Free dark fantasy: A Reputation For Prudence by Richard Swan

With Richard Swan’s Empire of the Wolf prequel novella The Scour now mere weeks away, I know you are slavering for more Vonvalt and Bressinger. According to James Tivendale of You and I Books, “The banter between Vonvalt and Bressinger is top-notch and reminiscent of high-quality exchanges between fantasy book duos Geralt and Dandelion (The Witcher) and Hadrian and Royce (The Riyria Revelations).”

Ask, and ye shall receive. In the first of what I hope will be many short stories where we add new art and post them on our site as free fiction, I give you A Reputation for Prudence, originally published back in Grimdark Magazine Issue #31.

If you’d rather watch Black Sails actor Luke Arnold perform this story instead of reading it, skip right to the bottom of this post and you can watch it on YouTube. Click here to watch A Reputation for Prudence.

A Reputation for Prudenceby Richard SwanAn Empire of the Wolf prequel short story

Sir Konrad Vonvalt watched the waves through a broken window as they crashed rhythmically against the shore.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

Like the ticking of a slow clock.

Seabirds trilled in the cold salt air. A biting wind whipped across the dunes. Razorgrass flickered and rustled.

He drummed his fingers on the old altar—fingers clad in the fine leather of a Justice’s glove. This place had once been a pagan temple. Now, roofless and glassless, its only congregation was the brackish, drizzly air.

The old temple creaked. Wooden beams older than him protested. Stones and mortar older than his grandfather grated and chafed as the earth shifted under the sea’s relentless pounding. Through the bones of the roof, the light drained from the sky like blood from a corpse.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

His foot tapped against the flagstones. He had been waiting all day, whilst snow had turned to sleet and then to drizzle. His body ached where the wet cold had seeped into it. In an hour it would be dark.

But he was patient. He had learned patience. It was a Justice’s best quality.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

The waves no longer pounded like a clock, but like some monstrous heartbeat.

“Sir Konrad Vonvalt,” a voice said, cutting through the frigid air. Vonvalt looked up sharply. Justice Klaudia Sokol stood in the old entranceway. The wooden steps had rotted away, and she lowered herself to the floor stiffly, though it was no great height.

He knew better than to move to assist her.

“You received my message, then?” Sokol asked.

Vonvalt nodded. “Shall I fetch Sir Ivan?” he asked, referring to the local sheriff. His voice was hoarse; they were the first words he had spoken in many hours.

Sokol pulled an expression of distaste and sat at the altar with a grunt. She was much too old for these misadventures, but the winter’s bite of Baniskhaven, an old coastal town at the western extremity of Denholtz, would have tested even the toughest of the Emperor’s Legionaries.

“No,” she said. “There is no one in the residence except Lord Emil Baran.”

“He is a Reichskrieg veteran,” Vonvalt said.

“What man is not?”

Vonvalt shrugged. His shoulders were stiff. “I am just saying. If he is half the rogue you say he is, he will not go quietly.”

Sokol looked at him askance. “You have a reputation as an accomplished swordsman.”

“I am trying to cultivate a reputation for prudence.”

Sokol smiled, and then laughed—quietly, for they were trying to remain undetected. Vonvalt smiled too.

“Master Kadlec says you are the best in the Order. That is why I asked for your assistance.”

“I assumed it was because I was the only other Justice in the Westmark of Denholtz,” Vonvalt replied.

“Aye,” Sokol allowed. “There was that, too.” She gestured outside. “Your man is with the sheriff? What was his name?”

“The sheriff, or my taskman?”

Sokol grunted. “Better give me both.”

“The Sheriff of Baniskhaven is Sir Ivan. My taskmen—”

“The Grozodan?”

“The Grozodan,” Vonvalt confirmed, “is Dubine Bressinger.”

Sokol looked out through the door, though she could not see the posse of men hiding in the forest there. “You and I will enter the manor alone. I have instructed Sir Ivan to hold back unless we call for him.”

Vonvalt sighed but nodded. He had to be careful not to seem impudent. He was well-respected in spite of his relative youth, but Sokol was many years his senior — indeed, this was to be her last case before she returned to Sova. There her life as a roving Justice would end; her twilight years would be spent as Jurist, maintaining the philosophical health of the Order of the Magistratum.

“Here,” she said, opening her satchel and unwrapping a parcel of cured sausage and bread. She nodded at the sky. “We will go in after nightfall.”

Vonvalt accepted his share of the food, and they ate in silence, waiting for the last of the light to fade.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

The manor was unremarkable, a two-storey box of grey stone, sloped roofs of lichenous red slate, and a crenellated tower that sat at the nexus of two uneven wings. The whole structure lay in the centre of extensive grounds which had been cultivated into attractive gardens—though a careful observer would notice several months’ worth of neglect that had left the flowerbeds ragged and the weeds unchecked. Sokol knew why, though given the number of missing people reported in Baniskhaven, Vonvalt had his suspicions.

They left the temple ruin under the cover of darkness and surmounted a low stone wall that separated the ornamental gardens from the wider landholdings. The manor was mostly dark, but there was light in several of the oriel windows in the south wing. There was almost no moonlight, and thanks to the wind and drizzle, their approach was well masked.

“Here,” Sokol whispered. They had reached the dark northern wing and were crouched beneath one of the windows. There was just enough space to slip a dagger through and push the latch up, and Sokol did so. She exhaled slowly as she opened the window and peered into the darkened chamber beyond.

Immediately, she ducked back down.

What is it? Vonvalt mouthed. He was crouched on the ground, his back to the wall, hand on the pommel of his short sword.

Sokol did not immediately answer. She spat onto the grass, then cleared her throat a few times and spat some more. Vonvalt moved to stand, but Sokol grasped at his shoulder and pushed him back down.

The silence within the manor continued undisturbed. Sokol eventually pressed herself back up — not without difficulty — and once again peered over the sill. She spent a few moments looking, then motioned for Vonvalt to do the same.

“Nema,” he swore quietly.

Inside was a dining hall, filled with all the ostentation one would expect of a wealthy provincial lord. In the centre, on a huge, ornate rug, was a long table of glossy dark wood attended by three people—two men and a woman—all of them sitting upright and with their arms stiff and outstretched. Between them was a generous spread, and some of this food had found its way onto the guests’ plates. There, it sat, untouched.

Despite the cold, the smell that emanated from the dining hall was overwhelming. It was a rich, cloying, fruity stench, one that caught at the back of the throat and clotted there. It was the sour smell of decay, a smell that both Sokol and Vonvalt were intimately familiar with. And yet, although the food was undoubtedly degrading—the infestation of maggots was testament to that— it was the state of the guests that accounted for at least some of the smell.

Vonvalt and Sokol crept into the dining hall. Vonvalt went first and then helped Sokol over the threshold, despite the latter’s clear reluctance to be helped. Sokol pulled the window closed behind her and eased the latch down.

Vonvalt turned and examined the closest guest. What he had initially taken to be hair in the poor light was, in fact, a dark mass of brain. Looking across at the other two victims revealed the same fate; namely that the caps of their skulls had been cut away with the skill of a barber-surgeon. Some of the brains had been removed, too, roughly excavated by knife and fork. From what Sokol had told Vonvalt about the case, he had no doubt that these morsels had been consumed by Emil Baran.

Sokol drew Vonvalt’s attention with a wave and then gestured to the door at the far end of the room. Vonvalt nodded, and together they made their way quietly to it. Sokol held her breath as she pressed the handle down and pulled the door open, but they need not have worried; the hinges were well oiled, and it made no sound.

They were now in the central part of the manor, a large open hall that was home to little more than a broad staircase and an impressive array of hunting trophies. They crossed it quickly and achieved the door to the south wing. Vonvalt looked at Sokol. She nodded. The time for subtlety was over. Vonvalt pressed the handle and flung the door open so hard it slammed into the wall.

If they had hoped to startle Baran, they were disappointed. A man was sitting in an armchair, facing away from them, and he did not stir. A silver plate of human brain matter and other viscera sat on a small table next to him. Flies, untroubled by the interruption, buzzed soporifically in the cold air.

“Lord Emil Baran,” Justice Sokol said, sweeping past Vonvalt. What little candlelight remained was suddenly extinguished. Vonvalt curled his lip. He was not a credulous man, but the sudden darkness felt inauspicious.

There was no response from Baran.

“Emil Baran! In the name of the Emperor, hearken to me!” Sokol snapped. The words seemed unforgivably loud in the silence of the manor house.

They rounded the armchair. Vonvalt lowered his sword. The man was slumped, unmoving. His skin was waxy and pale, his lips blue. He had the stout frame of the well-fed, though in death his features were slack. In a physical sense, he was, by any measure, an unremarkable man.

Sokol rammed her sword back into its scabbard. Her face was a mask of displeasure.

“That is that, then,” Vonvalt said, sheathing his weapon with no small measure of relief. Sokol had been working on the matter for weeks, and there had never been any indication that Baran was in league with another.

“That is nothing of the sort,” Sokol said, irritably. She moved about the chamber, lighting fresh candles and jamming them into the hot wax of those recently extinguished.

Vonvalt squatted and examined Baran. The body itself did not smell particularly, though the plate of brain matter did. Next to the plate was a crystal goblet. Vonvalt picked it up and sniffed the remnants of the liquid inside. He pulled a sour face.

“Monksbane,” he said to Sokol, but she seemed hardly to notice.

Vonvalt placed the goblet back down and cast an eye over the corpse. He shook his head. Monksbane was too painless and clean a death for someone as monstrous as Baran, there was no question of that, but the matter was concluded. Sokol had not filled him in on every last detail, but it was obvious that those who had been reported missing in Baniskhaven were the corpses in the man’s dining hall. The reasons behind such appalling murders died with Emil Baran, but what was there to be divined? The man had clearly been profoundly insane.

Vonvalt sighed and he stood. There was no longer any need for him to be in Baniskhaven and he was eager to move on. “I shall fetch Sir Ivan.”

“You shall do no such thing,” Sokol said. Vonvalt saw the flash of polished silver where she had pulled her Justice’s medallion from within her blouse, and the pale, wrinkled skin of her forearms where she had rolled her sleeves back. Vonvalt’s features creased in confusion as she approached the corpse.

“You do not mean to—” he began, but she held up a hand to silence him.

“What measure of comfort can I provide to the families of his victims if I do not at least attempt to discover his reasons?”

Vonvalt shrugged. “His reasons cannot matter,” he said. He gestured at the corpse. “The man was clearly a lunatic. It is cold comfort, I agree, but we must play the hand we are dealt.”

Sokol ignored him. She moved so she was standing next to the corpse.

Vonvalt felt his frustration grow. “Justice, this is a risk you need not take.”

“’Tis not a risk if you know what you are doing,” Sokol snapped.

Vonvalt gritted his teeth. “You do not know how long he has been dead.”

“It cannot have been more than a day.”

“You do not have the grimoire necromantia.”

“Any necromancer worth their salt knows the incantations by heart.”

Vonvalt opened his mouth and closed it again. He grimaced. “Justice, your reputation as an experienced necromancer is well known and deserved within the Order, but—”

“But what?”

“The case is concluded. Do you not make for Sova tomorrow?”

“And?”

Vonvalt was silent for a few moments, trapped between speaking his mind and affording a much more senior and experienced Justice the respect of his faith in her abilities.

“If the séance goes wrong—”

“Blood of gods, Konrad, shut up and step back if you are not going to assist me.”

Vonvalt’s further protestations—and he had had plans for many—withered on the vine. Whether it was obsession, hubris, grandstanding, some combination of the three—or something else entirely—he could not shift her.

With a sigh that verged on insolent, he obliged and took several steps back.

Sokol began muttering under her breath in an ancient, arcane tongue known only to a select few within the Order of the Magistratum. The candles, only freshly lit, began to tremble and gutter. Vonvalt turned and looked through the window, out across the gardens and to the forest at the edge of the manor grounds where Bressinger and the sheriff and his men waited. He willed them to approach, to interrupt this foolishness and so give him an excuse to cancel the séance. The baron was long dead, and his mind had been in disarray at the moment of his death. To attempt to commune with him, even for a necromancer with the skill and experience of Justice Sokol, was very ill-advised.

What sounds there had been beyond the residence—the wind, the rustling of the trees, the odd bark of a fox—died away. The more Sokol spoke the incantations and wards, and the thinner the fabric of reality between the mortal plane and the holy dimensions grew, the more sound and light drained away. Soon, there was little except silence and darkness.

Vonvalt felt a familiar cold dread well up within him. His physical courage was beyond question, but some fears could never be fully erased. Necromancy was so offensive to the laws of nature that it was impossible not to be frightened by it, but it was too powerful an investigative tool to be relegated to the Master’s Vaults of the Law Library.

His skin roughed with gooseflesh. His brain reeled from what his eyes were telling it, but the reality of the situation could not be denied:

The corpse of Emil Baran was waking up.

Vonvalt watched the man twitch and jerk as though he were strung to a puppeteer in the midst of a seizure. Justice Sokol’s eyes had gone white like balls of cut marble. She continued to speak the incantation, and the baron responded, his life force being rammed forcefully back into his body like a pillow being stuffed.

Eventually, Emil stopped twitching and his eyes opened. Whereas Sokol’s were purest white, Baran’s were dark pools of obsidian. He maintained the same pose as before and stared fixedly at the ceiling.

Complete, raging silence claimed the solar. Vonvalt let out a shaky breath. His hand instinctively went to the pommel of his short sword. They had entered the séance’s most dangerous period.

“You are Lord Emil Baran,” Sokol said. Establishing the identity of the dead was the first and most important thing. There was power in a name; it anchored a spirit to the Plain of Burden, for a time. But for as long as it was so anchored, it was also vulnerable.

Baran did not respond for a long time. “Quite delicious,” he said. His voice was jarring, at once both muffled and clear. “Quite delicious.”

Vonvalt’s grip on his sword tightened. It was normal to obtain nonsense from the subject of a séance—more often than not, it was all that was obtained.

“Hearken to me!” Sokol said sharply. “You are Lord Emil Baran.”

“What do you want?” Baran asked. “I am in the middle of a dinner party.” He spoke with sudden expansiveness, but his body remained unmoving.

“You are a murderer,” Sokol said. There was venom in her voice.

“I am a murderer,” Baran agreed.

“There are three people in your dining hall,” Sokol said. “You killed them, yes?”

There was a pause.

“Baran!”

“What do you want?” He twitched. For a moment—no longer than an eyeblink—his face was a rictus of agony. “I am in the middle of a dinner party.”

Vonvalt looked at Sokol. The urge to bring the séance to an end was strong.

“You murdered the people in your dining hall. You ate their brains. Why?”

“Quite delicious.”

“You killed them!”

Something changed. The air shifted, drew in. The darkness deepened. Vonvalt’s ears throbbed with a distant buzzing. The pit of his stomach dropped.

He looked sharply at Sokol. “Break the bond. You must.”

“Silence!” Sokol snapped.

“I have killed many,” Baran said. His voice had changed, deepened, taken on weight. It was an unsettling timbre, one that injured the mind to hear.

“I am speaking of the people in your dining hall,” Sokol pressed.

“Thousands. Tens of thousands. Bodies piled high like petals of ash.”

“Three people!” Sokol snapped. “I am talking of the three people in your dining hall!”

“What do you want? I am in the middle of a dinner party.” Baran’s voice, now, jarring and mild.

Vonvalt could clearly remember his tutelage many years before in the Grand Lodge in Sova. In warm, subterranean chambers, the walls and bedrock carefully inscribed with magickal runes, one of the first things they had been taught was to never interrogate an insane mind. They were like chum to the predators of the afterlife.

“Why did you do it?” Sokol asked. “Why!”

“The churned offal and powdered bones make good mortar for the stones of the Ziggurat of Ambyr,” Baran said.

Vonvalt clenched his fists. His heart pounded.  “Klaudia, please!” he hissed.

“Why did you murder them?” Sokol demanded, one last time.

“I’ll tell you why I did it!” Baran snapped. “I was there the day the Muphraab led his legions against the Accuser. He spent almost a year marshalling his host by the Halls of Hell. And then for six days they battled, and he slew them, rendered their flesh from their bones, put the flesh into pots and boiled them to mulch, ground the bones like chaff and mixed them, and he quarried the stone from the Broken Path which had set the ground of his greatest victory and built the great colossus of death in the Edaximae, the Ziggurat of Ambyr. The Muphraab made it his home, a temple to his greatest victory, may his name live forever in the mouth of the Accuser!”

Baran’s voice had reached fever pitch. Vonvalt looked between Sokol and the corpse. The latter had changed. Something intangible had shifted. Emil Baran, if he had ever been summoned to the Plain of Burden, was gone. His body was a vessel, but it was not his spirit that inhabited it.

Vonvalt instinctively grabbed his medallion and advanced on Sokol. Precisely his worst fears had been realised, and they had but a precious few moments to remedy it. “You must come back,” he said to Sokol, “at once!”

In a sudden, explosive movement, Baran’s corpse folded like a pocketknife. His mouth broke open and a violent stream of black ectoplasm vomited forth and splattered Sokol. She shrieked as the necrotic goo filled her mouth and nose. In moments, her eyes had gone from white to black as though diluted with poison. She staggered backwards clutching her face, screaming like a burn victim.

Vonvalt lunged forward. He quickly incanted the wards from memory and grabbed Sokol by the shoulder.

He gasped as he was thrown backwards, crashing through one of the solar’s windows. He landed outside in the gardens.

“Klaudia!” he shouted. He immediately pulled himself back up and hurried to the broken window.

Sokol was standing at the far end of the room, slightly hunched over and breathing heavily. Everything was silent and still.

“Klaudia?” Vonvalt asked.

She looked up.

It was not Klaudia.

Vonvalt leapt backwards as she bore down on him, barrelled out of the smashed window, overshot, hit the ground, turned, and came at him again.

“I am the progenitor of the Legions of Sardach!” Sokol shouted in a voice that was not hers. She took her medallion into one hand and Vonvalt watched as it melted into molten silver. “I am the one who smote the Accuser and took his head to the Halls of Hell! It was I who cut the heart out of Vangrid, and it was I who poisoned the Blood of Creus! And you, fools, children, animals, attempt to deny me my prey! This man is mine! His spirit is mine! No man should seek to deprive me!”

Vonvalt stepped backwards as Sokol—diminutive, elderly Sokol—towered over him, impossibly, her body swollen and straining with dark energies.  He was moments from losing his nerve entirely. His short sword was held out in front of him, but he was not even sure it would achieve anything.

Sokol took two steps forward and gripped the blade. Rancid breath washed over Vonvalt, making him gag. His fear manifested as a single, low grunt. He felt the cold, damp stones of the mansion press into his back. His ears were filled with a horrible buzzing that by itself threatened to crush his sanity to a fine powder. His heart squirmed and thumped so brutally he was sure it was about to give out.

“Tread. Lightly,” Sokol said, the words like blades of ice. With her other hand, she let the molten medallion dribble to the floor. “Have better sense than your master.”

And then, vacated, Sokol collapsed.

“Fucking Nema,” Bressinger said the following morning. In front of him was a jar of onions in vinegar, and he picked at them idly, crunching them between his teeth.

It had been a long, cold night, one filled with the heavy burden of administration that came in the wake of murder. Vonvalt, his taskman Bressinger, and the sheriff, Sir Ivan, as well as the latter’s constables, combed through the house for more remains. They had unearthed a hoard of corpses in the residence’s cellars in various states of dismemberment and decomposition, in and amongst a great many pots of human bonemeal.

After the search was exhausted, and the bodies had been cleared out, Vonvalt gave the order for the house to be burned. Now, he and Bressinger breakfasted in one of the few remaining inns in Baniskhaven—insofar as a succession of goblets of wine could be considered breakfast.

“What a senseless waste of a life,” Vonvalt said bitterly, draining the last of his wine and signalling to the barkeep for another. The man had broken out a bottle of some of his finest red, expecting Vonvalt to have a refined palate, but seeing that the two of them were simply drinking it as one might a pint of ale, this time he brought over a significantly cheaper vintage.

“And a career,” Vonvalt added.

“What did she hope to achieve?” Bressinger asked him.

“I know not,” Vonvalt sighed. “Nema knows I tried to dissuade her. Emil Baran was insane. His dead mind was never going to be anything other than a stew of interdimensional parasites.” Vonvalt shook his head and winced at the taste of the new, cheaper wine. “Interrogating him was nothing but reckless. She could have used me, too, but she did not.”

“I’ll warrant she was showing off. Going out with a bang. You said she was due to retire?”

Vonvalt shrugged. “Perhaps. I think it more likely her actions were born of obsession. Baran cheated her, and on her last case as a roving Justice. He killed himself. She cannot have thought to extract any useful testimony from him. I think she wanted to make his death more traumatic.”

“Revenge?”

“Something like that. In any event, it was a risk she did not have to take. And now she is dead.”

“Aye. And what a death.”

“Do not remind me,” Vonvalt said with great sincerity.

“What was it? That commanded her? I do not want the detail,” he added quickly. “Nema knows I’ve not seen you so troubled in a long time.”

Vonvalt pulled an expression of distaste. “Truthfully, I know not. A very old soul, talking on all manner of things concerning the holy dimensions.” He waved Bressinger off. “It is best relegated to memory.”

“It had its hooks in Baran?”

“Aye. As though Sokol had interrupted a tyger and the carcass of its prey.”

Bressinger shuddered. “Fuck me.” He drained his wine and fished the last pickled onion from the jar. “Have the families been informed?”

“Sir Ivan will take care of it.”

“Then there is nothing left for us in Baniskhaven?”

Vonvalt shook his head. “I must send a letter to the Order, explaining what has become of Justice Sokol. You and I will head north this afternoon.”

“Thank fuck for that.”

They sat in silence for a long while.

“Sir Konrad?”

“Aye?”

Bressinger cleared his throat. “If you want to discuss it, you know I will always listen.”

Vonvalt nodded. “I know,” he said. He looked out the window, to where snow was pattering against the panes.

“But I do not.”

They left Baniskhaven that afternoon, hunched in their saddles, their horses kicking through snowdrifts on the sand. Above, the sky roiled like a ceiling of broken slate. To the west, the cold, grey waters of the Grall Sea foamed and lapped against the beach.

Thump, fizz; thump, fizz.

Like the pounding of a monstrous heartbeat.

“Dubine?” Vonvalt called over the wind.

“Aye?”

“Let me hear one of your Grozodan folk songs, eh?”

Bressinger smiled. “With pleasure, sire.”

Vonvalt eyed the distant horizon. It would be a long time before the image of Justice Klaudia Sokol being dragged into the afterlife, her eyes wide with horror and bafflement and agony, faded from his memory.

“And Dubine?”

“Aye, sire?”

“Make it a long and happy one.”

Want more Vonvalt and Bressinger?

Order The Scour now and find out what Vonvalt does when a fellow Justice is accused of murder.

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Acknowledgements

Author: Richard Swan

Header artist: Luke Spooner

Wolf’s head device: Shawn King

The post Free dark fantasy: A Reputation For Prudence by Richard Swan appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.