by James Wallis
“If you had stayed I would have taught you those things, but you’re not willing to learn. The Emperor does not need men like you in his service. You’re a coward: you don’t fear the enemy but you fear hard work, and that’s worse. I won’t waste my time on you. Get out.”
There was a long, hard silence. Karl could feel the tension all around. Hidden in their tents, the irregulars were awake and listening. Half of what he had said was for their ears.
He didn’t move. After seconds the other two did, turning and walking towards the gate, the Talabheimer leading. Karl watched them go, then picked up their bundles of pilfered equipment and put them inside his tent. The tension was still in the air. He walked slowly between the tents, stepping carefully. Some men were whispering. He guessed two, maybe three more would be gone by morning, but the rest would be one step closer to being real soldiers.
He was awake now, full of energy and would not sleep for another hour. Plus he needed time to think, and walking would help him do that. There was still something missing from his picture of the camp.
He looked up the hill to where the officers’ encampment was. Above the tents, the ruin of the ancient castle lurked in shadow, still and ominous. Below it, the camp was laid out by sections and he walked its regular aisles between the rows of canvas, noting where the different banners flew, where each section of the army was. There was something about its layout that made him uncomfortable, though he could not name it. He needed some perspective.
He found the section for the Fifth Reiklanders and felt a wave of nostalgia. How many of the men in these tents had he known, had fought alongside him, had obeyed his orders though their lives depended on them? How many had died at the hands of orcs? A part of him wanted to step back into these ranks, to take up his old life, to be the old Karl Hoche, the man he had been before his world had become a wider and more terrifying place. He fought it down. That would not do.
Ahead, a figure flitted between two tents and into shadow. He didn’t turn his head or break his stride but watched carefully from the corner of his eye. His Untersuchung training, he thought. Now he knew there was someone there, it was easy to track them. Was it someone trying to get past him, or someone shadowing him?
He walked on, catching glimpses of movement. The figure was keeping up with him, staying around twenty yards away, moving only when Karl’s vision was blocked by at least one tent. He could give chase, he thought, but it would likely be fruitless: his stalker probably knew the camp better than he did and would have a bolt-hole prepared. There was only one thing to do.
The row of tents ended at the mess area, deserted at night, its fires out and the great iron cooking-pots cold and empty on their tripods. There was nobody around to hear or see anything. He walked to the middle of the area, stopped and turned.
“Come here,” he said. For a moment there was no movement, then a man dressed in black appeared between two tents twenty yards away. He walked closer, stopping ten feet away, keeping his distance.
“Lieutenant Hoche,” he said. “Forgive me for this clumsy surveillance. My skills are a little rusty. I’m sure you remember me: I am Duke Heller’s aide-de-camp, Johannes Bohr, though perhaps you know me as Gunter Schmölling.”
“You are Lieutenant Andreas Reisefertig of the Untersuchung,” Karl said, “and I swore to Gottfried Braubach that I would kill you.”
Reisefertig smiled. “My goodness,” he said. “You don’t beat around the bush. How is dear Gottfried?”
“Dead,” said Karl, “as you know. They are all dead. Why did you do what you did to Gunter Schmölling?”
“Firstly,” Reisefertig said, “why should I give you answers? Secondly, what makes you think I did it? Gunter and I were working together, infiltrating the Illuminated Readers to remove a book we needed. Gunter went too far. I warned him the cult had turned to darker ways but he wouldn’t listen. I found him, his tongue and mind gone, and gave him to the care of Saint Olovald and then, knowing my life was at risk, fled.”
“What book?” Karl asked. Reisefertig smiled again.
“That would be telling,” he said. “But what of you? How did you survive the purge?”
“Firstly,” said Karl, “why in turn should I give you answers? Secondly, I don’t believe you. I think you found the information you required and left Schmölling as your scapegoat. You came to work for Duke Heller for a reason, and I think it’s connected to the Knights Panther who fled last summer. That’s why you covered up their crime.”
“So you think I’m a Khorne cultist?” Reisefertig asked, moving to sit on a bare wood bench. “You think I sent you to Altdorf to die?”
“No. I think you sent me to Altdorf to join the Untersuchung, and Braubach thought so too.” Karl carefully did not answer the question about Reisefertig’s gods. “But what he couldn’t tell me, and what I cannot work out, is why you did it.”
Reisefertig tapped an idle rhythm on the wood of the bench and paused. “I refer you to the previous response about giving answers,” he said. “If we are to share information and work together, then we must be able to trust each other.”
“Can I trust you?” Karl asked. Reisefertig snorted.
“Of course not! You have no idea what I’m doing, and I know nothing of your reasons for returning.” He looked thoughtful. “I do hope it’s nothing as petty as revenge.”
Karl shook his head.
“That’s a relief. But all the same, you’ll have to take my word for it that we’re on the same side, or at least your enemy is my enemy. Some would say that makes us allies.” He paused. “Your being here is interesting. The duke himself said so earlier. You’re a bit of a wild card in this pack, Lieutenant Hoche, and I look forward to seeing how the game plays out.”
Karl’s mind hummed with questions, but asking them would not get him any answers, only tell Reisefertig that he did not know them. He was learning how this game was played fast. The balance of power here was bad; the general’s aide had the upper hand. There would be a time for a full exchange of information, but this wasn’t it. For now it was enough to know that something was going on, something important enough for people to hide information from him and discuss him behind his back.
Reisefertig looked away, then up into the night sky, and finally back at Karl.
“So are you going to carry out your oath to kill me?” he asked.
“Yes,” Karl said. “But not yet.” He turned and walked away, back to his tent and his men.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Appetites
The next morning Karl drilled the mercenaries for an hour before breakfast, then over bread, mutton and cheese he sat with three who seemed to be natural leaders and talked about the lie of the land.
The news was not good. Their previous officer had obviously had little head for command and less for strategy. The sellswords had been scouting the width of the valley, but not in organised sweeps and only rarely moving away from regular tracks and paths. The groups were too large and had no training in scouting. They were not even sure what they were looking for. This had been going on for weeks.
“Nobody asked about this?” Karl protested.
Johan shrugged wide shoulders covered in tattoos. “It’s the army way. You don’t question orders and you don’t ask for more.”
Karl sent a messenger to the Fifth Reiklanders, asking two soldiers he remembered to come over and instruct his men in tracking and observation. Meanwhile, he asked Kurtz to call over men who knew the local area to help him understand the layout and terrain. Within an hour he had a sketch-map of the land and landmarks around the camp for ten miles in every direction, the most likely locations for enemy camps and approaches, and a system for patrolling and monitoring it all. The details would need refining, but it would do for today.
He sat for a while, staring at the map and thinking. Something worried him. Mentally, he took the plan and overlaid it on his memory of the view from the hilltop. That was it. He let out a puzzled snort. Kurt
z, polishing a breastplate nearby, looked up.
“What is it, sir?”
“Nothing. No, wait. Kurtz, you’re from Wolfenburg. Look at this.” The short man peered at the chart as Karl pointed out positions on it. “We’re here, buttressed against the hill on the west side of the river. The oracle has told Duke Heller the Chaos army will come from the north-east,” he indicated, “which means they’re going to have to cross the river at some point between here—” point “—and here—” point. “That makes them easy pickings for us: we’re well defended on all sides.”
Kurtz nodded his understanding.
“What worries me,” Karl said, “is if the attack doesn’t come from the north-east, or if the army has already crossed the river somewhere upstream. They’ll come straight down the west side of the valley, into the north edge of the camp, which isn’t well protected or defended. If they used the woods for cover, they could get to within a quarter-mile of the camp before we knew they were even there. An army of decent size could take us completely by surprise.”
“That’s what happened last time,” said Kurtz.
Karl jerked round to look at him. “Last time?”
“When the castle was destroyed, back in the first incursion of Chaos. A big Empire army met a force that was supposed to be coming in from Kislev and the east. Maybe it crossed the river upstream, maybe it was coming from the north, but they charged in at dawn and broke the army’s back before anyone knew what was going on. My granddad heard about it from his granddad, whose father had met a man who survived it. The fall of Castle Lössnitz.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Karl said, “but I didn’t know this was the place.” He stared up the hill at the sombre ruins, their broken walls offering no protection now. “From what I remember the Empire was victorious,” he said. Kurtz shook his head.
“A pretty poor sort of victory,” he said. “Four thousand men were camped here the night before. You know how many were left by sunset? Ninety. Oh, they stopped the invasion and the general walked away so they call it a victory. But they lost the castle and an entire army.” He stopped and looked away, chewing thoughtfully on his thumbnail. “I don’t like to be here,” he said. “It makes my flesh crawl. Too much death. It’s a cursed place. That’s why nobody farms this land. Would you eat crops knowing they’d been grown in earth watered with the blood of four thousand men? They say at sunset that day this whole plain was red, and each year on the same day you can see it again. They call it the field of the cloth of blood.”
“The cloth of blood,” Karl said thoughtfully. He remembered the feel of a sodden Imperial banner, coarse and sticky against his fingers, draped over an altar in the ruins of a farmhouse, dark and glistening in summer moonlight. “So it all comes round again,” he said.
“So they say,” Kurtz said. “I’ll tell you one thing, I wouldn’t have camped an army here.”
“Nor would I,” said Karl. He looked up the hill, to Duke Heller’s tent, where figures in a group were looking at charts, consulting. He felt someone had given him another part of the answer, but he had no idea what to do with it.
“Come on,” he said. “The men should be in the field by now. We’re going with them.”
Kurtz looked surprised. “Old Langstock never—”
“Old Langstock isn’t leading this company any more. No more shirking, Kurtz. I need you to be a soldier.”
Big tattooed Johan, who Karl was surprised to discover was not only a natural leader but also the third son of a Hochland baron, took twenty men and headed north along one agreed route. An Ostlander named Ludolf who had a head full of sense and the tone of command in his voice went east with another twenty. Karl and the rest followed the river.
The Eiskalt was narrower and shallower than the Reik. River traffic on it was rare, and though there was a path along its bank, it was narrow and overgrown. If the Reik was the backbone of the Empire, this was little more than its ankle.
“Or its arsehole,” Kurtz said, and the men laughed. The afternoon sun hung in the sky, they had seen nothing all day and they were bored. By now, Karl suspected, they would normally have found a shady tree and would be sleeping off their midday meal.
“N-no, Wolfenburg’s the arsehole,” said young Ewald and there was more laughter.
“It’s people from Wolfenburg who are the arseholes!” declared Matthias, who everyone called Dodger, “and there was guffawing and shouts of ’Oy, watch it!”
“Enough! Quiet,” Karl said from the rear. “This is reconnaissance work. Everything within three hundred yards knows we’re here now. That’s a good way to get ambushed.”
The laughter died away as the troop walked on. Karl had missed many things about army life, but its sense of humour wasn’t one of them. He watched the men, noting who was using their new training and who would need a quiet word this evening.
So, he thought, Duke Heller has camped his army on the site of a centuries-old massacre, and made exactly the same defensive mistake. He welcomes me back and gives me command of a minor section of the army, one that he knows will cause me trouble. He talks to his aide-de-camp about me, and the aide comes to watch me by night, possibly for his own motives but possibly for the duke. This is the same duke and aide who covered up the infiltration of an Imperial regiment and the sacrifice of Imperial soldiers by Khorne cultists the previous summer.
Summer. How long ago was that?
“Kurtz,” he said, “what’s the date?”
Kurtz scratched his head. “Almost the end of Jahrdrung,” he said. “The… oh, the thirtieth.”
“Th-thirty-first,” said Ewald.
“Mitterfruhl is not past?” Karl asked.
“Still three days hence.”
Mitterfruhl, the spring equinox, the feast-day of Ulric, Taal the wild god, and the half-forgotten deities of the old faith too. Nine months since he had ridden out to Altdorf. What things had gestated and grown fat in that time, he wondered?
Whatever was going on, Duke Heller was involved in some way. That was bad. He had no idea if the duke knew anything about his past year. Karl had claimed he had delivered his messages, tried to return and been injured, and the duke had not contradicted him. But the Untersuchung had notified the army that they were co-opting Karl. Had that message reached the duke? If not, perhaps Reisefertig had told him after last night’s conversation?
If the duke knew, why had he said nothing? If this was all a plot that involved Chaos, why had he welcomed Karl—an agent of the agency that investigated Chaos conspiracies—back into the camp? Perhaps that was why he had given him the sellswords to command; to keep him distracted. Perhaps Heller believed Karl was not acting alone, and could not risk killing him without drawing suspicion. And if there was a scheme, how many of the other officers and other companies of the army were involved?
Too many unknowns. He would have to start filling in the blanks in his understanding, and quickly. Wandering through the wilderness was not the place to do that. He wondered absently if there might be anything in Braubach’s journal that would help him. For a moment he missed the older agent’s detached cynicism with sorrow so sharp it felt like pain. He thought of the candle he had lit in the cathedral at Mondstille. It was time he lit another, and made his own peace with Sigmar.
“Kurtz, where is the camp shrine?” he asked
“Up in the ruins, sir, in the remains of the castle’s chapel. We went there to pray for Old Langstock when he pegged.”
“Oh yes. You never told me how he died.”
Kurtz coughed. “He—er, tripped and banged his arm on a pike.”
“Clumsy,” Karl said. “But that wouldn’t kill him?”
“Blood-poison from the wound did. The surgeons bled him and bled him, but it didn’t do any good. He—”
There was a call from the front of the group, and the two men broke off and hurried to the front. A long, shallow puddle split the path ahead. In the mud around it were deep hoof prints.
“One horse,�
�� said Karl. “Either heavy or with a heavy rider. Anyone here know horses?”
There was a pause and some murmuring until Otto, a bald man with thick ears, pushed forward. “My old dad was a blacksmith,” he said.
“What do these tell you?” Karl asked.
Otto leaned to look, and whistled. “That,” he said, “is a big horse. I’d say a big carthorse, but look at the length between the marks. Long legs. Clean prints, no dragging, it lifts its feet. It’s been trained.” He bent closer. “It was shod in iron, but not locally. I’ve not seen a shoe like it. Look at the heads of those nails. They’re spiked.”
“Kislevite, maybe? For riding on ice?” Karl asked. Otto shrugged.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Some sort of beastman?” someone asked.
“No,” Karl said. “They don’t wear horse-shoes. Let’s follow it. Quietly. Julius, Harro, you’re on point.”
The prints led down the path for a quarter-mile, and turned towards the river at a small beach of pebbles. “The rider paused to water his horse,” Otto said.
“The tracks stop. They don’t continue,” Karl said. He stared out across the churning river, full and cold with snow-melt from the Middle Mountains. Twenty yards out stood a large island, its bushes and trees thick with green spring leaves, blocking the view of the far shore. The only movement was the wind in the tree-branches and the river-water surging between it and the shore.
For a second he had a sense of déjà vu, of having seen this place before, but it passed. He stood for a moment, contemplating, then turned to his men. “Good work. I’ll report this to the general; he can interpret it. Time we were heading back.”
At the evening meal, Sergeant Braun came to find him. “Do you remember Armin, sir?” he said. “Young lad, joined up after Wissendorf, showed promise?”
Karl nodded. He’d kept an eye on the boy for promotion.
“Well, he took a bad blow to the head in sword-practice today, and he’s in the infirmary. It would mean a lot if you could visit him, sir.”