Death's Angels

Chapter Twelve

The camp buzzed with rumours of the new commander. It seemed like every second person had something to say on the subject. Rik did not care all that much. He was tired and wet. He had spent most of the afternoon playing dead in a ditch while Hef and the lads stormed a makeshift emplacement. Sardec had ruled that he had been hit by enemy fire and ordered him to lie there face down in the mud, surrounded by stinging nettles. He was hungry. They were allowed only water and the smallest rations of the plainest of foods during the Mourning.

Rik already had plenty to think about. He had seen with his own eyes that most of the town’s carters had been hired indefinitely on the Queen’s Commission. General proclamations had been posted on every tree and tavern wall announcing that Her Majesty was paying good silver to any man in possession of a wagon prepared to do his patriotic duty. That could only mean one thing. Weasel put it in words.

“It’s war for sure, Halfbreed. They would not be doing all this hiring if it was not. There will be supplies to carry. I think I’ll pay the Quartermaster a visit.”

Perhaps he was thinking that where there were government contracts there would be money to be made or perhaps he still had hopes of organising a good drinking session. So far, despite his best efforts, Weasel had not been able to get either the advance he had hoped for or permission to leave camp. It seemed like the Quartermaster was busy using his influence elsewhere. The Barbarian swaggered after him.

There was still some light left. Most of the older men wanted back to their beds or their wives. The younger ones wanted to head down to the stream to flirt with the free girls. Rik begged off and headed to his billet, stripped and changed into his old tattered, patched uniform. He knew he should find one of the camp girls and pay her to wash his dirty tunic and britches, but there was nobody there, so he took the sack of books out of its hiding place, opened one volume and inspected it.

It was hand-written, in classic Exalted runes in a small crabbed hand. As he flicked through it he noticed that some parts were comprehensible, written in the vernacular. Others were written in High Exalted, a language favoured by scholars and wizards, and still others in the runes and hieroglyphs of the Elder Races. This volume had an air of great antiquity. The leaves seemed very dry, as if they might turn to dust at any moment.

A feeling of despair settled on him. How was he ever going to decipher this? His grasp of the vernacular was reasonable. Koralyn had taught him how to cipher it out well enough, claiming it was invaluable knowledge for a thief. Rik wished the former master of his first gang were here now. He wished he were still alive. Koralyn had been a wicked old bastard but he was the closest thing to a father Rik had ever known.

Rik had never really known his whole story, but he knew that Koralyn was well-educated for a thief in the slums of Sorrow and had not always lived there. In his youth he had travelled far before ending up becalmed, as he called it, in the City of Thieves. He claimed most consistently to have come from Harven Greatport in Northern Kharadrea, but then he had claimed to have come from a hundred different places at different times.

Being a compulsive liar was an occupational hazard for a thief, as he had always said himself. It had not saved him in the end though, and he had gone to an inglorious death, weeping and begging for mercy on the Lowgate Gallows. Rik had gone to watch the hanging, his head full of tales of daring escapes such as highwaymen always made in the chapbooks. He had considered all manner of rescue plans himself, but of course, they had never happened.

Old Koralyn had come out surrounded by a squad of soldiers, accompanied by the hangman in his black mask. There was no way anyone could rescue him. No one had even wanted to, not even some of his friends who were present. The whole thing had the atmosphere of a public holiday. The street and square were crowded, as were all the nearby windows. There were even boys sitting on the roofs and chimney pots. They had all come to witness the death, to look on at that primal mystery, the transition of one man out of life.

The hangman had read the text from the Scriptures about the Queen’s Justice and the punishment of the guilty. Koralyn had raved and begged without dignity. Rik had been so angry about it that he had half-wished the old man dead himself, and had felt guilty about it ever afterwards. Then Koralyn has taken the Drop. His body had been cut down. His head was cut off and stuck on a pike over the Lowgate as a warning to other malefactors. The crowd, having chatted and eaten its way through this exemplary lesson in royal justice, had dispersed to the taverns. Always good for business, a hanging, an innkeeper in the square had told him.

Rik had learned no lesson that day. The hanging of someone he knew had scared him just enough so that he did not steal anything for several days, until his belly had started to growl and he felt dizzy. He had snatched a watch from an old lawyer’s pocket as the man had taken him into a back alley looking for a blowjob. He had almost not gotten away with it. After that he had fallen in with the Old Witch and her gang of youthful pickpockets and thieves, and his education had really begun.

Rik shook his head. All of this reminiscing was getting him nowhere. He knew he was merely putting off the task at hand. He needed to make a start on this book if he was ever to learn something from it. If you don’t start, you can’t finish as the Old Witch had always said. It was getting dark but that did not bother him. His eyes had always been good in the dark.

He tried another one of the books, flipped open the first page, and began laboriously to read.

To begin with the book was not as bad as Rik had feared. At least it was written in contemporary Exalted. There were many words he could not follow, many sorcerous terms he did not recognise, but the gist of things was clear, and not a little disappointing. The book was indeed a sorcerer’s journal, a combination of diary and commonplace book. It contained his thoughts on his art, on what he had learned, and how he thought he should proceed. There was a great deal of mathematical notation and a few astronomical diagrams.

The mage wrote about the way sorcerous power ebbed and flowed at certain times, that these times could be deduced from the position of the stars and planets, and, more importantly, that certain entities could be contacted much more clearly under these specific conditions. It all made a certain sort of sense to Rik. If you had more power at certain times, working magic should be easier, he thought.

He was disappointed that there were no spells, incantations or inscriptions of easy magical use. The chapbooks were always full of those, and of young apprentices unwisely summoning demons. At the moment the only thing he could imagine unwisely summoning from reading this book was a headache.

He flicked through the other two books and they were worse. He could make out some of the words. There were lots of strange glyphs depicting spider-like beings which reminded him uncomfortably of the thing in the mine. There were references in the margin in the familiar crabbed hand to Uran Ultar, the Spider God, demon-wizard of the ancients, that made him more uncomfortable yet. It brought home to him that these books dealt in forbidden knowledge, and that knowledge had been forbidden for a good reason. Rik had never heard anything good of Uran Ultar, only shadowy tales of spidery demons, devoured souls and evil magic. The book referred to him sometimes as the Scuttler in the Shadows, at others as the Weaver between Worlds. They were not reassuring terms.

He put the books back in their leather sack and put the sack back in its place. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling and wondered about the wisdom of what he was doing. There was knowledge in these books but it was knowledge that endangered his soul if all that the temple brothers had told him was true. He was not entirely sure he believed any of that any more. His faith, so strong and simple as a child, had been chipped away by the life he had led. He had been around death enough to consider agreeing with those philosophers who thought that maybe the body was just a machine of sorts, one that ceased to function when important parts were broken. It was not a comforting thought, that this was the only life he would ever have and that when it ended, as it might at any moment, he was gone. He could understand why the priests objected to that idea so much, calling it a council of despair straight from shadow. If he did have a soul, he wondered, and these books held the power to change his life, was it worth risking that soul in pursuit of power? In theory the answer was simple. No. He was risking life eternal for nothing more than worldly gain.

Ah, but what if the priests were wrong, and what if the despairers were right? And what if these books pointed some other way to eternal life in this world? The priests of the Spider God were said to have had that secret. It was certain that some ancient wizards had known it. Even the Terrarchs confirmed that.

In his life he had done enough to get himself damned already according to the priests’ view of the world. There were few crimes he had not committed in his time in Sorrow and after. He had stolen, lied, killed, borne false witness, fornicated, committed adultery, and all before he was fifteen. The chances were that he was damned already. What did he have to lose? The scales had been stacked against him from the moment of his birth. Perhaps these books were the only chance to balance them he would ever get.

And he was curious. He wanted to know what was in them, to be privy to forbidden knowledge, to be in some ways like his unknown father, to steal the fire of the Exalted’s strange heaven.

All of which brought him to another thing. It was obvious that he did not have the training for this. The little bits of hedge lore he had picked up from the Old Witch had not prepared him for such work in any way. Whoever had written this book had possessed a great deal of education in a great many arts. He had a working knowledge of mathematics, astrology, alchemy, ancient pre-human lore, and a grasp of many languages. You could only pick that up at a University, or from being apprenticed to a wizard, or as a priest, perhaps all three.

Rik’s hopes of easy power and wealth had already been dashed. It was obvious the road to mastery would be a long one. Perhaps the best plan after all was to try and sell the books to some scholar who might have a use for them. The one who had written it had managed to summon and communicate with an Elder World demon. His knowledge would be useful to the right person.

Rik shook his head and rose to a sitting position. He was not going to give up so easily. He was going to continue with what he had started for as long as he could, and see what he could decipher. These books were his first real contact with true lore, with the great world of high sorcery. They were not like the cheap herb-books and star charts and books of purported love charms you could pick up in the book markets of Sorrow. This was the real thing. They had been the possession of an actual wizard, and he must be able to learn from them. There had to be something useful there. He refused to believe there could not be.

Just as the thought crossed his mind Leon stuck his head inside the door. “Time to eat,” he said. “Looks like the cooks have excelled themselves today.”

“What is it? Boiled boot sole with a bowl of sewage soup?”

“Even better! It’s the Stew!”

“The cook is a sadist. He waits until we are ravenous and then serves boiled vomit.”

“I think I would prefer boiled vomit.”

Rik rose from the bed, and strode out the door. The air was cold. A breeze blew down from the mountains, and he thought he caught a hint of moisture in it. A glance at the distant peaks showed them shrouded in cloud.

“Looks like rain,” Rik said.

“You think we’ll be heading off soon? They say the new General and his retinue are already here. They are hiring carts in the city for supplies. All the girls at the stream are talking about it. They don’t fancy hiking through the pass this early in the year.”

“I am sure the Terrarchs will take their feelings into consideration.”

“You really think we’re going then? Really?” Leon was as excited as a puppy playing with a rag.

“I don’t think they sent one of the high lord muck-a-mucks down here just for his health.”

“It’ll be the first time I have ever been out of the Realm.”

“For me too. We signed up together, remember?”

“What do you think of Sarah?” Rik was used to his old friend’s sudden changes of topic but he still found them annoying sometimes when he wanted to think.

“She’s pretty, but isn’t she going with Bear?”

“She was but they had a falling out. She says she’ll go out walking with me if I ask. Ana told me she likes me.”

“I thought you were sweet on that town girl, whatshername?”

“Bethia. I was but she took up with a hussar. Says he has a destrier and will take her riding.”

“I am sure he will, just not in the way she thinks.”

“I don’t like the hussars, neither does Handsome Jan. He says they are stealing all the girls. The girls think they have nicer uniforms than ours.”

“They have destriers,” said Rik. “Destriers cost money. Girls like men with money.”

“You are a cynical bastard, Rik,” said Leon. “Sabena certainly changed you.”

Rik had no desire to talk about that particular betrayal. It sometimes amazed him how raw it still made him feel. He did not know what annoyed him more, the fact that she had suckered him so easily, or the fact that he had so desperately wanted to believe her love for him was real even when he had proof that it was not.

“It amazes me that you are not cynical. Are you sure you are from Sorrow?”

“You know I am,” said Leon.

“It was a joke.”

“Yes, of course, I knew that.”

“Come on, let’s get something to eat. They say the cooking is not nearly so good in times of war.”

“Maybe we can get the cook shot as an enemy spy. We can say he is trying to poison us poor soldiers.”

“He could probably cause more casualties than an enemy brigade.”

Laughing they went to their meal.