Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  “Twelve hours,” he said, “and all you’ve got for me is an empty warehouse and a dead girl.”

  “An Elector’s mistress. That’s got to be worth something,” Grenner said.

  Hoffmann shook his head. “She can’t tell us what’s going on, who these people are or where they’ll strike next. So who’s behind this?”

  “Ulrican extremists,” Johansen said.

  “Bretonnians,” Grenner said.

  Hoffmann turned his stare to them. “Make your minds up,” he said. “The city’s in uproar, every noble is screaming for protection, we’ve got a report of skaven in the sewers, and on top of it another woman’s disappeared. The last thing I need is you two following a wrong lead.” He paused. “You do have more leads?”

  The agents exchanged a tired look. “Can you send someone to the city records office, to find out who owns that warehouse?” Grenner asked.

  “And the customs records, to see if there’s anything on who brought the barrels to the city,” Johansen said.

  “Who do you suggest I send?” Hoffmann asked. “There isn’t anyone else. Get the records clerks to do it.”

  “You think there’ll be any records clerks there on Hexensnacht?”

  “Then you do it. I’ve got my hands full.” Hoffmann turned back to the window. “We got the explosion report from Alchemics,” he said. “Inconclusive. The sulphur in the gunpowder was Tilean, the saltpeter was gathered near Wolfenburg and the charcoal could be from anywhere. The ingredient ratio suggests a Middenheim-trained alchemist, but that means nothing.”

  “Couldn’t you send someone from Alchemics to the records office?” Johansen asked.

  Hoffmann snorted. “Nobody’s going to do your book-work for you. And don’t dare fall asleep over them, or I’ll have your guts for garters. Go on, get out.”

  The street outside the Palisades was quiet. A cat padded silently down the gutter. Grenner watched it go, yawned and flexed stiff muscles.

  “If we’re going to the records office,” he said, “can we go by Weberstrasse?”

  “What’s in Weberstrasse?”

  “My tailor.”

  “You and your clothes, I swear—” Johansen said, but Grenner wasn’t listening. Movement had caught his eye: a laden cart moving past the end of the street. He ran after it.

  He was right: it was the Bretonnians cart, still piled high with barrels. The short man was staring straight ahead, as if deep in thought. Grenner overtook him and stood in the road, hand raised.

  “Stop,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  The Bretonnian reined in his horse. “Ah, m’sieur,” he said. “You have come to buy some wine? Ze aftertaste of cinnamon, she has lingered on your tongue…”

  “Where are you going?”

  The wineseller shrugged. “The market is finished. I go to find some taverns, maybe zey buy.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I put my cart in an alley, I sleep zere.” The little man raised his hands in supplication. “M’sieur, I have no money. I am—”

  “You’re under arrest. I want you off the streets.” The Bretonnian turned white. He grabbed for his whip and swiped it across the horse’s rump. It started forward, towards Grenner, who ducked sideways and groped in his jerkin for a throwing-knife. A hand landed on his arm, restraining him. He turned. It was Johansen.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m arresting this man.” The cart was rattling away behind him. “It’s not him.”

  “How do you know?” Grenner demanded, turning to give chase. Johansen gripped harder. “It’s not him. It’s Ulrican extremists, trying to kill their Elector.”

  “I think he’s working with them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” The cart was gaining speed. “Look, he’s up to something or he wouldn’t be running.”

  “Not our problem,” Johansen said. “Electors in peril, the safety of the Empire to protect, that’s us, remember? Leave him for your friends in the Watch. Besides,” he added, “if I was stopped by someone looking like you, I’d run too.”

  “What do you mean?” Grenner ran a hand through his blond hair.

  “You’re unkempt. Not to mention unshaved, haggard and smelling of last night’s beer.”

  “Visiting my tailor would let me—”

  Johansen laughed, a short humourless bark. “Forget it. We’ve got records to check.”

  They went to three breweries, to ask about beer deliveries to the Seven Stars. Nobody knew about anything unusual.

  They knocked on the doors of the houses around the remains of the Seven Stars to see if anyone had been awake before the explosion, or had heard or seen anything. Nobody had.

  They spoke to a couple of winesellers about the Seven Stars, but the inn had only taken small casks. Grenner asked about a Bretonnian wineseller dying of plague four months ago, but they didn’t know of anyone. Grenner looked at Johansen significantly. Johansen raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  They walked through the Konigplatz. The market-stalls had closed up early for the day, clearing the space for the evening’s celebrations. There was no sign of the stoneworkers who had been there earlier.

  They went to Grenner’s tailor, who fitted his new clothes and wanted to know how the search for the missing women was going. Even wearing a new shirt and stylish short-cloak, Grenner still looked unkempt and sleepless.

  After several hours, after putting it off for as long as possible, they went to the city records office, in the basement of the council-hall. There was one clerk on duty, but after he showed them the section of leatherbound warehouse and tax records that they needed, he excused himself and they didn’t see him again.

  “Typical work-shy civil servant,” Johansen said.

  “Not very civil either,” Grenner observed.

  The books were cold, wide, dry and dusty. Their parchment pages were filled with tightly written records of who owned everything in Altdorf, who had sold it to them, and what percentage of the sale the tax collectors had taken. It was slow, tedious work.

  Johansen yawned and picked up the fifth ledger in the pile beside him. It was hard to stay awake: the cold air and the candlelight were soporific, and outside the narrow window daylight had fled hours ago. Across the table, Grenner echoed his yawn.

  “We’re doing this the wrong way,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’re looking for where they’ve been. We should be working out where they’re going. Who they’re going to target next.”

  “Oh yeah?” Johansen raised a weary eyebrow. “How do we do that, a crystal ball? You know what Hoffmann thinks about that scryer the Watch uses.”

  Grenner passed a hand over his face, trying to wipe tiredness away. “It was just an idea.”

  Footsteps weaved through the racks of records towards them. Johansen raised his head to look. It was Alexis, the prince’s bodyguard.

  “Sigmar’s teeth, you two are hard men to track down,” he said.

  Johansen thought of a snappy response, but swallowed it. It was too late and he was too tired. “What’s this about?”

  Alexis leaned on the edge of the table. “Anastasia.”

  “You know we found her body?” Grenner said.

  Alexis nodded. “We heard.” He paused. “The prince lied to you. He sends apologies but he was trying to protect her.”

  Johansen was suddenly very alert. Across the table, Grenner pushed his chair back.

  “What was the lie?” he asked.

  “His wife wasn’t ill. He was going to stay the night at the Seven Stars, but Anastasia told him he was in danger and he should leave.”

  “So she was the person the cellarman heard leaving a few minutes later,” Grenner said. Alexis nodded.

  Johansen absorbed the information, fitting it together. “She wasn’t an innocent,” he said, “she knew what the Ulricans’ plan was. But she couldn’t go through with it. She may even have lit th
e fuse, knowing the prince had left. And they killed her for that.” He looked up at Alexis. “When you learned the prince was seeing Anastasia you checked her background, had her followed, right?”

  The bodyguard nodded. “We didn’t find any links to known troublemakers.”

  “What other northerners did she meet regularly? Friends? Associates?”

  “Her brother’s in the city.”

  “What does he do?” Grenner asked.

  “He’s a stonemason.”

  Johansen exhaled sharply. “Grenner,” he said, “remember I said the dead girl reminded me of someone?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The stoneworkers’ foreman in the Konigplatz this morning.”

  Grenner stared at him, horror across his face. No words were needed. They sprinted from the records room, out of the council building, heading towards the Konigplatz.

  It was later than they had realised and the darkened streets were thronged with revellers. Johansen let Grenner take the lead, following the former Watch sergeant move through narrow alleys and through short-cuts, avoiding the crowds. After five years in Altdorf he still couldn’t understand why people celebrated Hexensnacht, the night of witches. Back home in the south his family would be around the fire tonight, doors locked and windows shuttered. Bad things happened on Hexensnacht.

  Above them the two moons sat, one thin and one fat in a sky that flashed with bursts from fireworks, their explosions echoing off the buildings. It was not a good omen. As he ran, Johansen clenched his fists and made a silent prayer to Sigmar that he was wrong.

  They burst into the Konigplatz. The square was a sea of people and movement, lit by flickering braziers on poles. Johansen leaped onto a market-barrow to scan the crowd.

  “The statues,” he shouted to Grenner over the hubbub, and began pushing his way to where he had seen the work-crew. They had been digging a trench, he recalled, deep enough for several barrels.

  A knot of merrymaking students blocked his way. “Clear a path! Imperial officers!” he bellowed, shoving through them. Ahead a red-haired figure turned sharply, slapped someone on the shoulder and raced away through the crowd, towards the base of the statue of Sigmar. Johansen felt a rising dread, and gave chase. They’d spent the day assuming an Elector was in danger. They hadn’t thought about symbols of the Empire.

  If the Ulricans had buried gunpowder, he thought, there would be a way of lighting it, some kind of fuse. As if on cue a firework went off behind him, throwing colours over the crowd. The red-headed man ducked between the bases of the outermost statues. It was darker in there and the crowd was thinner. Johansen saw Grenner to his left and gestured towards the maze of stonework. Grenner nodded. That was all the plan they needed: they knew how each other worked.

  Johansen drew his hand-crossbow from its holster and stepped into the shadows, heading for the statue of Sigmar. He surprised an entwined couple between the feet of the Empress Magritta, and sent a black-lotus peddler scurrying away from under Ludwig the Fat. Around the plinth of Leopold I, he could see where the Ulricans had been working that morning. Above, Sigmar’s mighty hammer eclipsed the moons, and in its shadow he could see the red-haired man kneeling on freshly laid paving-stones, crouched over something. A spark. It was a tinderbox.

  Johansen knew he was out of time. He rushed forward, his crossbow raised, shouting, “Drop it!”

  The man didn’t turn as he’d hoped, but crouched lower, blowing on something that glowed. Johansen charged in, firing as he ran. The bolt hit the Ulrican in the arm and the tinderbox went flying. The man twisted, his face maddened with rage, and Johansen kicked him in the teeth. He went backwards, his skull hitting the base of the statue with a crack.

  Johansen’s eyes searched the ground. A white cord lay between two flagstones, one end raised and singed. He grabbed it, pulling it with both hands. It came free, about three feet of fuse. He dangled it in front of the man’s eyes.

  “Happy Hexensnacht,” he said.

  The man grinned through broken teeth and raised something in one hand, smashing it down onto the stones. Shards of clay splintered and a liquid spread, covering the ground, seeping between the flagstones into the soil below. Johansen punched the Ulrican in the side of the head, then dipped a finger and smelled it. Oil.

  “Johansen!” Grenner yelled and he jerked his head up. A man was running out of the shadows, carrying a torch. It was the man the Ulrican had slapped in the crowd. A back-up. From the other direction Grenner’s throwing knife spun and sunk into the new man’s chest, a second into his eye. He fell. The torch went up, curving a bright path towards Johansen.

  He jumped to catch it, and his foot slipped on the oil. It bounced through his hands and hit the flagstones. The oil burst into flames. He stared for an instant. “Run!” Grenner was bellowing. “Run!”

  He ran, roaring warnings, grabbing people and pushing them ahead of him. As he ran past the Empress and out into the crowd, he thought he might be safe.

  Then the world picked him up and flung him across the square, filling his senses with bright loud disaster. He ducked and rolled, bruised and breathless, clambering back onto his feet, running through the panicked, screaming crowd to get away. There was a second explosion. People were knocking each other down, trampling over bodies, desperate to get away.

  The statues were falling like trees in a gale, crashing into each other. Stone limbs dropped, torsos cracked, heads fell and exploded. Leopold collapsed into the Empress Magritta, her hollow bronze frame booming like a bell across the stampede in the square. She crumpled down into the crowd, crushing—Johansen didn’t want to think how many people. He could see bodies impaled on the spikes of her crown. He felt sick.

  Above the mayhem, the mighty figure of Sigmar stood firm, warhammer raised against the sky, the symbol of the Empire. Johansen, swept away by the crowd, tried to keep his eyes on it. Could it have survived the blast? Would it stand? Then he saw the first crack appear in its right leg. Pieces of stone fell. The crack grew. The leg shattered. The stone warhammer moved against the sky, slowly but unstoppably.

  Johansen watched, not caring about the people streaming and screaming past him, as the first emperor fell from his plinth like a god falling from the heavens, smashing its hundred-foot length across the flagstones and crowds of the Konigplatz, splintering into uncountable pieces. The head of the warhammer, ten feet across and solid granite, bounced once, rolled and crashed into the Black Goat Inn. Beams fell, tiles cascaded off the roof into the crowd below, and part of the front wall collapsed.

  Johansen felt a hand grip his forearm and turned to see Grenner. His partner’s face was gaunt and covered in dust, his clothes torn, his face bleeding where it had been cut by flying stones. They stared at each other and at the devastation around them. Grenner raised an arm and pointed at the wreckage of the inn.

  “You know,” he shouted above the tumult and chaos, “that’s hurt your chances of getting a snog tonight.”

  Johansen almost hit him. Instead after a second he said, “Give me your cloak.” Grenner passed it and Johansen tore it into strips. Together they knelt and began bandaging the wounded.

  * * *

  “Get some sleep,” Hoffmann said.

  It was four hours later. Altdorf was in shock. The Konigplatz lay in chaos, corpses still strewn amidst the rubble of two thousand years of history, everything covered with a layer of powdered stone, made ghostly by the flames of a hundred torches, lighting the rescuers’ efforts to find more wounded. The temples and hospices were full, and the cold stone slabs in the temples of Morr too. Messengers had already ridden out from the city to carry the news across the Empire, like a rock dropped in a frozen pond, the news fracturing and rippling out across the land.

  That, Johansen thought, was what the Ulricans had wanted, what they were prepared to give their lives to achieve. In the north of the Empire, in Ostland and beyond, the fall of Sigmar would be a rallying-cry. Come the spring, there might even be civil war.


  He sat in Hoffmann’s office, drinking hot spiced wine, Grenner beside him. The three had spent the night lifting rocks, carrying bodies and comforting the wounded and the grieving until they were utterly exhausted. Logically, he thought, they should have been searching for the other Ulricans. But this was more important.

  “Sorry we didn’t stop them, sir,” he said for the fifth time. Across the room, Hoffmann shook his head. The leather of his chair creaked with the movement.

  “Not your fault. You did everything you could. We didn’t have the manpower, it was as simple as that.” He looked contemplative. “Get some sleep.”

  “Shouldn’t we find the rest of them, sir?”

  “They’re probably miles outside the city by now,” Hoffmann said, “heading north. But don’t forget the two of you are on duty at seven bells.”

  “You’re bloody joking,” Grenner blurted out.

  “I’ll overlook that insolence, Grenner, given the circumstances. Hexenstag dawn: the Emperor will be at the cathedral service for the blessing of the new year. We attend him. Plain clothes, not uniform. And shave, for Sigmar’s sake.”

  “Won’t it be cancelled?” Grenner asked. “Under the circumstances?”

  Hoffmann shook his head. “The Emperor’s determined to show his people that Sigmar’s Empire and its faith are still strong—and to mourn the dead as well. He’s adamant. He’s instructed all the Electors in Altdorf to be there too.”

  “Oh Sigmar,” Johansen said quietly.

  “What, Johansen?” Hoffmann asked.

  “Don’t you see?” His mind was exhausted; perhaps that was how he could understand the Ulrican fanatics, the way they thought, the depths of their madness and the extremes they’d go to. He remembered the eyes of the red-haired mason, a man who knew he was going to die and didn’t care. “It’s not over. The cathedral with the Emperor and the Electors, all the nobility of Altdorf… that’s the next target. They’re not settling for sending a signal, they want to start the war. Today.”