Van Horstmann

by Ben Counter

  ‘Pure?’ said Daegal. ‘So ours is impure? A lower form?’

  Van Horstmann smiled his thinnest smile, not letting it reach his eyes. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Our dealings with magic occupy merely a different place on the hierarchy.’

  ‘A place higher or lower than ours?’ demanded Daegal.

  An automaton, as if sensing tension in the Gold wizard’s voice, hastily topped up Daegal’s wine glass.

  ‘It is only logic that I employ,’ said van Horstmann, in a smooth and supercilious voice that even Zhaan would find objectionable. ‘A smith might make an item of great use. Great power, even, as you do in your forges. But he relies on knowledge to do so, knowledge that is collected and written down, and studied and comprehended, by those who need not ever set foot in a smithy to have their own part in such creations. The Light Order occupies a step in that process above that of the mage-wright. This is the simple truth, as all must surely see it.’

  ‘Our ways of magic,’ said Zhaan a little too quickly, ‘stand upon an equal pedestal to all the other orders, and always have.’

  ‘Teclis never wrote,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘that all the orders were to be equal.’

  Daegal stood suddenly, his chair scraping back. ‘How dare you?’ he demanded. ‘The Grand Magister of our order will be spoken to with respect!’

  Van Horstmann held out his hands, a gesture of reconciliation. ‘Respect is not an issue between us, Magister Daegal. Does not the good Emperor respect the smiths of his domain, and the peasants in the field? For without them, his authority and the wisdom of his scribes mean nothing.’

  ‘And then we are peasants,’ snapped Daegal, ‘to your Emperors?’

  ‘Perhaps the analogy was unfortunate,’ replied van Horstmann slickly.

  ‘Magister Daegal,’ said Zhaal. ‘I hear the music of our college is out of tune. Communicate my concerns to the masters of the Chord.’

  Daegal shot a look back at van Horstmann, bowed to the Grand Magister, and briskly left the feasting hall.

  ‘The music,’ said Zhaal, ‘is what keeps us concealed. Its combination of notes confuses the mind of the uninitiated and turns their senses away from our college. Its song is subtle but those who spend enough time here can make it out.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said van Horstmann.

  Zhaal pointed a fork at van Horstmann’s plate. ‘Eat, Magister van Horstmann,’ he said. ‘You magisters of the Light are all far too skinny.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  UPON A THRONE OF LIES

  The dances of the Old World’s moons were such that only the wizards of the Celestial College really understood them. Only they knew when the witch moon Morrslieb would grow fat and sickly green in the night sky, or when the stars would be in alignment to pick out one of the constellations inscribed on the most ancient monoliths, constructed when all known civilisations were yet to be born.

  When the Ninth Alignment occurred, when the stars overhead took on the aspect of a serpent winding around the heavens, the Light Order marked the occasion with a series of ceremonies that required the attention of all the acolytes and most of the magisters. The hidden square around the pyramid, concealed in a fold of space around Midday’s Mirror, became a parade ground where the acolytes were assembled in seven circles and Master Chanter Alric led them in the ritual sanctification of implements of sacrifice.

  Van Horstmann watched the acolytes taking on the sacred configurations, shifting from place to place in the circles as lines of white fire traced ever more complicated patterns between them.

  The square outside was visible through the translucent wall in the Grand Magister’s quarters. Van Horstmann saw Alric walk into the centre of the largest circle, a heavy snake, its body as thick as a strong man’s thigh, draped around his neck.

  ‘I understand,’ said Elrisse, ‘that you dislike snakes.’

  ‘This is true,’ said van Horstmann.

  ‘And for this reason you seek to be excused from the Ceremonies of the Serpent.’

  ‘Not at all, Grand Magister,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I would find the ceremonies… trying, certainly, but I would have no quarrel with being assigned to them. But my work on Egelbert Vries’s cipher is at a crucial turn. I can feel the answer hovering just beyond me. I must grasp it and the work will be complete. It is maddening, but enticing, and I fear that if my concentration is broken for an hour then I will lose it again. I ask that I be permitted to continue my work.’

  ‘And at what stage is that work?’ asked Elrisse. The Grand Magister sat at his hardwood desk, silks from Araby draped behind him and stacks of correspondence before him. He was signing documents with a quill plucked from some exotic bird, and his signature was a long list of honorary titles.

  ‘It’s not in the text,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It’s in the illustrations.’

  Elrisse sat back in his chair, the throne of a deposed sultan brought back by Imperial explorers. ‘The illustrations,’ he repeated.

  ‘Vries inserted invented words and strange phrasing to make it seem the text was hiding something,’ said van Horstmann. ‘There was something of a pattern to it, but not enough to permit deciphering. And some of the supposed cipher fragments were far too obvious for one of Vries’s intelligence. It is in the illustrations that they lie. I had a city botanist source a fresh witherbane flower. Vries had drawn the stamens incorrectly. Again, too grave an error for him. That is where the cipher lies. I am so close, Grand Magister. I need just a little while, as mages reckon things, and I will decipher it.’

  ‘I need no magical sense to tell you will shortly ask me for something, magister,’ said Elrisse.

  ‘More samples of Vries’s work,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I need the Codex Aethyrica.’

  Elrisse sucked in his breath sharply. ‘The Fourth Circle will scarcely forgive me,’ he said. ‘Such a tome is guarded more vigorously than the fattest jewel in our vaults.’

  ‘Vries wanted his code broken. Everything needed to do so will be contained in what he has written. If I can study the Codex Aethyrica at my leisure then they will soon add Herbs and Poultices of Troll Country to the vaults, because it will contain the newly-deciphered lost ceremony of Egelbert Vries.’

  ‘Then it will be done,’ said Elrisse. ‘Results, van Horstmann. That is what I must demand of you. A mind like yours can be excused the rote learning of our order only if in its place, the total of our order’s knowledge grows.’

  ‘It will.’

  Elrisse looked at van Horstmann with an expression that he could not read. Many people cultivated inscrutability, but with Elrisse it seemed effortless, as if he had been born with his emotions already hidden. ‘It intrigues me what you will come up with, van Horstmann. In the five years you have been here you have greatly refined the rituals for aethyric perception and elemental protection. You learn quickly and you perceive the world not through the cold and dead matter of which it is composed, but in terms of its potential, its capacity for change. My indulgences have their limits, but this one is acceptable. The Fourth Circle will release the Codex Aethyrica. I will suffer their complaints. In return I shall preside over the lost rituals of Egelbert Vries.’

  ‘My thanks,’ said van Horstmann.

  ‘And if I may say so, magister, you will find yourself much more at home if you can bring yourself to suffer snakes. They have been a symbol of this order since its inception.’

  ‘I will see what I can do in that regard. For now, though, I must to my quarters. The answer to the cipher taps at the front of my skull. I fear it slipping away.’

  ‘Then go,’ said Elrisse. ‘I shall send word to the vaults. You will have your codex. See to it that the order has its secrets in return.’

  When van Horstmann reached his quarters, a steward of the Half-Circle was already standing at his door, the Codex Aethyrica in his hands. Van Horstmann had stopped by the ablution chamber to wash his sweating face, for seeing the snake being used in the ritual had filled his mind with images of fl
eshy coils and fangs, and it had taken some minutes to banish them again. He took the book from the steward, acknowledged the man’s bow, and retreated into his chambers.

  Van Horstmann placed the Skull of Katam on the desk beside the book. The skull rolled its emeralds in its sockets and shuddered as the spirit inside it came to the fore.

  ‘It doesn’t look like much,’ said the skull.

  It was right. The Codex Aethyrica was old and threadbare. Its cover was of wood covered in thin and tattered fabric, with faded letters stamped on its cover. It had been fitted, some time after being written, with a lock that had fixed bands of steel in place around it to keep it closed. The key to this lock was tied to the book’s spine by a short cord.

  ‘There is no more valuable book,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘in the upper vaults. Certainly, none more valuable that I could get hold of.’

  ‘If it is not enough,’ said the skull, ‘there will be consequences.’

  ‘And you would know of consequences,’ said van Horstmann.

  If the skull could have scowled, it would have then. Van Horstmann knew what the Skull of Katam was – who it was. That was knowledge no one else in the Light Order had. The Fourth Circle had been ignorant of the skull’s true origin for centuries, which begged the question of how many other artefacts in the vaults had power that no one understood.

  ‘I shattered the Nine Blades of Burning Dusk,’ said the skull. ‘I crushed them beneath the weight of a thousand corpses. I flung the shards from the pinnacle of Cripple Peak! That was enough.’

  Van Horstmann unlocked the cover of the Codex Aethyrica. The book was in the hand of Egelbert Vries, making it akin to a sacred relic. Vries was one of the first magisters of the Light Order, tutored by Loremaster Teclis himself.

  Flickers of light rose from the pages, as if the syllables were taking flight. Vries’s hand was swirling and dense, almost a cipher in itself, and in reddish ink he had filled the margins with annotations and diagrams. Many pages were covered in representations of ritual circles, the first examples of the patterns being created outside the pyramid at that moment.

  ‘Can you feel that?’ said van Horstmann.

  ‘I have not felt anything for six hundred years,’ said the Skull of Katam.

  ‘Yes, you can.’ Van Horstmann took a bronze tray of alchemical instruments from a shelf beside the desk. Magister Vek had loved to collect such things, the trinkets of other, lesser orders of magic. The instruments had been made for a magister of the Gold Order, and van Horstmann recalled his discussion with the wizard Daegal.

  They thought that magic was a tool, like a knife or an anvil, to be wielded as the user wished. No imagination. No respect.

  Van Horstmann knew what magic really was.

  He took two slender silver tubes from the tray and popped off the stoppers that held them closed. He poured the contents of the cylinders onto the open Codex Aethyrica. Each tube contained a small quantity of silver-white dust, which burst into orange sparks where they met on the book’s page.

  The Codex Aethyrica caught fire. Grey smoke swirled up towards the ceiling. Van Horstmann waved a hand and cast a circle spell, one he had used many times before to seal off Magister Vek’s quarters from outside scrutiny. If anyone passing smelt smoke, they might become suspicious. Light magic made preventing that scrutiny simple enough for van Horstmann.

  He could hear Vries’s words screaming. It was like the sound of squealing animals, trapped and terrified as their warren burned. They tried to escape, peeling themselves off the parchment, the scraps of ink waving like spiders’ legs. But they could not get away.

  The Codex Aethyrica was as valuable as a substantial Altdorf estate, as the financing for the raising of an army. To the Light Order it was more valuable still, like the bones of a saint or a relic of Sigmar himself. And it burned away to the spine, scraps of paper flittering upwards on the heat of the flames.

  Van Horstmann passed a hand over the burning book. Deep cold enveloped it and the flames were instantly snuffed, replaced with a spray of ash and charred fragments that spilled out across the desk. Some spilled across the Skull of Katam.

  ‘And now?’ said van Horstmann.

  ‘Hope he hears,’ replied the skull.

  Van Horstmann looked at the skull. Did its expression ever change? Sometimes he was certain it did. There had been times when that fixed smile had been perhaps a little turned down, as when he wore it among gatherings of other magisters. Maybe it had been offended to be flaunted as a decoration. Perhaps now it looked a little sly, its grin more of a smirk.

  ‘I wait on no one,’ said van Horstmann.

  He took the puzzle box from his pocket and opened it halfway. Hiskernaath, the caged daemon snickered and cursed inside.

  ‘I need blood,’ said van Horstmann.

  ‘Begone,’ replied the daemon in the puzzle box. ‘I’m busy swyving your ancestors in hell.’

  ‘I command blood from you,’ snapped van Horstmann.

  One of Hiskernaath’s less important limbs unfurled from the box. Van Horstmann grabbed a ritual dagger from a shelf, one of the many such implements that Vek had collected. It had an oddly-shaped blade that curved sharply to one side and became broader at the end, with a hilt of bound horn or ivory. Van Horstmann drove it through the daemon’s limb and into the desk.

  Thick blood, hissing as if acidic, spread around the knife’s point and mixed with the ash from the burned book.

  The limb withdrew back into the puzzle box, and the box’s intricate panels snickered closed. Van Horstmann forced the point of the dagger into the wood of the desk and scribed a symbol into it. He used all his strength, carving as deep as he could.

  The symbol was something like a comet with a pair of tails, and an ignorant man might think it was a debasement of the twin comet of Sigmar. The comet was a portent said to signal Sigmar’s arrival and, after his death and passage into godhood, the presence of Sigmar’s spirit on the battlefield. But this symbol was a lot older than Sigmar’s Empire. Perhaps it was older than the race of men itself.

  Van Horstmann put the dagger aside.

  ‘Hear me,’ he hissed, teeth gritted. ‘Hear me!’

  The desk shuddered. The room followed. The braziers swung and dropped burning embers, and Vek’s collection of trinkets spilled off the shelves. The two bearded statues swayed and threatened to topple over. Van Horstmann thrust his hands wide and syllables of power flickered across the walls as he held the bubble of silence around the chamber. If he was discovered now, it would be over. In spite of all the precautions, of all the second and third backup plans, there were times like this when a single stroke of bad luck could bring it all down.

  The air split open. A purple-black gulf yawned over his head, spilling shadows into the chamber. This place had not seen a shadow since the day the pyramid was built, and now it recoiled from the alien darkness pooling on the floors and in the corners.

  Van Horstmann knelt to keep his footing. Alternately scalding and freezing gales battered at him. He forced himself to look up into the chasm, at the boiling mass of energy that seethed there like something that festered.

  ‘I will not be ignored!’ he shouted over the wind shrieking in his ears. ‘I will be heard!’

  The Skull of Katam was laughing. The sound was lost but its expression was clear, eye sockets narrowed in cruel glee.

  The black gulf yawned wider and enveloped van Horstmann like a great dark mouth.

  Van Horstmann had spent time in his head, navigating places that did not exist as a literal reality. He knew what such a place felt like – which parts of it slid off the senses as if refusing to be perceived, which parts were blown up in impossible clarity. The dirt beneath his fingers felt sharp and prickly, while the sky around him was so indistinct his mind did not register its colour.

  Chunks of shattered stone floated like islands. Lengths of spiked and gory chain held them down, criss-crossing between them like the web of an iron spider. Worms as long
and wide as the Empire’s great rivers looped and plunged through the void, round maws billowing open to scoop down the burning rocks that fell in a bright rain. Trees clung to the islands, bodies twisted and torn up in their gnarled and leafless limbs. Here and there a body fell, marks of torment on its shredded skin, face locked open in an endless scream.

  Behind van Horstmann, a staircase rose from the island on which he lay. It was built from blocks of white stone. Fingers and scraps of skin stuck from between the stone blocks, for it had been mortared into place with the bodies of the slaves who had built it.

  Van Horstmann drew a breath. The air was infernally hot, almost impossible to inhale. He got to one knee and his mind was aware that he had to ascend. He did not know where the mental command had come from – it made more sense by far to curl up into a mewling ball until this place was gone. But the command was there. He had to climb.

  Van Horstmann dragged himself to one knee. He went forwards one step. The sharp rock and dirt scraped the skin from his palms and knees. The pain shot up his limbs, prickling the inside of every limb and organ. Pain, in this place, was magnified, or it was different, a living thing that once released would carouse around the body to take as much as it could until spent.

  Another step. Van Horstmann tasted blood in his mouth.

  He had gone through worse. He had mentally travelled to some of the most gods-forsaken places of the Old World, the chill corners rightfully forgotten to all but madmen. He had climbed ice-capped mountains and almost died in Araby’s northern desert, buried alive by a sandstorm in a robber’s cave, all within the confines of a fevered trance. He had survived those. He would survive this.

  But even if this place was not real, in the same way that Altdorf and the chambers of the Light Order’s pyramid were real, it was still real enough for him to die there. This much, at least, van Horstmann had learned.

  His hand touched the lowest step. His fingers left tracks of blood on the stone as he dragged himself onto it. He saw the folds of skin poking from between the stones, and could just make out the loops of crushed eye sockets, tongues and ears. Were these indeed the builders of the staircase, or the remains of those who had tried to climb it?