Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

Kaspar hated it when his comments drew no reaction. He tried a third time. ‘And it is madness to be on the road now. I heard that a week ago Breisgau was razed to the ground. They made a bonfire of the village and roasted its livestock on the coals. Some say they also roasted the inhabitants and ate them too.’

I shuddered. For months now the country around Strassburg had been infested with a plague of wild men, the Armagnaken or ‘poor fools’, the remnants of a great army which had been marauding around Europe in the service of one duke or another for years. An unholy cabal of the French king, the German emperor and the Italian pope had schemed to send them to Switzerland to sack Basle: the king because he wanted them out of France, the emperor because he aimed to annex Switzerland to the empire; the pope because he wanted to put a stop once and for all to the council which Aeneas and his friends had conducted now for over ten years. The Swiss had defied the Armagnaken and defeated them at terrible cost. The survivors had fled, rampaging down the Rhine in a storm of fire and blood that – men said – only the Apocalypse would equal. They had arrived near Strassburg in the spring. Many thousands had died.

The forest was no longer beautiful. I peered into its depths, trying to see what lurked behind the blaze of foliage.

‘Nick? What the hell happened to you? I’ve been hearing some bad things.’

Urthred the Necromancer paced his chamber in front of a roaring fire. A unicorn stood tethered obediently in the corner.

‘Long story. I need some help.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Strasbourg.’

‘Is that Kentucky?’

‘France.’

‘Right.’ A waxwork scowl was fixed on Urthred’s face. ‘Um, I’m kind of a long way from France right now.’

‘I need a high-res scanner and a fat data pipe. As fast as possible. I thought you might know someone.’

Urthred tapped his staff on the stone floor. Blue sparks fizzed from its tip. ‘Sheesh, Nick, you don’t make it easy. What time is it with you?’

Nick checked his watch. ‘Nine at night.’

‘You know, this is not cool Nick.’ A pause, then a grumpy sigh. ‘OK. I’ll check my contacts for insomniac French data-centre managers with a hard-on for fugitives from justice. Stick around.’

Urthred disappeared in a puff of smoke. Nick unhooked the headset from his ear and looked up from the laptop. The cobwebbed walls and swirling mists of the Necromancer’s tower were replaced with thick red paint and cigarette smoke, an underground bar off the Quai Saint Jean. To Nick, the other customers seemed as outlandish as anything in Gothic Lair: piercings through every permeable patch of skin, hair dyed red or purple or green, steel chains around their necks and waists. None of them looked as if they’d come to take advantage of the free wireless Internet.

‘Are you sure this is the time to be playing computer games?’ asked Emily. She sat next to him on the threadbare banquette, sipping a Jack Daniel’s and Coke.

‘You know the slogan, “The network is the computer”?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, in human terms the network is Randall. Urthred. If there’s anyone who can help us, Randall probably knows him somehow.’

‘I don’t understand. We’ve got an Internet connection here.’

‘Nowhere near fast enough. And we need to scan the pictures. You can’t do that with a mobile-phone camera.’

On the laptop screen, Urthred reappeared out of nowhere. Nick put the headset back on and tried to ignore the sneering looks he drew.

‘I got it,’ Urthred bragged. ‘You heard of a place called Karlsruhe?’

‘No.’

‘It’s in Germany – about an hour away from you, according to the Interweb. Hochschule für Gestaltung. It’s some kind of technical college. There’s a chick in the computer science department there, Sabine Friman. She can hook you up.’

Nick hesitated. ‘Can we get there without a car?’

‘What am I, a fricking concierge service?’ Urthred crossed to the large book spread on the wings of an eagle-shaped lectern and consulted it. ‘Says there’s a train from Strasbourg to Frankfurt at 21.50 that stops at Karlsruhe. You want me to tell you where the restaurant car is too?’

‘We’ll find it.’ Nick reached for the lid of the computer, ready to shut it down. ‘But there’s one other thing I need you to arrange.’

Whatever dangers lurked in the forest, we reached our destination without harm. Schlettstadt was an unremarkable town some twenty miles up the Ill from Strassburg. Like every town in those days, it existed in a state of siege. Guards manned the walls, and its gates only opened when we had proved we carried no weapons. Suspicious gazes followed our progress along the winding alleys inside, up the hill towards the church.

‘Have you noticed how goldsmiths always keep their shops near churches?’ Drach muttered. ‘Jesus preached poverty and forsaking worldly goods.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ I warned him. ‘It’s bad enough that everyone here thinks we must be an advance party of Armagnaken, without you sounding like a Free Spirit heretic as well.’

We found what we had come to see in a steep-gabled house plastered red between its branching beams. Much of it was familiar from all goldsmiths’ shops: the tools on the walls; the boxes of beads and wire; the plate glinting behind the bars of the show cabinet; the residues of quicksilver and hot metal.

But they were not fresh. No smoke rose from the furnace at the back of the house, and the anvils were silent. These were lean times for goldsmiths – they could not work gold when it was all buried under mattresses and floorboards.

I leaned on the empty counter and peered inside. A man sat on a stool, pulling rings off a spindle and polishing them one by one.

‘Are you Götz?’ I asked.

He nodded. He must have been about thirty, with bushy brown hair and a thin face. I introduced myself.

‘I am associated with the goldsmiths’ guild in Strassburg. I have seen your work there. A brooch of Christ on his cross.’ It had been Andreas Dritzehn’s. His brother had brought it into Dunne’s shop to sell after Andreas’ death. Through discreet enquiry, I had found out who had made it. ‘The lettering on the inscription was exquisite. So precise.’

He accepted the compliment in silence.

‘I assume you cut the letters with punches.’

A suspicious look. I sympathised. ‘I do not want to steal your secret. I want to buy it.’

I put a purse of coins on the counter.

‘I want you to make me a set of punches, exactly as you made your own.’

Götz eyed the purse but did not touch it.

‘I can cut your punches.’ He hesitated. ‘But not exactly as I made my own.’

‘What do you mean?’

He chose his words cautiously. ‘You want punches that will stamp each letter in metal. I do not have any.’

‘But the brooch…’

‘You could scour my workshop from top to bottom and you would not find a single alphabetical punch.’

I tried to remember everything I could about the writing on the brooch. ‘Surely you did not engrave it freehand?’

He pushed the purse back towards me. ‘I would rather not say.’

Frustrated and perplexed, I was about to turn away. But the wink of gold in his cabinet delayed me. I peered through the leaded glass.

‘May I examine that cup?’

I could see his doubts – but the purse still lay on the counter, and I might be the only customer he would have that week. He unlocked the cabinet and handed me the cup. It was about six inches tall, with a bowed stem and garnets set into the bowl. Around the base was written a verse from St John’s Gospel.

I studied it a few moments, pressing my fingertips into the sharp incisions. The lines were too straight, too clean to have been carved by hand. They must have been stamped. Yet Götz claimed he had no letter punches.