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.
WOLF IN THE FOLD
Ben Chessell
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.
The man spoke, with obvious difficulty, his voice fine wine in a rough wooden mug. “Kaslain.” The name of the arch-lector.
Arch-Lector Kaslain sleeps, as do all the priests. “Might I find you a cot in which you could rest until they awaken?” Magnus was a good student and his lessons served him well on this occasion.
The man straightened himself a little and a flash of pain stained his features.
“I doubt,” a nobleman’s voice, Magnus was sure now, “I will see the dawn.” The boy could not deny that, from the size of the stream of blood, which was nosing its way to a drain beneath the altar, the man was unlikely to wake from sleep.
“Perhaps,” Magnus took a step forward so the man could hear him without straining, “I might wake one of the other priests to give you audience?”
The expression might have been a smile. “My last words, the confession of the sins of my life, are fit only for the ears of the arch-lector.”
Magnus searched for the textbook reply but was interrupted.
“Perhaps it might help you, boy, if I told you who I was. You have heard, I presume, of Hadrian Samoracci?” The guarded but blank stare by way of reply convinced the man that he had not.
The man sighed and a licked a fleck of blood from the corner of his lip. The taste wasn’t enough to carve an expression from the hard muscles of the man’s face. He continued, the names coming out with the measured curiosity of a man more used to hearing them than speaking them: “The Tilean Wasp? The Thousand Faces from Magritta? The Coffin Builder? There are other names.”
“Ah, recognition. You are he?”
“I am.” A pause. “And I wish, before I go kicking and screaming into Morr’s blessed company, to purify my soul of the stains which are upon it. Can you be sure any lesser priest is so enamoured of your god that he can grant me that absolution? And, boy, are you the one to deny the arch-lector the greatest confession your cult has taken in his lifetime?”
There is a certain dignity, lent to a man, even a dying man, who asks questions which cannot be answered. Magnus walked quickly from the knave of the chapel and followed a route which he knew well but seldom traversed.
One must pause for thought, to find resolve for action, before waking the arch-lector of the Temple of Sigmar at Nuln. Magnus waited for several long moments with his small fist cocked before the door. The distance it had to cross was hardly the length of his forearm but any distance crossed for the first time is a journey in darkness. Magnus had to knock twice before a voice came from inside.
“Your holiness, a man is here.” The reply was predictably scathing and Magnus waited politely for it to play itself out. “Your worship, it is a man
of great import who asks for you by name. Even now his heartblood spills on the temple floor.” Over-poetic, perhaps, but Kaslain had a penchant for that kind of language in his sermons and Magnus took a gamble. The next response would decide the issue.
“Who is this man?”
Victory. Of a kind.
Two lesser priests came to carry the Tilean Wasp to Kaslain’s chamber. The killer had drawn his hood over his face and Magnus’ imagination couldn’t help but conjure up the expression on the face which had looked on death so many times as he now went to face it.
As the almost funereal procession passed Magnus, the dark head lolled towards him and the faceless hole studied him. Magnus found something pressing to examine in the pattern of the marble. He had looked at this pattern many times, head bowed in prayer, and imagined grape vines, clouds, fish netting. Now he saw veins, like the pale cheeks of an elderly man.
Left to himself in the dying hours of the night, Magnus began to sponge the man’s blood from the stones. Some had stained the mortar and Magnus scrubbed hard, removing most of it. His last act before retiring at dawn—he would be allowed to sleep until mid-morning devotions—was to open the temple doors to greet the rising sun. He stepped out onto the wide stone platform and fastened the doors to the walls by means of their hooks. Solid oaken doors.
Magnus was about to enter the temple and go to his few allowed hours of sleep when he was stopped by what he saw on the doors. The bronze hammers, usually fixed to each door had been removed, taken for polishing so Sigmar’s temple would show no tarnish. He remembered the sound of the stranger’s insistent banging on the door. He dropped the sponge and walked carefully back down the corridor to the Arch-Lector’s private chambers.
Tales of the Old World Page 63
