't you agree?'
   Vido did as directed, scribbling in crabbed shorthand, trying to ignore the sensation of the droplets of blood splashing down upon his head. He felt a warm wetness on his upper lip, and touched his fingers to it in surprise. They came away smeared with red. His nose was bleeding.
   'That happens to lots of people who go in there,' confirmed Luntz, calling out from the doorway. 'Unnatural, that's what it is. Daemon-work, that's what it is.'
   'Yes, definite signs of extra-natural activity,' confirmed Konniger, dispassionately regarding his manservant's nosebleed. 'Luntz, tell me again what happened here.'
   'It was the night before that Butcher maniac's execution. Usually, they make a lot of noise when they start to think about what's going to happen to them at sunrise, when the witch hunters come and drag 'em out of their cells. You'd be amazed, Herr Konniger, at how many of them heretics have a change of heart when they know that big bonfire's waiting there for them in the morning. Not this one, though. We didn't hear so much as a peep out of him until well into the second watch of the night.'
   'And then what happened?'
   'Screaming, that was what we heard. Not your ordinary screaming, neither. Horrible, it was, like he was already at the stake, with the flames already getting a taste of him. Gave the whole place a shot of the terrors, so it did. There was screaming and moaning coming from half the cells in the Keep. By the time we found out where it had started, we was already too late.'
   'And what did you find?'
   Luntz gestured helplessly at the red, dripping material that still coated the stone surfaces of the room. 'Just what you see here, sir. That maniac, he was gone, slipped right out his chains, and all we found was this stuff. Daemon-work, that's wh—'
   'So, the Butcher, he escaped after all?' asked Vido, confused.
   'In a sense, Vido,' answered Konniger. 'He called to one of the Ruinous Powers, and his patron lord must have responded. Part of him escaped, but part of him still remains here.'
   Konniger registered his manservant's further look of confusion, and held out a hand to catch some of the falling droplets of blood. 'This is all that remains of the physical form of the Reikerbahn Butcher.'
   'So where's the rest of him?' Vido asked, not really sure he wanted to hear the answer.
   'Isn't is obvious?' asked Konniger, matter-of-factly. 'His daemon-changed spirit has escaped back into the city and is now busy building itself a new body from the flesh, blood and souls of dead magic-users.'

THEY WERE IN the coach now, travelling back to the city. Mundsen Keep was an ugly memory behind them, darkly silhouetted against the setting sun. Ahead of them was the city, bright with light as the Imperial capital settled in for the night. The markets would be packing up, the farmers making for home before the city gates were closed for the night. The street-girls would be applying their rouge and kohl before going out to ply their trade. In the Reikerbahn, the footpads and cutpurses would be gathering in readiness for their night's activities, and in their precinct houses the watchmen patrols would be teaming up in increased numbers to stop them.
   And somewhere there in the city too, according to Konniger, an inhuman killer was also planning its own night's business.
   'So what do you make of all this?' asked Konniger, eventually.
   'I think the same as you, master. I think our Herr von Hassen has been lying to us. I think he knows more than he's telling about what went on back there in the Keep, and that line he gave us about wanting to catch this sorcerer-slayer because he wants to protect the city is just so much stale ale-slop.'
   'Agreed,' nodded Konniger. 'Tell me, Vido, what do you know about the ways of the Ruinous Powers?'
   'As little as possible,' answered Vido, truthfully. 'I dare say I've picked up a thing or two since I've been in your service, and maybe some people might judge that I've seen more of such things than is good for me, but as often as not I try my best to forget about as much of it as I can.'
   Konniger nodded again. 'A wise policy. But the Ruinous Powers must be confronted, and, to confront and defeat them, there must be those willing to learn all that can be known of their hidden secrets.'
   Vido kept silent, knowing that it was just such unorthodox thinking that had finally forced his master to break away from his former brethren of the Church of Sigmar.
   'Most people believe these Powers to be a single unified threat opposed to all that is good and sane in this world. There is nothing wrong with such a view in most circumstances, but it conceals the real, more complex truth. The Powers of Chaos are not united as one, Vido, and it is perhaps this sole fact that has prevented them from long ago destroying us all. The gods of Chaos wage war on each other or make alliances among themselves as suits their whim, although each is opposed by another one who is always their most implacable enemy. Their servants mindlessly follow their gods' commands, continuing these battles here in the real world, sometimes even in places like Altdorf itself.'
   'That's what's happening here, isn't it?' exclaimed Vido, picking up on the hints his master was giving him. 'The Reikerbahn Butcher, he was serving one of those Chaos gods, wasn't he?'
   Konniger nodded again. 'The stories of his atrocities and what we saw tonight in the scarlet cell leave me in no doubt that the Butcher was a follower of the force known as the Blood God, who is perhaps the most terrible and infamous of the Lords of Chaos.'
   Vido's mind raced to keep up with his master's train of thought. 'You said each of the Chaos gods had another one that was always their enemy? Who's the enemy of this Blood God?'
   'The force known as the Lord of Pleasure, whose followers commit the most foul kind of debaucheries, and whose name I will not speak aloud.'
   Konniger lapsed into silence for a moment, and then continued.
   'So consider all we have learned, Vido. Who is the most likely enemy of the thing we are now hunting?'
   Vido's answer was immediate. 'Von Hassen.'
   Konniger smiled in approval. 'Yes, von Hassen. It was he who was responsible for the Butcher's capture, and it's he who seems most anxious for us to capture this new killer whom he pretends not to know is the Reikerbahn Butcher reborn in a new and more powerful daemonic form.'
   They were passing through the city gates now. The guardsmen on duty there waved the coach through without a second thought, as soon as they saw who was inside.
   'What does the thing that was created in the scarlet cell want, Vido? Why does von Hassen really want it found, and why must he depend on us to do the task for him? If he is what we now suspect he is, then why cannot he and the others of his ''Vigilance Committee'' accomplish it on their own? Work out the answers to these questions, Vido, and you will have solved the riddle of the mystery of the scarlet cell.'
   Konniger rapped twice on the roof of the cab and then leaned out the window to shout instructions to the coachman. 'Straight on at the Weiser Kirkus, and then take the western riverside road until I give you other instructions.'
   Vido looked at him in surprise. 'We're not going home, then?'
   'Not yet, Vido. Events are moving fast now, and we have to move with equal speed to keep up with them. We came into this situation late, too late to save the lives of those that have died already. Too late, perhaps, to now stop events coming to their natural conclusion.'
   Vido glanced out the window, taking note of the route they were taking. 'We're going to the Reikhoch?' he asked.
   'That's where von Hassen lives. I think it's time we paid our client an unexpected visit. I imagine he might be surprised by how much we've discovered in so short a time.'

THE KILLER CONCENTRATED, focusing all its new-found power to effect the start of the Blood Change. From blood it had come, reborn in that terrible night in its cell deep beneath Mundsen Keep, and to blood it could return, when need be. The voice of the daemon-thing that Lord Khorne had soul-bonded it to rasped in the back of its mind, threatening and cajoling it, telling it what to do with its new Blood Lord-given abilities.
   It was getting better at the metamorphosis. The spell-lore it had consumed from within the minds of the three sorcerers had helped it master the intricacies of the change, while the fortune-teller's stolen farsight allowed it to better find the safest routes through to its destination. Lord Khorne hated all magic and all those who practised it, and the killer took only what it needed from its victims, consuming their sorcerous power and using it to kill Lord Khorne's enemies.
   It concentrated again, and the Blood Change began. Its physical form bled away into the flagstones of the floor. Down it seeped, through rock and soil, until it reached the stinking sewer-ways beneath the city. It passed along those dark, airless tunnels as a hazy, blood-red mist. This was how it had infiltrated the places where it had found its other victims. At first, it had taken all the killer's willpower and energy to maintain this new form. It had barely been able to kill its first victim, the weak old holy man, and the effort had almost exhausted it to beyond the point of return. It had taken weeks for it to recover, to learn how to add the holy man's blood and power to itself, but, after that, the next one had been far easier. The one after that, easier still. The killer exulted at its new-found abilities, at the gift of the Blood Change that had been granted to it by the Master of the Skull Throne.
   It flowed through the darkness, sensing the presence of its new prey in the city built on top of these ancient, crumbling waterways. With the power it had taken from the fortune-teller, it could find them, but they could not find or sense it.
   Eagerly, the blood stuff of its new form churning in excitement, the killer rushed on towards the lair of its chosen victims.

KONNIGER AND VIDO stayed well back in the shadows, following their erstwhile employer and his companion through the back ways of the low-rent mercantile and warehouse district to the east of the wealthy Reikhoch district. It was just across the river from the far bawdier and busier Reikerbahn, and some of that district's dismal seediness had spilled across the waters of the Reik to take root here. It was a strange place to find a man like Gustav von Hassen wandering about after the close of business hours. Vido guessed the merchant would probably have property or business interests in the area, but he couldn't imagine that a man of von Hassen's wealth and position would ever actually visit such a place.
   Stranger still was the fact that von Hassen and his companion were apparently walking the streets in disguise. Konniger and Vido had arrived at the merchant's richly-appointed mansion just in time to see the two men leaving the place by a side entrance, dressed in clothes far less grand than the ones they had been wearing earlier that day. The sage-detective and his manservant had retreated into the shrubbery of one of von Hassen's neighbours' gardens and watched as the two figures hurried past. Then, with a silent look of agreement, they had set off in pursuit of their quarry.
   Vido had followed enough marks through the streets of Altdorf in his time to recognise all the signs of someone on their way to something or someplace that they didn't want anyone else to know about.
   Von Hassen hurried through the city streets, taking a route that took them away from the busiest thoroughfares. They could have used the merchant's own coach or hailed down any passing coachman-for-hire, but, clearly, they didn't want any third party to know where they were going. Konniger and Vido followed at a distance, observing them.
   They had already recognised the merchant's companion as being Sigmund, von Hassen's supposed nephew. The mysterious Sigmund might have been silent when they met him that morning, but he seemed to be doing more than his fair share of all the talking now. The two men were arguing together, that much was clear. The strange thing was, it was Sigmund who was doing all the complaining, and setting the pace of their hurried walk. Von Hassen had trouble keeping up, and his gestures and body language were strangely subservient and weakly conciliatory as he received the angry beratings of the younger man. Konniger and Vido were too far away to hear any details of the argument. Had they been close enough to eavesdrop, they would have found the conversation enlightening indeed.

'FOOL!' HISSED THE thing that called itself Sigmund. 'I told you not to bring that sage-meddler into our affairs. He suspects us already. You brought him in to find the Khornate, but what is to stop him uncovering the truth about us instead?'
   'He suspects us? You know this for a fact?' bleated von Hassen. 'I thought you said his mind was closed to you when you tried to see into his thoughts in the coach this morning?'
   'It was. It does not need magic to accomplish such a trick. There are ways a strong-willed human with knowledge of such things can use to mask their thoughts, and to push any further would have risked revealing myself to him. He is clever, this Zavant Konniger. Perhaps too clever, and now far too dangerous to us.'
   'The Pleasure Lord will guide us. We will join the others in the temple. Everything has been prepared for our arrival. We will commune with the Prince of Pleasure, and Lord Slaa—'
   Von Hassen was cut off by an enraged hiss of warning from his companion. 'Do not speak that name here, in these streets. Only within the sin-consecrated walls of the temple can that blessed name be permitted to be spoken aloud. But, yes, in this much you are right. We will pay honour to the Pleasure Lord, and He will grant us the power to deal with the Khornate savage and this sage interloper, so that we may carry on His great work here.'
   The thing that called itself Sigmund broke off, abruptly turning round to scan the empty street behind them. Its eyes narrowed in suspicion, although there was nothing there to be seen. Imprisoned inside this pathetic human shell, its daemon-senses had become weak and dulled, reduced to a mere fraction of everything they should be. Its daemon mind had perhaps sensed something, but its human eyes saw nothing.
   It stared for a second longer at the empty street before turning again and hurrying on.

VIDO PEERED CAUTIOUSLY out from the darkness of the shadow-filled doorway that Konniger had pushed them both into a second before the merchant's nephew had turned round so suddenly. With his better-than-human halfling's eyes, Vido could just see the faint dull glow in Konniger's own eyes. That glow was a side-effect of some of the strange and unnatural substances he knew his master occasionally imbibed in the privacy of his study. Vido didn't know what effect these things had on Konniger's soul and sanity, but they sometimes seemed to give the sage an uncanny sense of prescience in moments of danger. Moments like this, for example, when their quarry had almost realised they were being followed.
   Vido checked again, seeing their quarry moving off again down the street. He gave his master the all-clear signal and the two of them continued the pursuit, arriving at the cover of the next street corner just in time to see the merchant and his companion arrive at their destination.
   It was a nondescript warehouse building, little different from the dozen or so other places that lined this long and deserted stretch of the street. Von Hassen rapped on a side-door in a careful arrangement of coded knocks, simultaneously hissing a few words low under his breath. A moment later, a barred viewing hatch slid open. An unseen watcher inside peered out to confirm the new arrivals' identity. Another few moments later, there was the sound of a lock being opened and a wooden bar being hauled aside, and the door was pulled open. The figures of von Hassen and Sigmund slipped inside and the door was locked and firmly secured behind them.
   Konniger and Vido moved forward quickly, taking care to keep out of sight of any hidden watcher that might still be lurking behind that barred side door.
   'We have to get inside there, of course,' said Konniger, looking at his manservant. 'Your field of expertise, I think?'
   Vido went to work, studying the outside of the stone-walled warehouse building with a practiced thief's eye. The double doors on the main street front, where the wagons of merchandise would be loaded and unloaded during the day, was right out, of course, no doubt barred from the inside. The upper windows and roof looked a better bet, at least for Vido. A skilled halfing thief could scale that crumbling brickwork in half a minute or less. Vido's heavier, larger, far less nimble human master was a far different proposition, however.
   A quick reconnoitre of the rest of the building found a better option: a long-disused cellar door set into the ground of the alley behind the building, covered by empty wooden crates and secured by a heavy, rusted padlock and chain. It took Konniger a few moments to clear away the crates, and his manservant only a few moments longer than that to spring the workings of the padlock with the judiciously-applied point of one of his throwing daggers. Together, they silently hauled the doors open, and peered into the darkness of the building's cellarage. The smell of dust, of dirt, of mildew and of perishable trade goods that had been in storage for far too long wafted up. There was something else there too: a sickly, cloying sweetness that smelled to Vido like perfume gone sour. Or the scent of flowers growing out of something irredeemably putrid.
   Konniger saw his manservant's nose wrinkle in disgust as he caught another faint draught of the sickly odour. 'Follow the scent,' he instructed, as they descended into the darkness.
   They hadn't gone too far into the surprisingly extensive and deep-dug network of chambers and passages beneath the warehouse before they heard the first scream. After that, as more screams rang out through the place, it wasn't hard to trace them back to their source and locate the hidden temple of the Cult of Slaanesh that had been active in Altdorf for these last few months.

THE KILLER CAME up through the floor at them. The environs of the hidden temple were protected by powerful Slaaneshi warding spells through which no enemy creature of Chaos could easily pass. They were woven into the walls of the place, and consecrated by rites and words of power sacred to daemon-kind.
   The floor, however, was a different matter. No one had thought to put similar protections into place in the stonework of the floor.
   It flew up through the cracks in the flagstones in front of the altar. A living curtain of blood, seething with lethal intent.
   It seized hold of the first of them, flaying him alive in front of the other coven members, stripping away his skin with barbed tendrils formed out of the blood-stuff of its new form. Its victim fell to the ground in a bloodied meat ruin heap. When the sun rose tomorrow, the daily assizes held in the great Imperial Courts of Judgment in the Kaiserplatz would be looking for a new chief clerk of the court.
   The coven drew its members from some of the most important and wealthy citizens in Altdorf, all of them drawn into the embrace of the Prince of Delights by the lure of pleasures dark and forbidden. The walls of their underground meeting place had rang with screams of mixed ecstasy and horror as new members were initiated into the blasphemous mysteries of the worship of the Pleasure Lord. Now they rang with screams of a different kind as the servant of the Blood God took its revenge on the followers of its god's most hated enemy.

IT SOLIDIFIED, TAKING new shape, the blood-stuff of its body coalescing and drawing inwards to give it physical form. The reverse Blood Change was achieved in moments, speeded by the nourishment it had taken from the dead Slaaneshi worshipper and its eagerness to kill more of its enemies. It stood before them, revealed. Its iron-hard skin was reddish-black, the colour of hardened blood. Its heavily-muscled arms ended in fingers transformed into weapon blades. Its eyes, set into a face which contained the ghost of the memory of the original face of the Reikerbahn Butcher, were blood-red, and blazed with fury as it glared at the enemies all around it. Then it was amongst them, slashing and killing, bringing the crazed savagery of the Blood God to the children of the Pleasure Lord.
   A flash of its claws tore away the throat of the youngest son of an ancient Reikland noble family.
   A thrust with those same claws ended the life of one of Altdorf's most prominent diamond merchants.
   The career of a champion gentleman duellist ended ignominiously as the killer batted aside the thrusting blade of the man's sword and seized the hand that held it, crushing bone and flesh together in a vice-like grip. It seized hold of the dropped poniard and speared it through the skull of the screaming cultist.
   A physician who had once attended the sick-bed of a member of the Imperial family received a new anatomy lesson, with himself as the subject, as the killer eviscerated him from stomach to throat.
   Everywhere, there was blood. Everywhere, there was panic and terror. Everywhere there was screaming.

KONNIGER AND VIDO followed the sound of screaming, coming through a doorway leading into the antechamber of the main temple room just as a Slaaneshi worshipper ran out the door on the other side of the room, fleeing the scene inside the temple. He was stripped half-naked, his body tattooed with markings normally hidden from sight, markings that signified his secret devotion to the Prince of Delights. His eyes were glazed, either with terror or the effects of whatever powerful intoxicants the cultists took in the worship of their god. He saw them, and ran screaming towards them, drawing a dagger from his belt.
   Vido looked at Konniger, who nodded at him once. This was not a time for half-measures, or the taking of prisoners. Vido drew a throwing dagger from its hidden sheath inside the lining of his cloak, and, with one smooth motion, sent it hilt-deep into the cultist's throat. The cultist dropped like a stone. They ran past his corpse and entered the temple.
   The air there throbbed with the unnatural, unwholesome vitality of Chaos. The radiance from the lamps round the temple walls spilled out a strange light that hurt Vido's eyes. Everything seemed to be shifting out of focus, with odd shadows and flickering movements appearing and disappearing out of the corners of his vision. The stuff burning in the temple's gold braziers filled the air with a powerful sickly sweet scent that burned his throat and made his head swim. The altar was a strange, unnaturally contoured thing made of an unfamiliar marbled stone and streaked with veins of white and pale purple that made it look more like flesh than stone. There were things lying upon it that Vido didn't even want to look at.
   His main focus, though, was on the battle taking place there in the temple. Naked and half-naked bodies lay everywhere. The floor and bed-like silk divans round the sides of the place were splashed with blood. As Vido watched, horrified by his first glimpse of the thing from the scarlet cell, he saw the creature tear open the body of a woman who Vido fleetingly recognised as being a famous actress at one of Altdorf's biggest and most prestigious theatre companies.
   Von Hassen was there too, carrying a silver-wrought staff topped with a strange-shaped sigil that resembled too closely one of the signs on that altar for Vido to want to look at it for any longer than he had to. He was screaming words that sounded like unintelligible gibberish but which still managed to make Vido feel as if his head was in the grip of a giant's fist as he heard them. Von Hassen gestured with the staff, pointing it at the thing from the scarlet cell, and the air between them shimmered with power. Something lanced out from the tip of the staff, striking the daemon-thing. Striking it, but seemingly not harming it. The creature's black blood skin sizzled with the heat of the sorcerous blast, but the thing merely bellowed in savage laughter and tore apart another of von Hassen's fellow cultists. The merchant blanched, and prepared himself for another, more powerful attempt to magically strike down the creature.
   'Quickly! Slay it! Prove you are worthy of the power Mistress Slaanesh has given you!' hissed Sigmund, from the sidelines. He turned, spotting Konniger and Vido just as they saw him.
   Sigmund glared at them in contempt. 'So, the sage-meddler. How much of this is your doing, I wonder?' His mouth opened impossibly wider as he spoke, a long forked tongue snaking out to lick the edges of his rouged lips just as he charged at them.
   This time Vido didn't first look to receive his master's permission. The throwing knife flew from his hand, unerringly finding its target as it pierced Sigmund's right eye and struck into his brain. The man staggered, but didn't fall.
   Then he reached up and plucked the dagger from out of his eye, as if it were nothing more serious than removing a small splinter from beneath the skin of a fingertip.
   The wound did seem to trigger something in the Pleasure Lord worshipper, however. His mouth continued to open wider, and Vido could see the skin starting to split open on either side of that impossibly wide maw. Its right arm swelled obscenely, something there splitting through the clothing and the flesh beneath.
   Vido looked on in disbelief as he saw what was happening: Sigmund's arm was transforming into something that looked like a monstrous crab-claw. The thing that had been called Sigmund gave an inhuman hiss and stepped forward, shrugging off the remains of its human disguise the way an actor casts aside a role at the end of an evening's performance.
   Vido saw fangs and glittering, purple-jewelled eyes set into a face that was a grotesque parody of painted human beauty. He saw a body that was both male and female, and that was filled with a deadly, lithe grace. Most of all, though, he saw the razor-edged blades of that crab-claw limb as it came snapping towards him.
   'A daemonette creature of the Pleasure Lord. If only I'd known we were facing not one but two creatures of the Realm of Chaos,' said Konniger, rebuking himself as he completed the last few gestures of what Vido fervently hoped was some piece of daemon-fighting spellcasting.
   Vido's hopes proved correct. The daemon struck the Sigmarite shield of protection blessing as if it had run at full-tilt into a solid wall, sending it staggering back. Vido knew how limited his master's spellcasting powers were, and how much Konniger disliked the use of magic, seeing it as a too-easy solution to problems that could be better solved with good old-fashioned human intelligence and intuition. It was doubtful the sage-detective would be able to rouse up enough of what remained of his priestly powers to stave off the daemon-thing's next and all-too-imminent attack.
   In the end, though, it did not matter. The delay, although fleeting, had been enough to allow other events to interfere. A bloodthirsty roar of challenge from the other side of the chamber served to announce that the servant of Khorne had just spotted its Slaaneshi rival. The thing that had once been the Reikerbahn Butcher literally tore through von Hassen and the few remaining cultists to get to its chief enemy. The Slaaneshi daemon turned to face the attack, and the two creatures of Chaos met in a clash of claw and fang that threw out rippling waves of invisible energy that shook the very walls of the temple chamber.
   Konniger picked up Vido and pressed him into the cover of a nearby stone pillar. Vido thought his eardrums would burst any second as the air pressure inside the place seemed to increase five-fold, and the atmosphere pulsed with unnatural power thrown out by the rival daemon-things' opposing auras as they clashed together in a battle to the finish.
   Konniger mouthed more prayers of protection as the daemonic energies washed over the two of them. 'The battle won't be a long one,' was Konniger's grim warning. 'No matter how powerful von Hassen's own daemon guardian might seem, it can't match the fury of the thing that was created in the scarlet cell. Tonight may already have seen the destruction of one Chaos cult in this city, but it may also see the rise of a new and terrible servant of another of the Ruinous Powers, and that is something we can never allow to happen.'
   The first part of Konniger's warning came true all too soon. The blood-creature roared in fury. The Slaaneshi daemon answered with a chorus of its own angry shrieks and hisses, but the exchange ended in one final, hellish scream of impotent rage from the servant of the Pleasure Lord as the Khornate creature thrust its claws into the daemonette's hermaphrodite body and ripped out its heart. The Slaaneshi creature died with a mewling gurgle, its soul cast back into the depths of the Realm of Chaos, its body starting to dissolve into stinking slime even before it fell to the ground.
   The servant of the Blood God had not survived unscathed, however. Its body was rent with wounds from the slashing claws of the Slaaneshi creature, daemon-inflicted wounds that could not be immediately healed, even with the blood-thing's unnatural powers of vitality. Hot, sizzling gouts of blood fell from these wounds, forming a red mist in the air around it. It seemed to have difficulty maintaining its Blood Change form, as the material of its Chaos-altered body and some of the essence of its daemon spirit leaked out of it.
   Konniger knew it was more vulnerable now than it probably ever would be again.
   'Whatever happens, don't try to help me. You can do nothing against a creature like this,' he told his manservant. 'At the first sign that I may fall, run from this place, and never look back. Go to the Church of Sigmar. Use the code words I have already instructed you in, and gain access to the very highest levels of the Church authorities that you can. Tell the brethren everything that has happened here. They will know what to do after that.'
   With that, he was gone. Running out into the open. Running to face the blood-thing, running in search of any kind of weapon that might be of any use against the creature.
   He found what he was looking for amongst the bloodied litter of bodies on the floor. Von Hassen's staff, still held in the grip of one of the merchant's severed arms. He picked it up, shaking it free of the last remnants of its former owner, and turned to face the daemon.
   The creature flowed towards him, leaving a slick blood trail in its wake. Konniger threw a Sigmarite prayer-spell at it, and then cursed himself for a fool, as the daemon deflected it harmlessly aside. It had ritually consumed the heart and absorbed the blood of the late Archbishop Heiggler, and was thus protected against all such magics.
   After that, the daemon was on him. He wielded the Slaaneshi icon like a quarterstaff, ignoring the pain as the metal of the Chaos-tainted staff burned into the flesh of his hands. Konniger abjured using weapons whenever possible, but was an expert quarterstaff fighter.
   He traded blows with the Khornate daemon, ducking in to try and land a blow, ducking back out to avoid the lightning-quick slashes of its lethal knife-fingers. The pain from his burned hands was intense now, and the blistered and Chaos-seared flesh of his palms would be many weeks in healing.
   If the pain was bad to him, though, then it must be nigh on unbearable to the creature of Khorne. The Blood God and the Prince of Delights inhabited opposite sides on the Wheel of Chaos, and anything connected to Slaanesh was an anathema to Khorne and his servants. Each blow Konniger landed with the magically-charged sigil on the end of the staff was like plunging a red-hot iron into water.
   The daemon staggered back, roaring in rage. The Slaneeshi staff opened up bubbling wounds in the unnatural material of its body, and the air around it and Konniger was filled with a haze of red steam and the stench of charred, sticky blood-tar. The daemon tried to strike back, but Konniger expertly parried or dodged its blows. Three of the creature's knife-fingers were left smouldering and broken, one of them completely vaporised by contact with the haft of the staff. The pain only added to its rage, while the wounds only left it further weakened.
   Konniger knew he couldn't keep this up for much longer, though. Despite its injuries, the daemon's vitality was still superhuman, while his was all-too-human. It would only take one missed blow from him, or one ripping slash from those terrible knife-claws, to reverse the flow of the battle.
   He ducked one slashing blow, stepped aside to avoid the daemon's follow-up strike and then stepped back in to strike it across the chest, eliciting another scream of rage from the daemon, and another splatter of bubbling blood from the wound that had been opened up into its flesh.
   Almost there, thought Konniger, weaving the staff in a complex pattern of defensive moves that struck the creature several more glancing blows, forcing it back even further. Its next attack he risked allowing through, twisting his body to avoid the thrusting knife-blades, feeling one of them slice through his shoulder instead of piercing his heart as had been intended. Now, though, the daemon had left itself vulnerable.
   Konniger made his move, spinning the staff in one hand, flipping it round to reverse it and then catching it again in both hands to plunge its point with all his strength into the blood-thing's chest. The spear-like bottom tip of the staff burned through the daemon's body, emerging out of its back to strike into the flesh-like stone material of the main temple altar directly behind where the Khorne daemon stood.
   A violent shock of magical energy pulsed through the air of the place. Konniger released his grip on the staff, just as a blast of energy coursed through it. Had he been a split-second late in letting go, he would probably have lost both his hands. The daemon, transfixed by the staff, directly connected by it to an altar consecrated to the power of its patron lord's most hated enemy amongst the other gods of Chaos, opened its mouth to roar its final bellow of rage, but all that emerged was a steaming hiss as its body melted away around it.
   It was gone in seconds, reduced to a spreading pool of bubbling, hissing, burning blood. The Pleasure God's altar was dead too, its surface split and cracked where the staff had pierced into it, its unnatural appearance of life now nothing more than curiously coloured but lifeless marble.
   Konniger staggered away, nearly falling, but was caught in time by Vido. The halfling manservant bundled his master away, Konniger wrapping his injured hands in the folds of his cloak, as the spreading pool of burning blood flowed out to find and ignite the cushions and rich furnishings of the Pleasure Lord's temple, as well as the corpses of his followers that still littered its floor.

THERE WAS A fire that night in the riverside warehouse district, A great blaze that was only contained by the concerted efforts of the city watch and the volunteer teams of citizen fire-fighters. There was nothing unusual in the fire itself, but what happened the next morning was enough to raise a few collective eyebrows.
   A full company of Templar knights arrived on the scene, quickly dispersing the crowd gathered there and sealing off the streets around the place as priests of Sigmar crawled over the still-smoking ruins of the fire. What they were looking for, or what rituals they performed there remained unknown, although it was said that several items and perhaps even bundles of charred human bones were secretly removed from the ruins before the entire site was cleared and the rubble there carted away to some unknown destination.
   Over the next few days, and even weeks, word of various deaths and unfortunate happenings amongst some of Altdorf's most notable circles of citizens began to trickle out. The youngest son of one of Reikland's most venerable old noble families killed in a tragic hunting accident. An announcement from the Imperial Tarrandisch Theatre Company that its star actress Augusts Friedrichsliebe had retired indefinitely from the stage and left Altdorf, suffering from nervous exhaustion. A spate of deaths and sudden tragic illnesses ran through the higher membership ranks of some of the merchant guild houses.
   If anyone in Altdorf registered any pattern amongst these happenings, they wisely chose to keep their opinions to themselves. As Konniger had once observed, the Church of Sigmar, this time assisted by the full power of the Imperial authorities, had always been adept at keeping its house in order.