The God Tattoo: Untold Tales from the Twilight Reign (2 page)

Vampire
.

Sunset on the following Prayerday found me on the balcony of the watch-house. Beside me stood my assistant, the innocent fourth son of a suzerain who was to be groomed for the
office of Commander of the Watch. Brandt was good company for a man prone to melancholy. A light-hearted and spirited youth, he had served me well for two seasons by then and remained undaunted by
the horror of the monster we sought. At the tender age of fourteen winters Brandt still had a lot to learn, but already had developed the unswerving loyalty that made many love him. It is a cruel
irony that this devotion to duty would be the very reason he died, when over the years he had become one of the finest young men I had ever known.

My heart broke as I heard of his foolish bravery on the walls of the White Palace. So many times I had told the eager youth to leave battle to his soldier brothers, but he had stood back to back
with the Lord Isak against that final ferocious breach. It is said he saved the entire city that day; certainly the king himself gave thanks at Brandt’s funeral and his ashes still occupy
pride of place at the temple of Nartis. His heroism, and I call it nothing less, was the inspiration of my greatest fury; the democratic decision of Brandt’s watchmen to seek glory with their
king on the field at Moorview. Perhaps his example went even further than that. They also suffered terrible injury, but emerged in glory.

At the time, slate roofs were still infrequent in this burgeoning part of the city. Though Narkang is now famed for its purple slate, it was predominately thatch that bore a gilt edge for those
precious minutes before the ghost hour. Wrapped warm against the breeze, we could see much of this side of the city and almost the entirety of our district. What we thought we might see amid the
gloaming I am unsure, but there Brandt and I stood – waiting for our questions to be answered.

From that balcony I could smell the sea’s salt and spices roasting in the market. I stood with my elbows upon the wooden rail, staring out into the reddening sky while Brandt rested his
chin and scrutinised those below. He was a fine mimic and constantly studied the manners of others, taking great pleasure from his unseen vantage even as the shadows obscured his view. When the
whistles started to call a second act of tragedy, he and I were among the first to hear the piercing calls of my officers.

‘Do you think it’s happened again?’ he asked me, a tremor of anxiety in his young voice.

The calls were clipped and repeated – a crime discovered and help required rather than officer in danger. The difference between the two was speed. The latter brought your comrades riding
as though the creatures of the Dark Place were close behind, while in the second they would canter, eyes scanning for anyone hurrying away.

‘Gods, I hope not,’ murmured I, with a thought to going home. The scents on the breeze had reminded me of the dinner that would welcome me there.

‘If it has, what will you say to the commander?’

‘What I said last time, I suppose. I’m a thief-taker. Not a priest, not a mage, not a soldier. I understand the minds of men. Who can say how a monster thinks?’

Brandt strained his eyes in the fading light to place where he thought the choir of whistles was coming from.

‘It is rather close to the whorehouse,’ he ventured.

‘Sure?’ I asked, a cloak of doom settling about my shoulders.

The boy turned his hazel eyes up to meet my gaze and nodded. ‘It’s close.’ His ears were sharper than my own and the evening was clear. ‘Nearer to us I’d guess, but
close.’

With a sigh I returned to the cramped corner that served as my office, retrieving my sword, cloak and gloves before descending to the stable.

‘Well, Captain, what do you make of that?’

I looked at my trusted sergeant, a gruff war veteran not much prone to displays of emotion. Now his face was thunderous, his one great fist clenched so tight the effort caused his whole body to
tremble. When I peered into the room my sentiments echoed his.

‘I don’t think I’ll be wanting my supper no more. Gods, what a mess. If it weren’t for the symbols I’d say this was a whole new problem.’

The room was a ruin. What had probably been a family meal was now utter devastation. Whatever had been in here had torn the furniture apart in addition to, what according to the neighbours, had
once been a family of four. Those same neighbours had refused to investigate the tumult emanating from these rooms, the top floor of a building that contained three other families.

Such was the thrall fear and rumour had over the district, they had barred the doors and sat in prayer through the chaos. This had happened late at night, yet none had dared investigate and only
much later gone to fetch the Watch. No doubt donations to the temples would again rise once word got out, something that was likely to be soon with the crowd gathering.

‘Tell me what happened,’ called Count Antern, as his bodyguards battered a path for himself and another man I didn’t recognise.

I was unsurprised to see Antern there so soon, he was said to be the king’s spy master after all. No doubt half the guard were in his pay. With a glance at his companion – a slender
individual wearing expensively tailored clothes and an eye-patch, the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat extending down to the small point of a beard common among the city’s duellists – I
began to tell what I knew.

‘A family now. The same creature, I assume. More of those symbols, but this time it looks like a bear went berserk in there. Only clue’s a scrap of velvet snagged on a chair. You had
word of those symbols yet?’

Antern had promised to enlist one of the king’s wizards to decipher the bloody writing, but no word had been forthcoming, much to my annoyance.

‘A bear you say?’ purred the other man, cutting Antern’s attempted reply short. ‘I’ve never seen one that could write before, might be a valuable creature. Still, I
suppose that explains why it’s able to dress in velvet.’

My temper almost got the better of me, but Antern came to my rescue and got there first.

‘This is, ah, Nimer. A man of special qualities, the king feels. He is here to assist the investigation – you will extend him every courtesy.’

Only then did I notice the golden clasp that held Nimer’s cloak and marked him as a servant of the king. Unassuming in size, but a contrast against the black silk and velvet of his
doublet, the bee device was the personal emblem of the king. It declared him as a bad focus for my ire for only clerks of the council and King’s Men wore the bee emblem.

From the way his hand lounged on the hilt of his longsword, I could tell which Nimer was. Clerks tended to do little that endangered their eyes, while King’s Men were not expected to grow
old, let alone emerge from their service unscathed.

‘Very well,’ was the best reply I could muster.

‘Now then, Captain, what is your best guess?’ Nimer asked in a clear, aristocratic tone. He was perhaps not quite as young as I had first thought, the small beard and clipped
moustache belonging to a younger generation, but still I felt old by the way he looked at me.

‘With the last one, a vampire. With the two sets of symbols, a sacrifice for summoning daemons. With the mess and noise he made here, no fucking idea. I don’t think the symbols are
even the same, ’cept for that cross in the centre.’

Nimer gave a strange little smile and tapped his cheek with one finger in exaggerated thought. After a few seconds he looked up and stepped through the wrecked doorway, into the despoiled
kitchen. Curiosity was all I saw on his face at a scene army veterans found sickening. I tried not to wonder what were these ‘special qualities’ Antern had spoken of.

‘Interestingly enough I’m informed the symbols are most commonly used in the banishing of daemons, not summoning as you had quite logically surmised. As for the cross, it looks to be
an elven core rune.’

‘Meaning?’

He looked up at me with the look a spider might give to a fly that had spoken out of turn.

‘Runic systems are not my forte, but leave the matter with me. If it proves to be important I shall rush to inform you. Now, don’t let us keep you from your duties.’

And that was my first meeting with the man called Nimer. A man with special qualities. A man who had answers to the strangest questions, and asked even stranger ones. A man
whose mind seemed to be able to shrug off all concerns and mould itself to any bent or problem he required at the time.

I have no doubt that in another life Nimer could have been an actor without peer, but his stage was a greater one. I saw him most days after that, we even ate together once or twice. I found
myself truly liking the man – for all that not once did I come close to understanding his brilliantly reflective mind. Some days he deferred to me and acted as my young assistant would, on
others he adopted a regal authority that I obeyed without thought. The only consistent feature of the man was the remarkable colour of his one good eye, a pale blue glow that both bewitched and
chilled.

One conversation we had during that time remains perfectly clear in my mind. Nimer had arrived at the watch-house one afternoon about a week after our first meeting. He claimed to have been just
passing and called in to collect a copy of a statement. Having secured the papers he required, Nimer looked me straight in the eye and asked a most curious question.

‘When I was younger I knew a man who claimed to be a native of no single place. Having lived in this city from an early age, he nevertheless claimed lineage from four separate states, and
called each one home. When I asked him why, do you know what he said?’

I could think of no suitable answer and merely stared in puzzlement. Nimer’s face blossomed to life for a moment and he gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder before turning to leave.
As he approached the door, his cool mocking voice called out.

‘He said, that way, no matter how successful he was in life, he would always have a cause to fight for.’

That was not the only time he bemused me, nor the only time I suspected I did not understand the full implication of his words, but it stayed in my memory as my lasting impression. That was
Nimer’s way; to bewilder and puzzle those about him, and keep any answers he might have close, but always it was clear that he would have not bothered to perplex someone he lacked respect
for. In themselves, I saw his games of condescension as a mark of respect and felt glad he was not my enemy.

The fact that he was a well travelled, highly educated Narkang native – possessing a face I didn’t recognise despite glimpses of the familiar – deepened my suspicions that he
was an assassin of the king’s, perhaps separate even from his elite agents, the Brotherhood. A killer of breeding who possessed a ruthlessness none of the vermin on my streets could hope to
match. It was an aspect I could never quite reconcile with the countenance he shrouded himself in, but I think I could have been a friend to the man I got to know over that time.

Over the next few weeks, two more attacks occurred; connected to the others by a variety of strange symbols, scripts and the rune. Nimer spoke sparingly of them, his one eye glittering to tell
me he withheld as much as he was revealed. Instead he would expound upon irrelevant points of scholarly antiquity. He was well aware such tomes of research were not available to me and took some
obscure amusement in the fact.

I say obscure because he held no notions of class that I ever heard, only those of intellect. While I could not match him there either, Nimer still gave a measure of respect for what I did
possess. I did my best to ignore those clues that were beyond my scope and hoped ultimately they would prove unimportant. My belief was that if I caught this fiend, evidence would probably be
either in abundance, or unnecessary.

With ten bodies on our consciences we had come no closer to stopping the horror, and the pressure was mounting on all sides. Panic reigned on our streets and riots brewed, with
vigilantes already responsible for the deaths of four more men. There was also the more subtle anger over our failures, in the eyes of my friends and family as well as city officials, although of
course Nimer exhibited no sign of the weight I felt bearing down. To add to our problems the last two victims were a scion of some eastern suzerainty and the son of a marshal. Obviously they had
been seeking the glory of catching whatever beast we hunted, but they had instead been deprived of their heads.

Powerful families now bayed for blood with the commoners, only louder and with pointed words. Count Antern had taken it upon himself to berate me daily for our lack of progress in the name of
the king, but in Nimer’s company he was far more restrained – a disquieting observation considering Antern’s position in the government.

The royal assassin, as I now termed him privately, had advanced a theory that for the latest two attacks, the third being the slaying of two beggars in the next district, the symbols and
invocations were growing more extreme. His reasons for this were either continued failure, or a ritual to culminate later. Neither theory gave us much cheer but we had very little else.

Nimer’s time with a prominent mage had proved as equally fruitful as my own surveillance and draconian hours for my officers. The rituals were impossible to decipher. ‘A mess of
complexity’ was how the mage had described them. The consensus among his select colleagues was that an ancient and forbidden text was involved, one beyond their experience.

As for my efforts: glory hunters, the morbidly curious and a variety of religious fanatics had actually swelled the numbers walking the streets of my district. How to watch for suspicious
behaviour in that collection? They suspected each other and fought, incited mobs and, on two occasions, managed to fall from rooftop vantages. Blood ran freely across the city and the frenzy of
fear continued to build – while through it all, Nimer sauntered with a cold, distant interest and my officers feared to tread.

The first snows of the season arrived after another ineffective week, to find me again on the watch-house balcony, staring out over the city in late afternoon and praying for a clue. In truth I
knew I was praying for another death. That tells a sad tale of desperation, but desperate we certainly were.