Marks of Chaos

by James Wallis

  “They came for us this morning. No subtlety, battering at the barracks door with staves, which gave us a few moments to hide the most precious items in the prepared places. Many were arrested in their homes before dawn, and the hunters have taken the chance to settle many old scores. I escaped over the ladder and am leaving this for whoever has the wits to find it, for what good it may do you. I suggest you flee to our allies in Kislev. Or, if you are brave, stay low in the city to learn what scheme was behind this. Learn why the witch hunters moved against us now, who gave the order and what his motives were, and avenge us. Sigmar be with you. Pray for our souls.”

  That was the end.

  Hoche stopped, considering his options. This late at night the bridges and the city gates would be closed. He could not venture north of the Reik, and to leave Altdorf now would mean passing through the needle’s eye, the narrow doorway set into the walls beside the great gates, passing under the eyes of watchful guards. Better to spend the night here and depart at dawn as the gates were opened, in the crush of people entering and leaving.

  He wasn’t sure where he should go: somewhere he could lie low and be unobserved until the news of the Untersuchung’s burning had died away. Altdorf would be too hot for a former agent for a while. Possibly literally.

  There was still the question of how to spend the night. The safe-houses in the city would all have been purged. The bounty on the heads of all Untersuchung agents meant the inns would be scrutinising everyone who came in, and trying to find a room this late at night would rouse suspicions. Besides, he knew he would not sleep a wink. Maybe he should find a tavern down by the docks, drink and silently mourn his comrades until dawn. No. No more drinking. He needed his wits about him. He thought back to Braubach’s journal, and its mention of escaping from the barracks ‘over the ladder’. That implied there was another way of getting into the Untersuchung’s headquarters. If he could get in, and if the searchers and scavengers of the witch hunters had not found all of the hidden documents Braubach had mentioned, he might be able to learn something about what had happened, or glean some information he could use.

  It would be dangerous, even foolhardy to try to break into the barracks. On the other hand it was one place they almost certainly wouldn’t think to look for him, and if he was forced to become a fugitive with a price on his head then he wanted to know why. And, he reasoned, breaking into the Reiksguard barracks at night couldn’t be that hard. He’d already done it once.

  There was only one moon, and not much of it: the crescent of Mannslieb glowed from behind drifting clouds, edging each one with faint silver. By its faint light the brick bulk of the Reiksguard headquarters was a black mass, its rear wall shadowed and textureless. No lanterns or torches lit the narrow street, no candles glowed in windows or firelight from behind shutters in the wood-framed buildings that stood opposite the back of the barracks, their gabled roofs jutting out, overhanging the street and blocking out the few stars that had fought their way through the clouds. It suited Hoche fine.

  He stood at the base of the barracks wall, trying to work out what Braubach had meant by ‘the ladder’. The wall was blank and featureless, without so much as a window or gutter to help him up. Three storeys above the roof was pitched steeply, tiled with slates, black and sheer. There were no handholds or footholds anywhere, apart from rainspouts on the roof corners, carved like the heads of horses with laughing mouths. There was no sign of a ladder here, and it would have had to be over thirty feet high to reach the barracks roof.

  It occurred to him that the route Braubach had mentioned had been designed for escape. It might not be possible to get in that way. Altdorf’s cat-burglars were notorious for their expertise in climbing, and only a fool would give them a way to break into a building, even one as unfriendly to thieves as a barracks. Perhaps Braubach had used a rope secured to a window-bar on the top floor to escape. Perhaps he was being a fool.

  What would Braubach have done? Laughed at him, along with the horse-head gargoyles? Or told him to think harder, walking away, waiting until he’d found the answer on his own? Hoche could almost feel his tutor’s presence, a shadow against the bricks, like a ghost.

  He stared at the wall. It reminded him of something: a summer evening in the Windmill, with Braubach and some of the others swapping riddles. “Faced with a wall,” Braubach had said, “an elf will try to go over it, a dwarf under it, and men of the Empire through it. A halfling will look for the door. I once told that to a scholar from Cathay, and he said that in his country a wise man would turn his back and imagine there is no wall. And who’s to say that won’t work as well as the others?” He’d laughed. Nobody else had.

  Hoche stared at the barracks. What if there is no wall, he thought? Or rather: don’t think about the wall. It’s part of the problem, but it’s not part of the solution. If the wall is unclimbable, ignore it. The answer lies elsewhere.

  He turned and studied the houses on the other side of the street. With their overhanging upper floors they were worse than vertical, almost impossible to climb without a rope. He took a step or two closer. The white plaster fronts were smooth, the windows high and shuttered. But in a slight gap, a corner where one building stood a foot further back than its neighbour, he saw it.

  An iron lightning-rod, about as thick as his thumb, reached up the side of the houses and along the chimney-stack, jutting into the night sky like a taunt to the thunder-god. Hoche walked over to it and leaned close until the shadows melted and he could see there was an inch of room between it and the building: enough for his fingers. He reached out and tugged it: sometimes these things were fixed so they would pull loose in the hands of a burglar. This one was sound.

  This wasn’t going to be easy. The temptation to give up was strong. It would be simple to walk away, leave the city, get away from the forces who were chasing him, to live with not knowing what had happened. But he had never been one to take the easy way out.

  Muttering a short invocation to Sigmar he reached up, took a firm grip around the iron rod, and let his hands carry his weight. Then he bent at the hips, walking his feet up the side of the wall in careful inches, letting the mass of his body push them against the side of the building. Walk up two foot-lengths, then move his hands up the same distance. That was the tricky moment as his fingers scrabbled for a new grip against the pitted metal, his knuckles barking on the dirty plaster of the wall. The first ten feet were the hardest, but after that he began to develop a rhythm and a momentum. Nevertheless it was slow going.

  After six or seven minutes he lifted himself over the edge of the low parapet and lay in deep shadow, out of breath, in the deep gutter on the other side. From here he could see over the city, the occasional glare of lanterns marking the cobweb plan of the narrow streets. Opposite, the roof of the barracks lay no more than fifteen feet away, its sharp slope ending in a narrow ledge. The curious geometry of the pigeon-coop stood in its middle, outlined in shadow against the dark sky. Thirty feet below, the street lay as empty as before.

  Fifteen feet was too far to jump. There was no space to take a run-up.

  Hoche stood to get a clearer view of the surroundings. Perhaps a hidden wire would pull some kind of bridge across. Or maybe, he wondered briefly, the bridge was only accessible from the other side: an exit, not an entrance. After all, why would the Untersuchung have made an entrance to their headquarters that any roof-walker could find? That would have been careless.

  His foot struck something long and solid, lying concealed in the darkness of the gutter. Hoche bent to pick it up, and found how careless his late employers had been. It was a fifteen-foot ladder.

  The pigeon-coop was empty, its hatch swinging, a few feathers patterning the floor. The birds hadn’t been killed, they had been taken. Braubach had told him that it wasn’t possible to interrogate a messenger-pigeon. Hoche wondered if the witch hunters knew that.

  The passageway below was dark and still, its doors opening into empty and strangely tidy rooms
on either side. Hoche had expected strewn papers, bloodstains, broken furniture and signs of carnage, but there was none of it. The place didn’t feel as if something terrible had happened there, it was more as if the occupants had moved out or were elsewhere, like an empty schoolroom on a feast-day.

  He reached the stairs and began to descend towards the main room below, then stopped. The door at the bottom was closed. Why that door, but none of the others? He moved to the side of the stairway and stepped slowly down, transferring his weight carefully from foot to foot, leaning on the banister to put as little strain as possible on the stairs, in case they should creak and give him away. If there was anyone to hear it.

  The windowless landing at the bottom of the stairwell was almost completely dark, but a thin sliver of light crept under the bottom of the door, giving away its position. Hoche stopped, mentally picturing the long room, working out the position of the moon. It wasn’t possible; the first night he’d seen the place the moon had been half-full but none of its illumination had filtered through the slit windows. The light was coming from inside the room. Someone was in there.

  Hoche found he was gripping the stair-rail with all his strength, and forced himself to be calm. He hadn’t expected this, but of course a site used by a Chaos cult would have a night-watchman. They could have no idea he was here. It was probably some greybeard, asleep by now. The door was well oiled and, Hoche remembered, did not creak on its hinges. He could push it open a crack, to see if it was safe to enter.

  He took two cautious steps towards the door, reaching for its handle, then stopped, it would be safer to have his sword drawn. He reached for it, pulling it free of its belt-loop. The tip caught in the unaccustomed folds of his merchant’s cloak, wrenching out of his grasp and springing away. He grabbed for it with his left hand but missed. The sword fell with a metallic clatter, spinning away across the wood floor. Hoche dived after it.

  In the other room, someone pushed a chair back. A voice said, “Sigmar! What was that?” Another said, “Quiet!” Hoche froze, listening. Two of them. They sounded young.

  Footsteps moved towards the door. No time to find his sword; it was gone in the darkness. He drew his belt-knife and stood to one side of the door, his back against the wall. His heart was pounding.

  Someone on the other side pulled the door open and a rhombus of low light blocked out across the floor. The first voice said, “It’s either one of those rats, or another fool for the fires.”

  Hoche held his breath, watching as the first man stepped into the landing. He carried a longsword in one hand and the lantern raised in the other. He wore the dark tunic of a witch hunter.

  “Come to Sigmar, you Chaos-scum,” he said.

  Hoche stepped up behind him and stabbed him in the side of the neck, left-handed. The blade sunk deep, cutting blood-channels and opening the man’s windpipe. He gave a throttled cry and his body thrashed. Hoche twisted the knife with his left hand and reached for his victim’s sword with his right, snatching its hilt as the witch hunter’s grasp loosened and he sank to the ground. The lantern fell with a crash and went out.

  “Sigmar!” said the second voice.

  Hoche took a quick step back, turned to his left and swung the sword through the sudden darkness at the point where the voice had come from. It struck something with a metallic clang—another sword, a lucky parry. Then he realised there was another light in the long room and it was moving, throwing shadows of other figures against the walls.

  “Bring lights!” one shouted. Someone else: “Raise the cry! Bolt the doors!”

  He had surprise, subtlety, experience and a borrowed longsword on his side. They had at least three men awake, hundreds more asleep and, if the lucky parry was anything to go by, Sigmar’s blessing on theirs. Hoche knew when he was outclassed.

  He ran for the stairs, taking the familiar risers two at a time, and sprinted to the message-room and its steps up to the pigeon-coop. In seconds he was back on the roof, skidding down the steep tiles to the spot on the parapet where he had left the ladder propped between the buildings.

  It was gone.

  Hoche looked wildly to either side, down into the darkened street, then across to the opposite roof. There, wreathed in shadow, a figure stood in a dark priest’s cloak. Her hood was pulled back and the starlight gleamed idly on her mass of dark hair, contrasting with her complexion and her eyes like firelight glinting on coal.

  “Don’t do anything you might regret,” said Sister Karin Schiffer, and smiled.

  Hoche stood dumbfounded, completely lost. He felt a part of his senses fall away, tumbling down into the city, and for an instant he was tempted to jump after it. Instead he said, “You followed me.”

  “It was easy,” she said. “My tutor was the finest of his kind.”

  They stared at each other across a gap too wide to cross. It occurred to Hoche that if he hadn’t left his knife in a man’s neck downstairs, he could have thrown it at her.

  Heavy feet rang on the steps of the pigeon-coop, and two witch hunters, swords drawn, emerged onto the roof. They spotted Hoche and moved defensively, blocking his possible escapes along the long gutters. One, with long tousled hair, had an expression that jerked Hoche back to the Old Bridge and the faces of three Knights Panther. This was a man who wanted revenge, and wanted it now.

  “Stop!” Sister Karin shouted. “We need him alive and unharmed!” The witch hunters glanced up at her voice. A third man appeared at the pigeon-coop. Hoche looked at them, then across at the priestess on the far roof, and down into the street thirty feet below. There was only one way he could avoid capture, he knew, but he did not feel like joining his colleagues in the afterlife yet.

  He raised his hands, letting his sword hang loosely from his grip, and dropped it. It struck the parapet at an odd angle and fell clattering down the side of the building into the street. Sister Karin was watching him. For a second, as in the tavern, their gazes locked and held. For a second time she was the one who broke away from the stare.

  “Bring him to the inner temple,” she said. “He has questions to answer.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Reasonable Man

  They had searched him and tied his hands. Two more witch hunters had arrived and together they walked, Sister Karin taking the lead, through the streets to a small Sigmarite temple close to the south wall, through a side-entrance and down a set of stone stairs into the earth, curving anti-clockwise in a lazy spiral lit by oil-lamps that flickered and smoked. They had gone down a long way. The air had become cold and damp.

  The chamber at the bottom gave into a series of dark corridors. The witch hunters had taken torches and led him down one of them. It was lined with wooden doors, each offset so that no two faced each other.

  As the torches moved down the passage, casting brief light through the small window with vertical bars set in each door, Hoche heard voices shout, guttural and inarticulate. Some of them were speaking his language, others in tongues he did not recognise, a couple in shouts and howls that seemed barely human. Filthy hands grasped at the bars, ragged fingernails reaching out imploringly towards the guards. They dodged them with an ease that spoke of much practice. As the light moved away, the cries died back to silence.

  Hoche felt completely passive, drained of all resistance. It was as if he was watching himself be marched down this corridor, observing what was happening but not taking any part in it. So much had happened. He felt very tired.

  A door hung open, the space inside pitch black. The witch hunters stopped outside it. One untied his hands. Hoche looked up and down the dark corridor, stretching away into night in both directions. A few cells away someone shouted a few words. Something made a wet noise. He noticed Sister Karin was not with the group any more.

  “Your chamber awaits,” one of the witch hunters said, his voice laden with sarcasm. “Breakfast will be served in your room. If you’re lucky.” Hoche looked at them, expression and mind empty of emotion. Then he stepped into t
he darkness, and heard the hard wood door swing closed behind him. Heavy bolts slid into place.

  “A hundred and fifty-four,” someone said.

  “Enjoy your stay,” said the sarcastic one. Their footsteps moved away, the light fading as they went, the cries of other prisoners following them away down the corridor. In less than a minute all was silence and darkness.

  Hoche moved carefully to one wall of his cell and felt his way around it, foot by foot, working out the dimensions and contents of the room. It was about eight feet square. There was a wooden bed, cunningly assembled without nails or pegs, with a thin straw mattress on it. An iron ring, set into the wall. A pile of rags that might have once been a blanket. A grating in one corner of the room, stinking of human filth. Nothing else. A patch of wall above the bed was curiously uneven, as if someone had scratched some words or message there, but in the total darkness his fingers could not begin to decipher it. He lay on the bed, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

  “Hey!”

  He opened his eyes to the enveloping darkness. He didn’t move.

  “Hey, new man!”

  The voice came from outside, from one of the other cells. It was low and rough, with a faint Altdorf accent. He ignored it. He wanted to sleep.

  “New man, what news? What news?”

  The voice was insistent, and Hoche could tell it was not going to shut up. He stood and walked slowly to the door, one arm outstretched so he did not walk into it. The wood was rough and cold under his fingers.

  “News of what?” he said.

  “Any news! Tell us of the outside. What season is it?”

  “Almost winter. The month is Kaldezeit.”

  “What news of the Empire?”

  “It stands. Karl Franz reigns still. There was war with the orcs in the south this summer.”

  “And you, new man? What news of you?”