Van Horstmann

by Ben Counter

  A gaggle of children ran across the square, playing a game which involved chasing one another and squealing. They might well know. Their parents, of course, would tell them not to entertain childish ideas. The old men had the look of people who had outlived their prejudice against such fantasies. The stranger was certain they must know. Only during the middle of their lives did men refuse to believe what should be obvious to them. The very young and the very old had the liberty to believe.

  The stranger walked to the edge of Midday’s Mirror. A few copper coins lay on the flagstones at the bottom. He stepped up on the lip of stone running around the pond’s edge and spread his arms.

  Some of the people in the square, those who believed, could see him. Most could not.

  He let himself fall forwards. The cold, clear water rushed up at him.

  And he kept falling. The world tipped and twisted around him, tilting at angles that could not exist. He felt a sudden cold dislocation, as if falling through a place that was empty – not even space or time, a void in reality.

  He swung up, momentum carrying him up from the surface of the water he should have landed in. His balance kept him from tipping forward and he was standing on the edge of Midday’s Mirror again – but this time facing away from the pond.

  The square was not the same. It was bigger.

  It was immense.

  The stranger had to screw up his eyes against the light. He could just about make out the expanse of the square. It could not have fitted into Altdorf normally, for the city would not have permitted such an open space to exist without colonising it with slums, temples, sweatshops, marketplaces, teeming poorhouses or cramped graveyards.

  His eyes adjusted. The light did not die down.

  In the centre of the square, tall enough to shrink the highest peaks of Altdorf’s skyline, was the pyramid. The stranger had heard of it – what he had learned at Kriegsmutter Field had confirmed the sketchy rumours he had collected. But none of that had prepared him for seeing it with his own eyes.

  The pyramid was made of white stone, and yet it shone from within. It was all but impossible to look at it directly, just like the sun itself – although the sun now seemed comparatively dim and insignificant in the sky. Smaller structures clustered around the pyramid. From this distance they looked like shrines or mausoleums, cut from white marble. They just made the pyramid itself seem vaster, big enough to fill the senses almost to the exclusion of anything else. Unlike the one around Midday’s Mirror, this square was deserted, its white flagstones an empty expanse like a desert of stone.

  The stranger held up a hand to shield his eyes as he approached. The shape of a door was just visible in the lowest row of great white stone blocks. The door was enamelled in white and inlaid with gold.

  The pyramid contained many light sources, not just one. They separated as he approached. They were not hung on the pyramid but shone from inside it – every light within the pyramid could be seen from outside, and the stranger knew why. Light magic suffused the square, as thick as newly fallen snow. He had tasted it in the Buchbinder district, a constant background sensation like the air just before lightning struck. Here it was unmistakeable. The most blunt-minded peasant, someone without the least sensitivity to the winds of magic, could have felt it.

  Beside the door stood a pair of soldiers, the only people aside from the stranger anywhere in sight. Their armour was polished so the segments were like mirrors and they blazed with reflected light. Their faces were hidden behind visors and they each held a halberd, which they lowered to bar the door.

  ‘Your name,’ said one of them.

  ‘My name is Egrimm van Horstmann.’

  ‘Are you expected?’

  ‘I am not.’

  The guard stepped forwards. ‘There is no place for you here.’

  ‘There is always a place,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘for one such as I.’

  The guard made a sound like muffled laugh, and van Horstmann knew he was smirking. He turned around to rejoin his post.

  ‘I know I am older than most you take,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I was not raised to be sent here. No official of this Empire saw my talent and bade my parents prepare me for the colleges. I have wrestled with this gift and I have not lost my mind, been devoured by daemons or been tied to a witch hunter’s stake. That is recommendation enough, is it not?’

  The guard turned back to him, and seemed to regard him from head to toe, though it was impossible to be sure from that side of the guard’s visor.

  ‘What matters most?’ the guard asked.

  Van Horstmann looked at the stones of the square for a second, as if gathering up words that had lain inside him for a long time, slumbering, waiting to be spoken.

  ‘Purity,’ van Horstmann said. ‘And sacrifice.’

  The guard took his place alongside his colleague, their halberds once more crossed.

  A pause, and the halberds were raised like the bars of a blocked door.

  Van Horstmann nodded his thanks, and walked into the Light College.

  ‘What,’ said Master Chanter Alric, ‘is magic?’

  His words fell dead against the vast space of the Chanters’ Hall. The lower floor of the Light College was a single enormous chamber, pillars of white marble supporting an arched ceiling. Everywhere there was light. Lanterns, impossibly bright, hung from the pillars as close and numerous as clusters of grapes. The raised dais, like a huge altar consecrated to an ancient god of the heavens, had a burning brazier at each corner, yellow-white flames leaping up towards the ceiling.

  Three hundred acolytes knelt on the floor. Their heads were shaved, although many had single locks running from the crowns of their heads. They wore simple white robes trimmed with gold. Master Chanter Alric stood on the dais above them, looking down as he spoke. He was a magnificent sight of a man: a great greying beard, eyes the blue-grey of a winter sky, faded circular patterns tattooed on his face and hands. His robes were more gold than white, the golden stitching picking out script in letters of a language that no one outside the Light College was permitted to speak.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Alric continued, ‘you believe you know. Through you have blown the winds of magic as they have through no one else you have ever encountered. In your home towns, be they villages or fleshpots of the Empire, there were none that you knew who could match your mastery of magic. And so you came to believe you are masters of it. It is my task to teach you that you are masters of nothing!’

  Alric passed his eyes across the acolytes. They were the lowest rung of the Light College’s pyramid. Both figuratively, for there was no rank lower than that of acolyte, and literally, for they were not permitted to ascend from this lowest floor of the pyramid. They ate and slept here, learned here. Not a few of them would fail here, cast out as the pure wind of Light magic refused to dance to their tunes.

  Among the novices was one who, even among the newcomers, was new. He had arrived a few days before, unannounced, one of those relative few who arrived on his own cognisance without having been handed over by witch hunters or recommended by one of the order’s magisters. The magisters had taken note of his arrival, though it would not do to have a mere acolyte thinking himself important. They were watching him, as was Alric.

  ‘The least magister of the unworthiest college,’ continued Alric, ‘is master of forces beyond the understanding of your untrained minds. In you may reside the potential to one day wear the robes of a magister and command the magic of the winds. But before me now kneel not Imperial wizards, but ignorant children, the faint glimmers of powers they possess more dangerous to themselves than useful to anyone else. Some of you have scoured your family homes with unbidden fire! Some have done mystical violence to the bodies of your kin through some act of unconscious brutality! Some have read portents with such accuracy you had to be sent either to the gallows or to Altdorf! Such are the perils of your power. It is my task to compel you to understand your own failures, for only then can you start to build up yo
ur strengths.’

  Alric hauled a heavy book onto a lectern at the front of the dais. The acolytes snatched glances at him. Instinctively they knew they were supposed to stare down at the floor, as if the riches of the marble and scalding lights were not for their lowly eyes. Those who looked up quickly turned their eyes down as he glared down at them.

  Van Horstmann was looking at Alric. Perhaps he had not yet learned the unwritten rules of humility before the Light Order’s higher ranks. He would, soon. They all did. A lifetime ago Master Chanter Alric had learned it, before he had been remade as the man who was now lord of the order’s acolytes.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘What is magic?’ He opened the book. ‘The soil-stained farmers of the Jade Order will tell you that it is life. The Gold Order’s alchemists, hunched in their laboratories, will say that it is the interaction of one substance with another. The morbid masters of the Amethyst College will say, of course, that it is a negative force, the void that is left by death. In some ways, they are all true. But of all of them, what we of the Light Order believe is the truest. For we know what other men are unable to accept, a truth too cruel for them to countenance. We know that magic is sacrifice.’

  This time, a stir passed through the acolytes. They did not dare say anything, of course. No one would ever speak out of turn while the Master Chanter was imparting his wisdom. But which of them had not heard the rumours about the Colleges of Magic? Every Altdorfer had. They believed that the Bright College’s wizards lusted after fire, some becoming obsessed with it and setting fires at random. They knew, or thought they knew, that the Celestial wizards gazed at the stars for so long they glimpsed the courts of the gods, and sometimes were driven mad when they looked on the faces of the Fell Powers. And, of course, the Light College performed sacrifices. Human sacrifices.

  ‘It is no blade through the heart that gives us power,’ said Alric. ‘Such sacrifice is crude and hateful to the purity of the Light. No, our sacrifice is of devotion, as demonstrated through ritual and vigil. Thus can an acolyte play his part in the weaving of a spell. He kneels, he fulfils his part in the ritual drawn up by the magisters of his order. He makes his own sacrifice. He chants. Ula dhaz maaru!’

  The acolytes had been given the passage to memorise, along with dozens of others. It was the lot of the acolyte to learn by rote. Some colleges maintained that magic required imagination, quick-mindedness, that it could be grasped by flights of intuition. The Light Order knew better. Understanding had to be hammered home by repetition and stern admonishment. Only when that framework had been laid down could an acolyte hope to ascend from the First Circle to the Second.

  ‘Ula dhaz maaru!’ chanted the acolytes in unison. ‘Salheh corvun draa!’

  Alric led the chant, turning the pages as the passage was recited. His own voice was deep and sonorous, reverberating around the hall. The pages of the book glowed. The letters inscribed there, written in the alphabet unique to the Light Order, were in silver ink on black-stained parchment and they turned burning white now.

  The air turned hazy. The images of the kneeling acolytes distorted and the pillars seemed to bow in, forming impossible angles where they met the ceiling whose frescoes squirmed as if alive.

  Magical circles, well-burned into the chamber floor, took light again, white flames licking along the complex designs.

  This ritual had two purposes. The first they all knew. It was to reinforce the mystical warping of space around the Light College itself, which kept it hidden in a fold of reality, away from the eyes of the ignorant. Each college was hidden from Altdorf’s citizens by some means – this was how the Light Order’s pyramid kept itself secret. But the second purpose the acolytes were not supposed to understand, not yet.

  The acolytes were not individuals. They were components in the ritual, and they meant nothing on their own. When they were broken down enough they could be rebuilt, gradually given back their sense of individuality. Those whose minds survived strong and intact could find themselves magisters when they reached the Third Circle. Those who failed either remained chanters, assisting the magisters with the sacrifice of their labour, or stayed as mundane servants: the cooks, guards, manservants and librarians of the Half-Circle. It all started here, with the breaking down.

  Sometimes they would not break. Alric had no time for them. Misshapen cogs, they were, in a machine that did not need them.

  Grand Magister Elrisse, the High Illuminator of the Light Order, looked like all the moisture had been drawn out of him leaving a husk as thin as a birch tree and roughly the same colour. His skin clung closely to his skull, sucked in at the cheeks and under the jaw. His eyes and scalp were painted and his face resembled the death mask of an exotic fallen civilisation. Pearls hung from his high collar and his robe was embroidered with gemstones ensorcelled to glow with a steady yellow-white light.

  ‘I am troubled,’ said Elrisse.

  The Grand Magister sat at the hardwood map table in his chambers. Here, near the pinnacle of the pyramid, the very walls were made of light. The chamber was decked out in the manner of a palace of Araby, with geometric tapestries on the walls, exquisite carpets and the smell of strange spices in the air.

  ‘Then the order is troubled,’ said Alric.

  ‘Indeed we are. What news do you bring of our acolytes?’

  ‘They obey,’ said Alric. ‘Some among them are sharp. I can see them donning the robes of the Second Circle within the year. Others are chaff. They have a crude ability, but nothing that will trouble the fringes of competence. I count Heiden Kant the most intelligent and studious. Gustavus Thielen is the most prominent in terms of raw magical strength.’

  ‘Any that should concern us?’

  Alric gave this a moment’s thought. Though he lorded over the acolytes as if he was Sigmar reborn, here he was very much of the lower rank. Elrisse had ratified every induction into the First Circle and it was dangerous to suggest the recent intake of acolytes was in any way substandard.

  ‘Not greatly, Grand Magister,’ he said. ‘Fausten is willful. I think he opposes us, but with childish transgressions. Misspoken syllables and so forth. I shall grind him down. A few others gather and make plans, but nothing more than stealing luxuries from the kitchens and storerooms.’

  The Grand Magister smiled a little. ‘Like children,’ he said.

  ‘They are children,’ replied Alric.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Grand Magister. ‘How we forget.’

  ‘We were like them once.’

  The smile disappeared. ‘No, Master Chanter. The man you are is not the same man who knelt as an acolyte. I am not the same man who first walked through the gates of the pyramid. Those men have been erased by the journey from circle to circle. They are as surely gone as any who pass through the hands of Morr.’

  ‘Of course, Grand Magister,’ said Alric with an inclination of the head.

  ‘But at least they give us no more trouble,’ continued Elrisse. ‘You are aware of the nature of the crisis?’

  ‘Crisis? I have heard rumours, but nothing that–’

  ‘A crisis,’ said Elrisse. ‘As grave as anything since Magnus’s passing. It is both dangerous and sensitive. Mere knowledge of it is damaging. The people say the Bright Order did great violence to the city with their recklessness, but that will be as nothing compared to the chaos that will ensue if Altdorfers come to know of our current predicament. I would not have burdened you with it, Alric, but that I fear I shall need your help.’

  ‘Of course, Grand Magister,’ said Alric, inclining his head.

  ‘Then gather half a dozen acolytes. It is more important they can keep a secret than have any exceptional skill. Tell none of your purpose and do not be seen leaving the pyramid, if you can.’

  ‘And where are we to go?’ asked Alric.

  ‘The Imperial Palace,’ said Elrisse. ‘And Grand Chanter, pray be quick.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE JESTER

  The Imperial Palace’s founda
tions dated to before the birth of Altdorf as a city, when it was a sturdy fortress-settlement on the Reik. In those times the unending war with the greenskins had been waged since before living memory. There were no kings and no heroes, just a desperate banding together to survive. The fortress on the Reik was one of the few places in the lands of men that could stand before the besieging goblin hordes and it had done so many times, its stones stained black with the blood of man and goblin alike.

  Then Sigmar had taken up the fight and scoured the greenskins from human lands. He had entered into a pact with the dwarfs of the Worlds Edge Mountains, and they had forged for him Ghal-maraz, Skullsplitter, the Hammer of Sigmar. The battered fortress became the founding stone for the city of Altdorf, first hold of the Empire and sacred city of Sigmar.

  The air of those times clung to the stones. It seemed the same air trapped there in the days of Sigmar still circulated through the warren of cellars and dungeons beneath the Imperial Palace. Above was splendour, where ambassadors from across the Old World knelt before the throne of Emperor Wilhelm II. Below, in the forgotten foundations of the palace, the rats and the spiders held court.

  One intersection, lit by torchlight, saw the first gathering here for hundreds of years. In one direction were the wine cellars, abandoned and left to decay. In another were the crudely-built oubliettes where enemies of an early emperor had also been left to rot, and where a few well-gnawed bones still poked out from the shadows.

  Eight souls were gathered there. One of them was Grand Magister Elrisse, leaning on the snake-headed staff that was his badge of office. Another was Master Chanter Alric. Behind Alric, heads bowed, were the novices he had brought with him. Heiden Kant. Gustavus Thielen. Rudiger Vort. Kryzstof Schwartzgelben. Egrimm van Horstmann. Pieter Diess.