Hammer and Bolter: Issue 21 by Christian Dunn

Author:Christian Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

Dead Man’s Party

Josh Reynolds

It was Spring Tide, and Marienburg was awash in revelry of both the sublime and more boisterous sort. Poles bearing caged seagulls were hoisted aloft as the celebration unfolded. Cornets and other instruments were played, mostly badly, by over-enthusiastic revellers. Buckets of seawater were sloshed about on the unwary as priests and pilgrims bellowed out the more profane hymns to Manann, popular among sailors.

Steel spheres containing handfuls of incense and hot coals were draped from every available protrusion, and clouds of exotic spices drifted across the streets, battling for dominance with the normal urban stew of the canals. Children threw dried flakes of seaweed and coral into the waters of the Central Canal as the great altar-barge of Manann hove to, the high priest roaring his praises and shaking his gull-pole until the bird’s raucous squawks threatened to drown out his own.

Every citizen was either in the streets or in the taverns, or heading from one to the other. Or so it seemed to Erkhart Dubnitz, knight of the Most Holy Order of Manann-in-Marienburg, as he stiff-armed a red-faced drunk into the canal in order to clear a path for his charge. ‘Right this way, Meneer Lomax,’ he said obsequiously, bowing and sweeping an armour-plated arm out just in time to catch a bucket-bearing priest in the belly. The seawater sloshed across the cobbles and Dubnitz’s charge chuckled.

‘At least the stones are getting a good scouring, hey?’ Bernard Lomax said, rheumy eyes taking in the celebration with a weary air as he leaned on his narwhal-horn cane. He was dressed archaically, in the fashion of his youth, and his clothes showed signs of having been repaired, rather than replaced. Lomax was old, and age weighed heavily on his thin form. He had the heft of a Nehekharan mummy in his twilight years but none of the joie de vivre, as the Bretonnian saying went.

‘Are you enjoying yourself, Meneer Lomax?’ Piet Van Taal said. Like Dubnitz, Piet was a knight of the most holy, and only occasionally violent, Order of Manann. In contrast to Dubnitz’s barrel-chested heft, he was a lean whip of a man with the stamp of one of the lower rungs of Marienburg’s aristocracy on his features. Like Dubnitz, he wore a coat of chainmail beneath an emerald surcoat bearing the trident-and-crown emblem of Manann, god of the seas.

‘Who can enjoy themselves with the stench and the noise?’ Lomax said, coughing into a clenched fist. ‘Is this what you do for fun?’

‘Not quite, no,’ Dubnitz said quickly. ‘Normally our carousing takes place indoors, away from the hurly-burly.’ He spun and punched a celebrant who’d been about to place a wreath of eel-skins and shark fins around his neck.

‘That sounds good,’ Lomax said, watching the wreath clatter across the cobbles.

Piet looked at Dubnitz over the top of Lomax’s head and mouthed, ‘The Scalded Gull?’

Dubnitz nodded. He laid a leather gauntlet on Lomax’s shoulder. ‘Right this way, Meneer Lomax. We’ll have you quaffing in no time.’

‘Are you taking me to a dive? Is it filthy?’

‘The filthiest,’ Dubnitz assured him.

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