[Warhammer] - The Enemy Within

by Richard Lee Byers - (ebook by Undead)

  Excitement swept all of Dieter’s worries and discouragement away. A new truth, maybe a new enchantment, was about to reveal itself.

  It was a spell, and unlike the magic Adolph had unleashed to imperil the entire coven, in no way ambiguous or enigmatic. Its purpose and the proper way of performing it were immediately apparent. Indeed, they almost seemed to brand themselves on his understanding.

  With comprehension came a spasm of nausea so powerful that, for the moment at least, it even loosened the grip of his obsession. He’d appeased his helpless hunger, gorged on the magic even though it sickened him, and now perhaps he could rest. He put the parchments back on the lectern, picked up the candle, and made his way towards his cot.

  Mama Solveig snorted and groaned in her sleep. The noise snagged Dieter’s attention, and, fatigue and revulsion both forgotten, he began to reflect on her and the problem she represented. That in itself wasn’t unusual. He did it every day. But now his thoughts ran in a new direction, as if the lore of Chaos had stimulated his mind.

  The midwife was the coven’s sole link to the Master of Change. He’d understood that from the first time he met her, but had found himself unable to turn the knowledge to his advantage. Now, perhaps, he was starting to grasp how, but it took several hours of sleepless rumination before he realised how the new spell could figure in his plans. Maybe that was because he hadn’t wanted to see.

  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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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.”

  Dieter hesitated. According to the principles of wizardry, he should be able to control an entity he’d summoned no matter how it sought to deceive and intimidate him. But in point of fact, he hadn’t completed the ritual, it hadn’t functioned as anticipated, and he had little confidence in his ability to return to his body without assistance. All in all, it made fighting a daemon in its own world about as unappealing a prospect as he could imagine.

  Yet sealing any sort of covenant with the entity could prove equally disastrous. Daemons were infamous for the cunning malice with which they often perverted such compacts. Bargainers discovered too late that the treasures they’d acquired were actually curses, or that the seemingly token prices they’d agreed to pay entailed the forfeiture of their lives, their souls, or the slaughter of their loved ones.

  Still, if Tzeentch really did mean for Dieter to survive this encounter relatively unscathed, and if he was careful, bargaining might be at least a little safer than battle, and the bleak truth
was, now that he’d recklessly landed himself in this terrible place, he had to try something. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Oh, how about a memory or two? I promise not to take anything you need. In fact, I’ll only extract material that hinders you, that burdens you and slows you as you travel the Changer’s road.”

  “In other words, memories that buttress my sense of the man I truly am.”

  The priest smiled. “If your identity is so fragile that the loss of a few moments will annihilate it, then you might as well give it up now.”

  “Promise me I’ll still remember my identity and my mission. That I’ll still possess all my magic, skills and faculties. That I’ll remain just as capable as I am now.”

  “Didn’t I just guarantee as much? But very well. I agree to all your conditions. I swear by the Changer of the Ways. Now do we have a bargain?”

  Dieter noticed he was breathing hard and struggled to control it. He flinched from the thought of trading away even a tiny portion of himself. But he feared it was necessary, and besides, a part of him, the part that grew stronger every day, wanted to learn the spell the priest had promised. He craved it as he’d come to hunger for every new piece of dark lore, no matter what it cost him.

  “All right,” he said, “I agree. But no tricks!”

  The priest chuckled. “I believe we already stipulated that. The way you keep harping on it, a person might almost imagine you’re afraid.” He advanced to within arm’s reach. “If you’ll allow me?” He raised his hand and touched his fingertips to Dieter’s temple.

  Pain ripped through Dieter’s head. He cried out and stumbled.

  “I’m sorry it’s uncomfortable,” said the priest, “but at least it’s quick. Certainly quicker than squinting and puzzling over a musty old grimoire for days on end. Now go home and make me proud.”

  He shifted his hand to the crown of Dieter’s head and pushed downwards. Dieter’s body plunged into the sand as if he were a tent peg, and a hammer stroke were sinking him deep into soft earth.