by Ben Counter
Kardiggian looked up at the sky, squinting at the horizon still aglow with the dying sun. ‘Sun goes down in seven minutes,’ the battle magister said. ‘Let us begin.’
The four magisters, still cloaked in Arcinhal’s mantle of disinterest, headed across the street, down which the last few stragglers of the funeral march were hobbling. They were the old and sick without family to help them along, and a couple of young urchins who trotted along to keep up. No one looked at the magisters as they moved towards the gates.
The side street that ended with the gate was, uniquely for Altdorf, scrupulously clean. No ordure ran down the channels cut into the middle of the street, and no wheel ruts had been worn into the stones. Trash did not gather in the corners, to be picked over by the vagrants who haunted the dusk and pre-dawn streets of the city. At the end of the street rose the intricate wrought iron gates of the Garden of Morr.
‘For a place that serves as this city’s symbol of death,’ said Kardiggian, ‘have you imagined how many of Altdorf’s people are actually buried here? One in ten, perhaps?’
‘Less than that,’ said Arcinhal. ‘Perhaps once it was more, but not now. A grave in the garden is beyond almost everyone. Even money isn’t enough any more. Most burghers won’t get in, no matter how much they might pour into Morr’s coffers. You need power and status. Good breeding, too.’
A figure emerged from the shadows that, until then, had not seemed deep enough to hide him. He wore a long black habit and his head was tonsured, the exposed scalp white and newly-stubbled. His habit was held closed by a rope belt fastened through the eyes of a large bird’s skull and around his neck hung a small book on a length of twine.
‘Father,’ said Vranas. ‘We seek passage to the Garden.’
‘I have been told to expect you,’ said the priest of Morr. ‘Do no dishonour to the interred. Mark the nobility of those within. And, good sirs, pray be careful where you tread.’
‘We will,’ said Vranas.
‘I shall be without. Though you may not see us, none of us will be very far away.’ The priest unhooked the chain that held the gates closed. The gates themselves were of black-painted iron and depicted two skeletons holding up a slab on which lay a body as if in state. The gates squealed as they opened, and the magisters moved into the garden.
Arcinhal let the concealing spell fade. There was no one in here that would be alarmed at the sight of them, and he had to be ready to put up any other form of protection they needed. Everywhere there were grave monuments – statues, full tombs like miniature mansions, grave slabs with the images of the interred carved onto their lids. Some were new, with the metal fittings of statues untarnished and the mottling of mould yet to gather on the stone. Others had been worn smooth by the ages – they had been here since before Altdorf itself, when the lords of the keep on the Reik had buried the dead from wars with the greenskins.
‘What might a Light wizard have to do to be buried here?’ asked van Horstmann.
‘Save the city,’ said Arcinhal. ‘Or become Emperor.’
‘They would never let one of us in here,’ said Kardiggian. ‘Altdorf hates the wizards. No matter how many times we might save them all, they will never trust us. It is part of what it means to be a wizard.’
‘Focus,’ said Vranas. ‘Remember why we are here. Van Horstmann?’
Van Horstmann placed the case for his speculum on the ground and began to assemble it. The other magisters watched with some interest, for none of them had ever used such a device. Van Horstmann had designed it himself and had the pieces crafted by the Altdorfer craftsmen who usually made stargazing implements for the Celestial Order or navigational devices for sailors. It was not the kind of thing that was ever seen among Light wizards, who relied on the magical labour of their acolytes rather than complex tools.
‘Quite the contraption,’ said Vranas.
‘We must have more than one way of looking at the world,’ said van Horstmann as he worked. ‘That is the weakness of the colleges. Each order only sees through one eye. Through the concept of the world created by the way of their own wind of magic. The Bright Order sees everything as creation and destruction, always in violence. The Amethyst wizards as decay and dissolution. We see it in terms of purity and corruption, everything in those terms. It is how a wizard becomes blind to the reality of the world, for he rejects whatever does not fit into his view of it. I see through the eyes both of a Light wizard and of a man curious about the world. That is how I stave off stagnation.’
Van Horstmann’s Speculum was assembled, a waist-high collection of lenses and mirrors. The sun was down now and night had fallen, yet still the speculum gathered enough light from the stars to send fractured reflections glimmering across the headstones and monuments.
The light formed into a single beam, playing across the garden. This place was not just a graveyard – it was a monument to the most exalted dead of Altdorf. The Emperors had their own burial places in the crypts of the Imperial Palace but other leaders of the city, the noble-born and rich, had their resting places here. The priests of Morr kept the place flawlessly tended, including the elegant beds of flowers they planted between the monuments. The light caught the names of famous families from Altdorf’s past, some of them still among the leading households of the city, a few others forgotten save for the graves.
‘There,’ said van Horstmann. The beam had settled on one part of the Garden of Morr, a side-plot centred on a grand tomb with three wings. SALZENHAAR, read the name inscribed on the lintel.
‘Damnation on high,’ hissed Arcinhal. ‘It’s the Salzenhaars. They built half this city. One of them’s the Burgomeister.’
‘Opening the tomb may be difficult to explain,’ added Vranas.
‘I am not wrong,’ said van Horstmann. He stood up and walked towards the tomb. He had his staff held across his chest, as if ready to fend off an attacker with it.
‘You say you can find the source of the plague,’ said Kardiggian, ‘but what does that mean? An infected body buried here? The ratmen?’
‘No,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Not the skaven.’ He reached the door. It was of greenish bronze, with no apparent means of opening it. He pushed at it, then put his shoulder against it and shoved. It did not move.
‘If this device of yours works,’ Vranas said, ‘then it should at least–’
The rest of the sentence never got out. The door boomed open, throwing van Horstmann back across the flowers planted outside the Salzenhaar tomb. A foul, hot gale blew from the tomb, with the sound of a hundred voices howling.
‘Arcinhal!’ yelled Kardiggian.
Arcinhal swept his staff in a circle and the circle sprang up around himself, Vranas and Kardiggian. It took the form of the images of several hooded acolytes, blue-white, translucent and ghostly, standing heads bowed at guard around the wizards.
A hand gripped the door frame from the inside. The fingers were long and bony, held together by greyish, ropy muscles. The hand of a corpse.
Kardiggian yelled the words of a spell and bars of white light sprung up in front of the open door. Van Horstmann rolled away from the doorway and got back to his feet, pushing himself up with his staff. He held up a hand and conjured a circular shield of white fire around it.
‘Black heart and unwelcome stranger!’ yelled Vranas. ‘By the light of the aethyr be blinded! By its fires be constrained! Slaves to darkness, there is no darkness here!’
Above Vranas swelled a globe of light, a miniature sun that cast its harsh light against the statues and tombs of Morr’s Garden. Beams of light seared the moss encrusting the oldest headstones and withered the flowers to dust.
The skeleton of a son of the Salzenhaar family reached through the bars of light. The light burned the scraps of muscle and skin from his arms and set fire to the stained remnants of his funeral vestments. He had been wrapped in dark purple and gold-threaded ivory silk, and buried in the red-lacquered armour he had been wearing when struck down on the battlefield.
A bony hand grabbed van Horstmann’s ankle. Van Horstmann rammed the butt-end of his spear into the leering skull’s eye socket, forcing it into the mulch that filled the cranium. He let the wind of Light magic flow through him, from the core of his body through his arms to his fingers. White heat filled the staff and the skeleton’s skull burst, sending hot bone shrapnel flying.
More bodies were clambering over each other to get out. Some were fresher than the first, still with half-recognisable faces clinging to their skulls. Others were just bones.
Van Horstmann rolled onto his front and ran to Arcinhal’s circle. Behind him the bars of light shattered and the dead spilled out.
Darts of light impaled one, a woman, going by the long burgundy dress she had been buried in. The darts had spat from Kardiggian’s hand and the battle magister’s eyes were glowing now, the Light magic forced through his body in such quantities that it threatened to immolate him from the inside. Kardiggian had to condition his body to keep it intact when he wielded the raw force of battle magic.
Another corpse lurched through the edge of the protective circle. The parchment skin was scorched off it as it fell through the ring of glowing images. Vranas’s sphere of light descended and bathed the undead creature in fire. Smouldering bones fell off its frame until its spine and pelvis came apart.
‘Vranas! Banish them!’ cried Arcinhal.
Vranas knelt on the grass and aimed his staff at the tomb. Half a dozen more were struggling out, burning in the fire raining down. A spray of silver blades sheared from the staff and broke like glass against the undead.
‘This is fell magic,’ gasped Vranas. ‘Dark things animate them.’
Another stumbled close. Its fingers were like nails of bone, raking at van Horstmann’s face. Van Horstmann swiped his staff at its skull and a burst of yellow-white flame erupted from the impact, the charge held in the staff released in violence.
‘Hold them!’ yelled Vranas. Arcinhal was sweating now, shoulders drooping. The circle was flickering, the images of the acolytes close to fading out.
The tower drifted from the back of van Horstmann’s mind. It took form against the backdrop of the burning graveyard and time slowed down, the old channels of discipline giving shape to his thoughts.
This time the fortress was black stone and pitted iron, lashed by acidic winds and bounded by a moat of stagnant, corpse-choked water. Heads and hands were nailed to the battlements. Bodies were splayed across spiked barricades. A flaming beacon on the roof flickered against the dense, dark clouds.
The gates opened. Van Horstmann imagined himself drifting across the foetid moat and into the tower.
Chains hung from the rafters overhead. From each chain hung a dozen bodies, stripped and bloody, swinging bloated with decay like grapes left on the vine to rot. The eye sockets of each one had been hollowed out and in every socket was a gemstone.
Every time van Horstmann had meditated on magic, he had crystallised a single instance of it into one of these gemstones. There were hundreds of them here – some of them purely mundane, enabling him to conjure a light or a flame quickly. But many were more powerful, the result of months of hunting down the most dangerous and complicated spells and committing them, syllable by syllable, symbol by symbol, to memory.
Devonion’s Seventh Circle, a spell that, when cast around a bound and subdued subject, compelled the subject to answer any question truthfully. The Conjunction of Martyrs, which caused the energy channels of the target’s body to align and tear his organs apart with a burst of unfettered power. And the Argent Storm.
Van Horstmann had placed the Argent Storm in the tower years before. He had known he would need it one day. As time had gone on, as the pattern of events had unfurled, he had known exactly when he would have to call on such spells. Each one had taken months of study before van Horstmann had been able to hide them away here. But when the time came, he knew he would have to let them shatter and be destroyed.
Van Horstmann plucked the Argent Storm from an eye socket. It was deep blue and glistening with silver sparks. In his hand – though it was not really his hand, just a part of the mental image he had made of himself – it vibrated coldly, as if angry and impatient to be released.
Outside, in the real world, the dead had broken through Arcinhal’s circle. Van Horstmann had known they would. There were not just the walking dead, such as might be summoned by any petty necromancer. Vranas had been right – there was something darker animating them.
Van Horstmann let the tower recede. He felt the coils of snakes around his feet, their clammy flesh pressing against him, but he banished the sensation and forced himself to ignore them.
Not now. He would not fall apart now, as he almost had when facing the Hand Cerulean.
The Garden of Morr shifted back into place. The nearest skeleton emitted a loud hiss as it dragged itself on its sternum towards van Horstmann. Its legs had been blasted away by a volley of darts from Kardiggian’s hands, and as he watched another was impaled by a spear of light that fell from above and transfixed it through a shoulder blade. The other magisters had bought van Horstmann the few seconds he needed.
The gemstone shattered in his mind. The patterns of the Argent Storm burned against his skin, spiralling through his mind like tunnels of light. Van Horstmann dropped to his knees, the force of the power bearing down on him almost enough to knock him unconscious.
Bolts of silver lightning hammered down, each accompanied by a crack of thunder that shook the ground. The bolts earthed in searing light, separated by curtains of darkness.
Where it struck, the lightning shattered animated bone. The long-dead sons and daughters of the Salzenhaar family were destroyed in rapid succession, fragments of burning bone falling like hail. One bolt struck the family’s tomb and shattered the pediment, a deep crack splitting the miniature mansion in two. Another blew a crater in the middle of the magisters, throwing them off their feet.
The sound left van Horstmann’s ears ringing, and fingers of glowing light were burned against his retina. He tried to blink them away and clear his head from the cacophony.
The Garden of Morr drifted back into focus. The starlight had returned as the storm clouds dissipated, and it illuminated the shattered stones of the Salzenhaar tomb, the smouldering tears in the grass and flowerbeds, and chunks of smoking pelvis and skull littering the Garden. A haze of metallic-tasting smoke hung in the air.
Vranas coughed and got to his feet. Van Horstmann was still kneeling, leaning on his staff.
‘Holy stars,’ said Vranas. ‘Comprehender, what was that?’
Arcinhal was in the worst way, almost exhausted. Kardiggian had to help him to his feet – there was ice on Arcinhal’s breath and crystals of it clinging to his eyes.
‘Are they gone?’ said Kardiggian.
‘Van Horstmann?’ asked Vranas.
‘Maybe,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The Argent Storm leaves little in its wake.’
‘Powerful magic,’ said Kardiggian. ‘Battle magic. I tried to master it.’
‘You were working from a transcript that was flawed,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It took me months to find a complete example.’
‘Arcinhal?’ asked Vranas.
‘I can walk,’ said Arcinhal. ‘But no more. They were almost on us. I am sorry, magisters. We could all have died here.’
‘The tomb,’ said Vranas. ‘Some might remain.’
Van Horstmann followed Vranas to the shattered tomb. The crack down the middle of it looked like it ran right down to the foundations. Vranas held up a hand and a light appeared in his palm, illuminating the inside of the tomb like a torch. Van Horstmann could see the stone slabs with their coffins, each one with its lid torn off. This place had been more lavish than the houses of most living Altdorfers, gilded sculpture running across the walls depicting the generosity or prowess in war of the Salzenhaar family.
‘There,’ said Vranas, pointing to a flight of stairs that led beneath the upper chamb
er. Van Horstmann followed him to the staircase and saw that here, too, the coffins had been ripped open from the inside. This was where the older dead were buried, the matriarchs and patriarchs who had founded the bloodline.
In one corner was the stone sarcophagus of a knight. Its lid had been forced aside. It was filled now with nothing more than dust, the remains of whatever this body had been buried with. HEINRICH GRUNHALD-SALZENHAAR, read the name inscribed on the side.
The place smelt of mould and great age. A few loose bones were scattered around the floor along with the leavings of rats and insects.
‘If this is the source of the plague,’ said Vranas, ‘perhaps the evidence of it was lost with the bodies of the dead.’ He stood now beside the sarcophagus of Heinrich Grunhald-Salzenhaar and bent over it.
He ran a hand through the fine dust in the sarcophagus. He paused and reached in further. When he stood again he had a book in his hand.
The book was bound with bloody bandages that van Horstmann knew, from experience, never dried out. Vranas was holding the Liber Pestilentius.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TYRANT
Rumours grew stale. Even the tales of the newest district to fall to the Gods’ Rot, of the red crosses daubed on the doors of yet another street, grew old. The criers on the corners, whose lists of newly-infected streets had been a staple of every Altdorfer’s morning just a week before, had to pad the daily news of the plague with accounts of hapless souls cut down by the Imperial Palace guards who were stationed at the gates to prevent anyone breaking the city’s quarantine.
Spouses, parents, children and friends wailed at the gates for their loved ones to be allowed out, or for themselves to be allowed in to wait out the horror of the plague with their families. The usual crowd of self-appointed oracles described the juicy categories of sin for which the plague was a punishment, or described ever more bizarre cures dictated to them by an angel of Shallya, or the spirit of a long-dead king.
It was as if there existed a script to be followed. The well-worn ruts of Altdorf’s superstition were brimming with the word that immersion in chicken hearts would cure the plague, or that archers on the rooftops were shooting anyone who made a rush for the walls. They still invented stories about beastmen in the city, only now they were brewing cauldrons of infectious bile and pouring it into the Reik.