The Enemy Within (21 page)

First, he had to find a place to work. He couldn’t perform
the ritual in the cellar for fear Mama Solveig would return home unexpectedly
and catch him. Nor could he cast the spell out in the open. Someone else might
see, quite possibly a wizard, sensitive to the play of unnatural forces, or one
of the ubiquitous witch hunters, and even if that weren’t the case, he couldn’t
bear the thought of engaging in such obscenity beneath the sacred living sky.

In the teeming capital city, privacy proved elusive, but
eventually he noticed a small, dilapidated brick warehouse above the Reik. From
the look of it, it was deserted. Most likely, it had served some failed
mercantile venture, and the owner hadn’t yet managed to sell it or find a
renter. In any event, it would do for Dieter’s purposes.

He bought a lamb and left it inside the building with feed
and water. Mama Solveig wandered off on her own three nights later. He hurried
back to the warehouse, wrapped the struggling animal in a cast net he’d pilfered
from the docks nearby, then tied its mouth shut.

Once that was accomplished, the ritual could commence. He
chanted the first invocation. Other voices seemed to whisper the words along
with him, and a choking carrion stench filled the air. The lamb writhed and
bucked, fighting to break free of the mesh.

It struggled even harder when he drew his knife and starting
cutting it. Its flailing and the obstruction of the net made it difficult to
carve the glyphs with the proper precision, but with patience and care, he
managed.

It came to him as he strained to hold the lamb still, stabbed
and sliced, that perhaps the exactness of the symbols was less crucial than a
college-trained wizard might have assumed. It was more important that the animal
suffer intensely and that it be thoroughly mutilated, stripped of any ability to
walk or breed or see, that its tormentor transform it into a squirming, bleeding
rebuttal of the very concepts of health and happiness as the general run of men
understood them.

It was likewise important that the magician enjoy the
animal’s terror and pain. Only thus could he properly attune his spirit. Dieter
had questioned his ability even to perform such cruel acts, let alone take
pleasure in them, and in fact, a moment arrived when he found himself unable to
make the next cut. His old self shrank from the act in nausea and self-loathing.
But the new Dieter, born of exposure to Tzeentch’s icon and blasphemous lore,
full of anger and the will to dominate, to be the hammer and not the anvil,
stepped from the darkness to assume control of his wet red hands. Afterwards, he
sneered as he worked, and even laughed from time to time.

Eventually, the lamb bled out. He carved one last glyph, then
brandished the knife in ritual passes and commenced a final incantation. His
third eye throbbed to the rhythm.

As he drew breath to recite the concluding couplet, agony
stabbed through the centre of his forehead as if something had smashed open his
skull to expose the brain inside. He screamed, then seemed to hurtle upwards
through the breach in his head, sudden, fast and helpless as a ball shot from a
gun.

Dieter floated so high above the world that he could see it
curve. His vicious elation had vanished and so had his pain, both supplanted by
fear and confusion.

It seemed obvious that his ritual was responsible for his
current situation. But this was scarcely the effect he’d intended, and the magic
had exploded into existence before he completed his conjuring.

Did that mean he’d botched the casting? If so, what was the
consequence? What was it that had actually happened to him?

He had hands he could see when he held them in front of his
face, and that felt solid to one another when he clasped them together. Still, a
normal human body could scarcely have drifted on the wind this way. He must be
pure spirit now, plucked from its shell of flesh and bone. But was it a
temporary separation, or was it possible magic had literally shattered his head?
If so, his body was a corpse, and he, a ghost.

The thought was distressing but, to his surprise, sparked a
perverse sort of hope as well. For if he was dead, mightn’t that mean he was
done with struggle and desperation? Beyond the reach of doubt and fear?

The face of the land altered, or rather, his perception of it
did. Though he hadn’t dropped any lower, he could suddenly see the heights and
valleys seething with life like a busy anthill. It defied common sense that
anyone could observe individual men and women or even the grandest works of
humanity from such an altitude, yet he was doing it nonetheless. Somehow, he
even knew their thoughts.

A farmer planted and tended his crops with the utmost
diligence. Drought seared them, and he and his family starved.

A ruffian knifed a friend in a drunken brawl, and a
magistrate sentenced him to hang for it. Then, however, the count announced his
betrothal, and in celebration emptied out the jails. The murderer continued to
kill, for profit now, and was never caught again. He lived a long, happy life on
the proceeds.

The lake always froze solid as stone in winter. No one could
remember a time when it hadn’t. Yet the little girl skated over a thin spot and
crashed through. The villagers found her body after the thaw.

A mother lavished care and affection on her children until a
lump flowered in her brain. Then voices whispered, exhorting her to deliver them
from sin. To that end, she whipped them every day.

A man digging in his garden unearthed a chest of old gold
coins. Miserly by nature, he reburied them, told no one of their existence, and
lived meanly all the days of his life. Even as he lay dying, he kept the secret,
condemning his neighbours, kindly folk all, to poverty.

It was all unjust and ultimately cruel, for even those few
people who attained some measure of happiness came to loss and infirmity by and
by. Worse, it was senseless and uncontrollable. No matter how wisely a man laid
his plans and how hard he laboured, it was happenstance that determined his fate
in the end.

But though the tale of human existence lacked any point or
semblance of moral order, it did display a progression. As the generations
passed, Chaos crept through the world and all that man had built like an
infestation of rats taking possession of a house. Monstrous armies swept down
from the north to sack cities and lay waste to principalities. Mutants were born
in increasing numbers. Converts flocked to hidden altars to offer to Tzeentch
and his ilk.

Emperors and other lords of mankind did everything in their
power to drive back devastation and decay. Indeed, they fought so savagely they
became horrors in their own right. Yet it was all to no avail, and as defeat
followed defeat, the world itself transformed. Trees grew shaggy pelts instead
of bark. Horses chased and devoured prey like wolves. Rivers dried up one hour
and ran deep with blood the next. New stars flared into being as if someone were
stabbing wounds in the sky. Until finally, Dieter could see no difference
between the actual world and the landscape of his nightmares, nor between
Tzeentch’s warriors and the gibbering, shambling beasts mankind had become.

He screamed, and at last the spectacle ended.

Or at least it shrank to a scale the human mind might
apprehend without breaking. Everything whirled and broke apart, and then he
stood on a strip of bone-white sand beside a crimson sea. As the waves broke,
images formed and dissolved in the foam, providing glimpses of the tortures he’d
inflicted on the lamb.

Before him stood a familiar figure in a cowled brown robe.

Dieter swallowed. “All this time, I thought you were a
figment of my imagination.”

The priest cocked his head. For a moment, his eyes caught the
crimson colour of the waves. “Have we met before?”

“Don’t play games. You’re the creature who’s been working to
corrupt me.”

The older man smiled. “Time has little meaning here. That’s
why you were able to watch the future of your world unfold. It also allows me to
see you in the past as well as the present, and it looks to me as if you worked
to corrupt yourself. You worshipped the Changer’s icon and conjured Dark Magic.
Perhaps you even invented a phantom tempter you could blame to ease your
conscience.”

“If my ‘tempter’ wasn’t you, then why do you look exactly
like the figure I saw before?”

The priest smiled. “I can look like a great many things”—his
shape seemed to flicker as if he’d become something else, then turned back
again, too quickly for Dieter’s eyes to quite follow the double change—“but
most of them would strain what’s left of your sanity. This guise seemed more
conducive to conversation.”

Dieter took a deep breath. It was frustrating that the priest
wouldn’t admit he’d been haunting him all along, but did it truly matter?
Perhaps he’d do better to focus on the business at hand. “I was trying to summon
a daemon.”

“And maybe you have.”

“You were supposed to appear before me in the warehouse.”

“It takes a great exertion of power for a daemon to fully
manifest in the human realm. One day, it will be otherwise, but for now, it was
less trouble for me to bring you here.”

Less trouble, Dieter thought glumly. It also made a mockery
of the idea that he was truly in control of the proceedings.

“Don’t worry,” the priest continued, “you aren’t dead.
Assuming we reach an accord, you can return to your flesh. Which I suppose is
bad news for the race of sheep.” He grinned—for just an instant, the leer made
his face look like a naked skull, but then it was the same as ever � and waved
his hand at the visions in the breaking waves. Shooting stars arced across the
sky as if the heavens too were pointing at the sea.

“I conjured you,” Dieter said, trying to assert some
semblance of the dominance that by rights should belong to the summoner, not the
spirit, “because I require a service.”

“Then you’d better tell me what it is.”

“I need you to kill Mama Solveig.”

“The doting old woman who took you in and cooked you all
those wonderful meals? Won’t you feel even more guilty when the treachery is
done?”

Dieter scowled. “My emotions are no concern of yours.”

The priest shrugged. “Perhaps that’s true. But I do have a
legitimate concern. Solveig Weiss is a faithful servant of the Architect of
Fate. Why, then, would I want to harm her?”

“What you want is irrelevant. You’re going to kill her
because I command it.”

“And if I resist, you’ll chastise me. But are you certain you
can master me on my home ground? Perhaps I can call a thousand maimed lambs
bleating and floundering out of the surf to take their vengeance on you.”

Dieter raised his hands as if to conjure. “If so, you’d
better start them crawling.”

The priest laughed and lifted his own hands in a pacifistic
gesture. His voluminous sleeves slid down his forearms. “Easy! There’s no need
for unpleasantness, at least not yet. I was only teasing you. In truth, the god
doesn’t care about the old woman’s welfare. He cares about you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it obvious? No matter how you try to run away from our
lord, every stride carries you closer. You now wear his mark. Your knowledge of
Chaos and its powers grows by the day. That’s because the god has chosen you to
be his sword, and is leading you down the path you walk to forge and temper
you.”

“Nonsense.”

“Deep down, you know it isn’t. But as it’s your fate and
accordingly inevitable, it isn’t anything we need to quarrel about. Let’s
concentrate on the business that brought you here. I take it you hope that if
Solveig Weiss dies, the Master of Change will choose you to succeed her as coven
leader.”

“Yes.” At which point, the sorcerer would summon him to his
lair, and he would at last discover where the damn place was.

“It’s a reasonable hope,” said the priest. “You’re the ablest
magician in your circle, and on top of that, the god has altered you, so who
else would the Master pick? But do you really need a daemon to murder the crone?
Just take her by the throat and choke her.”

“I have to make sure suspicion doesn’t fall on me, so I can’t
kill her in the cellar, and it would be chancy doing it elsewhere. She has magic
that alerts her when she’s being followed, and any passer-by could observe me
doing the deed. In addition to which, I’m still not certain just how formidable
her sorcery is. All things considered, it just seems wiser to act through a
powerful proxy like a daemon. Afterwards, my comrades of the Red Crown will
assume the Purple Hand summoned the entity just as they conjured the fiery
serpent.”

“I follow your reasoning, and I’m glad it isn’t simply
squeamishness that makes you baulk at butchering the old woman yourself.
Nevertheless, that’s what you’ll have to do.”

“No, I’m commanding you to do it.”

“Command all you like. Neither you nor I have the power to
keep me hovering about in your world until an opportune moment to strike arises.
What I can do is teach you an enchantment to alter your form sufficiently to
conceal your true identity. The spell may also help you get closer to your prey
before she spots you, and aid you in actually making the kill. Are you
interested?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then what will you give me in exchange?”

“Nothing. You’re constrained to help me.”

“I wonder if we really will have to put that to the test.”

“You said the Changer of the Ways wants me to walk the path
I’m on. If so, why should I have to barter? You should be eager to help me.”

“Maybe I should, but daemons tend to dislike helping humans.
We certainly detest taking orders from them. And perhaps paying the price is the
next step on the path. So: I’ll help you kill Solveig Weiss and so further your
schemes. But you will reward me for my trouble, or else suffer the consequences
of your intransigence.”