The House of War and Witness Read online

  Dedication

  To Dave, who kept our timelines straight and was

  our go-to-guy for all things real-world, historical and

  verifiable. The rest was stuff we made up.

  MIKE CAREY, LINDA CAREY

  AND LOUISE CAREY

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Also by Mike Carey, Linda Carey and Louise Carey

  Copyright

  1

  There was a border up ahead, though the trees were so thick here that no sign of it could be seen. The forest stretched for many miles in all directions, and the trees were the same ahead of them as behind. Nevertheless, the border was there. Not half an hour ago the ground had risen and the trees with it, and through the trunks they had all seen the flash of the river. On the other side of it was Prussia.

  The men were too hungry and dispirited to celebrate much at the sight, though it meant their long march was almost at an end. Not so much a march, Colonel August had to admit: there had been no road for two days, and the officers had been leading their horses more often than riding them. It wasn’t possible to maintain an orderly column among so many damned low-hanging branches, not with an infantry company more than two hundred strong. But at least they’d all kept up, and after his threat to cut the rations of the next man who complained, the grousing no longer reached his ears.

  ‘There’s a great house here? Really?’ Lieutenant Klaes said. He looked again at the map, hand-drawn for them by the landlord of the last inn they had stopped at, three days ago. It was crude, but better than the official map, which showed a swathe of beautifully depicted trees with a single cross at the edge and blank space beyond.

  The colonel – newly promoted from lieutenant colonel for the purposes of this assignment – didn’t bother to look at either document. ‘It’ll be where command says it is,’ he pronounced with easy confidence. ‘The family hasn’t used it in years, apparently. I think we’re still trying to find someone to accept the requisition papers.’

  ‘And the village: Narutsin? Outlandish name.’

  ‘Outlandish place, no doubt. But this close to the border, what do you expect? There’s a small detachment there already: local forces. Their captain can fill us in on the peculiarities of the natives if he’s halfway competent. And if it’s really a backwater, so much the better in some ways. It’ll discourage the men from fraternising.’

  ‘It’s not so much the men I’d worry about,’ muttered Klaes as a burst of girlish laughter reached them from far back among the trees. The women – that is, the respectable women – were all in the rear party, together with a couple of the older sergeants for protection, the pack-mules and the baggage. They were the officers’ wives, who were too delicate to travel at a soldier’s pace and would arrive later in the day, following the trampled path left by the company. But a few of the camp followers, mostly washer-women and whores, had managed to tag along with the men. They kept to the back of the column where their presence was not too obvious, but Klaes could not ignore them: giggling and flirting and disrupting every attempt at good order. One of them, the gypsy girl Drozde, had a laugh that could drown a church bell. He turned to glower over his shoulder at the noise.

  A cry from one of the scouts brought his attention back to the road ahead. Klaes glimpsed a straight edge through the trees and the grey of stone: a building. Only a few more minutes’ walk confirmed it. The trees thinned, and through them the soldiers could see the gables of a house.

  It stood on a rise too insignificant to be called a hill, the trees straggling around it on three sides. On the fourth were the house’s grounds, maybe a dozen fields’ width. Part might once have been laid out as lawns and herb beds, but all that could be seen there now was scrubby grass and a tangle of the same bushes they’d been pushing through for the last few days in the forest.

  The house and its grounds were surrounded by a stone wall that might once have kept out intruders but was crumbling now in several places. Beyond it were the villagers’ fields, jealously reclaimed from the forest and still more jealously guarded from each other with partitions of ditches or stick-fences. In the distance they could just make out the village itself: low, grey-brown buildings topped with a haze of cooking smoke.

  After two miles the road crossed a bridge. It was yet another landmark that did not appear on their inadequate map, but the garrulous innkeeper at Kastornya had told them to look out for it. ‘It’s a bridge over nothing! You’ll see for yourself. It’s where the river ran – not the big river, the Oder, but the small ’un. Mala Panev, I think they call it. Only then they dammed Mala Panev as she comes out of the hills – trying to make some good pasture, I reckon, but there’s none to be had up there. So now there’s just this big cut in the land. This big dry cut, see. And they call it the Drench.’

  This was a concern to Colonel August, and he stopped to take some measurements – or rather to allow Klaes to do so. It was not the Drench itself that troubled him. That was, indeed, only a dip in the land, five or six feet deep and no more than twenty wide at this point. It was dry at the bottom apart from a thin trickle and some standing pools, and even if there had been no bridge the officers would not have had to dismount to lead their horses down the gentle slope.

  But the guns, which were a day behind them, were another matter. Lieutenant Dietmar needed well maintained roads, and given how few there were to choose from, would almost certainly be obliged to take this one. So it was of some moment to determine whether this wooden bridge would take their weight.

  Klaes drew out a tape and stick that he kept about his person, and solemnly did his calculations. His original posting had been with the corps of engineers, and he had learned a great deal there about the mechanics of this and that. Fortification, transport, sapping and undermining. Intellectually it had suited him well, and he still evinced a fascination with such technical minutiae, but he had turned out to have little willingness to get his hands dirty, and so had found his way into a regular regiment by the quickest way.

  But now Klaes inspected the bridge and pronounced it sound. And his commander accepted the verdict, knowing that if there was one thing Klaes could be relied on to do well, it was to weigh and measure.

  Once over the bridge they halted at the edge of the trees while August gave orders: Sergeant Ja
nek to run and take word to Lieutenant Tusimov in the rear, while the other sergeants relayed the order to halt along the rest of the column. The main body of the company would remain where they were, awaiting further instructions. A smaller group, headed by Klaes, was to accompany August into the village to meet the burgomaster.

  ‘He won’t be expecting us,’ Klaes observed. ‘It’s clear your message miscarried, sir, or else he would have sent someone to meet us along the way.’

  ‘Still, he will come out to us,’ said August. ‘We’re marching over two hundred men onto his land. If the mayor’s not the first to greet us, he’s not the one we should be dealing with.’

  In fact it was not the burgomaster they met first. The season was late autumn, the ground still boggy from the first rains of the season, and the company were concentrating on their feet as they crossed the fields. They had been keeping to a narrow track between two harvested plots, but the hedges which served as boundary markers here had been allowed to grow straggly and wild. Privates Leintz and Rasmus swerved to avoid a bush in their path and ran into a man hiding behind it.

  He started up from them like a pheasant, flapping his arms. His eyes were wide with terror.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ he said, high-voiced. ‘I didn’t. I don’t know a thing about it!’

  He stood for another moment goggling at them. Then he turned and ran off across the field, his boots picking up fresh clumps of mud with each step.

  ‘Local dullard,’ said Leintz, watching the man’s lumbering retreat. ‘There’s always one.’

  ‘More than one, I’ll bet,’ Rasmus said. ‘Place like this, it’s probably their main crop.’

  The company usually looked forward to their arrival in a new town. According to the archduchess’s edict, soldiers of the empire were to be given food and lodging wherever they stopped along their route, provided free (or at a reduced rate at least) by the grateful populace: a small gesture to the heroes who defended them from the Prussian threat. In practice this mostly meant that the enlisted men under August’s command were given a flattish field to pitch their tents, and could supplement their rations at their own expense from the town market. The arrangement worked well enough for a week or two, so long as they kept Taglitz away from the drink and restrained Pers in his target practice. But the day of their arrival, that was generally a high point. The towns out here, at the edge of the empire, were small and scattered and might not see a visitor in months. To most of them the arrival of a troop of soldiers – whipped into marching order by their colonel as they approached, uniforms as smart and swords as bright as could be managed after months on the road – was as good as a circus.

  Not here, though. In fact, the town seemed almost deserted, nothing but a few chickens pecking around on the muddy track of the main road to show that people lived here at all. No pretty young girl waved or smiled; no old wife threw them the look of interest that might mean a free meal. The detachment, which had marched in briskly enough, began to slow. Some murmuring arose from the ranks. August frowned. It looked as though they had been stationed in a plague town.

  But when they reached the town square – though this was too illustrious a name for the flattened patch of earth which terminated Narutsin’s main street – the burgomaster was waiting with a cluster of men, just as the colonel had predicted. A squat little church, the town’s only stone building, lay to their left. From its doorway Klaes heard the sound of low voices, and saw a crowd shifting about in the shadows. This accounted for the whereabouts of the townsfolk, but why on earth they were all in church on a Wednesday was a mystery to Klaes. He was at a loss to know how to respond to this turn of events. Perhaps these yokels were unaware of whose forces they were receiving, and had hidden out of fear? If so, reassurances were in order. But August seemed determined to ignore this witless game of hide-and-go-seek, so the lieutenant did too.

  The little group of men gathered in front of them filled the road, from the cattle trough to the gate of the biggest house. All of them seemed to be old, and all dressed in waistcoats or jackets, which probably passed for formal wear here. At their head the burgomaster stood stiffly, shoulders back in the manner of a sergeant at attention. His red-grey hair bristled and his collar was fastened high beneath his chin. He might have been bursting with pride at his own importance, receiving the ambassadors of the archduchess’s army outside his home, but his face was guarded.

  He and August bowed formally to each other while Klaes advanced a little awkwardly, holding out the letter of commission. The mayor took it and scanned it – he appeared to know how to read, Klaes noted with faint surprise. After a moment he looked up and inclined his head to both men.

  ‘It is all in order,’ he said. ‘I am Meister Berthold Weichorek. You and your men are welcome here, Colonel.’

  He turned from them before they could answer and held out the commission to the old men behind him.

  ‘This says –’ he raised his voice, possibly for the benefit of the listeners in the church ‘– the archduchess suspects some of her enemies might want to try how safely she sits her throne. These men are here to defend us should any of them think to strike here. So we’re to give them lodging and food while they’re with us, and make them welcome.’

  There was a collective shuffling from behind him. The greybeards in his retinue did not seem particularly pleased at the news. The older ones rarely were, in Klaes’s experience: they tended to think more of the cost than of any diversion the company’s presence might occasion. They began to wander off, each one nodding to the mayor as he left. One of them disappeared into the church, and the whispering from within intensified.

  August cleared his throat pointedly. ‘We won’t require lodging,’ he said. ‘I have requisitioned the mansion house three miles up the road for our officers, and the men will camp in the grounds. I understand that the owners are absent, and there is only a small force stationed there at the moment? There should be room for all of us.’

  Weichorek turned back to them with a look of puzzlement. ‘Another force, Colonel? My apologies, but what do you mean?’

  Klaes stepped in fast: nothing tried the colonel’s patience like block-headedness. ‘The soldiers who are here already,’ he explained. ‘The ones who arrived here last summer.’

  The mayor’s face clouded. ‘Oh, the militia men,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ For a moment he said nothing more, but only gestured as though his position could be made clear by a mummers’ show. ‘But they left months ago. They were moved on somewhere else where they were more needed, I understood.’ He wilted a little under August’s glare. ‘I am sorry, sirs,’ he stammered. ‘This is a small town, and unimportant.’

  August’s expression did not change. ‘As loyal subjects of the archduchess,’ he said, ‘you deserve her protection as much as any city. And now we are here to give it. Lieutenant, the great house will not be prepared for us: take your men there now and see to it. You can tell the rest of the company to begin making camp in the grounds.’ The irritation in his voice was for Klaes too.

  Weichorek seemed to realise that he had given offence in some way and was clearly anxious to repair the damage. ‘You are welcome here, Colonel,’ he said again. ‘My wife and I would be honoured if you would share our table at supper tonight.’

  Klaes, heading off to muster his men, permitted himself an inward smile. It was only sensible for the officers to stay on good terms with local dignitaries, of course. But boiled eggs and small beer at a provincial’s table! Colonel August would certainly not relish that prospect.

  The great house’s owners had named it Pokoj – Peace. Klaes assumed that this reflected their romantic expectations rather than the actual experience of living in these uncivilised borderlands. The name was worked in imposing letters amidst the ornamentation of the wrought-iron gates. Klaes could easily have led his men through one of the gaps in the surrounding wall, but, deserted or not, the house was private property, so he had Edek and Rasmus heave apart the great gates o
n their rusted hinges, so they could advance down the carriage path like visitors. Even from here they could see the house’s dilapidation: the moss on the pale stone walls, the cracked windows and the missing roof tiles. This was not the only abandoned mansion hereabouts, of course: all along the border the nobility had fled their country retreats at the first threat of an invasion the previous year. But Pokoj had the look of a place that had been empty for much longer than that.

  The carriageway was uneven, its gravel spotted with weeds. On each side were spiny bushes, some of them the height of a man. Above them, some way off to their left, rose a ruined building of some kind, its stone a darker grey than the house, with an arch and a ragged tower.

  The house itself had clearly been designed on the model of the great ducal palaces, though less than half their size, with a pilastered frontage and two wings flanking a courtyard. It looked out of place here against the background of forest, as if its builder had imagined himself living somewhere more cultivated, closer to the heart of things.

  The front door was massive, iron-chased and stuck fast in its frame. The burgomaster had found them the key, but even once Klaes had managed to free the lock it took three of them, straining their shoulders at the damp wood, to get the thing open. Inside was darkness and a powerful whiff of mildew. Lighting their lanterns they found a cavernous hallway big enough to house a stable. The floor was marble and the walls studded with mould-flecked statues. Corridors led off to each side, and ahead of them a great staircase curved up into the dark.

  Exploring, Klaes found the interior as ramshackle as he had feared. The roof had fallen in on the north side and the rooms on the upper level had spongy floors and stank of fungus. Downstairs, the ceilings dripped and bulged ominously. The south wing was a little better, and here Klaes set the men to work, driving tribes of mice out of the cupboards and shaking the dust and beetles from the curtains. Everywhere the wallpaper was peeling and the carpets alive with roaches. The owners had taken most of the furniture with them, but in the billiard room a heavy oak table stood alone, facing a marble fireplace with a picture above it too blackened for its subject to show.