[Warhammer] - Zavant Read online

  Trailing along grumpily in Konniger’s wake, Vido followed him through the maze of corridors and chambers that made up the ancient Hall of Archives, buried deep beneath the headquarters of the Church of Sigmar that itself made up one whole district of the city. The former thief had robbed too many churches in his time to ever feel comfortable on holy ground, and the eerie silence of this sepulchral warren only added to his uneasiness. From up ahead, the voices of Konniger and von Heltz echoed back down the corridor.

  “The break-in was discovered only hours ago. The cathedral guard immediately sealed off all the gates, but it is assumed that the culprit is no longer within the church precincts.”

  Konniger gave an unsurprised grunt. It was an open secret that the walls and crypts of the church were riddled with more secret passages than anyone had yet managed to map. The fact that so many previous holders of the office of Grand Theogonist had seen fit to create so many escape routes from the place spoke volumes more about Church politics than you could ever learn from any of the official histories, Konniger had once said.

  Vido cast a speculative eye on the heavily barred and padlocked doors that lined the corridor on either side of him. Row upon row of them, stretching back as far as the eye could see… and behind each one, vaults crammed full of the treasures and relics of the Church. There was a lot of old junk—mouldy old books, the mildewed bones of saints and heroes, the blessed bedpan of Heimdal the Nineteenth or whatever—but there were real treasures in there too, he knew. The booty of two thousand years of holy wars and empire-building. So much of it that they hadn’t even got round to properly cataloguing it all yet.

  Criminal, it is, Vido grumbled to himself. All this loot lying down here and going to waste. Why, if I wasn’t a reformed character these days…

  Konniger’s voice shook him out of his reverie, reminding him who it was that had brought about that reformation.

  “Vido! Your attention, please. We have matters to attend to other than your keen interest in the safekeeping of the contents of Sigmar’s vaults.”

  “Master?” Vido looked up, meeting Konniger’s knowing look. Sometimes he almost believed that Konniger could read minds. Probably another side-effect of that damned powder, he swore silently to himself. He saw that they had reached the corridor’s end, and stood at the entrance to the large and well-lit chamber beyond. Bookshelves lined the walls, dusty and still incomplete inventories of the contents of those sealed vaults. More such books were piled up on the writing desks in the centre of the room, where scribes worked during the day to identify and classify the Church’s many treasures. One whole area of the chamber was stacked with boxes and packing crates, and Vido saw the definite gleam of gold amongst the debris.

  It was only with some difficulty that he managed to turn his gaze towards the group of figures waiting to meet them . Vido saw the different coloured cloaks and cowls of whole hierarchies of different ranks of priesthood. He saw the shine of the polished weapons and armour of at least a dozen members of the cathedral guard. But it was the figure in the centre of the group that caught Vido’s attention, the solemn dark-robed figure whose lined and ancient face suggested that he might be almost as old and desiccated as many of the items kept under his care.

  “Ah, Herr Konniger. So good to have you amongst us once again,” the Chief-Archivist said in a voice that suggested anything but. “I am pleased to see you respond so quickly to our request, but I am surprised that you have seen fit to involve another in the Church’s affairs.”

  The Chief-Archivist’s gaze swept briefly over Vido with a look of what the halfling could only describe as withering contempt. At almost three and a half feet, Vido stood tall for one of his race, but at that moment he felt about as big as one of the grotesque homunculus creatures that Konniger kept preserved in brine-filled jars in a cupboard in his study.

  Vido felt Konniger’s hand rest reassuringly on his shoulder as the sage stepped forward to meet the first challenge of the night. “My manservant, Vido. In his time in my service, I have found him to be of much help to me in investigations such as this. His presence here is one of the conditions by which I have agreed to come here tonight.”

  Konniger and the Chief-Archivist locked eyes across the room. Vido remembered the stories about these two old intellectual adversaries, how the Chief-Archivist had once attempted to have Konniger burned at the stake on charges of heresy against the faith of Sigmar. The Chief-Archivist was first to break his gaze, turning away and making a gesture of obvious dismissal towards Vido, dispelling the halfling’s existence from his mind.

  “As you will, Konniger. I had forgotten just how insistently stubborn you could be. I pray to Sigmar that you will bring these same qualities to bear on the matter in hand.”

  “As do I, Herr Chief-Archivist,” Konniger said, nodding respectfully at his old rival. Now that both had made their point, they could proceed with their business together. “Your envoy provided me with some of the details on the journey here. I have been led to believe that two guards have been found slain, that it is suspected but as yet unconfirmed that items may have been stolen and that Brother Wollen, a novice-scribe here in the Archives, is missing and believed to be the culprit. Now, in any murder, I’ve always found it best to deal with the cadavers first…”

  He had seen dead bodies before but death by strangulation always made Vido feel somewhat queasy. Call it an old thieves’ superstition, but the livid faces of the two dead guards, their eyes bulging out their sockets and their swollen tongues protruding from their slack mouths, was a sight he’d rather not spend too long contemplating.

  There but for the grace of Ranald go I, the wiry little halfling decided, staring at the ugly black-and-purple ligature marks on the throats of both corpses and remembering the feel of the hangman’s noose round his own throat, that day atop the public gallows in Kaiser’s Platz. When, just seconds before the trapdoor opened, Vido first heard the voice of Zavant Konniger as the sage came striding up the steps of the gallows platform, bellowing at the hangman to stop and waving an Imperial decree of stay of execution in his hands.

  “Pay attention, Vido. You’re not listening to a word I’m saying. How many times have I told you? Logical deduction and proper note taking are the principal cornerstones of any fieldwork investigation. Read back the last few observations I’ve just dictated to you!”

  Vido scrabbled at the parchment in his hands, trying to make sense of the scratched quill marks written in that damnable shorthand code the sage had devised and insisted on teaching to his companion. They were in one of the empty vault rooms off the main corridor, now serving as a makeshift mortuary. The bodies of the two dead guards were laid out on trestle tables, with Konniger inquisitively poking and prodding at them.

  “Lividity and estimated body temperature consistent with calculated time of theft…” Vido mumbled. “The two deceased only guards on duty in the lower archive chambers at this time… conclude that they were killed by assailants as a necessary, if cold-blooded, precaution against alarm being raised during commission of the main crime. Unfortunate that both cadavers have been removed from where they were found… possible loss of vital forensic evidence due to bumbling ignorance of uneducated amateurs.”

  “And?” barked the ever-impatient Konniger.

  “And that’s all you’ve said so far, so that’s all I’ve written!” his manservant protested. Konniger shot him a deadly glare. Vido began to suspect that they taught these kind of stares to young initiates at the divinity college located in the building above. “Sigmar’s Withering Stare”, they probably called it. The first weapon in the magical arsenal of any aspiring young priest.

  “So, what are your conclusions?” Konniger pressed. “I’ve given you a head start, but the rest of the evidence is right in front of you. What would you say about the particular cause of death?”

  “That they were strangled?” Vido offered, already mentally cringing in readiness for the intellectual onslaught he knew was
about to come.

  Konniger made a sound of impatient disgust at the back of his throat, a sound that back home in his study would usually act as a forewarning that some heavy object was about to be hurled in fury across the room. “Sigmar save us from halflings and half-wits, which mostly amounts to the same thing! I can see that they were strangled. Even those ham-fisted butchers at the College of Surgeons could see that they were strangled. Look at the pattern of ligature marks. Look at the way the wounds cut into the flesh of the throat. Look especially at the way the larynx and Adam’s apple have been crushed. Look at all this and now tell me about the particular cause of death!”

  Overcoming his vague nausea, Vido leaned over the nearest corpse. He looked up into the expectant face of his master. “They’ve both been expertly garrotted?”

  Konniger smiled, pleased to see that all those lessons in logical deduction had not been entirely wasted. “Exactly. Two garrotted guards—and garrotted in a most distinctive manner, I must point out; and the theft of an artefact from far-distant Araby. Come, Vido. Let’s go in search of the last few pieces of the puzzle, and see if our suspicions are correct.”

  Vido scurried after Konniger as he strode imperiously out of the vault room. Pieces of the puzzle… see if our suspicions are correct, Vido repeated to himself, used to dwelling in the shadow of intellectual inferiority that his master seemed to cast on everyone around him. Typical. He may know what he’s talking about, but I’m as much in the dark now as when we arrived.

  In the main archive chamber outside, the Chief-Archivist and his guards and assistants waited to hear Konniger’s findings. “Herr Chief-Archivist!” Konniger’s voice echoed shockingly loud in the high-vaulted room. “It is vital that I see the inventory of items that your missing scribe was working on at the time of his disappearance!”

  The old priest bristled visibly in indignation at the tone of Konniger’s request, and behind him one of his younger acolytes gasped in disbelief. Clearly, the Chief-Archivist was not in the habit of taking orders from anyone below the rank of Grand Theogonist. He paused, allowing the last echoes of this insult to the dignity of his office to fade away, before choosing to reply in a voice that struggled to retain its authority. “Von Heltz. The inventory, if you please.”

  Konniger almost snatched the leather-bound volume from the hands of the Chief-Archivist’s envoy, rapidly flicking through it and running one long thin finger down the list of illuminated entries, muttering to himself the whole time. “Sealed sarcophagi… no. Golden skull throne… no. Selection of silver death masks… no. Golden falcon statuette? Certainly not…”

  Standing beside him, Vido shifted uncomfortably, well aware that his master’s behaviour could appear more than a little eccentric sometimes, and wondering how much tonight’s performance would add to Konniger’s reputation as the resident mad mystic of Altdorf.

  “One large and unadorned clay jar, wax-sealed with imprint of unidentified pagan hieroglyph… ha! I knew it!”

  Konniger slammed the book shut with a flourish of triumph, brandishing it at the Chief-Archivist. “Sigmar’s oath, man! Didn’t you recognise it? Didn’t any of you know what had unwittingly been passed into your care? Here we are in what is reputably one of the greatest repositories of learning in the known world, and only a lowly novice-scribe recognised this artefact for what it truly is!”

  The Chief-Archivist drew himself up to his full height, glowering at Konniger with an air of haughty indignation. “My calling is the acquisition of knowledge concerning the greatness and glory of Sigmar, the Empire and the deeds of those who would faithfully serve them both. I leave the understanding of the heathen affairs of the savages of Araby to the likes of fools and novices.”

  “Ah yes,” Konniger said as if thinking aloud, looking contemplatively around at the collection of unpacked Araby exhibits that filled the other half of the chamber. “Our missing novice, and the only piece of the puzzle still unaccounted for. What became of Brother Wollen, I wonder.”

  Every eye in the room followed Konniger as he strode amongst the exhibits, his hands distractedly touching the many gold and bejewelled surfaces all around him as he continued his reasoning. “Quite the budding Araby scholar, I seem to remember. He corresponded with me on several occasions, seeking advice on a few points of particularly obscure Araby history.” Vido looked away, noticing the Chief-Archivist flinch at this remark; obviously correspondence with the theologically-suspect Konniger was not encouraged amongst young and impressionable initiates. “I was pleased to provide him with a few pointers in the right direction, but I became concerned with the darker tone that his researches were taking. I wrote to him with my concerns, but heard nothing more. I thought nothing of it at the time—I correspond with a large number of my fellow scholars on a variety of topics—but, alas, had I acted on my concerns, everything that has happened here might have been prevented.”

  As he spoke, Konniger bent down to inspect the flagstones of the floor, nodding in confirmation at something he had found there, waving one arm at his manservant. “Vido, your eyes are sharper than mine. Your opinion, if you please, on these marks here.”

  Vido greatly doubted this—Konniger’s senses were unusually sharp for a human—but hurried forward to take his place alongside his master. He bent down to study the spot indicated by Konniger, seeing the trail of two faint lines marked out in the dust of the floor. Vido had been involved in enough shady deeds in his time to recognise them instantly.

  “Drag marks,” he confirmed, looking up at Konniger. “There’s been a body dragged across this floor, and not too long ago either.”

  Konniger nodded in appreciation at Vido and started slowly pacing along the floor, following the trail of the near-invisible drag marks. Almost unwillingly, the Chief-Archivist and his guards and assistants followed after him, drawn into the spell of the mystery that Konniger was now unravelling before them.

  “So what are we to suppose? That Brother Wollen, a young initiate scholar and certainly no expert assassin, succeeded in overpowering and garrotting two veteran guards? That he then stole one of the valuable Araby artefacts stored here and made his escape through one of the many secret tunnels that infest these vaults?”

  “You have a better theory, Herr Konniger?” the Chief-Archivist sneered. “The facts speak for themselves. You were invited here tonight—against my strongest counsels, I might add—to aid the Church in the capture of this culprit and the recovery of whatever he has stolen, not to restate what is already clear to everyone here!”

  Konniger never looked up from the flagstones as he followed the trail of marks through the labyrinth of unpacked artefacts and still-unopened crates, never allowing his concentration to waver as he replied to his old rival’s criticisms. “Let the facts speak for themselves, you say? Very well, then that is what we shall do. If Wollen didn’t kill the two guards—and I can tell you now for a fact that he did not—then someone else did; the same unknown accomplices whom Wollen, with his knowledge of Church secrets, was able to smuggle into the building through the network of tunnels.” Konniger stopped, pausing either to check that he had not lost the trail or to ensure that his audience was still hanging on his every word.

  Then he was moving again, quicker this time as he neared both the end of the trail of marks on the floor and the end of his argument. “I have no doubt that you have already checked the inventory and found that the most valuable and easily portable items can still all be accounted for. It will take days to go through the rest of the items on the list, but I tell you now for a fact that you will find only one item missing: Large and unadorned clay jar, one, wax-sealed with imprint of unidentified pagan hieroglyph. A mundane item of apparently little value, especially compared to the many other riches on offer here. So the facts leave us with three unanswered questions: why was only this one particular item stolen; who were Wollen’s accomplices; and where is Brother Wollen now?”

  Konniger had come to a dead stop, standing before the g
leaming shape of a large golden sarcophagus standing upright against the far wall of the archive chamber. Adorned in the usual elaborate style of the tomb treasures of Araby, its golden glow seemed to light up that whole area. Konniger stared at it in contemplation, the death-mask features of some long-dead Araby king carved into its hinged lid eerily returning his stare.

  “Vido, would you join me here for a second and tell me what you see.”

  Vido shuffled nervously forward to join his master. He didn’t mind being this close to so much loot, but he had heard all manner of unpleasant tales about these Araby sarcophagi and the horrible things they sometimes contained.

  “Your apprehension is understandable,” Konniger commented, again uncannily picking up on Vido’s thoughts, “but you’ve nothing to worry about in this case. Dead or undead, whatever was originally laid to rest in here would have long ago been put to the torch by our noble Bretonnian allies when they liberated it during the crusades. Properly sealed again, it would have made an amusing decorative piece for the baronial hall of some Bretonnian lord. Now, your appraisal, if you please.”

  Vido ran his hands speculatively over the inlaid surface of the sarcophagus lid. The old thief in him admired the fine work on the goldleafing and mentally estimated what such an item might fetch on the open market, while the newly-found detective in him searched for the clue here that Konniger had evidently already found and was perhaps trying to lead him to…

  “Sealed!” Vido shouted, suddenly realising what his master had been hinting at. “The seal on the lid has been broken, but when you read from the inventory earlier, all the sarcophagi were listed as having their seals still intact!”

  “Exactly,” Konniger commented as he swung open the hinged lid. Vido barely managed to get out of the way of the stiff-armed corpse that fell out of the open sarcophagus. Konniger bent down, casually turning it over to reveal the body of a young man dressed in a plain novice’s habit, his hair tonsured in the severe style of an initiate of the Church of Sigmar. The corpse’s face was bloated and livid, the garrotte wire that had killed him still buried deep within his throat. Konniger looked up calmly, taking in the horrified expressions on the faces of the Chief-Archivist and his entourage.