by James Wallis
“Sir,” he said, “what is my course of action if I find Lieutenant Reisefertig alive?”
Braubach sat forward abruptly, his face moving into the light. His expression was cold and dry.
“Kill him,” he said.
There was a dead silence in the room. Hoche’s eyes flicked to the general’s face, looking for a signal, some sign that this was an order, but saw nothing there. He looked back to his teacher. The air was full of tension.
“Kill him,” repeated Braubach. “You will do that?”
“I will,” Hoche said, knowing he would.
“Swear it,” Braubach said, staring at him.
“In Sigmar’s name,” Hoche said slowly, “I swear.”
CHAPTER FIVE
In At The Deep End
A year ago, Hoche reflected, he would have had no idea that Marienburg was a city at war. There was no sign of conflict in the city’s streets, taverns and coffee-houses, only the normal rivalry of merchant families and trading clans, dock guilds, and the criminal gangs that populate every major port, and they kept their fights to themselves. The great seaport at the mouth of the Reik seemed to be what it always had been: the busiest melting-pot of races and trades in the world, where money ruled and a man’s word carried no more weight than the gold in his purse.
But Marienburg had a second, lesser-known trade: in knowledge. The Unseen Library, an archive of scholarship so secretive that most researchers had never heard of it or believed it a fable, had been a cynosure for those desperate enough to seek it out and pay its entry price. A year ago there had been a disaster and the library had flooded, its collection destroyed. Only the scrolls, books and manuscripts that had been outside its catacombs when the waters flowed in had survived, though beggars scavenged scraps of parchment and vellum from the river’s foreshore over the months that followed, selling them to eager collectors.
Now the religious and academic groups that had centred on the Library were warring for control of the remaining books and the allegiance of their members. For a struggle fought by academics, priests and half-blind scholars, it was surprisingly fanatical and bloody. And somewhere in the midst of the mess lay Andreas Reisefertig, or the dues that would lead to him.
Hoche stood at the prow of the river-barge as it swept downstream at full sail. They were approaching the spiralling stone columns of the Hoogbrug Bridge, its great span high enough to allow the masts of the tallest ships to pass underneath.
On the right bank was the Paleisbuurt, where the city’s governors and rulers had their opulent dwellings; on the left lay the Suiddock district, the city’s main docks, where the real government went on, the buying and selling of goods from all over the world. People said that anything that could be given a price could be bought in Marienburg, and on the city’s great scales, a man’s life was among the cheaper items.
It had taken him three weeks to reach Marienburg, on horseback as far as the border between the Empire and the Wasteland, and then taking passage on one of the riverboats that sailed the Reik between the trading town of Leydenhoven and the sea, its holds filled with grain from the summer’s harvests upstream.
It was not safe to ride all the way to Marienburg without an escort, since the marshy outreaches of the Wasteland were populated by bandits, mutants, and, some said, weird creatures of legend.
Three weeks. If it took him as long to get back to Altdorf, that left only two weeks for his investigations. He would have to move fast.
The barge docked, the stevedores moved in to unload the cargo, and street urchins swarmed around the gangplank to offer the passengers cheap trinkets, grubby sweetmeats and guidance through the city’s maze of streets, bridges and islands. Hoche shouldered his bags, selected the least dirty of the pack, gave him half a penny and told him to lead the way to Duck Street.
Duck Street was at the west end of the Suiddock, away from the commercial part of the borough. A canal ran along one side of the street, filled with thick brown water. On the other side, the plasterwork of the high-gabled houses was decorated in many colours, though several were looking the worse for weather and time.
Hoche found the only door without a symbol on it and knocked. After a while it opened a crack and an eye of some age and indistinguishable sex peered through at about waist height. No voice spoke. Hoche cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry to trouble you. I’m looking for my son,” he said.
“Ah,” said the voice. “I believe he is in the eighth house, perhaps? Ha ha! Come in, come in.” A chain rattled and the door swung open. In the dimness of the dusty hall beyond stood a figure just too tall to be a halfling but of much the same build, wearing a long red robe fastened at the neck with an ornate clasp. His features were drooped and reddened, and he had a bald patch on the top of his head, amidst grey hair, making him look monk-like. A pair of lenses in silver frames were clipped to his nose, magnifying his eyes so they looked huge and distorted. Like an insect, Hoche thought.
“Lieutenant Hoche, I assume?” the figure said.
“Erasmus Pronk,” Hoche said, stepping inside. “It is good to meet you.”
“A pleasure, a pleasure,” the shorter man said, ushering him into a large room filled with well-stuffed furnishings. “Your timing is good. I have some tea infusing, and some excellent cakes left over from the Mittherbst feast last week, which should tide us over until supper.”
“I regret that I cannot stay,” Hoche said, aware how stiff his language was. “I came to pay my respects and to see if there was any news from Altdorf. But I must get to my inn and prepare. I begin my investigations this evening.”
“Oh well.” The diminutive Pronk seemed disappointed. He lowered himself onto a darkwood chaise lounge. “That’s so like you younger agents; an investigation stews for a year, and once it’s finally assigned you won’t waste a single second in the execution of your duties. You’ll learn. I don’t suppose a bottle of Majjeran wine, aged twelve years, would tempt you to stay? No? Ah,” and he looked sad, “then I’ll have to drink it on my own.”
“News from Altdorf,” Hoche reminded.
“Yes, yes,” Pronk said, waving a hand airily. “Altdorf told me you know Gunter Schmölling.” There was a note of expectation, even hope in his voice. Hoche sensed it and it made him uncomfortable. There was something about this whole encounter that put him on edge; he couldn’t explain it but he felt nervous and jumpy.
“I didn’t know him, exactly,” he said, “but we spoke a few times. We both served under Duke Heller this summer. He was the general’s aide-de-camp, calling himself Johannes Bohr. I commanded a platoon of pikemen. He recruited me. In a roundabout way.”
Erasmus was smiling now, appearing genuinely happy. He swung himself to his feet and came over to sit beside his visitor.
Hoche realised belatedly that he should not have given away such information, even to another Untersuchung agent: Schmölling was in an undercover role and information about him was privileged, need-to-know. He hoped that word of his slip wouldn’t get back to Altdorf. He wondered if he could trust Pronk.
“How was he?” asked the old man. “How was he looking? Well?”
“Very well,” Hoche said, thinking of Bohr’s foxlike eyes and duplicitous dialogue. “The general trusted him and gave him great responsibility.” He was surprised to find how fresh his sense of injury at having been deprived of the chance to run the investigation was.
“I’m glad,” Erasmus said. “I’m very glad. He left the city so suddenly, without so much as a word, that I knew it had to be something very important. And of course the code of silence forbade him from writing to let me know. But friends worry about friends, you understand? I was concerned. I had these absurd nightmares—”
“You knew Schmölling well?” asked Hoche.
“Like he was my son, Lieutenant Hoche. Better than a son.” Erasmus clapped Hoche on the knee and left his hand there an instant too long before springing to his feet. “This news does call for a glass of t
hat Majjera. I insist.”
He produced a glass bottle filled with a dark, syrupy wine that tasted of oak, smoke, and rich, deep fruit. “You’re certain you won’t stay for supper? I have a wonderful halfling cook.”
Hoche smiled politely, insincerely. “I must begin my work. Is there news from Altdorf?”
Pronk shook his head. “No messages, I’m afraid. The only pigeons I’ve seen are the ones we’ll be having for supper, with raspberry sauce and roast parsnips. You’re sure you’d prefer the slop at your inn?”
Hoche smiled again.
Pronk lowered himself back onto the chaise lounge. “Well, if you must… How do you propose to proceed with following Reisefertig’s year-cold trail?”
Hoche had expected the question. “I want to find out which books and documents he was trying to locate. We know what he had been reading in Altdorf, and the topics he had been researching. The failed entrapment operation had used a forged copy of the missing pages of the Lexikon of Eber Keiler as bait, and Reisefertig was involved in creating it. It’s possible he was looking for the real pages.”
“Possible. Yes.” Pronk refilled his glass. “And what do you hope to discover from these musty documents?”
“Clues,” said Hoche. “Perhaps something in the texts themselves will indicate where he may have gone. Possibly he made notes in the margins; many scholars do. More likely the books’ guardians may recall him, and if he said anything. And it’s possible that by reading the same books, I may be able to work out his state of mind and divine his intentions that way.”
Pronk made an amused clucking sound. “Really, my dear lieutenant, I think that’s taking optimism a little far. Many men may read the same book but each takes away his own interpretation. Nevertheless I believe your scheme has a chance of success, which is to say slightly more than none.”
Hoche was stung. “What do you mean?”
“Altdorf expects you to fail, you know, but they want to see how you fail. Take back a single trace of Reisefertig and they’ll be astonished.”
Hoche was taken aback by the old man’s good-natured pessimism. “I think, sir,” he said slowly, trying to control the anger rising in his throat, “that you do me a disservice.”
“Possibly. Possibly,” Pronk said. “On the other hand, if you think I’ve spent the last year sitting in my house drinking alone and mooning over Schmölling, you’d be wrong. No, I’ve spent my share of time chasing after the bad lieutenant. Sniffs I have had: three in a year; and solid leads none. I wish you the best of luck, but if you find more than I have, I will kiss you.”
Hoche resolved that if he did find anything, he would not tell Pronk.
“Besides,” the old man continued, “how were you proposing to discover and infiltrate these secretive, defensive, factionalised cults that now control the few books that are left of the Unseen Library? You’ll need to know who to contact and where to find them, and have papers to show you’re a man with good reasons to seek these books.”
Hoche tried to avoid smiling. He knew the old man already knew his answer. “I was planning to ask you for your advice.”
“Aha!” Pronk crowed, reaching for the bottle of Majjera. “And to do that you have to keep me happy and entertain me with talk of the fashionable people in Altdorf before I’ll give you the benefit of my wisdom and experience. You see, you are going to stay to supper, I knew it all along. Come, pass over your glass for a refill and tell me, what news of the Emperor’s son?”
Hoche sighed and handed Pronk his glass.
“What is the subject of your studies?” Father Willem asked.
“Dreams,” said Hoche.
They sat on the wooden pews in one of the side-chapels of the Cathedral of Verena, in front of a fresco showing the goddess in her aspect as the protector of justice. Pale light filtered through high windows, throwing slanted shapes against the plaster of the walls and the dark wood of the furnishings. The goddess’s symbol, the owl, was everywhere: carved in the woodwork, painted in the fresco, in brass on the small altar, a senate of all-knowing eyes staring at them. Apart from the owls, they were alone.
Hoche had met Father Willem in the public room of the Grape’s Progress, a seedy wine-seller in the Tempelwijk district close to Marienburg’s university. Pronk had set up the meeting for him. The priest had bustled in after the morning service at the cathedral nearby, had downed two glasses of Bretonnian brandy, out-haggled a beggar for a few waterlogged scraps of vellum the man had found on the Reik’s foreshore, had a furious argument with a gaunt scholar who had been beaten in the haggling, clapped an arm round Hoche’s shoulders, declared that any friend of Erasmus Pronk’s was a friend of his, and bought him a large brandy. It was very bad brandy. Then he had suggested that they adjourn to his ‘office’, which had turned out to be this chapel.
“Dreams,” said Father Willem thoughtfully. He had a weaselly face on a portly body and an accent that betrayed his birthplace in the Empire. Hoche guessed he was in his late thirties. He was, so Pronk had said, the top information-broker in Marienburg. He didn’t keep libraries of musty books and decaying scrolls, but he knew who did. Now the Unseen Library was no more, that knowledge made him an important man. And a rich one.
Father Willem leaned back against the smooth wood of the pew. “So which books of dreams do you believe are here but not in the libraries of Altdorf or Nuln?” he asked.
“I am looking for—” Hoche paused. It didn’t seem right to name the blasphemous book in a holy place like this, even if it might lead him to Reisefertig’s trail. He licked his lips. “I am told there is much I could learn from the last volume of the New Apocrypha.”
The priest steepled his fingers and brought them close to his face, hiding his expression. “We in Marienburg may have more liberal views about such things than your colleagues in the Empire,” he said, “but possession of those books is still a capital offence here. I believe I can help you, but it will require a fee to cover my personal danger. The guardians of the book may require concessions of their own.” He stopped, observing Hoche’s face.
“I believe you may be after more,” he said. “There is something you want but have not mentioned.”
Hoche felt a rising fear. Pronk had warned him that the priest was a shrewd judge of character, but this insight felt so piercing it was as if the man had read his mind. Was that possible? Or… No. He remembered what Braubach had said. Today he was not a spy, nor a soldier playing at being a spy. He was a student, needing forbidden texts to further his research. That was all. There was no secret for Willem to discover. He banished other thoughts from his mind.
“You are right,” he said. “There is more. But I am afraid to ask.”
Father Willem smiled indulgently. “What is it?”
“The lost pages of Eber Keiler’s Lexikon.”
The priest laughed, the sound reverberating off the high hard walls of the chapel. “Ah, ah,” he said. “No, I will not help you there. I won’t say that such a thing does not exist, even within a half-mile of these stones, but to ask for it is like marching to the Imperial Palace in Altdorf and asking to hold the Hammer of Sigmar. To see those pages you would have to study here for many years, gaining knowledge and trust, and probably lose your tongue into the bargain.”
“Lose my…?” Hoche was taken aback. Father Willem grinned.
“You didn’t know?” he asked. “The inner circle of the Unseen Library, the Readers, they took a vow of silence. To encourage them to keep it, their tongues were cut out. Although the Library is no more, the Readers are still with us, guarding the texts they saved from the flood. They’re still cutting out the tongues of their new initiates, and some are said to have found new, even darker ways to protect their secrets. So be on your guard.
“Don’t look so disinterested,” he added. “Whose libraries did you think you’d be visiting for your studies?”
Two days and forty golden guilders later, they came to his inn-room before dawn: four men in dark-g
rey robes. They said nothing as they frisked him, removing his knife, and escorted him downstairs and into the stable-yard’s chill morning air. Hoche let them blindfold him.
They led him through the quiet streets. He tried to make a mental map of the route, the turns and distances, how far they’d walked, but by his estimate they re-crossed their path twice and should have been a hundred yards into the river. Finally there was the sound of a door closing, a change in the echoes as he was led down a corridor and some steps. Then the man leading him stopped, he felt himself being spun round, and the blindfold was removed. Not a word was spoken.
The library was the size of the back room at the Tilted Windmill, with no windows and only one door. Every wall was covered with shelves, and every shelf was filled with books. Tall church-like candles stood in the corners, their flames thin and motionless in the still air. It smelled of age, dust, old leather, tallow and ink. In the centre of the room was a plain wood table and a chair. On the table was a small book.
One of the grey-robed priests stood by the door, his scalp bald and flaking, his long beard flecked with white. His eyes were trained on Hoche, following everything he did. Hoche forced a smile and nodded a bow of thanks to the man, who did not respond. Under the thin cord that served the man as a belt, a knife of strange design was tucked. It was clear that he was not a trusted guest.
The book drew his gaze and beckoned to him. He sat down and looked hard at it. The New Apocrypha, volume thirteen: a collection of lost learning and false scholarship. Braubach had told him about it. The book was an inch thick, bound in a whitish leather, stained and warped from old water damage. The damage seemed to have loosened the binding as well; one page halfway through stuck out a little further than its fellows. A modern book as these things went; new enough to be printed, not a hand-made copy.
He did not want to open it. The thing repulsed him. The thirteen volumes of the New Apocrypha, though not one of the great works of Chaos, were banned across the Empire: possession of a copy or knowledge of the information within were capital offences. Logically he knew that Jakob Bäcker was right: it was just a book and could not change him. But Chaos did not follow the laws of logic, and neither did his emotions.