Van Horstmann

by Ben Counter

  And then, that morning, there was a new word on the criers’ lips. A name.

  Salzenhaar.

  One of the Salzenhaars lay there now, tied down with a stick clenched in his teeth. He had been taken in the night and he still wore his nightshirt, now wet with perspiration though the house’s cellars were cold.

  Witch Hunter Argenos stood over the man and looked at his prisoner. Salzenhaar looked like any other man. Perhaps mid-thirties in age, a little weighty around the middle, as was fashionable for those wealthy enough to eat more than they had to. In good shape otherwise. Thick dark-brown hair. The heavy lower lip that was typical of the Salzenhaars and the various branches of their family tree.

  Mikhael Salzenhaar didn’t need to speak to express a mix of fear and anger. Argenos was intimately familiar with that particular mix. Salzenhaar’s eyes stared, lids pared back as if he was trying to bore twin holes on Argenos’s face with a look. He wasn’t quite panicking yet. He did not despair. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. You could never tell before they were dragged down here and introduced to the way the Silver Hammer conducted its affairs.

  Argenos took the stick from between Salzenhaar’s teeth. Salzenhaar spat out the taste in his mouth, spittle clinging to his goatee beard. ‘I know what you’re going to do,’ said the nobleman. ‘I’ve heard of it. I have friends who know about this sort of thing.’ He spat the words out, trying make them sarcastic, but his throat was dry and there was a crack in his voice.

  ‘Then you also know that everything you fear will not come to pass,’ said Argenos, ‘if you just tell me what I want to know.’

  Salzenhaar closed his eyes and seemed to deflate. Argenos had seen the look on men hundreds of times before. Either Mikhael Salzenhaar did not know anything in which Argenos might have an interest, or he was exceptionally good at pretending he didn’t, which in Argenos’s experience was not a skill men like Salzenhaar had.

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said. It was the first time he had said it, but already it sounded like a weary refrain he had trotted out more times than he could remember. Argenos knew he would say it again, many times more.

  ‘I see,’ said Argenos. ‘Then we are going to perform that dance, are we? I know the steps well. I know them a lot better than you, Salzenhaar, and believe me, you will tell me something.’ The witch hunter turned from the table on which Salzenhaar was restrained and took a large metal jug from the bench behind him. ‘Just what you tell me is not important to you, though it might be to me. What matters is that you will tell me, sooner or later. Sooner.’ Argenos lifted the jug so Salzenhaar could see it. ‘Or later.’

  Salzenhaar swallowed, with obvious difficulty. ‘I have money,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, yes. That particular step. Done with haste but very little grace. I know that one, too. But do you know this one?’ He nodded at the jug. ‘Holy water, Herr Salzenhaar. Blessed by priests of every pious faith in Altdorf. Good, sacred stuff. And drawn from the purest well in the city. Pure enough even for one of your high birth to drink. But can you drink it all? At once, and without a single drop escaping your lips? If you tell me lies, the holy water will recoil and you will gag. If not, you will imbibe it cleanly and you will be proven innocent and honest. Will you drink, Herr Salzenhaal?’

  Salzenhaal looked more confused than afraid. ‘That’s insane,’ he said. ‘That’s… that’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘I have burned witches that were exposed by the trial of water,’ said Argenos. ‘And they were most definitely witches.’

  ‘And who else? How many who weren’t?’

  ‘Few enough that the trial has proven its worth,’ replied Argenos without a pause. ‘So, will you drink?’

  ‘Of course I won’t drink! I can’t down that whole thing without bringing it back up! No one could!’

  ‘Then you will talk?’

  ‘And say what?’

  Argenos bent low over Salzenhaar. He could smell the sweat on the man, stale already. ‘Tell me the secrets you have sworn never to tell a man like me,’ he said. ‘Tell me where you got the book.’

  Salzenhaar’s expression now hovered between disbelief and resolve. He made a decision, somewhere down there among the dread.

  ‘I bought it,’ he said.

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From an Estalian,’ said Salzenhaar, his words rapid. ‘I heard tell he was in the city with something to sell. I learned it from a monk of Taal who spreads such news in the guise of advising our households. I met him one night and bought it.’

  ‘For how much?’

  ‘For a chest of… silver. A bottle of innocents’ tears. A statue that I bought five years ago from a wandering pedlar, who told me it was an idol of the beastmen who lived in the Forest of Chalons. It had amber for eyes. And he gave me the book in return. I did not learn his name, nor he mine, so far as I know.’

  ‘Good,’ said Argenos. ‘Good. That saves us a great deal of time and anguish. Good. Now tell me.’ Argenos stood at the end of the table behind Salzenhaar’s head, so the man could not see him, and leaned down close to speak in his ear. ‘Now, what is the book called?’

  Salzenhaar took two or three rapid breaths. ‘The Forbidden Codex,’ he said.

  ‘Wrong.’

  Salzenhaar gave a strangled noise, like cry of anger forced down into the back of his throat. ‘What do you want me to say?’ he shouted.

  ‘Tell me what I want to hear.’

  ‘I tried! You know more about it than me! I know nothing! Shallya’s teats, you should be asking yourself!’ Salzenhaar was hyperventilating now, his face red.

  Argenos leaned down over his prisoner. ‘You know nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ gasped Salzenhaar, his breathing shallower and shallower.

  ‘What a shame,’ said Argenos. ‘Then what follows will be wasted effort.’

  Salzenhaar’s eyes rolled back in his head. He strained against his bonds in spasm, and fell still. Argenos turned his head one way then the other, and opened the man’s eye. He was unconscious.

  The door to the chamber opened. Argenos could not quite hide his annoyance at the intrusion.

  Magister Heiden Kant stood in the doorway. He had a handful of loose parchment in his hand. ‘Lord Argenos,’ he said. ‘A moment.’

  Argenos indicated Mikhael Salzenhaar, contorted around in his restraints. ‘I have all my moments spoken for, magister. There are none to spare. Once my guest wakes again I must go to work.’

  ‘The Salzenhaars won’t know anything, no matter how many of them you put against the grindstone.’

  ‘I shall ascertain that for myself.’

  ‘There’s no need. It’s not them.’

  ‘The book was found in their tomb.’

  ‘And I know who put it there.’

  Argenos cocked his head to one side. ‘You do, Magister Kant?’

  ‘I suspect.’

  ‘Ah, you suspect. I suspect things, too. I suspect them about Mikhael here.’

  ‘Just listen, Argenos! Just for once, listen!’ Kant had never spoken to Argenos with such bluntness before. Very few ever had. Even people who did not know what the Silver Hammer did had instincts enough to know that Argenos was a man who assumed he would be respected and had the capacity to create unpleasantness when he was not. Kant threw his papers onto the table, beside Salzenhaar. ‘The memoirs of Mholik.’

  ‘And who, pray, is Mholik?’ Argenos’s voice had a note of danger in it that Kant did not seem to notice.

  ‘A one-time Grand Magister of the Celestial Order,’ replied Kant. ‘That is why the connection was not made. The colleges do not speak to one another, witch hunter. We keep what we know to ourselves, as if there never was a Teclis and we all sprang into existence of our own accord. Mholik was a scholar above all and everything he wrote survives, but no one outside the Celestial College ever set eyes on it before now. It was only the form of the ritual that gave me the connection. I had heard of something simi
lar among Mholik’s ceremonies for observing the conjunctions of the stars.’

  Argenos looked through the papers. They were covered in diagrams and cramped writing that had faded to light-brown on the ivory-coloured parchment. ‘I fail to…’

  ‘You fail to see any relevance. Yes, Argenos, I know. The relevance is that these are the root ceremonies on which the protective rituals attributed to Vries are based. But Egelbert Vries is supposed to have invented them. That was the whole reason the Light Order put such effort into rediscovering them in his writings. The writings that van Horstmann earned his spurs deciphering.’

  Van Horstmann?’ said Argenos. ‘You have ever had an evil eye for Magister van Horstmann, Kant.’

  ‘And now I understand why,’ continued Kant. If he recognised the impatience in Argenos’s manner, in the dangerous way his eyes narrowed and his voice dropped, it did not dissuade him. ‘Vries did not invent what he hid in his works. He copied them from Mholik, who broke the same ground a generation earlier. Vries was a plagiarist. He took advantage of the fact that the evidence was hidden away in the library of the Celestial Order to leave a legacy that wasn’t even his. It was lies. All of it. He was a barely competent wizard at best. Nothing he wrote was ever worth a damn.’

  ‘And you went to the Celestial College to find this out?’

  ‘And I will never be owed another favour by a wizard in this city because of it,’ said Kant. ‘I didn’t think I’d get through the gates. But I did, and when I told them I could prove one of the Light Order’s favourites was a fraud they gave me free run of their library. But that isn’t the point.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Argenos, ‘otherwise I would have to dig up Egelbert Vries and tie him to this table.’

  Kant looked down again at Salzenhaar, almost seeming to see the prisoner for the first time. ‘What is more important to you, witch hunter,’ he said, his tone now more measured. ‘Finding the truth, or being the object of fear?’

  ‘The truth, of course,’ said Argenos.

  ‘Then let Salzenhaar go. I know the truth. The absolute reality of it, this I swear. But it only means anything if you will act on it. Otherwise you might as well believe in whatever this poor idiot makes up to keep you from cutting his fingers off. Will you believe the truth, Argenos? Will you show that much faith?’

  Argenos folded his arms. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Egrimm van Horstmann researched a new cycle of exorcism rituals. You saw them used against the Hand Cerulean. He said they were more works he had deciphered from Vries’s books. But I know that cannot be the case. Vries couldn’t write a limerick, let alone a ritual that could do what you witnessed. So it came from somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Van Horstmann himself. He created it. Using this.’ Kant picked up one of the parchment sheets. This one had on it a single shape, a twisted figure that might have been a letter or a numeral but in no alphabet that either man had seen before that day. ‘The key sigil of van Horstmann’s exorcism. It is supposed to represent destruction. The component that severs the daemon’s presence in the real world and sends it back to the aethyr. But it doesn’t mean destruction at all, witch hunter. I found this in the Temple of Sigmar, and I had a daemon’s own job getting them to let me into the section where they held it.’

  ‘I have been to the Temple many times,’ said Argenos.

  ‘Then you know what I mean. It was transcribed from a menhir in Norsca, a place heaped with corpses and skulls.’

  Argenos looked at the sigil. It was easy to imagine it cut into the weathered stone on a chill Norscan mountain, glowering down over a heap of sacrificial victims rotting away as a feast for the birds. ‘And it does not mean destruction?’

  ‘No,’ said Kant. ‘It means enslavement.’

  Argenos looked up at the magister. ‘Then the daemons were not destroyed, they were enslaved?’

  ‘All of them,’ said Kant. ‘Every possession since the Battle of Drufenhaag. Enslaved and bound to Egrimm van Horstmann.’

  ‘The same van Horstmann,’ said Argenos, ‘who brought in the Liber Pestilentius and claimed it to be the source of the plague. Meaning–’

  ‘Meaning,’ interjected Kant, ‘that there is every chance that he was lying, that the Liber Pestilentius was planted by him and that he has an interest in the plague continuing. Perhaps even that he is its source. Given the magnitude of the damage he has done with his corruption of our rituals, that would certainly not be beyond him.’

  Lord Argenos thought about this for a long moment. ‘And I take it you bring me this revelation because I am the one who must bring Comprehender van Horstmann to justice?’

  Kant held up his hands. ‘I am here because I am a member of the Order of the Silver Hammer, and the Silver Hammer must know. If it is you who acts upon it, if it is another, if it is I alone, my duty must be done.’

  ‘And you would attempt to bring down van Horstmann alone, Magister Kant? If there was none other?’

  ‘I would.’

  Argenos nodded, as if he had just heard an elegant solution to a complicated problem. ‘Yes, I think you would. The Silver Hammer has before countenanced moving against a target within the Colleges of Magic. There is no little suspicion of wizards among my kind, and Sigmar knows it has been proven justified. I have seen many chill evenings made bearable by a rogue magister burning at the stake. But we have never staged an assault on one of the colleges. The Pyramid of Light is as secure a location as exists in the Empire. The Imperial Palace would be easier to storm. The entire strength of Altdorf’s Silver Hammer could descend upon it and even with our own wizard in the shape of yourself, Magister Kant, we would stand little chance of getting through the gates.’

  ‘Van Horstmann must be stopped,’ said Kant. ‘If I die in the attempt then it is not a bad death.’

  ‘For you, perhaps,’ said Argenos. ‘For those who are lost in the attempt. A fine epitaph that would make. But for those of us left behind, such an attempt would leave a crippled Silver Hammer. Our enemies would wax great in the wake of such a catastrophe. As we are, there is no way the Order of the Silver Hammer will attack the Pyramid of Light directly.’

  ‘I can get you more magisters,’ said Kant earnestly. ‘I am not alone in my suspicion of van Horstmann. We can get inside, perhaps even bring a sizeable force to van Horstmann’s location. It will be us against him then.’

  ‘What if van Horstmann has been as busy as you, though? If he has won his own faction to his side, primed to believe that the Silver Hammer wants him ousted on trumped-up charges for some reason of our own? Make no mistake, Magister Kant, I want van Horstmann brought down. If what you say is true he is a daemonologist doing his work at the very heart of what should be our most stalwart institution for the destruction of the daemon. But I cannot make war. Not with Altdorf’s gates closed, not with what we have.’

  ‘You have us,’ said a third voice.

  Kant and Argenos looked down at the slab as if they had both forgotten Mikhael Salzenhaar was there. Salzenhaar had woken up, though he still looked worse for wear.

  ‘Why be so surprised?’ said Salzenhaar, his voice weak. ‘Is this van Horstmann the swine-dog who planted that damn book?’

  ‘Quite probably,’ said Argenos.

  ‘More than probably,’ added Kant.

  ‘Then he despoiled the tomb of my father,’ said Salzenhaar. ‘I saw it torn and broken. I saw the bones scattered around the Garden of Morr. The bones of generations of my families. My father… and my cousin, dead at nineteen. I swore I would look after her when she was alive but thanks to this wretched witch I couldn’t even keep her body safe in her coffin. And my family’s name has become a thing of hate in the mouth of every Altdorfer. Isn’t that why I’m here? Because everyone across the city thinks they know the Salzenhaars are black magicians who brought down the plague? If this man is half of what you say he is then everything the Salzenhaars have in this city is yours to kill him with. We have men. Our own tr
oops, and those of a dozen other houses bound to us by patronage. Probably the greatest armed force that could be summoned from the population of Altdorf. I will carry a blade myself, witch hunter, if you will have it.’

  Argenos bent down over the table and removed the pin that held the restraints around Salzenhaar’s wrists. The prisoner tried to sit up, winced and lay down again, gingerly testing his shoulders and arms for twisted joints and pulled muscles.

  ‘You can get me more wizards?’ asked the witch hunter.

  ‘I can,’ said Kant.

  ‘Men are not enough. An army is not enough. We must have allies in the pyramid.’

  ‘And I swear we will have them.’ Kant turned to Salzenhaar. ‘I need your men by next sundown, armed and ready to march.’

  ‘Why such haste?’ asked Argenos. ‘We will strike the harder the more we can gather our strength.

  Kant swallowed, took a breath, and explained in as calm a manner as he could what he believed van Horstmann was about to do.

  This time, he went in stripped to the waist, displaying the cramped writing of the contracts etched into his skin. It had been a tedious and painful job having them all tattooed onto him – he had probably gone to every needle artist in Altdorf, having a line here, a paragraph there, to make sure none of them ever read enough to recognise the nature of what they were creating. The words of contracts sealing the services of a daemon to Egrimm van Horstmann for eternity. Woven among them were the older tattoos, the spiralling wards that concealed the Dark magic clinging to him from the aethyr-sight of his fellow magisters.

  The crystal panes of the sanctum looked again onto the interior of the puzzle box in which van Horstmann had trapped the daemons. Obscene, inhuman faces of every description, of appearances beyond the capacity for the most deranged artist to draw, loomed from each window onto the world inside the puzzle box. Behind them, dark and indistinct, was a landscape that hinted at barren wastes, dense leafless forests, the churning blackness of an endless ocean. Van Horstmann had never given any thought to what that world must feel like to Hiskernaath and the other daemons he had trapped there. He had not cared. He still didn’t. He cared only that they listened.