Van Horstmann

by Ben Counter

  ‘There have been none here for decades,’ said Alric. ‘Little of the Light penetrates this place.’

  ‘Faith, Master Chanter,’ said Elrisse. ‘The Light is everywhere, and we must prepare to call upon it the most when we are in darkness.’

  From the shadows emerged another light, in the direction of the cells. It was a lantern held by a small man trussed up in a very expensive suit of breeches, jacket and slashed sleeves, with high hunting boots. He wore a pair of small spectacles and his thinning hair was scraped back. He had picked up a great deal of the dungeons’ grime already and did not look happy about it.

  ‘Minister,’ said Elrisse. ‘These are my brethren on the path of the Light. Master Chanter Alric and the finest of our acolytes.’

  ‘Can they be trusted?’ asked the man.

  ‘They are every bit as trustworthy as yourself, Minister Huygens,’ said the Grand Magister.

  Huygens looked critically at the acolytes. ‘Have they been told?’

  ‘They have been told nothing.’

  ‘Then come,’ said Huygens, and led the way through into the cells.

  The cells went further into the darkness under the palace. Here and there were remnants of other phases of the palace construction: piles of unused building materials and stone blocks, even the outlines of old tombs and burial chambers, all well-stained with age.

  ‘We dare not permit her above,’ Huygens was saying. ‘We have so far curtailed any wagging tongues, we believe. None but a few servants know and they are sworn to secrecy. His Imperial Majesty is not in attendance, it was thought better for him to journey to Nuln under the guise of a state visit. The more distance he keeps the better, until this matter is resolved.’

  ‘And the rest of the Imperial family?’ asked Elrisse as they walked.

  ‘Empress Mathilda would not leave,’ replied Huygens.

  ‘Understandable,’ said Elrisse.

  ‘She confines herself to the empress’s wing, at least,’ continued Huygens. ‘We could not permit her down here. This is not for her eyes.’

  The party rounded a corner. Though the equipment had been taken out of it long ago, its purpose was clear enough. Manacles were still riveted to the walls, and channels were cut into the flagstones to draw off the blood.

  ‘Emperor Gotthold built this,’ said Huygens. ‘None have used it since, thank Shallya.’

  At the far end of the room was a raised stone block forming a table, which still had shackles to restrain hands and feet. Shackled to the table was a woman in a white nightdress, a halo of blonde hair spread across the stone under her head. Over her stood a man in the long leather greatcoat and leather gauntlets of a plague doctor. He had removed the pomander-filled face mask that such doctors wore when tending to the sick, revealing a pocked and angular face. He had laid out several bottles and jars of medicine, along with various implements, on the slab beside the woman.

  ‘Herr Doktor,’ said Huygens. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She has changed little,’ replied the doctor. ‘She murmurs in her sleep, but the language I do not know.’ He turned to Huygens, his eyes blue with yellowish whites. ‘It is not, in my experience, a good sign.’

  ‘Leave us,’ said Huygens.

  ‘As you wish.’ The doctor bowed and took his leave. As he walked through the archway out of the chamber he cast an unimpressed eye over the wizards.

  ‘I take it,’ said Alric, ‘that the Light Order is a last resort.’

  ‘The Emperor insisted on science first,’ said Huygens. ‘He was educated in Nuln. He is a man of reason above all.’

  ‘There is no purer reason than that which can see how the winds of magic blow.’ Elrisse walked up to the slab. He shook his head. ‘Very young,’ he said. ‘No wonder she could not fight.’

  Alric joined him and the acolytes lined up behind him. Up close the girl’s face was clearer – she was indeed young, still a child. She had the delicacy of her mother’s features, but with the stern jaw of the Imperial line.

  ‘That’s Princess Astrid,’ said Rudiger Vort.

  Alric glared at the acolyte. Vort turned his eyes to the floor.

  ‘It comes and goes,’ said Huygens. ‘Now she sleeps.’

  ‘Then we must wake her,’ said Elrisse. ‘I take it a shower of priests has already been here?’

  ‘Of Shallya first, then Sigmar when it became clear it was no mortal sickness,’ replied Huygens. ‘We called on a priest of Morr in case of the worst, and he would not commend her soul to Morr’s embrace.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Alric.

  ‘Because by then it was clear,’ said Huygens, ‘that her soul is not alone in there.’

  ‘Form the circle,’ said Elrisse. ‘I shall be the principal. Alric, lead the chant.’

  ‘And I?’ asked Huygens.

  Elrisse looked at him much as a parent might look, with forced patience, at a child who asked many questions. ‘You will stand back,’ he said.

  Astrid stirred.

  ‘She knows,’ said Heiden Kant.

  The princess’s lips were tinged with blue and up close, purplish veins were clear beneath her translucent skin. She writhed on the slab, pulling at her restraints. A sudden chill surrounded her and mist coiled from her mouth as she exhaled a long, shuddering breath.

  The acolytes formed a circle around the slab, with Alric taking his place among them to form the seventh point. Elrisse stood over Astrid’s head, and held a hand just over her face.

  ‘Flow through me, Light,’ said Elrisse. ‘Accept our sacrifice. Hear our words. Fall upon us the light of banishment!’

  ‘Ulan tahl she’halla!’ began Alric. ‘Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

  ‘Ulan tahl she’halla!’ echoed the acolytes, perfectly matching the Master Chanter’s cadence as they had been trained. ‘Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

  Princess Astrid’s eyes snapped open. They were shot through with crimson and the irises were yellow, shining as if a fire burned behind them. The light glittered around the shadowy torture chamber. Her elbows and knees bent almost backwards as she arched off the slab and the restraints were pulled taut.

  A cracking and wrenching came from her joints, gristle and bone forced to their limit.

  ‘I see you,’ said Elrisse. ‘Foul and deceitful thing that wears this innocent flesh. From the Light even your kind cannot hide!’

  ‘Ulan tahl she’halla! Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

  Silver fire was playing around Elrisse’s hands. It flowed out, describing a circle in the air encompassing the chanting acolytes, with Astrid at its centre. Glowing symbols orbited the princess, each a syllable of the secret language they had learned, the tongue with which their voices could reach into the aethyr.

  ‘Down!’ yelled Erisse. ‘Down! I command you! Burn in the Light, hateful thing. Down!’

  The shape of it writhed under Astrid’s skin, distorting her youthful features and forming lumpen shapes as it rippled across her torso. With a horrid cracking of bone one hand tore free of its manacle and the princess’s body thrashed on the slab. Elrisse was forced back a step by the fury of it, for the princess’s nails were suddenly long and tapering, like talons lashing at his face.

  The acolytes chanted, but they could not keep their eyes off the princess. Her free arm was bent the wrong way at the elbow, reaching for the Grand Magister as the side of her face bulged horribly. Something inside was trying to get out.

  Elrisse grabbed Astrid’s wrist with one hand. The other he placed against the slab and flame licked from his eyes as the magic of the Light channelled through him. The slab was bathed in white flame and Astrid’s spine bent almost double as the thing inside her tried to escape it.

  Waves of cold were coming from the slab. Frost covered the chamber’s stones. It was cold enough to hurt, but the acolytes kept up their chant even as pain prickled up their arms and across the exposed skin of their faces.

  ‘What are you?’ demanded Elrisse. ‘What are you?’

  The circle spu
n faster, the sigils burning brighter. Astrid’s breastbone seemed to force its way up towards the ceiling, warping her slender frame until it seemed certain her ribcage would crack open.

  ‘Ulan tahl she’halla! Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

  The Light was hearing them. It was accepting the sacrifice of their devotion. The chill enveloped them and the whole chamber seemed to shudder with the force of it.

  Kryzstof Schwartzgelben dropped to his knees. He was still gasping the sacred syllables as he pitched onto his front, arms drawn tight around him, blood running from his nose and staining the white robes of the Light Order. Pieter Diess bent to help him up but a glare from Master Chanter Alric stopped him. The ritual was all that mattered. No acolyte was worth more than that.

  Astrid’s body was distorted beyond all human limits. The writhing shape of the thing inside her was bulging out through her chest, her nightclothes pulled taut. Elrisse moulded the flame around his hand into a sphere, his face lit at unnatural angles in its hard white light. With a shout he cast the fireball up into Astrid’s body and she was bathed in the fire, spasming with more violence than a human form could take.

  It tore itself free of her. It shed her like a lizard sheds its skin, and she flopped motionless onto the slab. It leapt up onto the ceiling, away from the flame, spreading its inhuman limbs around it to cling on.

  It was mostly reptilian. Its skin was a scaly dark green-brown, glistening with secretions. Its eight limbs, neither arms nor legs, but both, splayed around it and its talons anchored it to the ceiling. Its head was located in the centre of its body and it had a wide, lipless mouth lined with teeth, leading to a gullet that disappeared into darkness surely too great to be contained within its pulsating body.

  It was asymmetrical. Each limb had a different number of joints and digits. Its mouth was lopsided, fangs spilling out one side with a three-forked tongue flickering between them. It moved in jerking fits, shifting from one posture to another without any visible motion between them.

  It stank of ancient decay, like something soured and buried, strong enough to bear down as if the air itself were suddenly heavy. It was accompanied by the sound of twisting gristle and blades through flesh, and a drizzle of transparent gore showered off it as it scuttled across the ceiling.

  ‘Burn, daemon!’ yelled Elrisse. ‘Burn in the Light!’

  Eyes opened up in the daemon’s torso and rolled in their oozing sockets as they focused on the Grand Magister. Elrisse shot both hands forward and a ray of silver light leapt from his fingers, scouring along the stone blocks of the ceiling.

  The daemon leapt away from the fire, scuttling away faster than anything of its size should have been able to move. An arm lashed down and yanked Pieter Diess from his feet, hauling the acolyte up towards the ceiling. Diess’s legs kicked as he struggled. The daemon dashed him against the ceiling and threw him down again, and Diess crumpled against the base of the chamber wall.

  The circle was broken. The patterns of light around the acolytes shattered and a shockwave battered through the chamber. The acolytes were thrown to the floor, only Master Chanter Alric keeping his feet.

  The daemon leaped down onto Diess. Muscles pumped under its skin as its mouth closed on Diess’s head and upper torso, the crunch of bone audible through the crackling of the silver flame still immolating the slab. The daemon shook its head and threw what remained of Pieter Diess across the chamber. The ruined torso, lacking a head and one arm, sprayed blood in a red fountain.

  The stones of the chamber warped, a ripple running through them as if they were suddenly turned to liquid. Blocks were dislodged from the floor and ceiling as the ripple hit Grand Magister Elrisse and threw him against the wall. The old man tumbled to the floor, and the high-pitched broken shriek was the sound of the daemon laughing.

  Egrimm van Horstmann wiped a hand across his face, getting the worst of Diess’s blood out of his eyes.

  The other four acolytes were struggling to regain their feet. Kryzstof Schwartzgelben was bleeding heavily from his nose and ears. Heiden Kant and Gustavus Thielen were down beside the slab, supporting each other as they got up. Rudiger Vort was curled up in the corner like a child waiting for a nightmare to end.

  The room was on fire. The Light magic was uncontrolled now and it was catching on the walls and floor. Van Horstmann placed a palm against the floor in front of him and murmured the rote spell that was the first Light incantation he had learned. The circle of protection shone against the flagstones – a flimsy barrier, but better then nothing.

  Princess Astrid lay in a heap on the slab where she had fallen. She had reverted to her human shape, but there was no sign of life in her pale, skinny form. She might have been unconscious or dead; there would be no way of telling while the daemon was loose.

  Pieter Diess’s body was a pathetic thing, the torn stump of a torso spilling organs from a ripped-open ribcage. Diess’s chewed-up head hit the floor as the daemon regurgitated it.

  ‘Thielen!’ shouted van Horstmann. ‘Kant!’ But he couldn’t hear his own voice.

  The sound of the unbound magic was so great that it hadn’t registered as a sound at all. It was a wall of noise that shut down that sense entirely.

  In front of van Horstmann lay the doctor’s implements, which had been scattered when Astrid rose off the slab. Among the shattered unguent bottles lay a long, thin knife, very sharp, perhaps used for cutting out growths and tumours. Van Horstmann grabbed the knife’s handle and held it up in front of him.

  He turned to Rudiger Vort. Vort was shivering like a bullied dog.

  The daemon ran across one wall, past Grand Magister Elrisse and off down a side passage. Master Chanter Alric chased it and, though he could not hear Alric’s words, van Horstmann knew the Master Chanter was cursing it with all the ferocity the tongue of the Light could muster.

  Van Horstmann ran to Vort and grabbed the collar of his robes, dragging him to his feet. He maintained the circle as he did so. Every wizard felt the wind of magic differently. To van Horstmann, the Light was as cold as a winter stream. It coursed from the core of his body, behind his heart, and swirled around the inside of his chest. The chill ran down his arms and poured from his fingers, it crept up his neck and bathed the back of his brain. It was difficult enough to focus when that power flowed, even sitting alone beside a book of the Light Order’s lore. It was more difficult now, but Pieter Diess had not been quick enough to focus and van Horstmann, if he had to die, would not die that way.

  No. That was not good enough. He was not going to die here at all. There was no way, because then his work would remain undone, and that could not happen.

  Rudiger Vort stumbled after van Horstmann as they followed Alric down the side passage. Cells lined the walls and others were beneath the floor, accessible only by single barred openings. Oubliettes, where past emperors had dumped those they intended to forget about, the prisoners they could not kill but could not permit to live free. Even the Light wind was tinged here with the shudder of despair, the metallic taste of fear.

  Ahead was a sinkhole, a circle of darkness that plunged through the floor. Perhaps it had been the site of a foundation since dug up for building stone, or there was a subterranean cavern beneath the dungeons into which a chunk of the structure had collapsed. Its ragged earth sides were illuminated by the bolt of silver fire streaking across it, bursting in a shower of sparks against one wall, a few feet from where the daemon was clinging to the ceiling.

  The bolt had come from the hands of Master Chanter Alric, standing on the edge of the hole and shouting magically-charged syllables that van Horstmann could still barely hear.

  The daemon glowed with sudden power. A ripple ran out from behind it, deforming the stone as it moved, as if the walls and ceiling were water and a stone had been dropped into it sending ripples in Alric’s direction. Alric held up both hands and threw a blue-white sphere of energy about him. The ripples converged on Alric and the floor erupted around him.

 
; Stone burst into flesh. Tendons whipped and tendrils of muscle lashed out, an explosion of living matter growing too fast to see. Blood and torn meat flailed from the impact. Alric was cast off the edge of the pit and into it, followed by a waterfall of pulsing, oozing flesh, thick tentacles and spraying veins, ill-formed false limbs with joints of knobbed and bloodstained bone and spurts of red-black gore.

  The daemon turned what passed for its head in van Horstmann’s direction.

  There was an ocean beyond human sight. The aethyr. It was one thing to speak of it, but to understand it was another. Quite possibly no man, no high elf even, had ever fully understood what it was. It was not a physical place, yet it could only be spoken of as if it were so because no tongue of man could describe the concepts of the aethyr truly. It was spoken of in metaphor. It was an ocean, with each drop enough to power the working of a mage’s wonders. It was a city teeming with inhabitants, but they were not people or creatures – they were ideas, concepts, emotions, given a real form in the aethyr. It was a mirror that reflected every mind in the Old World, so that every thought, every fleeting sensation, left its mark on the aethyr like tracks in the snow.

  It was a single living being so immense and complex that its consciousness encompassed everything a man knew or ever could know. It was nothing at all and existed only as potential to be tapped, a void to be filled by the act of observing it. It was a puzzle box. It was a map to everywhere. It was a book in which was written every possibility that might ever come to pass. It was a mighty mountain range, down from whose peaks the winds of magic blew. It was the opposite of the physical world, a twin composed of energy and thought. It was every dream ever dreamed. It was an infinite and perfect heaven. It was a hell inimical to sane existence.

  No man’s concept of the aethyr could be perfect, and so every wizard had his own. It was dangerous to develop such an idea too early, for if the understanding was flawed the interaction with the aethyr might similarly be flawed, and the raw magic could harm or corrupt, or the wizard could find himself prey to the predators that lived there – if the aethyr was an ocean, it had sharks. The training of a wizard therefore involved the laborious study of countless versions of the aethyr, each one laboured at for a mighty wizard’s lifetime, each one inevitably flawed. Gradually he was to develop his own, so that by the time he wore the robes of a magister the vision of the aethyr was fully formed in his mind and through that vision he could draw on the winds of magic.