by Ben Counter
CHAPTER ONE
THE GRAVE OF OSTERMARK
Writers of battle-songs always missed out the smell.
They did not shy away from the bodies, of course. A battlefield, after the battle, was scattered with knots of corpses marking the sites of the worst struggles. It was that way with Kriegsmutter Field, where the sun was starting to set on a
battleground that had been fought over and held by the Grand Army of Ostermark and Nordland. The worse carnage had been on the left flank, where the Imperial cavalry had ripped into the ill-disciplined masses of farmers and labourers who made up the majority of Pretender Count Scharndorff’s army.
Bodies in rough sacking and labourers’ tabards lay draped over one another, heads split open by the swords of passing riders. A few were still pinned to the ground by broken lengths of lance. They, who had once been men, were becoming something else now, something more like the mud in which they lay. Their skin was turning grey and they were becoming soft and shapeless, merging with the earth. The ground was trampled by hundreds of hooves and into those depressions the rebel dead sank, as if they were trying to return to the earth.
The poets sometimes mentioned the dead horses, too. Soldiers who had seen endless sights of human death could still be moved to tears when they saw the proud bulk of a warhorse split open, red and raw, sinews white to the sky. Discarded helmets, shields and swords were everywhere, as if they had fallen from above. Birds flocked to pick over the dead in the crow’s feast those poets loved to write of.
The living were there too. Bands of Ostermark soldiers picked across the churned ground looking for the living. Sometimes they picked up their fallen brother, letting him lean on them as they trudged on. Other times they despatched him on the ground, seeing his wounds were too grave to let him live through the night. The uniforms of Ostermark’s soldiers were quartered purple and yellow, a relic of the great ostentatious courts of the province’s past counts, and they seemed a mockery now stained with blood and dirt. Those of Nordland were a shabby grey. That province’s soldiers, too, turned over bodies to find the wounded, pick up fallen standards and pocket what valuable trinkets they thought they could scavenge without consequence.
Surviving rebels were moving too, trying to hurry into the woodland and barrens northwards. The Pretender Count had promised them a province carved out of the Empire’s north, free from the taxes and laws of Altdorf. Quite probably he intended only to build a place he could rule, exploiting the peasants who had fought for him as surely as the worst Imperial count ever did. No one would ever know now because the Pretender Count Scharndorff was dead, his head mounted on a pike near the baggage train of the Count of Nordland. Word was Nordland had killed Scharndorff in person as the cavalry reserves had clashed, and no doubt that was how the artists and history writers would choose to depict it.
Lights speckled the hillsides to the south, where the Imperial forces had camped for the night. A slow trickle of wounded stragglers headed towards the burning campfires, where thousands of their fellow soldiers were warming themselves beside makeshift tents or seeing to the wounds of those who had not come through the battle so fortunately. Banners of Ostermark and Nordland flew as the wind picked up and the evening chill began to set in. An epic poem might mention the strange beauty of the glittering hills as seen from that place of death.
But it would leave out the smell. There was blood, but that was not the worst of it. Voided bowels were far too crude a matter to be brought up in an tale about a glorious Imperial victory, but that was what Kriegsmutter Field stank of. Some had evacuated themselves in fear as they stood huddled behind their shields, or amid the forests of pikes and spears, shuddering to see the field darkening with the advance of the enemy. Others had kept their bowels intact until the first blows were struck and the hours of waiting became short, crunching storms of breaking steel and bones.
When they died, everything inside them seeped out, and mingled with the mud, and stank like a midsummer cesspit. The scavengers wore cloth wrapped around their noses and mouths to ward off the stench. A few, the veterans, had brought pouches of herbs to hold under their noses, knowing that war was a stinking business even when you won.
At one edge of the battlefield, the Ostermark soldiers had constructed a tent from the wagon covers of the looted rebel baggage train. The dead lay around it in great numbers, not lanced or cut open but burned and broken. Some looked like they had been crushed beneath a great weight. Some had been blown apart.
A lone straggler made his way towards the tent. He did not look like he belonged there. He was not a soldier, for he wore neither the uniform of an Imperial state soldier nor the rough clothing of a peasant rebel. It was difficult to tell his age – old eyes were sunk deep into a long, serious face too young for them. He wore a travelling cloak down to his ankles and walked with a staff to help keep his footing across the swamp of mud and bodies.
The stranger reached the tent and pulled aside the opening. It was dark inside, and only a little of the day’s dying light made its way in.
‘Magister?’ said the stranger. ‘Magister Vek?’
The wounded man lying in the tent looked up feebly. Prior to that day’s battle he had cut a wondrous figure. His robes were ivory and gold, and though they were now spattered with gore and mud their gold embroidery still shone. His shaven head, with a single lock of braided black hair, lolled against one shoulder. He wore a golden jawpiece which gave him a stylised single-braided beard. Black symbols were painted on his forehead.
‘I am Vek,’ he whispered in reply.
‘Of the Light Order.’
‘Once of that order. Now I belong to nothing. Life itself has discarded me.’ Vek held up a hand, which had been clamped to his side. It was thick with blood, and more oozed from the tear between his ribs.
The stranger entered the tent and knelt down beside the dying wizard. ‘The Light never leaves you,’ he said. ‘You will join it.’
‘I see only darkness,’ said Vek. ‘Let me look at you. I cannot see your face.’
A red flame caught in the palm of the stranger’s hand. It cast strange shadows across the inside of the tent, glinting off the gold of Vek’s jawpiece and the stranger’s deep-set eyes. The flame burned without ignition or fuel, a glint of the aethyr’s winds as they blew, invisibly, across Kriegsmutter Field.
For a moment Vek studied the man’s face, then his eyes lost focus, as if looking beyond him to something only he could see ‘Are you sent from Morr?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said the stranger. ‘I was sent by the god of the dead to see you through to the next world.’
‘What… what is there?’ asked Vek. ‘I always wished to know, but every priest told a different tale, and the winds of magic never offered up the answers. When we are dead, where do we go?’
‘To where you deserve to go,’ replied the stranger. ‘Whatever fate you know you deserve, deep in your heart, that is the fate that will befall you.’
‘I think that I have lived a good life. But I have never been sure, not truly, and so I am afraid.’
‘Then look back upon your life,’ said the stranger. ‘For you must be sure, Magister Vek. Look back on how the winds of the aethyr blew through you. Then you will know, and there will be no room for fear.’
‘This day,’ said Vek, ‘I called down the banishment on my enemies. I burned them with the purity of the Light and cast them back with bolts from the heavens. It was my duty, for they raised swords against the Emperor who is my lord. But… they are dead. They were men, like me. Can I have lived a good life, having called down so much death?’
‘Good and evil cease to have meaning in battle,’ replied the stranger. ‘There are only friends and foes. Look further back, magister. Further.’
‘The Order of Light!’ gasped Vek. ‘There, I felt I was… a force for good. Banishing the dark. Holding back the things that lurk beyond. A noble cause. A great cause, with great men. The work of Sigmar, the work of Magnus. I fe
lt like a good man there. A force for truth.’
‘Tell me of it.’
Vek smiled. ‘You cannot imagine,’ he said.
‘I have seen much,’ said the stranger. ‘I have a good imagination.’
‘It is the place where the Light wind intersects with the earth. There alone does it flow unhindered into our world, focused like a… like a lance! Like a thunderbolt! So beautiful to behold it. Wondrous to look on of course, but it is more than that. The feel of the Light College, the song it sings in your heart. To have been one of the few to see it, that was good. That made me a better man.’
‘You speak of the pyramid,’ said the stranger. ‘In Altdorf. What brought you there?’
‘I was young,’ said Vek. ‘Decades ago. Longer than most men live. Magnus was upon the throne. The Great War was dying out. I lived through its last years as a child. Dark times. We pleaded for someone to bring us out of the darkness. Magnus and the colleges sent agents to hunt us down, all the witch-children and prodigies. I learned later that in earlier times we would have been put to death. So close we are to the grave. But you know more about that than I do.’
‘Indeed,’ said the stranger. ‘It is a thin veil that had the grandeur to call itself life, one on which we lie though it might tear at any moment. Second by second we live, always the slightest move from falling through into Morr’s embrace. But you were speaking of the pyramid. Go on.’
Vek coughed, and blood flecked his lips. ‘I am dying,’ he said.
‘Then there is not much time.’
‘They took us to Altdorf. Great men, I remember them. Tall and huge, and we so young. And they tested us. Some were taken early. Of them I never heard again. Some, later, were taken away, and a few of their faces I saw again among the magisters of the other colleges. But not many. And then there was me alone. They brought me to Midday’s Mirror, in Altdorf.’
The stranger leaned forward eagerly, as if this was some signal to him. ‘The Mirror?’ he said.
‘Indeed. It was the first time I had seen the sun since they took me. A hand was on my shoulder and a voice spoke. Stand by the Mirror, it said. Give up all you know. The world is not as you perceive it with your eyes. You must perceive it with your mind. There is a world on the other side, and you must inhabit that world, or there is no place for you in that world or this.’
‘And?’ said the stranger, demand in his voice.
‘And there was!’ Vek’s eyes were light, as if reflecting a fire that only he could see. ‘I know not how many others were tried there, and how many failed. But I made it. I told my eyes to be blind and my ears to be deaf! I told my skin to be numb! I told my soul to see! And I did. I fell into that world, and I was there, and the pyramid was before me. Oh, Sigmar’s Oath, it was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It was my greatest sadness that I could see it for the first time but once, and every time after that was bittersweet to remember that wonder.’
‘You have lived,’ said the stranger, ‘well enough.’
The stranger drew a dagger from beneath his travelling cloak. It was stained and rusted. It looked like it had been taken from the ground outside, from the hand of a fallen soldier. The stranger leaned down onto the magister, pinning him to the ground, and drove the dagger into his ribs. He drew it back and stabbed again, angling the blade upwards into heart and lungs.
Vek did not have the strength left to cry out. He gasped, a dry sound like wind through leaves. The blade went in and out, not frenzied but methodical, making sure that its point went through every organ it could reach.
The stranger let the dagger fall and stood up. Vek was dead. His eyes were turned back in his head and his mouth lolled. Blood ran from his nose, staining the jawpiece. The jawpiece was probably worth a lot of money. Some other scavenger could have it, and live off it for long enough to gamble away what it bought him. The stranger did not care.
As he went to leave the tent, the stranger paused and turned back. He knelt beside the body and picked up the dagger again.
He was not quite done yet.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CITY OF ILLUMINATORS
The River Reik had not yet been caged by the city that had grown up around it. Even now, with the vastness of Altdorf established as the Empire’s most populous city, and perhaps the greatest city of men in all the world, the Reik was not smothered by the towers and heaving tenement masses that crowded on its banks.
As if to remind the inhabitants that their city was fragile, a good quarter of the city – that part which sat in the fork of the Reik’s split eastwards of the city’s heart – was still a great scar of charred buildings and waist-deep drifts of ash. The Great Fire had torn through the quarter six years before and most of it had still to be rebuilt, the great dark scar now haunted by vagabonds and thieves. Beside that reminder of desolation, the brutal majesty of the Imperial Palace and the banner-hung splendour of Königplatz seemed to lose some of their lustre. The Emperor Wilhelm had reacted to the fire by covering his capital city in bright pennants and parades, but they seemed no more majestic than a handful of colourful trinkets compared to the untamed Reik.
On the left bank of the Reik stood a bustling quarter wreathed in the greasy smoke from a thousand pigment burners and tanneries. The Buchbinder district was one of Altdorf’s densest, for it had once been wealthy, and such had been the demand for a home there that upper floors had been piled on top of each other. Every building’s upper storeys overhung the streets below, so the narrow, winding alleys were sometimes completely closed off from the sky and a man might lean from his window to light the pipe of a neighbour who lived across the street. The pennants flying from flagpoles and weathervanes hung limp and stained, and even without the haphazard canopy of tenement floors it would have been difficult to see the streets through the permanent fug. The Buchbinder district existed to feed Altdorf’s hunger for illuminated prayer books, tomes for the inscribing of rituals and magic, and crude presses for the rags and pamphlets that fed the city’s favourite pastime of agitating against a political system no one understood.
Natives of the Buchbinder district knew how the streets worked. They were born in some smoke-stained basement with innate knowledge of the tangled knots of alleyways. Those who came in from outside needed some help.
A courier stood on a street corner. She wore the tabard of a herald in the colours of one of Altdorf’s burgher families. She held a leather document satchel under one arm. She looked behind her, the way she had come, and then ahead of her, in the direction she was fairly sure she was supposed to travel.
Then she looked back again, and saw a completely different street that, after a moment of confusion and slight nausea, turned out to be at ninety degrees to the direction it should have lead.
A passing man in a tanner’s apron paused and spoke to her. He had a look of condescension on his face, as if he were talking to someone very stupid about something they should nevertheless know. The courier was too exasperated by now to care much about his attitude and listened patiently as he pointed out what she should be doing.
She frowned as, no doubt, she tried to understand how the narrow alley, little more than a shoulder-wide gap between two walls, should lead to a street that was on the other side of the building she stood beside, or how, upon turning left at its exit, she should find herself facing back the way she had come. How her destination should now lie in front of her, she had no idea. But the tanner nodded and smiled, and shook his head and tutted, He seemed to be taking the pleasure a man gets from telling someone – especially a woman – something that he knows and she does not. She thanked him and set off in the direction he had indicated, and he waved as if he was seeing off a tedious child.
Along that same street, ignored by both, was another outsider. He, however, did not wander around in confusion. He was wrapped in a travelling cloak and wore a pack that looked to be full of books. His head was shaven, which was far from uncommon among Altdorfers, but in his case i
t looked to have been done through choice rather than to keep away the lice. His eye sockets were too large for his eyes and they sank down in the shadow. His nose was long and straight and his pose almost exaggeratedly upright, like a judge walking to the bar in Empire House. A few Buchbinder natives glanced at him, wondering how he could so obviously be an outsider and yet not be perplexed by the district’s idiosyncrasies, but he did not return their looks.
He turned right, saw the road behind him now stretching out to the left, and ducked into an alleyway. At the end opened up a square, quite possibly the oldest place in the district. It was still paved with flagstones that had, bafflingly, not been stripped away for building materials or headstones. Equally strange was the shallow rectangular pond in the middle of the square that had gathered none of the trash or grime that caked the rest of the Buchbinder district.
Stallholders had made the square their home. One sold horse and cattle hides. Others hawked cure-alls, trinkets or spices. A pair of old men sat at the foot of a statue of a mounted Reiksguard knight, swapping occasional sentences as they watched the square’s comings and goings.
As in the rest of the district, the sky was in short supply. The buildings bounding the square loomed in, looking ready to topple, permitting a square of sky that meant only when it was directly overhead could the sun shine on the unnaturally clear waters of the pond.
The stranger walked up to the nearest stall, the one selling the hides. The stallholder was a woman made greasy and foul-smelling by the work of scraping the hides with a blunt, curved blade.
‘Is that Midday’s Mirror?’ he asked.
The woman looked at him. Smeared, bloody handprints covered her apron. ‘What did you expect?’ she said, and spat on the ground.
‘Do people often come by here?’
‘S’pose so.’
The stranger looked back across the square. He wondered how many of the people there knew what this place really was. The stallholder certainly didn’t. He doubted the man hawking pomanders and quack medicines did, either. He was crying out that his wares were hand-picked by comely maidens in the hills of Araby and could ward off the plague, rid the face of blemishes, and restore a man’s wilting virility.
