by Ben Counter
To van Horstmann, the aethyr was a great plain, such as he envisioned might be found in the distant Southlands. This was the image he conjured in his head even as he realised the daemon had seen him and would go for him next.
Upon this plain stood a fortress. It was alone and inviolate. Though the plains were hot and inhospitable, the fortress always stood. It was made of iron, a dull metallic tower rooted deep into the earth. It had enormous doors of studded oak and when van Horstmann willed it – only when he willed it – they would swing open to reveal the cool, dark interior, shielded from the deadly sun.
Inside were a million glowing gemstones in every colour. They had been quarried from beneath the plain, refined instances of the aethyr’s power, gusts of the winds of magic frozen and crystallised.
Van Horstmann could walk into this fortress. He did this in his mind’s eye as he dragged Rudiger Vort behind a crumbling wall, forcing one half of his mind to focus on the vision as the other commanded his body to do whatever it had to in order to stay alive.
The bolt of change burrowed through the stones of the dungeon and detonated against the wall. Stone shattered and flesh billowed, heavy lengths of bloody tentacle thumping into van Horstmann’s back. Vort almost disappeared beneath the mass and van Horstmann pulled so hard on the acolyte’s arm he thought he felt it pop from its socket. Vort appeared, slathered in gore, finally shocked out of his stupor and gasping for breath.
‘With me, Rudiger,’ said van Horstmann.
‘What is it?’ asked Vort. Van Horstmann did not know him very well – none of the acolytes did, for conversation between them was not encouraged and their waking minutes were dedicated to study and ritual. Perhaps Vort was tough, and would shake off the terror. Perhaps he was not.
In his mind, van Horstmann studied the gemstones arrayed before him. They hung in the air, and above them soared the circular walls of the tower. The upper floors were distant, and the great majority of the fortress was taken up with this chamber in which each sphere of frozen power was held in position like the stars in the sky.
Van Horstmann selected one. This process could not be rushed, no matter how urgent. It was far worse to make the wrong selection than to make a decision too late.
One of the gemstones shone with destruction, but also with hope, a little anger, some fear, and a halo of determination. A dark vein of agony ran through it and normally this would have caused van Horstmann to reject it as flawed. Not now. Now, it was just what he needed.
In the real world, van Horstmann glanced down into the pit. He could just see Alric down in the darkness, lying insensible for the moment. The daemon was gathering itself for another bolt of change. Van Horstmann had seconds, at most.
He drew back a hand. Black fire coalesced around it, thrumming deeply enough to shudder the stones under his feet. Lines of fire crazed up his forearm, and he clenched his fist as the pain hit.
Pain was a part of magic, just as it was a part of everything else. Van Horstmann welcomed it, focused it, forced it into a point and threw it forward.
The bolt of flame arced across the pit like the trail of a dark comet. It slammed into the daemon and it lost its grip, tumbling into the pit.
Van Horstmann gasped. Hot and cold were flashing through him, the touch of the aethyr.
The edge of the pit crumbled. Blocks of stone shifted beneath van Horstmann and he fell, trying in vain to grab a handhold before he slid into the pit.
Everything was darkness, noise and confusion. Pain battered at van Horstmann from every angle. Beneath him something crunched as he tried to get his bearings.
Bones. The pit was full of bones. Dozens of skulls, hundreds of ribs, gnawed by rats and brown with age. Sigmar knew when this place had been filled, or which emperor had ordered the bodies hidden here. Perhaps they were agitators disappeared from the streets of Altdorf, perhaps prisoners of war no longer valuable as hostages or sources of intelligence. Perhaps they were plague dead from the palace staff.
Van Horstmann clutched dumbly at the bones. His head spun and he had to think to work out which way was up. A short distance away lay Rudiger Vort, his leg pinned beneath a block of fallen stone.
The daemon was on its back, legs curled like a spider. But it was not dead. It shuddered and hawked up a mass of gore and broken teeth. Talons clacked among the bones as it scrabbled to right itself.
Van Horstmann crawled next to Vort.
‘What is magic?’ said van Horstmann.
Vort looked at him without recognition in his eyes.
‘Vort, listen! What is magic? Think! Think!’
Vort could do nothing more than shake his head. The writhing form of the daemon was reflected in his idiot eyes – even the fear had been shocked out of him.
The daemon rolled over. It dug its talons into the dirt and bones beneath it and its mouth yawned open. Van Horstmann could see the churning power in there, a conduit to whatever hellish realm constituted the aethyr for such a monster, a purple-black vortex of decay and destruction.
‘Sacrifice,’ said van Horstmann.
He forced the point of the doctor’s knife up under Rudiger Vort’s jaw, feeling the point slide past the jawbone and up under the tongue. Vort finally felt something, eyes widening in shock. His mouth opened and he let out a gurgle as the arteries and veins in his neck were sliced through, blood gushing out. It seemed that it would never end, pouring from the acolyte’s mouth even as van Horstmann twisted the blade.
The Light Order preached sacrifice as a concept, not a literal reality. An acolyte learned that the sacrifice written of in the order’s most precious tomes was a metaphor for the devotion and labour of the chanting ranks. That was what an acolyte had to believe, because the truth was fit only for one who was ready to ascend to the Second Circle and beyond. But the truth was different.
There was power in sacrifice. There could be great power in the sacrifice of devotion, it was true, if there were both the time and the numbers to make it happen. When they were lacking, the sacrifice had to be immediate and literal.
Van Horstmann jammed the point of the knife further in and it punched through the base of Vort’s skull, piercing the lower region of his brain. The acolyte died with a rattling sputter, spraying flecks of blood from his lips.
The life escaped him. Van Horstmann could feel it. The fortress in the aethyr stood now beneath a red sky, battered by a shrieking wind. The power was a flood and van Horstmann fought to contain it – it felt like he would burst, the force building from the centre of his chest and blazing down his limbs.
It could knock him out. It could tear him apart. But it would not.
Van Horstmann was off his feet, lifted above the base of the pit by the force of the magic flowing through him. Pillars of white light fell from above. Skulls crumbled and fallen stone blocks were thrown up towards the ceiling. Van Horstmann was yelling, fists clenched, and the pressure was burning behind his eyes now.
He let the power go, and the circle he projected around him was a blazing cylinder of white light. Pulses of power like bolts of lightning shot across the circle, grounding through everything caught in it. It was banishment and forbiddance, a zone of enforced purity.
The daemon was caught entirely within the circle. Its corrupted flesh was anathema to the purity of the light. Muscle and skin were blasted from its skeleton, leaving green-black bones, twisted and withered. Its cry of despair and abandonment was lost in the sound of a hurricane.
Van Horstmann dropped to the floor of the pit, scattering bones beneath him. He gasped down a superheated breath that scorched his throat. The circle pulsed, once, and van Horstmann’s vision greyed out. The world tilted around him as the grey became white and he felt his stomach contracting. He put out a hand to break his fall and felt it plunge into dust and shattered bone.
The white fire flickered out. Where the daemon had been was a scorched crater, the sigils of the Light Order’s magic imprinted on the stones. On one side of the charnel pit Mast
er Chanter Alric was stirring, fumbling for his staff in the debris. On the other lay the body of Rudiger Vort, the ground beneath him black with blood.
Every part of van Horstmann ached. Every joint felt wrenched out of place. His eyes were stinging and his throat burned. Breathing hurt in half a dozen places at once.
The noise ringing in his ears was perforated by voices. The face of Grand Magister Elrisse appeared at the lip of the pit. He was pale and blood flecked his face. His eyes passed from Alric to Vort’s corpse.
‘Attend to the Master Chanter,’ said Elrisse. ‘Meet me by the slab.’
‘She lives,’ said the doctor. He carefully turned Princess Astrid’s face to one side. It was discoloured from ear to jawline by a livid red mark, as if the skin had been whipped. ‘Her breathing and heart rate are steady. I should wish to take account of her humours before I can say anything more.’
Minister Huygens replied with a nod and a grunt. He was pale, sweaty and shaking, and kept mopping his face with a handkerchief. He was leaning against the wall of the chamber, and seemed uncertain if it was acceptable to excuse himself so he could vomit.
‘She must be watched,’ said Grand Magister Elrisse. He stood be the slab watching intently as the doctor examined Astrid. ‘Notes must be taken when she wakes of everything she says. And keep her isolated. None must speak to her save those who can be most trusted.’
‘I shall… I shall send word to the Emperor,’ said Huygens. ‘He will wish to see her.’
‘No,’ said Elrisse. ‘A possession is a disease, minister. It is a contagion. Though the daemon is gone, yet the moral condition in which the victim is left can be as communicable as the plague. Restrict access to her only to those who are essential.’
‘I concur,’ said the doctor. ‘If I may, I suggest I remain in attendance so the princess might be regularly bled.’
‘Of course,’ said Huygens. ‘I should…’
‘You may go,’ said Elrisse.
Huygens crept out of the chamber, hunched and unsteady as if he had aged thirty years in the last hour.
Elrisse turned to the acolytes who stood, their heads bowed deferentially. Heiden Kant, Egrimm van Horstmann and Gustavus Thielen still lived. Diess had died in the chamber and Vort in the pit, both to the daemon. Kryzstof Schwartzgelben was also dead. When the Light Order’s wizards had gathered back at the side of Princess Astrid, they had found Schwartzgelben lying on the floor, eyes locked open and blood still running from his nose. A cursory examination by the doctor suggested that his heart had simply stopped.
All three bodies would be burned.
‘Forget what you have seen,’ said Elrisse to the acolytes. ‘If you cannot, you will be made to. Accompany the Master Chanter to the pyramid. Your work here is done.’
CHAPTER FOUR
DEAD MAN’S ROBE
Every night, the fortress changed. Tonight it seemed older, more like the skeleton of a building. The wind that whipped across the plains was shrill through the gaps in the stones, and the battlements were tumbledown and blunted like a mouth full of broken teeth. The banners were tattered.
Often it had a moat and it had one now, filled mostly with mud and choked with weeds. The drawbridge was down, slimy with moss as if no one had bothered to raise it for decades. The plains around it were different, too. A forest was encroaching from one side, turning half the horizon dark and chaotic where the dense growth reached up towards the lower slopes of distant mountains. Once, it seemed, there had been a great civilisation, for it had left the scars of metalled roads and a few crumbling stumps of buildings worn down almost to the foundations. Burial mounds dotted a hillside. Even the sky was old, grey and streaked as if by erosion.
Van Horstmann stood before the doors. They hung on their hinges and would need just a touch to push them open.
He took a long breath. It had taken a long time, longer than usual, to build this place in his mind. It was unusual for the fortress to be in such poor repair. Sometimes it was half-built and shored up by timbers, and on a few very rare occasions it had seemed inhabited, with smoke coiling from chimneys and lights in the windows of the upper floors. Each incarnation meant something, but the pattern was elusive, and perhaps it was something he would never understand.
Van Horstmann approached the gates. The drawbridge sagged under his weight, but even if it gave way there was just mud and tangled undergrowth beneath. The gate swung open.
The darkness inside was familiar. A flapping of wings broke the usual silence – birds had found a way in and roosted. A hundred turned pillars spiralled around each other up into the shadows of the upper levels, studded with dull and scratched gemstones that looked like they had just been dug out of the ground. Van Horstmann ignored them for the time being. He was not here to work magic.
Van Horstmann ascended the stairway that circled the inside of the tower. It shuddered under his weight and threatened to come away from the wall entirely. It was flimsy and wooden. Sometimes it was a flight of grand marble steps, other times a tight, winding stone stairway designed to funnel attackers onto the swords of defenders in ones and twos. Now birds fluttered away from van Horstmann as he reached the planks laid across the rafters, forming a precarious upper floor.
Here, the fortress was unfinished. Perhaps it would never be complete, because van Horstmann’s understanding of magic would never be complete either.
Maybe it would one day be a place of reflection and meditation. A library of knowledge that van Horstmann had learned by rote and could recall as clearly as if he were reading it from the page. A sawbones’ surgery where he could repair the mental wounds inflicted by the trials of a magister’s life. He would not know until it was built.
There was a door in one wall. It had always been here, though it could logically lead to nothing for it was in the fortress’s outer wall and beyond it could be only empty space and a fatal drop to the ground. Van Horstmann walked to the door and put a hand against it.
It wasn’t locked. It never was. There was a wish, always flickering in the back of his mind, that it wouldn’t open. He pushed, and the door swung in.
He walked in. One day it would change. That day might be today. What lay beyond might be different, at last.
But today, it was not.
He sank in up to his waist the instant his foot passed the threshold. The room could not exist except in the geometry of his mind where the rules of reality did not apply. He had tried to excise it from the fortress, spent hours meditating in his acolyte’s cell on purging this place of the hidden room, but it was always there.
Scaly bodies coiled around him, thick and smothering. The smell was awful, a mixture of all earthly filth and decay. He tried to draw breath but he couldn’t, for his chest was gripped tight and his ribs could not give his lungs room to fill.
He kicked out, but there was no floor beneath him, just the heaving masses of rubbery muscle. He sank in further even as he fought.
He could not help his hands from trying to find purchase. He could not keep the panic from rising. The mass closed over his head and then over the hand that reached up. He could not move at all now, kept tightly swaddled in place, and the darkness was total.
The mass started to crush around him. Though it had felt the same every time he had come here, it felt like he was experiencing it for the first time, as if he had never before felt his lungs burning and his body shivering with what would have been convulsions if he had been free.
He could not even open his mouth, because if he could, he would have begun to scream.
The darkness shattered into a billion fragments.
Air rushed back into his lungs and he was awake. As if falling into place from above, the walls and floor of his cell slotted into his perception. Even in the small room there were no shadows, everything lit by the candles that never went out and which were arranged around the edges of the floor or burned in the candelabra fixed to the walls. Van Horstmann had got used to the constant light – not ever
y acolyte managed the feat quickly enough and were rendered insensible by the inability to sleep.
A bedroll lay at one end of the room. Robes and underclothes were neatly folded and laid out along one side. A shield was fixed to one wall, polished to the sheen of a mirror, upon which was displayed the arms of the Light Order: a candle with a flame in front of a crescent moon. The moon represented the high elf mages, led by Loremaster Teclis, who had taught the first of the Empire’s magisters and who oversaw the founding of the colleges, Light College included. The rest of the furniture consisted of bookshelves on which van Horstmann kept his books, most of them volumes of the ceremonies an acolyte had to learn by heart.
These books and clothes comprised everything that van Horstmann owned. They were arranged with geometric neatness, not because the acolytes were required to maintain their cells so, but because that was how van Horstmann preferred to live. Some acolytes were from wealthy families and had suits of fine clothes, jewellery and quantities of money. Others had trinkets given to them by their families, like a painted icon or a father’s sword. Van Horstmann did not.
Van Horstmann’s meditation had been broken by the shape of a man standing at the doorway to the cell. Though his robes were silver and white he was still fractionally darker than the blazing light of the chanters’ cloisters behind him, which in the Light College counted as a shadow. The change had registered in the part of van Horstmann’s mind which remained dully sensible, like a sentry dog, while the rest of his perception was turned inwards.
The man was one of the Half-Circle, the stewards, guards, librarians and other staff who served the Light Order. Going by his robe and his great age, he served one of the magisters as a major-domo, valet and secretary.