by Ben Counter
It therefore came as no surprise when the first plague victims emerged. Coughing blood and moaning in pain, they stumbled from the hovels around the Bright College’s location and the grim districts adjoining the wharves, begging for cure or release. And the people of Altdorf dug mass graves outside the walls, hoarded wood for funeral pyres, and proclaimed impending destruction as only they could.
The Chanter’s Hall was never quiet, but it was not the voices of acolytes that broke the calm now. The hammers of a crew of workmen echoed among the pillars as they scrabbled across the scaffolding stretched across one end of the chamber. Behind the podium that Master Chanter Alric used to address the acolytes was growing a structure of brass and wood, with a bank of great pipes visible through the planking holding it all in place. The brass was inscribed with elegant scrollwork and the hardwood, brought to the Empire in ships from distant lands, was a deep brown-black and lacquered in designs of gold.
Master Chanter Alric watched the men working. The crews had been sworn to secrecy, with a little help from some subtle magics of the mind, to protect the location of the Light College, and they had needed time to adjust from the extraordinary architecture and unbroken light of the pyramid. But now they were working quickly. Within the month, they would be finished.
‘Master Chanter!’ said van Horstmann brightly as he approached. ‘I see our latest project has not stood idle.’
‘It is beautiful,’ said Alric. He had become an old man in the time van Horstmann had known him, the wrinkles around his eyes seeming deeper than ever. There were tears brimming behind those eyes, though Alric would never let himself show them before the acolytes. ‘For decades I have wished for an organ to lend music to the voices of our order. I petitioned Elrisse for it more times than I can remember.’ He looked at van Horstmann now, and the emotion on his face was clear even though he tried to keep it down. ‘I could never say so to the acolytes, for they must believe the magisters above them are all of one mind. But he and I were opposed. I thought the organ would make our rituals stronger and improve the morale of the acolytes, but he thought it was a needless expense. Morr cherish his soul, our Grand Magister’s death granted us this, at least.’
‘I believed this project would raise our spirits in these grim times.’
‘You spoke for it?’ asked Alric.
‘I did,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Though we have no one leader, yet still one voice can accomplish something. I and the other senior magisters debated the matter and I swayed them.’
‘Then this is your doing,’ said Alric. ‘I do not know what I thought of you when you were an acolyte, comprehender. There was such promise in you, such an organised mind, but I did not see the passion that a magister needs. I know now that you kept it hidden. I should have known better, I should have seen it. I underestimated you then, but now, we all see that you can take our order through this and out into a better future.’
One of the workers hauled a canvas cover away, revealing a triple tier of keyboards with keys cut from ivory. It might take three organists working in concert to use the organ’s entire range.
‘You flatter me, Master Chanter,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I am a researcher, that is where my passions lie. No wonder you did not see them.’
‘The Emperor was right,’ said Alric. His voice dropped, as if he was worried someone might be listening in. ‘He said we need a leader. We do. Without it, we cannot react quickly enough to threats. The conflict with the Gold Order showed us those threats can come from anywhere. The other colleges might sense weakness and try to bring us down. It is a dark thing to countenance but plots have existed in the past, between other orders. And you hear what they say about the skaven. If they strike at us, they will try to strike at the colleges first. We must defend ourselves.’
‘You are right,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But there is none who has emerged from among us to take control. Choosing a leader is not a simple business. Without a clear front runner, the process of selection will drag on and on.’
‘There is you,’ said Alric.
‘Me?’
‘Grand Magister van Horstmann. You think it strange? I think it is the perfect solution. You have respect among us. Some say you were conspicuous in your actions at Drufenhaag, the Emperor will admire that. And Elrisse trusted you.’
Van Horstmann took a sighing breath. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘How many others have voiced this?’
‘Few in the open,’ said Alric. ‘But I know I am not the only one who thinks it.’
‘The Light Order fears a leader who is chosen quickly and for the moment,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It fears a tyrant. The orders always have.’
‘That is a risk many are willing to take.’
‘And how would I go about becoming the Grand Magister?’ said Alric. ‘What if Kardiggian stands against me and demands a wizard’s duel to settle the matter? I am not a battle magister, as he is. He would incinerate me. And Vranas has made allies outside the Light Order, no doubt hoping to become Grand Magister himself. He could outmanoeuvre me, for he is a politician and I am not.’
‘And if the magisters want you, they will get you. That is what matters.’
‘Perhaps,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But aside from you, I hear no great clamour for me to become Grand Magister. Certainly nothing to shout down another candidate should he make himself known. And it is not as if this is a great ambition of mine. For other senior magisters it is. Vranas, to name only the obvious. Perhaps Kardiggian.’
‘Nevertheless, comprehender,’ said Alric, ‘do not discount yourself.’ He waved a hand at the grand pipe organ, now definitely taking shape behind the scaffolding. ‘This need not be the only mark you leave on your order.’
‘This is your legacy, Master Chanter,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Not mine. The pipe organ will play when we are all gone. You have left your mark here. Do not deny yourself that.’
‘My thanks,’ said Alric. ‘And do not deny yourself leadership of our order. We need a leader. Altdorf needs us to have one, too. The whole Empire does. Think of it, comprehender.’
‘I shall,’ said van Horstmann.
Amid the hammering, footsteps on the marble floor caught van Horstmann’s attention. An acolyte was hurrying towards them, flustered and sweating.
‘Acolyte?’ demanded Alric. His demeanour had changed back to the stern, unflappable face a Master Chanter presented to his acolytes.
‘News from the Imperial Palace,’ said the acolyte. ‘Representatives of every order have been summoned at the behest of the Emperor. It is the plague, magisters. The priestesses of Shallya have proclaimed it the work of Dark magic. The city is quarantined.’
The plague doctors of Altdorf were a strange breed, in their own way as arcane and secretive as the orders of magic. They trained by apprenticeship, each one picking a successor to train, and parcelling out their secrets one cure at a time. They guarded those secrets carefully, refusing to reveal the laboratories and hidden wards where they perfected their arts, and were paid collectively by the Imperial Court to watch over the health of the city. The priestesses of Shallya hated them, for they used bleedings, humours and strange concoctions to do what Shallya taught should be done with faith and prayer, but when disease ravaged the city no one could say to whom the citizens turned the fastest.
One plague doctor led van Horstmann through the narrow passageways towards the hospital. It was a makeshift place, hardly fit for taking care of the sick. It looked like a length of sewer that had been half-completed and then abandoned, leaving a section of dressed stone tunnels and junctions beneath the ground connected to nothing. Masons had decorated the place with grotesque gargoyles and scratched their names into the stone blocks, their etchings still visible beneath the mould and damp.
‘Every day, perhaps three dozen more cases are found in this district alone,’ the doctor was saying. His voice was muffled by the conical mask he wore, the beak of it stuffed with herbs to keep infectious fumes out of his lungs. Va
n Horstmann was reminded of the doctor he had encountered beneath the Imperial Palace, the one who had tended to the possessed Princess Astrid. For all he knew it was the same man. ‘If the relatives permit, we bring them down here, where they cannot infect anyone save us and each other. But many refuse. They fear us, it seems, though I cannot fathom why.’
Van Horstmann could fathom perfectly well, given that the plague doctors hid their faces behind goggles and masks, and were only seen in the streets of Altdorf when disease stalked the city. ‘How many survive?’ he asked.
‘It is difficult to say,’ said the doctor, ‘given that the outbreak began only recently and has moved with impressive swiftness. We do not know if we have seen the disease run its full course in any one victim yet. Some seem to be recovering, but it might be that this is just the space between two stages of the plague, as with Wharf Rot or the Fingerbone Ague.’
‘And can you tell how it moves from one person to another?’
‘I believe it is a miasma of the air,’ said the doctor. ‘But some insist it is transmitted by vermin, others body fluids. With so many theories it is impossible to mobilise our resources to test any one. We are all fools, magister. Such ignorance is the means by which all disease is propagated.’
‘Then ignorance is what we will fight,’ said van Horstmann. He had brought with him a leather case, similar in size to the case of implements the plague doctor himself carried. He held it up. ‘A device of my own design. Like everything in this world, a disease can be seen as a problem of logic. With this, I will discover the root principles of logic that lie behind it and thereby solve the problem.’
‘A novel approach,’ said the doctor. ‘Personally, I fear the maladies of the human body are immune to logic. A place like this I cite as evidence.’
The two reached the ward itself, a junction of two sewers with a great vault overhead and deep channels lined with decorative stone. Sigmar knew how much money and man-hours had been sunk into these unfinished sewers, which had never seen a drop of excrement until now. Dozens of wooden beds had been set up and on almost all of them were what resembled heaps of rags. From time to time one of the piles would moan or turn over, or was spoken to by one of the men and women who had evidently volunteered to tend the suffering. Some were washing the sores and boils of the victims, others were reapplying bandages to their limbs. The smell was awful, and the volunteers wore scarves around their noses and mouths.
‘Most of our volunteers have relatives down here,’ said the plague doctor. ‘They have already been exposed in their homes so they assume there is no harm in further exposure.’
‘I need to see a victim in the advanced stages,’ said van Horstmann, ‘but not on his last legs. A strong one. One who is fighting.’
‘I see,’ said the plague doctor. ‘Here. I have just the man.’
At the end of one sewer section was a large man lying on a bed, his shirt removed revealing the spiralling red-black marks typical of the disease on his barrel chest. Van Horstmann saw right away the broken nose and cauliflower ears of a man who fought for a living. His hands were big and gnarled, and his skin was covered in old scars.
‘Helmut,’ said the doctor. ‘Someone is here to see you.’
‘I wish,’ said Helmut, ‘it would hurry up and bloody kill me. Stuff this for living. If I wasn’t so bloody-minded I’d have given it up but damn me every way there is, I just can’t let it all go.’
‘Do not fear, Helmut,’ said the doctor. ‘You will be dead very soon. I can promise you that.’
‘Not often you can make us promises, eh?’ replied Helmut with a smile. There was blood on his teeth. He forced his head up to look at van Horstmann. ‘Who’s the ghost?’
‘A magister,’ said the doctor.
‘Gonna magic me better?’
‘No,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But perhaps if I learn enough from those such as you, I can do so in the future.’
Helmut made a low gurgling sound that might have been a laugh.
Van Horstmann placed his case on the floor beside the bed. He unfolded it, revealing several pockets in which were held brass fittings and several lenses. He assembled the device swiftly, and a tripod holding up a contraption of half a dozen lenses and mirrors held in sequence took shape.
‘This is my speculum,’ he said. ‘Designed to focus the wind of Light magic and allow examination of the hidden knowledge revealed thereby.’
‘Van Horstmann’s Speculum,’ said the doctor. ‘Most interesting.’
The device was adjusted so it stood beside the bed and aimed at Helmut’s chest. ‘The symptoms, if you will,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Rumours name everything from blindness to swelling of the extremities as indicators of this plague.’
‘Well, the first signs share much in common with any number of maladies,’ replied the doctor. ‘This makes it difficult to distinguish if it is this new plague or one of the other diseases that we have been quite happy to die from throughout all human history. Nausea, pain in the joints and belly, difficulties in digestive matters. Various others; it differs. Then the marks appear.’
‘It’s the worms,’ said Helmut. ‘Hungry little devils. Got plenty of meat on me so they must have thought they were in maggot-heaven.’
‘Indeed’ said the doctor. ‘The worms are either the cause of the disease or one of its other symptoms. Perhaps they are introduced in a larval form to the body and thereby give rise to the plague, or the plague creates conditions within the body conducive to their development. I personally believe they rise from the flesh as creatures of the river are birthed from the mud, but again, opinions differ.’
‘And then?’ asked van Horstmann, continuing to tinker with the speculum.
‘The organs are stressed to the point they overheat. They burn, often. They cook within the body. The skin might itself be burned from the inside. There is great pain. Sometimes several non-essential organs can fail in such a manner before the victim dies. If they are lucky, it starts with the heart. If they are unlucky, it can begin with the entrails and not stop for several days.’
‘And this is not a natural disease,’ said van Horstmann.
‘No,’ replied the doctor. ‘It is not. Whether from a beastman’s cauldron or some wayward alchemy, it is not on the natural world we can lay the blame.’
Van Horstmann made the final adjustment, and the lenses clicked into place. The mirrors and lenses took what dim light there was in the hospital and focused it in a patch of yellow in the centre of Helmut’s chest. ‘And what do they call it?’
‘Many things,’ said the doctor.
‘It needs a name,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The first part of any solution is to label all the parts.’
‘It’s the Gods’ Rot,’ said Helmut. ‘We pissed them off, the gods, and this is what we get. Can’t remember who I heard it from. But I crossed them often enough so I suppose I deserve it.’
‘Do not speak,’ said the doctor.
‘Gods’ Rot,’ said van Horstmann. ‘That will do. Helmut, what did you do before you were stricken?’
Helmut ignored the doctor’s admonition for silence. ‘Fought. For money. For gamblers.’
‘I see,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Then you are strong?’
‘Very.’
‘Good.’
Van Horstmann whispered the ritual phrase and made the required gesture. As was the way of the Light Order, the spell that infused the speculum with magic was made up of rote words and motions. They were the mechanism through which the Light wind could be tapped, brought from the aethyr into the real world. The gears and levers of the speculum clicked and whirred and the lenses shifted, focusing the light and tinting it different colours as it played across Helmut’s chest.
It found a point and focused. Helmut arched his back and gritted his teeth as a hot beam of yellow-white light burned against him. The skin was translucent now and the shapes of his ribs could be seen ghosted underneath, the shifting slabs of muscle in his pectorals and abd
omen, the squirming shapes of his organs.
In the yellow glare, shapes were appearing in the air above him. Snakes coiled. Jaws clamped home. In the swirls of light were shapes half-glimpsed, tantalisingly vanishing just as they seemed to take on a definite form. One lens folded out from the device and cast a shaft of yellow light up to the ceiling, and the shifting forms were forced to become more distinct.
Snakes. They formed symmetrical patterns, as if following an infinitely complex dance. Faces – no, masks, death masks perhaps, features echoing the idealised art of long-dead civilisations with high cheekbones, stern eyes, elongated jaw pieces, all golden. Hands with long fingers, that spun and coiled in on themselves in endless swirling patterns.
Helmut gasped out in pain. His upper body was almost completely transparent now. His ribs were clear, lifting and closing as he drew painful breaths that filled the quivering bags of his lungs. Several of the organs crammed into his torso were like shrivelled fruit, withered away by the heat. His guts were a mass of pale tubes like dead snakes. The fat bulge of his tongue was just visible as the transparency crept up his throat towards his jaw.
The volunteers had all stopped their work and were watching the spectacle. Several of the plague victims sat up in their beds, their red-rimmed eyes wide to see such strangeness. Perhaps they thought it was a hallucination, one more cruel symptom of the Gods’ Rot. Perhaps they thought that this was how it killed – it lit you up and projected its final mocking message into the air above you.