Marks of Chaos

by James Wallis

  He did not go to The Hog’s Head. Instead he walked past the pool of lamplight from the tavern’s door and waited at the far end of Marienstrasse under a lock-maker’s sign. The last light of day ebbed from the western sky, and the last traders closed their shutters. Karl closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, letting his other senses and instincts take over, to tell him about the city’s energy this evening.

  The clack of people’s heels on the cobbles grew fewer, either hurrying away to get home before one of the city’s famous fogs blew up the river, or heading more slowly to the temples, guild houses, taverns and banqueting halls that made up the city’s nightlife. For those who disliked the bustle, brassiness and prices of the Street of a Hundred Taverns, The Hog’s Head was a cheaper alternative that offered the same watered beer and the same chance of getting knifed or having your purse cut, but without the crowds. It attracted a clientele who knew what they liked, and mostly they liked discretion. Its booths were deep and dark, and sound travelled badly through the thick pine partitions.

  Karl could smell the dark beer and pork-and-cabbage stew, the occasional note of tobacco, the low hum of conversation. He ignored it, stretching his senses to take in the buildings around. What of them? Tanned leather from the saddlemaker in the next street, oil and metal from the knife-sharpener, the smoke of coal fires, the aroma of twenty different suppers: potatoes, mutton, a pottage of roots. Not many spices used in this part of town.

  There was something sharper on the wind. It smelled like lime and tasted like metal. The very air felt coarse. Karl breathed slow and careful, not moving, letting it fill him. Colours flickered behind his eyelids: reds, oranges and blacks. His ears sensed conversations from every direction, unable to make out words but gleaning the tone that underlay every one. Expectation. Anxiety. Tension. The city was waiting for something to happen, something explosive. He did not know what, and he felt that nobody else did either. No, someone in the city must know, must even be planning it. It was his job to find them.

  He opened his eyes and Oswald was there at the far end of the street, walking towards the door of The Hog’s Head. Karl slipped the lenses out of his pocket and put them on, then stepped out of the shadows. Oswald noticed the movement and changed his direction. Karl tipped his head towards the tavern entrance, but Oswald kept coming. Idiot. It would be better if they entered separately, less dangerous for both of them. They were twenty yards apart.

  “I found him,” Oswald said. Anyone could have heard him.

  “Well met, “Karl said loudly, quickening his step. “To the tavern.”

  “You’ll never guess,” Oswald said. Karl grabbed his arm, pulling him around. He didn’t think anyone was watching but this was Altdorf and you could never tell.

  “Shh,” he said, but Oswald’s news would not wait.

  “Your Herr Stahl’s a bloody witch hunter,” he said.

  They were in the tavern. Oswald had a cup of cheap sweet wine, and Karl had a pint of dark beer. Its taste reminded him of the Untersuchung.

  “Keep your voice down,” he said for the third time.

  Oswald nodded an absent-minded acknowledgement. “So the three of them are glowering down at me, their eyes demanding everything they’re not saying, and it’s all I can do not to bolt…”

  “You didn’t recognise any of them?” Karl asked. The lenses were pinching his nose, and he raised a hand to adjust them. They had drawn a couple of odd looks from the tavern’s patrons, but nobody had mentioned anything. The Hog’s Head was the kind of place where people who asked questions could end up with a new frown three inches below their usual one, cut through their windpipe. Besides, he didn’t want Oswald to see his eyes.

  “No, no,” Oswald said. “But you know witch hunters, the uniform is enough to put the fear of Sigmar in you. But they take one look and identify it and suddenly they can’t do enough for me, do I have any more questions, is there anything else I need, do I want to make an appointment for my master to see Lord Bethe himself.’

  “Who’s Lord Bethe?” Karl asked.

  Oswald swirled the wine in the cup and swigged. “You don’t know? He’s the Lord Protector. One of Johann Esmer’s appointees after the death of Volkmar. One of the senior council of the Order of Sigmar. Your man Stahl is his secretary and advisor, except here they call him Brother Heilemann.” He paused. “Is Lord Bethe involved as well, you think? If he is, you have some serious enemies.”

  Karl drank, savouring the dark taste. “I don’t think he is,” he said. “Stahl always acted as if he was in charge of something, not like a secretary. He may have superiors, but he’s used to giving commands and making strategy. Not the actions of a lackey.”

  “So how are you going to find Herr Stahl? Walk into the chapter-house and ask for an appointment?” Oswald gestured to the pot-boy to bring the wine-jug for a refill. “That’d be hazardous.”

  “I’ll do what I was taught to do,” Karl said. “I’ll wait.”

  “You haven’t struck me as the waiting kind,” Oswald said.

  “And you, Brother Oswald, haven’t struck me as the priestly kind,” Karl said.

  Oswald’s reaction was minute. A man who wasn’t looking for it would have missed it. Karl was looking, and saw the tensing of the muscles around the eyes, and the way a natural hand-movement suddenly became deliberate and conscious.

  “What do you mean?” the older man said. The nonchalance in his voice was, Karl thought, just a little too careful. This was a man who is practiced in deception, perhaps even trained. He waited until the pot-boy had recharged his friend’s cup and gone back to the bar before speaking again.

  “I mean many things,” he said. “Secret missions to the World’s Edge Mountains, knowing secret escape routes through town walls, these are hardly the business of an ordinary priest of Sigmar. And then this afternoon, the shop with no sign was no apothecary, was it? It deals with the students at the colleges of magic, selling them the ingredients and components for spells and research. These—” he patted his pocket “—are alchemist’s glasses, aren’t they? Yet you knew it was there, entered it without fear and addressed the owner as ‘praeparus’. Even he found that remarkable, coming from a priest.”

  “What of it?” Oswald said. He hadn’t touched his wine.

  “Only that there’s little love lost between the priesthood and the wielders of magic, since the elf Teclis revealed to men that the power of spells was derived from the winds of Chaos that blow across the world.”

  Oswald tried a smile. It didn’t work very well. “Can we discuss this somewhere else?”

  Karl shook his head. “We’re safe enough here. Very few words ever leave The Hog’s Head.”

  “But you know that priests cast spells.”

  “Some spells, yes,” Karl said. “But they do it through incantation and faith. I’m a priest’s son, I know the magic of Sigmar and the other gods doesn’t use component ingredients, so I’m curious that you’re so familiar with magic shops. And that reminded me of the inn in Grissenwald, where you doused me with your own piss—”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. You saved my life. But although I’ve seen my father use the same spell, you didn’t cast it as a priest would.” He paused to let his eyes wander the room, checking for observers or listeners, but found none. He said, “Brother Oswald, I believe I am not the only man at this table under a sentence of death.”

  Oswald said nothing. The noise of the rest of the tavern was like a curtain around them, isolating them and granting them anonymity.

  “I would hazard that Oswald isn’t your real name, and you were never ordained,” Karl prompted. “You’ve done a remarkable job of disappearing. I congratulate you. Which magical college were you apprenticed to?”

  Oswald lowered his head, and his thin hair drooped around his face. Karl sat unmoving, watching, sensing he had said enough for now. Something fell to the table: a drop of moisture, then a second dropped into his ignored cup with the f
aintest of splashes. The excitement of entering the witch hunters’ building had gone and Karl’s words had pushed the old man one step too far the other way. Silently, Oswald was crying into his wine.

  Karl waited for him to finish. It took a while. Finally Oswald dug a rag out of one of his sleeves and wiped his face dry and clean with it.

  “I am sorry,” he said. The words sounded choked, and he took a mouthful of wine to clear his throat. “I had—I mean, it’s been… I had almost forgotten that Oswald was not the name my parents gave me. I have grown so accustomed to being a priest that I had almost forgotten I had been anything else.”

  “Which college?” Karl asked again.

  “Gold,” Oswald said. “The lore of metal.”

  “Hence your knowledge of alchemy,” Karl said.

  “Yes. Well, no,” Oswald said. “I was apprenticed to the University College of Nuln and studied battle-magic there until I was sixteen. My tutors thought enough of me to recommend me for a place here in Altdorf. They wanted me to specialise in theories of metallurgic magic, and it’s true I had some skill in that area, but it didn’t interest me.” He paused. Karl didn’t say anything but watched and listened, letting the man tell his own story, looking for breaks, holes or things concealed. So far he hadn’t spotted any.

  “People—well, people who know of these things—think of golden magic as you do, the science of metals and alchemics, and it’s true that dominates the college. But there is another side to it. Just as gold dominates the minds, desires, wills and fates of mankind, so gold magic can do the same, if it is properly channelled. This was what interested me. My tutors indulged me. I learned much. My power grew.

  “But as it grew, I found myself falling victim to the same human failings I was studying—greed, arrogance, a desire for more power and more knowledge. None of these things are rare among wizards, and so they went unremarked. But before long I felt the other side of such things.

  “I was serving with the army, as all acolytes of the Gold College are required to do. We were around Erlach, engaged against a force of Chaos warriors that had emerged from somewhere in the Wasteland, nobody knew where. They had a sorcerer with them, and as the battle raged he and I fought a private war, his magic against mine. It was my first encounter with Chaos in any form. As we pushed incantation and invocation at each other, I suddenly realised that we were using the same forces. And while my understanding of them had more breadth and depth, his was simply clearer. Magical ability came naturally to him, because magic is inherently a thing of Chaos.

  “I had been taught this, of course, but I had only understood it rationally, not with my heart. This time, the first time I had seen Chaos magic used, it hit me like a club in the gut. Afterwards I lay in my tent to regain my strength and I was shaking with terror. I realised I had spent the last few years unknowingly embracing Chaos. Its patterns and its knowledge were in me, through the golden magic I had learned. I am not,” Oswald spread his hands wide, “a strong man. I do not have the powers of self-possession that you do. It was not a question of whether I would fall the first time I felt the temptation of power, ego or gold. I had been tempted and I had fallen, and I was falling still. There was only one thing I could do to save myself from it. I fled that evening.”

  “How long ago was that?” Karl asked.

  “Twenty-five years. Twenty-six this summer,” Oswald said. “But the warrants for renegade magicians never lapse.”

  “Memories fade faster than papers,” Karl said. “There will be few who remember you, and fewer who would recognise you now.”

  Oswald shook his head. “These are wizards. Their minds are trained to remember. But you are right: I felt safe entering the Grand Theogonist’s palace and the witch hunters’ chapter-house because I knew there would be none there who remembered me. You were right about one thing though,” he said, and signalled the pot-boy to bring more wine. “I never was ordained. I follow Sigmar and praise him in my heart, but I am not his priest. Not in the eyes of the church.”

  “Neither is Luthor Huss,” Karl said, “and he’s about to meet Sigmar.”

  Oswald snored all night. As dawn light crept through the window of their attic room, Karl picked up a bundle of loose clothes he had laid out the night before, glanced at his sword but left it where it lay, and noiselessly left the room, heading out into the still-empty streets of the Empire’s capital. He needed to find a place to observe the entrance to the witch hunters’ chapterhouse where he could wait a while—all day if necessary—without being seen.

  The Altdorf chapter-house stood to one side of the cathedral square at the centre of the city, the simplicity and cleanliness of its stark white architecture in contrast to the spiked granite grandeur of the cathedral of Sigmar that it overlooked. From the front it did not appear much larger than some of the courts, Imperial offices and regimental headquarters that shared the frontage of the square, but it stretched far back, its rear stretching into two wings in a T-shape like the warhammer of the god whose name it bore.

  Its main entrance gave onto Hauptstrasse, one of the streets that radiated away from the square to span the city like the spokes of a wheel. At one side a much smaller doorway was set in the wall of a narrower street to one side, and an alleyway around the back of the building led, via a brick passage, to the servants’ entrance. The trick, Karl thought, would be to find a place where he could observe the comings and goings through the main entrance, and ideally the end of the side-street too, and yet not be spotted doing so.

  He ran through options: hire a room in a house overlooking the entrance; buy a street-trader or costermonger’s barrow and make his pitch nearby; organise a system of shifts between himself and Oswald, each using the time they were not on duty to don a new disguise; pay street-urchins to do the watching for him. He rejected them all for taking too long, costing too much, being unreliable or too risky. It was an old truism, but the best place to hide was often in plain sight.

  He slipped down the side-street and into the deserted alley of the servants’ entrance, where he slipped off his jerkin and exchanged it for one he had bought for a few coppers yesterday, ragged and dirty. His trousers were still muddy from the road. A leather cap kept his unruly hair under control. His boots were military, but there was no time to do anything about that.

  He bundled the clothes into his pack and limped out of the alley a changed man: older, hunched, weaker and more nervous, wearing the silvered glasses that he had bought yesterday. One of his throwing-knives was tucked unobtrusively in the sleeve of his left arm. He made his way slowly down the street, to a place about twenty yards beyond its entrance. From here he could see the street and the doorway. He laid down his pack, sat on it, and spread a red handkerchief on the ground.

  “Alms!” he cried to the few passers-by. His voice was cracked, with the trace of a western accent. “Alms for a soldier blinded fighting for the Empire!”

  He sat there all day, and made eight shillings. The first hour was quite interesting, watching Altdorf as the city woke up and stretched, coming alive for the new day. The next two were boring. After that the waiting became contemplative, meditative, and the interruptions—insults from citizens, threats from other beggars claiming he was on their pitch, the rare tinkle of coppers dropped onto his kerchief—as regular, temporary and ignorable as waves breaking over rocks. He sat and thought.

  His night had not been restful. Oswald’s snoring had distracted his thoughts, and under its bandage his damned mouth had gnashed and gnawed against its gag, as if it had something urgent to say. The ash was almost bitten through and he would need to find a replacement soon. Perhaps iron. It could try gnawing its way through that. Perhaps it would break its teeth. He had no interest in anything it might have to tell him.

  So Oswald was a former wizard of the Golden College, afraid of his own powers, and a wanted criminal. Coming to Altdorf made him a doubly brave man, or possibly foolhardy. Karl thought back to his days on the crusade, and his worrie
s about letting his safety depend on anyone with a death-wish or on a quest for martyrdom. More importantly, were his motives as clear as he made them out? Was it possible he was working for anyone apart from himself or Luthor Huss? Perhaps even the Purple Hand. He had seemed to be well informed about them, and a former wizard had no business knowing the workings of Chaos cults.

  Witch hunters came and went. A few of them looked familiar. At around ten in the morning he saw Brother Karin come down Hauptstrasse and enter the building, the silver buckles on her uniform glittering with the clay’s clear sunlight. The last time he had seen her, the fires of a burning army camp had been reflected in her eyes. She did not even notice him, but went straight in. He could sense she had changed, but her strength of character was not just undimmed, but unleashed. No more reflected glory for her. If he was to survive and bring her to justice—whether Imperial or Sigmar’s own—it was crucial that he always stayed one jump ahead of her and her witch hunters.

  Morning slipped into midday, and midday stretched into afternoon. A sausage-vendor came past and Karl sacrificed two of the shillings on his cloth in exchange for a schnitzel wrapped in a piece of thick bread. Every so often he took a bite at it and chewed thoughtfully. Passers-by seemed to object to seeing a beggar eat, and for a while the coppers stopped dropping.

  The question, he asked himself, was what Huss was going to do if he located Sigmar. A lot depended on whether the reborn god was a child or a man. Would Huss want to use him as a weapon against the organised church, or against the forces of Chaos in the north? If the latter, how could he convince the Emperor and the Grand Theogonist to take him seriously?