Arcanum Part 43

The relentless onslaught didn't allow for a moment's rest. Every time a target died, or was clubbed insensible, there was someone else to replace them. And there were casualties starting to appear in the ranks of the librarians. A cut here, a concussion there; it made a difference to the effectiveness of their defence. The tables kept being pushed back. Their previously compact perimeter was expanding. Weaknesses were appearing. They didn't have enough reserves to plug the holes. Where defenders flagged through exhaustion or injury, there was no one left to take their place.

Felix found that he was taking a step backwards more often. And he couldn't feel his left arm any more. Most of him was numb, except his shoulder, which was on fire. He had to force himself to fight on.

This is how it ends, he thought.

The line finally broke, not with a shout but with a sigh. They had no plan for this part. He raised his sword-hand high and brought it down on top of a man's head. The blade stuck for a moment too long, and he couldn't use it to chop at the next target.

Buber threw himself between them, his big hand closing around a throat and punching.

Chaos.

Knots of men were struggling at close-quarters. In some, the black robes outnumbered the townsfolk, and they forced the attackers down. In others, hard boots and fists beat a bloodied librarian into submission and started to drag him away.

Without his sword, Felix found he was useless. He was a twelve-year-old, taking on grown men, some of them strengthened by years of manual work, and while they were fresh, he was so tired he could cry.

Buber hacked and cut and swung. He put his head back and bellowed his defiance. "Carinthia! Carinthia!"

Even as Felix clattered into a bookcase, the huntmaster raged and foamed and finally disappeared under a melee of bodies pulling at him, trapping his arms, holding his legs.

Then he was up again, his tormentors hanging from him like burrs. Unarmed, he simply tore at them with his nails, gouging and rending, throwing them off one by one, scattering them like leaves. Ignoring his fallen sword, he ploughed into the next band, barely sparing the crumpled librarian he was supposed to be saving.

Felix darted forward, scooped up Buber's sword, and swung at the bent shoulders of a man trying to rise.

"Carinthia, to me!" he called. He stabbed down, impaling a thigh, then cutting up as the body twisted away. Blood arced black in the orange light. "To me!"

But then Felix went down. He'd slipped. They were on him. He struggled, but their full weight was on his chest, crushing the breath out of him as though he were being pressed. He couldn't move. No, he could move, but it had no effect. He couldn't free himself. They were kneeling on his broken shoulder. The pain was incandescent, beyond feeling and sense.

A hood descended over his head, and it was dark. There seemed little point in resisting, but he did his best, which was to say very little. Someone took hold of his ankles and started to pull him, a step at a time, across the floor. Felix's good arm flailed ineffectively at them.

He was released. He stopped moving and his heels hit the ground. He lay there, waiting to be picked up again, but nothing happened. He realised that no one was going to stop him from taking off his hood, so he did so in one movement, casting it aside and propping himself up on his elbow.

The only figures left standing were librarians, and one of them spotted him with a cry of relief.

"My lord, you're safe."

"Where ... where did they all go?" He used the man as a prop to regain his feet as he tried to make sense of everything.

There was barely space for the dead to lie. It was as if an autumn gale had blown a pile of dried brown leaves through the doors and into the reading room. Tables and chairs and the weapons both sides had used protruded like trees and twigs. He raised his eyes towards the main entrance. The doorway was uncannily clear.

"I don't know," said the librarian, looking around, more stunned by the possibility of victory than the inevitability of defeat. "I think we won."

"Where's Master Buber?" Felix couldn't see him. "Master Buber?"

"I'll find him." But the librarian first groped on the floor and hauled out the Sword of Carinthia from under the still form of a well-dressed man who had fallen across it, obscuring all but the pommel. "Yours, my lord," he said, as he pressed it into the prince's hand.

He reeled away, asking his fellows if they'd seen the huntmaster, and eventually one of them pointed towards the outside. The librarian retrieved a baluster and picked his way warily towards the gaping darkness where the doors used to be.

Felix found an unbroken chair, righted it and fell into it. If they were to be attacked again, be bound and hooded and dragged across the bridge, there'd be nothing he nor the librarians could do about it. They were spent. Better to gather his allies and tell them to escape, if they could, than let Eckhardt have his way with them. Fuel, he remembered, and shivered.

The signore had switched sides. His stepmother was missing. His half-brothers and sisters were missing. Chamberlain, missing. Earls, missing. Order, scattered or slaughtered. Library, lost. He still had the fortress, but he wasn't in it, was he? No army, no magic, no way of holding back the night.

The librarian who'd volunteered to find the huntmaster was returning, not with one person, but with two.

The first was Buber, looking more animal than man. His clothes were ragged, his arms bloody, his teeth bared. His eyes were reduced to thin slits and his whole body appeared almost lupine, touched by a madness that was yet to leave him.

By contrast, the other was cool, self-possessed and controlled. It was Sophia Morgenstern, just as gore-covered as Buber, but regal where he was feral, magnificent instead of maleficent. She seemed to have acquired a dwarvish-made spatha from somewhere, carrying it drawn by her side, the blade stained red and black. She wore the ring Felix had given her on the thumb of her right hand.

"My lord," she said, "we have Library Square." She seemed not at all perturbed by the strewn dead lying between them.

Felix looked up at her. "You came."

Her face cracked into a half-smile. "We all came. All the Jews of Juvavum, except those who've made the White Fortress secure."

"But you could have been killed." Felix was out of his seat.

"Then I would have died in the service of my earthly lord, the Prince of Carinthia. When you sent Mr Braun to us, you knew I'd come, even if I had to come alone."

Felix nodded dumbly.

"What do you want us to do now? The mob has fled, and we're guarding Vienna Alley and Corn Alley."

"What do I want to do?" The prince's shoulders slumped. "I want to kill them all for what they've done. I want to kill them all and replace them with subjects who won't turn on me and each other because some magician promises them the world."

She looked at him with her dark eyes, sad and sombre. "You could do that."

"Do we have any prisoners?" He raised his voice. "Librarians. Any prisoners?"

"Yes," answered Erdlmann. He'd found Buber's crossbow, and he offered it to its owner. "Some. Not lots, but a few."

"Bring one to me."

Buber took his crossbow, slowly and reluctantly. Civilised men used weapons like that, and he seemed unsure of his right to carry one.

A man, his head matted with stiff blood and both eyes blackened, was thrust in front of Felix. He knelt, knowing that he would have been forced to anyway.

"I warned you," said Felix. "No mercy if you entered the library."

"I ... didn't hear you, my lord."

"I should just kill you." He examined the sword in his hand. Not magical any more, but it didn't need to be. "But I'm going to use you instead."

He put the sword on the chair behind him and pulled his knife from his belt. He turned to Erdlmann: "Hold him."

The man was held, and Felix knelt down on the floor beside him. He held up the knife. "Just to be clear: the man with his arm around your neck will kill you if I tell him to. I'm willing to do so, too, with my own sword or this, and I may well decide later that that's what I'll do. This, however, will do for now."

He carved a diagonal line down from left hairline to right cheek across the man's face, then, as the blood beaded and dripped, he went back for the reverse stroke so that the two cuts crossed on the bridge of the nose.

"Listen to me, because your life depends on this. I want you to go through the streets of Juvavum and declare a curfew. No one is allowed on the streets until the Bell Tower rings. If the curfew is observed, you live. If it doesn't, I'll hunt you down and kill you tonight. It's not like you can hide any more."

The man snivelled and gasped, but nodded.

"Hold his right hand out," Felix told Erdlmann, and when the prisoner's hand was thrust out palm-down towards the prince, he stuck his knife into it so that the point came out the other side.

The man screamed once, then shut up.

"Never take up arms against me again. I might be only twelve, but I know what to do with traitors." Felix pulled the blade out, and straightened up. "Take him outside and he can start."

Sophia was looking at Felix, unblinking.

"What else am I supposed to do?" he said to her, and he called out again to the librarians. "Bring me the next one."

43.

Dawn broke across the south-eastern sky as lines of blossom-pink cloud. Buber glanced up from his task stacking the bodies in ranks in the town square and reached over to open up his lantern. He blew the candle out and closed its hatch.

"It's morning, Master Buber," said Braun, working alongside him. He'd brought a fresh handcart piled with corpses, and had stayed to unload. "Last night..."

"We all thought that," said Buber. He took the arms of the topmost body and pulled it clear. "Yet here we are, and here they are. When we tell the story of what happened, it'll be because we were more worthy, more loyal, more true. But really? It was because they needed to take us alive, and we didn't need to do the same."

He dragged the stiffening corpse into place and dropped it down. He'd never been that good with numbers, tending to group things into ones, pairs, a few, a handful, lots, and fuck-loads. By that count, they'd killed lots of people, and every one of them a Carinthian. He wondered if the same scene was being played out all across Europe as monarchs fell and cities burnt.

It could still happen. Eckhardt was across the river, his power most likely waxing. Until he was dealt with, Felix's throne was vulnerable. The longer it went on, the worse it would get.

"I need to see the prince," said Buber. "Where is he?"

"Still in the library, Master, with that Jewish woman."

Buber wiped his hands on the back of his breeks. "Careful, Mr Braun. Not only did the Jews haul our arses out of the fire last night, for which we should be properly grateful, but we'll have a Jewish princess as regent before long. I'd keep your mouth shut if you value your neck, whatever your mind might say."

"No one's saying they didn't do a good thing." Braun checked around him before he spoke further. "They only have one god, Master Buber. How can that be right?"

"And how many gods do you think we have now, Mr Braun?" Buber looked up and down the rows and rows of still forms set out in the square, and at the gyre of crows circling above. A kite wheeled with them, its outline dark against the lightening sky, reminding him of one time he'd happened to glance upwards and see the outstretched wings of a dragon pass overhead. "Do you think this lot are feasting with Wotan in Valhalla? Or are they just going to stay rotting here until they're either claimed or tipped into a hole? Seems to me that the gods have gone the way of the unicorns, so what does it matter any more that the Morgenstern woman believes in one god or many?"

Braun wore a sour expression for a moment, before he shrugged.

"It just doesn't feel right, that's all."

"Well, get used to it, man. A group of people used to living without day-to-day magic? Until we learn how to do that for ourselves, we're beholden to them." Buber started off across the square, along the files until he reached a gap and cut through. When he was at the entrance to the alley, he turned. The bodies were grouped in lines of ten, and Braun was crouched over a cart parked halfway along the seventh line.

Buber shook his head in disgust and despair, and went to find Prince Felix.

The librarians were scrubbing the flagstone floor: on their knees, with buckets of steaming water and stout-haired brushes, sleeves rolled back and hands red with effort.

Now that, he had to concede, was dedication. The left-hand door was propped up against the wall outside, with the fortress's carpenter fussing over it. Another mob could swarm across the bridge again that night and walk right in, yet there the library staff were, scraping the blood and shit off the ground in case it contaminated their books.

He had no choice but to step in his boots right where they'd cleaned. He assumed they wouldn't mind.

"Mr Erdlmann?"

The man was intent on his task, and Buber moved to stand right in front of him. Weary, bleary eyes gazed upwards.

"Master Buber?"

"You have to sleep sometime."

"My turn soon," he said, and sat back on his heels. "The prince is on the first landing on the right."

The handrail had gone: of course it had, denied support when the banister had been de-constructed for weapons. Buber stuck to the wall side and climbed up to the gallery, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. A single lantern flickered on the floor, illuminating two blanket-shrouded shapes.

One lay curled up like a cat, and, separately, the other was propped against the curving wall.

"Master Buber," said Sophia Morgenstern. Her hand moved away from her sword, lying within reach on the boards beside her.

"My lady," he said.

"I'm not my lady of anything, Master Buber." She sat up further, moving slowly, almost painfully.

"I won't have been the first to call you that. Pretty sure I won't be the last."

"No," she admitted, "there is that." She pulled the edge of the blanket in, indicating that Buber should sit next to her.

He lowered himself down and found himself staring at the prince's sleeping form. "Poor kid," he said. "Must be knackered."

"He wouldn't stop until I made him." She snorted softly. "He listens to me. Don't know why."

"I'm not well-versed in the ways of kings and princes," said Buber. "But even I know that the normal rules don't apply to the likes of him."

"Whatever could you mean, Master Buber?"

He missed the irony in her voice, and attempted an explanation. "Just that who they marry, and when they marry, aren't matters that concern ordinary folk. Some are betrothed before they're born."

"Felix was telling me that just that happened to his father. His mother was a Frankish princess, taken as the price for offending the Order." Sophia made her lips go thin. "And many years later they let her die in childbirth, simply out of spite."

Buber raised his eyebrows. "When did he find that out?"

"Yesterday. Mr Trommler told him, presumably to stiffen his resolve and act against what his tutor was saying." Her hand went back to her throat where Allegretti had pricked her. "I don't suppose there's any word on either of them?"

"They haven't turned up among the dead, if that's what you mean. You know that Felix sent Allegretti to kill Eckhardt?"

She nodded. "And that you overheard him yesterday, singing Eckhardt's praises."

Chapter end