Swords of the Empire

by Edited by Marc Gascoigne

  We left fair Altdorf on St Talve's Eve, he that is the patron saint of lambing. I had under my command twenty men at arms of the Reiksguard, all of horse with spears unto them, and including two handgunners. We made, as I may say, a sorry sight, for we had cast aside banners and decorations so as to pass unremarked upon in the isolate tracks beyond the Empire. This was on the advice of my masters. I myself had set aside my laurels, and my full plate, and even the barding of my steed. We wore simple half-plate, leather and cloaks, and some had hauberks of good chain. Had you come upon us in the driving rain, you would have mistaken us for brigands or a sell-sword company.

  In this unseemly guise, we journeyed north, and performed our duty. To whit, this was to guard and escort a man of great worth. His name was Udo Jochrund, and he was a great wizard of the Order of the Wise, which is to say the Order of Light.

  Like all mortal men, I am uncomfortable in the company of magic. It makes me to tremble, and turns my belly to acid. Sire Jochrund had the stuff around his person like a perfume. He was tall and slender, like the white aspens that grow in profusion in the lowlands of Kislev, his scalp shaved bald, with a great bounty of moustache and beard sweeping forth from his chin, cheeks and upper lip like a waterfall. This beard hair was dark, like charcoal, and seemed to clash at odds with the waxy pallor of his skin. His eyes, under bushy black brows, were brightly the colour of a harvest moon; that is like spun gold, like full-ripened corn, like a healthy gelding's urine. He wore long under-robes of earth-brown velvet, embroidered with many wondrous sigils and patterns in silver thread, and overtop he dressed in the long white caparison of his office and order. His hands were, in the most part of our adventure, gloved in glossy black leather, the rings worn glinting on the outside, and he carried the most curious carven staff, fully head-tall, worked in all intricacy to resemble a serpent coiled around a bough.

  I have described him thus so you might know him by sight, but I have not described him at all. For it was in his manner that Udo Jochrund was known. Soft-voiced, let me start with that. Never a shout, never a bellow. His tone was as frail as a fallen leaf, dissolving in a trackway puddle, perfect in every detail yet insubstantial and fading like a spectre. Sometimes, from three furlongs distant, he had called to me, without any raising of his voice, and I had heard him most distinct. It was like he had quoth in my very head.

  More so than his voice, his bearing. He was stiff and ungainly, gesturing in conversation with his elbows rather than his hands, as if he was afraid that more vital manners might cause his potent hands to write upon the air and manufacture magic unintended. More even than his voice, the smell of him. Like burned sugar-powder, but not rank. A sweet, sickly odour.

  Sire Jochrund's mission was one of learning, as may be expected of an order whose purview is knowledge, and mine was to safeguard him. Before we set out, in the early part of spring, when I had been appointed to ride as his guard commander, he brought me to supper at his house. The food was ordinary, the atmosphere unnerving. By lamplight, in the late eve, his musty lodging was a place of jumping, darting shadows that could not be explained even by the flutter of the wicks.

  I profess again, I am a soldier, nothing more or less, and have no sensibility for magic. I want no part of it, and would be glad never to have to acquaint myself with its actions. But yet, I am sanguine. Without the Colleges of Magic, and the martial magicians they have bred, our Empire would not stand today. In the van of every Imperial army stands a wizard from one or other order, bent to use his arcane might to achieve victory. Thus is the legacy of Teclis, who taught Magnus the Pious that magic was a necessary art, and one to be practised and honed, even in an honest and Sigmar-fearing country like ours.

  At supper, in that haunted chamber, Sire Jochrund seemed to sense my distress, and made every effort to console my mind. He explained, in basic terms, the purposes of the Colleges of Magic, the nature of the eight orders, and the pertinence of his own, the first and most lauded order. Much of what he said I already knew, but it was the way he told it to me. He spoke, I suppose, as to a child eager to learn. I was transfixed by his voice, and by the way he kept on his glossy black gloves even when using the meat fork and tearing the soda-bread.

  'I will explain the venture before us, von Kallen,' he declared, 'for I want you to understand it rightly, so that you will play your part unquestioningly. Magic is without-'

  'Without what?' quoth I, in all innocence.

  'Without us!' he cried with a tremendous laugh at the expense of my foolishness. 'It is all around us, it permeates the world, soaks into the fibres of the land. It is a fact of life. Deny it and you deny reality. The colleges do not create magic, they tap into it, harness it, use it, and direct it. Our skills are not those of creation, they are of comprehension.'

  I nodded at that, though without much of the quality in question.

  Then he bade me answer this: 'Why am I a wizard and you a soldier?'

  I shook my poor head. Answers I had, in all truth, many, numbering amongst them merits of birth and demeanour, but the reply he was after was much simpler yet.

  'Because you are trained in the use of horse and lance and sword, and I am trained in the use of the arcane.'

  This much I had fathomed for myself. Then he said, 'Each order has unto itself its own discipline. For the Golden Order, alchemy. For the Grey Order, shadow. For the Amber Order, beastcraft... and such wise. The Light Order binds them all, for it is through us the knowing of their ways were divined. We scour and search, we find and collect, we catalogue and translate. We are the seekers of lore. We are the pathfinders of lost magics, or magics yet unknown to civilised man. And that is our endeavour now. A threat is rising in the North, von Kallen, a great and divisive threat that mayhap will tumble our proud Empire into dust.'

  'May Sigmar guard us!' I said at once.

  'May he indeed,' he agreed. 'But we may also guard ourselves. We have wrung the byways and remote villages of the Empire dry of lore, but in the realm of Kislev, rude magic abounds. Up in that great expanse are tiny communities and forgotten towns where shamans and wise-folk daily practise routines of lore and craft unknown to us. It may be that their very proximity to the wastes of Chaos means they are more connected to the source than us.'

  At his mention of the word, I shuddered. He pulled aside his white robe and showed me an eight-pointed star sewn in silver on his tunic.

  'Do you know this, von Kallen?'

  I blanched and felt I should reach for my sword.

  He saw me. He read me. He smiled. 'The octo-point star of Chaos. Eight fiery limbs, young man. Tell me... why are there eight Colleges of Magic?'

  I stammered dumbly.

  'Because,' he sighed, 'Chaos is the root of all magic. This much Teclis taught us. From their eight sorcerous winds, all magic derives. Be not afraid. Magic stems from Chaos, and is tainted by it, but it may be controlled and purified by a trained practitioner. Such is the purpose of the eight orders. And to discover such control is the purpose of the Light Order. In the scattered settlements of Kislev, in the tribal conclaves of the empty quarters, lore is waiting to be uncovered from the elders and shamans. Over the last nine years I have conducted seven missions to the North at the bidding of the elector counts. I tour the lonely stanitsas to learn new skills, new secrets, new crafts that have lain in their folk-rituals since the dawn of time.'

  This, then, was our purpose. To ride north and protect Sire Jochrund as he sampled and collected, learning and borrowing and otherwise obtaining new rudiments of magic from the outlying barbarians so that the craft might be employed for the good of our Empire.

  The wizard showed me the letters of permission and sealed charters from the princes that bade him do this thing. I needed no further convincing. In the Empty Quarter, this Imperial wizard might learn charms that could keep the Empire of Man standing for another thousand years, no matter what threat arose from the wild wastes.

  We passed beyond the bounds of the Ostermark at the spring e
quinox, the rivers running hard and foamy with meltwater from the highlands. The air was brittle, like ice. Our convoy was as thus: twenty men at arms, shrouded in tan cloaks, myself, Sire Jochrund on his black gelding, besides a storewagon driven by the sire's apprentice, Sigert.

  Rain beset us for the first month, then gales that rattled the moon on its hook. By the time the gales settled, we were far into Kislev itself, crossing the grasslands and the pine barrens from village to village. Time ground over and around, like a working millstone, slow, heavy and wearing. I had been in Kislev twice before, on military tours. I knew its vastness, the open flatness of its plains, the force of its winds. I felt them again on my face and wondered how many of them were driven by the eight winds of Chaos.

  To a man birthed and raised in the forests and mountains of the Empire, Kislev is a formidable country. It has an expanse that I have not experienced anywhere else, nor can truly describe. The vast sky bends over it in supplication, where the sky in Imperial lands flutters above the peaks like a banner. Even in summer, sleet and hail come down from nowhere, horizontal. It stings the skin. The sun comes out, like a phantom, and chases down over distant hills. The nights seem long, breathless.

  But I must confess, I like these wilds. The air is clear like crystal, the winds - whatever their origin - fresh and uplifting. Where there is flatness - the steppes, as they are called - there is total flatness, and nodding grasses nod forever to eternity. Where there are mountains, they rise suddenly, like giant's teeth, vast and snow-capped even in the heat of summer, colossal and overwhelming.

  Through this, we tracked, following the wizard. I have not hide enough, nor ink enough, to remark upon all the particulars. We followed lonely drove tracks far up into the mountains. We came upon little places that had hidden themselves for ten thousand years. Stanitsas, they are called. Villages, in my tongue. Some perched on river bends, others hidden in secret, misty valleys. A few sat, proud and untamed, in the centre of vast steppe plains, like crowns discarded on the earth. One we came to was shrouded in an aspen forest. Another clung to a crag over the deepest gorge I have ever seen. Water tumbled below, as fulsome and fierce as the wizard's beard.

  We spent a day at each, no more than two. The hospitality was astonishing. They lit their fires high and brought us in, and slaughtered a good many goats and hogs for spitting. We were given koumiss to drink - that is fermented mare's milk - as a welcoming gift from the ataman chiefs, and also stronger concoctions delivered with a pinch of salt. At every stop, the Kislevites knew how to drink and how to entertain.

  At every village, Sire Jochrand withdrew with the esauls and the stanitsa shaman. He talked with them into the night, as moths braved the campfires in vast, dusty hosts. He learned. He collated.

  On we went. The summer lengthened. A stanitsa greeted us, sparse on the plain, surrounded by eight sacred trees. Another, built on the summit of a granite crag like a tooth of the world, with steps hewn out of the living rock. Yet another, walled and discrete, surrounded at all sides by a lake of blue flowers, sprung from the dust, nodding in the breeze.

  I remember telling Sire Jochrund that we should return. The summer was waning. Already, a taint of cold could be felt in the air.

  He refused me, avowing that one last stop was in order. He'd learned such stuff at the last stanitsa (a walled township overlooking a gloomy vale), that he wanted to press on. Just a week more. Seven days.

  That was when we came upon Kzarla. It lay beside a lake in the hills, and the lake lay in the ground like a black blade lying on grass.

  But I forget myself! I must tell you of Subarin. And also of the fight. Ah, once more my story-wolf goes scattering my facts!

  Fortune had been with us enough, at least, to keep fighting away. For the most part, at any rate. At Zhedevka, two of my men, whose names are - no, I will not name them. I punished them at the time. If this account is to be our last testament, I will not defame them with a slight injury. So let it be said that at Zhedevka, two of my party were embroiled in a tavern fight over some no-matter. In the elm brakes above Kacirk, where the grey Kislev sky seems to run unnaturally fast, and shushes through the swaying branches like a river torrent, we skirmished with some painted raiders who were swift discouraged by the use of handguns. Then at Vitzy, along the great shingle beaches of the river, we fought for an hour or so with robbers and bandits who came down out of the pine woods. There were above forty of them, and we traded steel with them all the way down to the stepping stone crossing where the river bends, at no loss of our own. We made account of four of them, and packed them off to their indifferent sky-god.

  But that was all the bother for a long summer's riding, and grateful we were.

  Until Svedora.

  The wizard had made much of Svedora. It had been mentioned to him several times by the various elders and atamans he had interviewed during our trek, and he had made note of it at length in his chapbooks. It was a cattle town of some size, on the eastern slopes of the Czegniks, facing down across a wide valley girt with oak, myrtle and sandalwood towards the wide, mustard-yellow spring pastures by the reedy river.

  Svedora was said to be a town steeped in magic - cattle magic, weather magic, old magic. We were told a shaman lived there still who knew much of the old ways.

  I could feel Sire Jochrund's eagerness. Quite how much he had collected from the summer mission thus far I could not say. His chapbooks and scroll cases bulged, and he was forever writing. He had filled sacks with herbs and dried powders, flowers too, and had a little screw-press with which to flatten the blooms into perfect pictures of themselves. Bottles he had of tinctures given him by elders and wise men, and all other sundry totems and materials, all of which the sallow clerk Sigert catalogued and annotated.

  Occasionally, most often after nightfall in our latest camp, I would observe the wizard striding out of the way to a field or spot nearby where he would perform - I believe in practise - rituals he had but recently learned. With what measure of success I cannot say. Once we heard a moaning in the dark that put the horses sore afeared; once he caused a blue flame to walk across the surface of a pool, and once he made a great dusty wind to blow up, and came back to us, his eyes reddened, cursing some nameless spirit for at least two days.

  Sire Jochrund had his heart set on Svedora, even though on my map it lay a good three days further than I was happy to go. But on we went.

  A great number of black starlings began to gather above us for the two days prior to our arrival at the stanitsa. A few at first, circling and twittering, then more, then more. We touched iron against ill-omen, and the wizard seemed bothered by the mob, but in the bracken fields below Svedora, with the walled town overlooking us, they departed most suddenly and flew off cheeping and piping into the western sky.

  But our arrival had been noted, and a line of riders galloped out from the gatehouse and threaded a line of dust down the hill track towards us. I saw the flash of sunlight on speartips and armour.

  I drew the company to a stand, and stretched them in a line abreast, alert but with weapons sheathed, with the wagon held to the rear. The riders came out of the trees and formed a matching line facing us at a distance of three furlongs.

  Sigmar, but they were splendid. Thirty men in golden hauberks, and kettle-helms with nose-guards, decorated with bright jewellery, furs and expensive cloths. Upright from their backs rose the most remarkable wings of bright feathers, part of their decorative harness. Their horses were small, shaggy-maned creatures that had been painted shades of white, yellow, russet and pink. The men sported long, black moustaches and carried horse lances upright at their saddles. One held aloft a bright blue and white banner with a long swallowtail that turned and played in the wind like a water-snake.

  They were not the enemy. They were a proud company of Kislevite lancers, of a type long renowned in the Empty Quarter. We however - travel-stained, dusty and displaying no flag or banner - resembled their traditional enemy, the plains bandit, all too well.
/>
  I left my spear standing tip-down in the dirt, and rode forward, gesturing to Schroder to do the same. Schroder was my first officer, and sergeant of the men-at-arms, a decent fellow from Ostland who had a useful measure of the Kislevite tongue. We covered the scrubby ground between the two facing lines, and after a moment, two riders broke from their formation and came towards us at a trot. I was encouraged to see they left their lances in the earth likeways.

  Closer to, I was yet more transfixed by the ornate beauty of their armour. Gold, inlaid with turquoise and pieces of jet, and also a translucent orange gem called amber. Their horse armour was accoutred in jingling tassels and bead-ropes, and with medals or badges made of smoky silver inset with blue-glass stones. Their wings rose high above their backs, straight and true, formed of gilded wooden frames to which dyed eagle feathers had been expertly fletched. The valley wind rustled them and made the feathertips twitch, like the trim of a circling hawk. The brass nasal-guards of the riders' helms descended sharply almost to the lips, and gave them both a mean and snarling look.

  Through Schroder, I greeted them, and made it as clear as I could our intentions were peaceful. They listened attentively, but made no change of expression, nor did they show any signs of comprehension. I produced the Imperial seal, and also my letters of permission, one of which was counter-sealed by the provost of the tzarina. The two men passed the items between themselves and muttered. Then one turned his painted pony smartly and raced off in the direction of their line, taking my letters and seal with him.

  'Hie!' I exclaimed in consternation, and the rider who had stayed with us at once growled some caution, and drew his sabre enough that four fingers' width of blue-steel blade was visible outside its jewelled scabbard.