Arcanum
Authors: Simon Morden,Simon Morden
Nikoleta stopped, and Büber, and the two Carinthians, and simply stared.
What separated masters from adepts was a final surrender of pity. If a sorcerer could not put to death that part of them which made them feel sorry for their victims, then they were forever condemned to inhabit the lower orders. Great feats of magic, yes: true mastery of the art, never.
Looking up at the walls of Obernberg and seeing its inhabitants strewn across them in a grotesque display of inhumanity was enough to kill off any remaining shred of sympathy within Nikoleta Agana.
She marked stepping across the divide by shrugging off her heavy leather coat onto the wetly shining stones an
d throwing her hat to one side. Standing their, the rain beating down on her head, soaking the simple shift that she wore, she had never felt so powerful, so at peace, so certain as to what she should do.
The ground trembled in anticipation.
The women on the wagons, beforehand all catcalls and ululations, were suddenly silent.
Nikoleta’s tattoos shifted in new, unknown ways as she walked towards them and raised her hands.
Dr Simon Morden
is a bona fide rocket scientist, having degrees in geology and planetary geophysics, and is one of the few people who can truthfully claim to have held a chunk of Mars in his hands. Simon Morden lives in Gateshead with a fierce lawyer, two unruly children and a couple of miniature panthers.
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www.orbitbooks.net
.
Y
S
IMON
M
ORDEN
The Petrovitch trilogy
Equations of Life
Theories of Flight
Degrees of Freedom
The Petrovitch Trilogy (omnibus edition)
The Curve of the Earth: A Metrozone Novel
Arcanum
COPYRIGHT
Published by Orbit
ISBN: 9781405516778
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Simon Morden
Map by Anna Gregson
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
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Table of Contents
To the Other Simon
Pronunciation
True story: for my entire childhood and more embarrassingly, into my PhD days, I’d always pronounced the name for the double-walled vacuum vessels used for storing cryogenic liquids – dewar – as
dee-warr
,
because I’d only ever encountered the word in books. Of course, Mr Dewar who invented the receptacle, being Scottish, pronounced his name
dew-er
. Not as bad as believing that antelope and Penelope rhyme, but close.
So in order to avoid any confusion – and honestly, you can pronounce these names however you like – here’s a very rough guide to names and places in the book.
Pretty much everything is spoken like it’s written, which is one of the glories of German as opposed to, say, French. There are a couple of extra bits that’ll have you speaking like a native. Firstly, there’s no “th” sound, with that letter combination becoming a hard “t”. Which is odd, when you consider the Nordic languages (and Old English) had two different letters and sounds for “th” depending on whether it was “th” in “than” or the “th” in “though”. So Thaler’s name is pronounced
tar-ler
. The letter “w” is pronounced “v”. Wien (the German name for Vienna) becomes
veen
.
The other bit is the umlaut, the double-dots above certain vowels which show that they’ve changed in sound. The most important one as far as this book is concerned is the “ü” – it changes “u” (uh) to “ü” (oo). So Büber is pronounced
boo-ber
, and München (the German name for Munich) is pronounced
moon-chen
.
There are also bits in Old Norse, Icelandic, Greek, Italian and Yiddish. Don’t worry about those.
The Germans mix their units up, taking what’s useful from both Greek and Roman systems as they see fit. A foot is pretty much a foot whether it’s a Greek foot, a Roman foot or a modern Imperial one; a stadia (Greek) is 600 feet, and a mile (Roman) is 5000 feet – shorter than a statute mile.
The use of cash can be fantastically complicated, especially when crossing borders, but a coin’s worth is nominally equivalent to the weight of the metal it contains rather than its face value. In Carinthia, the smallest coin is the “red” penny, made from copper. Six of those make a shilling, and twenty shillings make a florin. Florins are silver coins. No one but kings and merchants deal in gold coins.
While it’s traditional for fantasy books to have a map, and have the principal characters go to every damn place mentioned on it, this is not a traditional fantasy book. So while the book refers to various places on the map, you don’t have to traipse around central Europe visiting them all. I’ve taken one or two liberties with distances, but mostly I’ve left them alone. The lines on the map, I’ve taken lots of liberties with, but then again, you can’t expect to end up with the same result after unwinding and replaying a thousand years of history. Borders are fluid.
I’m not giving anything away by telling you from the outset that the book you’re holding is set in a world that plays by some very different rules while still having the same geography. The most significant – apart from the fact that magic is real, and it works – is that there was no new religion spilling out of Jerusalem around what we think of as the first century
AD
. There was no subsequent conversion of the Roman Empire, which remained polytheistic. And to keep things even, nothing happened on the Arabian peninsular in 622
AD
either. There are Jews, though.
The other chief event sort of happened. Alaric the Goth did indeed sack Rome in 410
AD
, but he didn’t use wild, untamed sorcerers in lieu of siege engines to bring the walls of the Eternal City down. And while this didn’t mark the end of the Roman Empire in the real world, in this one it did. The Eastern Empire, centred on Byzantium, carried on, but in the west, the tribes north of the Alps carved out a patchwork of kingdoms roughly based on the old Roman provinces, remained true to the old gods and fought fractiously for the next thousand years.
Which is where we come in.
The Palatinate of Carinthia
T
HE
L
EOPARD
T
HRONE
Prince Gerhard V
, the prince of Carinthia
Felix
, his son and heir by his first wife, Emma
Caroline
, his second wife
Ulf
, her son
Trommler
, his chamberlain
Allegretti
, Felix’s tutor
Schenk
,
Ludl
,
von Traunstein
,
Hentschel
, earls
Wolfgang Reinhardt
, sergeant-at-arms of the White Fortress
Ehrlichmann
, messenger
Peter Büber
, huntmaster to Gerhard
Torsten Nadel
, huntsman
T
HE
O
RDER OF THE
W
HITE
R
OBE
| Eckhardt , a hexmaster | Nikoleta Agana , Tuomanen , adepts |
J
UVAVUM, PRINCIPLE TOWN OF
C
ARINTHIA
| Messinger , mayor | Schussig , metalworker, guildmaster |
| Prauss , stonemason, guildmaster Emser , cabinet maker, guildmaster | Seibt , journeyman carpenter Aelinn , maid Lodel , landlord |
| Taube , Gertrude , Heinrich , townspeople Rabbi Cohen and Mrs Cohen Aaron Morgenstern , bookseller | Sophia Morgenstern , his daughter Rosenbaum , Schicter , Eidelberg , neighbour to the Morgensterns Avram Kuppenheim , doctor |