by James Wallis
Hoche could tell that this conversation was leading somewhere, but he was too tired to go there himself. He let Braubach show him the way. “What are you saying?”
Braubach leaned forward abruptly. “The only way you can save yourself is to join the Untersuchung, Karl. The Knights Panther won’t dare come near you if you’re one of us. Face it, your career as a soldier is over. This is not the army, not as you think of it, but it’s a prestigious role in a prestigious team, and it’s still a chance to serve the Emperor. You’re the sort of intelligent officer we need.” He paused. “Plus it’ll save your life.”
Hoche sat still. The suggestion was a shock and yet it was as if the whole discussion had been leading up to it. What Braubach said made sense: although he enjoyed army life, he knew that without noble rank, he would never rise much further—even before this cursed business. Besides, the Untersuchung was part of the Reiksguard, the Emperor’s personal guards, much higher in status than a Reikland foot-regiment. He guessed the wages would be better too. And Altdorf was much closer to Grünburg. Perhaps he could persuade Marie to move here once they were married. It would be a new direction for his life but, he felt in his gut, a better one. A clear path cut through his tired mind.
“Yes, I’ll join you,” he said.
“You don’t need time to think?” Braubach said.
“No.”
“You’re a man of swift decisions and firm action. Once you’ve signed all the paperwork and a transfer request from your old regiment, we’ll teach you how unwise that can be. But welcome aboard.” He gestured to a table in the corner of the room. “There’s a mattress and a couple of blankets under there. Get some sleep. You’ll need it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Learning
Hoche was drowning. Black water enclosed him, pushing down on him as he sank, his lungs straining for air, his tied arms struggling against their bonds. Far above lay the surface, life, and freedom but a dreadful weight dragged him down. The heavy fabric of his clothes restrained him so he could not swim free. In another second the air would burst from his mouth, he would inhale the dark, cold water and die. Who had done this to him? Who had brought him to this end? Had he come all this way to die?
He woke suddenly. The panic of the dream stayed vivid for a second or two, then faded. The long office of the Untersuchung was brighter in the sunlight that streamed from the slit windows in the east wall. By daylight the room looked smaller and shabbier. Every desk was taken by people reading, making notes, comparing documents, talking to their neighbours. They did not wear uniforms, and Hoche was startled to see women and non-humans among them. Nobody paid him any attention.
He clambered to his feet, brushing dust and creases from his clothes. A few desks away Braubach was talking to a rotund man, probably in his mid-twenties but already balding and with several double chins. The discussion was animated. Hoche walked over. Braubach looked round.
“Awake and refreshed, I hope?” he said. “Well, roll up your mattress and stow it. I know you Reiklanders are country boys but you don’t have to prove you were brought up in a hovel.”
Hoche smiled. “Right away. Where can I get some breakfast?”
Braubach scowled. “Lieutenant Hoche. You are about to join the Untersuchung, which means I will be your superior officer. We may not be as formal as the army and we do many things differently, but you will address me as ‘sir’. If we lose order, we become our enemy. Remember that.”
Hoche saluted. “Sir.”
“Good,” said Braubach. “Breakfast must wait. We have urgent business.” He led the way down the long room, towards a closed door at its far end. It opened into a small hallway with a bare wooden staircase leading upwards. There were no paintings or tapestries to cover the bare white plaster walls of the stairwell and the windows were small. Braubach went first and Hoche followed, feeling underdressed in his shirt and britches. At the top a corridor headed back along the length of the building, plain doors on either side. Braubach strode down it, pointing them out in turn.
“Meeting room, cypher room—your training will cover that—closed case files, administration and requisitions, the armoury for—ah, let’s call them specialist weapons. Down there is the major-general’s office, but you’ll have to get past his private secretary. That—” he nodded to a set of narrow steps heading skywards, “goes onto the roof; there’s a loft of messenger-pigeons for communicating with agents in the field and the other Imperial agencies in the city.”
“Can’t you send a regular messenger?”
Braubach turned, and his expression was displeased. “Messengers can be bribed or captured. If you bring down a pigeon in flight, you may be able to decode its message but it’s nigh-impossible to tell where it came from or where it was going. I’m dismayed, Karl. Use your head before you ask another question like that. Untersuchung agents should be able to work these things out themselves. Here we are.” He knocked on a door and pushed it open without waiting for a reply.
Inside, five people sat in an arc around a circular table. Braubach closed the door and made the introductions. “Gentlemen, this is Lieutenant Karl Hoche, of whom you will have undoubtedly recently heard. Lieutenant, these are your new colleagues. Major-General Zerstückein, our commander-in-chief—”
A uniformed man, whose aristocratic beard and flamboyant moustache sat at odds with the pasty, corpulent flesh of his face, nodded to Hoche.
“Ernst Slavski, our administrator and historian—”
A gaunt man, his head shaved and shining, squinting through eyes with dark rims of shadow.
“Jakob Bäcker, our expert on Khorne—”
The jelly-fat man looked barely older than a student. His hair was long and unkempt, and he was using a quill-knife to clean dirt from his fingernails. He didn’t make eye-contact.
“Bruno Veldt, recently returned from duties in the north—”
Middle-aged and dressed like a merchant, he seemed the most relaxed man in the room.
“And Hunni von Sisenuf, our resident wizard, who will know if you lie to us.”
“So don’t,” she said, and smiled. Her voice had a western accent. Curls of red hair outlined her freckled face, brown eyes and a large mouth that would have been attractive if it hadn’t revealed a graveyard of crooked teeth every time she smiled. Mid-thirties, Hoche guessed, a woman accustomed to working in a man’s world, and trying too hard to put me at my ease.
Braubach sat down. Karl was reminded of the meeting in Duke Heller’s tent. He stood to attention. The major-general coughed.
“Don’t stand on ceremony. Make us all feel uncomfortable if you stay up like that. There’s a chair. Sit.” Karl sat. Braubach turned to him.
“Karl, tell us again what happened,” he said.
The room was quiet. Hoche looked at the faces surveying him from the other side of the table. It was going to be a long, hungry morning.
Tilted Windmill. Altdorf
Noon. 28th day of Vorgeheim
“So,” said Braubach, “according to Jakob your Panthers’ rituals fit the same pattern as a cult from a small town north of Salzenmund thirty years ago, and most of them were mercenaries and local traders in the sausage business. Where in Sigmar’s name did the Knights Panther get their information?”
“Parallel development?” asked Hoche. “A coincidence? The same daemon messengers from Khorne?”
Braubach shook his head. “You’ve got a lot to learn, Karl. Firstly, nothing in this job is ever a coincidence. There’s always a link. Secondly, if Khorne sends you a daemonic messenger it won’t teach you, it’ll rip your head off and eat it. Thirdly, if you’re going to say ‘daemon’ and ‘Khorne’ in public, then for Sigmar’s sake keep your voice down.”
They were sitting in one of the booths of the Tilted Windmill tavern, two streets away from the barracks, with the bread, meats and cheese of a late breakfast spread over their table. It was quiet and empty before the midday crowd, and the atmosphere was warm and heavy.
Hoche pulled at his beer and wiped his mouth. Relaxing and eating felt good after the morning’s discussions, introductions, letters and paperwork.
“Tell me about the Untersuchung,” he said.
“Sir,” said Braubach.
“Tell me about the Untersuchung, sir.”
“Better.” Braubach speared a chunk of ham on his knife. “History-wise, there’s not much to tell. We were set up sixty years ago to find and eliminate Chaos worship and the rogue use of magic in the army. A decade later there was a scandal in the Reiksguard—you can read about it in the records—and we got responsibility for the Imperial court as well. That’s our official role. Unofficially, we track down and monitor cults across the Empire. Not just the Ruinous Powers. Renegade wizards, heretics, political conspiracies, mutants, the works. We keep a low profile. Our job is easier if people don’t know we exist.”
Hoche chewed a piece of soft cheese. “Isn’t that the witch hunters’ job?”
“Yes,” said Braubach, “but they’re incompetent. Too fanatical and no organisation. So we do the long-term investigating, and when a situation comes to a head we call them in to arrest everyone and do the trials and the burnings. It works well. But they resent us for it all the same.”
“What’s the Untersuchung’s strength? How many soldiers?” Hoche asked. He felt absurdly uninformed about the regiment he had just joined, and self-conscious about asking the question. From the moment Braubach had opened the door of the Untersuchung to him he had felt like he was a new recruit again.
Braubach seemed not to notice. “We’re not soldiers. Even though we’re part of the Reiksguard, technically we’re civilians. Right now there are about forty agents in Altdorf, another fifty in the field—we have another barracks in Talabheim—and the rest, about the same number again, are on long-term assignments or deep-cover agents, living normal lives but feeding us information.”
Hoche added them up and felt his mouth go dry. What Braubach was describing did not sound like the ‘prestigious role in a prestigious team’ he had described the previous night. He thought he was going to be a soldier in a division of the Reiksguard. This wasn’t what he had expected at all. He felt misled and trapped, but tried to keep his expression calm and his questions neutral. A moment from the drowning dream flashed in his mind’s eye.
“That’s not many,” he said.
“Our numbers are down. It’s been a bad year. An operation went wrong in Carroburg and we lost twelve agents.” Braubach reached across for another lump of cheese.
“Lost them?”
“Seven dead, three hopeless cripples, two disappeared without trace. Bad business.”
“What happened?”
Braubach chewed bread and scratched his unshaved chin. “Karl, we have this thing we call ‘need-to-know’. If you don’t need the information then you don’t get it, and you don’t need to know about the Carroburg mess yet. You’ll hear enough things to worry about in the next few weeks, never fear.”
“Next few weeks?” Hoche sensed another setback. He’d assumed that after a couple of days of orientation he’d be on active duty, working.
Braubach nodded. “You’ve got a lot to learn. More than you can imagine. You’ll be trained for the next month or two. Then you’ll—” He stopped and looked up. Hoche followed his eyes. A priest of Sigmar was walking across the room towards them—no, not a priest, a priestess. The loose black robe gave away nothing about the body beneath it, but the head above was utter woman: long black hair framing a face that was full and feminine, with dark eyes and ample, symmetrical lips. A southern face with a touch of Tilean or Estalian blood in the skin, thought Hoche. She was coming towards them.
Spurred by manners, he stood up. Braubach followed him. “Good morning, sister,” he said. “Can we help you?”
She stopped and faced Braubach. “Are you Karl Hoche?” she asked. There was something in the way she said it that made Hoche uneasy. It was, he thought, as if she already knew that wasn’t who she was looking for, and this was an art. How had she known to come straight to their table?
“I’m Hoche,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“I am Sister Karin Schiffer, assistant to Lord Gamow, Lord Protector of the Order of Witch Hunters,” she said. “Come with me; my lord wishes to see you urgently.”
Hoche opened his mouth to reply but Braubach beat him to it. “This is an Untersuchung matter,” he said smoothly, smiling, “concerning as it does a Chaos cult within the Imperial army, as you know from the letter delivered to your high priest two hours ago.”
The priestess did not appear flustered. “We need to question this man,” she said. “If you will not—”
“Furthermore, Lieutenant Hoche is a serving officer of the Untersuchung,” continued Braubach, “having transferred from his regiment this morning. If you wish to request a meeting with him then you must go through the proper channels. Until then you have no jurisdiction here and you are interrupting our meal, which breaches both protocol and etiquette. You’re welcome to join us if you promise not to talk shop. I can recommend the hard cheeses.”
“Damn your cheeses! Think of the safety of the Empire!” she barked, and Hoche was surprised at the force and anger in her voice. He looked across at Braubach. His superior’s face was calm, but Hoche could tell he was enjoying himself.
“While you’re busy thinking of that,” he said, “I suggest you also think about section 17 of the Imperial Regulations, which lays down the conditions for the interrogation of members of other Imperial agencies. The third page is particularly apposite. If I may summarise, it says that unless you’re going to join us for a drink, you might as well go home. Two more dark beers here.” That was to the pot-boy, who carried over a jug to fill up the men’s tankards, bumping its spout against the pewter cups. The dull dinks were resonant in the silence. Braubach reached for his beer, held it up to Sister Karin in salute, and drank deeply. Her dark eyes stared at him.
“You’ll hear from me,” she said, turned on the balls of her feet and walked away, out of the tavern. Hoche watched Braubach. Braubach was watching the priestess’s departing rear until the door closed behind it.
“Sigmar!” said Hoche. “What was that about?”
“Business as usual,” Braubach said. “Like I said, everyone resents us. The witch hunters don’t like us because we’re doing their job better than they do, plus we got our hands on you before they could. The Reiksguard feel they should be responsible for guarding the Emperor—”
“But the Untersuchung is part of the Reiksguard?”
“Only technically. All we get from them is a corner of their barracks. The temple of Sigmar believes only priests should deal with policing heresy and magic. The Colleges of Magic don’t like non-magicians meddling in their business; and the Knights Panther—well, let’s say there’s some history there too. And then there’s all the smaller agencies like the Palisades, who make trouble just to get themselves noticed.” He broke off a chunk of black bread, wrapped it round a fatty lump of mutton and masticated thoughtfully.
Hoche paused, then shook his head. “Just now, that wasn’t it. There was something else, something more personal between you and her. What was it?”
“More history,” said Braubach. He swallowed, reached for his tankard and drained it, long and slow. “Drink up. There’s a lot to do.”
Untersuchung Barracks. Altdorf
Morning. 30th day of Vorgeheim
Jakob Bäcker was rounded and oily and young. He spoke like a man twice his age and licked his lips every time he said the word ‘blood’. As he was the Untersuchung’s expert on Khorne, he licked his lips a lot. Hoche sat on the other side of Bäcker’s desk, a pile of dusty books separating him from the agent-scholar. Around them the office bustled and chatted, fetched books, scratched words on parchment.
“Khorne cults are unusual,” Bäcker said, “but not unknown. They tend to spring up among the naturally violent—beastmen or exiled mutants, for example�
�or those who feel their lives have little value. They’re base cults, unlearned, and they either fizzle out or explode in a characteristic burst of self-annihilatory violence.
“What’s interesting about your case—” he leaned forward, “is two points. Firstly the rarity of such cults in the upper echelons of society, implying that this is a sect of unusually strong faith, devoted to Khorne qua Khorne, not to a quest for personal power, revenge, anti-societal tendencies, self-loathing, the more usual things. Also, the upper classes almost always go for the more intellectual and decadent Chaos gods, Tzeentch or Slaanesh.
“The second is the ritual. Khorne cults either devise their own, since they arise spontaneously, or they despise such things as strongly as they despise magic. They abhor learning, so there’s rarely any teaching or writing to pass their knowledge on to the next generation of worshippers. Finding signs of a pre-existing ritual, particularly one with ancient roots, is unusual.”
“Ancient roots?” Hoche asked. Sitting so close to Bäcker made him feel uncomfortable.
“Oh yes. Comparatively ancient. I’ve found a reference to the ritual cuts and use of blood”—Bäcker licked his lips—“that you described.” He opened the thick cover of a tray-sized book in front of him, revealing pages hand-written on vellum and illustrated with scratchy diagrams and drawings. It smelled of wax and soot. “It dates back at least two hundred years, to the last Incursion of Chaos. So either there is a hitherto unknown teaching-line of Khorne worshippers within the Empire, or the renegade Panthers had been doing some scholarship amidst forbidden texts like this.”
“Which do you—no, wait,” said Hoche. His hand hovered over the large book; he didn’t want to touch it. “What do you mean, a forbidden text?”
“This? No, no, you misunderstand. This is our copy of the Ermittlungsergebnis of Ute Nicol, a two-hundred year-old diary of one man’s inculcation into a Khorne cult. Possession of an actual copy is a capital offence. But this is a synopsis, a précis, and quite legal.”