Authors: Darius Hinks
Johann frowned as he turned the paper back and forth in his hands, peering at both sides. “There are no words on it.”
Caspar let out a bitter laugh. “Of course not. In your haste to get here, you’ve failed to even notice the latest plague.” He waved at the piles of blank paper that covered his desk and the featureless star charts on the walls. “Just when we need our learning more than ever, it has been taken from us.” He shoved an armillary sphere across his desk. The brass rings swung wildly around the central orb and Johann saw that the metal was blank—the rows of zodiacal glyphs that usually adorned it had vanished.
Johann shook his head in horror.
“Yes, now you see.” Caspar pointed through the glass roof to one of the college’s other domed spires. “And the Grand Astrolabe is exactly the same: utterly blank. We’re blind. There’s not a written word left in the Empire.”
Johann was stunned. Without the means to record its auguries and prognostications, the Celestial Order was powerless.
The two wizards fell silent and the room filled with the sound of ticking beetles.
Caspar grimaced and reinstated his loud, tuneless humming.
“Well,” muttered Johann, more unnerved by the humming than the beetles, “all is not lost. Magister Sulzer confided in me before I left. I know the gist of his letter, even if I don’t know the detail.”
The Grand Astromancer narrowed his eyes and spoke in his most magisterial tones. “You presume to know the mind of your master?”
“Of course not, my lord, I merely know that he wished to remind you of a certain prophecy—one that you both studied in your youth.”
The colour drained from Caspar’s face. “Prophecy?”
Johann nodded eagerly. “He said you would know the one. He even recited it to me.”
Caspar’s myopic eyes strained even harder. “He
recited
it?”
“Well, yes, but I can’t remember it all, I’m afraid. I didn’t think I’d need to.” Johann closed his eyes and frowned, clutching his temples as he tried to recall his master’s words. “There was a line in it—something about an ‘openhearted man, with flesh as clear as truth’. Magister Sulzer seemed to believe that this ‘openhearted man’ was preordained in some way to save our order from ruin.” Johann paused and nervously ran a hand over his neatly trimmed beard. “I think he believed that this man might one day become head of the Celestial Order.”
Caspar gripped the head of his staff so tightly that the veins in his age-mottled hands began to throb. When he replied, there was an edge of barely controlled venom in his voice. “Did he?”
Johann nodded, smiling awkwardly. As he wracked his memory for another fragment of the prophecy, he felt something moving up the side of his head. He reached up to dust it away, but Caspar beat him to it. The Grand Astromancer’s staff was topped with an orb of solid porphyry and as it connected with Johann’s skull, the younger man let out a yelp of pain and dropped heavily to the floor.
“You’re covered in them!” cried Caspar, lurching around the desk and crunching the beetle beneath his heel. “Get out!” He began pounding Johann with his staff again and sent him scurrying to the door. “Get out, get out, get out!”
As Johann tumbled out into the hallway, Caspar slammed the door shut and slid an iron bolt across the ancient oak. Once it was secure, he let out a furious howl and began stomping around the chamber, lashing out with his staff and creating a whirlwind of flying papers and overturned furniture. “
I’m
the Grand Astromancer,” he hissed, collapsing back into his chair.
As he sat there, trying to ignore the endless ticking, Caspar lifted his medallion again and peered at it. “They all think I’m past it. They all think he’s the one, but who brought him here? Who found him? He didn’t know an augury from an oar when I began training him. And what’s he doing now, as everything goes to hell? Nothing. Nothing of use, at least.” With a rattling, wheezing cough, the old wizard climbed to his feet and shuffled off down a gloomy corridor, still cursing as he disappeared into the shadows.
After a few minutes he reached another towering door and shoved it open with a screech of protesting wood.
The room beyond was lit only by the green light of Morrslieb pouring through another domed glass ceiling. It was a circular chamber, built of smooth, polished marble and it was empty apart from a single robed man, hunched over a glittering moondial. He was tall and unusually thin, and his face was hidden in the folds of a deep hood.
The man did not look up as Caspar approached. He kept his gaze fixed on the moondial, carefully studying the shadow thrown by the triangular gnomon at its centre. The face was made of eight concentric circles, each cast from a different metal and designed to spin independently of each other. As he worked, the man turned the discs back and forth, clicking them into different positions and muttering numbers under his breath.
Caspar watched him for a few minutes, a look of distaste on his face. Finally, he took a deep breath and stepped closer. “What do you expect to achieve, Gabriel?” he asked. “Without the means to record what you see, how can you hope to discern a pattern?”
Gabriel remained focussed on the moondial, but after a few seconds he croaked a single word.
Caspar shook his head, clearly irritated. “What?”
“Razumov,” said Gabriel a little louder, his head still bowed.
Caspar pursed his thin lips and looked up at the emerald night sky. “Razumov? The Kislevite? Why waste your time on that old folktale? Even if the legend were true, we’ve no idea what kind of power he was trying to discover, or even where he died.”
“He died a few miles north of Altdorf,” said Gabriel in the same deadpan tone. “Where the town of Schwarzbach now stands.”
Caspar’s face twisted into a snarl as he realised that Gabriel had unravelled yet another age-old mystery. He clenched his fists as he imagined how the rest of the order would greet this latest discovery. Yet again, they would lavish praise on the savant. Yet again, there would be thinly veiled suggestions that Caspar’s power was waning and that maybe he should hand the reins over to someone younger; someone with more potent gifts; someone like Gabriel.
When Caspar spoke again, it took all his effort to keep his voice soft. “Schwarzbach, really? How fascinating. So near. But, of course, the location of Razumov’s grave is meaningless unless one could discover the specific equinoctial signs he used to predict the eddies of magic. Without an exact date and time, it would be impossible to recreate his rituals.”
Caspar smiled to himself as Gabriel considered this.
“The 29th of Jahrdrung.” Gabriel’s words came in a gentle mechanical staccato. “Midnight.”
The smile on Caspar’s face became a grimace.
Gabriel finally looked up from the moondial, throwing back his hood and allowing the light to wash over his gaunt features. His head was skull-like, an effect heightened by his lack of hair—his pate was completely smooth and even his eyebrows were hairless. His skin was alabaster-pale and strangely translucent, so that the pulsing of his veins was clearly visible. “I could find the exact place,” he said, stroking the face of the moondial. “Morrslieb waxes full on the 29th. Then I could summon the ruins of the tower. I could harness the power Razumov sought.”
Caspar’s panic grew as he thought of the messenger’s words. Could this be it? Could this be the final straw? “Remind me again,” he said quietly, “what exactly was Razumov’s story?”
“He wanted a wife. Someone else’s wife. A Kislevite princess, Natalya. She was interested in astrology. She was interested in other…
things.
So Razumov researched storms. Divine storms. Storms that wrack the night sky.”
“You mean the azyr? He tried to harness azyr just to woo a woman?”
“Yes, he sought azyr, as we do. But he made no provisions. He did not protect himself. He did not consider Chaos. There was a warrant for his arrest. It was too late, Razumov was too dangerous. He fled, easily. To the south. To the Empire. His body changed. His mind changed. He forgot about the princess. Magic consumed him. He conjured a great tower out of the hills where Schwarzbach now stands. It was a fulcrum, an axis for the heavens. He studied the aspects of the moons, memorised astrological phenomena. Predicted Morrslieb’s proximity to his tower. Opened his mind to a storm of azyr unlike anything the world has seen before or since.”
“And he died.”
“He died. Razumov’s calculations were flawed.” Gabriel shook his head and a note of confusion entered his monotonous drone. “Somehow. Even after so many years of research, he forgot a crucial phrase. The magic tore him apart. It pummelled him into the ground, along with his tower.”
Caspar stepped closer to Gabriel. As he did so, he noticed that the wizard’s robes had fallen open slightly at the neck. He averted his gaze, unnerved by the strangeness of the man. Below the neckline of his cloak, Gabriel’s flesh was almost completely translucent. Before he looked away, he saw the pulsing of the younger man’s heart. Caspar shook his head as he considered the changes that had wracked the wizard’s body. When he had first passed through the college doors, just a few decades earlier, Gabriel’s skills were limited, to say the least. He had shown an uncanny affinity with animals that had almost led him to a witch hunter’s pyre, and a knack of predicting the outcome of card games, but beyond that he was just a slightly eccentric farm boy. Caspar had offered him an apprenticeship, out of curiosity more than anything else, but, to his amazement, Gabriel had quickly surpassed almost all of the other magisters, in skill, certainly, but also in strangeness.
“And you think you could finish what he started?” asked Caspar.
Gabriel nodded without looking up, unaware of Caspar’s discomfort. “Yes.” He frowned. “Only one thing doesn’t fit.”
“What?”
“The auguries indicate a metal mountain. They say I would need to ride a mountain of gold.” He shrugged. “It makes no sense, but it’s not important. I could raise the tower. I could harness the stars.”
Caspar’s legs began to tremble and he looked around for a chair. Seeing none, he settled awkwardly on the stone floor, letting out a small groan as the cold clamped around his arthritic bones. Darkness closed in on him as he considered the implications of Gabriel’s discovery. There was no doubt that he would be correct—he was like a freakish living almanac. The loss of written language meant nothing to someone with the movements of the entire cosmos locked inside his head. Caspar also had no doubt that news of Gabriel’s discovery would quickly reach the ears of the Emperor—the very Emperor who had recently questioned Caspar’s own ability to fulfil his duties. He pressed his hand over his robes, feeling the hard lump of the medallion as he pictured Gabriel explaining to the Emperor how he climbed Razumov’s tower and drew unimaginable power down from the stars. The Emperor would order Gabriel to replace Caspar as patriarch of the order, and free the Empire of the plagues that were blighting it.
Tears formed in Caspar’s eyes as he stared into the shadows. He could picture nothing but the tattered ruins of his own future. He could feel his life ebbing away from him, slipping through his fingers. As needles of pain pricked across his scalp, he saw something else and gasped, not in pain, but delight. A trail of lights had begun dancing across his retina and he realised that the sight was vaguely familiar. It reminded him of the visions he had experienced as a youth. Even then, he had never known if the lights were real or imagined but, at times of crisis, they would often fill his thoughts. As a young apprentice, he had learned to discern pictures in the brilliance—brief, shifting glimpses of the future.
Caspar had to stifle a smile as he realised his old powers had not entirely deserted him. As he focussed on the glow, he saw a vision of himself standing at the top of a storm-lashed tower, silhouetted by great, swirling tides of magic. The vision faded as quickly as it came but, as the lights receded, Caspar realised that, even now, there might be hope for him.
Gabriel had already turned his attention back to the moondial, forgetting his master as he attempted to decipher one of the myriad puzzles still locked in his skull. He did not notice as the old man climbed to his feet and leaned closer, his eyes glinting dangerously.
“Do you trust me?” asked Caspar, placing a tentative hand on Gabriel’s shoulder.
Gabriel looked up and finally showed a trace of emotion, clearly upset that Caspar would feel the need to ask such a thing. “Of course.”
Caspar nodded and graced his strange protégé with a paternal smile. He would have expected no other answer. He had saved Gabriel from the clutches of a witch hunter. He knew that the wizard considered him his only friend.
“That’s good, Gabriel. I think you should share this hope with no one else, at least until we’re sure it’s not a mistake, and…” he hesitated, squeezing Gabriel’s shoulder, “if anyone is to attempt such a hazardous task, I think the duty should fall to me.”
“You, my lord? The head of the order? Razumov died. What if you…?”
“It is precisely because I’m the Grand Astromancer that I must take on this mantle.” Caspar felt a twinge of guilt as he played his next card. He knew that Gabriel’s biggest weakness was a complete blindness to his own potential. “If you’re honest with yourself, Gabriel,” he said, adopting his most caring tones, “you know this task is beyond you. Maybe one day, but not now. You’re still little more than an apprentice.”
Gabriel’s pale cheeks flushed briefly with colour. “Yes. Of course.”
“Don’t feel ashamed, Gabriel. You’re brave, not vainglorious, but I think you must agree that it would take a magister of many years’ experience to achieve such a thing.”
Gabriel looked at the floor, appalled by his own presumption.
“I cannot do it alone though, old friend.” Caspar gripped Gabriel’s arms. “Will you make the journey with me? Will you be at my side as I gaze deep into the unknowable heavens?”
Gabriel stood up and pulled his robes a little closer around his neck. There was an intense look on his face and he replied in an earnest whisper. “I would be honoured.”