by David Guymer
‘Go?’
‘The Reiksmarshal is conducting a public rally at Wilhelmplatz this morning. Every guttersnipe in the altstadt knows there’s a pfennig in it for anyone who brings word of his appearances. Kurt Helborg can’t pass the gates of the castle without me hearing of it.’ Otto snatched the letter from Felix’s hand and waved it in the air. ‘I am going to show him this and demand his news of the Kislev Verge.’
Felix sighed. What with Mannfred von Carstein and his brood said to have escaped the blockade of Sylvania, with Chaos on the march and rumours of strife in every human realm but the very heartlands of the Empire, Felix suspected the Reiksmarshal had enough on his plate without caring to concern himself with one missing merchant. He stood up all the same. Family, when it came down to it, was all he had left now. ‘I don’t know whether he’ll be able to tell us much.’
Otto scoffed, his old self again. ‘Jaeger and Sons is the main provisioner of wood and cereal to the entire front. If we stopped today then tomorrow there would not be a full belly in Ostermark. Perhaps I will remind the Reiksmarshal of that too when I see him.’
‘Am I to stand behind you and look menacing?’ said Felix.
‘Nothing so terrible, Felix. Have you been working for the Reiksmarshal or not?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Felix, mindful of the parchments scattered all over the floor. ‘No more than every sword, scribe, and battle mage in the Empire. I’ve never even met him in person.’ He shrugged. ‘Considering my misspent youth, I think that’s for the best.’
‘Just get changed,’ said Otto, already leading Kat away by the arm. ‘And wash yourself, would you? You smell like a sewer.’
The chill in the courtyard was biting. The sky was the colour of washed slate and the wind blew dead leaves over the walls and into the garden of the townhouse. A young girl with boyish blonde hair shivered in a woollen smock as she raked them up from around the feet of the servants that bustled around Otto’s best coach. They were women mostly, young and nervous-looking, supervised by a few of Otto’s greyer hands. Like so many of Altdorf’s young men, the bulk of Otto’s household had already gone to war.
The rake’s iron teeth rattled across the flagstones.
Not a good day to be abroad, Felix thought, only then to smile sourly at the irony. Just minutes earlier he had been craving the wilds of Kislev. It wasn’t exactly Estalia at this time of year. Wondering what was keeping Otto, Felix stamped his feet on the cobbles and wrapped himself deeper into his cloak. It was a deep blue and, though very fine, far too heavy for his own tastes. It felt like walking around with a child perpetually tugging on the back of his shirt. It was warm though, he could not deny, lined with mink, and felt like being embraced by a cushion.
With nothing much else to do while the hostlers applied the final buff to the coach’s brass finishings and replaced the horse’s nosebags with halter and bridle, Felix watched the girl as she obliviously raked leaves. He tried to conjure in her place an image of the lad that had done this job before her: black hair for blonde, halberd in place of a rake, the rich cream of Reikland instead of drab homespun. His mind rebelled. It was the mental equivalent of imposing a death’s head mask over the poor girl’s face. How many boys like that had signed up and gone north because of him? And for what? War and plague, the march of the dead, rumours of a man claiming to be the Herald of Sigmar? If Otto heard half of the rumour that Felix had then he would be a lot more worried about young Gustav than he was already pretending not to be.
‘No, no, no, that’s not good enough. I ordered twenty barrels. For twelve it is not even worth the haulage all the way to Hergig.’ Otto limped from the house accompanied by his butler, Fritz, and a gaggle of expensively fripperied young men that seemed to all be competing to jump on Otto’s shadow. ‘You tell Muller I expect the rest of the consignment by tomorrow morning.’ He signed a document that was pushed in front of him without reading it. ‘Good. See that the count receives a half-ton more grain on top of that.’
‘Charity, Otto?’ said Felix.
‘Business,’ Otto replied, shooing his assistants with an exhausted wave. Over the last twelve months Otto had visited every town west of the Talabec and even when at home he was up at all hours receiving agents, clients, suppliers and the middlemen of the lot. Forget great destinies, mystic leach from artefacts of power and the changing touch of Chaos, to Felix it was abundantly obvious why the penniless rogue remained hale while the merchant grew fat, white-haired and frail. ‘There is money in war, but the real profit is in rebuilding. It is crucial that Jaeger and Sons be in the best position to benefit from our patriotism when the war is won.’
‘You think it will be?’
‘Father built the Ostermark business from the ashes of the last Chaos incursion, Felix. Every few decades, it seems, they come, and every time they are sent running back. This time will be no different.’
Felix wasn’t sure it was that simple, but decided to keep his mouth shut. Nobody liked a doomsayer and he should know, he had argued with enough of them over the years. All he knew was that this time it felt different. Perhaps he’d just got old enough that he had become one of those old men that sat in taverns nursing their favourite stein and complaining that the winters had grown colder.
Taking Felix’s silence as agreement and – accepting his knowledge of such things – trusting it, Otto grinned. His teeth were black from too much Lustrian sugar in his wine. One hand gripping his cane, he snapped his fingers until his butler handed him a large roll of parchment. From the plaster dust on the back and the splotches in the corners, it looked as though it had been pulled from a wall. ‘I wanted to show this to you before we left. Look.’ With Fritz’s help, he unfurled it.
Felix’s heart sank. It was a poster of the type commonly found nailed to village posts or to the walls at crossroads. As few men in the Empire were able to read, it was dominated by a huge illustration. It showed a gleaming phalanx of halberdiers marching towards a vast wall in the distance. The depiction of the wall was perhaps the most striking thing. It was drawn so as to appear mountainous, with a halo of power around its summit. Artistic licence perhaps, but Felix’s own conversations with Max suggested more truth than fiction. The image was surrounded by small print, beneath the bold header: ‘Victory in the North’.
A little premature, Felix thought, but Otto was tapping his finger on the second of two signatures at the bottom; the one that came immediately below Kurt Helborg’s. Felix sighed. When Otto had first had Felix’s journals published without his knowledge, the last place he would have expected the damned things to end up was in the lap of Reiksmarshal Kurt Helborg. Apparently the name of the Saviour of Nuln carried a helpful romance amongst the pfennig dreadful-reading peasantry.
It said Felix Jaeger.
‘The servants have been collecting them,’ said Otto, blind to Felix’s darkening expression. ‘Not very civic of them, I realise, but I doubt the city will miss just one.’
‘I’d say not,’ said Felix sourly. ‘I sometimes think that they are using them to buttress the walls in case of a siege.’
‘Don’t be prickly, Felix. Keeping the young men of Reikland up for the fight is valuable work, and certainly worth more to Jaeger and Sons than the paltry sum they pay you to do it.’ He tapped his finger on Felix’s signature again, then gave Fritz the nod to furl the poster up and take it away. ‘That’s the Jaeger name on every street corner and barracks of the Empire. That’s what’s paying your way in my house, Felix, and maintaining Katerina’s donations to the Shallyan hospice.’
Feigning numb toes, Felix stamped his feet and turned his back. He closed his eyes and mumbled his own imprecation to the goddess of peace and mercy. He didn’t want another argument about how much money Kat was costing his brother and he certainly didn’t want to listen to him enthuse about the number of men that Felix had coaxed to war.
The heavy scuff of ill-
worn leather boots made him look up. A pair of big men exited the servant’s quarters under the screening maple trees and the tangle of ivy and started across the yard towards the coach. Both men were dressed in long black coats and gloves with cudgels buckled at their hips. The first was a head taller even than Felix, broad shouldered and with a neck like a cannonball. The second man was older, bald-headed and scarred, his muscular upper body counterbalanced by a gut that strained against his gentlemanly waistband. Felix knew professional muscle when he saw it. These were dangerous times for a merchant to be travelling, even within the borders of Reikland which was as yet relatively untouched by war. Why, only recently, rampaging flagellants had put the torch to half of Nuln, the offices of Jaeger and Sons and Otto’s own home included. Felix sighed.
That city had no luck.
Schraeder, the senior coachman, directed his companion up to the box as he put on a tall black hat. The man tugged on the rim of his hat and opened the passenger door. Felix was in no way reassured by the show of deference. That hat and coat could not have been more intimidating on a troll.
‘Ready to leave when you are, sir.’
Three
Encounter in Wilhelmplatz
The steam of Felix and Otto’s breath filled the closed passenger compartment as the coach clattered over the cobbles of Befehlshaber Avenue. Suppressing a shiver, Felix took a handful of cloak to smear condensation from the glass window.
A mist clung to the ground and there were few people about at this hour except beggars and refugees from the south, homeless and frozen and with nowhere else to go. Face to the cold glass, Felix watched a black coach pull out and follow them a way before disappearing into the fog. Felix shifted his attention to the colourful rank of daub and wattle shopfronts and town houses that dragged by. Behind them lay Karl Franz Park, and the bordering trees raked the rooftop shingles. Autumn had burnished their leaves a dazzling copper. Each one shone in the low sun like a ritual blade as the wind willed them again and again to cut. Their cultist-robe rustle drowned out the dire portents of the street-corner doom-mongers and the weeping of the foreign vagrants that clung like mould to the roadside. Despair was on the air, and whether native Altdorfer or amongst the influx fleeing the wars in Tilea, Estalia, and Bretonnia, the taste of it was the same
Already, men were calling these the End Times.
It was going to be a hard winter. Felix’s natural cynicism reminded him that the priests of Ulric and Taal and Manann made similar pronouncements every year in the hope of extorting a few more pfennigs from those praying for a short snap and a warmer spring. This time though, Felix believed them. The ratcatchers were up to their ankles in vermin, the geese had fled the Reik early for their southern roosts, and the chill had come early. The signs were clear, but only the most dyed in the wool curmudgeons were complaining about it. Felix had firsthand experience of how powerful an ally the Kislevite winter could be, but somehow Felix doubted that this one would bring anything more than a respite.
If the rumours were to be believed, that Praag and even the proud Gospodar capital, Kislev City itself, had already fallen, then the northmen had all the shelter they needed to gather their strength until spring. Felix could not help a shiver of dread, some premonition of horror. Even the terrible Asavar Kul himself, in the great incursion two centuries past, had failed to broach the city of Kislev. That it had fallen now without most men of the Empire even realising that it had come under attack was deeply disturbing. Doubly so as it had been achieved without a single substantiated report of Archaon, Asavar Kul’s infernal heir apparent, taking to the field. Recalling the many ill-fated attempts he had made to confront the so-called Everchosen of Chaos during his career as Gotrek’s henchman surprised him with a smile. Then he sighed, shook his head, and resumed to staring out the window. The rattling of the coach over the cobbles bumped his head against the glass. He was an idiot.
There really was nothing to commend those days.
Nothing at all.
‘Pfennig for your thoughts,’ said Otto. His heavy cheeks were flushed with cold and every so often he stamped his feet on the boards and rubbed his arms with mittened hands.
Both men swayed to the right as the coach took a left turn.
‘Uncharacteristically generous of you,’ Felix replied drily.
A dull roar from the direction of Wilhelmplatz rose slowly over the dry whisper of the trees. It sounded like the cries of the beastman hordes at the walls of Praag and seemed oddly fitting to his memories. Felix watched his breath re-steam the window. Then his eyes narrowed. Using the hem of his cloak, he again wiped it clear and looked back the way they had travelled.
The black coach was still with them, about a dozen lengths behind. The two horses pulling were winter white and long-haired, trotting through mist up to their shaggy fetlocks. A pair of pennons fluttered from the rear. They depicted a white bear on a frozen field. The motif was itchingly familiar, but Felix could not quite place it. His hand moved to his lap, but the reassuring touch of Karaghul was not there.
Merchant gentlemen, he had learned, do not carry swords.
He was about to mention the coach to Otto, but his brother had reclined into the leather-backed seat and closed his eyes. Felix could not tell whether or not he was asleep: his lips were moving, but he might equally have been preparing his speech for the Reiksmarshal as dreaming.
Felix looked back. But the coach was gone.
The Wilhelmplatz rocked to the roar of the hundreds of peasants crowded in between the gates of the Imperial palace and the surrounding tenements. Women in wool dresses and winter shawls screamed curses. Old men hoisted orphaned grandchildren onto their shoulders that they might share the vitriol being directed towards the mutants being paraded before them. Upon a raised wooden platform surrounded by a double rank of halberdiers, a pack of mutants closed in on a single knight of the Reiksguard. His full silver-white plate shimmered with cold. The scarlet jupon that overlay it ruffled in rhythm to his footwork, the rampant griffon of the house of Wilhelm rending the air with claws of gold thread. The man had on an open bascinet, his face tanned, and wore a trimmed black beard and a broad smile. The pitch of the mob grew fevered as the knight danced from a mutant’s clutches, swung his sword in a bravura flourish, and rounded on a second with a cry.
‘Not exactly von Diehl, is it?’ Felix yelled, citing the great playwright as the halberdiers ushered another trio of ‘mutants’ onto the stage, stuffed limbs swinging from bloated costumes as they walked. There was a gathered hiss as one flailing limb forced the knight to duck, then a roar when he came up grinning, saluted the crowd and set about the poor actor with the flat of his blade. The crowd jeered as the mutant stepped on the oversized foot of its own costume and crashed onto the stage. The knight planted one foot on the body, raising one clenched fist in triumph. On cue, the square erupted with laughter and mocking cheers, the high stone walls of the Imperial palace providing a thunderous acoustic return.
All eyes were on the tableau being enacted on stage, but Felix felt certain he was being watched and it was making him nervous. Bowmen liveried in the red and blue of Altdorf kept watch from the palace’s sprawling ramparts while swordsmen in feathered sallets and padded hauberks patrolled the perimeter of the heaving square. The approaches were blocked by units of halberdiers, large weapons gleaming, as the soldiers searched carriages and held up foot traffic. Spilling out of the White Lady tavern just out of the square along Downfeather Alley, a group of drunken adolescents hurled abuse at the picket of halberdiers. The soldiers ignored it, but Felix saw the bowmen in the nearby windows shifting their aim and he did not doubt that there would be plain-clothes Kaiserjaeger following those boys home after the rally, probably with conscription papers handily pre-signed by the Reiksmarshal himself.
‘You realise I’m still technically a wanted felon,’ said Felix, eyeing the nearest unit of swordsmen warily.
‘Nobody cares, Felix,’ Otto replied, yelling directly into Felix’s ear.
Felix gave a tight smile. He did often wonder if his current employers had the faintest idea that he had been dodging Imperial justice for the past two decades following his role in the Window Tax riots. Probably not. Most of the officers in Wilhelmplatz today, up to and including the Reiksguard on the stage, looked like they would not even have been born when Felix had been breaking windows and generally making a nuisance of himself. Simpler times, he thought, suddenly feeling very old indeed. There was a reason that nobody remembered the Window Tax riots any more.
Like Felix himself, they were simply not that important.
‘Pay attention now, Felix.’ Otto’s voice was water thin under the oceanic roar of the crowd. Schraeder and the even larger coachman stood either side of him, and the peasants wisely gave them a wide berth. ‘I’m going to catch the Reiksmarshal before he takes the stage himself. You stay here and keep an eye out.’
‘For what?’ Felix called back, but Otto and his men were already off. Felix swore, the prickling scrutiny on the nape of his neck growing ever so slightly more urgent now that they were gone.
A tumultuous cheer filled the square and Felix’s attention was drawn along with everyone else’s to the stage. The knight had just tripped one of the mutants and pushed him into his companion, causing them both to roll off the stage and land on top of each other in a heap. Only the surrounding box of halberdiers held the baying mob back. They beat at their breasts and screamed slogans into the soldiers’ faces. With a sick realisation, Felix recognised the ones that he had written himself. Some kind of collective madness had them. Surely even the dimmest villein knew that those mutants were just players in padded costumes.
Felix scanned the crowd. Something about it all made his skin crawl, reminding him of the summers spent at the family logging camps in the Drakwald. He had used to watch the forest from the house as he watched these men now, convinced utterly that something hidden lurked there.