Marks of Chaos

by James Wallis

  It was not the first time Karl had wondered about such things, but when such thoughts came to him he preferred to push them away. He did so again, preferring to remember his old friends, playing in the market square, fishing from the docks, drinking in the town’s taverns, celebrating birthdays and feast-days, good humour and happy memories.

  He suspected that his homecoming would not find any of that.

  When dawn rose he returned to the camp and lost himself again in the job of training men to fight. It might not be rebuilding the Untersuchung, or training agents for Herr Stahl’s organisation, but he was creating a force of men opposed to Chaos and its works, and that was enough for him for now. And it was a distraction.

  The next day followed the same pattern, and the one after that. In the evening, after the training session had finished, the sun had set, and the camp had raised its voice together in prayer, Karl made sure the guards were at their posts, and then sought out Luthor Huss. He found him at the heart of the camp, sat at the fire with Oswald and two others beside him. They greeted him and he sat down. Conversation was intermittent and inconsequential.

  “What do you plan to do in Grünburg?” Karl asked Huss.

  “Whatever Sigmar tells me,” Huss said, then laughed. “Don’t look concerned, Magnusson. I’m not planning to throw any priests out of windows here. We’re passing through, that’s all. I’ll preach in the marketplace about the iniquity of the church, get donations, maybe meet the local priests and hear the news. We’ll be gone by mid-afternoon.”

  “We could have reached Grünburg this evening,” Karl said. “Why didn’t we?”

  Huss reached forward and stoked the fire with the head of his warhammer, sending flames and sparks cavorting into the sky. “To give them time,” he said. “They know we’re coming. We should let them prepare.”

  “Prepare what?”

  “Donations, I hope. We have no rich patrons, no coffers of gold to fund us and feed us. We depend on the charity of the citizens of each town we pass through. Farmers, millers, butchers, bakers, sometimes the temples too: they know we will ask them all to give us food, and often they do. The fact that we are nine hundred reputed madmen may help, but I fear our pickings in Grünburg may be slim.”

  “Why? Aren’t they generous people?”

  “They are, but they have no gripe with the church. Their priests serve them well and keep them happy.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” Karl said.

  Huss regarded him carefully, as if to say: are you? Oswald watched them both but held his peace. Conversation lulled. The fire ebbed back to embers.

  “I was thinking,” Karl said. “There’s a common to the north of the town. While you’re preaching and gathering donations, my men could spend several hours training there. It would do them good.”

  “No,” Huss said. “We need you and the armed men with us as we enter the town.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it may not be donations that they are preparing for us. As I said, they have no argument with the orthodox church here. A crew of renegades, heretics, doom-sayers and preachers of a new faith may get a cold reception.”

  You didn’t last time, Karl thought. There was another silence. Huss regarded him, his eyes reflecting firelight, full of leaping light and darkness.

  “You must face your fear, Magnusson,” he said. “There is no other way to beat it. I can’t force you to come into Grünburg, but I think you should. What is it that you’re afraid of here?”

  Everything, Karl thought. Myself. Old wounds, the type that Chaos does not heal but opens wider. Instead he said, “I’m worried that you don’t know what awaits us in the town. Haven’t you sent scouts ahead?”

  Huss laughed. “Scouts? No, we leave those to the armies. Whatever will be there tomorrow, we will deal with tomorrow.”

  “No scouts?”

  “None.”

  Karl sat very still. The words of the guard the day before came back to him: Sigmar guards us, he had said, and might have gone to his death believing it. “Brother Huss,” he said, “you told me that if Altdorf expected a crusade, you would give it a crusade. I am giving you crusaders; soldiers of Sigmar, to defend the faithful and fight for their beliefs. But soldiers need more than faith to support them: they need proper training, proper equipment and they need intelligence about who they will be fighting, the enemy’s strength, the layout of the field of battle and more. Without these, you have crippled your army before it has struck a single blow.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Huss stretched. “But we are an army that still has to beg for food from every town and village it passes through. Arms, armour, scouts and the rest will come with time. For now, all I ask is that you give me men who can fight.”

  A log turned over, sending a final tirade of sparks into the night sky. “Of course,” Karl said, and stood up. “Brothers, if you will excuse me, I need to sleep. There is much to do tomorrow.” The others nodded their farewells and he walked away into the camp.

  * * *

  It was an hour’s walk to Grünburg but there was bright moonlight on the road and even if it had been pitch dark he would still have known the route: he knew this countryside better than anywhere in the world. It felt familiar and frightening, the strip-fields and sheep-folds of his youth still here, the ruined estate-house of the Amsels, abandoned seventy years ago after plague took its owners, now a little more crumbled and overgrown but the same shape it had been for all his childhood, when he and the other Grünburg boys had dared each other to enter.

  The walls of Grünburg rose up in front of him, the ditch and earth ramparts topped with a low stone wall and guard towers. The ramparts dipped to ground level in two places, for the town’s two gates, but he knew their earth slopes too well to be fooled: that was where the watchmen were, warming around braziers and gossiping about local girls. There were other ways into the town, ways he had used many times as a teenager, sneaking out late at night to join friends in the hayricks of late summer, drinking, talking, spending time with farmers’ daughters.

  He clambered down into the ditch, wading through the ankle-deep mud at its bottom, and climbed diagonally up the steep bank on the other side. Under the grass, the old footholds were still there, and at the base of the wall were the projecting stones and gaps in the mortar beside one of the towers that served as grips and rests for agile young climbers. He was not so young anymore, but the path was as old as the wall, as sturdy and as familiar. A second to recollect it, and he was over the parapet, onto the wooden walkway on the other side, ducking, peering around to see if he was seen. Beyond, the familiar shapes of the roofs and streets of Grünburg stretched away down to the river.

  He crept down the stone stairs, to street level, then pulled the folded witch hunter’s hat from inside his cloak, straightened it and put it on once more. The alleyway was dark and cramped. A hundred yards north was the school where he had learned to read and write, and played knights and ladies in the lunch-period. Fifty yards west, the parents of his childhood friend Fritz. South-west, the temple, and beyond it his parents’ house. South, as near as a sigh, Marie.

  It had all loomed so large in his mind for so long that now he saw it again, it felt curiously diminished, made smaller by reality. He walked down the alleyway, careful to keep his guard up: nowhere in the Empire were people more likely to recognise him, and nowhere would they be more aware of his story and the price on his head.

  He took a cross-street, turned left towards the centre of town. Here was where Franz Beyer had been kicked by a horse, flying twenty feet, not a bone broken. That corner, the bakery of Frau Sommer, mistress of the Altdorfer pastry. Two years since he had been here: long enough for the details to have changed, but not enough for him to remember everything. The lamps were lit but the streets seemed empty, the house windows shuttered. Where were the people?

  Footsteps behind him, and a voice: “Brother!” He kept walking. The voice came again: “Brother witch hunter!”
He was seen. He had no choice now. He turned, tilting his head forward so the shadow of his hat’s brim covered his face.

  Two watchmen. He recognised them, but did not know their names. One carried a lantern, both had cudgels and whistles. “Yes?” he said gruffly.

  “Are you lost?” one of them asked.

  Admit nothing; give away no facts. “Where is everyone?” he asked.

  “At the temple. Your colleague is there too.” One of them pointed south-west. “The next street leads there.”

  “Thank you,” he said, turning his back to them and walking away. Witch hunters in town were bound to attract attention; Grünburg, though large, was not large enough for a chapter-house of its own. What had the man meant by “your colleague”? Another witch hunter? Why would a witch hunter come to Grünburg?

  The temple had not changed, the white outline of its limestone structure ghostly in the moonlight, every window lit from within. The doors were open, though this was too late for a religious service. But it was the largest space in town, bigger than the chamber of the town council. They were holding a town meeting. Everyone would be there. That meant two things: he had to know what they were discussing, and he could not go in.

  There would be men waiting by the door. He could see them as he approached: those who preferred to stand, or preferred the chill of the night air, or had arrived late. The rear entrance would be locked, as usual. But there was another way in, less secret than the path over the wall, but just as inobvious to the locals. On the far side of the building, the priests’ entrance, the way his father always used. He took a side-street, walking the long, concealed way to the small wooden door.

  It was shut, snug in its alcove. Everyone always assumed it was locked, but Karl knew that while anyone was in the temple, it wasn’t. He checked the street in both directions, saw nobody and darted across into the deep shadows at the base of the white wall. The worn bronze of the door’s handle was as familiar as the hilt of his sword, and it turned as easily in his hand. The corridor within was bright and empty. He went in, dosing the door behind him.

  Beyond the doors to the store-room, the sacristy and the stairs down to the crypt, the interior of the temple blazed with light. Someone was standing by the high altar, speaking in a rich accented voice that echoed effortlessly through the vaulted chamber. Karl recognised it, and crept to the foot of the short stairway that led up to the passage’s exit into the nave, behind the pulpit, out of sight of the congregation.

  He peered over the top of the stairs. Four chairs were set in front of the altar. In one was Barthold Meyer, the mayor, exactly as Karl remembered him. Next to him was Odo Rothstein, captain of the town guard. In the third chair sat a man Karl did not want to recognise.

  In the two years since Karl had left, his father had grown old, bent, tired and white-haired. He looked like a man who had lost everything, and was now lost himself. Karl forced himself to look away.

  The fourth chair was empty, its occupant on his feet, speaking. Evidently Brother Erwin Rhinehart had recovered from his illness, and unlike Luthor Huss he had not waited until the morning to enter Grünburg.

  “…each day they become more fanatical, as every crank and doom-sayer in the Empire flocks to join them. I have seen with my own eyes that they are training with weapons and becoming an army. The point is no longer whether Luthor Huss is a man of peace, it is whether he can control his followers, and I fear he cannot. Your most prudent course is to shut the gates to these men. There is little harm in asking them to go around your town, and much good may come of it…”

  Karl had heard enough. He crept away down the corridor, back into the silent town, trying to ignore the many memories that brushed past him as he made his way to the wall, through the countryside and back to the camp. The guards were asleep, and he slapped each one awake with hard blows born of frustration. How could Huss have been so unprepared?

  At dawn he woke his three officers and called them to council over a breakfast of porridge and herbs.

  “Huss doesn’t know this?” asked Gottschalk. A former local priest from a village just south of Nuln, he was tall, lugubrious and dogmatic, wanting to assimilate each piece of information before making a decision, unlikely to leap to conclusions or come up with inspired tactical schemes on the spur of the moment. That was why Karl had put him in charge of the pike-men, whose purpose was to take orders and react to things. He also had a body muscled like a statue of Sig-mar; he looked like a leader of men even though he didn’t always think or act like one. Gottschalk brushed his long unwashed hair from in front of his eyes. “You will tell him about it?”

  “Yes,” Karl said with patience. “Though I don’t know if he’ll listen, and if he does I don’t know if he’ll accept it. He’s strong-headed.”

  “So what do we do?” Lars Kuster asked, pushing forward. He had been a Templar once, in the Order of the Fiery Heart, but had left for reasons he would not discuss with anyone. Karl suspected there might be a price on his head too. Kuster seemed restless, though not nervous. He was probably eager for a fight. Tall, rangy, scarred, at home in the saddle; Karl had wondered at first why Huss had not put this experienced warrior and servant of Sigmar in charge of training the troops, but had realised quickly that the man needed a superior to rein him in.

  “We wait to see what happens,” Karl said. “Our role is to defend the crusade, and Huss in particular. Under no circumstances do we attack. Even if we’re attacked and fight them off, we regroup and dig in. At the moment we exist on the edge of the law. If we give them any excuse, the witch hunters or the militia will have us declared enemies of the Empire and call in the nearest army to put us down.”

  “What if Huss directs us to attack?” Otto Pabst asked, stroking the handle of his warhammer. Of the three officers, Karl had to admit that Pabst was the mistake: a good soldier, a strong leader and a reasonable tactician, but an aggressive fanatic and a follower of the Malleun Heresy, believing that Sigmar should be remembered only as the bearer of the mystic hammer Ghal-maraz that contained the true spirit of god-hood. Malleun heretics believed the true Ghal-Maraz had never been recovered after Sigmar’s death, and the one now carried by the Emperor was a replica. Of course Pabst would be a superb hammer-bearer. Of course, too, he would be quietly, zealously insane.

  “Huss will not give such an order,” Karl said. “He is not a fool, nor suicidal, nor wishes for martyrdom. The men are simply not ready for combat against a force that has training or experience; they’d be cut down like wheat at harvest. If attacked we defend, nothing more. And you take your orders from me, not from Luthor Huss.”

  Pabst and Kuster exchanged a look. Karl caught it, and felt a sinking feeling. As a lieutenant in the Empire’s army he had been used to leading men who were used to being led. This was a different type of command, and much more difficult. The only people these men respected were priests, visionaries or Sigmar himself, or dead heroes. If they were to obey him in the heat of battle—he stopped his thoughts. Pray to all the gods he would never have to lead this rabble into battle.

  * * *

  Huss had received Karl’s news with a grunt, and had not asked where he had learned it or whether it was trustworthy. Now as the crusade shuffled towards the distant shape of Grünburg, Karl and his men following on foot a few yards behind Huss and his advisors at the head of the column, he hoped he was wrong. At this distance the gates appeared to be open, a gap in the line of the walls, though he could see no travellers on the road.

  The road widened as they drew closer. Karl studied the walls. There were people there, too many for an ordinary guard patrol. Many of them were in uniform. He thought about walking forward and mentioning it to Huss but it would only have drawn strange looks from the others; his eyesight was more acute than most mens, and they would only have questioned his report or asked how he knew.

  He calculated bow-range and crossbow-range from the walls, and wondered if they were walking into a trap. The crusade moved slowly on
towards the gates.

  At about two hundred yards, the limit of crossbow fire, a figure dressed in black stepped through the opening and the heavy oak barriers swung closed behind him. Karl heard the thunk of heavy wooden bars being slid into their grooves behind it. The town was sealed to them. Huss raised his hand and the crusade came to a slow stop and an uncomfortable, expectant silence.

  “Magnusson!” he shouted.

  Karl came forward. “Sir?”

  Huss didn’t turn to look at him. “Analysis?”

  “The man in black is Erwin Rhinehart,” Karl said, “the witch hunter who has been following us. No sign of troops, other than defenders on the walls.” He shaded his eyes with one hand. “The Grünburg militia is handy with crossbows but we’re out of range. They’re not going to attack us, they just want us to go round the town.” As I told you two hours ago, he added under his breath.

  “No chance they’re forming up troops behind the gate?”

  “Very unlikely. They don’t have the force of arms. But if you disagree I can order the pikemen forward to resist a charge?” He suspected that if faced by thundering horses and riders bearing lances, the pikemen would break and run until their lungs gave out, and he suspected Huss knew it too.

  Huss shook his head. “No. But we’re going through the town. You’re the strategist. How do we do it?”

  Karl felt rage rising in his throat. An insignificant force of men, with a handful of days’ training and weapons they’d made themselves, and Huss was asking him to storm his home town’s gate? He opened his mouth to reply, to tell Huss some of the realities of warfare, but before he could speak he heard a voice, distant but assertive and commanding, from the figure outside the gate.

  “Luthor Huss!” Rhinehart proclaimed. “Grünburg is closed to you. Take your retinue and go around the town.”

  Retinue. A nice touch: accurate, yet belittling.

  Huss took a step forward. “You do not speak for Grünburg,” he declared, and his voice rang across the fields, echoing off the distant walls. “You are a lackey, the lap-dog of a lapdog of an idolatrous Grand Theogonist who grows fat in Altdorf. If Grünburg is closed to me and my brothers, then let the mayor of Grünburg tell me so. Or its high priest, Magnus Hoche.”