by Ben Counter
It was not just the inside of the statue. That would have been substantial enough, easily large enough to fit a hiding man. But the door hidden in the statue revealed a whole room beyond.
‘This is false space,’ said Alric. ‘Van Horstmann has created a room where none can fit. I had not thought him capable of such magic.’ He looked around at Kant. ‘I could not do this.’
Alric walked into the room, the light reflected from the crystal panels on the walls illuminating his face. The floor was covered in cushions, as if set out for meditation. More than a dozen crystal panes of various sizes were mounted on the walls and there stood a bookcase loaded with volumes. Alric examined the bookcase, pulling out one book after another.
‘The Worms of Saakinhand,’ read Alric. ‘Lost for more than seventy years. And the Second Moon of Lamentations. I remember when this was banned, back when I was an acolyte. All the copies were burned. Well, not all.’
Alric put the book back on the shelf. Something had caught his notice on top of the bookcase.
Kant, standing by the doorway in the statue, strained to see it. It was small, and glinted wetly in the glittering light.
It was an eyeball. It looked fresh and bloody, sitting watching Alric as he peered at it in puzzlement.
Van Horstmann looked back, through the pane of crystal in his hand. It was linked magically to the eyeball in the sanctum. On the pane was the image of Master Chanter Alric, confusion on his face.
A noise caused van Horstmann to look away from the sight. It was the sound of a door opening. The door to the Pinnacle Vault.
‘Egrimm van Horstmann!’ called a voice well-used to laying down accusations at a witch’s trial. The man who walked into the vault wore the battered leather cloak and wealth of weapons and torture implements that marked him out as a witch hunter. Behind him, shielding their eyes from the glare of the light, was a gaggle of noble household troops carrying swords and halberds, who looked as afraid of the man who led them as of anything they might find in the vault. The battle magister, Kardiggian, was with them. Kardiggian must have led them down through the sea of light to the vault’s door, and the expression on his face made it clear he looked on van Horstmann as an enemy and not a fellow magister.
‘You stand accused of daemoncraft and the practice of forbidden magic,’ continued the witch hunter. ‘The vows I have made compel me to demand of you a plea to these charges, lest I be moved to believe you innocent. I must inform you that I have never been moved so.’
‘You would be Lord Argenos,’ replied van Horstmann. From across the floor of the Pinnacle Vault, he could read nothing from Argenos’s face. The witch hunter wore a mask, a face he had crafted through the years to show nothing but sternness and disdain. ‘I knew one of you would come to take me in. Either you, or a magister from one of the other colleges. Mother Heloise was a possibility. But no, you were always the most likely.’
‘That you have prepared yourself for this moment displays only a further depth to your guilt,’ said Argenos. ‘I know that you seek to do violence to the Empire by the use of the Mantle of Thoss. Clearly you intend no contrition with the revelation of your crimes. I hereby pronounce you guilty of all charges. In the name of Sigmar, kneel and receive your punishment.’
‘There is no action you have taken,’ said van Horstmann, ‘or that you will take from now on, that I have not foreseen. Think on the path that led you here. What manner of daemonologist would I be to show my hand so early, by casting a host of daemons at you the moment you walked in through the door? And what manner of a witch hunter would you be, if you did not storm down here yourself, to lay down Sigmar’s law in person? Every step of that path, I have set out for you. You are here because I have brought you here.’
‘Then you have prepared the battlefield for us to fight,’ said Argenos. ‘So be it. I have faced a dozen champions of the Dark Gods, and bested them all. I have broken their bodies and torn out their souls. I have–’
‘Do you think,’ snapped van Horstmann, ‘that any of this is about you?’ He held up the Key of Isha in one hand. ‘Or about the Mantle of Thoss? Do you honestly believe, hunter of witches, that you understand but a fraction of what I have wrought?’ Van Horstmann’s hand was wreathed now in black flame, the same flame he had used to kill Magister Pendorf minutes before.
Argenos drew his pistol. Even as he aimed it at van Horstmann, the flame flared up around the Grand Magister’s hand, and a terrible chill radiated from it so profound it snatched the breath from the throats of House Salzenhaar’s men.
With a sound like a distant scream, the crying out of the goddess herself, the Key of Isha shattered in van Horstmann’s hand.
The door to the sanctum slammed shut. Master Chanter Alric whirled around at the sound of it banging shut behind him. He ran up to the door, which from this side was a slab of stone, and pushed against it. It did not yield.
‘Master Chanter!’ cried Magister Kant from outside. ‘Master Chanter, can you hear me?’ Kant, exhausted as he was, tried frenetically to find a means of opening the door, or a crack into which a lever might be inserted to pry the door away. But there was none, not even the slightest mark to show a doorway had ever been there.
Kant could not hear Alric as he pounded against the door, nor could Alric hear Kant’s voice. It was as if the sanctum had always been sealed, always formed its own tiny world separate from the rest of reality.
Magisters from outside van Horstmann’s chambers were rushing to heed Kant’s cries. They joined him trying to find a way into the statue, but none of them succeeded.
‘Back!’ cried one of them and Kant realised it was Magister Vranas. Vranas stood with both hands against the side of the statue as the other wizards backed away from him. The chamber rumbled as sparks of white power, like fragments of lightning, flickered around Vranas’s hands and over the surface of the statue.
The statue shifted. Vranas stepped back a pace and the statue went with him, the effort of moving it making the veins stand out on Vranas’s face. As the statue came away from the wall the magisters saw, not an opened passageway into the room that Kant had seen, but just the blank wall of the chamber.
‘There is nothing there,’ said someone. ‘Magister Kant, where is Alric?’
‘Kant, did you him enter the statue?’ demanded Vranas.
‘I did. There was a room in there, with windows of crystal. Alric went inside and now…’
‘Then where is he?’ asked Vranas.
Kant could not look at his fellow magister. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BLACK MIRROR BROKEN
The Pinnacle Vault echoed with the shattering force of the shot. The cascade of light shuddered and the troops of House Salzenhaar scattered at the sound.
Argenos’s shot was well-aimed. Anyone else would have been drilled between the eyes. Even as the bullet was in flight, van Horstmann conjured up a shield of light that deflected the blessed shot.
‘Forward!’ cried the leader of the household troops. ‘For the kill!’
Van Horstmann recognised them now as the men of House Salzenhaar, their leader a son of that family. Mikhael Salzenhaar ran past Argenos with his blade out, his men running with him.
Van Horstmann had his staff to hand before Mikhael reached him. He struck it against the ground and silvery ripples went out across the floor, and in the zone they encompassed time seemed to run thick as treacle. Salzenhaar’s movements were laboured and painful, each step seeming to stretch out forever.
Van Horstmann batted away Salzenhaar’s sword with his staff and stepped aside, letting the nobleman’s momentum carry him past. He drove the head of the staff, with its death mask, into Mikhael’s back and sent him sprawling to the floor.
Time snapped back into reality. Van Horstmann turned to the men now bearing down on him, ready to chop him up with their halberd blades or run him through with their swords. He swept a hand, hissed words of power, and threw them away from h
im on a pulse of white flame. They were thrown from him, their livery catching light. They screamed as they burned.
Van Horstmann put a foot on Mikhael Salzenhaar’s neck.
‘It is amusing to me,’ he said, ‘that having spent so many hours elbow-deep in Salzenhaar dead, I am about to be surrounded by dozens more.’
Mikhael tried to cry out, either in despair or defiance. Before any sound could escape him, the white fire had turned black, now moulded by van Horstmann’s will into a spike that projected from his palm. He drove it through the back of Mikhael Salzenhaar’s head, and Mikhael’s head became a vessel for the black flame. It rushed from his eye sockets and between his teeth as the flesh was stripped away, leaving a blackened skull that rolled away as van Horstmann took his foot off the corpse’s neck.
Witch Hunter Argenos slid into the cover of the pedestal that held the Mantle of Thoss. ‘This way there are no answers, van Horstmann!’ he yelled. ‘Only in the extirpation of your corruption can you ever find peace.’
Van Horstmann let the black flame turn in on itself, surrounding his fist like a bouquet of black roses. He stalked across the vault, backing up against the structure in its centre. ‘I do not want peace,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I could have found peace decades ago.’
‘Then what do you want?’ demanded Argenos. With a well-practiced motion he filled the chamber of his pistol with powder from the horn that hung from his jerkin, and rammed home another bullet into the barrel.
‘It benefits me nothing for you to know,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘So you will die in ignorance. Rather, I think, as you lived.’
This time, the tower in van Horstmann’s mind, the anchor that kept him connected to the realm of the aethyr, was a bizarre creation of lapis and gold. Shimmering blue walls supported arches and battlements of gold, glimmering in the strangest of colours under a sky so loaded with stars that it seemed a smeared mass of mottled light. In the real world Witch Hunter Argenos was rolling out from behind the pedestal with the agility of a far younger man, gambling everything on one magical shot that would end everything. But in the aethyr – realer, perhaps than the ‘real’ world – van Horstmann was walking under the tower’s raised portcullis, a moat of blue and pink fire roiling beneath his feet in which gambolled daemons with iridescent flesh. Inside everything was bulbous and asymmetrical, columns of twisted, blue stone running up the height of the tower festooned with chains of silver and gold. The floor was studded with swirls of diamonds and amethyst. The deep-blue light fizzed and shuddered with pent-up power.
Van Horstmann had been saving one gemstone for this occasion. He had known it would come, and he had studied and meditated accordingly to inscribe this spell in his mind. He had found it when still an acolyte, split up and hidden in the appendices and footnotes of a dozen books of otherwise tedious lore. Maybe the Changer of Ways had whispered to an early sage of the Light Order to plant it where van Horstmann would one day find it. More likely it was another example of a wizard’s pride, to share his teachings only with those willing to piece them together. Van Horstmann didn’t care, as long as he had it ready.
He took the gemstone from its place in the tower wall, where it had formed one of the many eyes of a bestial face seemingly frozen in the blue stone. The gemstone was jet-black, the size of van Horstmann’s fist, with flashes of light in its heart as if a bolt of lightning had been imprisoned there.
Outside van Horstmann’s body, Argenos was bringing his pistol up to shoot. Van Horstmann was not familiar with the latest contraptions emerging from the workshops of Nuln, but he knew that a well-placed shot could blow a man’s head clean off even without the blessed ammunition Argenos doubtless used. The eventualities of the next couple of seconds spiralled out in van Horstmann’s mind, each possibility forking the path of fate. Some of the paths ended in van Horstmann’s death. Others did not. Van Horstmann aimed himself towards the latter.
A spell learned by rote, unleashed by instinct, flashed blackly in van Horstmann’s palm. It formed a vortex, an ice-cold hole in space which sought to draw all energy into itself. The cold flooded through van Horstmann as the heat was leached out of him but he held his shaking arm up even as the flint sparked and Argenos’s pistol roared.
The speed of van Horstmann’s thoughts outstripped the bullet. The vortex caught the bullet and drew it in, robbing it of heat and speed. The lead ball orbited the vortex in van Horstmann’s palm, slowing until it fell and plinked harmlessly to the floor.
Argenos did not break stride. He drew his hammer, which glowed an angry orange. Van Horstmann dropped to one knee as Argenos charged, and the hammer blow passed an inch over his head.
The heat seared van Horstmann’s face.
‘We have magic of our own,’ growled Argenos, drawing the hammer back for a killing blow.
A lance of glass speared down from the ceiling and impaled Argenos through the thigh. Van Horstmann whispered, made a chopping gesture with one hand and another followed it, piercing Argenos’s shoulder and pinning him in place.
Argenos fought and shattered the two spikes that held him. Broken shards still sticking from his chest and leg, he loped another step closer to van Horstmann. The head of his hammer was aflame now, trailing twin fiery tails like the comet of Sigmar.
Van Horstmann slammed his staff into the ground. A hundred spikes erupted now, from every direction, criss-crossing the vault with Argenos at their nexus. The spell was the Chain of Purity, an early and powerful working of Light magic which was used to pin a violent and physically strong daemon or possessee in place while rituals of banishment were enacted. Now Argenos was caught in it, blood trickling down the glass shafts as he struggled to break out.
He was speared through the body and all limbs. One punched through from his collarbone to the middle of his back, another went through the back of his hand.
The witch hunter roared. Glass shattered. Argenos fell forward to one knee, some lances breaking while others slid further through his body.
‘Now!’ cried Argenos. ‘Now, by Sigmar!’
The roar of heat behind van Horstmann was just enough warning for him to throw himself to one side as the gout of white fire roared past him. His robes caught fire and he rolled on the floor to put them out, scrambling behind the nearest pedestal.
Magister Kardiggian shot past, flying high enough to brush the vault ceiling. He scattered a hail of white bolts from his hands, and they seared through the floor where they hit. Most thudded into the pedestal, but one raked across van Horstmann’s back and he felt the heat of its purity blistering his skin. He gasped and yelled out, not in pain but in anger.
‘You know full well I am better than you, Kardiggian!’ he shouted. ‘You saw it at the Garden of Morr! You were never anything more than a conjurer of tricks!’
‘And I have tricks enough to kill you, van Horstmann,’ replied Kardiggian. He halted, hovering in the air, and gathered a great ball of white flame between his outstretched arms. ‘What you sought in Dark magic, I found in the purity of my soul! Let us see which is the stronger!’
Van Horstmann had taken shelter behind the same pedestal Argenos had used moments earlier – the one on which stood the mannequin wearing the Mantle of Thoss. Van Horstmann tore the grey fur cloak down and threw it over himself as the fireball erupted from Kardiggian’s hands and the storm of flame broke against him.
The Mantle of Thoss was described, by those who knew it had ever existed, with all manner of miraculous powers. It could be lain on the floor, said some, and when removed would reveal a portal to one of the hells of the Sigmarite faith into which the Grand Theogonist had hurled those he judged guilty. Others maintained that it was the fur of the greatest wolf ever killed in the Empire, and that while wearing it a man took on an aspect so terrible that all who saw him fell down in awe and terror. It was rumoured to heal, of course, a belief that van Horstmann had exploited to gain entrance to the innermost vault. But most commonly, the Mantle of Thoss was said to protect the w
earer from harm.
Thoss had been shot with an arrow, stabbed twice, thrown off the balcony of the Temple of Sigmar and set alight. None of the attempts on his life had succeeded. He had died of old age, and many blamed the Mantle of Thoss for keeping the hateful old man alive for so long.
As van Horstmann learned in that moment, the Mantle of Thoss did indeed possess that particular property. The fireball battered against him like a gang of men with clubs, and the heat snatched the air from his lungs, but the flames did not burn him. The air rushed back in, van Horstmann gasped down a scalding breath, and threw the Mantle back off.
In the aethyr, the black gemstone shattered in van Horstmann’s hand.
The ceiling of the vault seemed suddenly gone, replaced by a sky heavy with lead-coloured clouds. The light that drenched the vault dimmed as during an eclipse, and freezing rain drove against van Horstmann’s face.
Black lightning crashed down from the sky, earthing through the hovering form of Magister Kardiggian. Kardiggian was bent almost double backwards as his muscles spasmed and the raw Dark magic tore through him. It burst from his eyes and mouth, it forked off his fingers. His staff shattered into shards of gold.
When Kardiggian hit the ground, his white robes were scorched black and tattered. His skin was the same. He coughed out a mouthful of blood and ash, broken teeth spilling from his lips.
Another bolt hit him in the back and slammed him to the floor. Another cut through his shoulder and sheared his arm off. There was no blood, for the flesh was seared closed. Kardiggian dragged himself a pace or two as van Horstmann stepped out from behind the pedestal, leaving the Mantle of Thoss on the floor.
He watched Kardiggian die. It took only a few seconds, during which the clouds dissolved away and the light returned, illuminating now the burned and broken mass of ashes and scorched meat that had been Magister Kardiggian.