Bloodforged (22 page)

His heart was hammering. So was the girl’s. Their fear was intoxicating. Ulrika was beginning to regret not agreeing to kill them as Stefan had suggested.

‘Searching for knowledge,’ she said, as calmly as she could. ‘And you?’

‘But… but th’ library ish closed,’ Valtarin said. ‘You aren’t allowed here.’

‘Nor are you, I’ll wager,’ said Ulrika, then smirked and looked at the girl. ‘Certainly not for the reason you’ve come. So we would both be in trouble if our trespasses were discovered, yes?’

Valtarin looked from her to Stefan to the girl, weighing the situation. ‘I… I…’

Ulrika cut him off. ‘Do know how to find a book in these catalogues?’

Valtarin blinked, apparently surprised at the question, then shook his shaggy head. ‘Only Gorbenko knows. He made a mesh of ’em jusht so he could keep his job. No one can find anything without him any more.’

Stefan’s hand dropped casually to the hilt of his rapier. Ulrika stepped down from the desk to keep Valtarin’s eyes on her.

‘Then perhaps you have direct knowledge of what we seek,’ she said.

Valtarin’s eyes followed her as she crossed to one of the tables and leaned against it. The girl picked herself up off the floor and clung to Valtarin’s arm.

‘I represent a collector of fine musical instruments,’ Ulrika said, taking her purse from her belt and opening it. ‘A nobleman of Sigmar’s Empire who is seeking a rare, legendary instrument that perhaps you’ve heard of.’ She took out five gold coins and laid them one at a time on the table. ‘The Viol of Fieromonte.’

Valtarin’s eyes went wide at the name and he stumbled back, almost upsetting the girl again. His heart hammered even harder.

Ulrika exchanged a glance with Stefan, who was stepping down to circle around behind Valtarin. Such a strong reaction. Could it be the boy knew something of the theft?

‘I see you’ve heard of it,’ Ulrika said, advancing on him. ‘Do you have some interest in it too?’

‘What?’ said Valtarin, looking nervously from her to Stefan. ‘No! I don’t think it even exists any more. It is just an unlucky name, a musician’s curse. It is bad luck to hear it, and worse to speak it.’

‘I think it is more to you than that,’ said Ulrika. ‘You are sweating, sir. Why?’

The boy backed away from her, eyes rolling. ‘I… I… Why don’t you madmen leave us alone!’ he cried. ‘Nobody here knows where your cursed violin is!’

Ulrika stopped and looked to Stefan again, then turned back to Valtarin. ‘There have been others here?’ she asked. ‘Inquiring after the Fieromonte?’

He nodded, his eyes still wide with fright. ‘I… I didn’t see them myself,’ he said. ‘But I heard. They scared old Daska near to death.’

‘How long ago was this?’ asked Stefan. ‘Who were they?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Valtarin. ‘I only heard that they came sneaking around a few weeks ago, saying they wanted to buy it, like you. And they didn’t like it when nobody could tell them where it was.’

‘Well, we are not so rough,’ said Ulrika, pushing the coins towards the quivering young man. ‘If you were able to tell me where it was, or where in this place I might find knowledge of it, these coins would be yours. We were seeking a book called
The Memoirs of Kappelmeister Barshai
.’

Valtarin looked at the gold, then up at the three floors of books. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know where that is. I’ve never…’

Ulrika sighed and reached for the coins, while Stefan reached for his sword.

‘Wait!’ said Valtarin, edging away from Stefan. ‘Wait! I wasn’t finished. I was going to say, I’ve never heard of it, but I know someone else who might know. I… I’m sure he would.’

Over Valtarin’s shoulder, Stefan shook his head, clearly impatient to return to their search. Ulrika ignored him.

‘Who is this person?’ she asked the boy.

‘My old tutor, Maestro Padurowski,’ he said. ‘He knows everything about violins. If the Fiero–, er, the instrument, still exists, he could surely tell you where it was.’

‘Where is he now?’ asked Ulrika.

‘He will be in his offices,’ said Valtarin. ‘Working on his arrangements for the duke’s victory concert.’

‘And did these others speak to him?’ asked Stefan.

Valtarin shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was tutor Daska they saw. He didn’t come out of his apartments for a week, after.’

‘Can you bring us to this Padurowski then?’ Ulrika pressed. ‘The coins will be yours.’

Valtarin hesitated, looking towards Stefan. ‘Will you hurt him?’

‘We are not like the others,’ said Ulrika. ‘We will pay him, just as we are paying you.’

The boy nodded at last. ‘Come with me.’

He turned to the entry hall and beckoned them to follow. Stefan shot Ulrika a disapproving look as she scooped up the coins, and they fell in with him. She shrugged.

From behind them came a plaintive, drunken whine. ‘But, Valtarin, I thought you were going to show me Astanilovich’s bed.’

Maestro Padurowski’s offices were in an unassuming faculty building on the edge of the campus, a cramped hive of tiny suites that smelled of dust, wood polish and decaying paper. Valtarin knocked on a door at the back of the second storey and a brisk voice called, ‘Come!’

The young man pushed open the door and bowed, and Ulrika saw over his mop of hair a narrow room lined with paper-filled shelves and lit by a lamp set on top of a pile of folios. A man was hunched at a desk, wild white hair hiding his face as he scrawled rapidly with a goose-quill pen across a large sheet of music-ruled paper.

‘Is that my dinner, Luba?’ he said without looking up. ‘Just put it on the chair, will you?’

‘It is I, maestro,’ said Valtarin, bowing again. ‘Valtarin.’

Maestro Padurowski raised his head and flipped back a great mane of white hair, beaming. ‘Valtarin, my boy! How nice!’ He had a long, lined face, all nose and chin, with a high forehead and white eyebrows that would have shamed a magister.

‘I’ve brought some people to see you, maestro,’ said Valtarin, stepping in. ‘They want to ask you some questions.’

Padurowski scowled. ‘No time for that, my boy,’ he said, waving his quill and flicking ink everywhere. ‘We are rehearsing tomorrow and I haven’t transcribed the brass parts yet. Later, later. Next week.’

‘I can pay you for your time, maestro,’ said Ulrika.

Padurowski shook his head and bowed to his work again. ‘You can’t pay me enough to save my neck if I disappoint the duke at his concert. Go, go.’

‘It will only take a few minutes,’ said Ulrika. ‘And I will pay you a gold Reikmark for each of them.’

The maestro raised his head again, his eyes glittering. ‘A Reikmark for each minute? Even the duke doesn’t pay so well.’ He put down his pen and sat back. ‘Ask your questions.’

Ulrika put a coin on the desk. ‘I represent a collector of musical instruments who seeks a famed violin known as the Viol of Fieromonte. Your student said you might know where it was.’

‘I told them that others came asking about it before, maestro,’ blurted out Valtarin. ‘I told them they questioned tutor Daska and got angry when he didn’t know!’

Padurowski made a face. ‘And I don’t know why there is suddenly all this interest in an old legend.’

‘A legend?’ asked Ulrika. ‘You mean it doesn’t exist?’

The maestro smiled wryly. ‘It seems I will not win many gold coins,’ he said, ‘for the answer is short. It did, but does no longer. It was burned just after the Great War against Chaos. The tale goes that it had become possessed by a daemon when the hordes took the city, and afterwards it had the power to drive men mad. The duke at the time ordered it burnt at the stake, as if it were a witch.’ He laughed. ‘I know not if it was truly possessed. Perhaps so. But I do know it was burned, and its ashes scattered to the four winds. A great shame. For it was said to have the purest tone in all the world.’

Ulrika sighed. It couldn’t be true, not if the cultists had staked so much upon it, but Padurowski obviously thought it was, and there seemed little point in pressing him further. She laid two more gold coins on the desk beside the first. ‘Thank you for your time, maestro. I will inform my patron of this.’

‘I am sorry not to have been able to give you news more to your liking,’ said Padurowski. ‘But I thank you. I have never won coins so easily before.’

Ulrika handed Valtarin the five coins she had promised him, and she and Stefan made their way down the narrow stairs of the faculty building and back into the Academy grounds.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ulrika as they stepped through the Music Academy’s gates and started aimlessly through the streets of the student quarter, empty but for a dispirited-looking watch patrol. ‘How can the cultists be after a violin that was burned two hundred years ago?’

‘Padurowski must know less than he thinks he does,’ said Stefan. ‘Perhaps the story of the burning was planted at the time in order to hide the true fate of the violin.’

Ulrika nodded. ‘But if so, where is it?’

She paced on, trying to think of places within the city where an instrument could be hidden. Her hunger was making it hard to think. She had suppressed it during their interview with Padurowski, but now it was growing again, nagging at her like an insistent child. She forced it down and returned to the question.

There were treasure vaults in the duke’s palace, of course, and Praag had many private collectors of unusual objects. Or perhaps the violin was hidden at the Opera House or the Music Academy itself, but in which of those places, or a hundred others should they begin their search? The cult meant to steal it tonight, and if they couldn’t stop them, they would use it in two nights, when Mannslieb was next full–

A new thought blasted all others from her head. The Opera House? The full moon? Ursun’s teeth, she had it!

She caught Stefan’s arm. ‘I know what they’re going to do! I know how they intend to use the violin!’

‘How?’ said Stefan.

‘Duke Enrik’s victory concert!’ she said. ‘It takes place on the night when Mannslieb is full.’

Stefan frowned. ‘Aye, but–’

Ulrika cut him off. ‘The tales say the violin drives men mad when it is played, yes? The cultists are going to play it before the duke and all the nobles and generals and guild masters of Praag and turn them into raving lunatics! That is how they intend to bring down Praag – by destroying its leaders.’

Stefan’s footsteps slowed. ‘I… I… By my master, I believe you could be right. This… this is a grave danger, graver than I previously thought. It must be stopped.’

‘Aye,’ said Ulrika. ‘But, how–?’

A movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. As she turned, a figure ducked back into an alley. She looked away again as if she had seen nothing.

‘We have picked up a tail,’ she said.

Stefan nodded, keeping his eyes forwards. ‘Where?’

‘In the alley behind us,’ said Ulrika.

‘Let us speak with him, then,’ said Stefan.

As one, they turned and strode swiftly to the alley.

The man in the alley gaped as they approached him and began to back away. Ulrika frowned. She had seen those sloped shoulders and that slack-lipped mouth before. Then she had it – the instrument-maker’s apprentice. Had he followed them since they visited the shop? That was embarrassing.

The apprentice turned to flee as they closed in. Ulrika leapt over his head and landed in front of him, drawing her rapier. He skidded to a stop and looked back, eyes wide with terror. Stefan approached him from behind, also drawing. The boy pulled a dagger from his belt with a trembling hand.

‘Put it away, apprentice,’ said Ulrika, stepping towards him. ‘We only want to speak–’

‘For the coming of the queen!’ screeched the apprentice, then plunged the knife into his neck and tore it across.

Ulrika and Stefan sprang forwards and caught his arms, but they were too late. The boy was sagging to his knees, a torrent of blood pumping from his gaping throat and the light dying in his eyes.

‘Damn him!’ snarled Ulrika, shoving him down. ‘Damn him!’

‘Don’t damn him,’ snapped Stefan. ‘Drain him, quickly!’

Ulrika started, annoyed, then dropped to her knees and closed her mouth over the gushing wound. So hungry, but in her frustration she had pushed away what she needed most. She sucked in the boy’s blood, trying to catch it before it all spilled on the ground.

Her eyes closed in pleasure, but as the sweet song of blood throbbed in her ears, the faint trill of a violin joined it, playing a discordant, laughing counterpoint to her rapture that caught at her like a barbed thorn and held her head above the flood of red warmth, nagging at her. It seemed there was always a violin playing somewhere in Praag, sometimes plaintive, sometimes laughing, and always carried to her by a trick of the wind. Was it the
same
violin? And if so, who played it, and why did she always seem to hear it at times of great distress or horror?

Ulrika’s head jerked up from the apprentice’s neck, an impossible idea coming to her. She looked up at Stefan, her mouth dripping blood. ‘Do you hear that song?’

Stefan cocked his ear. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘A fiddler, somewhere.’

Ulrika wiped her mouth on the boy’s sleeve and stood. ‘Have you heard it before?’

Stefan frowned, thinking. ‘Aye,’ he said at last. ‘Now that you mention it, I have. Always in the distance, and always just a snatch.’

‘Yes,’ said Ulrika, excitement growing in her chest. ‘It has been the same for me. I have always ignored it. There is so much music in Praag now. It just seemed another part of the symphony. But… but it is
everywhere
, though only when something terrible has happened. I heard it after I killed Gaznayev’s thugs, and when I slaughtered the cultists in the distillery, and when the Blood Shard wounded Raiza.’