03 - Death's Legacy (22 page)

Luckily, they were able to locate the Koenigsplatz without
too much difficulty. After several minutes of shoving and sidestepping through
the ever-present crush of bodies, Rudi at last caught sight of the famous statue
over the heads of the crowd. The Emperor was mounted on a griffon, his sword
held aloft in a suitably heroic pose, which would probably have pitched him over
the creature’s neck to the ground if he’d ever been incautious enough to try it
while airborne. Rudi pointed.

“This way!” With Hanna at his heels, he forced his way into
the wide open space, finding a few square feet of relative calm in the lee of
the massive plinth. He glanced up, hoping to read the inscription, but the
sinking sun struck hard from the gilded lettering, rendering it unintelligible.
He wasn’t even sure if this was supposed to be Karl Franz himself, or his father
Luitpold. Or Magnus the Pious, come to that, whose foresight had established the
Colleges of Magic in the first place. That reminded him. “Where to now?”

“That way.” Hanna pointed, following the direction indicated
by the shadow of the statue, as if it was a compass needle. At first, Rudi
thought she must be mistaken. The main routes in and out of the Koenigsplatz
were on the north side, leading to the main gate of the city, and the south,
after the thoroughfare had split in two to flow around the gigantic sculpture,
as if it was a tree root in a stream. The streets in the direction Hanna had
indicated seemed small by comparison, little more than alleyways, but the girl
seemed sure of herself, so Rudi simply nodded, and launched himself into the
milling crowds again. To his battered senses, it seemed as if half of the
Empire, if not the entire Old World, had congregated there, hawking wares of
dubious provenance, arguing in tongues he hadn’t heard even in Marienburg, and
in one or two cases picking the pockets of the unwary.

“Fresh pies! Rumster’s Originals! Get ’em while they’re hot!”
A halfling-sized pushcart rammed into his shins, its owner apparently so busy
scanning the forest of knees surrounding him for potential customers that he’d
forgotten to watch where he was going. “Oops, sorry sir, my fault I’m sure.”

“Don’t mention it.” Rudi shot out a hand without looking,
finding to his complete lack of surprise that a second halfling was attempting
to lift the flap of his belt pouch. Grasping the tiny wrist, he dragged the
miscreant around and into view. “You need to get another routine, lads. Distract
and lift was old when Sigmar was in swaddling.”

“I dunno what you’re talking about,” the pie vendor said, in
tones of aggrieved innocence. “I’ve never seen this ruffian before in my life,
have I, Ned?”

“No,” his confederate confirmed, wriggling in Rudi’s grasp.
“You’re a witness, Peasemold. This great lummox just assaulted me for no reason
at all. Be off with you, or I’ll call a watchman!”

“He is a watchman,” Hanna said, with a trace of amusement.

Ned stopped squirming, and Peasemold’s jaw went slack.

“I’m sure we can sort this out,” the pie vendor said, back
peddling hastily. “Just a little misunderstanding, that’s all. Have a pie, on
me, your lady friend too.”

“Thanks, but no.” Rudi put Ned down, and the would-be
pickpocket scurried behind his friend, keeping the cart between himself and the
possibility of further retribution. “If I did, I’d have to take you in for
attempted poisoning too, most likely.” He shrugged, content to have kept his
money and made his point. “Just don’t let me catch you at it again.”

“No sir. Thank you, sir. Ranald bless you.” The halflings
knuckled their forelocks and scurried off, vanishing into the crowd. A moment
later, Rudi heard “Oops, sorry, madam. My fault I’m sure,” echoing through the
intervening bodies.

“Maybe you could join the watch here,” Hanna said. “You were
a good Cap in Marienburg.”

“Maybe I could,” Rudi said. He supposed he’d have to find
some way of earning a living while he was in Altdorf, but had no real desire to
linger there once his business in the city was concluded. Hanna would be safe
from the witch hunters as soon as a college took her in, but Gerhard would still
be after him, of that much he was certain. Once again, he felt the woods and
forests of the Empire calling him, and resolved to find refuge in the wilderness
as soon as he could.

As they drew nearer to the street that Hanna had selected, he
realised that the sheer scale of the Koenigsplatz had fooled him. The
thoroughfare was as wide as many of the ones he’d been familiar with in
Marienburg. They were just as crowded as the other streets he’d seen in Altdorf,
and just as cosmopolitan. Within a hundred yards, they passed a shop selling
exotic rugs and tapestries, and a dark-skinned merchant pedalled pungent spices,
the odour of which endured even through the all-pervading street stench of stale
perspiration and ordure, and before which Hanna paused with an expression of
deep interest. Further along was a blacksmith’s forge in which a sweat-slicked
dwarf, stripped to the waist to reveal a plethora of peculiar tattoos, hammered
at a lump of glowing iron with an expression of deep concentration.

“I suppose we must be getting nearer,” Hanna said after a
while. The streets had narrowed, the businesses becoming more mundane, and the
houses thinner, though no less tall. Mindful of their progress from the docks,
Rudi kept an eye out for passers-by who seemed to know Hanna for what she was,
and noted an increasing number of people who turned to look at her with
controlled and unobtrusive movements. More of the ones he noticed seemed to be
in red or orange robes, and he began to wonder if her choice of dress was
entirely coincidental. She certainly looked the part, he thought, even if she
wasn’t actually a fire mage yet.

“Look.” Hanna paused in the middle of a wide stone bridge.
Unlike the ones Rudi had grown used to in Marienburg, it was edged for the most
part with a simple parapet, rather than being choked by buildings. She leaned on
the balustrade, and pointed. Beneath them, a broad stretch of river flowed,
confined by stone embankments, but still wide enough for two riverboats to pass
one another unimpeded with room to spare. “Shenk didn’t waste much time, did
he?” Sure enough, the
Reikmaiden
was making her way slowly upstream,
navigating cautiously between the piers of the bridges obstructing the route.

“Evidently not,” Rudi said, quietly sympathising with the
skipper’s desire to get out of town as quickly as possible. He shrugged. “Can’t
really blame him though, can you? If I was him, I’d want to put as much distance
as I could between myself and the Fog Walkers for a while, just to be on the
safe side.”

“Guess that’s why he’s heading up the Talabec,” Hanna said,
waving. One of the figures on deck glanced up and returned the greeting,
grinning with delighted recognition. It was Pieter, his arm still strapped up.
Whether he was about to point their former passengers out to anyone else on
board, Rudi would never know. As the deckhand turned to speak to someone, the
Reikmaiden
passed majestically between the pillars of the next bridge along,
which, rather more conventionally, supported a townhouse or two, and vanished
from sight. “By the time he’s been up to Kislev and back they’ll have forgotten
all about him.” Rudi rather doubted that, but it wasn’t his problem, so he
simply shrugged.

“We’d better get moving,” he said. The shadows had lengthened
noticeably, and the air was growing chill. He retrieved his woollen cap from his
pack, and pulled it down over his ears gratefully. It was going to be cold
tonight, he could tell, discerning the tang of frost in the air even over the
reek of the sewage in the gutters.

“I suppose so,” Hanna said, and began walking again. If he
hadn’t known her so well, Rudi would probably have missed the faint hesitation
in her voice, and the nervousness it betrayed.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her hand
for a moment. It felt warm to the touch, a little more so than he might have
expected given the chill in the air, and he assumed she must be using her
abilities to keep herself comfortable despite her relatively immodest attire.
Perhaps it was intentional, a visible demonstration of her powers, he thought,
or perhaps the trick had simply become so much second nature that she barely
realised she was doing it. “They’re bound to see how talented you are.”

“You’re right, of course,” Hanna said, returning the pressure
for a moment before retrieving her hand. She seemed encouraged by his words,
striding out a little more confidently, but her tone was still uncertain.

This side of the Talabec, the streets had grown even
narrower, the shops replaced mainly by taverns or rooming houses, and the few
that remained stocking little more than staple foodstuffs and other items of
basic utility. Orange robes were still prevalent among the passers-by, so Rudi
remained confident that they hadn’t strayed from the route that they ought to be
following.

“It can’t be much further,” he said, and then stopped,
staring ahead in sudden disbelief. For the last few minutes the ever-present
crowd around them had been thinning out, but preoccupied as he was the
significance of that hadn’t really registered, other than as a vague sense of
relief that he didn’t have to keep using his elbows to make a reasonable amount
of headway. A few yards in front of him, the street had simply ended. Instead of
cobbles and buildings, a vast open space, carpeted with ash and littered with
the remains of burned-out structures, stretched away in front of them. Far in
the distance, the jumble of houses and businesses resumed, and beyond them, the
city wall loomed, but in between, and stretching for hundreds of yards in every
direction, there was nothing but desolation.

“I think we’ve arrived,” Hanna said dryly, leading the way
confidently into the gently smouldering ruins. Her feet left deep prints in the
carpet of ash, and as he followed her, Rudi felt his boots sinking almost to his
ankles with every step, but when he turned to check his bearings, the thick grey
blanket lay pristine and unmarked behind them. He felt the hairs on the back of
his neck beginning to stir.

“Well it
was
here,” Rudi said hesitantly. He glanced
around, uncomfortably reminded of the burning farm cottage that he’d stumbled
across outside Kohlstadt. Some of the beams of the collapsed houses around them
still smoked lazily, as if they hadn’t quite been extinguished, and little
pockets of glowing embers rippled the air around them like dancing phantoms,
testament to their residual heat. “Do you think it’s been destroyed?”

“No,” Hanna said decisively. “Come on, this way.” The deeper
they ventured into the zone of desolation, the more confident she seemed to
become. At a loss for anything else to do, Rudi followed on behind her,
beginning to wonder what he was doing here at all. What little he’d seen of
sorcery so far left him inclined to avoid it, not head straight towards one of
the biggest concentrations of mystical energy in the whole of the Empire. If it
hadn’t been for the loyalty he felt to Hanna, and the desire to see her safe, he
would probably have turned and run. “There you are. What did I tell you?”

Hanna’s voice was triumphant, and for a moment, Rudi couldn’t
understand her euphoria. Then he took another step himself, and suddenly the
College was right there in front of them, shimmering into existence like a
solidifying heat haze.

“Sigmar preserve us,” he whispered. The building was vast,
larger than almost anything he’d ever seen in his life. Perhaps the facade of
Baron Hendryk’s College in Marienburg or the staadholder’s palace there,
rivalled it in size, but in form, it exuded a simplicity and power that made
them both look like peasants’ huts. Huge towers rose into the smoke-blackened
sky, vivid roaring flames apparently bursting from their summits to tint the
whole area around the college the colour of perpetual sunset. A wall of stone,
the colour of the iron the dwarf had been hammering, soared overhead, at least
to the height of the ramparts protecting the city itself, and a gate of
dully-glowing metal stood squarely in the centre of it. “What do we do now?”

“Ask to see someone,” Hanna said, striding forwards, her
confidence apparently growing with every step. Rudi followed, feeling the heat
beating back at him from the vast portal in the wall ahead. “Do you think we
should knock?”

“There’s no point in disturbing the gatekeeper
unnecessarily,” a new voice said. A man stepped out from behind a tumbled heap
of masonry, which had presumably once been a house. He was dressed in red and
orange robes, and his hair and beard were both the colour of flickering flames.
“I happened to be on my way into the city when I noticed your approach. State
your business.”

“I want to study with the Bright College,” Hanna said. “I was
a licensed student of magic in Marienburg, and…”

“I see.” The Bright wizard took a step forward, and stared at
the girl intently. Determined not to seem intimidated, Hanna gazed levelly back,
although Rudi was sure the mage was studying her with something more than normal
sight. After a moment, the man shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Application
denied.”

“Now wait just a minute!” Hanna said, her voice rising. “I’ve
travelled all the way from Marienburg for this. If you think I’m just going to
turn around and take my chances with the witch hunters because you can’t be
bothered to wake up your porter, you’ve got another think coming! I demand to
see someone in authority!”

“I
am
in authority,” the wizard said. “Like all
magisters, I’m empowered to speak for the order to which I belong, and I would
be grossly derelict in my duty if I let a Chaos-tainted witch set foot inside
the college.” Hanna’s fists clenched, and her jaw tightened.

“I’m not a witch!” she said, her voice tight with anger,
clearly fighting the impulse to shout. “I’m a pyromancer like you! I need
training to control my gift, that’s all!”