by Ben Counter
A new shape was emerging in the show of lights. This one was darkness, a void in the light. It was the shape of a great head, like that of a bull or a horse, on muscular shoulders. Four eyes burned in its face and its jaw opened to show that it was, in shape, nothing that resembled anything that had ever lived in the natural world. Horns appeared, twisting together above its head, spreading behind its cranium like the spires of a crown. A long forked tongue lolled from its mouth, bright red.
The eyes turned to van Horstmann. The speculum shuddered and emitted sparks.
The mouth was wide now, and it roared. The sound reached all the way from the aethyr. The stones of the unfinished sewer shook. Chunks of mortar fell on the patients and the volunteers.
‘It sees us!’ cried the plague doctor. Someone in the hospital screamed. Another voice was raised in wordless panic.
Van Horstmann stood and yelled a word of power. The speculum shut down and folded up. The light show diminished just as the daemon’s head rushed forwards to fill it. The device clattered to the floor, spilling brass gears.
The transparency of Helmut’s body faded. His ribs disappeared, replaced with skin, newly scorched and blemished. The man’s eyes were closed and his mouth hung open. Smoke coiled from his chest and mouth.
The doctor bent over Helmut, feeling his wrist and throat. He put his ear to Helmut’s chest. Van Horstmann could feel the heat coming off the man.
‘He is dead,’ said the doctor. ‘His heart has stopped.’
‘Then he got what he wanted,’ said van Horstmann.
‘And did you?’ asked the doctor.
‘Perhaps. I know now more than I did when I arrived.’
‘Where is this disease from?’ said the doctor. ‘Magister, if you know, if there is hope, then you must tell us.’
‘A cure I cannot give you,’ replied van Horstmann. He began to scoop up the components of the speculum and dismantle the device, patiently placing each piece back in its assigned compartment in the case. ‘But as to what caused it? I can make some suggestions about that.’
‘Such as?’
‘You saw it as well as I did, doctor. The daemon. The plague is the work of the daemon. The leader of some cult hidden in our city, or a lone daemonologist possessing great learning and malice, has concocted it and unleashed it on us. Perhaps they are in league with the beastmen, but it is not shamanic magic itself that we are facing.’
‘And that makes it easier to fight?’ asked the doctor.
‘Perhaps,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It makes it easier for me to understand. And if we are ever to find a cure, that is the first stage.’
In the Light Order’s pyramid, the exorcisms were continuing.
‘Fear breeds them,’ said Magister Kant. He was watching another ritual. A man, in his later middle age he guessed, was lying on his back in the middle of the exorcism chamber surrounded by chanting acolytes.
‘How many have there been?’ asked van Horstmann. He rarely came by this chamber, its proportions and materials carefully chosen to create greater magical resonance. The Light Order’s exorcists had gone one way, the battle magisters another, pure researchers like himself yet another.
‘Today?’ said Kant. ‘Three. This week, a dozen.’
‘I see. Strange times.’
‘Strange indeed. Some of them are just hysterical. Nothing daemonic at all. But most are real enough.’
The man in the circle howled and convulsed. Van Horstmann could hear his bones cracking. Hands were pushing up against the skin of his belly from the inside, forcing his abdomen out of shape.
‘No!’ yelled Kant. ‘The seventh declaration! Make the seventh declaration or you will lose that thing! It will run to the aethyr and we will never see it banished!’
The lead acolyte scrabbled in the pile of parchment and implements beside him. He found a scroll, unrolled it and began a new chant, gabbling through the syllables as the man’s screaming grew louder.
‘Vries’s declaration,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It is of use, then?’
‘Just like everything you brought in,’ said Kant. ‘That isn’t the problem. There aren’t enough of us. There are few enough priestesses of Shallya in the city now, so the burden lies on us.’
‘What of the Silver Hammer and their warrior priests?’ asked van Horstmann.
Kant looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t know, comprehender,’ he said. ‘Who does? It’s the Silver Hammer.’
‘Of course.’
Van Horstmann left the chamber behind. Fear bred the possessed. Minds became obsessive, or inflamed with a passion of madness. They became desperate. They begged for someone, for something, to make sense of the chaos in their minds. Sometimes, something answered. And the result was a man like the one lying in that chamber, probably about to die, a daemon being dragged out of him.
It was a short walk through the glare of the pyramid’s incessant light, through the many corridors and sub-chambers towards van Horstmann’s quarters. Many of the walls were translucent, allowing light sources to shine through, or were plated with polished gold or mirrors to send the light cascading in an infinity of reflections. Perhaps someone who was not a wizard would have been driven mad by the strangeness of the place, and ended up himself a gateway for daemons. Van Horstmann had accepted the place as he had accepted the warping of reality that occurred within himself every time he focused the winds of magic.
The Skull of Katam was quiet when he entered. Several books and heaps of parchment lay on the floor where he had been researching notes from various expeditions sponsored by the order. Men had ventured across the Sea of Claws, to the Southlands, into places thought to be cursed, or not to exist at all, and had written down what they saw. It was fascinating – not what they had actually encountered, but the strange things their minds conjured out of nothing. They saw sea monsters in the wave-tops and vast flying beasts in the clouds. Sometimes they were real, but it was the illusion of them that van Horstmann found more interesting. When a mind was not organised and aware of its own workings, it filled in those gaps of ignorance with whatever it feared or desired the most.
Van Horstmann opened up the side of the statue, revealing the extra-spatial sanctum. It was quiet there, too, which was good. If any of his guests learned to escape the puzzle box it would be a severe problem. He would deal with it, but not without compromising much of the rest of what he had to do. As it was the puzzle box sat undisturbed on its shelf beside the Liber Pestilentius.
Van Horstmann turned to one of the panes of crystal that hung on the walls. They were finely polished and without flaws, and had cost as much as van Horstmann could appropriate from the coffers of the order without creating suspicion. The same craftsmen who had made the lenses of the speculum had also, after overcoming their bafflement at such strange instructions, cut and polished these panes to van Horstmann’s specifications.
He raised a hand and let the winds of the aethyr flow through him, just a breath of it. The pane illuminated in a jumble of colours, and through the light a shape coagulated.
It was a familiar one. Ugly as a violent death, part insect, part lizard, and just enough human to make it capable of an expression of annoyance. The face of Hiskernaath.
‘What do you want?’ hissed the daemon. ‘You’re too good now to speak face to face? You’re finally afraid of what I’ll do to you when I get the chance?’
‘Our contract will never be broken, Hiskernaath,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And I keep the box closed for now because it will be a swine of a task to cram you all back in.’
‘How much longer must I endure?’ demanded the daemon. ‘A hundred are in here. The stench! The lies! Hatred such as men will never know exists a thousand times over, and it is the hatred one daemon feels for another.’ It was an exaggeration. There were a couple of dozen in the puzzle box with Hiskernaath, at most.
‘You were created to serve,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Not to be friends.’
‘Not to serve you!’
&
nbsp; ‘And yet,’ said van Horstmann, ‘I have further instructions, and they will be obeyed. Is that not right?’
Hiskernaath spat and grumbled in some arcane tongue.
‘Is that not right, daemon? I am your master. You will answer.’
‘Yes,’ said Hiskernaath. ‘Your will is my will.’
‘Master.’
‘Master.’
‘Good. The plague is well-advanced. The daemons captured by the new rituals have done their job well. It is rampant throughout the city. Morkulae and his cohorts probably enjoy their task rather too much.’
‘Good for them.’
‘There is another stage to this plan. That is where you come in. I need someone possessed.’
‘Then I will…’
‘You will be free, yes. For a time. I know that is what you crave, Hiskernaath. But this is not another case of making one angry soul lash out at the right time. This requires more complexity and subtlety. And a lot more power.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I need all of you,’ said van Horstmann.
Other panes were swimming with light and shapes now, more faces forming. Some were knots of broken fingers, or bunches of angry muscle. Some were all fangs and horn, or drooping handfuls of sagging, flabby flesh. None of them looked remotely human. Dozens of them crammed into the panes, like faces trying to look in through a window.
‘What?’ asked Hiskernaath, now drooling with anticipation. ‘What do you desire?’
Van Horstmann explained what he was going to do, and what he needed the daemons to do to make it possible. He explained how they were all bound to him by the same contracts inked and burned onto his skin, and how their few moments outside the confines of his puzzle-box prison would only be earned through performing this task for van Horstmann.
Halfway through, Hiskernaath began to laugh.
The procession wound its way from Königplatz to the river, and had already gathered more than three thousand Altdorfers. Drummers at its head beat out a slow gait and behind them were the widows, dressed in what had once been their finest dresses, now torn and smeared with mud and ashes. They tore at their hair and sang long, old funeral dirges.
Then came the main mass of the procession. They were from every segment of Altdorf’s society. Nobles in fine purples. Skinny urchins, as filthy as the widows. Burghers holding pomades against their noses to ward off the stink of the masses. Bakers, smiths, paupers, the rough-handed men who punted boats across the river, wan maidens apprenticed to the city’s temples, builders, gamblers, fighters and farmers who had only come into the city to visit the markets and found themselves trapped by the quarantine.
‘What do they want?’ asked Kardiggian. He was a large man for a Light wizard – the order did not much value physical strength or presence, and Kardiggian’s height and broad shoulders made him stand apart. If any of the Light Order looked the part of a battle magister, it was Kardiggian, whose full, black beard and equally black eyes gave him the look of a warrior taken from an ancient battlefield and wrapped in the robes of a wizard.
‘I don’t think they want anything,’ said van Horstmann. ‘They have to do something. For many the worst part of the Gods’ Rot is that it leaves them helpless. They can’t do anything to help those who have it, and there is precious little they can do to avoid it now they are forbidden to leave the city. So all they have left is to take to the streets.’
Altdorfers loved protesting and rioting if the object of their anger was egregious enough. But this wasn’t a protest. It was more like a funeral march, where every member was marking the death of someone they cared for – someone who had died, or was going to die, or was at great risk of dying. Judging from the obvious weakness and sickliness of many, some of them marched to mark their own deaths.
‘It is pitiable,’ said Kardiggian.
‘You surprise me,’ said van Horstmann.
‘How so? You do not feel pity?’
‘To see so many people, moved to action not because there is any practical purpose but because there is a compulsion built deep into them, all the same? I find it fascinating. When I am afforded the opportunity to witness such an example of the mind’s frailties, there is never much room left for pity.’
‘Will it be a problem?’
Van Horstmann shook his head. ‘They will be gone from the Garden’s vicinity soon. I do not think we need pay it any more mind.’
Kardiggian was there as, for want of a better word, muscle. His skills lay with destruction, and he might be called upon to use them. Van Horstmann’s role was to operate the speculum – van Horstmann’s Speculum – and because it was right that he be there. He had, after all, been the one to set the Light Order’s investigations on this path. Vranas was an expert exorcist and also had the political savvy to cope with any fallout from their mission. Arcinhal, meanwhile, was an expert at protective magics, which would most definitely prove useful. Vranas was, by unspoken consent, their leader.
The four magisters had gathered in a side street, looking onto the road choked with the marchers. Arcinhal had cast a protective circle around them – one that, as long as the magisters did not leave it, turned onlookers’ eyes away. It was not true invisibility, for that was much more difficult to achieve and was a specialism of the Grey Order. Instead it simply implied to any potential witnesses that this group of men was not worth looking at, so ordinary must they appear. It was impossible for the wizards to look like normal Altdorfers without magical aid. Even if they had not worn their Light Order robes or carried their staffs and wands, they would have looked like trouble of some kind. Arcinhal’s spell was the only way they could go about their business without attracting a crowd of onlookers.
‘I would rather we had requested the assistance of the priests of Morr,’ Vranas was saying.
‘They would not countenance us doing what we must,’ said van Horstmann. ‘They would call it grave robbing. They are protective of their patch, are they not?’
‘The Amethyst Order, then,’ continued Vranas. ‘This is more their–’
‘The less people know, the better,’ said van Horstmann.
‘I agree,’ said Kardiggian. ‘There are many… perhaps you might say, exalted guests in the Garden. One of them might be involved. I can trust us to be discreet, but I do not extend that trust very far.’
Vranas raised an eyebrow. He was a tall and pale man with a shaven head and a long, sharp nose. He had a cultured accent and a slickness of speech that made him the ideal magister to step forward when the order had to converse with people on the outside. Van Horstmann had developed an instant dislike of Vranas that had no logical base, save perhaps that he represented a breach in the isolation of the Light Order. Van Horstmann appreciated that isolation. Vranas, if he tried to make the Light Order more open to the scrutiny of outsiders, would have to be discouraged.
‘Night will fall soon,’ said Arcinhal. ‘That is when it must happen. I can’t keep us hidden if I need to protect us from harm, too.’
Van Horstmann had no quarrel with Arcinhal. Arcinhal was a brilliant man, quiet and organised, one who drove the acolytes beneath him to distraction with his exacting routines. His acolytes copied out reams of protective enchantments, over and over again, or pored over fragments of old magics recovered by adventurers and explorers. Van Horstmann conducted his research in isolation, but most other magisters worked in some way with Arcinhal as they delved into the Light Order’s collection of magical texts.
‘This will not be as neat and organised as you are used to, comprehender,’ said Vranas. ‘It may well tend towards the ugly.’
‘You forget, exorcist,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘I was there at the banishment of the creature that had taken Princess Astrid.’
‘You were there?’ asked Arcinhal. ‘At the Imperial Palace? I did not know that.’
‘I understand van Horstmann here likes his secrets,’ said Vranas with a smirk. ‘The wharf district fires destroyed evidence of some such
secrets, is that not right, van Horstmann?’
‘You would have to ask the Silver Hammer,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Best of luck with that.’
Van Horstmann regarded Vranas again, this time from the point of view of an enemy. Vranas had no way of knowing the worst of what van Horstmann had done, that was certain, but no doubt the magister kept tabs on every prominent member of the Light Order. Even the Half-Circle’s stewards and cooks would not be beneath his notice. There was nothing unusual about the fact Vranas had collected rumours and secrets about van Horstmann too. The only difference was, of course, that there was a lot more to find about van Horstmann than any other magister in the Light Order.
And as an enemy, Vranas had his weaknesses. Vranas considered himself an inviolable, indispensable part of the Light Order, as essential to its existence as the foundations of the pyramid. Elrisse’s death had, though Vranas would never articulate it as such, been a great boon to the exorcist. He no doubt imagined himself the natural choice as the next Grand Magister, and assumed – rightly, van Horstmann thought – that if the Emperor was compelled to appoint a new Grand Magister he would choose Vranas. But the assumption of indestructibility did not make for a position of strength. It meant that Vranas was ignorant of the threats that might be gathering beneath him – the opposite of the Silver Hammer’s paranoia, an inability to jump at shadows. If someone moved against him, Vranas would – perhaps literally – never see it coming.
‘If you are wrong, van Horstmann,’ said Arcinhal. ‘If this… this device of yours–’
‘The speculum,’ said van Horstmann.
‘Yes, this speculum, if it is wrong–’
‘It is not.’
‘If it is wrong and we dig up some… I don’t know, some saint, some ancestor of who knows what family, then we might never hear the end of it.’
‘I am not wrong,’ said van Horstmann with gravity. ‘I have seen what this plague does. I have seen where it comes from and what it leaves of those it infects. And I am not wrong.’