03 - Death's Legacy (29 page)

“I told you some of it,” von Karien said. “What I didn’t
mention before was that you were there. You were a part of it.”

“What do you mean, I was a part of it?” Rudi asked,
apprehension and horror sweeping over him with renewed vigour. His months as a
watchman had made him adept at detecting evasions and falsehoods, and both men
spoke in the level tones of someone telling the absolute truth. All the thoughts
he’d had of fighting his way free were gone. The only thing he wanted was to
know the full story of his past, although his hands trembled with unease at the
prospect. “How could I have been?” An appalling possibility presented itself, as
he recalled von Karien’s words the previous night. “You mean they were going to
sacrifice me? My own parents?” His stomach twisted at the enormity of it, but to
his vague relief von Karien’s plaster-thick porridge seemed determined to remain
where it was.

“Worse than that,” von Karien said heavily. Gerhard nodded.

“It took some time to deduce the nature of the ritual. It was
one we’d never seen before, and the battle left few traces of what had been
going on, but in the months that followed, as we combed through the papers your
father had left, and interrogated the peripheral members of the cult we’d been
able to track down, we began to find clues as to what he had hoped to achieve.”

“Which was what?” Rudi asked, his mouth dry. Gerhard was
silent for a moment, clearly wondering how best to explain.

“What do you know of the nature of daemons?” he asked at
last. Completely taken aback by the question, Rudi shrugged.

“Nothing at all,” he said. He looked from one witch hunter to
another, and clearly this was the answer they’d been expecting. “Well, only what
everybody knows,” he added, trying to be helpful. “They’re powerful and nasty,
and you don’t want to meet one.”

“True enough,” Gerhard said, “but what most people don’t
realise is that the most powerful tend to be servants of a particular one of the
Dark Powers. Your parents were attempting to invoke a daemon prince of Nurgle,
the Lord of Disease.”

“The same power that Magnus worshipped?” Rudi asked.

Gerhard nodded. “Him and his cult, both in Kohlstadt and
Marienburg, although the one in the city seems to have had another leader, at
least in his absence.”

“The lawyer, van Crackenmeer?” Rudi asked.

“He’s a plausible suspect. Why do you think that?” Gerhard
asked.

“I found a letter from Magnus in his office,” Rudi explained,
“talking about me, and Greta Reifenstahl, and somebody’s grandchildren. I’m not
sure who the grandchildren were, though.”

“His fellow degenerates,” von Karien said, with manifest
loathing. Rudi’s confusion must have shown on his face, because he paused to
explain. “The Plague God’s acolytes refer to him as Grandfather Nurgle.
Presumably in an attempt to deny the truth of what they’re worshipping by making
it sound protective and benign.”

“I wanted to talk to van Crackenmeer to find out where Magnus
was living,” Rudi explained, “but by the time I got to his office, he was
already dead.”

“I realised you hadn’t killed him as soon as I saw the body.
It was obviously the work of a mutant. If you’d discussed matters reasonably
then, as I asked, instead of making a fight of it, I would have made that
abundantly clear.”

“It was Hans Katzenjammer,” Rudi explained. There was no
point in not being as honest as he could at this juncture, he thought. The witch
hunters obviously knew more about what was going on than he did, and any
information he was able to add to that would only enable them to explain things
to him more clearly.

“Katzenjammer?” Gerhard looked surprised for the first time.
“Are you sure?”

“I’m a tracker,” Rudi reminded him, “and I’d followed him
through the woods, remember? The traces he left were pretty distinctive.” He
hesitated, and then hurried on, reminding himself that there was no point in
holding anything back. “Besides, I’d already seen him in Marienburg. He was
there with Greta. They attacked Magnus and his cultists.” He frowned, still
trying to understand the bizarre confrontation that he’d witnessed. “I still
don’t know what to make of it, to be honest. I got lost in the Doodkanal shortly
after we arrived in the city, and I found this old warehouse on the waterfront.
Magnus and his followers were there, chanting about a boat, and then Greta and
Hans arrived and killed them all, or, most of them, anyhow. Magnus got away, and
a few of the others I think.”

“A boat?” Von Karien looked confused. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said Rudi. “They kept saying, ‘Hail the vessel’.”
Another thought struck him. “That’s what they were chanting in the forest too,
just before the beastmen attacked.”

“You were there as well?” Gerhard asked, his voice intent.

“I just stumbled into the clearing. I was looking for my
father in the woods, and somehow I knew the right way to go. It was like that in
the city too, when I found the warehouse. It just seemed right.”

“You were being summoned,” von Karien said. “At least…” he
hesitated, and glanced at Gerhard. “The vessel was.”

“It can’t have been,” Rudi told him. “Kohlstad’s miles from
the Reik. There’s nowhere a boat could dock anywhere near the place.” He glanced
at Gerhard. “You’ve been there, you must remember.”

“The main characteristic of daemons,” Gerhard said, “and it’s
a fortunate one indeed, is that they’re tied to the Realm of Chaos. Except for
the most tainted of places, they can’t remain in the mortal world for long,
unless they possess a mortal host.”

“I see.” Rudi nodded, a tight knot of terror winding itself
around his gut. The implications were obvious, but he still couldn’t bring
himself to face them. “So this daemon my parents were invoking would have
vanished again soon anyway.”

“Ordinarily, yes,” Gerhard nodded soberly, “but it seems that
your father had struck a bargain with a daemon prince. In exchange for power,
and knowledge that only a madman would crave, he agreed to provide it with a
host, a vessel.”

“His own son.” Von Karien’s voice was so thick with disgust
that it was barely recognisable. “You.”

“That’s impossible!” Rudi protested, more by reflex than
because he believed it to be true. So much that had perplexed him now made a
twisted kind of sense. “If I was possessed, I’d know it, wouldn’t I?”

“Not necessarily,” Gerhard said. “It’s quite common for the
victims of possession to be unaware of the presence inside themselves.” He gazed
levelly at Rudi. “Have you ever woken somewhere with no memory of how you got
there? Found periods of time missing from your recollection?”

“No.” Rudi shook his head, feeling the first faint stirrings
of relief. “Nothing like that.” He remembered something else. “Besides, you
interrupted the ritual, didn’t you? It was never completed.”

“Exactly.” Von Karien nodded soberly. “At the time, we
thought that would be enough to thwart their fell design. It was only after we’d
examined Manfred’s papers that another, more disturbing possibility presented
itself.”

“Which was?” Rudi asked, already dreading the answer. Gerhard
went on, his pale blue eyes boring into him like an auger.

“That enough of the daemon’s essence had already entered you
for it to remain trapped there, in a dormant state. It’s my belief that the
ritual in the woods was intended to revive it, and complete the process.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Rudi protested, uncomfortably sure that
it wasn’t.

Gerhard shook his head soberly.

“It’s my belief that whoever removed you from the house sent
you to Kohlstadt, perhaps by magical means, knowing that von Blackenburg would
prepare the way to complete the pact. You said yourself that he’d had dealings
with the von Karien family. Manfred must have been aware that he was a fellow
cultist, at the very least.”

“Why would he wait so long?” Rudi asked, seizing on every
objection he could think of to the chain of reasoning that Gerhard was laying
out so patiently.

Von Karien shrugged. “Partly because he needed to make
extensive preparations,” he said. “Incarnating and binding the daemon would
require a great deal of power, and a full coven of worshippers.” Gerhard nodded
his agreement.

“Not only that, some kinds of ritual magic are most potent at
particular times. The Chaos moon was in exactly the same alignment that night as
it had been when your parents first tried to summon the daemon. It wasn’t until
I examined the site of the ritual, and searched von Blackenburg’s house, that I
began to notice certain similarities with what I’d seen fifteen years before. I
began to wonder if you might possibly be the missing vessel, and set out to find
you. By then it was too late. You’d already fled.”

“Then if the beastmen hadn’t attacked…” Rudi’s voice
trailed away, unwilling to complete the thought.

Gerhard nodded soberly. “The daemon would have taken control
of your body, consuming your soul in the process. As it was, it seems to have
remained dormant, at least for the most part.”

“So that’s why Magnus tried to kill me,” Rudi said. He felt
numb, beyond all feeling. The magnitude of the concept was just too great to
grasp. Gerhard nodded.

“He knew he’d lost. All he could do was free it, and allow it
to wreak as much damage as possible.”

“So if I die,” Rudi said, looking from one witch hunter to
the other, letting the idea sink in slowly, “the daemon escapes.”

“That’s right,” Gerhard said, “and sooner or later, you will.
Everyone does, and that leaves us with a considerable problem.”

“Any news?” Rudi asked hopefully. Gerhard shook his head, and
pulled up a chair next to the fireplace, where a small fire sputtered fitfully.
The room was a large, but bare, with tiny vertical slots in the stone for
windows. Its contents numbered two hard chairs, a bed, and a rickety writing
table.

“No progress at all.” Their regular evening conversation
concluded, both sat staring at the dying flames, as if a solution to their
terrible dilemma might somehow be found within them. The form of words might
have changed from night to night, but the import of them hadn’t, for the whole
of the three weeks that Rudi had been staying in a secure room in the templar
chapter house.

In all that time, he hadn’t left the temple precincts once.
He’d hardly even been allowed to set foot outside the room, and the bustle and
squalor of the city surrounding them had faded to a distant memory. The
predominant odours were of incense, wafting on the breeze from the scores of
small shrines scattered around the sprawling site, and cooking, exuding from the
refectory. That, at least, was some compensation for being kept under arrest, he
thought, the viands provided by the temple authorities were of the finest
quality, even his uneducated palate able to discern subtleties of flavour that
he’d never considered possible before. All in all, he was better off now than
he’d had any right to expect, especially given the way things had been at first.

When they’d left the library annexe, he’d tried to make a run
for it, but still weak from the near-fatal stab wound and the after-effects of
Gerhard’s healing prayer, he’d stumbled within a handful of paces, and been
mercilessly battered to the ground by the two witch hunters. By the time they’d
finished with him, he’d been barely able to stand, let alone walk, and had
acquired a grim understanding of what von Karien had meant by his assertion that
needing him alive didn’t have to mean whole.

Certain that he was in no fit state to resist any further,
the two men had hoisted him up between them and dragged him away to a small,
windowless room somewhere in the cellars of the chapter house.

How long he’d remained there, he had no idea. Day and night
ceased to have any meaning, and the only relief from the stygian darkness
surrounding him was the faint glow of torchlight from the corridor beyond as it
leaked around the jamb of the ill-fitting door, accompanied by a draught that
chilled him to the bone. What sleep he could get was fitful at best, interrupted
periodically by the clatter of boots in the corridor outside, and intermittent
bursts of agonised screaming, so muffled by the intervening walls that he
couldn’t tell whether they came from a man or a woman.

As if that hadn’t been torment enough, his head ached
constantly from the talisman that Gerhard had fused to his forehead, just as
he’d done with Hanna the first time the fugitives had fallen into his hands, in
order to keep the daemon within him bound even more tightly than it already was.
He’d soon given up trying to touch the thing, every attempt resulting in a
blinding stab of pure agony, and if it was possible, he found himself hating the
witch hunter even more than he had done before. Not so much on his own behalf,
but because of his renewed appreciation of how much Hanna had suffered during
their months in Marienburg, while a similar abomination had been suppressing her
magical abilities.

Somehow, the anger had given him the strength to endure his
captivity, and the growing hunger pangs, which, by the time the door finally
creaked open again, had grown even more painful than the ache in his head.
Forewarned by the rattle of the key in the lock he’d clawed himself upright
against the moisture-slick stone, determined not to show his captors the
slightest sign of weakness.

“It’s about time,” he’d snapped, blinking dazzled eyes at the
silhouette filling the doorframe: Gerhard, of course. Of von Karien there’d been
no sign, other than the distant screaming, some luckless member of the Silver
Wheel, he assumed, or some even more luckless innocent mistaken for one. With an
effort of will he ignored the sound, trying to sound confident. “Get me some
food, unless you want me to starve to death and let the daemon out.”