Arcanum

by Simon Morden

  Sophia lowered the blanket gently over his feet again, and made to stand, but Büber reached once more into his clothing and pulled out a small metal case.

  “Take this,” he said, and pressed it on her. “They use this to light fires.”

  “What do I do with it?” She rehung her scabbard and opened the little box. She sniffed it and made a face.

  “Give it to Frederik Thaler. He’ll … know what to do with it.” The effort of talking to her had worn him out. “Gods, I’m tired. I’m tired, and there’s so much to do.”

  “Get well, Peter. We’ll get you home somehow. And then” – she shifted her shoulders, as if squaring up to the enemy – “prepare. How long do you think we have?”

  “It’ll be over, one way or another, by winter.”

  He sounded more than tired. She nodded slowly and, taking the scroll and the case, she left, closing the door quietly behind her. Outside, the soldiers were keeping the Flintsbachs and Kuppenheim at a discreet distance from the house.

  Sophia went straight to her horse and stowed the items Büber had given her. She collected the purse and held it out to Mr Flintsbach without subtracting from its contents.

  “Take this,” she said. “You’ll need every red penny of it.”

  “Why?” he asked, even as he closed his fingers around it.

  She thought about lying, or at least of not telling him the truth. “You’re going to need to buy another farm, a long way from here. There’s a war coming, and this little house and these fields are going to become our battlefield. That river will run red and the first snows will bury the dead.”

  She fastened her saddlebags again and, reluctantly, awkwardly, raised one foot to the stirrup.

  75

  He always seemed to end up back in the refectory when something significant happened: some setback, some triumph, some event large enough to shake him, and he’d suddenly find himself at one end of the long table, drinking or eating, or both.

  To explain the size that he was, his whole world had to be changing daily.

  Take now, for instance. The princess consort, or Sophia to give her the name that Thaler had known her by all her life, had ridden – ridden, mind: she’d barely sat on a horse before – all the way to Rosenheim and back, just to press a small box of grey-black powder on him.

  The box sat on the worn and scrubbed table in front of him, right next to a cup of short beer and some middling cheese he’d managed to procure. What he wanted was a good thick slice of sausage, and preferably several thick slices of sausage, some bread, and perhaps some sauerkraut. It was too early for anything like that, so beer and cheese had to do.

  “She said I’d know what to do with it,” growled Thaler. He liked his sleep almost as much as he liked his food. “Or rather, Peter said I’d know what to do with it.”

  He drank his beer and cut himself a generous slice of cheese. While he was still chewing, he snagged the box and inspected it for what felt like the tenth time that morning. This time was no different to the others, so why should it yield any more information than before? It was lighter in the hall, certainly, and there were hopeful sounds beginning in the kitchens, but the box was just a box: silver, finely made, carefully carved with dragon-things looping in and out of their own coils, clearly dwarvish. Nothing but a container for the powder.

  So it had to be the powder itself that was special.

  The lid was tight fitting, like Thaler’s breeks, and had to be dragged free by opposing motions of fingers and thumbs. It struck him that perhaps the box was intended to be water-tight. The powder inside wasn’t really a powder, more a grit, like sand. It smelt … odd. Of anvils and the cloud of dust made by the strike of a mason’s chisel.

  He took a pinch of it, felt its coarseness between his fingertips and made a little pile of grains on the table. He peered at them. If the case was designed to keep out water, what would happen if he deliberately got the powder wet?

  Thaler still had dregs of beer in his cup, and he dribbled them onto the pile. It turned to mush, and nothing obvious happened, even when he poked it with his finger. The mixture ran up inside his carefully clipped nail and stained it black, and he was left rubbing and smelling his fingers. The odour of broken stone grew strong.

  “Master Thaler?”

  He turned, expecting to see a cook because it was a woman’s voice.

  “Mistress.”

  The Order wore white, the library wore black. She’d chosen to dress in grey, all in grey, as if she’d taken the robes of her former profession and washed them with ink.

  He’d also learnt that she was a changeling, an elf-girl who’d been left in a newborn’s cradle. Felix hadn’t known what to make of that, and neither did Thaler.

  He remembered his manners long enough to stop staring and wave at the space next to him.

  “Please, sit. I don’t think breakfast will be long.”

  Tuomanen perched on the bench beside him, then swung her legs over so that she was properly at the table. Her sleeves fell as she steepled her fingers in front of her. Her tattoos, two full forearms of disturbing patterns, were on view. There was a design on her neck, too. He could see it rising towards her jaw-line.

  She looked tired. More tired than Thaler, even.

  “Not sleeping?”

  She pursed her lips. “You were up before I was.”

  “Ah, but I was woken.”

  “Whereas no one dares to wake me.” She scrubbed at her face with her open hands. “I have nightmares, Master Thaler. You wouldn’t want to know what happens in them, but screaming your throat raw every morning clearly isn’t the best way to start your day.”

  “There are things you can take,” he offered. Simple hedge remedies, relying on the amount of distilled spirit in them for potency.

  Tuomanen sighed. “Then I wouldn’t be able to wake up when they come for me. At least I know that, when I open my eyes, what’s gone before is only a dream.” She reached out and took the box from in front of Thaler. “Good craftsmanship. Silver. Dwarvish?”

  “Yes.”

  “A pretty gift. Dwarves don’t normally give anything away.” She rattled the box next to her ear and frowned.

  She didn’t know they were at war, thought Thaler. The only people in Juvavum who knew that were himself, Sophia and, by now, Felix. He mashed at the splodge of powder-slurry. “No, apparently not. I’m not sure they gave this away.”

  “Then …?” She gave the box another shake, then inspected it to see how it opened.

  “Peter Büber sent it to me,” said Thaler. “Apparently, I’d know what to do with it.”

  “And do you?” She pulled the two halves apart carefully.

  “Not a clue.” Together, they looked at the contents.

  He felt, rather than saw, a change in the hexmaster’s demeanour. She turned from being open and expansive to guarded and precise. She took a pinch of powder and sniffed at it, then carefully removed the grains from the ends of her fingers so they fell back into the container.

  She said nothing as she replaced the lid.

  “Do you know what it is?” he asked her, and felt a sudden surge in his heart. Büber was right. He did know what to do with the powder: show it to other people and ask them. There was no reason, no reason at all why he had to have all the answers himself.

  Tuomanen stayed silent. She looked to the door, way down at the far end of the refectory. She wanted to run. She certainly didn’t want to answer Thaler’s question.

  “Mistress,” he said. “I’ve made vows of obedience to my lord Prince of Carinthia. You’ve given your own promises to me.”

  “I have to go,” she said, and started to get up. Thaler instinctively put his meaty hand on her shoulder and brought her down again. Both of them were so surprised that it worked.

  She sat heavily, and Thaler pried the box from her grasp. “What is this?”

  He brought his face close to hers. He was angry. At her, at the dwarves, at being woken before sun
rise, at everything. Normally, he would have apologised for his intemperance, but not today.

  “I…”

  “Let me explain something to you, something I thought you realised without me having to spell it out as if you were some neophyte apprentice. The library works by cooperation. We don’t own the books we care for. We are their slaves, their serfs, if you will. Our knowledge is open for all to share. If I keep a secret, and the gods know I’ve done this and suffered the consequences, then we are all less for it.” Thaler sucked air through his teeth. “In the Order, you guarded everything, yes? Nothing was given away, and in any trade of knowledge, advantage was sought. The strong took from the weak.”

  Tuomanen nodded, dry-mouthed.

  “I have no intention of beating this information from your tattooed skin, or threatening you in any way. That is something I would never do. I would, however, be very, very disappointed in you should you fail to share it.” He sat back, folded his arms and waited.

  She seemed shocked, unable to respond, and Thaler thought he’d lost her, her trust and her confidence in him.

  Then she laughed, loud enough that one of the round, red-faced cooks peeked out of the kitchen to see who was killing whom.

  He took affront. “Mistress Tuomanen, I see little to amuse either you or me. These are serious matters for librarians and, may I say, the palatinate.”

  She grabbed his head in the crook of her elbow in a movement fluid and fast, but instead of visiting violence on him, she planted a kiss on the side of his head, right where his thinning hair met his rising forehead.

  “Gods preserve you, Thaler. You’re a prince among men, and worth more than a dozen hexmasters. If I’d defied the Order like I defied you, they’d have flayed me, torn the muscle from my limbs and ripped my heart from my chest, all the while keeping me alive, with everyone watching and making suggestions as to which part of me to mutilate next.”

  Which was all too much information for Thaler.

  “And you try to control me with your stern looks and down-turned mouth.” She let him go. “You’ve disarmed me, my lord. I apologise.”

  The refectory door creaked open, and a gaggle of apprentices burst in, all talking at once.

  Thaler was at a loss. He seemed to be swinging from one emotion to another with no visible means of support. What did any of this mean?

  “Will you tell me what the powder does? Do you even know?”

  She met his gaze steadily. “I know what it does, and yes, I’ll tell you. There’s something else I need to tell you first, though. Just not here. Somewhere we can’t be overheard or spied on.”

  “They are your brothers,” said Thaler, “as they are mine.”

  “I’m hiding something from you, my Master. It’s about time I told you.”

  From hungry to sick in a moment. Gods, he couldn’t keep doing this. “Is it something my lord Felix needs to be present at?”

  “It’ll sound better coming from you.”

  “Will it?”

  “I’d rather not be there, and you have a way with words. Perhaps you can stop the prince ordering my immediate pressing.”

  She was serious.

  “Mistress, I appear to have lost my appetite anyway. I know just the place.” Thaler pocketed the dwarvish box and swung his legs out from under the table. He remembered to greet his apprentices, but was in too much of a daze to remember any of their names.

  He led her through the corridors into the library. It was silent, though full of scaffolding. Soon it would be noisy with the rasp of saws and creak of wood and ropes. Outside, the workmen were beginning to gather, but where he and the mistress were going, they wouldn’t be disturbed. He snagged a lit lantern as he passed the entrance hall, its candle burnt almost to a stub and the melted wax a white pool on the plate underneath, and carried on to the little door that opened directly into the wall.

  The staircase was dark except for the thin window halfway up. He ushered the hexmaster in, and pulled the door firmly shut behind him. There was no room to push past her without getting far too close: he handed her the lantern and shooed her on until they reached the window.

  “Here?” she asked.

  “Can you think of a better place?”

  “Several.” Tuomanen put the lantern on the floor and squeezed as much of her as would fit into the window niche, managing to get far enough in to be able to look down at the alley below.

  “You had something important to say?”

  Her shadowed face looked down. “We – the Order – deliberately kept secrets—”

  “Hardly a revelation,” interrupted Thaler.

  “Knowledge that was useless to us. But not to you.”

  She gave him time to think the concept through.

  “Ah,” he finally said. “Knowledge that would have allowed us mundanes to challenge your power?”

  “Yes. We found things out, by accident mostly. Other things we learnt from outside the Order and decided it’d be better if such matters never came to your attention. We killed people where we had to, but, for the greater part, we didn’t have to do anything but let the discovery wither and die. No one was really interested because it wasn’t magic.”

  Tuomanen looked small and unthreatening, almost merging with the stone on which she sat.

  “What sort of things?”

  “Alchemy, mainly, because it was so close to magic. We have books on it, all written in code. Our maps of the human body are, shall we say, worryingly accurate. Metal and glass working techniques that are beyond Juvavum’s best smiths. Or Firenze’s, for that matter. If it could be mistaken for magic, then we probably know about it already.” She shrugged and looked up at Thaler. “It’s all written down, but just telling you that this knowledge even exists breaks one of the Order’s most rigidly enforced rules.”

  “And the books?” asked Thaler. “The ones we’ve been pulling out of the White Tower and locking away in a separate room? What an idiot I’ve been. A naïve, trusting fool.”

  “Deceit is at our core,” she said. “It’s a habit we learnt throughout our training, and its full expression is seen in the masters. If I’d lured you here, where there are no witnesses and no one to overhear us, my next step would be to push you down the stairs and take the dwarvish box from you, and then simply to close the door. I’m sure they’d find your body, eventually, but I’d be innocent of everything.”

  Thaler didn’t have so much as a knife on him. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

  “No. But I don’t think you’d get the same response from … well, some others. I don’t know what they’d do.” She gnawed at her lip. “If I throw my lot in with you, can you save me?”

  “Save you? From what? From whom?” He reached into his robe and held the box tightly, so that the corners dug into his palm. “I’ve already said you are welcome to stay for as long as you wish, and, perhaps in time, you’ll choose to become a librarian.”

  “Save me from myself,” she said. “I’m a bad person, Master Thaler, used to doing bad things.”

  “The gods offer no more salvation than I can, Mistress, but you’re as safe as anyone can reasonably hope to be in these troubled times.” Which was scant comfort, he knew. How bad could it get, and how quickly? Here she was, telling him all the Order’s secrets, while he was keeping his own. “We, that is, I … the box. Apparently, we’re at war with the dwarves of Farduzes.”

  She blinked in the gloom. “Since?”

  “Since we can no longer defend ourselves. Or rather, since you can no longer defend us and we are like sheep in the face of wolves. We have some things in our favour: the Bavarians seem content to tear each other apart, and Byzantium will fall to a slave revolt. Felix is a Frankish prince as well as a Carinthian one, so we may be able to count on their support. On the other hand, Over-Carinthia is vulnerable to the Doge, and our eastern quarter to the Protector of Wien. But it seems that the dwarves have first claim on our land.”

  Put like that, it seeme
d hopeless. In a year, in five years, with all the reforms in place – local militias and palatinate cavalry, training and better weapons – they might have been able to give a decent account of themselves on the field. Instead, they had to fight a war this summer.

  “Why the dwarves?”

  “Now you know as much as I do, Mistress. I was woken in the night and told we are at war. I was given the dwarvish box with no more comment than that I would know what to do with it.” He held it out to her again, and she reached out to collect it. “That’s the only part of this that makes any sort of sense. I do know what to do with it.”

  He dropped it into her hands.

  “Where does this staircase go?”

  “To the roof,” he said.

  “Good. Bring the lantern.” She scrambled off the window ledge and walked purposefully up. She didn’t appear to need light: either it was younger eyes or elvish eyes that allowed her not to stumble. She even worked the door without assistance.

  After the dark of the staircase, the open expanse of the roof was blinding. Thaler stayed still and squinted until he could see. The parapet was low, and accidents likely.

  Tuomanen judged where the wind was blowing from and crouched down on the stone to shield the small mound of grey grit she poured from the box. Thaler lowered himself down with difficulty next to her.

  “They use this to light fires. Underground, they have their black rock, but not kindling.” She opened the lantern door and, heedless to the closeness of the flame or the molten fat dripping onto her fingers, she worked the candle stub free.

  She touched the flame to the powder. For a moment, nothing happened, then she jerked her hand back as orange fire blossomed. It grew as it consumed the whole pile, then winked out just as quickly. Smoke roiled away into the newborn sky.

  Thaler had felt the heat on his face, and the brightness of the fire was still with him when he closed his eyes.

  “Remarkable,” he said.

  “No, no. You don’t understand.” Tuomanen sheltered the guttering candle with her curved palm. “That it burns is not the interesting thing about it. Otherwise it’d be no more than a curiosity.”