Archaon: Everchosen
Page 5
Diederick felt Nils standing behind him. Watching, like the page.
‘Sieur Kastner is not what Sigmar intended,’ Diederick said.
The squire didn’t disagree, but as the beer-blind templar rose from the small lake in the road, mumbling to himself in a black mood, Nils returned to the greatsword Terminus and his work. Sieur Kastner listed back towards the Three Ways Inn before seeming to forget where he was going and settled on a course for the open stable door.
‘Get back to work,’ Nils instructed the page. Diederick nodded slowly and returned to Oberon’s side.
Sieur Kastner stumbled into the stable. He tried to hold position for a moment as he glowered at Nils, furiously at work on the blade, and Diederick’s back as the page selected a further shoe for the steed.
‘What do you think you’re looking at?’ the knight slurred at them, despite the fact that no eyes had been raised in the templar’s presence. Kastner fell to more grumbling, holding some kind of conversation with himself. Diederick could only make out intermittent words and phrases: ‘cesspit’, ‘White Wolf’, ‘…where a man of the God-King can be appreciated’.
He stomped through the straw at Oberon, who snorted his uncertainty. When the knight was in his cups, nothing was safe from his drunken wrath. The templar wasn’t above whipping the horse for some perceived fault. Snatching for the spooked animal’s noble head, it became apparent that Kastner intended on mounting the horse and riding north for Middenheim.
‘My lord,’ Nils braved finally, amongst the commotion. ‘My lord, what are you doing?’ It was unwise to challenge the knight in such a state but if Kastner had ridden and fallen or if Oberon were lost, there would only be a greater price to pay the next morning. In his inebriated state, the squire could at least hope that the templar might tire easily or pass out.
‘Are you telling me what to do?’ Kastner growled, turning on Nils. Diederick watched the pair of them fall into a familiar routine. More slurred mumbling from the knight eventually formed the words, ‘…little dung-shoveller like you tell a templar of the Tail-Twinned Orb when he can ride and when he cannot…’
Nils didn’t correct the knight but simply tried to convince him that the horse was without saddle, bridle and bereft of shoe.
‘You want to do this?’ Kastner asked with a fat snarl. His face moved between contortions of confusion and gall, falling away occasionally to the palsy of growing fatigue. Unconsciousness beckoned but the templar wouldn’t let it take him. ‘You want to do this, turd?’
‘No, my lord,’ Nils said, his voice rising with fear and his own face straining with the ordeal he knew was to come. ‘Please, sir. I beg of you. My concern is but for the safety of your hallowed person. In Sigmar’s name…’
Kastner’s eyes closed for a moment and the fat nobleman drifted to the left. For a second it looked as if he might crash to the stable floor in a drunken malaise. His eyes shot back open suddenly at the mention of his God-King.
‘You use his name to me?’ the templar slurred. He advanced on the squire.
‘F-f-forgive me, my lord,’ Nils stammered, his eyes glassy and quivering. ‘Diederick changed the shoes against my good counsel. It is he who is responsible for the unreadiness of your steed at this hour.’
Kastner turned his head towards Diederick, who stood trying to calm the snorting and disquieted Oberon. He stared at the page.
‘You?’ Sieur Kastner blurted.
Diederick stared back, his teenage face hard and unreadable. There was nothing of hurt and betrayal to be found there. Nils couldn’t take another beating at the templar’s hand. Diederick knew that. Kastner glared at him. He gave him the darkness of his eyes. As usual, the knight found it difficult to hold the boy’s gaze. He always had – ever since he had reluctantly taken the young Diederick off Hieronymous Dagobert’s hands. The drunken Kastner turned back to Nils.
‘No, no, no,’ the knight rumbled dangerously. ‘The page is responsible to the squire, the squire to his lord. Punish him as you will. You are my servant. Your correction is my burden.’
With difficulty, Kastner unbuckled his belt and tossed the coils of heavy leather down on the ground before the squire. Stumbling at the stable wall, Kastner rummaged through the squire’s saddlebags, hanging from a nearby stall.
‘Please… sir,’ Nils pleaded. The flush-faced knight found what he was looking for. He tossed a tied bundle of birching twigs and a length of knotted rope down with the thick belt. Nils almost seemed to crumble before them. Diederick watched in stony silence.
‘Birch, braid or belt?’ the templar put to the demolished Nils, spittle rolling down through his beard.
‘No,’ the squire moaned.
‘What?’ Kastner roared. ‘I can’t hear you. Birch, braid or belt. Choose your correction.’ Nils just wheezed at his hulking master. ‘Sigmar compels you, boy. Tell me now.’
The shoeing hammer flew across the stable, head over handle, before striking the templar in his mountainous backflesh. It thudded and fell. Kastner staggered forward, his face a mixture of pain and surprise, his brow like a growing storm. He turned slowly to look down at the hammer on the straw-strewn floor. The knight seemed to sober. He looked up at the page.
‘I choose the hammer, you sack of wine,’ Diederick told his master. The knight still couldn’t believe what had just happened. He kicked the other implements of punishment at Nils with his boot before leaning down to pick up the hammer. He must have been seeing several because it took him several attempts to acquire it.
‘So be it, you little runt,’ Kastner told him, advancing with the hammer. ‘I knew you were more trouble than you were worth. Since your squire has clearly failed to beat such unruliness from you, it falls to me to take charge of your re-education. You want the hammer, boy, then you shall have it.’
Nils, bawling into the straw, went to crawl away.
‘Don’t you move,’ Kastner seethed back at him. ‘You’re next.’
Diederick stepped fearlessly forward, drawing the templar’s eyes back to his dark-eyed defiance. ‘Tell me, boy,’ Kastner said, lifting the tool in readiness to strike. ‘Why the hammer?’
‘Because Sigmar compels me,’ Diederick told the templar. Kastner grunted his drunkard’s derision and went to bring the hammer down on the boy.
Oberon snorted and whinnied. The stallion suddenly reared up on its hind legs, kicking out with its front hooves. Thinking that Kastner was coming for it, the horse had gone wild. Kastner stepped back from the flash of the hooves and the steam of the destrier’s breath.
‘Calm, Oberon, calm,’ Diederick called, reaching out for the animal, but it bucked and turned, kicking out behind it and smashing the stall bar to splinters.
‘Back you blasted thing,’ Kastner raged, swinging the hammer before him. As Nils scrabbled away through the straw, Diederick snatched up the stallion’s halter chains from the stable wall and moved in to calm the beast before it harmed itself. Oberon’s flank came around suddenly, knocking the page to one side, before the frightened horse’s back hooves kicked out, striking Diederick in the head.
The page’s body was knocked from his feet, smashing into the opposite stall like a child’s rag doll. Everything grew dark. Oberon’s hooves thundered about him and the heat of the steed’s snorts washed over his face. Then, within several hoof-falls it was gone, the horse having bolted from the stable.
The lantern-light was dim. Diederick’s face felt wet. There was a dull ache where his head used to be. Something bad had happened, but the page’s thoughts couldn’t quite make their way to what. All he knew were the beams of the stable roof above him and the tools mounted there. Two heads moved slowly into view. Everything was blurred and the light was bleeding away, but Diederick could make out Nils and Sieur Kastner looking down at him – their faces wearing the same mask of dread stupefaction. The light wit
hered and died. It was the last thing Diederick ever saw.
Accident. Chance. Providence. Doom. These are one and the same. How many heroes have been crafted of the misfortunes that befell them? But for the roll of a die, the flip of a coin or the turn of a card they would be happy nothings to the world. All gods – those of light and of darkness – operate in the enormity of these mere moments. They are in the quiver of the string that sends the arrow wide and the glance of the sword that fails to meet its mark.
I have saved my pawn, my small piece in a larger game, from a hundred such deaths. What is life but the journey of hapless mortals through the myriad dangers of their miserable existence? It is the tedious curse of princes such as I to watch the tangled deathtraps of entwined lives form knots before me. Sometimes I cut the skein free, damning all to whom it is attached. To mortals these are the battles, massacres and disasters of the world. The labyrinthine circumstances into which the doomed have been inescapably placed. Sometimes, however, I take the time to unravel the threads of existence and free the living of their present doom. This I do when I have investment in the game. This I do for my pawn. I set him free knowing that he will similarly set me free of fate – bonds no less intricate or inescapable. And so my pawn, I release you from a death ordinary and unknown. You are meant for greater deeds.
CHAPTER III
‘But man’s way
Lies through the twists and turns of forests great and woodland dark,
Where savage and borne of the earthen spite before fancy’s fearful eye,
the grotesques of the underwald come, as they did before Sigmar.’
– Stoltz and Kramer
Near Suderberg
The Drakwald
Black Aubentag, IC 2406
Nils called but the thick darkness of the forest gave them nothing. They were alone. They were wet. Deep in the Drakwald and getting deeper. Nils held out Sieur Kastner’s dress sword before him. Kastner wore the short blade when not decked in his templar’s plate and required at temple or before Graf Todbringer. Nils cared little for etiquette and court protocol now. He needed to put cold steel between himself and the dank darkness through which he was advancing. Diederick – having through hard work and study, also attained the rank of squire – followed with the reins of Oberon in hand. A lantern bobbed from a saddle-mounted staff, throwing a feeble circle of light about the three of them.
It had been raining and although it had long stopped, the heavens’ issue had yet to work its way down through the Drakwald’s twisted canopy. The darkness was a wall of sound. A cacophony of dripping. Droplets gathering, rolling and falling from leaf to branch to muddy pools and saturated undergrowth beneath. It made for a miserable passage.
Nils called out for the templar again. The action filled both squires with dread. ‘What else can we do?’ Nils had put to Diederick, but the boy didn’t have an answer for him. In a place so thick with trees, tangle and shadow that they might walk straight past their master and not even know it, hollering his name through the night-drenched forest was all they could do. It didn’t stop the fanciful imaginations of the pair conjuring images of beastmen, fang-faced lycanthropes and the wandering dead drawn down on them by their own foolish advertisements.
‘Surely the barrow can’t be that much further,’ Diederick said. ‘We’ve been walking for an age.’
Nils crunched on through the sodden undergrowth.
‘Perhaps it just seems that way,’ the squire mused.
Sieur Kastner’s drunken boasts had once again drawn them into danger. Passing through the village of Suderberg, the knight had ventured into the Crooked Boar for a stein or four of spiced brew. When he hadn’t emerged, the pair of squires assumed as usual that he had forgotten about them and had taken a room at the tavern. As the next morning spent in the stables rolled into the afternoon, the boys entered the tavern to enquire as to their master’s whereabouts. They found that the templar had never made it to bed and had instead entertained them with a tale told by a grieving woodsman about his children, Franz and Frieda, who had disappeared about the Six Stones Barrow. Two trappers at the tavern told the squires that the old Teutogen burial ground was due west of the village and that was the direction the knight had set off in the previous night, after stein-clashing boasts in the tap room that he would find the children or destroy the evil that had.
The squires stopped in their soggy tracks. There were sounds from beyond. Wood cracking. Branches splintering. The agony of trees with their trunks rent apart by something monstrous and unseen moving through the wet forest. Nils crouched down in the brush. Diederick did likewise, holding Oberon’s head down and praying to the God-King that the dense forest smothered their lantern-light. His other hand was preoccupied with holding the sacred hammer of Sigmar, the pendant that nestled coolly against his chest. The horse snuffled and blinked its alarm. The animal smelled something, for it too fell to stillness. Listening to the departing crash of the unseen thing through the crowded forest, Nils and Diederick exchanged glances of fearful relief.
‘What if we don’t find him?’ Diederick said as they resumed their trek through the bleak wood.
‘You mean Sieur Kastner?’ Nils said.
‘Yes.’
‘We will.’
‘What if we don’t?’ Diederick pressed. ‘This is the Drakwald. Entire companies of troops have disappeared here without a trace.’
Nils nodded. Diederick wasn’t exaggerating.
‘Well you for one would return to your priest and temple on the Nordland coast,’ Nils said with confidence, cutting through the knotted undergrowth with the edge of Sieur Kastner’s short sword.
‘Father Dagobert’s moved,’ Diederick said. ‘I mean, he was moved. The Arch Lector said he was needed in Hochland. His way temple is near Esk, at the foot of the Middle Mountains.’
‘Some bad country,’ Nils said. ‘So I’ve heard.’
‘What about you?’
‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ Nils assured the squire.
‘Will you return to your parents?’
‘I’m an orphan,’ Nils told him. ‘Like you.’
Diederick stopped for a moment, bringing Oberon and the lantern to a stop. He’d never known that about Nils. The squire found that he was hacking ahead of the grim halo of light that the lantern was casting in the tight confines of the ancient forest. ‘Come on,’ Nils scowled, prompting Diederick to follow.
Nils’s blade cut through the darkness. ‘Bring the lantern up,’ he instructed. As Diederick brought it forward, the squires realised that they had hit a clearing. Where there had been trees there was now a dripping, thorny tangle. Leading with Oberon’s mighty hooves, the horse trampled a way through for the boys. Through the squire-drowning foliage, they found that the lantern was not needed. Mannslieb was high in the sky – although Nils and Diederick wouldn’t have known it under the thick forest canopy – and blessed the clearing with its ghoulish light. The clearing was roughly circular in shape, rising in the middle and dominated by stubby stones, standing upright out of the ground in a circle. Diederick counted them. The two squires looked at one another.
‘The Six Stones Barrow,’ Diederick said. The trappers had been right.
Climbing up the moon-glossed hummock, the pair moved through the stones.
Nils swore.
‘What?’ Diederick said.
‘I’ve got bones over here,’ the squire said. ‘And here. They look human.’
‘Probably an animal kill,’ Diederick said, upon inspection. ‘See the gnawing? Besides – they look old.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Nils told him. ‘This could be like Fassberg. Or last Geheimnisnacht.’
‘Dark ceremonies? Human sacrifice? Look at the moss on the stones,’ Diederick assured him. ‘Teutogen alright. Nothing’s happened here for a long time.’
‘Wish I knew.’
Nils kicked a rock at one of the standing stones. ‘Let’s go.’
‘We should wait,’ Diederick suggested.
‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘We’ve come all the way out here,’ Diederick said. ‘You want to just go back?’
‘He’s probably returned to the Crooked Boar and is snug in a bed with a farmer’s wife as we speak.’
Diederick shook his head. ‘Or passed out under a tree with an empty flask.’
Sieur Kastner kept several about his massive person, for when he was out of reach of an alehouse. ‘We should wait. We’ll probably hear him snore or fart or something.’
Diederick smiled his reassurance. Nils’s anxious mask broke and the squire joined him in the joke.
‘Just look for the trees shaking…’
‘Or the ground…’
‘Enough to wake the dead,’ Nils’s chuckle died in his throat as he looked down at the bones littering the barrow. Tying Oberon to one of the stubby stones, Diederick and Nils sat down on two of the others. The cascade of droplets from the surrounding forest fell to a puddle-plopping trill. Moonlight bathed the clearing. Nils looked about him.
‘Seriously,’ Diederick said, attempting to take the squire’s mind from the ghastly moon, the dark suggestion of the treeline and the sepulchre beneath his boots. ‘You have a plan?’