The Enemy Within (28 page)

He gritted out a counter spell, but it failed to wipe the
hovering entity from existence. Heat seared his ribs; one of the sorcerers had
managed to drive an attack through his protective halo.

It’s over, Dieter realised. The warlocks will pick me apart
while I dangle here struggling to free myself from the anemone. Krieger, you
treacherous bastard, why didn’t you come?

As though in answer to his silent reproach, gunfire banged,
the reports echoing from the high stone walls. Someone screamed.

With his face angled upwards, immobilised, Dieter couldn’t
see anything but the dark anemone, but he assumed all the cultists had jerked
around to defend themselves from the intruders. If so, then for a moment at
least, they’d stop attacking him. Maybe he still had a chance after all.

Or maybe not. He threw darts of light at the flower-thing,
but they didn’t appear to damage it. He asked the wind to tear it apart, but the
conjured entity withstood the blast. Meanwhile, the pain around the periphery of
his face was excruciating. It made it all but impossible to cast spells with the
necessary precision, and it seemed to him that the pull was growing stronger.

He croaked the call for a dark binding, nearly botching the
cadence of the incantation but correcting just in time. The coils pounced at the
anemone, and he sent them snaking and weaving among the petals, entangling the
entire structure, then, with a sudden, savage exertion of will, yanked the
complex knot tight as a hangman’s noose arresting a condemned man’s drop through
the gallows floor.

The binding cut the manifestation to pieces. The myriad
pieces screamed, and the petals started tumbling to the floor, only to vanish in
mid-fall. The tentacles withered from existence as well, and the pain in
Dieter’s face, or anyway, the worst of it, disappeared also. Blood from the
punctures along his hairline trickled down his forehead, threatening to drip
into his eyes and blind him. He wiped it away and looked around.

As he’d surmised, Krieger and his minions had finally invaded
the crypt, along with a flying fiery serpent like the one Dieter had encountered
on the night he first met Adolph and Mama Solveig. The newcomers’ pistols had
done their work, smearing the air with sulphurous smoke in the process, and now
the human intruders had switched them out for swords. The snake dived and
struck.

Since Krieger had attacked by surprise, with the advantage of
firearms, superior numbers and an infernal ally, he should have had no trouble
massacring the leaders of the Red Crown. But in point of fact, it was unclear
which side, if either, currently held the upper hand, because only a couple of
the cultists had fallen. Perhaps the others wore protective talismans or
possessed hidden alterations to their anatomy that had enabled them to withstand
a volley of gunfire. In any event, they were striking back, with flares of dark
power when possible, and fists and daggers when necessary.

Too much of the time, it wasn’t necessary. Living up to his
reputation for lethal skill and prodigious power, rattling off incantations, the
Master of Change was conjuring supernatural servitors of his own to interpose
themselves between the Red Crown and their foes. Dieter suspected that, like the
spider-things Mama Solveig had evoked to test his abilities, the Master’s
creatures weren’t real in every sense of the word. But they were tangible enough
for one, a scuttling, crab-like thing the size of a table, to catch a witch
hunter’s leg in its serrated pincers and snip it out from underneath him. The
man fell, and the crab cut and pulled the rest of his body apart.

Left undisturbed to produce such horrors in abundance, the
Master would surely vanquish those who’d come to lay him low. Fortunately,
Dieter, still standing between the towering black icon and the altar, was
likewise well behind the defensive line of monstrosities, in good position to
strike at the three-armed adept. In fact, the Master wasn’t even looking in his
direction and likely had no idea he’d freed himself from the power of the
floating anemone.

Smiling, Dieter breathed the first syllable of a word of
power, and something emitted an ear-splitting wail. When the Master heaved
around in his direction, Dieter realised the source of the noise must have been
the slavering infantile head growing from the warlock’s chest, because the
dripping yellow eyes of the twisted lump were glaring at him. It had somehow
sensed his hostile intentions and shrieked a warning.

The Master snarled a rasp of a word Dieter had never heard
before, and one of the conjured monstrosities forsook the defensive line to rush
at him. Perhaps the ugly word was its name. The creature’s round, writhing form
was so bizarre and complex that at first glance, it baffled the eye. Dieter
couldn’t make out what it was, or whether it was crawling as fast as a man could
sprint or rolling itself like a wheel.

Then his mind made sense of it, and he perceived it was a
great tangled mass of arms and clutching hands. Perhaps the limbs all grew from
a central hub, or maybe they simply attached to one another. Dieter couldn’t see
deeply enough into the shadowy crevices in the heaving, squirming mound to
determine which.

He cast darts of light at it, but the barrage failed to slow
it down. It leaped onto the dais and then, like a ball bouncing, flung itself on
top of the altar. A dozen hands snatched at him, and he hurled himself
backwards. The creature pounced after him. He scrambled to get behind Tzeentch’s
statue and use it for cover, but the entity lunged and cut him off.

Dieter kept retreating before it, off the edge of the
platform and onwards, relying on the precognitive vision of his third eye to
warn him which hands would grab and pummel next. He hurled knives of shadow, but
they had no more effect than the darts of light. He wrapped the monstrosity in a
binding, but, scarcely pausing in its rolling, slapping, scuttling advance, it
gripped the jagged strands and ripped them apart.

Dieter felt himself starting to panic. He was already winded,
and his glimpses of the future wouldn’t keep him out of the creature’s clutches
once his reflexes slowed. He had to stop it forthwith, but how, when none of his
spells appeared to have any effect at all?

He shouted at it with a voice like thunder, but that was no
use either. It grabbed his ankle and jerked him off his feet. He slammed down
hard on his back, and the entity crawled over him, countless hands gripping and
pounding him. He realised that if not for his protective halo, they likely would
have rendered him helpless in an instant.

The enchantment couldn’t save him for long. If he was lucky,
he might have time to attempt one final piece of magic. Twisting his head back
and forth to keep any of the monstrosity’s hands from covering his mouth, he
gasped words of power, then scrabbled at the floor, his fingertips catching and
bunching something cold and flat.

With his arms essentially immobilised, he couldn’t actually
rip the creature’s shadow away from its corporeal form. But the mere effort
satisfied the requirements of the spell, and the entity, no doubt suffering the
shock and sudden weakness he remembered, faltered in its efforts to mangle and
kill its prey. Meanwhile, a second such mass, made of darkness and accordingly
vague in the ambient gloom, surged up from the floor.

The shadow creature threw itself on its counterpart, and the
original let go of Dieter to defend itself against the assault. Tangled
together, they rolled off him, and he jumped up and scrambled to distance
himself from their portion of the battle.

Gasping and shaking, he cast about. Though more combatants
had fallen on both sides, the fight still raged. Krieger had left off swinging
his gory sword to bellow an incantation. His effort shredded the flesh of two of
the Red Crown’s conjured monstrosities. The serpent of flame hurtled down at the
Master of Change, and he met it with a gesture of denial that stopped it as if
it had slammed into an invisible wall. The relentless, ubiquitous discharge of
unnatural energies brought chips of stone showering down from the ceiling and
woke the graven images on the walls to jerky, repetitive life. Blades of
gleaming copper-coloured grass stabbed up from the floor.

Bracing himself for his next effort, Dieter drew a deep
breath. Then something smashed into the back of his head.

Jarla crouched in a small shrine, an alcove adjacent to the
vault where everyone was fighting. A voice had started whispering from the
shadows at the back of the space, and the statue in the centre, a representation
of a robed dwarf carrying an orb and sceptre, cracked and crunched periodically.
Maybe it was just getting ready to fall apart, but it reminded Jarla of an egg
in the process of hatching.

She was afraid to stay where she was, but even more reluctant
to venture back out into the open and the maelstrom of slaughter there. She
wished that she’d tried to flee the temple when hostilities first erupted, but
her instinct had been to bolt for cover instead, and now it was too late. With a
band of dark-clad, well-armed intruders and a vile miscellany of Chaos creatures
swelling the numbers of the combatants, she had little hope of slipping past
them all.

So the only thing she could do was cower and watch, and more
than anyone or anything else, she watched Dieter. She felt a reflexive stab of
anguish when the thing with a hundred hands bore him down, and went limp with
relief when he extricated himself from its clutches. The relief was short-lived.
Mere moments later, a dark, hairless, shriveled-looking figure with a whipping
rat-like tail appeared directly behind him. Perhaps it had just come into
existence, or maybe it used a trick of invisibility to creep up on those it
wished to harm.

It cocked back a bony fist and punched the back of Dieter’s
head. Despite its emaciated appearance, it must be strong, because the blow
threw him down on his belly. It immediately dropped to its knees on his back and
gripped his neck in a stranglehold, lifting his head in the process. It opened a
mouth lined with jagged tusks, and a white tongue as long as Jarla’s arm
slithered forth to lick the bloody wounds on Dieter’s face.

Jarla tensed, her body preparing to flinch, for she was sure
Dieter was about to die. He was plainly helpless, and the creature need only
savage him with those terrible fangs or wrench and break his neck with its
powerful, long-fingered hands to finish him off. But it didn’t do either of
those things. Not yet. Rather, it kept on throttling him while lapping at the
flow of blood.

Such being the case, Jarla realised she might be able to save
him.

But why should she risk herself? Why forsake her refuge,
dubious though it was, dash out into the thick of the battle, and confront a
Chaos creature? She comprehended almost nothing of what was happening, but she
had heard Dieter say he was a spy. Surely that meant he’d deceived and used her
from the start, and probably even expected her to die as a result of his
machinations. He’d certainly thrown her down in the street and kicked her into
submission, then dragged her into this nightmare against her will.

Yet in the end, he’d endangered himself to save her, and of
all the people she’d ever loved, he was the only one left. If she lost him too,
was there even a point in trying to preserve what passed for her wretched little
life?

I’m an idiot, she thought, stupid as Adolph always said. She
drew herself to her feet and, trying to stride quickly but quietly too, advanced
on the blood-drinker and its prey.

A stray flare of sorcerous fire blazed at her, and she jumped
out of the way. His leather armour hanging in tatters, a lanky swordsman
retreated across her path pursued by a thing like a homed lizard stalking on two
legs. He executed stop cuts, and it slashed at him with talons as long as
fingers. Each was too intent on the other to notice Jarla. She waited for them
to pass, then scurried on.

Dieter’s assailant shifted its grip from his neck to his
shoulders. In all likelihood, it had already choked him into unconsciousness or
worse. It drew the pale tongue back into its mouth and bent to bite the prone
man’s throat.

Realising she was out of time, Jarla sprinted. The creature
heard her coming, straightened up, and started to twist around. She jabbed her
thumbs with their long, painted nails at its round black eyes.

Her right thumb found its target; it was like plunging it
into jelly. The left one missed and skated along the side of the creature’s
face, scratching its dry, wrinkled hide.

She pulled her left hand back for another try, but the entity
struck first, a backhand swat that caught her under the jaw and sent her reeling
backwards. As she struggled to regain her balance, the creature hissed and drew
itself to its feet.

She retreated. It was all she could do. The creature
stumbled, swayed, clapped a hand to its perforated, leaking eye, and she dared
to hope she’d incapacitated it after all. Maybe it wanted her to think that and
relax her guard, for a bare instant later, it sprang. Startled, she froze.

A wind sprang up. It tore at Jarla’s hair and clothing, but
she was only at the edge of the effect. The blast of air had actually targeted
her attacker. It caught the creature in mid-leap and tumbled it across the room
to smash into the edge of the dais. Bone cracked. The apparition convulsed for a
heartbeat or two, then slumped motionless.

Jarla pivoted towards Dieter, who was struggling to stand.
She ran to him and helped him up. “You summoned the wind, didn’t you?” she
asked.

Rubbing his neck, where the marks of the blood-drinker’s
fingers were still visible, he sucked in several rasping breaths before
attempting a reply. “Yes. The gods know how. I couldn’t really even talk. When I
pushed you away from the altar, I meant for you to get out of here.”