by Ben Counter
Van Horstmann pulled himself up step by step, every inch drawing blood from his fingers. The stones seemed to shift and tip, trying to throw him off or send him tumbling to the foot of the staircase, but he forced them in his mind back into shape and he carried on. It was in his head, this place – that did not mean it was not real, but it did give him a presence that he did not have in the physical world. It depended on him to exist. As he changed, so it changed. As he became rigid and unyielding, so it was forced to keep its shape around him.
It was all in his head, but it was also in the aethyr. In the aethyr, these things were real. It was called by some the Realm of Chaos, a domain where all things might become real when sculpted by the right thought. There were parts of the world where the land merged with this realm, where the two worlds touched, and from there marched the armies of the Dark Gods.
If van Horstmann let go of his thoughts, this world would turn into madness beyond description, a boiling pit of impossibility that would scour his mind of everything that made it human. He had read the memoirs of those whose minds had been so touched, and been afraid that the madness would infect him. He had been to this place before in the recollections of the few who had gone there and come out capable of putting quill to parchment.
At the top of the staircase was the throne room. Where below had been an endless but imperceptible sky, here there was an enormous vault with ribs of stone, hung with enough billowing silk and embroidered banners to cover a continent. There, in its gargantuan throne, a heap of burning books the size of a mountain, was the Prince of Lies. The prince was an enormous fleshy mass, somewhat humanoid in shape but lacking a head. Its body was instead covered in faces: a thousand, a million of them, writhing in the pinkish skin in such clarity that van Horstmann could see the exact expression in every one. Every single manner of emotion was contained within it. On that throne sat the sum total of anything a human mind could feel.
Around the Prince of Lies gambolled a legion of a million daemons, all of them glistening knots of flesh and bone that reformed a hundred times a second. All forms of beauty and monstrous horror were there, any given second a dizzying gallery of shapes that did not fit properly into van Horstmann’s mind. They were madness incarnate, the Court of Lies that danced a performance of the play in which all things that might come to pass were depicted.
Van Horstmann crushed down the incredulity that rose inside him. It wanted to blind and deafen him, to shut down the feel and smell and taste of the Prince of Lies. He did not let it. He had prepared for a long time for this moment. If ever he were to finish the road he had started to walk, he had to pass through here.
‘So,’ said the Prince of Lies, ‘you kneel before us at last. It has been a long time a-coming, Egrimm van Horstmann.’
The prince’s voice was not a voice at all, but van Horstmann’s own thoughts, coalescing in his mind like invaders from another realm violating his consciousness. The effect of it made him want to recoil and reel his soul back into the Pyramid of Light, but he had mastered that cowardly part of him a long time ago.
‘You are not Tzeentch,’ said van Horstmann. ‘If you were Tzeentch, I would be struck mad to look at you.’
‘And how do you know you are not mad?’ said the prince from a thousand mouths.
‘You are His servant,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Perhaps an aspect of Him. It does not matter. I know that He hears. And I have done as He asked.’
‘I asked of you nothing,’ replied the prince.
‘I have destroyed sacred knowledge on His altar,’ continued van Horstmann. ‘I have given Him that sacrifice. That is what He asked of a hundred sorcerers who came before me. I have read their words. I know what they did, and what they sought. I seek it too.’
‘And you are different from all of them,’ said the Prince of Lies. ‘You will not fail me. You understand what I ask. You can deliver my demands. You will not break in will or fall in battle. You are different from all the sorcerers who have knelt as you did, and died with their promises to me unfulfilled.’
‘Yes,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I am different.’
‘Well, well,’ said the prince, and his voice was so heavy with sarcasm that van Horstmann was pushed face down to the floor. ‘What a treat. A Light wizard by day, enemy of the daemon. And a daemonologist by night, fawning before the God of Change for His favours. How can this be contained in one man?’
‘It was forged in hate,’ said van Horstmann through gritted teeth. His blood was spattering from his lips onto the marble floor. Perhaps, back in Magister Vek’s chamber, he really was spitting blood. ‘Those two can exist together, devote themselves to Lord Tzeentch, if the hatred that binds them is strong enough. And it is. It is as strong as anything a man’s mind has ever known.’
‘And yet it is a mind too afraid to perceive the god it has chosen,’ said the Prince of Lies. It rose from its throne, and whole kingdoms would have been swallowed in the stride it took. Landslides of burning books slid from its throne as it rose to its full height, catching on the silks and sending them smouldering into the air.
‘You are… you are as Berthold Wormiaus depicted you,’ gasped van Horstmann, even as his senses were assailed by the sight of the god striding towards him, ‘in the Norscan Fragments. And as Lady Eiger wrote in her poetry. This is how my mind expected Tzeentch, so that is how this fragment of His will appears.’
‘And will you see Tzeentch as He is?’
Van Horstmann, with an effort he felt would break his back, pushed himself up to his knees and looked the Prince of Lies in a pair of eyes on its chest. The expression of that face was smirking, despising, showing pity.
‘I will,’ said van Horstmann.
Van Horstmann had known it would come to this – that he would have to face the Prince of Lies on the Prince’s terms, in a realm where he could control everything van Horstmann’s senses perceived. And of course, once given access to everything in van Horstmann’s head, there was only one form it could take.
The Court of Lies dissolved into a vast writhing pit. The God of Lies transformed into a mass of snakes, each one fouler than the last around which it knotted itself more obscenely.
Van Horstmann plunged into the pit, and though he had always known this moment would come, it did not keep the horror from overcoming his mind.
Down there in the constricting darkness was a place he had revisited countless times. There had been period of his life when every time he slept, he went back there. Now he would find himself there when he was pushed towards the edges of mental endurance, or when some shock dragged him back there as if, in fleeing whatever trauma was present, he blundered through the door into the last place he ever wanted to be.
It was more real now than the memories had ever been – as real as the time that inspired them. The scales against his skin. The nothing beneath his feet, the awful certainty that below there was nothing but an eternity of snakes running down to the centre of the world.
The sound of them. The smell – they stank. The way he could barely draw breath. It was the same. It was not a memory. He was back there, for real, by every definition of reality that counted.
He reached out like a boy who could not swim groping through the water. His hands found only slabs of scaly muscle sliding past one another, trying to ensnare him in their loops to drag down and crush. Then a finger brushed against something else, something soft and shuddering.
It was another hand. It was slender as he caught it in his own. He felt the ring on its finger and he knew it was her.
The hand was warm. She was still alive.
He fought harder now, pistoning his legs up and down through the mass of snakes to power himself upwards. He thought he felt slightly cooler air on his face, as if he were near the surface. His hand was clamped around hers and he gasped down a foul breath, lungs screaming, as his head broke the surface.
‘Lizbeta!’ he gasped, the only sound he could make before he was under again.
T
he coils closed and he could not breath. A new and profound darkness fell.
When van Horstmann woke he was alone. He could not see anything, and he felt only the sharp ground under his back where he lay. The shallow breaths he took were raw and painful in his throat. It was cold and quiet.
Lizbeta. He had said her name. It rarely got that bad. Usually he tore his mind out of the pit before she was there. But this time, he had not been in control.
A glimmer of light caught his eye overhead, like a single distant star reaching through a cloudy night sky. A faint pool of it gathered nearby, slow as treacle dripping from above. The polished scales that glinted in that light picked out the body of a thick and muscular snake, sidewinding its way towards van Horstmann.
The fear was not there in the same way. Van Horstmann could understand it was not real now, that this was not one of the snakes that had once wrapped its length around him and crushed out all his hope. The fear, this time, stemmed from the fact that the Prince of Lies had delved into his mind and pulled from it that moment, the time van Horstmann had protected so devoutly.
The snake arched up over van Horstmann. It spoke with the voice of the Prince of Lies.
‘That,’ it said, ‘is how I truly am. Not a god that resides beyond, but one that lives inside you, and in the mind of all those who have given themselves to me. Do you understand now what I am?’
‘Yes,’ said van Horstmann, unable to muster anything more than a whisper.
‘And you will still serve?’
‘I will.’ There was no hesitation. ‘I will serve.’
‘In return for what?’
‘There is only one thing I want,’ said van Horstmann. ‘You know what it is.’
‘I do. And I can give it to you.’
Van Horstmann swallowed, painfully. ‘You can have whatever you want from the Light Order. Its vaults, its magisters, anything.’
‘I know,’ said the snake. ‘But I am a god. I can take whatever I want from any ensorcelled vault in the world, and destroy it with a whim. What do I care if you offer up a pyre of books to me?’
‘Because the one thing you cannot take is willing obedience,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘That must be given freely. And so it is the only thing that a god can crave, for it is the only thing that is beyond Him.’
‘True,’ said the snake, its forked tongue flickering. ‘And indeed, I desire it. But you know full well what I really want.’
‘You cannot have it,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I will no more pledge my soul to you than I would pledge it to Sigmar. That is my one rule. Anything else you want, you will have. But not my soul. And it is not much that I ask of you. Just a little information. Most of the path I have to take I have pieced together myself. I just need a few more points on the map and I will never require anything more of you.’
‘I will have your soul, Egrimm van Horstmann.’
‘No, Lord Tzeentch. You will not. That is the deal I will make. That is the contract I will sign. Everything short of my soul, for the knowledge I need to get what I want.’
The snake seemed to consider this. It was hooded, like a venomous snake from the deserts of Araby or the Southlands, and its eyes were like flecks of amber. Its tail flicked idly from side to side as it thought about the offer.
‘That is satisfactory,’ said the Prince of Lies, known to some as Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, or by any one of a thousand names. ‘It will be signed.’
Van Horstmann closed his eyes and let out the breath he realised now he had been holding. ‘Then tell me,’ he said. ‘Everything I must know. Tell me.’
‘I impart this knowledge only because it suits me that you shall have your revenge,’ said the Prince of Lies. ‘All that happens will be because I will it. You must never forget that, Egrimm van Horstmann.’
‘I know the terms of a deal made with you,’ said van Horstmann.
‘Then listen.’
Van Horstmann would never be able to say afterwards just how long he lay there, listening to the snake’s words. It was quite possible they were imparted in an instant but that the effort needed to process them in his mind meant it felt like hours. Or perhaps it really was hours, in the way that time can stretch and be manipulated inside the mind.
Some of what he learned van Horstmann thought he knew already, but he was now free of doubts that might have turned his hand away from what needed to be done. Some of it was completely unknown. Some helped van Horstmann make the choice between two paths which had previously seemed equally profitable or perilous. And a great deal of it seemed irrelevant, but was filed away by van Horstmann in the fastidious library of his memory, knowing that it would be important one day.
There was always more, the Prince of Lies promised. Everything van Horstmann would ever need to know to destroy his enemies. He could have anything he wanted. He could rule. He could create his own kingdom out of the aethyr, a place founded on magic in which his will would become manifest and he could reign as a god. But the price was too high. It was always the same – van Horstmann’s soul, the means by which he could determine his own future. And he would not give that up.
Plenty had, of course. Every other tome that van Horstmann had discovered, hidden in a remote cairn or in the forbidden library of some debauched noble, was the record of some poor fool who had sold his soul to the Dark Gods. They always regretted it. The same parable was written a thousand times, of those who thought there existed in the world something that was worth their freedom over themselves. But there never was. Van Horstmann would not be like them. He might not finish on his path. He might die, be destroyed, be found out and dismembered before a baying crowd on an executioner’s platform. But he would take his soul with him when he died.
Finally, the Prince of Lies was finished. The pact had been struck and its parties had agreed the terms. The means for revenge, in return for anything van Horstmann could tear from the heart of the Light Order. The snake vanished, the darkness shattered, and van Horstmann came to lying on the floor of his quarters in the pyramid.
Bitter smoke still hung in the air. Van Horstmann must have thrashed around a little on the floor, because some of Magister Vek’s trinkets were scattered around him and he had battered his elbows and knees raw.
The Skull of Katam seemed to look down at him from the desk with an expression of amusement.
‘It was like watching a child with nightmares,’ said the skull. ‘Like a kittling-cat yowling for its mother.’
Van Horstmann stood up, dizzy for a moment as the blood drained from his head. He steadied himself against the desk, which was now inscribed deeply with the symbol of Tzeentch. He would have to find a way to hide it, he thought. He would have to hide a great many things.
He felt a burning pain on the back of his right hand, reaching up over his wrist and forearm. He pulled back the sleeve of his robe to see the words burning into his skin. Unlike the contract on his torso, this one was burned from the inside out, scorched onto the inside of his skin by tendrils of power reaching through from the aethyr.
The words were in one of the tongues of the aethyr, a lyrical language with meanings that shifted with the moods of the reader, and one that van Horstmann had learned early in his pursuit of the daemonology. The last line had the mark of Tzeentch, similar to the one van Horstmann had carved into the desk, while another had the signature of van Horstmann himself. The finished contract covered the back of his hand and wound halfway to his elbow.
Van Horstmann gingerly flexed his fingers. They stung, but the pain was bearable. He went to the bedchamber and found one of Vek’s robes which had a black trim, perhaps for wearing at the funeral rites of fellow magister. He tore off the strip of black hem and wound it around his afflicted hand, covering the contract and binding it tight.
‘Then it is done,’ said the Skull of Katam.
‘It is done,’ said van Horstmann.
‘It is as I said,’ continued the skull. ‘He will listen, if what you have to offer is valuab
le enough. The Light Order’s treasures, they got His attention, did they not?’
‘They did.’
‘Then what next?’
‘I must think on it,’ said van Horstmann. ‘You have done for me all I asked.’
‘But of course.’ The skull’s grin seemed to widen. ‘We are on the same side.’
Van Horstmann sat on the chair beside the desk. He was aware now of how weary he was. Though the gruelling ascent and the pit had been in his mind, his body had echoed his movements to the extent that his robes were damp with sweat and every joint ached. He ran a hand over his face and felt his scalp beaded with sweat. His throat was raw too, and he wondered if he had shouted while unconscious.
‘It seems,’ the skull was saying, ‘that you should have results from Vries’s cipher to dangle before the Grand Magister if he is not to become suspicious.’
‘I broke the cipher half a season ago,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The vocabulary is in the number of petals, the grammar in the number of leaves. Vries didn’t even use a sub-cipher, the text is written there plain.’
‘Then the path continues?’
‘It continues.’ Van Horstmann looked at the jewelled skull. Of course he could not trust the thing. If there was one certainty he had learned from his research, that was it. But it had its uses. It had known how to contact the Prince of Lies – an actual audience, not just a dream-message or strange portent but an actual conversation with the god. Or an aspect of the god, or a servant, or a part of his own mind infected by the god’s will. An audience, nonetheless, and without the skull that would not have happened. But trust?
Van Horstmann wondered whether he was even capable of trust any more. But then, what was trust? If he had lost it forever, he doubted that he would miss it.