Marks of Chaos Read online

  Johansen drew his hand-crossbow from its holster and stepped into the shadows, heading for the statue of Sigmar. He surprised an entwined couple between the feet of the Empress Magritta, and sent a black-lotus peddler scurrying away from under Ludwig the Fat. Around the plinth of Leopold I, he could see where the Ulricans had been working that morning. Above, Sigmar’s mighty hammer eclipsed the moons, and in its shadow he could see the red-haired man kneeling on freshly laid paving-stones, crouched over something. A spark. It was a tinderbox.

  Johansen knew he was out of time. He rushed forward, his crossbow raised, shouting, “Drop it!”

  The man didn’t turn as he’d hoped, but crouched lower, blowing on something that glowed. Johansen charged in, firing as he ran. The bolt hit the Ulrican in the arm and the tinderbox went flying. The man twisted, his face maddened with rage, and Johansen kicked him in the teeth. He went backwards, his skull hitting the base of the statue with a crack.

  Johansen’s eyes searched the ground. A white cord lay between two flagstones, one end raised and singed. He grabbed it, pulling it with both hands. It came free, about three feet of fuse. He dangled it in front of the man’s eyes.

  “Happy Hexensnacht,” he said.

  The man grinned through broken teeth and raised something in one hand, smashing it down onto the stones. Shards of clay splintered and a liquid spread, covering the ground, seeping between the flagstones into the soil below. Johansen punched the Ulrican in the side of the head, then dipped a finger and smelled it. Oil.

  “Johansen!” Grenner yelled and he jerked his head up. A man was running out of the shadows, carrying a torch. It was the man the Ulrican had slapped in the crowd. A back-up. From the other direction Grenner’s throwing knife spun and sunk into the new man’s chest, a second into his eye. He fell. The torch went up, curving a bright path towards Johansen.

  He jumped to catch it, and his foot slipped on the oil. It bounced through his hands and hit the flagstones. The oil burst into flames.

  He stared for an instant.

  “Run!” Grenner was bellowing. “Run!”

  He ran, roaring warnings, grabbing people and pushing them ahead of him. As he ran past the Empress and out into the crowd, he thought he might be safe.

  Then the world picked him up and flung him across the square, filling his senses with bright loud disaster. He ducked and rolled, bruised and breathless, clambering back onto his feet, running through the panicked, screaming crowd to get away. There was a second explosion. People were knocking each other down, trampling over bodies, desperate to get away.

  The statues were falling like trees in a gale, crashing into each other. Stone limbs dropped, torsos cracked, heads fell and exploded. Leopold collapsed into the Empress Magritta, her hollow bronze frame booming like a bell across the stampede in the square. She crumpled down into the crowd, crushing—Johansen didn’t want to think how many people. He could see bodies impaled on the spikes of her crown. He felt sick.

  Above the mayhem, the mighty figure of Sigmar stood firm, warhammer raised against the sky, the symbol of the Empire. Johansen, swept away by the crowd, tried to keep his eyes on it. Could it have survived the blast? Would it stand? Then he saw the first crack appear in its right leg. Pieces of stone fell. The crack grew. The leg shattered. The stone warhammer moved against the sky, slowly but unstoppably.

  Johansen watched, not caring about the people streaming and screaming past him, as the first emperor fell from his plinth like a god falling from the heavens, smashing its hundred-foot length across the flagstones and crowds of the Königplatz, splintering into uncountable pieces. The head of the warhammer, ten feet across and solid granite, bounced once, rolled and crashed into the Black Goat Inn. Beams fell, tiles cascaded off the roof into the crowd below, and part of the front wall collapsed.

  Johansen felt a hand grip his forearm and turned to see Grenner. His partner’s face was gaunt and covered in dust, his clothes torn, his face bleeding where it had been cut by flying stones. They stared at each other and at the devastation around them. Grenner raised an arm and pointed at the wreckage of the inn.

  “You know,” he shouted above the tumult and chaos, “that’s hurt your chances of getting a snog tonight.”

  Johansen almost hit him. Instead after a second he said, “Give me your cloak.” Grenner passed it and Johansen tore it into strips. Together they knelt and began bandaging the wounded.

  “Get some sleep,” Hoffmann said.

  It was four hours later. Altdorf was in shock. The Königplatz lay in chaos, corpses still strewn amidst the rubble of two thousand years of history, everything covered with a layer of powdered stone, made ghostly by the flames of a hundred torches, lighting the rescuers’ efforts to find more wounded. The temples and hospices were full, and the cold stone slabs in the temples of Morr too. Messengers had already ridden out from the city to carry the news across the Empire, like a rock dropped in a frozen pond, the news fracturing and rippling out across the land.

  That, Johansen thought, was what the Ulricans had wanted, what they were prepared to give their lives to achieve. In the north of the Empire, in Ostland and beyond, the fall of Sigmar would be a rallying-cry. Come the spring, there might even be civil war.

  He sat in Hoffmann’s office, drinking hot spiced wine, Grenner beside him. The three had spent the night lifting rocks, carrying bodies and comforting the wounded and the grieving until they were utterly exhausted. Logically, he thought, they should have been searching for the other Ulricans. But this was more important.

  “Sorry we didn’t stop them, sir,” he said for the fifth time. Across the room, Hoffmann shook his head. The leather of his chair creaked with the movement.

  “Not your fault. You did everything you could. We didn’t have the manpower, it was as simple as that.” He looked contemplative. “Get some sleep.”

  “Shouldn’t we find the rest of them, sir?”

  “They’re probably miles outside the city by now,” Hoffmann said, “heading north. But don’t forget the two of you are on duty at seven bells.”

  “You’re bloody joking,” Grenner blurted out.

  “I’ll overlook that insolence, Grenner, given the circumstances. Hexenstag dawn: the Emperor will be at the cathedral service for the blessing of the new year. We attend him. Plain clothes, not uniform. And shave, for Sigmar’s sake.”

  “Won’t it be cancelled?” Grenner asked. “Under the circumstances?”

  Hoffmann shook his head. “The Emperor’s determined to show his people that Sigmar’s Empire and its faith are still strong—and to mourn the dead as well. He’s adamant. He’s instructed all the Electors in Altdorf to be there too.”

  “Oh Sigmar,” Johansen said quietly.

  “What, Johansen?” Hoffmann asked.

  “Don’t you see?” His mind was exhausted; perhaps that was how he could understand the Ulrican fanatics, the way they thought, the depths of their madness and the extremes they’d go to. He remembered the eyes of the red-haired mason, a man who knew he was going to die and didn’t care. “It’s not over. The cathedral with the Emperor and the Electors, all the nobility of Altdorf… that’s the next target. They’re not settling for sending a signal, they want to start the war. Today.”

  Hoffmann stared at him. “Sigmar’s balls, man, didn’t they use all their gunpowder this evening?”

  “No.” His neck ached. “The crater in the Königplatz wasn’t deep enough. I reckon they’ve got four or five hundred pounds left.”

  Hoffmann stared across the dark room. “An hour’s sleep,” he said. “No more. Then we search the cathedral from top to bottom.”

  Something clanged, and Grenner was instantly awake. It knelled again and he realised what he was hearing: the great bell of the cathedral, ringing to summon the faithful to worship. Light streamed through the windows. He threw off his blanket and shook Johansen on the next bed.

  “We’ve overslept! We’ve bloody overslept!”

  Johansen
was alert in a second. “What happened to Hoffmann? He was going to wake us.”

  “No idea.”

  Johansen began throwing on his torn and filthy clothes. “You know he’s an Ulrican?”

  “Who?”

  “Hoffmann.”

  “What are you saying?” Grenner stared at him.

  “Nothing. Just an observation.”

  “I hope you’re right.” They rushed downstairs and out into the street. Nobody turned to look at them: there were too many ragged, haggard people in the city that morning. Thin grey dust coated everything. Two horses stood at a hitching-post outside a building opposite. Grenner caught Johansen’s eye. A moment later they were on horseback, galloping towards the great cathedral of Sigmar.

  “How would they have got barrels of gunpowder into the cathedral?” Grenner shouted above the clatter of hoofs on cobbles.

  Johansen gestured with one hand. “Bribery. Concealment. The powder may not be in barrels any more. Where the hell’s Hoffmann?”

  “How should I know?”

  Ahead, they could see a crowd around the cathedral’s high doors. Many people had come to worship alongside the Empire’s greatest citizens today, to mourn loved ones, or ask for divine retribution on their killers. Grenner could see armoured guards by the doors, swords drawn.

  “Stop,” he shouted. Johansen reined in his horse.

  “Why?” he said.

  “We need to think about this.”

  “Every second counts.”

  “They’re not going to let us into the cathedral looking like this.” He paused. “How much gunpowder did you say the Ulricans had left? Enough to bring down the building?”

  “Enough to make a hole in it, maybe.”

  “They want more than that.” Grenner grimaced, thinking. “Maybe they’re going to crash a Bretonnian wineseller’s cart stuffed with gunpowder through the doors and blow themselves up.”

  “Not funny.”

  “I wasn’t joking.” Grenner wiped his brow and stared up at the huge building, its buttresses rearing up into the sky around the peaked slates of the pitched roof. Between their stone arms, hanging over the high crenellated wall around the top of the building, a scarlet flag was blowing in the wind.

  “What would five hundred pounds of gunpowder do to the roof?” he asked.

  Johansen furrowed his brow. “You could collapse the whole thing.” He raised an eyebrow. “Why do you think they’re up there?”

  Grenner pointed at the flag that had caught his eye. “Recognise that?”

  “No.”

  “You should pay more attention to fashion. That’s Hoffmann’s cloak.”

  Johansen was silent for a second. Then: “How do we get up there?”

  Grenner grinned. “Follow my lead.” He dug his heels into his horse and galloped down the street, heading for the crowd around the cathedral doors, Johansen hard on his heels. Heads turned as people heard their approaching hoofbeats, there were shouts, and a path opened. Grenner rode down it, heading for the doorway, holding his reins tight to keep the horse straight.

  The guards tried to block them with their swords but they weren’t fast enough and their blades weren’t long enough: Grenner thanked the gods that they hadn’t been pikemen. He flashed past them and into the cathedral’s antechamber, glanced back to check Johansen was still behind him, then crouched low as the horse plunged through the smaller arch into the vaulted expanse of the long nave.

  People in the pews either side leaped to their feet as the two horses galloped down the cathedral’s central aisle. There were shouts of surprise and anger. Grenner ignored them. He knew a stairway in the south-east transept; it led up past the gallery where the Elector Counts sat to watch the service, then spiralled upwards to the roof. That was their way up.

  He galloped past the choir. Almost there. People behind them were chasing on foot, but he was well ahead of them. The horse cantered into the shadows of the transept, Grenner leaped from its saddle, drew his sword and ran to the stairs, taking them three at a time. Johansen was right behind him.

  A wall of armed men blocked their way.

  Oh Sigmar, he thought. The Electors’ guards. There was no way through. He twisted round, to see more soldiers behind him. No way out either. Trapped.

  There was a strange hush in the cathedral at this invasion of a holy place. Off to one side Grenner could see the open gallery where the Electors were seated. He recognised faces among them. He’d saved some of their lives, but they wouldn’t know him.

  No, he thought, one would. Grand Prince Valmir von Raukov, Elector Count of Ostland.

  “Prince Valmir,” he shouted. “The men who killed Anastasia are on the roof.”

  The Elector’s head jerked up and he stared at the Palisades officers as if woken from a dream. He looked surprised and alarmed. Startled, Grenner thought, to hear his mistress’s name echo across the cathedral. It was a risk. If the prince was a typical cold­blooded noble he could ignore them and the guards would cut them down. But if, as Grenner had guessed, he had really loved the girl…

  The prince stood. “Let them pass,” he said.

  The guards moved aside. Grenner pushed between them and headed up. Behind him, Johansen paused to take a loaded crossbow from one of the soldiers. “I’ll borrow that,” he said, and followed his partner.

  The door at the top of the stairs was closed. Grenner shoulder-charged it and it flew open with a crash. Outside, in the narrow trough between the low wall of battlements and the steep pitch of the roof, three men looked up. One grabbed for a lit lantern, one for a bow, and one did not move because he was bound hand and foot, gagged and leant against the wall with his cloak flapping in the cold wind. Hoffmann.

  Grenner dived to one side. Behind him, Johansen raised his borrowed weapon and shot the other bowman in the head. He fell.

  The second man, dark and heavily built, ducked behind Hoffmann, wrapping an arm round his neck, using him as a shield. “You cannot win,” he shouted. “This is Ulric’s year! The false god Sigmar has been destroyed and his temple and priests shall perish too! It is ordained!” His voice had a northern accent and the hectoring tone of a true believer.

  “Morning, sir,” Johansen said, looking at the network of oil-soaked cords running over the roof, doubtless leading to caches of gunpowder. Grenner had been right: they were planning to bring the roof down on the worshippers below.

  “Don’t move, or the nobleman dies!” the Ulrican shouted, pulling Hoffmann with him. The fuses were joined into a single twist of cord, Johansen saw. So they were all linked. Any fuse lit would ignite the others. Thirty feet away the Ulrican was moving towards the cords, lantern in one hand, Hoffmann in the other.

  Johansen slowly raised his hands. “Don’t kill the nobleman,” he said.

  “It’d look bad on our records if you did,” said Grenner from behind him. “Sorry about this, sir.” A throwing-knife flashed from his hand and embedded itself in Hoffmann’s thigh. The general’s leg gave way and he collapsed. Johansen was already drawing his small crossbow from its shoulder-holster and firing, running forwards.

  The Ulrican took the bolt in the temple and fell, throwing the lantern at the cords. It struck the stonework of the gutter at an angle and rolled, the oil inside blazing up.

  Johansen sprinted and kicked it as hard as he could, away from the fuses. Glass shattered and glistening liquid sprayed out as the lantern soared away over the battlements and down into the city below. He didn’t hear a crash.

  He turned. Grenner was crouched beside Hoffmann, cutting his bonds. Johansen made an abrupt gesture and Grenner stopped.

  “What?”

  “Remember last night?”

  Grenner’s eyes widened. “Backup guy.”

  “Where?” There was no sign of anyone else. Johansen took a few paces, checking around the exit to the stairway.

  There was a scream from the top of the roof and a figure hurtled down the steep slope full-tilt, a lantern in one hand
, a sword in the other.

  The sword slashed at Johansen’s arm. He dodged sideways, grabbing for the man’s jerkin, lifting him as he ran, using his momentum to throw him over the wall.

  The man screamed all the way down.

  “I can’t believe Hoffmann went to I start the search on his own,” Grenner said as they walked away from the cathedral, leaving the oblivious crowds behind them. “He must have known the Ulricans would have left people on guard.”

  “Why didn’t they kill him when they caught him?”

  “They wanted him to distract people like us. They only needed a few seconds.”

  “They almost got them.” Johansen looked around. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Since the Black Goat is out of commission,” Grenner said, “I thought I’d treat you to Hexenstag breakfast at a place I know by the west gate.”

  “I’d rather have a wash and get some sleep.”

  “You’ll sleep better with a full stomach.” Grenner paused. “Have you noticed that nobody thanked us?”

  “Hoffmann did.”

  “Hoffmann is deducting his surgeon’s bill from my wages. That’s hardly thanks.”

  There was silence as the two men walked on through the city. Some things didn’t need to be said out loud. The watery sun was warm on their skin and the light breeze helped them forget how dirty and tired they both were.

  There was a queue of carts, wagons and pedestrians at the west gate, waiting to leave the city. Already security had been tightened after the Königplatz explosion, and every guard wanted to be seen doing his job. Grenner felt Johansen’s elbow dig into his ribs and looked up. His partner was pointing at a familiar cart in the queue. “You owe someone an apology,” he said.

  Grenner gave him a long look, then sighed and walked up to the cart, its cargo of wide barrels stacked upright and roped together for travel. He reached up a hand in greeting.

  “It is Hexenstag morning, a time of goodwill, monsieur,” he said, “and I owe you an apology.”