Tales of the Old World (83 page)

For his daemonic part, M’Loch T’Chort could feel the hold he had over Cain’s
body growing weaker by the hour. He knew that he did not have much time left to
salvage his diabolic plot. He was pleased to note the taint of horror on the
boy, and could sense a nascent treachery flowering in him. Although the daemon
prince could not read the minds of men, he was possessed of certain intuitions
for the darkness in their hearts, and he felt assured that Michael’s corruption
was now advanced enough to offer the young man a daemonic bargain. Until that
time came, he must conserve his energy.

Michael found the witch hunter to be uncommunicative for the remainder of the
day, and noted how he had never once seen the man eat or drink anything. When
Michael suggested they dine, Cain grunted noncommitally and tossed a few coppers
in the youngster’s direction, but did not stir from his bunk when Michael left
the room and descended the stairs to the bar alone.

When the evening finally drew around, the witch hunter was suddenly
galvanised into action. The cadaverous figure rushed around, collecting up his
belongings and instructing Michael to bring the oils and the book. Michael
hurried to comply, fear of Cain and curiosity about his intent blending in equal
measure to bring about his obedience. The witch hunter was obviously in a hurry
to be away from the Tulip, and Michael almost had to run in order to keep pace
as Cain strode out of the premises.

“Where are we going now?” Michael enquired guardedly as they left the inn.

Cain smiled in a paternal way. “To the sewers, lad. There is to be a ritual
this very night and I need you with me.”

“Why don’t you just inform the authorities and let them deal with it? It
sounds terribly dangerous.”

“Ah,” said Cain with a snort, “we prefer to work independently of such
institutions, and I want you to positively identify the participants. We’ll
observe quietly and bring them to trial later, so I can guarantee your safety.”

This explanation rang false to Michael but, with no one else to turn to, he
knew he had to rely on his own resources to get to the bottom of this mystery.
So it came to pass that he found himself scurrying along behind the bobbing
lantern of the witch hunter on the slippery walkways of Marienburg’s sewer
network. They had entered through a disguised door in the cellar of a silent,
shuttered town house. Before descending, Cain had slipped away for a moment
before returning bearing long robes of purple velvet. They were a disguise, Cain
explained, that would allow them to get close to the ritual.

After slogging through the foul, dank underground for what seemed like hours,
eventually they came to the threshold over which, only scant days before, the
cultists had dragged the tortured body of the second lieutenant of the Church of
Sigmar’s Holy Inquisition. M’Loch T’Chort, struggling to maintain a grip on the
dead body of Cain, went about the room, igniting flambeaux held in sconces to
illuminate the scene for a plainly shocked Michael.

Grey traces of ash delineated the skeletons of those whom the daemon prince
had consumed in panic, in order to fuel the strength he had needed to hold on to
the rapidly expiring body of the witch hunter. In one corner of the chamber, a
lamb stood tethered, contentedly munching on a bale of hay. M’Loch T’Chort had
clearly made some preparations for his salvation before ascending to the surface
of Marienburg.

“What—what is going on?” Michael asked slowly.

“You are,” the witch hunter hissed. “To better things!” He leapt up to the
throne and snatched up a parchment.

“You see this?” he continued in a wild voice. “This is a contract I have
prepared for the one who would solve my dilemma. This contract holds the keys to
the greatest magical mysteries of the age! Its clauses have been set down in the
name of the unchallenged master of magic, Lord Tzeentch himself! Aid me now and
sorceries beyond your wildest imaginations shall be yours to command, if you but
dedicate yourself to the service of the Changer of the Ways!”

Michael stood open mouthed in astonishment. He had expected some sort of
elaborate con trick, but nothing of this magnitude. “So you’re not a real witch
hunter then?” was the best he could manage in that frozen moment.

Ignoring the young man, Cain’s face become deadly serious and his hand
grasped the hilt of his sabre. “I am the High Daemonic Prince of Twisted Fate
and Misguided Destiny, from the nethermost planes of the Void!” he hissed. “Do
you accept these terms?”

Michael’s mind raced. He was terrified, but also strangely thrilled.
Temptation was before him, or death. What would he do?

“I—I accept,” he announced, struggling to keep a level tone of voice. “What
is your dilemma?”

“Excellent!” Cain wheezed. “I will talk plainly. I am a spirit from beyond
this world, and the body I have acquired is dead. It cannot be brought back to
life, and I do not have the energy to sustain it much longer. However, the
necromantic process of mummification will preserve the corpse and allow a spirit
to control it. I believe you are now familiar with that ritual. I want you to
carry out such a ritual and then spill the lamb’s blood over me, a requirement I
have as a daemon to indefinitely exist upon this realm, for reasons too complex
to explain to you just yet. I will now prepare.”

Cain hastily stripped off his clothes and lay in the circle on the floor.
Michael saw now the hideous wound that was the source of the witch hunter’s
speech impediment, and no doubt the demise of the real Obediah Cain. He wondered
briefly how the great man had come to such a tragic end, then falteringly began
the rite. He poured the natron potion over the body before him in the prescribed
fashion, enunciating the words from the pages of
Liber Nagash,
using the
vocal techniques he learned at the college to craft the phrases into vibrations
of mystical power:

Within moments, dark energy gathered in the room, it’s easy, exhilarating
flow threatening to consume the boy with more and greater secrets yet. There was
the scent of lightning in the air, and death.

When he completed the mummification process, Michael untethered the lamb and
fetched it across to the ritual circle. Then, taking a deep breath, he reached
down for the sacrificial knife. Now would come the part of the ritual which
completed the binding.

However, instead of picking up the dagger, at the very last moment Michael
swept up the witch hunter’s sabre instead. Its wicked steel blade incised the
still, dark air with a hissing silver arc as it plunged towards the form on the
floor. For the second time in its short existence, the lamb had a narrow escape
and skipped away unharmed as Obediah Cain’s blood poured out onto the mosaic.
There was no redemption for the daemon prince this time. The ex-apprentice had
totally severed Cain’s head. The glassy eyes blinked once in astonishment before
expiring forever.

“Never underestimate humans, daemon filth!” Michael gasped, still clutching
the sword in both hands, his whole body heaving in uncontrollable spasms.

M’Loch T’Chort’s grasp upon the Earthly Plane had not totally loosened yet,
however. Tendrils of vapour began to emanate from the corpse’s neck, rapidly
ballooning into a twisted, ropy tentacle. Behind the tentacle a burgeoning cloud
of foul gases pumped out of the awful, headless body. As it formed, howling,
enraged mouths manifested across its horrendous surface. It was a dank, nebulous
obscenity which writhed and billowed before Michael’s panic-stricken eyes with
an oozing, hypnotic plasticity.

It reared up before the young man as a towering column of smoking, stinking
Chaos, its absolute horror profoundly changing his outlook on the world forever,
and turning his luxuriant black locks snow white in the passing of but an
instant in its unholy presence.

“Innn-ssect!” sputtered the ephemeral nightmare. “I sshaall crussshh you!”

And then the most intolerable of all the violations of nature, beyond
anything Michael ever dreamt possible, unfolded before him. For the headless
body of Cain rose jerkily to its feet. It groped towards him, the dank cloud of
daemonic essence dancing above it, whispering its vengeance in grossly distorted
tongues. It was all too much and Michael turned and fled for the door, sick with
the knowledge that humanity could never stand against abomination of this
magnitude.

Before he could make good his escape, though, M’Loch T’Chort reached out
purposefully with Cain’s hand, making a curious sign with the fingers, and the
door slammed shut with such force that the brickwork of its frame cracked from
the impact.

“Now, boy!” wheezed the daemon. “I will flay the meat from your bones and eat
your very soul!”

In panic, Michael shrunk against the wall, trying to steel himself for the
inevitable end and turned his eyes away. White hot light burst all around him.
Michael was shocked rigid and, blinking his eyes seconds later, he wondered if
he was in the Halls of Morr.

But no, he was still in the chamber and had somehow survived the daemon’s
magical assault. Not three paces from him, he saw to his horror, the last wisps
of M’Loch T’Chort slithered free from Cain’s ruined neck and the witch hunter’s
corpse slumped, almost gratefully it seemed, to the ground.

The daemon was yet abroad, though, hovering like a wrathful thunderhead of
pure magical essence in the centre of the room, swelling rapidly as hatred and
rage fuelled its murderous purpose. Knowing that it had to be the end for him
this time, Michael’s mind, which had been feverishly calculating ways to survive
this ordeal quite simply overloaded, and pure instinct took over. Rolling
himself into a tight ball on the floor, he unconsciously clutched the amulet at
his neck and prayed over and over to Sigmar as the hell-begotten daemon cloud
washed over him. There was an awful, agonised wailing like the lament of a
legion of tortured spirits… then nothing.

After a moment, Michael risked opening his eyes again, just in time to watch
the last flickering trails of M’Loch T’Chort’s magical form disappearing between
his fingers, into the curious little obsidian talisman he wore at his throat—the very talisman that the fiend had given him.

“So that was a daemon,” Michael said to himself.

He looked thoughtfully at the remains of Cain, who had given his life in the
battle against these plagues and vexations of decent folk, and reached for the
sword with which the witch hunter had set out to right such wrongs. Hefting the
sabre and picking up the pistol from the floor, he gauged the weight of them
both. They felt good. He had carried on Cain’s good work, ensuring that the
heretic-slayer’s death had not been in vain.

It had been the first thing he had done right in his entire life, he
reflected.

“Truth? Inquisition? Balance?” he muttered, donning the wide-brimmed hat that
Obediah Cain would definitely be needing no longer, and scooping up the other
belongings of the late witch hunter.

“Work to be done,” Michael de la Lune, one-time apprentice sorcerer, said in
a stronger, more determined voice as he left behind the carnage of the small
cultists chamber. As he strode through the sewers, a strange gleam shone in his
eye and he clutched the witch hunter’s sabre in his white-knuckled fist.

The light in the temple at night had been reduced to two iron braziers in
deference to lean times. The stone pillars leapt into the resulting darkness,
supporting a vaulted roof of pure midnight. An insistent drip of water had found
its way through the tiles above and hissed into one of the braziers, as regular
and relentless as a torturer’s whip.

“Magnus, named for The Pious”, straightened from where he was squatting to
cover his sandals with his robe, his sole meagre defence against the cold, and
resumed scrubbing the altar. Chores were performed at night by the boys.
Sigmar’s altar must never be touched by an untrained hand and yet it must shine
like a looking glass come morning. Magnus wondered if his namesake had ever
considered this paradox, or indeed polished the altar. Certainly the Arch-Lector
did not do so now, cocooned in his velvet sheets with a concubine like as not,
his privacy enforced by gates and blades.

The knock on the huge doors caused Magnus to drop his bucket and spill water
and sand on the piecemeal image of a rampant Heldenhammer which adorned the
knave of the Nuln temple. The mosaic, picked out in tiles of blue, white and
gold, made little sense to a viewer as close as Magnus. Six tiles comprised the
hero’s nose which only took on a convincing curvature with some distance and a
fair amount of latitude on the behalf of the observer. Biting a curse sufficient
to have him expelled from the seminary, Magnus circumnavigated his pond and made
his way down the aisle, inhabiting for a moment the scoured footsteps of
countless processions of now-dead priests. The knock was repeated: three sharp
cracks made with a heavy object. Magnus conjured the image of the leaden pommel
of a sword until he remembered the hammer, cast in bronze, that was fixed to the
left-hand door.

The boy straightened his shoulders before he drew back the heavy bolt. A wet
cloak knocked him to the cold floor. The body rolled off him and lay still as
the storm beat its way into the temple. Magnus struggled to his feet and put all
his weight against the door.

By the time he had forced the bolt into place, the man had dragged himself to
one of the huge pillars and was leaning against its massive carved base. He was
a tall man, with all detail of form muffled by the sodden cloak, perhaps more
than one, which he wore like a shroud. His breathing was heavy and Magnus could
see the man was not well. Both of his hands grasped his stomach as if he had
eaten very poorly and in the second pond made on the floor of the temple that
night Magnus saw curling fronds of blood.