Van Horstmann

by Ben Counter

  ‘No,’ said Argenos. ‘We are the result. Retribution and redemption. The story ends not with the Hand Cerulean, but with their destruction.’

  The sun dipped below the horizon, and the district was swathed in shadow.

  ‘Then let’s get to it,’ said van Horstmann.

  The witch hunting party moved with grim swiftness across the bridge and into the stinking alleyways of the wharf. It had been hurriedly assembled, Lord Argenos recieving intelligence of the cult’s whereabouts and gathering his muscle even as a message was sent to the Light Order indicating the need for exorcists. It was the first time van Horstmann had crossed paths with the Silver Hammer, which he knew to be an order of witch hunters, priests of Sigmar and other pious men devoted to rooting out evil among the Empire’s people. In their zeal they had been responsible for countless false accusations and mass executions. Quite possibly, for every true devotee of Chaos they executed, more than one innocent man or woman was tried and killed. Van Horstmann also knew that the Silver Hammer themselves would not have a problem with such a statistic at all.

  ‘It is the stars that bring them out,’ said Argenos as the thugs lined up beside a doorway, recently rebuilt and sturdy in contrast to the rest of the area. ‘These ones watch the skies. A dangerous field of study. Only madness lies there.’

  ‘What is your plan?’ asked Kant.

  ‘Fire,’ said Argenos. ‘Then the sword. Then, for what remains, the ministrations of the exorcist.’

  ‘How many know we are here?’ asked van Horstmann. The speed with which the operation had been mounted had left him too many unanswered questions. Van Horstmann did not like those.

  ‘As many as need to know,’ said Argenos. ‘The enemy has spies everywhere, even among our most trusted. The fewer know of our deeds, the fewer traitorous tongues can take news of it to our quarry.’

  Two of Argenos’s men had crowbars at the hinges of the door. Two more knelt to light their torches with flints, and the last two took glass vessels from their packs. Each vessel was spherical, stoppered with a rag in a plug of wax.

  ‘Magister Kant,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It is rare that wizards of the colleges and the witch hunters work so closely together. There are some hunters who would rather see us all burned at the stake than fight alongside us.’

  ‘These are desperate times,’ replied Kant, once out of Argenos’s earshot. ‘The enemy we faced at Drufenhaag has resorted to other means to get at us. And while some of us are battle magisters and others are exorcists, I have perhaps walked furthest of all on the path of the diplomat. It is true, though, that a man like Argenos would not leap to let us in on the Silver Hammer’s operations. He needs us, I think, and he knows it.’

  The doors were levered open a crack. Witch Hunter Argenos drew his weapons. In one hand he had a warhammer, its bright silver head shining in the starlight, and in the other was a flintlock pistol. Van Horstmann had rarely seen such a weapon, for they were crafted only by the best gunsmiths of Nuln. Argenos kissed the pistol and whispered a prayer, and the ball loaded into its muzzle shone with a blue-white light that bled from the end of the barrel.

  The witch hunter nodded. The two men swung the door open. In the same moment the other four lit the rags stuffed into the glass vessels, and hurled them into the open doorway.

  In that moment, van Horstmann got his first look at the Hand Cerulean. He had no idea how the Silver Hammer had learned of them, but it had done so with no time to spare. Twelve figures knelt in a circle, wearing nothing more than loincloths, their skin painted blue and covered in silver stars. Three more stood in the centre of the circle and while they had started out dressed and marked the same as the other worshippers, they were something else entirely now. One had, in place of a head, a mass of flesh roughly the shape of a flattened worm fringed with wriggling limbs like those of a centipede. The mass pulsed and flapped, pink veins writhing beneath its taut, shiny surface. The mouth of the second had grown wider and wider until it formed a maw reaching from its chest to the middle of its face, and in that black pit seethed a mass of worms or perhaps stubby, slimy feelers. The left side of the third figure’s body had blistered up into an enormous membranous sac that sloshed as if filled with water, its left arm and leg lost in the folds of heaving flesh.

  One of the kneeling worshippers turned at the sound of the splintering door. In the light of the flame that tumbled past it, van Horstmann saw its eye sockets, empty and black, as if drilled through to a place of utter darkness.

  The two firebombs landed and shattered. One smashed against the side of a worshipper’s face, not giving him time to even turn around. The other hit a joist holding up the warehouse’s upper level and broke there. Flame billowed and a rush of superheated air slammed into van Horstmann, almost knocking him back from the doorway.

  Instantly, the worshippers’ reverie was broken. They screamed. Van Horstmann could just see two of them running through the fire, aflame from head to toe, careening senselessly at random. Others were running into the further reaches of the warehouse to find the relative safety of its furthest corners.

  The three deformed creatures – possessed, van Horstmann had no doubt – did not run. They turned to one another as if in silent conference, even as the flame caught on the straw and detritus of the floor and wreathed around their feet. It caught on their clothes and skin, and began to consume them even as they turned calmly towards the intruders.

  Argenos was first in. ‘By my proclamation, be execution upon thee!’ he cried. He levelled his pistol and shot the nearest one, the flesh sac, through the head. The blessed bullet tore a channel through its face and sent showers of blue sparks exploding from the ruin of its skull. A pulse of power spread from the impact and the other possessed darted away, lost in the flame and smoke. The body that hauled the flesh sac toppled over and the sac burst, a cloud of foul orange steam sizzling from the corpse.

  ‘Surround it!’ shouted Argenos. ‘Let none escape! Wizards, you are with me!’

  Van Horstmann followed Argenos in. He whispered the syllables of a protective spell, one he had mastered and memorised so it was cast with barely a thought. A shimmering dome of energy sprung into life over him, encompassing himself, Kant and Argenos. Flame rushed towards them and swarmed over the dome. The heat was appalling, barely breathable, but the fire did not reach them.

  A worshipper stumbled into their path. Her teeth were bared – van Horstmann saw it was a woman, her long hair cut into a single lock at the back of her neck. Her teeth were filed and pointed, and blood ran down her chin. Argenos knocked her down with a boot to the chest, and shattered her forehead with a downward swing of his hammer. The woman hissed out her last breath and lolled over, dead.

  ‘Thus are your wages,’ shouted Argenos over the rush and thunder of the fire. ‘Thus does Sigmar repay your service!’

  Van Horstmann saw silvery bolts of light springing from Kant’s fingertips, scoring deep furrows along the warehouse walls where more worshippers scurried for cover. One fell, but van Horstmann could not tell if Kant had struck him. Van Horstmann himself concentrated on the spell that was keeping them alive, calling down a column of Light magic from the sky to pour over them and douse the infernal heat that threatened to scorch his throat with every breath.

  The creature with the worm-like head came charging through the fire. It was aflame itself, the skin of the lower half of its body black and charred. It headed straight for Argenos who was a split second too late with the swing of his hammer. He was bowled to the ground and the possessee rolled over him, thrown off-balance by its momentum.

  The thing rolled to its feet in front of van Horstmann. Van Horstmann’s mind raced and time seemed to slow down. In front of him was the monster, mutated beyond any semblance of humanity by the daemon that he could almost taste writhing inside the once-human soul. But in front of him also hung a thousand jewels, each a spell he had researched, reconstructed and committed to memory, filed away in the fastidious library of hi
s mind. He chose one that gleamed with deadliness and purity, plucked it from its shelf and let it dissolve through his mind until it hummed with power at the ends of his fingers.

  Darts of it shot out and punctured the flesh of the possessed cultist’s chest. Silver strands whipped around the supports that held up the roof. The darts held fast and the cultist was pinned in place, straining against the silver bonds that suddenly held it. One arm was twisted almost behind its back and the mass of its head was constrained, even as it tried to strike forward like a scorpion’s tail.

  It had eyes, van Horstmann saw now, tiny and faceted like those of an insect, and between each pair of centipede limbs a set of mandibles surrounded by bristly black hair.

  He knew this daemon. He had read of it in the forbidden books first described to him by the Skull of Katam. It was an offshoot of the Plague God, the one debased men called Nurgle. He had read of what it did to those it possessed – they first turned into a wormlike creature of which this mutation was the first stage, then pupated, and emerged as a gigantic fly with a distended belly full of plague agents. Such knowledge, of course, would mark van Horstmann out as one who delved into the works of the enemy, so he would have to feign ignorance.

  Argenos was on his feet. His hammer came down against the cultist’s knee, still a human and vulnerable limb. Van Horstmann heard the bone crack and the leg folded the wrong away. The cultist hung in the silver threads, arms flailing uselessly towards van Horstmann.

  Kant drove his staff, a long, slender shaft of gold tipped with a shard of crystal, into the chest of the ensnared cultist. Light crackled around the crystal as it punched out through the cultist’s back and earthed through its convulsing body.

  From the flames leapt the third mutant cultist, whose body had warped into a portal into another extra-real space crammed with writhing worms. It barrelled into van Horstmann, who lost his footing and fell under its weight.

  His staff flew from his fingers, and Lizbeta’s golden death mask was lost in the fire that crackled along the filthy straw that covered the floor.

  The mass of the cultist seemed to grow, its body filling more with the seething mass that pressed forwards through its mouth. The cultist’s eyes were pale and dry, like those of a day-old fish at market – the cultist had long gone, his body given over entirely to the daemon that possessed it. That daemon took the form of a mass of worms, and it was reaching out now with its hundreds of limbs to grasp at van Horstmann’s hands and face.

  The stench of it was awful. Even the smoke and heat took second place to the breath that reeked from its mouth. Each worm had a tubular mouth of its own, tiny teeth gnashing, ringed with black bead-like eyes.

  Bile rose in van Horstmann’s throat. His heart thudded. He felt himself detached from his body suddenly, as if he was fleeing from the horror of it, and with a lurch of shame and nausea realised that he was losing control.

  Some of him recognised it. That relentless, organised, unfeeling part of him, on which he relied so much, could see what was happening. But the rest of him would not obey. The fortress did not stand before him, anchoring him in the winds of the aethyr.

  Instead, there was only the pit.

  Though van Horstmann knew, with every rational faculty he had, that this was not a real place, it seemed as completely real as the burning warehouse and the possessed cultist that pinned him to the floor. That world now seemed far away and only the pit registered on his most immediate senses.

  The clammy, cold scales of the snakes writhed against his skin. The press of them crushed his chest and made every breath a fight. The stench of them was worse, somehow, than the otherworldly stink of the worm daemon.

  Only Lizbeta’s hand in his told him there was any good in this world. He held on as tight as he could and she held on too, and the pain of her grip around his fingers was something he could cherish. He kicked out to force himself upwards towards the open air and bring her with him, pull her from the coils of the snakes and deliver her to safety. But the snakes would not let go and Lizbeta did not budge.

  He could hear her. She was sobbing, or perhaps screaming, her voice smothered. He fought all the harder and wrenched his joints with the effort, but he was little more than a boy and he had never been strong. Not in body, at least. For all his intelligence and cunning, he could not think or talk his way out of this.

  ‘Lizbeta!’ he cried. ‘Don’t let go! Don’t… don’t be afraid. I’ll save you. I promise!’

  Even as he said it, he knew it was a lie.

  Lizbeta’s hand was gone. Van Horstmann’s stomach turned over as he felt for her slender fingers again, sure that if he found her he would grab her with renewed strength and pull her up from the pit. But she was nowhere. Van Horstmann risked sinking too low to escape as he groped among the slithering coils for his sister. She was gone. He couldn’t hear her any more.

  Van Horstmann fought to drag himself up. He would clamber from the pit and… do what? Empty it? Wrestle every snake, break its spine, and cast it aside until the pit was empty save for Lizbeta? Would she somehow be alive down there, waiting patiently for him to rescue her?

  It didn’t matter. He could not organise those thoughts into anything coherent. He kicked and fought, thrashing out a few inches of space at a time. A hand broke the surface into air and he could draw breath now, thick and foul as the air was.

  The pit was dug into the floor of a cave, lit by a few smoky torches on the walls. It was a cold and wet place, silty water dripping from the stalactites overhead. Van Horstmann could see the entrance to the cave, the slick rock walls edged in the light that crept down from the surface above.

  There stood the woman, watching. From a distance she was achingly beautiful. Up close, she had the look of something that waited for its prey beneath the mud. She dressed well but practically as if for riding, wrapped in a black travelling cloak lined with crimson against the cold. Her skin was very pale and her hair a blonde as light as buttermilk. She had green eyes and thin red lips that, when she smiled to see van Horstmann struggling to reach the edge of the pit, curled up like a wound cut with a curved knife.

  Van Horstmann had seen her fleetingly before. He and his sister had needed help – a ride in the woman’s coach, for the night before had been stormy and dangerous. Beastmen were abroad and he feared for Lizbeta’s safety. He had to protect her, after all. All they had was each other.

  He had woken in this pit, and as the serpents tried to drag them down he had told his sister that she was safe, that he would get her out of this just like he had every dangerous place they had wandered. She had promised the same. She would save him. But she was younger, and weaker, and had always relied on her brother Egrimm’s quick mind to keep her safe.

  ‘You do not understand this now,’ the woman said in a cut-glass accent that spoke of the finest city breeding. ‘But your gift to us is the knowledge we glean from your death. Thank you, young man. You and your companion have given your Empire in death more than you ever could in life.’

  Van Horstmann tried to pull himself onto the surface of the snake pit and drag himself for the edge, to reach the cave floor and run for the way out. But he was tired, and every part of him hurt.

  And Lizbeta was gone. She was all he had. What did anything mean now? What did living mean?

  The woman vanished from his memory, leaving the echo of her smile behind. Darkness fell.

  ‘Lord comprehender!’ shouted a voice in his ear. ‘We must get out! The whole place is going to come down!’

  The voice belonged to Magister Kant, who was bent over van Horstmann shouting at the top of his voice. The roar of the fire almost drowned out his words.

  Beside him, Witch Hunter Argenos aimed his pistol again at a cultist who had clambered to an upper level of the warehouse for shelter. The pistol barked and the cultist’s head disappeared in a mist of silver and crimson.

  Van Horstmann forced himself back into the moment. His protective spell had faltered and the flames r
ushed closer. He got to his feet, unable to stifle the sense of disdain as he realised Kant had helped him up.

  Kant handed van Horstmann his staff. It was hot to the touch, having lain down in the flames, but Lizbeta’s face was undamaged. He gasped out the syllables of the spell again, this time tingeing it with a thread of chill magic that fended off the worst of the scalding air. He could breathe again now and he followed Kant towards the nearest way out – a set of double doors, probably for livestock, that the cultists must have thrown open to escape.

  He reached the open air to see two of the cultists lying in a broken heap being beaten by three of Argenos’s thugs. The cultists looked dead, but the Silver Hammer’s men were making sure. Argenos ran out, reloading his pistol with a shot that glowed in his fingers. A wayward part of van Horstmann’s mind wondered how many hours a priest must have prayed over the sacred bullets to imbue them with such power.

  ‘What news?’ yelled Argenos. ‘How many have fled us?’

  ‘But none, Lord Argenos,’ replied one of the thugs. ‘We caught them all, the few that survived.’

  ‘And alive?’

  The thug smiled. From around the side of the warehouse came the remainder of the thugs, dragging the senseless bodies of two of the possessed cultists. One was the flesh-sac creature that Argenos had shot. Though its head was gone, presumably whatever animated it did not need the host body’s brain to survive, because its mass still heaved with uneven breaths. The other was the one that had so nearly done for van Horstmann, its enormous maw now a half-closed drooling slit, the worm-daemon retreated deep inside it.

  Argenos indicated a building a couple of streets away. ‘The fire will spread,’ he said, ‘but we cannot move them far and so our work must be done here, and quickly. Take them to that building. Magister Kant, prepare a circle. Comprehender van Horstmann, we will need your new rituals now.’

  ‘Not new,’ said van Horstmann. His throat was raw and smoky as he spoke. ‘Very old.’