The Enemy Within (27 page)

“Now,” he said, “go on.”

Beyond the threshold, it soon became apparent they’d exited
the sewers for a different sort of warren. The floor was dry, with no depression
to channel muck. The stonework was manifestly finer, with carvings ornamenting
the walls. Yet the catacomb felt even fouler than the filthy, reeking tunnels
that had brought them here, because the taint of Chaos lay over everything.
Dieter perceived it as an oily, creeping shimmer.

Jarla likely couldn’t see it the way a true magus could, but
she sensed it, and despite her familiarity with the similar forces at play in
Mama Solveig’s shrine, she paled and swallowed as if resisting a pang of nausea.
“What is this place?” she asked.

Dieter inspected some of the graven symbols. “Dwarfs built
it,” he said, “long before there was an Altdorf. But after they died out or
abandoned it, another group occupied it, and cut their own glyphs alongside and
atop the builders’ original inscriptions.” He recognised many of the newer
sigils from the forbidden texts. “That second group served Chaos as we do.”

“I don’t want to serve it,” Jarla whispered. “I didn’t
understand!”

“Just trust me,” he pleaded, “and keep moving.”

They walked on, and he sensed a stirring of arcane forces,
visible only as a shift in the shadows that didn’t quite fit with the motion of
his light. The manifestation swirled around them like a whirlpool, and, unliving
but aware in its fashion, seemingly examined them from all sides at once. Then a
touch, ephemeral as a cobweb but somehow noisome as dung, dragged down Dieter’s
face. He stiffened, and, a moment later, Jarla cried out, no doubt alarmed and
revolted by the same sensation.

“It won’t hurt you,” he said. “It’s just a defensive ward. It
had to make sure we are who we’re supposed to be, but now that it has, it will
let us pass.”

It did. But he wondered if Krieger could cope with such an
enchantment, and do so with a minimum of noise.

Light flowered in the darkness ahead. Another fifty paces
brought them to their destination, and the foxfire, its task accomplished,
winked out of existence.

Peering about, Dieter found that the light of half a dozen
scattered lanterns, inadequate though it was, sufficed to reveal that the
long-vanished dwarfs had constructed a splendid temple to serve as the crowning
glory of the complex. Interrupted by choir lofts and galleries, the walls of the
sanctum sanctorum swept up and up to a vaulted ceiling. Unfortunately, the Chaos
worshippers who came after had perverted and polluted this holy of holies even
more thoroughly than they had the rest of the corridors and chambers. Made of
the same congealed malignancy as the icon in Mama Solveig’s cellar, a black
image of Tzeentch leered behind an elevated red marble altar equipped with
shackles, and runnels to drain away blood. A curved jewelled dagger lay atop it,
waiting for someone to pick it up and stab and slice a sacrifice to death.

Robed in pink, puce and purple, in finer versions of the
costumes Mama Solveig’s coven wore to conduct their rituals, eight figures stood
waiting in the vicinity of the altar. On first inspection, the Master of
Change’s deputies looked like ordinary men and women, yet as Dieter had guessed,
the cult leader himself was a mutant so deformed that he surely lived his entire
life underground. For, even cloaked in the most potent spells of disguise, he
would have found it impossible to walk the streets of Altdorf undetected.

That was because the size and shape of his body were entirely
wrong. He was fatter than any human could be without his heart failing, and
because he was too immense to close his robe, Dieter could see that his lower
body had fused together to become a bloated, sexless, worm-like tail with
clusters of twitching fingers growing out of it. The appendage would hump and
drag behind him as he crawled about.

Above the navel, an extra head, small as an infant’s,
drooling and weeping dark slime, lolled from the centre of a hairless, blubbery
chest. The Master’s arms were too long and possessed too many joints, and an
extra one grew from the left shoulder. The upper head, positioned more or less
where a head should be but off-centre nonetheless, was nearly all lipless mouth
lined with square, stained teeth, the remaining features and the cranium itself
squashed together at the top to create an appearance of imbecility.

Dieter had sojourned with Leopold Mann and his followers, but
even so, the Master’s appearance was grotesque enough to make him falter. Jarla
sobbed, whirled, and took a first running stride towards the exit.

Dieter dropped his luminous knife and grabbed her. The blade
clattered on the floor, and she thrashed, struggling to break away. “Calm down!”
he whispered. “If you run now, they’ll kill you for certain! I won’t be able to
stop them!” She kept flailing and kicking, and managed to jerk an arm free.

Then, however, the coven leaders rushed up to help him
immobilise her, and of course she had no hope of prevailing against so many.
They bore her to the altar, shoved her down on her back, and snapped the
shackles shut around her wrists and ankles. She jerked on her chains, rattling
them, wailed and sobbed, until, her hand lashing back and forth, a grinning
female cultist slapped her into quiescence.

Dieter wanted to stop the abuse, but knew it would be suicide
to try. He had to content himself with taking note of the key hanging on the
side of the sacrificial stone.

He retrieved his knife, sheathed it, and approached the
Master of Change. He dropped to his knees as he’d once knelt before Mama Solveig
and the icon in her keeping. Up close, the mutant smelled like sour milk.

The Master put his right hand on top of Dieter’s head.
Portions of his palm bulged, pressing down, then receded, as if, beneath the
skin, tumours were swelling and dissolving. “I give you,” he said, the metallic
shiver still underlying his otherwise human tone, “the blessing of the Changer
of the Ways.”

“Thank you, Master,” Dieter said.

“Are you ready to take the next step in your service?” the
Master asked. “Are you prepared to lead your coven?”

“Yes.”

“Then come with me.” The sorcerer led him before the altar,
where Jarla lay shuddering, and the black draconic figure looming behind, then
bade him kneel once more. The other cultists formed a circle around them.

Dieter realised with a stab of panic that they meant to
anoint him a coven leader forthwith, and that the ritual would surely culminate
in Jarla’s murder. He’d hoped for some sort of instruction or examination first,
something he could protract to give Krieger a chance to arrive. But that
obviously wasn’t how the Master wanted to proceed, and Dieter couldn’t think of
any way to deflect him from his course. He could only pray that the ceremony was
a lengthy one.

As it turned out, the preliminaries, a series of chanted
prayers and catechisms, did take a while. The obscene import of the declarations
and the corrosive power radiating from Tzeentch’s statue ground at Dieter’s
mind, churned his guts, and made his head swim. But he’d learned to endure such
things, and so far at least, managed to prevent them from drowning his will and
sense of purpose. Glancing from the corner of his eye, he kept on watching and
listening for Krieger.

Who failed to appear.

“Now rise,” said the Master of Change.

Dieter stood up. Someone took his cloak and helped him into a
vestment of tangled, sickly colours.

“Now take your place behind the altar.”

Dieter mounted the dais. Tzeentch leered down at him.

When Dieter turned and looked back at the Master and his
lieutenants, he felt a sudden wild surge of hope, because a murky figure stood
in the gloom at the rear of the chamber, where the light of the lanterns failed.
But then he saw it was the priest.

“Now take up the blade,” said the Master of Change.

Dieter did that, too. The dagger was well balanced and looked
razor-sharp. A tangible malice stirred inside it like a cat stretching.

“Can you feel the power in it?” the Master asked. “It’s an
ancient, sacred instrument. It’s sent souls beyond counting to feed and serve
our lord. Now lift it up and strike.”

Her eyes wide, Jarla stared up at him. “Please don’t,” she
whimpered, “please don’t.”

I don’t want to, he thought, but even as he silently
articulated the words, they abruptly felt like a lie.

How dare she beg him to risk his own life on her behalf when
she herself had guided him to Mama Solveig and so bore responsibility for all
that followed? When he was a wizard of the Celestial College and she was a
despicable Chaos worshipper and a common whore? When, in all likelihood, any
effort he made to save her would merely doom them both? For he couldn’t prevail
in a fight against the Master of Change and seven other warlocks too.

No, better to stick her in the heart and in so doing, at
least preserve the hope of saving himself, especially when it would have the
added benefit of putting an end to her constant whining need for reassurance.
More than that, he realised that it would be like yanking out a rotten tooth. By
destroying her, he would finally eliminate an aching, troublesome part of
himself. What a relief that would be!

He swung the dagger high over his head, and as he drew
himself up tall, he chanced to look out into the chamber once again.

All the spectators, cultists and phantom priest alike, were
smirking at him with absolute confidence in their eyes. No doubt, at his back,
Tzeentch was doing the same. They were positive they knew what he was about to
do. Positive he didn’t have a choice.

Somehow their gloating certainty shifted the balance inside
him, twisting the anger he’d momentarily felt towards Jarla into a need for
defiance. He threw the dagger over the altar at the Master of Change. He was no
warrior, the curved knife wasn’t meant for throwing, and it clanked down well
short of its target. Still, the effect was salutary, as the cultists gaped at
him in shock. It was a moment to savour, no matter what happened next.

“No,” he said, “I’m not going to do it.” He lifted the key
from its hook.

“You’re insane,” said the Master of Change.

Dieter laughed. “Absolutely. For weeks now.” He unlocked one
manacle, then pressed the key into Jarla’s hand. She could open the other
shackles herself. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the sorcerers for even a
moment if it wasn’t necessary. “But even a madman can see this is stupid. How
can the Red Crown ever accomplish anything if it slaughters its own adherents?”

“The whore is of no importance,” the Master said, “except to
provide a test for you.” Agitation made the fingers protruding from the
worm-like tail twitch more rapidly.

“That statement is stupid, too,” Dieter said. Jarla sat up on
the altar and started freeing her ankles. “She does her part and is genuinely
devoted to the god, which ought to make her more valuable than me. I’m a spy. I
infiltrated your filthy conspiracy to bring it crashing down around your heads.”

The cultists goggled at him anew. Their consternation was so
satisfying, so comical, that, for the moment at least, he didn’t even feel
frightened anymore. Maybe a sane man wouldn’t have reacted that way, but if so,
he was glad to be crazy.

“So you see,” he continued, “if you need a new coven leader,
you should give the job to Jarla and sacrifice me. That’s the way it makes
sense. Although I warn you, you’ll have more trouble chaining me to the altar.”

“Neither one of you is worthy to lead a circle of our lord’s
followers,” said the Master of Change, “and accordingly, neither one of you can
be allowed to leave here alive. Kill them!”

The cultists started chanting and sweeping their hands
through mystic passes. Jarla scrambled down from the altar, and Dieter shoved
her towards the edge of the dais. He wanted her to scurry around the periphery
of the vault to the exit. If he could keep the enemy sorcerers occupied for a
few moments, perhaps she’d have at least a slim chance of escaping. But he
simply had to hope she understood, because there was no time left to explain, or
for anything but combat.

He opened his third eye and glimpsed the multiple images that
revealed an opponent’s intent an instant before he actually moved. That might
enable him to avoid an attack or two. He visualised the night sky, rattled off
an incantation, and wrapped himself in his armour of light.

Darts of shadow streaked at him an instant later, but the
corona leeched the virulence from them, and they stung no worse than pinpricks.
He realised that by rights, the missiles should have flown before his protective
enchantment was in place, but his foes hadn’t worked their magic quickly enough.
Perhaps, for all their power, they weren’t accustomed to casting spells in
battle, whereas he’d had a taste of it as a journeyman wizard, and grown grimly
familiar with it again in recent weeks.

It was another small advantage. Perhaps he’d even be able to
kill one or two of the whoresons before the others penetrated his defence.

He spoke to the air, and a blast of howling wind battered the
cultist who’d slapped Jarla. It caught her in the middle of an incantation, and
the half-born magic, escaping her control, opened raw, wet sores down the left
side of her face. Another sorcerer sought to snare him in a binding, and he sent
the dark, thorny coils leaping back to net their maker.

His foes spread out to flank him and no doubt get behind him
if possible. He pivoted to strike at the ones on the right, and then, from the
corner of his eye, glimpsed the Master of Change slashing his three hands
through complex arcane patterns.

A thing resembling a huge black sea anemone, its shadowy
substance made of dozens of fused, flattened, anguished faces like the
countenances of the damned, wavered into being in the air above the altar.
Several of its wire-thin tentacles whipped at Dieter. He tried to dodge, but
they caught him anyway, stabbing pain around the edges of his face and lodging
there as if they terminated in barbs or fishhooks. They jerked him up on tiptoe
as though attempting to tear his own face away from the skull beneath for
incorporation into the central mass.