by James Wallis
The door slammed open and there was a shout: “Karl!” He turned. Water hit him in the face, and then more liquid splattered his chest. In the door, Oswald was chanting, his hands held at a strange angle, the silver hammer he wore around his neck clutched in his fingers. Another attack? He launched himself at the pilgrim, and the room was plunged into darkness. All the flames had gone out. He stumbled in the sudden darkness and crashed to the floor. Oswald was there, picking him up.
“Come on,” he said. “They’ll be back. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Karl looked up. “What happened to the other man?”
“He went out of the window.”
Karl glanced over, to the open window-shutters and the area of flat roof beyond. There was no sign of his would-be assassin. He slowly climbed upright, trying not to let his shattered ribs move, slowly becoming aware of an acrid smell in the air. “What did you throw at me?”
“My chamber-pot,” Oswald said with a certain cheer in his voice. “Human urine is surprisingly efficacious as an emergency component in certain spells.”
The pilgrim, a spell-caster? Some priests had a little magical ability, but Oswald didn’t seem the type. “Who are you?” Karl asked.
“Later. You need to get out of town, and I know how.”
“How?”
“Trust me.”
“Trust is scarce and valuable in these parts,” Karl said.
“You trusted me with your name. I can repay that trust now.”
Karl looked into his eyes and saw something he recognised, something familiar. He picked up his pack and sword. “Lead on.”
The inn was quiet as they crept downstairs: either nobody had heard the commotion or nobody had thought anything of it. Outside the town was dark but watch-patrols were moving through the streets and there were guards at the gates and on the wall. They were looking for someone. It was not hard to guess who.
Oswald led Karl through the town’s back-streets and alleys, heading towards the shadow of the wall. The old preacher seemed to know what he was doing, or at least where he was going, and Karl held his peace.
They stopped beside a small house, timber-built that backed onto the wall itself a hundred yards west of the gate. Karl kept watch as Oswald rapped on its door. The door opened a crack. Oswald said something in old Reman, and it opened further. The two men slipped inside, to where a single candle lit a single room filled with old furniture. Worn hangings decorated the walls. An old man with rheumy sleep-filled eyes fastened the door behind them, his night-shirt blowing briefly in the breeze from outside.
“Go back to bed, father,” Oswald said. “We’ll not trouble you for long.”
“Tell me what’s going on,” Karl said. “You were here to meet people. Yet now you’re helping me escape.”
Oswald sighed. “We don’t have time.”
“There’s an assassin on my tail. Convince me this isn’t a trap.”
“The short version, then. I have the information I came for. The people I met this afternoon will help us escape. I don’t know who tried to kill you, I just heard the commotion from your room. I don’t know if we are on the same side, but your enemies are mine.”
“Who did you meet? Who will help us?” Karl demanded.
Oswald lifted a corner of the wall-hanging, revealing a wooden door four feet high set into the stone of the town wall. “The people who tunnelled this. Dwarfs.”
They crawled through and emerged in a rough hut on the other side of the wall, stone-dust on their hands and knees. Greetings were exchanged with the woken sleepers on the other side, hands shaken, filled water-bottles and bundles of provisions thrust into their pouches. A boatman was woken to ferry them across the river a few hundred yards upstream of the town, and they were away, walking northwards along the bare earth road, the moon Mannslieb sinking towards the horizon to illuminate their path.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t bring your horse,” Oswald said.
Karl shrugged. “No matter. It wasn’t my horse.”
“No, I meant we could have ridden it.” They trudged on.
“Will they follow us?”
“They might. You are an Imperial criminal, after all, and they’re bound to claim you tried to burn down the inn last night. Did you know the man who tried to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Local?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’ll take his side over yours. And I’m guessing he has powerful friends. So your business did not go well?”
Karl was silent. He had travelled to Grissenwald to look for answers, and instead had been given more questions. He had been lured into a trap. Did that mean it had been Herr Stahl who had given him up to the witch hunters in Nuln? If so, whether Stahl knew who he was or not, it meant that Karl’s entry to his organisation was closed forever. But if they were the kind of people who sent assassins to bum people to death in their beds, it was possible they were not the kind of organisation Karl had anticipated.
Arson. An interesting style of assassination. Easy to make it look like an accident; no inconvenient crossbow bolts or stab-wounds in the corpse, and almost silent until the moment of ignition. But why hadn’t the man stabbed him and then burnt his body? And why not just give him over to the authorities and collect the reward?
Because he was a mutant, and mutants should be burnt. But how much did Stahl, Scharlach and the dock-worker know about him?
Grissenwald and the rivers had disappeared behind them into the night. “Where are we going?” he asked Oswald.
“West.”
“To where?”
“To wherever Luthor Huss has led his crusade. I have information for him from our allies among the dwarfs.”
“Can you tell me?”
Oswald looked over at him. “I suppose. It makes few odds now. It’s bad news. About the fulfilment of a prophecy.”
“What prophecy?”
Oswald took a deep breath. “I don’t know what you’ve heard but Huss isn’t prowling the Empire looking for corrupt priests, and he isn’t building a crusade to put the fear of the gods into the Grand Theogonist. He believes that the times foretold in the Testaments of Sigmar have come, and that we are facing a threat worse than any the Empire has faced before.”
Karl stared at the moon. “And that at such a time Sigmar would come again to his people and save them.”
“A priest’s son you truly are. Yes. And the twin-tailed comet has been seen in the sky, the sign of Sigmar. You knew that?”
Karl was silent. He had seen a two-tailed star himself, a little over a year ago, on the hardest day of his life. He had set the course of his life by it. He knew what it meant.
“Huss is searching for the reborn Sigmar,” Oswald said. “If the comet signalled his birth, he comes of age this year. We heard a story from the World’s Edge Mountains, of a young dwarf born to a lineage of great history, having extraordinary powers. There was a thought it might be him. We asked our allies among the dwarfs to find out more.”
“Sigmar was reborn as a dwarf?” It was an extraordinary thought.
“He wasn’t. At least not that dwarf. The hold’s high priest of Grungni examined him. A fearsome warrior, a future leader of armies, possibly a retaker of lost holds and a fulfiller of prophecies in his own right, but not Sigmar.”
“Where does that leave Luthor Huss?” Karl asked.
“I don’t know.” Oswald closed his eyes, walking blind down the road ahead. “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER FIVE
In Stereo
They travelled west, and saw evidence of the crusade long before they saw the crusade itself: flattened fields, rough-built shrines beside the roads, shallow-dug latrine ditches beside pastures used as overnight camps, villages where children ran screaming at the sight of a man in priest’s robes. Since leaving Grissenwald—in fact since leaving Nuln, or Oberwil, or Schoppendorf the previous autumn—Karl had noticed a growing number of wandering preachers, pilgrims, monks, ran
ters, fanatics and flagellants on the roads of the Empire, but as he and Oswald walked across the Empire they met more and more, heading to join Huss, to hear him preach or receive his instructions.
Some of them claimed Huss was a messiah, some the forerunner and prophet of a messiah. Some claimed he was Volkmar the former Grand Theogonist, deposed by the usurper Johann Esmer who claimed he was dead; others claimed that Volkmar was dead, had been resurrected by dark magic, and Luthor Huss had been sent to oppose him. Several said they had been told to join him in a dream. One man claimed that Huss was himself Sigmar reborn, but he bore the scabs and rotted nose of a second-generation syphilitic and drooled as he spoke. Of those they questioned, none had news and none knew where Huss was.
The villagers were more helpful. Yes, the crusade had passed through a month ago, or a handful of weeks, or a week, or two or three days. They had seen Luthor Huss at its head astride a great warhorse, his warhammer on his shoulder. He had spoken to the headman, or stood in the centre of the village and preached a message of change and destruction for the unwary and the unreformed. Many had prayed, or sung, or wailed, or spoken in tongues. Some of his followers had bought food, others had begged for it, or for alms. Some had preached. One or two had stolen things. The temple had been crowded, the local priest terrified. The villagers had been left fearful of the powers of Chaos, fearful of the corruption of the church in Altdorf, fearful that the crusade might return.
In a couple of towns the story was different. Two weeks earlier the crusade had arrived at Kemperbad, pitching its camp outside the walls. It was a fierce, cold day. Huss had entered the town, seeking a meeting with Brother Florian Eggers, well known in the area for demanding high tithes and tariffs from local merchants, and selling indulgences and other documents of dubious religious provenance.
They had met in private for two hours. Then Huss had come out onto the temple steps, proclaiming that Brother Eggers had seen the error of his ways and was praying for forgiveness, but would appear shortly. He then began to preach a sermon of damnation and brimstone on those who used the holy church to profit themselves. As he reached the climax Brother Eggers appeared at the top of the temple’s spire, and leaped to his death. Some said that he was aiming for Huss, who had to step back to avoid the impact of the suicide. Others said he was thrown from the spire by Huss’ followers. Nothing could be proved. The crusade left the next morning, heading north along the Reik, towards Altdorf.
The stories told too of the crusade’s followers. Anything from a few minutes to several hours later came the camp-followers: local farmers and priests bringing donations of grain, oats and sometimes meat and beer; traders with carts of food to sell; the priests of other sects and gods hoping to spread their gospels to the disenchanted; the sad relatives of crusaders hoping to persuade their loved ones to come home; and always, always mentioned, one lone figure wearing the garb of a witch hunter, riding a black horse, who said nothing to anyone.
Karl had marched with armies in the past. He recognised the signs of one on the march, could tell how long ago it had passed, and knew that it would only move as fast as its slowest member. From the signs it left, that wasn’t very fast. Two fit men on foot should have been able to follow this crusade’s trail, catch up with it and rejoin it in just a few days. Once or twice they saw the smoke of campfires on the horizon, or met stragglers who had dropped behind, ill or injured, who told them of Huss’ progress. But the crusade remained out of their reach.
“Do you know a man named Herr Stahl?” Karl asked on the fifth day. Oswald looked pensive.
“I knew a fat priest in Weissbruck called Father Josef Stahl. Is that the man?”
Karl shook his head. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t even know if Stahl is his name. He leads a group of agents with similar aims to my old employers the Untersuchung—and, it seems, the same enemies.”
“Tell me.”
Karl told him, from the description Frau Farber had given him, to his arrival in Nuln, the body in the pond, the trap set for him by the witch hunters, his escape and his search through the city. When he reached the description of the corpse in the beer-attic, and the handprint beside it, Oswald stopped him.
“A hand in blood? Like this?” He held up his right hand, fingers slightly splayed.
Karl nodded. “A woman’s hand. She wore rings.”
Oswald dropped his hand and looked away, shaking his head. “Whoever Stahl and his crew are, they have powerful enemies. The Purple Hand.”
“Who?”
“A cult of Chaos worshippers. Followers of Tzeentch, the Lord of Change. They’re said to span the Empire and beyond. They don’t have ties to the crime-gangs, or to bands of mutants and beastmen like many cults, nor a desire to crush the Empire by force of arms. Instead they infiltrate and corrupt, getting their people into positions of responsibility in—well, anywhere. Temples, trade guilds, regiments. Even the witch hunters, it’s said.”
Karl barked a laugh. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t?”
“It’s Khorne’s followers who have infiltrated the witch hunters.”
“You have a strange sense of humour.” Oswald looked at him. “You’ve never heard of these people? Not when you were in the Untersuchung? They’re an old cult.”
“No, never.” Karl was caught in thoughts of Nuln. “So the hand-print by the corpse could have meant that the dead man was a member of the Purple Hand, or that the person who killed him was.”
“That’s if the murderer would leave a mark to show their allegiance.” Oswald chewed his lip thoughtfully. “The sign could have been placed there before the killing. Or afterwards, to show the cult was aware of the death, or to show the drop-point was not safe anymore.”
“Possible,” Karl said, “but let’s apply Occam’s broadsword to this and eliminate the unlikely.”
“Have you ever read Occam’s writings?” Oswald asked. Karl shook his head. “An interesting man. One of the first warrior-priests of Sigmar. He wanted to preach at the temple in Altdorf but the bishops, afraid of what he might say, tied the doors shut with a knot of great complexity. If Occam could undo it, they said, he would be allowed entry. Occam studied the knot, then drew his sword, sliced the tie in two, pushed the doors open and went in. Hence the principle: the direct route to a solution is most likely the best. Otherwise you spend your life picking at threads.”
Karl nodded absently. His father had told him the story many times and here, in the midst of this wildness and uncertainly, hearing it again gave him comfort. He touched the hilt of his own sword. Occam’s solution seemed simple, but Occam had been shown where the knot was. He was still trying to find the ends of the cords that led to his own.
On the morning of the eighteenth day they found the crusade’s camp, spread around a crossroads on the Altdorf road a few miles north of a shrine to Sigmar. There were few tents or carts visible, no structure to the camp, just a maze of tents, bedrolls and campfires, makeshift altars, banners planted in the hard ground, occasional tethered horses or donkeys, and huddles of men and women chanting, singing hymns, preaching, ranting, talking quietly, praying silently, cooking, eating, meditating. Wide fields of arable land stretched away on either side, and the Reik flowed clear and dark in its course half a mile off.
Karl estimated there were seven or eight hundred people in this huddle of humanity, many of them old, infirm or weak with hunger. Enough to scare villagers, but hardly an army to face down the hordes of Chaos or the Templar-knights of the Church of Sigmar, should they come head to head.
They threaded their way through the honeycomb maze of camps, tents and groups, the sounds of conversation and prayer, the smells of boiled cuts of cheap meat, stale bread, unwashed bodies, urine and filth. A slow parade of people made their way down to the stream at the bottom of the field to drink, wash and relieve themselves. Karl’s eyes searched the crowds for a face he recognised, or who recognised him, among the muddy robes, filthy hair, shaven heads and
grubby faces, but there was nobody.
Having been brought up in the church, spending so much of his life surrounded by the things of Sigmar, he found it strange to be made so deeply uncomfortable. But this wasn’t the church. These people were Sigmarites but they were from the far edge of the faith: extremists, heretics, fanatics, zealots who lived for their beliefs and were prepared to die for them if necessary. He knew that if any of these people knew who he was, if a single one was to shout his name or declare him to be a mutant, the crusade would rip him to shreds in seconds.
Oswald abruptly elbowed Karl in the ribs. A few days before the poke would have doubled him over in pain but now he merely winced and glared at the man. Oswald didn’t seem to notice.
“Shh!” he said.
Karl, who had not said anything in minutes, took a second to register that this was more than an affectation or a call for reverence. At the heart of the hubbub, under the blue-grey spring sky, it was as if they had walked into the stillness and silence of a marble vault. The noise of the crowd was still there, but behind them and somehow muted.
Ahead of them, in front of an altar made of piled logs with a heavy warhammer placed on top of it, a man knelt, his bald scarred head bowed in prayer. A heavy robe, coarse with wear and weather, covered his shoulders and back, hanging strangely over the plates of his armour. He wore a metal band around his head, studded, half-way between a crown and a manacle. His great hands, each big enough to crush a dog’s head, were clasped before him in a pose of peace and power as he made supplication to his god. Two armoured men knelt either side of him, their poses of prayer echoing his, a sense of structured calm spreading out around him to touch everyone in the camp.
This was not a man, Karl thought. This was a force of nature, an elemental power, a storm, a flood given human form. His strength was that of boulders: immovable at rest, unstoppable in motion. This man could reshape the world.