Arcanum (76 page)

It was driving him to distraction, except there was no distraction to take his mind off the waiting. There was his horse, the dwarvish guards standing as still as statues at each end of the entrance hall, and that was it.

He’d done his duty: he’d delivered Felix’s letter. He had thought it might be his final duty for Carinthia, but it was clear that the dwarf-lord didn’t see it like that. The concept of being released from service wasn’t one he looked prepared to even consider.

So much for the opportunity just to keep on going, into the Franklands beyond the mountains, and the ocean’s shore beyond that. In his wilder moments, he wondered if he could reasonably hope to take on the guards, batter them into submission and flee with his horse. He’d be free, but he couldn’t hope to repair the damage to Felix’s reputation once it was done. Trapped by the weight of expectations, Büber sat and stewed, paced and seethed, until finally the inner doors clacked and opened.

He wheeled about and saw Heavyhammer approaching.

“You kept me here,” said Büber, “without a word.”

“Did you have something more important to do than to wait on my king’s word and take back my king’s reply?” He held out a wooden box, long and flat, carved with intertwined serpents and chased with silver; just as an object, it would clearly command a high price, and Büber grew suspicious.

Beware of dwarves bearing gifts.

He purposefully put his hands behind his back. “I might be Carinthia’s messenger-boy, but I’m not Farduzes’.”

“Our ways are not your ways. The king demands that you take this back to Prince Felix,” said Heavyhammer, thrusting the box into Büber’s midriff.

“I’m sure he does.” Büber stood his ground. “Why not take it yourself?”

“Me? I don’t even know the way, human. None of us do.” The dwarf tugged at his beard. “Our maps are a thousand years out of date, and we know little of the surface world. Where would we go? How would we navigate? We are blind and lost under the canopy of the sky.”

Heavyhammer’s doom-laden speech rang false to Büber, but he played along with it for now.

“You want me to hold your hand and care for you like wounded cubs until you’re strong enough to cope on your own? How long do you think that’ll take?” What was going on here? Heavyhammer had already shown himself to be a consummate liar, and although Büber was as straight as any given mile of Roman road, even he could spot this act of intended duplicity.

“What’s in the box?” he asked.

“It is King Ironmaker’s response to your prince,” said Heavyhammer. He pushed the box at Büber again, forcing the huntmaster to take a step back.

“That doesn’t tell me what’s in the box.”

“A message for the prince, clearly.”

Büber took another step back, in order to give himself some room. “Can I see it?”

“The box is to be opened only by your lord, human. The message is for him alone.”

“Yet you trust me to take it to Felix without peeking. That’s” – he tapped his lip – “almost praiseworthy.”

Heavyhammer tried to press the box on Büber for a third time. “You cannot open the box. Only a prince of your people can.”

“Cannot, or should not?” Finally, and seeing no alternative, he took the box, and turned it over in his hands. It seemed … well, boxy. There was no hinge, just a thin line that chased around the edge, barely enough to interrupt the carving or inlay. He lifted it to his ear and gave it a little shake.

He could hear nothing: certainly no sound that might tell him what the box contained, assuming it contained anything at all.

“I think King Ironmaker forgot to enclose his message,” he said, and went to hand the box back.

Now it was Heavyhammer who was having none of it: he stepped smartly away and was just as reluctant to touch the box as Büber had previously been.

“Everything is in order, human. Take my lord’s reply to your prince without delay: he’ll know how to open it.”

“I did explain that Felix is a twelve-year-old boy, didn’t I? If you’re relying on any knowledge his father may have had of how to open the box, we’ll end up just having to take a crowbar to it.” Büber shook it harder, and saw a tell-tale twitch in the corner of Heavyhammer’s eye. “Why don’t you show me how to open it? I’ll swear any oath you like to any god you like that I won’t abuse the information.”

Heavyhammer tugged at his beard. “The box is locked, human. You delivered a letter under seal: we reply in our way.”

“I brought you a letter. I have no idea what I’m taking back.” Büber decided that if the dwarf wasn’t going to give in, then neither was he. He placed the box on the floor in front of him. “I think you should open it. My duty to my lord compels me to check its contents.”

Büber turned his back and picked up his horse’s saddle. Untying the reins, he lifted it onto the creature’s back. It looked at him with a vaguely disappointed air. While he was busy with the girth strap and stirrups, he heard a faint snick from behind him.

“Look, then, and be satisfied.”

Heavyhammer was holding the box open. The velvet-lined interior contained a folded piece of parchment. Büber strode over and, taking the dwarf by surprise, dipped his incomplete fingers inside and scooped up the parchment.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll make sure Felix gets this. Keep the box: it looks valuable.”

Heavyhammer lunged forward, but Büber skipped away, spinning. As the dwarf repeatedly closed on him, trying to snatch at the letter, all Büber had to do was hold it up and keep twisting. In the few moments it took him to reach his saddlebag, the guards at the doors had hardly started their lumbering runs.

Büber whipped out his knife, caught Heavyhammer around the neck with the crook of his elbow, and stretched him against his own body.

The knife-point, so recently used to stick Teutons, tickled at Heavyhammer’s beard.

“And that’s far enough, friends.”

The guards stumbled to a halt, tense and bristling. The hall echoed to the sound of their breath, and the horse shook its head, making its harness jingle.

Büber realised that, unless Heavyhammer was particularly important to the Lord of Farduzes, the stand-off wouldn’t last long.

“Close the box,” he said. He felt the dwarf stiffen, and pressed the knife harder. “Do it.”

He was watching now, very carefully. Heavyhammer did something to the base of the box – held it in a special way as if he was pushing on part of it – and slowly, carefully, lowered the lid down. Only when it was safely shut did the dwarf change his grip.

The cavity inside the box was obviously only a small portion of the volume. There was something else there, something that was secret and lethal.

“Let’s try this.” Büber kept his knife at Heavyhammer’s throat, and snagged the box with his other hand, still grasping the now-crumpled letter. When he had proper hold of it, he swept the dwarf’s legs out from underneath him, then stamped on his descending back, pinning him to the stone floor.

The guards edged forward, but stopped again when he held up the box. “If I open this now, without using the hidden catches, what happens? Just how dangerous is it to everyone in this hall?”

He let the pressure off Heavyhammer’s spine sufficiently to let him speak. “Do it, human. We will die in agony, but your prince will never hear of this.”

What Büber really needed was a third hand. He needed the box, he wanted the letter, he had to get to his sword. Whatever trap the box held, he had no intention of falling victim to it himself: when it came down to the basics of life and death, he realised that agony wasn’t for him.

They were going to rush him. He knew it. They knew it. So be it.

He dropped everything: knife, box and letter, ground his heel down hard on Heavyhammer, and reached behind to the scabbard hung on his saddle. The interval between the dwarf’s scream and the song of his sword was an eye-blink’s worth of time, but Büber found that was all it took for the white heat to boil up inside him.

He swung his arm. The very tip of his sword slashed the face of the first guard to reach him. The bloom of his crimson blood made Büber mad. Now an axe heading in an arc towards his chest, and he could see it and use his momentum to sidestep it and bring the edge of his blade across the exposed nape of the second guard’s neck between helmet and mail coat.

The sword went straight through, and if there had been a spray of blood before, there was now a gout of it like rain.

The third and fourth guards had further to come but arrived at the same time. Büber wouldn’t retreat. It wasn’t in his nature any more. He thrust his sword through the open mouth of one and leapt at the other.

He was stronger, even without the berserker rage. His arms were longer and he was heavier too. His blunt fingers trapped the dwarf’s axe-hand and he smashed it repeatedly down against the floor until he’d forced him to let go, and then Büber’s hands were reaching for the sides of the helmet.

It took three blows against the stone pavement to roll the dwarf’s eyes up behind his lids. Büber reached for his sword-hilt and drew it out between bloodied frothing jaws, and struck out from where he crouched at the injured first guard, whose descending axe split Büber’s blade in two with a shock that should have numbed his whole arm.

He barely felt it. It was as if it were happening to someone else.

The cleaving blow had unbalanced the dwarf who’d made it. Now he was overstretched, axe scraping against the floor for support as he tried to lever himself upright again.

Büber reached past the head of the axe to the handle, and pulled. Since he refused to let go, the dwarf was pulled off his feet and came crashing down into the gore next to Büber. His wild-eyed struggle to free his weapon became weaker with every thrust of the shattered sword-stub.

When Büber felt the dwarf’s grip on his axe fail, he rose roaring from the ground. In front of him, Heavyhammer. In his hands, the box.

Büber threw the axe at him. Instinctive, primal, savage.

It sliced into the wooden box, bursting it apart, and buried itself in Heavyhammer’s chest. Springs and cogs and spinning blades sang out in a chaotic wash of noise, and, in an instant, the dwarf was cut to pieces. Hands, arms, legs, torso, face – all carved and sliced … and that was only part of the lethal armoury of the box. Steel glittered as it spun outwards. It passed to the left and right of Büber. Some travelled as far as the distant ceiling, some ricochetted off the floor in front of him and howled over his head.

What was left of Heavyhammer sank to its knees. Propped by the axe handle for a moment, it fell sideways and didn’t move.

Now it was over, Büber could taste blood: he’d bitten his tongue, or the inside of his mouth. He spat it out. Not that he could tell where it landed, as he was all but wading in the stuff.

His horse was at the far end of the hall, spiky and skittering and flecked with white foam, clattering its hooves and dancing against the closed outer doors. It was hardly surprisingly; Büber was soaked in blood, so no sane grass-eating animal would want to go near him.

The inner doors clattered, creaked, started to open: he scrabbled on the floor for his knife and the half-soaked parchment, pushing both into his belt. He had to run, and found he could barely walk. He started slowly, lumbering, then speeding up as shouts and curses chased after him. His legs were longer. He could win the race. And his horse, even when he charged at it full pelt, seemed to smell him behind the iron taint that covered him, and didn’t shy away as he threw himself at the lever embedded in one of the walls.

The outer doors swung apart and light flooded in. Büber squinted in the sudden brightness, barely able to see. His slippery, aching hands tightened around his horse’s neck and refused to let go, even when the doors parted another fraction and the horse burst out onto the mountainside. Heedless of the path, it was mere luck that it didn’t fall in the sharp rock shards or run off a precipice.

Büber held on, swinging his leg up and over and crouching low on the saddle. The cold air was like an ice bath, stinging and sudden after the heat of the fight, freezing the blood to his body and stiffening his clothes.

The horse would run and run until it was exhausted. He had no choice but to let it.

The key was heavy around Felix’s neck and cold on his skin, though its weight and temperature were more to do with what it represented than with what it was. Fear and dread, mainly, a constant nagging reminder that they lived in a world where magic was still possible and was still shaped by it. The contour of every hill, the lie of each forest, every straight or crooked road, the position of towns and villages and their populations: everything was a legacy, and it was going to take time to change.

Even though he was in his own fortress, he felt like he was sneaking around in it. He checked up and down the corridor before fishing inside his shirt for the key on its leather thong. Its shape was crude, and the lock difficult to turn. As he leant into it, he felt the ache in his collar-bone, but he persisted and the lock gave.

He looked again along the corridor, then pushed the door open only just wide enough to ease his slight body through. He pulled the key back out and shouldered the heavy wood shut again.

Three windows pierced the wall high up on the south side of the room, giving little light to the space below. It was sufficient, though, to make out the long, still shapes of bodies laid out on the cold stone floor, arranged in rows and columns like beads on an abacus.

Some were partially dressed. Mostly, they were entirely naked. Some were without a mark, others had molten burns. Their grave-white forms lay exactly where they’d been placed. None appeared to be breathing. Their hearts were still. Yet their eyelids made an occasional traverse across their wide eyes.

This was magic. They were dead, but alive. It shouldn’t be so, but it was.

There were seventy-two of them. There had been more, of course, but some had been burnt to a cinder in the fire that Mistress Agana had poured down in front of the novices’ house, and more had been consumed in Eckhardt’s chambers when she’d burnt them and him. The aftermath of the rebellion had been chaotic, but seventy-two of these … people remained, sequestered in the fortress, and he didn’t know what to do with them.