[Empire Army 01] - Reiksguard

by Richard Williams - (ebook by Undead)

  “Here.” His father pulled Heinrich up into a small walled courtyard amongst the tenements. “We shall spend the rest of the night here.”

  He dismounted, tied the horse up and locked the gates behind them.

  “And what will we do tomorrow?” Delmar asked, following his father into the house.

  “Tomorrow,” his father said, walking down the steps into the cellar, “we take you back home. Where you belong.”

  “Home?” Delmar said. “I can’t just go home. I’ve sworn to the order, they need me.”

  “Need you? Need you more than your family?” his father replied. He looked at Delmar. “Oh, I understand now. You thought the order was waiting, expectant, for you to arrive at their door. That they would laud you and praise you, because you were special? That they would give you some magic sword and dispatch you to Middenheim, where you would stand against the Chaotic horde beside Helborg and Karl Franz and that they would look to you to save the city? You live in a fantasy, Delmar. No, if you stayed you would serve and you would die and be little more than a footnote. Just as I was. You do not choose your fate in the Reiksguard, it is chosen for you.”

  Delmar looked down, confused. Yes, he had dreams, what young man did not? But there were dreams, and there was duty. He looked back up at his father.

  “If service is all the order can offer me, then it is all I require. And the only sword they gave me, Father,” Delmar reached back and drew his blade, “is yours.”

  “The only sword that is mine, Delmar, is the one I carry within me.” His father held up his bloodied hand and, with a stroke of shadow, his hand and forearm flattened and discoloured, transforming into a bloodied blade. He drew a spiral in the air with its point and, wherever it touched, it leeched the colour from the world.

  “You see, Delmar, the Reiksguard is nothing. Your oaths to them are nothing. Give them up and come home with me.”

  “No,” Delmar said. His father’s sword-arm drew a circle at Delmar’s feet and the ground burst into a grey flame.

  “Do not disappoint me again,” his father ordered. He gestured again and Delmar’s sword melted through his hands.

  “No!” Delmar bellowed, and that sharp smell once more burst in his sinuses.

  The grey glow dimmed around the illusionist and a sergeant opened the cover from around the lantern. Verrakker checked on Delmar, but the novice had already fallen back into a natural sleep.

  “We are finished here,” Verrakker announced. “Go and prepare the next.” He nodded at the sergeant, who ushered the illusionist out of the cell.

  One other figure remained. A woman. A crone, doubled over. She hobbled over to the bed where Delmar lay.

  “If,” the crone began, “my last maternal feeling had not already been burnt from me, I might almost feel sorry for the boy.”

  Verrakker did not reply. He did not enjoy this testing, but he knew better than anyone how necessary it was. He had overheard the novices and their talk; they had thought the test of the spirit would be one of simple courage. To face a monster, perhaps. They had had little idea of what the enemies of the Empire were capable of. The dark mages and daemons that whispered in a man’s mind to plague them with their most personal terrors, or tempt them with corrupting dreams of glory. Too many strong men had been lost, not to fear, but to pride. The belief that they were greater than their oaths, that their ambition trumped the order’s own. Too many had fallen and turned their swords against their homes. Truly, man’s most determined foes came from his own ranks.

  The crone continued her inspection. “The father, though,” she tutted, “so predictable. All these boys, driven by their fathers, one way or another. Never a thought for their mothers. No.”

  “We are finished,” Verrakker interrupted. “Let us move on.”

  “Oh, I am in no hurry,” the crone continued. “You let me out of my hole so little, you cannot blame me for savouring the moment.” She played her splintered nails across Delmar’s sleeping face.

  “Do not touch him!” Verrakker ordered and grabbed her hand away. The crone whipped about, her free hand going for his neck, and Verrakker grabbed it and held both puny wrists in a single grip.

  The crone, hands pinned together, smiled up at him. Her blind eyes flickered from side to side.

  “I do not need to use my talent to know this boy’s fate. Testing, acceptance, service, a little glory, death, a modest memorial, then oblivion. Same as his father. Yours, however…”

  The crone stretched out her smallest finger and placed it against Verrakker’s wrist, below his glove. “Your destiny is far more interesting, Master Verrakker.”

  “Do not think that you may read my weakness as easily as this boy’s. I am one of the inner circle and I have faced far worse than you.” Verrakker replied, his voice level, his composure like steel. “As to my destiny, I reconciled myself to that long ago.”

  The crone tried to spit at him, but nothing but dry air reached Verrakker’s face. He tightened his grip around her wrists in warning.

  “Break them then, if you wish,” the crone declared. “I can do nothing to stop you. But I know you will not. For the first fate we learn to read is our own.”

  Verrakker paused for a moment, then pushed the crone away. She rubbed her wrists.

  “It amuses me greatly,” the crone said, as she ran her hands over her shaven scalp and retied the last vestiges of hair into a braid.

  “What has?”

  “That you bring me out to use the very gift for which you keep me in my cage.”

  “Your ‘gift’ was not our concern, though there are witch hunters and templars enough to burn you for that alone. I would have cared not if you had spent your life where you were, reading commoners’ fates. But to try to read the fate of an emperor? To know his terrors and temptations? That I care about a great deal.”

  “An emperor who died only a few years after? Do you not wonder, Verrakker, if the Reiksguard had let me read him whether he might have been saved? Do you not wonder why I did it, knowing I was destined to fail? Do not answer, I can tell you do.”

  “Hence you serve your purpose, and it is that alone that has kept you alive for all these years.”

  The crone chuckled. “When you threaten the life of one who knew their fate before she could even speak, Verrakker, you sound like a fool.”

  “On,” Verrakker ordered, his tone brooking no further postponement, “you have delayed long enough. On to the next.”

  “Yes, on,” the crone concurred. “Let us see what you have next for old ‘Brother Purity’.”

  Two of the novices did not return from the trial of the spirit.

  The novices were excused services and gathered in the Great Hall for the morning meal. Siebrecht was the first there. He was still shaky, but already the details of the vivid dream he had had during the night were fading. As he saw the haunted look upon the faces of the first novices who joined him, though, he knew that some machination of Verrakker’s had been at work.

  Siebrecht watched as Delmar, Falkenhayn, Proktor, Hardenburg, Gausser, Bohdan and finally Alptraum, entered the Great Hall and took their seats. No one could explain what had happened to them, but Siebrecht could guess. Proktor said that he had seen Harver’s possessions being taken away, and there was no doubt in any of the novices’ minds that whatever test they had faced, he had failed.

  Siebrecht could surmise why. The accident with Breigh had affected him greatly. Carrying such guilt, a man’s spirit could easily be broken. Unlike Breigh, however, Harver would never be allowed back. Harver, though, was not Siebrecht’s first concern. The face that he most expected to see, most wanted to see, did not appear.

  “My lord, my lord Verrakker,” Siebrecht interrupted the knight when he appeared in the Great Hall.

  “Matz, what are you doing? Novices should not be speaking at meals.”

  “Where is Gunther?” Siebrecht’s determined expression convinced Verrakker not to try to quiet him there, within the hall th
at was quickly filling with hungry knights. Verrakker bustled Siebrecht outside.

  “Show some courtesy,” he berated the novice as he went. “If you cannot hold your questions for the proper time, at least have a respectful tongue in your mouth.” But Siebrecht did not care for Verrakker’s censure, only the answers he might give.

  “Where is Gunther?” he asked again.

  “You mean Novice Krieglitz?”

  “Yes, yes,” Siebrecht demanded. “He did not return last night. He cannot have failed; I know him too well, my lord. If I have passed then he must too, for he has twice the courage that I do.”

  “I cannot talk of it,” Verrakker said, but Siebrecht heard the note of hesitation in his voice.

  “Please,” he asked and, in desperation, he added, “brother?”

  Verrakker relented. “He received news last night that has meant that he has had to delay.”

  “What news?”

  “I cannot and I do not wish to say. And you will get no more from me.”

  “But he is still here? He has not gone?”

  “Yes, he is in a room in the upper corridors, but he is not to be seen or spoken with. Do you understand me, Siebrecht?”

  “Perhaps next time, Novice Matz, you will recognise an order when I give it to you.”

  Brother Verrakker was seriously displeased. He had been called to the guardhouse and there found the wretched novice in the corner of his cell and under the sergeants’ watchful guard.

  Even crammed into a corner, Siebrecht maintained his composure. “In my defence, my lord, I did not see or speak with Novice Krieglitz.”

  “Only because the sergeant saw you climb atop the antechapel and try to scale the side of the chapter house.”

  “I would have succeeded as well,” Siebrecht muttered.

  “Quiet!” Verrakker snapped and slammed his good hand down on the cell door. Siebrecht near jumped from his skin.

  “It beggars belief, novice.” Verrakker did not shout or bawl; his voice was quiet, but no less chilling for that. “That for all your attempts at dedication, you still carry this air about you. That your opinions, that you yourself, are somehow greater than this order. That you are more right than your superiors, and that therefore you may obey or refuse their instructions as you think fit. This order is not a pastime; it is not some indolent band of aristocrats playing at soldiers. It is a sacred duty and no one is greater than it, not you, not I, not the Reiksmarshal himself.”

  “I am sorry, my lord. I truly am…” Siebrecht mumbled.

  “I doubt it,” the knight interrupted. “And it would not be enough, in any case. I realise now that you cannot help yourself saluting with one hand and biting your thumb with the other.”

  Siebrecht struggled for something to say, but he could think of nothing.

  Verrakker spoke again, his tone more level this time. “Tell me this instead: why did you do it?”

  Siebrecht’s mind went blank for a moment, then every possible reason he could have had tumbled into his thoughts. His perverse amusement in defying the order; how if there was a secret he desperately wanted to know more about it; how he wanted Krieglitz back to help him endure the insufferable Reiklanders.

  “Well, novice?”

  Siebrecht scrabbled down through his own thoughts, and therein found his true reason.

  “Because he is my brother,” Siebrecht said, unfolding himself and standing to his feet. “And because a Reiksguard knight should not allow his brother to feel he has been abandoned. Not even at the last.”

  Verrakker tested Siebrecht’s gaze for a long moment, before finally speaking.

  “Well put. Master Lehrer would be proud of you.”

  “It is no rhetoric, my lord.”

  “No. I realise.”

  The silence stretched between them, Verrakker’s knuckles twitching as he drummed his missing fingers.

  “You have a day, Novice Matz, to reconsider your position within this order. Tomorrow night there is the novices’ vigil and then their oaths. Until then, I do not want you in the citadel. Your uncle has agreed to take you into his custody for the duration. If you decide not to return after that time, then I will understand.”

  Siebrecht nodded. Verrakker paused, deciding something for himself, and then continued. “You caused a great deal of commotion, you realise? I would warrant that there are none within the chapter house, even those in a room along the upper corridors, who would not know of your actions or why you undertook them.”

  Siebrecht understood the meaning in the knight’s words. “I thank you, my lord.”

  “Thank me? You have nothing for which to thank me.”

  “For a knight’s judgement.”

  For a moment Verrakker looked genuinely touched, then he scoffed at such flattery and left Siebrecht alone.

  “If you had wanted information,” Herr von Matz scolded his nephew when he collected him, “then I do not know why you did not simply ask me. Yes, the young Novice Krieglitz, a sad case, indeed.”

  “What is?” Siebrecht asked. “What is happening to him?”

  “Not to him, rather to his father, the Baron von Krieglitz. He has been accused of consorting with dark powers.”

  “What?” Siebrecht could not believe his ears.

  “A rather melodramatic turn of phrase, I know, but not a charge to be taken lightly in any case.”

  “Can it be true, uncle? I cannot believe that it can be true.”

  “Who can say? Talabecland is rife with intrigue at present. Since their little internal coup all the noble families are manoeuvring themselves into position, each trying to undermine and outflank the other. And a scandalous legal charge has ever been a favoured weapon in the political armoury of the Talabheim families. Krieglitz’s father is of little consequence himself, but his family’s connections run straight up to the countess.”

  “So this is just politicking. Talabheim will sort itself out and Gunther will be fine.”

  “That would be true in any ordinary accusation, but this one has been endorsed by the Order of Sigmar. It is their investigation now.”

  “The witch hunters?” Siebrecht gasped.

  “Indeed,” Herr von Matz replied. “Have you ever seen the witch hunters at work when they have discovered their prey? I have. A common family that I knew slightly. It was not the punishment that chilled me so, it was the hunters’ dedication to it, their thoroughness. The woman was exposed as being tainted, mortally corrupted; she and her family were hounded from their home. They caught the husband there, and he refused to denounce her, so they burnt him. The witch hunters and their templars pursued the rest into the hills, but still that was not enough and they chased and chased, until finally their quarry was spent and they lay down on the cold hillside to die. I saw them bring the bodies back, the clothes cut open to reveal the marks of corruption. I remember thinking how small those marks were, and yet how significantly they were treated. She had asked me to stand as a witness of her character at the trial. I refused for I did not want their attention drawn to me. And I am glad I did so. That is why from that day forwards I have been careful to display my worship of Sigmar, Ulric, Taal and Rhya, Morr, Myrmidia, Manann, even though I hate the sea, Shallya and Verena. So that no matter what kind of templar may break down my door and drag me out, they will find me a model devotee of whatever god they worship. Fear evil men, Siebrecht, for they will take all you have and destroy all you are. But fear the good man with a righteous cause more, for they will do the same and convince you that they were right to do so.”

  The dream of his father had unsettled Delmar and he had returned to Master Lehrer’s library. After reading about Talhoffer and Ott, he had gone back often to learn more from the annals of the Reiksguard. He had discovered what had happened to Lehrer who, in his first campaign after taking his oaths, had lost both his legs to a scythed chariot on a campaign in the Southlands.

  Delmar’s favourite accounts, though, had been the ones that included his father. Se
arching back, Delmar had found his name mentioned in several records before Karl Franz. He had even found the listing of the knights of his father’s vigil and saw his name there beside Griesmeyer’s. Delmar had read of his father’s first battles, but then there had been no mention of him at all for a year. Delmar thought back and realised that that was because it was the year that Delmar himself had been born. Heinrich von Reinhardt had returned to his estate to be with his wife.

  A year on, there was his name again: a brief notation amongst those assigned to guard the Supreme Patriarch on some expedition to Ostermark. Then his name vanished once more. He had been injured on that expedition and had taken a long time to heal. Then there were swathes of notes from the period of Karl Franz’s election. The Reiksguard prided itself on staying above political matters, but as the Emperor’s guard they could not afford to remain ignorant of them, especially at such an uncertain time.

  Afterwards, when Karl Franz led his first campaign against the Norse who plagued the coast of the Sea of Claws, there was Heinrich von Reinhardt. Delmar had read all he could about his father, yet there was one book which he had not yet had the courage to open.

  “Ah…” Lehrer replied. “I did wonder when you would finally ask to see it.”

  Lehrer reached down below his desk and pulled out the volume. “I have marked the passages that you will wish to read.”

  It was a brief account, for the Reiksguard had not considered the battle against the survivors of the Skaeling tribe of any great significance. The war had already been won, after all; the fact that the fighting still continued was neither here nor there to the annalist. Furthermore only a few squadrons of Reiksguard knights were involved, and had only been left behind to placate Count Theoderic Gausser as the remaining regiments of the army returned home. The account merely reported the bare facts: the Count of Nordland’s disastrous attack, Helborg’s charge, then noted that the knights dispersed to cover the army’s retreat. And then, Delmar could not believe it, it was literally a footnote: the death of Heinrich von Reinhardt was a footnote below the account of the battle.