Arcanum (31 page)

It was his name that came through the trees, faint but recognisable. He resisted the urge to snatch one of the soldiers’ spears and brace it against attack. There had to be some rational explanation for this. Besides, no malevolent spirit would be hunting him down and calling him “Mr Thaler” at the same time. The last he’d heard, such beings didn’t announce their intentions at all, let alone do so politely.

He went to the edge of the path and looked down to where he thought the sound was coming from. He squinted, and was rewarded with a flash of movement – a darker green against the browns of the tree-trunks and the leaf litter.

“There.” He pointed the place out to the mayor. “A stadia or two away.”

“I can’t see anything.” The mayor, being shorter, had a more restricted view, but he moved closer and was rewarded with a fleeting glimpse himself. Then a longer one. “It’s a woman.”

“Gods. I recognise her.” Thaler tried to think of anywhere more unlikely to see her but halfway up Goat Mountain, but couldn’t. “It’s Aaron Morgenstern’s daughter.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Now the threat had a name, and it was seemingly mortal, the mayor relaxed just a little. “What does she think she’s doing?”

“I have absolutely no idea at all.” The slope she needed to climb was steep, and he thought the best thing to do would be to go and help her. He hesitated for a moment before stepping off the path and slipping down to the next tree.

She chose that moment to look up, wild-eyed and dishevelled. “Mr Thaler!”

“Miss Morgenstern. A great number of pertinent questions spring irresistibly to mind, but they would be better served if we could communicate in something less than a full-throated bellow.”

Sophia had no energy left to blush. She carried on using every handhold in her effort to climb, and eventually she and Thaler met at a mountain ash: he, hanging down from the slim trunk, extending his hand, and she, reaching up, her fingers encrusted with black soil and decaying plants.

He caught hold of her and pulled. He wasn’t strong, but she was surprisingly light. And, fortunately, the tree they were both clutching took their combined weight.

“Mr Thaler,” she gasped.

“Miss Morgenstern.” Her face was bare inches from his, flushed and panting. “Does your father know where you are?”

She blinked, and growled at him, “Just get me to the top.”

“Most people would use the perfectly serviceable road.” Thaler looked up at the mayor and all the soldiers staring down at them. “
We
did.”

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ve come this far. I’ll do it myself.”

Sophia carried on scrambling up, until one of the soldiers lowered his spear-haft and she could hold on to it. Thaler followed after her, respectfully turning his head: she was, after all, wearing a skirt, and modesty made demands on him that his curiosity didn’t quite overwhelm. Climbing was difficult, muddy work after all that rain, and the same soldier who’d helped the Jewess found Thaler a much weightier proposition.

“Gods,” Thaler muttered. His hands were now just as filthy as hers, and the hem of his robe was snagged and littered with leaves. He batted himself down and tried to dislodge some of the grime with an expression of distaste. “Master Messinger, may I present to you Miss Sophia Morgenstern?”

The mayor made no attempt at pleasantries. The tension of being somewhere he knew he ought not to be exploded. “Wotan’s one eye, girl, what do you think you’re doing? Go back home this instant – it’s death for you to be here.”

Defiant, she said: “And for you, sir.” She shook some twigs from her hair and stood her ground. “Yet here we all are.”

Messinger’s fists tightened. “Do you want me to beat you back to your father?”

“Beat me if you want,” she said. “Now, do you want to hear what I have to say, or are you just going to ignore me?”

Thaler interposed his body between them. “This is all very irregular. We understand the risks we’re taking, Miss Morgenstern. The mayor is representing the town, I am representing the library. Why are you here?”

“I followed you.” She looked down at her exceptionally muddy shoes. “I suppose that wasn’t very sensible.”

“Indeed, young lady. I have no idea what I’m going to tell your father.” Thaler glanced over his shoulder at the adepts’ house. “This is no place for, well, anyone. As you say, here we all are, but some of us are not here by choice. You should really go home, Miss Morgenstern.”

“I found bodies,” she blurted.

Messinger shoved in front of Thaler. “Bodies?”

“At the back of the novices’ house. There are …” she shivered, “skeletons. Hundreds of them, I think. Just thrown over the back wall. But the whole of the forest floor has bits of bone in it, just below the surface.”

“Men?”

“Yes. And women, I suppose. Tossed out with the rubbish.”

“Hundreds?”

“I didn’t count them, but there were more than I could count in the time I had.”

Messinger pressed his chins against his chest, digesting the news, so Sophia spoke over his head to Thaler.

“I had to tell you straight away. They must have been killing people for years.”

“Not our people,” said Messinger. “We’d know.”

Thaler suddenly felt very ill indeed. “Gods. The children.” He staggered, and was caught by one of the militia. Their arm-guards pressed uncomfortably into his flesh, but all he could think about was what Martin Kelner had told him.

“What is it, man?” asked the mayor. “What do you know that I don’t?”

“That children have been disappearing over the last few months. But,” and Thaler righted himself again, “that doesn’t explain tens of bodies, let alone hundreds.”

“If the woman’s right, of course.”

Thaler saw that Sophia was about to have her own explosion, and deflected it. “I’m certain that Miss Morgenstern saw what she says she saw. It may be that missing Carinthian children are the least of it.” He turned his sights back to the adepts’ house. “Perhaps we can find someone – anyone – at home prepared to give us an explanation for that as well as for why the magic has suddenly gone.”

Messinger grunted with dissatisfaction. “I don’t like it, Mr Thaler. This whole enterprise is looking madder by the moment.”

“You may like the next turn of events even less, Master Messinger. I propose that Miss Morgenstern stays with us until we return to town and I can repatriate her to her father’s care. It would seem foolish in the extreme to abandon either our sworn task, or the young lady.”

The mayor closed his eyes and shook his head. “Gods, man. Come on, then. Let’s get this over with.”

He tramped up the road, and Sophia mouthed a heartfelt “thank you” to Thaler, who raised a sceptical eyebrow and fell into step with her.

“I still fail to understand what possessed you to follow us. It’s dangerous here – just how dangerous you appear to have discovered – and it’s no place for anyone unaccompanied. I wouldn’t have done it alone, which says something about either your courage or your foolishness, or both.”

“I’m not brave, Mr Thaler. I’m quaking in my shoes.”

“Well then,” he said. “Let’s call it what it is: foolishness. You’ve added an unnecessary complication to an already fraught situation. I would have expected better from someone who’s read Euclid.”

Sophia sighed. “I’m very sorry, Mr Thaler.”

He kept looking straight forward, and despite his serious demeanour, he couldn’t help give a grudging smile. Courage it was then. “And if you would at least pretend to mean it, I could pretend to believe you.”

She had no answer to that, and neither was she supposed to. She had to realise that there was a line, and she’d crossed it. As had he, for that matter, but he felt his mission had more about it than simple curiosity.

The adepts’ house slowly came into view. It looked both old and eternal: built in a late Roman style, added to and taken from until it looked more thrown together than designed. Perhaps the adepts had been expected to change the shape of a wall as a test of craft, create a new courtyard or tower to order. Or perhaps the masters had done so to frustrate and confuse their pupils.

Whichever, it looked wrong.

“Is there a door?” asked Messinger.

“There, look,” pointed Sophia. Reminded of her presence, the mayor scowled, but she’d spotted a dark opening and the semblance of an arch.

“You did the last one,” said Messinger. “I suppose I should do this one.” He looked less than happy.

“Nonsense. We’ll both go.”

Except that when they set off for the door, there were three sets of footsteps on the path.

“Miss Morgenstern, what are you doing?”

“Keeping you company, Mr Thaler,” she said.

The reason the doorway was dark was because the door itself was off its hinges, lying inside, and the corridor beyond was pitch black. The scene was similar to the one they’d found inside the novices’ house, but with more violence. Some of the discarded robes were bloodied, and a few of them were still filled with the shrouded bodies of the dead.

None had died easily.

Messinger reached for a cloth to cover his nose and mouth against the sweet, rank smell.

“What d’you reckon, Mr Thaler?” he said, voice muffled. “This doesn’t look like the reaction of a group of people who think they can get the magic going again.”

“Not any time soon, at least, Master Messinger.” Thaler stole a glance at Sophia, who was staring boldly at the corpses on display. “It seems the Order has deserted us, just as surely as the source of their power has deserted them.”

“Aren’t we going to go in and search, see if anyone’s left?” Sophia had edged forward until she was at the threshold.

“No.” Thaler reached out and pulled her back. “Firstly, we have no lights. Secondly, there are too few of us. And thirdly, it’s the last thing anyone in their right mind would want to do. We want to question the Order: the Order is demonstrably not here.”

The closest body seemed to have had its face smashed repeatedly against the floor: all sense would have suggested that the assailant might have stopped sooner, but clearly hadn’t. There was a fourth good reason to leave, right there.

“What about the White Tower?” asked Messinger. It was lost among the trees, but they could all feel its presence.

“If we descend to the town now, we’ll only have to return later. Better that we get this out of the way.”

The path wound upwards.

“I can’t imagine Carinthia without the Order,” said the mayor. “Thaler, what are we going to do?”

“Hold firm, Master Messinger. What we do isn’t our decision but the prince’s.” Thaler turned to his companions. “We must, however, give him the fullest account we can. That means we have one more place to visit before we can be satisfied the Order has completely abandoned us.”

They started the ascent to the summit of Goat Mountain. The trees went from straight to crooked, and finally into shapes that were warped so far beyond true that it was a wonder they’d grown at all. The leaf buds that had dared to sprout were just as twisted as their parent branches.

In the broad circle around the base of the tower, nothing grew at all. The ground was bare, the soil gone. No mosses or lichens, none of the tiny alpine flowers that seemed to colonise the tightest of crevices. Nothing living.

“Well, this isn’t promising,” said Thaler, if only to hear his own voice. On every other peak surrounding them, wild green spring was breaking out. The top of Goat Mountain was like the desert he’d read about.

The tower loomed over them. The wind played against its glassy surface, causing it to hum at a pitch that made his stomach roil, and the sound seemed to emanate from the tower’s entrance. Which was shaped like a mouth, an ancient, toothless sucking maw that wanted to consume them like slops.

The wind was also cold, but they would all have trembled no matter what the weather.

“It’s as if—” started Sophia, but Thaler cut her off.

“Any allusion you may make will be no doubt apposite, but entirely unhelpful. We are all too aware of our predicament.” He moved to set himself in front of the opening. “Why not wish me luck instead?”

“Good luck, Mr Thaler,” she whispered.

Messinger had gone as pale as a ghost, but he wasn’t going to be shown up by a mere librarian – as Thaler had intended all along. The darkness inside was thick and churning, or it was easy to imagine that it was, set between the melted uprights and half-formed lintel.

They walked together towards the tower, and were slowly aware of a lighter shape taking form in front of them. Then Thaler realised that it was no piece of architecture or artefact, but a man. He gripped Messinger’s arm and brought him to a halt.

“Who’s that?” He realised that he sounded like a terrified child. He forced himself not to bruise the mayor, and lowered his hands. “Who’s there?”

The figure resolved itself: an almost-bald man, a roughly trimmed grey beard framing wine-red lips, wrinkled hands with hints of tattoos emerging from the ends of his sleeves. His robe would have been white once, but most of it was now stiff with splashes and smears of dark dried blood.

He carried a carved stick, but he appeared not to need it for walking.

It was blood on his face, too. It seemed to run down from the corners of his mouth to darken the hairs of his beard, as if he’d been drinking it.

Thaler wondered if he should have brought some sort of weapon. The mayor was carrying the ceremonial sword of office, but for all he knew, it might be just that: blunt, unweighted and for show only.

One look behind told him that only Sophia Morgenstern was holding her ground. The spearmen were edging back, towards the path down.

The man emerged into the light. He blinked as if unaccustomed to day, and looked first at Thaler, then at Messinger. Then finally at Sophia. His eyes narrowed.

“Good morning, Master,” said Thaler. “May I present the mayor of Juvavum, Master Messinger? I am Under-librarian Thaler – the master librarian is currently indisposed, and I’m acting as his deputy.”

The hexmaster finally turned his attention away from the Jewess to Thaler. Then he spoke, slowly and deliberately, without any semblance of emotion. “Why are you here?”