Van Horstmann

by Ben Counter

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHALLYA WEPT

  When Katam was young, he saw death.

  His home town, a place of isolated and fearful people before Sigmar’s conquest, was visited by a terrible plague that ripped through everyone Katam loved. That is, the majority of the stories have it so. A plague, perhaps, is useful shorthand for all the many varieties of death that might have afflicted the young Katam. In other variations, goblins attack his home, or roving bandits, or a natural disaster like a flood or a storm. Sometimes, everyone simply dies.

  Katam is typically a child during these events. Perhaps he really was. Priests and parablists who told the story certainly saw the impact of that image – a child, alone and afraid, wandering through his home which was now scattered with the corpses of his loved ones.

  Katam had seen death. He had escaped it in a physical sense only. He knew now that everything he had been told was a lie. There were no benevolent spirits or gods who helped determine his future. Being good, avoiding sin and helping the needy did nothing to stave off death. There was no moral currency that could buy extra days of life. There was not even a predetermined date of death, no lot of time which everyone was given at birth to fill as best they could. Death was cold and random, and cruel. In the face of death, everyone was infinitely helpless.

  Katam decided that he would not die.

  While every story differed, they all came to this point. The young Katam renounced the human vulnerability to death. He refused to obey it, to die when it decided. Most versions simply state that he made this decision. Some have him howl his promise over the bodies of his parents or from a storm-lashed mountaintop or other suitably dramatic location. Many record his exact words, which are of course different in every iteration. But they all agree he made his decision. Katam would not die. He would discover how to foil death, and he would become immortal.

  The rest of the story is very short in essence but that did not stop the chroniclers from adding as much as they could about Katam’s adventures. In the pursuit of his goal this young nobody bloomed into a practitioner of magic, an explorer, adventurer and warrior. He also became irredeemably tainted by his drive for immortality. He did terrible things. He killed, and tortured. He destroyed. Some chroniclers glossed over this, putting his deeds vaguely so as to avoid sensationalising the tale which was, after all, a moral parable. Others described every foul thing attributed to Katam and added some of their own, treating the canon of Katam’s sins like a cultural repository of broken taboos and gruesome legends looking for a home.

  It was these tales that had attracted van Horstmann to the legend of Katam, for at the time he discovered Katam’s story he was himself on a similar search. He too had travelled much of the breadth of the Empire and its surrounding lands. Katam was said to have travelled the Dark Lands, to the fringes of Cathay and across the oceans to Naggaroth and the jungles of Lustria, but van Horstmann did not believe that. It was unnecessary. There were plenty of evil little corners to be unearthed in the mundane lands of men. One did not need to circumnavigate the globe to find them.

  Van Horstmann had, however, done things that echoed Katam’s adventures. He had not been so bloodthirsty or wanton as Katam, mainly because doing so served no purpose and carried the risk of being caught, but it was a man very like van Horstmann who is said to have descended a staircase of six thousand steps into a lightless cavern, where great pale things lived below the surface of a lake and told fortunes in exchange for pairs of lovers thrown into the deep.

  Katam’s failures were left out but surely he had some. Van Horstmann’s own experiences were proof enough of that. He had once bargained for a priceless dragonhide tome in the basement of a gambling den in Couronne, only to find it was gibberish written on horse leather. Surely Katam had swindled his way into possessing some fake prayer tablets, or had his time wasted by a prophecy-spouting charlatan.

  Eventually Katam had found what he wanted. He learned how to speak with the Dark Gods. Such gods were not to be spoken of by name and were referred to by euphemism or metaphor: the Throne of Skulls, the Prince of Lies, Grandfather, the Gentle One, the Warlord, the Smiling King. No one knew how many they were or who had first started to worship them. They had no church, just isolated obsessives who sometimes infected others with their fervour to start a cult. The only things anyone could agree on was that they were real, that they were evil, and that they either needed or loved to have mortals do their will in this world.

  Katam wanted to live forever. He told the Prince of Lies this. The Prince of Lies replied that he wanted Katam’s soul. Katam would exist forever, but the Prince of Lies could call upon him at any time to serve in whatever way the god wished. It was a terrible price, but immortality was a wondrous prize.

  Katam was without fear, and cunning beyond measure as a result of his search for eternal life. He agreed to the deal, knowing that the Dark Gods are fickle and capricious, and even slavery to the will of the Prince of Lies would last only as long as it amused the Prince to give him orders. It was far from perfect, but Katam had finally found what he was seeking and the conditions of the pact did not dissuade him.

  The words of the contract appeared on the side of a mountain – or a mighty reef below the sea, or written in the stars, or scorched into Katam’s skin – and Katam put his name to it beside the symbol of the Prince of Lies.

  The Prince of Lies, for once, had not lied. Every detail of the contract was honoured. The contract failed to mention, however, just how much of Katam would be alive. To be alive, one only needed one’s mind. The rest of his flesh and bone could perish and crumble, and the conditions of life, as the contract encompassed it, would still be fulfilled.

  So Katam went about the world, using his knowledge to seek out greater magical power. He developed the idea that if he learned enough – as he surely would with an infinite lifespan – he could find some loophole or magical spell that would free him from the contract with the Prince of Lies and let him keep eternal life. He gave little attention at first to the fact that he still aged, and even as his skin wrinkled and his hair thinned he reasoned it would take little magical learning to reverse the physical symptoms of age. He could become a young man when it suited him.

  Then his heart stopped and he ceased breathing. His body did not respond any more. One of his minions assumed him dead and had him buried in the place he had first sworn never to die. But Katam was alive, and awake.

  A flood opened up his grave. His bones were gnawed upon by animals. A child found his skull and sold it for a handful of copper coins to a travelling hawker of fake medicines, who in turn sold it on to a student of anatomy. It was lost and found, purchased and stolen, Katam all the while seeking a way to take control of his fate again. He tried speaking to those into whose hands he fell. Some threw him away in terror, some thought him a symptom of madness. One covered him in gemstones and set him on an altar. He was evidence in witchcraft trials and a collector’s item for the idle rich who loved to shock one another with their transgressions.

  He told his owners how to speak with the Dark Gods. Some of them did, and were consumed or driven insane. Some did not listen. Katam could not get the attention of the god he had sworn his soul to.

  He did not die, at least. Sealed in his skull, spending years in meditation on the pact he had entered, he would have gone mad if he had not abandoned sanity some time before.

  Tales spread of a magical skull that knew the secrets of the Dark Gods. People killed one another over its ownership. They bargained away everything they had for a lead on its location. A heretic bought the skull at enormous cost to serve as the centrepiece of the cult he would use to acquire wealth, power and unearthly pleasures. His estate in Altdorf was raided by witch hunters under Imperial orders. The heretic’s entrails were scattered across the grounds and the estate burned to the ground. From the ashes the Skull of Katam was found and handed over to the Light College, who could be trusted to keep safe this object that seemed immu
ne to all efforts to destroy it.

  The wizards of the Light Order knew only the name of the artefact, and the hazy rumours about how it spoke and knew the future. Everyone who knew what it really was had been quartered or burned alive by the Emperor’s witch hunters. But the traces of the truth were left behind in the journals and treatises of madmen, the notes of heretic summoners and the dark philosophies of those who had thought too deeply about the Dark Gods and their realm. In fragments, they told the whole story of the Skull of Katam and the man who still lived inside it.

  It took someone like van Horstmann to discover the story of Katam. Zeal, and the willingness to delve into forbidden places to find the fragments of the tale, was not enough on its own. It required an organised mind to extract each piece of the story and assemble it into one, to pare away the lies and guesswork. It took van Horstmann to realise that he needed to speak with the Prince of Lies, and that to do so, he needed the Skull of Katam.

  There were so many pieces that had to fall into place. Van Horstmann could only carry on through the certainty that none of them were up to chance. He had control of them all. He had never written it all down, because then he might be discovered – it was arranged in his mind, the building blocks of his fortress, all his plans and certainties spanning between them.

  This was his revenge. He had built it in every detail. The greater part of his task was done. His pact with the Prince of Lies had been the final part of the groundwork to be laid, the final strings of theory tied into place. Everything that followed would happen of its own course, with just a tending hand from van Horstmann to see it through.

  He already had what he wanted. It would fall into his hands like the Skull of Katam had.

  It was just a matter of time.

  Van Horstmann could usually be found in the pyramid’s grand reading room.

  That afternoon was a quiet one. Many of the Light Order were at a conclave of magisters from across the Colleges of Magic, part of the Teclian Pact which demanded each college send representatives every five years. It kept the colleges, if not of united purpose, at least aware of one another and of their diplomatic obligations, and without such clauses in the pact the magisters would, as was their nature, become insular and obsessive without giving magisters of another order a passing thought.

  Van Horstmann was insular and obsessive. He sat, as he did on so many days, on a throne brought by some past explorer from the Southlands, carved from black stone in the likeness of antelope horns. With a wave of his hand he took books from the towering bookcases surrounding the circular chamber, and added them to the twenty-high stacks that surrounded him. Most had covers inked in silver and gold, which winked in the light that drenched the reading room as it did every other corner of the pyramid. Here it shone from waterfalls of glowing water that fell from the dome high above, plunging down into the fountain surrounding a statue of Loremaster Teclis himself. Van Horstmann only had to glance up and he would be looking into the face of the high elf who had taught his people’s way of magic to men, and founded the Colleges of Magic to help them learn.

  Van Horstmann made a gesture and one of the books hovered in front of him, cover opening. The sound of pages flipping by merged with the gurgle from the waterfall of light.

  ‘Light of lore, aethyr’s heart, give my eyes the speed of my thoughts.’

  The phrase focused his mind, and let him unravel the spell contained there. It was a spell he had researched and created himself, and under its effects van Horstmann could read as quickly as the words could pass his eyes. A minor thing, below the notice of many magister researchers, but van Horstmann had made much of its usefulness.

  Then pages flipped past. This book was one of a series of several dozen documenting the legends of the northern Empire. Every other tale was about crazed Norsemen sailing across the Sea of Claws to pillage and despoil. But there were fragments. A name here, a stock phrase there.

  Someone else had entered the reading room. Van Horstmann focused one part of his mind on the book, the other on the newcomer, because a faint recognition had fired off in his mind.

  ‘Heiden Kant,’ said van Horstmann as the other figure drew close. Framed in the waterfall, Kant looked just as young as van Horstmann remembered. Which was odd, because the last time van Horstmann had seen Kant was at the investiture of Eckhardt III, and that had been twelve years ago. Kant had an unruly mess of dark, curly hair, a long nose and bowed mouth like some fanciful portrait of a well-born boy. As an acolyte he had looked at home. On the battlefield, or in a debate on magical dogma with a dozen magisters, he would look like a lost choirboy.

  ‘My greetings, Comprehender van Horstmann,’ replied Kant. ‘I trust that I do not disturb your studies too gravely.’

  Van Horstmann had only recently been granted the title of comprehender. It was one rarely used, and had first been given to a member of the Fourth Circle who had specific responsibility for written works not in traditional form: tapestries, inscribed tablets, preserved tattoos and other apocrypha. It had been given to recognise van Horstmann’s completion of the Cryptothaumaturgia, the total of Egelbert Vries’s hidden writings. It was also an unofficial recognition of the fact that he was of a senior rank to the other magisters, without giving him a specific role within the order such as Master Chanter or Lord of Ceremonies.

  ‘Children have studies,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I have a calling.’

  ‘Of course, comprehender,’ said Kant. Van Horstmann found himself thinking of Kant as a boy, even though Kant had joined as an acolyte at around the same time as van Horstmann himself. Kant might even have been the older of the two.

  ‘But no, I am not disturbed.’ Van Horstmann let the book drift back down, like a falling leaf, to the top of its pile. ‘I seek fragments, as ever. There was a story written long ago and then shattered into a million pieces, and if we are ever to read it again we must find every piece. They came to rest here, in these poems and fairy tales. Perhaps it is a compulsion that I pursue.’ He smiled, because he had filed away, along with so much other information, the necessary expressions and platitudes to be employed when having a conversation.

  ‘We all have our callings,’ said Kant. ‘I seek the path of the exorcist. They tell me it is the longest of all. That many of us, maybe most, never reach the stage where we can trust ourselves to cast out the daemon. And that it is the most dangerous. Even the strongest can lose his soul. But I walk it anyway. I think it must have been compulsion that made us walk into this pyramid in the first place.’

  Van Horstmann indicated the books piled around him. ‘Thousands of years ago,’ he said, ‘something happened in the far north of the Empire, near the shore of the Sea of Claws. Perhaps on the edge of the Kislevite steppe. It left its scars in folk songs and legends, but nowhere is it attested in its entirety. Something fell from the sky, perhaps, or a great magic was wrought. I do not know yet, but I can feel it building up, piece by piece in my mind. Perhaps eventually there will be enough to sponsor an expedition to find what traces of it remain in the earth. Or perhaps it will never be found, and it will always be that maddeningly final step away. It would not be the first. Knowledge degrades such that without diligent custodians it will corrode until it is useless. A sad state. A tragedy. When I think of what has been lost, I feel the need to claw back what I can. Compulsion, as you say, without a doubt.’

  ‘I came here,’ said Kant, ‘to speak of you about the Codex.’

  ‘The Codex?’

  ‘The Codex Aethyrica,’ said Kant. ‘I understand it discourses at length about the link between the mind and the aethyr, through which it can be vulnerable. I have spoken with my fellow magisters and they agree that it would be most profitable for me to study it. The last one to do so, I understand, was you, comprehender, and the Fourth Circle would be much more likely to release it for study with your endorsement.’

  The Codex Aethyrica currently held in the upper vault was just the cover, which had been undamaged by the sacrifice o
f its pages. That cover held a collection of samples, errors and unclaimed manuscripts purchased from the illuminators of the Buchbinder District and carefully trimmed to give the Codex the appearance of being complete. The book had remained locked and undisturbed on its podium in the vault since van Horstmann had returned it to the magisters of the Fourth Circle and it suited him very much for it to stay that way.

  ‘I have studied the Codex, it is true,’ said van Horstmann, ‘and it would have no application to the study of exorcism. Exorcism is a practical art, and the Codex is theoretical to the point of wilful obscurity on matters pertaining to the interaction of the aethyric world with ours.’

  ‘Nevertheless…’ began Kant.

  ‘Any magister must curry good will with the Fourth Circle,’ continued van Horstmann. ‘It would earn me no good will to insist on their releasing the Codex for such an inappropriate area of study, even if I alone had the power to sway them. I suggest you locate the ninth volume of the Historiae Prodigium instead. It lies in this very reading room, though it may take some time to find it.’

  ‘I am familiar with that volume,’ said Kant. ‘If the Codex really is out of my reach for now, perhaps…’

  Kant’s sentence broke off as the whole pyramid shuddered. Books fell from the shelves, smacking into the floor around the two magisters. The waterfall splashed liquid light across the statue of Teclis and the whole structure groaned as if under a great weight. Both magisters looked around them in shock at the interruption. The pile of books beside van Horstmann toppled and scattered its volumes across the floor.

  ‘Was that an earthquake?’ said Kant.

  ‘Sigmar’s oath!’ swore van Horstmann. ‘No, not an earthquake. The fold in space would keep us safe from such. It was something else, heavens know what.’

  Magisters were running through the passageway outside the reading room. One leaned in through the doorway.

  ‘An attack!’ he said. ‘It must be an attack!’