Van Horstmann

by Ben Counter

  ‘Even better,’ said Argenos. ‘Let us begin.’

  They moved quickly. Twenty acolytes waited on the other side of the river and Magister Kant sent up a magical flare, in the shape of a white-plumed bird soaring from his hand into the sky, to summon them. They were untrained and without reliable offensive or protective magic of their own, and so had not been trusted to fend for themselves in the assault on the cult’s hideout, but now Argenos and the Light wizards needed obedient and reliable ritualists to complete the destruction of the Hand Cerulean.

  It was a second warehouse they used, this one untouched for what looked like years. Crates of abandoned cargo – bolts of cheap cloth, furniture, heaps of uncured leather – mouldered in the damp. The Silver Hammer thugs kept watch, peering into the corners with torches in hand as they sought out the enemies the Silver Hammer was convinced lay everywhere.

  The acolytes stood in a circle and chanted the passages they had memorised, a new set of ritual exultations that van Horstmann had handed to Master Chanter Alric just a couple of weeks before. Van Horstmann formed a link in the circle and Lord Argenos looked on, his hand never far from the grip of his ensorcelled pistol.

  He was watching for any sign of danger from the subjects of this ritual. The two possessed cultists lay tied up in the middle of the circle. The one with the enormous worm-filled mouth lay on its side, heaving with ragged breaths in a puddle of drool. The one with the fleshy sac seemed to have replaced the fluid inside somewhat, the mass of oily flesh hanging from its left side now deformed with shifting, bulbous shapes, as if whatever it was incubating was fighting to be born. This cultist, of course, had no head, and its human portions had bled white from the ragged stump of its neck.

  Magister Kant, who specialised in the arts of exorcism, led the ritual. He had brought with him his own implements – a selection of knives, tongs and searing irons – in case the daemons inside the cultists required a physical effort as well as a spiritual one to be extracted from their hosts.

  With possessees this far gone, this far corrupted by the daemons inside them, the survival of the host could never be considered a priority.

  ‘Light that bathes the aethyr, accept the sacrifice of our devotion!’ called out Kant. He, too, had memorised his part in the ritual. ‘Heralds of the enemy, out! From this flesh, we cast thee out!’

  The language the acolytes chanted had no equal in the tongues of human lands. It existed only in one place, in the writings that van Horstmann had presented to the Light Order’s exorcists as the greatest work of Egelbert Vries. Time and space seemed to warp as the acolytes spoke it. The shadows bowed in, as if the warehouse structure had become malleable and was deforming under the force of the Light magic coursing around the circle. The light of the torches crept up and down the walls in smouldering fingers. Straight lines curved and angles did not add up, and the rules of reality slowly ceased to apply.

  The rules of the will would supersede them. And even the daemon would be subject to those rules.

  The possessed cultists were changing, too. The flesh-sac became evermore agitated, exposing more of the dead cultist’s original form as it tried to pull away. The shape of a hunched figure appeared against the walls of the sac, a broken and monstrous face with one eye and one horn, gnarled hands, a distended belly that itself writhed with life. The mouth of the other cultist yawed wide and the wormy mass was forced out, inch by inch, as if retched up, the tiny ring-shaped mouth of each worm leeching wide as if trying to scream.

  ‘Your gods have no authority here!’ shouted Kant. The chanting grew louder and the daemons mewled and growled, like animals cornered and in pain. ‘I am in command, and I command you to depart these vessels of flesh!’

  The worm-daemon was the first out, vomited from the cultist’s enlarged mouth. It was a heaving pile the size of a horse, far larger than should have been able to fit inside the cultist. Its hundreds of worms were rooted in heavy glistening lumps of whitish muscle, like knots of broken and skinless limbs. They unfolded revealing asymmetrical, atrophied fingers that tried to drag the daemon’s bulk along the warehouse floor. Large wet eyes blinked in the folds of muscle and a pair of mandibles chattered. It shed dead worms as it did so, and they curled up and shrivelled when shorn of their master and exposed to the reality that abhorred the daemon.

  A hand tore from the flesh-sac of the second cultist. The thing that emerged dripped with pale-red birthing fluid but its flesh was a dank, warty green. It was roughly humanoid in shape but its head was thrust forwards on a neck that emerged from its chest. Its face was thuggish and slack-jawed. It had one yellow eye and a single horn in its forehead. Its arms were overlong and its hands dragged on the floor as it forced its way upright, and its belly sagged down, full of its own young of seething insects that spilled from rents in the flesh.

  ‘Back!’ shouted van Horstmann. He thrust out his staff, not leaving his place in the circle, and cast a wall of shimmering light around the emerging daemon. The daemon battered its fists against the wall of its magical prison but it held fast. ‘A lesser daemon,’ said van Horstmann to Kant. ‘A bearer of the plague. I can hold it. The other, I am not so sure. It must not leave the circle. Banish them now.’

  ‘I have a destination of my own,’ said Lord Argenos, drawing his pistol. ‘And I will banish them both there if you cannot.’

  ‘No!’ snapped van Horstmann. ‘The daemon does not die. It will return. Properly exorcised, it will not escape its bonds in the aethyr for a thousand years. They must be banished by the Light.’

  ‘Begone!’ yelled Kant, as the chanting rose in volume. ‘Wither and burn in the Light!’

  The daemons mewled and moaned. A blue-white glow shone down from above and their skin blistered in it.

  Van Horstmann turned his head to look at one of Argenos’s thugs. ‘Bring him in,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’

  The thug nodded and went to one corner of the warehouse. From among the trash he brought a cultist – the last surviving member of the Hand Cerulean, mouth gagged and hands and ankles tied. He had painted himself to resemble the night sky but much of the paint had rubbed off, revealing the bruises and cuts administered by the Silver Hammer during his capture.

  The thug threw the cultist into the circle. The cultist, unable to keep his balance, fell face-first to the floor and fresh blood flowed from his nose. The cultist was trying to speak, to yell, but the gag thankfully muffled his words.

  Van Horstmann took the familiar wavy-bladed knife from his robes. He stepped into the centre, the acolytes swiftly taking his place to keep the circle intact. He knelt beside the cultist and pulled the man’s head back. The air was thick with power and van Horstmann could feel crackles of it earthing from his fingers and toes into the floor. His mouth was suddenly dry, a metallic taste in his mouth.

  The cultist’s eyes were wide. The religious ecstasy that had fuelled the Hand Cerulean was gone, and now there was little more than fear there. There wasn’t even much hatred. In spite of the oaths he had sworn to his god – the Plague God, van Horstmann guessed, the one they called Nurgle – this man had never truly examined the fact that one day he would die. The day had come, and he was not ready.

  ‘This life,’ called Magister Kant, ‘in exchange for the strength to cast you from this realm! This life, for your eternal banishment! As the blood flows, so shall you begone!’

  Van Horstmann thrust the knife through the cultist’s neck. The blade might have been ornamental but it was also sharp. It passed clean through. Van Horstmann twisted it and tore it out through the cultist’s throat, the edge cutting clean through the windpipe and voice box. The blood sprayed almost up to the ceiling, the cultist’s hammering, terrified heart propelling an arc of it high into the air.

  Van Horstmann let the cultist flop back onto his face. The blood pooled in a spreading red-black pool.

  Flitting sparks of white fire flew, like insects. They spiralled and looped around the circle, and where they struck the foreheads of
the chanting acolytes the young wizards’ eyes lit up with pulses of magical power. Their chanting was echoed by cascading notes, like a great but distant choir singing. Fragments of skin lifted off the cultist’s body, turning to ash and lifted towards the ceiling on an unfelt current of energy.

  The daemons were suffering a similar fate. The plaguebearer’s skin was a crackled black carapace, as if it had been charred in a fire, and was lifting away to reveal pale white-veined muscle underneath. It lifted its head and brayed. The worm-daemon was shedding the creatures of which it was composed, each one wriggling as it was carried aloft.

  Van Horstmann hurried back to his place in the circle of acolytes, wiping the bloody blade on the sleeve of his robe.

  Even Lord Argenos looked impressed by the sight, as the dead cultist and the daemons were all, morsel by morsel, picked apart and winnowed to ash. The plaguebearer was reduced to a skeleton, its mouth locked open as its yellow eye rotted away leaving a filth-caked open socket staring at the ceiling. Its ribs were exposed, and the purple-black masses of maggoty viscera spilled from where its stomach had been.

  The worm-daemon was reduced to a quivering lump of muscle. It tried to grow new limbs to drag itself out of the circle but they, too, were reduced to corroded bone by the force of the purity that Light magic forced onto everything in the circle.

  The last remnants of them were handfuls of bone. A broken pelvis, a pair of snickering mandibles. A spine. And then they, too, were gone.

  Magister Kant held up a hand and the chanting ceased. The acolytes bowed their heads.

  ‘It is done?’ asked Lord Argenos.

  ‘It is done,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Vries’s ritual is everything we hoped. They were stripped down to their component magics and cast to the winds of the aethyr.’

  ‘Good,’ said Argenos. ‘And if what you say is true, they will be the first of many.’ He looked at Magister Kant, who still held his place in the circle. ‘Kant,’ he said. ‘You do not agree with the means.’

  ‘With the sacrifice?’ said Kant. ‘No, I do not. I would have preferred another way.’

  ‘There is none so quick,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Or so strong.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kant. ‘But I would have preferred another way.’

  ‘Then you, Magister Kant, will never understand what it means to take up the hammer and the stake, the thumbscrew and the holy book, in the name of Sigmar.’ Lord Argenos addressed his men. ‘Leave this place. The flames will consume what little we have left.’

  The acolytes and the thugs hurried out, pausing to collect what little they had brought with them. In the alleyway outside were piled the bodies of the Hand Cerulean’s cultists, and they would soon be turned to ash by the fire that was threatening to leap across the alley from one rooftop to the other.

  ‘Vries hid these rituals of exorcism for a reason,’ said Kant. ‘Is that not so? That was how he thought.’

  ‘It was,’ said van Horstmann, as the two followed the Silver Hammer’s men towards the nearest bridge across the Reik.

  ‘Then he hid them so that they would be found when they were needed,’ continued Kant.

  ‘Indeed. And whatever he saw coming, it will be upon us soon.’

  ‘Dark days.’

  ‘Darker even than these, Magister Kant.’

  Hiskernaath was waiting when van Horstmann returned to his sanctum. The daemon, though released from his puzzle box, had been shut up in the extra-spatial room van Horstmann had created within the statue. It was crouching on one wall, drooling ropes of thick green-black spittle when van Horstmann opened the statue’s flank again.

  ‘A shame,’ hissed the daemon. ‘I was just starting to enjoy your taste in cushions.’

  Van Horstmann knew better than to answer the daemon. He took the puzzle box from his robe and sat cross-legged on the cushions piled on the floor, avoiding what he hoped were patches of Hiskernaath’s drool.

  ‘And now I’m going back in,’ it said. ‘I look forward to it, you know. I have a hundred maidens in there, trussed up ready for rumplefyking. It’s like the Cloisters of Saint Ludmilla on a feast day. You should see it.’

  ‘Quiet,’ said van Horstmann. With a well-practiced motion he operated the complex panels of the puzzle box. It sprang open in his hand.

  The stench was terrible. The creature that emerged carried with it a stink so foul it was visible as a faint greasy haze. It materialised in the middle of the sanctum – the plaguebearer, the humanoid, one-eyed, one-horned servant of the Plague God.

  ‘So, the ritual did not banish them,’ said Hiskernaath. ‘It captured them. It worked.’

  Van Horstmann shot the daemon a look. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I created it.’

  ‘But this is a plaguebearer, van Horstmann,’ said Hiskernaath. It reached a limb towards the plaguebearer, which snapped back at it like a cornered dog. ‘One of the lowest of its kind. A foot soldier in Grandfather Nurgle’s army. Surely you know this?’

  ‘It is the first of many,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And it is not alone.’

  Now, from the puzzle box issued a tide of worms, overflowing onto the floor. The torrent did not stop until a great heap of them lay there. From the centre of the pile emerged the mandibles and eyes of the daemon’s core, swelling impossibly until it was even bigger than the creature that had forced its way from the deformed cultist’s mouth.

  ‘This is Morkulae,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The Key to the Nineteenth Gate. The Beautiful and the Pure. The patron saint of torturers and grave robbers. Nurgle’s Cup-Bearer.’

  The plaguebearer was on its front, grovelling and moaning, as if pleading.

  ‘You will void your bowels with fear when I hold you over Nurgle’s cauldron,’ growled Morkulae, its mandibles making for a strange, many-voiced sound as if each worm was lending its own voice. ‘And from your own leavings I shall concoct the plague that will devour you. Your own guts will eat their way out of you. Your eyes will crawl from their sockets. Your spine will slither from your back and you shall be alive, and aware, for every moment. Do you know how long such a disease can take to claim you? I infected souls at the beginning of the time who have not yet perished, and they cry out still from pustuled throats. Grandfather Nurgle keeps them at his side, for he loves the music they make.’

  Van Horstmann pulled open the front of his robe, revealing a fresh tattoo just below his collarbone. There had only been just enough room to cram in the many lines of arcane wording, and seal it with the three-globed symbol of Nurgle.

  ‘You will do no such thing,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Your Grandfather commands it.’

  Morkulae recoiled and hissed, the worms standing up like the hairs on an angry cat’s back. ‘You dare cage Nurgle’s Cup-Bearer with words?’

  ‘I was tutored by the best,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Before the throne of Lord Tzeentch.’

  ‘He isn’t lying,’ said Hiskernaath from his perch on the wall.

  Morkulae could not reply for a long while. It was by now at its full size, significantly larger than the height of a man, shedding worms as it constantly grew new ones. ‘Then,’ it said. ‘Then…’

  ‘“Master” is an acceptable term of address,’ said van Horstmann.

  ‘Then what is your wish… master?’

  Van Horstmann turned to one of the sanctum’s shelves and took from it the Liber Pestilentius. He handed it to Morkulae, who took it in a pair of mandibles it extruded for the purpose.

  ‘Inflict this on the city,’ said van Horstmann. ‘There will be others of your kind sent to aid you, for all who are banished by the Light Order’s exorcisms are in truth sent here, to this prison, and in doing so are bound to contracts I have made with their gods. These are my commands, Morkulae of Nurgle: infect Altdorf. Let the plague spread as quickly as fear.’

  Perhaps, if it had possessed the features of a human, Morkulae would have smiled.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE GARDEN OF MORR

  Through the nigh
t, the fear spread.

  These beastmen were cowards. They had been defeated in open battle but instead of being slaughtered in the rout, they had vanished into the countryside of Reikland and seeded Altdorf with hundreds of spies and assassins to take the city by subterfuge.

  Such was the gist of the rumours speeding through the city, and there were few who had any interest in quelling them. Enterprising Altdorfers had long sent out criers to street corners armed with scribbled notes of the latest news, to bark them to passers-by and be paid for their trouble in spare coins. The more shocking the news, the more grave the peril it implied, the more Altdorfers would reward it, as if they wanted to be afraid. And so rumours of the beastmen filled the streets.

  If the barkers were to be believed, every murder and vanishing in Altdorf was the work of cloven-hoofed assassins rendered invisible by their mastery of strange stealth techniques. Every mutant child and two-headed animal was created by one of the beastman shamans, or was the detritus of some dark experiment they conducted beneath the streets. Even as learned men shook their heads at the ridiculousness of it all, some new horror was speculated to exist on the streets, and Altdorf’s masses found such tales only too easy to believe.

  One fearsome matron from the city’s mercantile district, citing the safety of the city’s children from monstrous baby-snatchers, raised a rabble of concerned city folk. They went into the catacombs, old fortifications and sewers beneath the city, hunting for the enemy they were certain lurked there. Although they found many strange things, skulking beastmen were not among them, but of course that was just proof of how good they were at hiding.

  It was a curious feature of Altdorf, this quickness to panic. When Magnus the Pious had agreed with Teclis to the founding of the Colleges of Magic, the people had rioted and seen portents of destruction in everything. The wizards, they were certain, would be the doom of them all. They had evacuated the city en masse as the high elves and the students of Teclis created the magical defences that concealed the eight colleges, and when they returned to find their city subtly stranger they never lost their suspicions of the wizards in their midst. A child born fifty years before with the body of a snake was the catalyst for a rash of witch-burnings and lynching, in which hundreds of innocents lost their lives, along with, perhaps, a few genuine witches who should have learned to lay low. Grand Theogonist Thoss had taken advantage of Altdorfer paranoia to launch his crusade against all faiths bar that of Sigmar. It was how Altdorfers functioned. They were boisterous and outspoken, they were bold and cunning, and when they decided to fear something they feared it with a passion that tore out the foundations of their city.