red thirst

by ich du

  The stillness was shattered abruptly: a scream rang out, coming from within the laboratory. Katarina stood there, held rigid by the sound. It was the wizard's voice. And full of such rage and pain.

  Images of Anton injured - even dead or dying - filled her mind. For an instant longer, she remained motionless. Then, as the scream ended, she sprang to the door. Anton might be fighting for his life. She had to get inside.

  She put one hand on the massive bronze door knob; it was icy cold to the touch. She tried to turn it, first one way and then the other. It would not move. And the knob felt as if it were slightly warmer now, almost the same temperature as her body.

  Using both hands this time, she tried again. Still the knob would not turn. Katarina could sense that it was resisting her pressure and its temperature was definitely increasing now: already it was unpleasantly hot. Her palms and fingers were beginning to hurt.

  Calling out the words of an open-spell, she exerted all her strength. Still the knob was immovable. The heat rose, the pain in her hands was much greater now, it felt as if the skin were burning. Somehow she forced herself to hold on to the knob, straining to turn it, knowing that the only important thing was to get inside the laboratory, to help Anton.

  The pain continued to worsen. But when she looked down at her hands, half expecting to see the skin burnt, and saw to her astonishment that they were unmarked, she knew.

  Once again, she brought Anton's image back into her mind and held it there. The pain wasn't real, she told herself. Only the door was real.

  Anton's spell held for a moment longer, then the knob gave an almost human groan and slowly, reluctantly, the door swung open.

  The room beyond gleamed with light. A ring of skulls was revolving slowly in the centre of the chamber. Each one floated in the air, suspended only by magic, its jaws opening and closing at intervals as if chanting a spell, but no sound emerged. The eye sockets were giving out a soft, bone-white radiance.

  Katarina stared at the turning skulls for a moment, both horrified and fascinated. As they slowly swung past her, she found herself counting them: there were five.

  Once Anton had spoken to her of the source of his great magic - he had talked of a mechanism, a reservoir - that allowed him to accumulate magical energy, to use whenever he needed. Was this grisly assemblage of skulls Anton's secret? Could this be what powered his spells?

  Chaos magic? No, she decided. Not Anton Freiwald. He was of the Rainbow College and was willing to use any and all of the colours of the magical spectrum. But not the undivided black of Chaos.

  Then the memory of the scream finally returned to her and she called out, "Anton?"

  There was no answer. Neither the wizard nor the assassin was in sight. Nothing moved except the skulls. The whole room was silent. The shifting light from the eye-sockets reflected off the contents of jars and vials that lined the left-hand wall, producing shafts of rainbow light. A faint sulphurous odour hung in the air.

  Across the room from her, half hidden behind a curtain, a door stood ajar. Beyond, she could see cold stone. A tunnel, leading out of the chamber, perhaps to the city above. Had Anton taken it, perhaps pursued by the assassin?

  She stepped forward and almost immediately she saw a face. It was staring towards her from the opposite side of the room. Again, she called out. She recognized the features now; they were Anton's. But another step closer and she realized it was only a portrait of the wizard hanging on the far wall.

  Then, further to her right, half-hidden by shadow, she saw a dark shape sprawled in front of a wall lined with bookshelves. A human shape.

  Katarina took a step towards the body. Anton? No, it was a man, but dressed completely in black: The assassin.

  His eyes stared up at her through a fine grey mesh that covered his face. The lines were drawn so tightly that they had cut into the skin beneath. The man's hands were clutching at the mesh in what must have been a last desperate attempt to rip it off.

  When she heard the noise behind her she whirled around but it was only the familiar. It stood in the doorway for a moment, sniffing the air, its eyes searching. Then it ran forward on its thin legs and disappeared behind the large oaken desk on the other side of the room.

  Katarina approached cautiously and peered over the desk at the creature. The familiar was squatting on a body. Anton's body. Katarina knew the face immediately, even though the features were contorted by rage and pain. He was dead; a slim black-hilted dagger was buried in his heart. His robe and the brocaded carpet beneath it were soaked in blood.

  But Katarina's grief was buried by disgust for what the familiar was doing. The creature was bent over the body, its thin hands clutching at Anton's tunic, its tiny mouth at the wizard's throat.

  Filled with loathing, Katarina reached for something - anything - to throw at it. As her fingers closed on a flask that stood on the wizard's desk, the familiar raised its head, flicked a glance at her, and bared its teeth in a snarl. Its lips were smeared with blood.

  She hurled the flask with all her strength, and it struck the familiar on the side of its head. The creature toppled off Anton's body to sprawl, limp and bleeding, beside its master.

  Breathing hard, tears streaming down her face, Katarina stared down at Anton then, and waited for her grief to overwhelm her. Nothing mattered any more. He was dead. How could she go on living without him?

  The feeling that finally came was a ghost of the grief she had expected. Its lack of intensity astonished her. Anton Freiwald, the man she loved, the man who had meant more than her own life to her, was dead. Why did she only feel - regret?

  Shocked, she turned to her memories, in search of something that would inspire some deeper feeling. Trying to remember the gratitude she had felt for him, the respect, the loyalty, the love.

  Memories came, but they were blurred, wavering, as if reflected off moving water. Her father's death, the debts she could not pay. And then Anton offering her his protection. Gratitude. She knew she should feel gratitude. And yet...

  As she struggled to make everything come clear, something broke in her mind - rainbow light shimmered in the corners of her vision for a second and then was gone.

  A spell, she realized. Someone had used a spell on her. Someone? - Anton. He had clamped a magic shackle around her mind.

  Her memories came into focus - to be seen from a stark new perspective. Her talent for magic was great, as her father had told her often enough. Anton had seen an opportunity to harness that talent for himself. He had come to her when she was vulnerable and put the shackle in place. All the lessons with him, the magic he had taught her, had been simply so that he might use her more effectively.

  Feelings burst up from deep within her and churned through her mind. There was rage and hate and bitterness - and a sense of violation.

  She had been his slave. Only that. Love him? How could she ever have believed that she had loved him? What she had felt in his arms had been a forgery. The memory of his hands on her body brought the taste of bile to her mouth.

  "All the gods damn you, Anton!" she cried out. Her hands clenched, she stood above Anton Freiwald's body, not touching it - unwilling to - but wanting to strike it, to hurt the wizard as he had hurt her. Tears slid down her cheeks. She almost wanted him to live again so that she could kill him, and this time watch him die. Almost.

  Then, a new thought came: Free. She was free. Her mind was her own again, her body hers and hers alone. A feeling of joy went through her, grew until it was almost dizzying in its intensity. Free, she told herself again. And she was going to stay that way.

  A glance at the ring of skulls and her new exhilaration faded. It was slowing, its light fading. Anton was dead, and his spells were dying with him. When the skulls stopped completely, the spell-shield above would fail - and Gerhard Lehner would lead the Grafs soldiers down to the laboratory. All she could expect from them was torture and - eventually - death.

  Swinging around, she found the tunnel that led away in
to darkness. The air that wafted out of it was dank and icy cold. It looked very old - perhaps it had been carved by Dwarven engineers in the days of Waldenhof's founding.

  Anton had never intended to fight, Katarina knew then, only to escape. This tunnel was his secret escape route. Now it would be hers.

  She started towards the tunnel - and then halted. Anton had told her of his grimoire, a listing of all the spells he had mastered, from every branch of the art, and drawing upon all the magic colours. It was somewhere here, Katarina was sure. If she could find it and take it with her, then she could continue her studies and - slowly, patiently - master the spells Anton had never intended to teach her.

  The bookshelves that lined the right-hand wall from top to bottom and wall to wall caught her eye. Once she would have been fascinated by the wealth of knowledge the wizard had accumulated here, could have spent hours raptly studying them. Now she thought only of the grimoire. Books tumbled to the floor as she hunted for it. The grimoire was not among them.

  The drawers of the desk came open easily. Inside were papers bearing magical signs and script in Anton's precise hand. But again no sign of the grimoire.

  The skulls were barely moving now, their light a dim glow. At any moment they would stop completely. Anton had hidden the grimoire too well. Perhaps she should run while she still had the chance.

  No. She had suffered too much. It had to be somewhere down here and she would find it. Then her eyes chanced to return to the portrait on the wall and she felt a sudden sharp certainty.

  "Come no further!" a voice called out as she took a step towards it.

  The voice froze her, her fear returning in a sudden rush. She wanted to turn, to look at the wizard's dead body. But her eyes were still on the portrait. Its thin lips were moving, its dark eyes flashing. "Come no closer, intruder. Or you die."

  The words were coming from the portrait. Another spell. But the face was expressionless, the voice flat, as if the effort of animation was now too great for it.

  "All the gods damn you, wizard," she said, hating him, and reached for the portrait.

  Dust rose from the thick, patterned carpet to sting her face and arms. She screwed her eyes shut and brushed at it furiously. Something drifted down onto her head and shoulders from the ceiling. Her eyes flicked open again. A spider's web. It settled on her and began to tighten. She put both hands up to it to pull it away. Its silken strands had the strength of steel. They tightened further, biting into her flesh. She couldn't breathe!

  An image of the assassin's masked face came into her mind, the mesh that had killed him tight around it. Choking, she pulled again at the web, this time in desperation. One of its strands parted, with a sharp twang. Then, one by one, others followed. Katarina sucked in air through her mouth and, a moment later, she ripped the thing from her face and flung it onto the carpet. It writhed there for a time, like some dying grey insect, the dust drifting back down to the ground around it.

  Katarina massaged her face and neck for a moment, knowing that if Anton's power had not almost completely drained from his spell, if only a little more of his strength had remained in it, she would be dead now.

  Stepping up to the portrait, she took it carefully in both hands. "Beware..." the wizard's voice intoned as she lifted it away from the wall. Behind it was a small round hatch, bearing Anton's rainbow wheel symbol.

  "Intruder," the portrait was droning at her. She smashed it against the wall, heard the frame splinter, the canvas rip. She broke off a piece of the frame, letting the rest drop onto the floor, and began trying to prize the hatch open. At the same time, she called out spell-words, commanding it to unseal. When it wouldn't move, she beat at it with the wood, hitting it again and again, as hard as she could, imagining it was Anton she was striking.

  Abruptly, the hatch flew open with the same groan of despair that the door to the laboratory had made. Inside, an arm's length away, was a book. It was bound in leather and embossed with the rainbow-wheel: the grimoire.

  Transferring the piece of the frame to her left hand, she reached into the vault with her right. Her fingers found the book.

  The vault grew teeth along its rim, then closed on her arm with a snap. She screamed. As the vault gnashed at her, her vision blurred and she felt as if she would pass out from the pain. A shard of canvas was whispering from the carpet, "Beware. Come no further."

  She beat at the vault with the bar of wood in her hand, then stabbed at it with the splintered end. Finally, when she felt as if she had no more strength left, the vault opened fractionally and, with an agonized cry, she managed to wrench her arm free.

  As she stared at the blood, expecting to find her limb half-severed, she saw with surprise that the cuts the teeth had made were only superficial. Then that spell, too, had been almost exhausted.

  But, most of all, she was amazed to find that in her hand she held the grimoire of Anton Freiwald.

  The book was hers, and so was its knowledge. Nothing would stop her now. Laughing, feeling much as she did when Anton had made her drink too much wine, she clutched the grimoire to her as if she had already mastered its many secrets, had already become a wizard of the highest level.

  The canvas fragment on the carpet whispered: "Beware." Again she laughed, but her eyes moved to the ring of skulls.

  Stories had been whispered of Anton Freiwald in the taverns and the market-place, stories she had shut her mind to. Now they came back to her. Stories of him moving from city to city across the Old World, through the years. How many cities? How many years? And - darker rumours of a death in each of those places: Anton's death.

  The skulls swung around in their stately decaying orbit, their jaws moving in unison, as if they were telling her the answers to her questions in a language she could not understand. The skulls - there were five of them.

  As Katarina watched, the ring of skulls began to spin faster and faster, its light brightening. A silken shivering went up and down her spine. Slowly, drawn by a fear that she could not have put a name to, her eyes dropped to Anton's body.

  It was still lying in the same position, the knife buried in its chest. But it was shrivelled, fleshless. The skin was intact, but now it was only a parchment-thin covering hanging loosely over the wizard's bones, like the abandoned skin of a snake.

  The familiar was gone from beside the body.

  At that moment, a pale hand appeared from the other side of the oaken desk and clutched at its edge. It flexed there a moment, trying to secure its grip.

  Then, a second hand followed. After a moment, a head came into view, and then the rest of the body was rising on the other side of the desk, swaying unsteadily. It was the familiar - Katarina knew it by the chalky complexion of the skin, the coarse features of the face - but its body was now man-size.

  Its flesh was moving - rippling and twitching, as if still trying to settle itself into its new shape. The mouth opened but no sound came out. The grey eyes glistened, not quite focused.

  As she stared at it, the face began to change, moulding itself into a new image. The lips thinned, the cheekbones came into prominence, eyebrows bristled into view.

  Katarina took a step backwards, towards the tunnel, and her booted foot brushed against the husk of Anton's body. Bones scraped together, but she did not look down.

  The creature's eyes were shifting, searching for the source of the noise. They slid past her, then swung back to focus on her.

  "Katarina," the half-formed thing said, in a slow, slurred whisper. "What are you doing here?" The eyes regarded her with vague surprise at first. Then, as they moved to the book in her hand, understanding came into them, understanding and a cold anger. "So."

  The creature reached out with one pale hand. "My grimoire. Give it to me."

  Staring into those grey eyes, Katarina found herself starting to obey out of sheer force of habit. Then the hate for the wizard that she had discovered inside herself returned with almost sickening force. She shook her head. "No, Morr damn you."r />
  The creature's jaw slid down in surprise. "My slave-spell. You've broken it!" The protean features shifted; the expression was unrecognizable. Then, an almost affectionate malevolence came into its eyes: they were wholly Anton's now. "But it will only take me a moment to replace it."

  The creature gestured at her. A nimbus of rainbow light left its fingertips and drifted through the air towards her. Her eyes followed it, hypnotized, unable to pull away. The light blossomed as it neared her, its colours opening out like the petals of some iridescent flower: gold, jade, blue, grey, amethyst, crimson, amber, white. The eight colours of magic.

  They splashed onto her eyeballs, soaked softly through them and into her mind. They shimmered and sparkled there, and then began to crystallize into a familiar pattern: an eight-spoked wheel.

  "No!" She remembered it now, had lived with it inside her head. "Not again!"

  Her reaction was instinctive. As the wheel began to spin within her, to grip her mind in its familiar embrace, she visualized her hands clenched inside her own mind, and hit out at it with all her strength.

  The colours pulsed.

  Sigmar give me strength, she thought, and struck again. This time a crack appeared. Another blow. More cracks. She hit the wheel again and again, until there was a webwork of fractures patterning the rainbow form. She smashed at it a final time, imagining the hammer of Sigmar in her hands. The wheel shattered into a thousand pieces.

  "Katarina!" the creature said in surprise. "My little Katarina. But so strong now. It's hard to believe. To break my slave-spell a second time." The voice dropped. "That's dangerous."

  It stumbled forward, its movements still not fully coordinated. Before she could draw back, it reached out with surprising speed and grasped her right wrist.

  The contact sent a wave of disgust through her body; its skin was clammy, the smell that came off it not quite human. She tried to wrench her arm free, but the grip was too strong.

  With its free hand it reached out for the spell-book. Half-turning, she flung the book behind her. The creature made a barely articulate cry of rage, and struck her in the face. Then, wrapping its free arm around her, it used its strength and weight to force her to the ground. As she went down onto the carpet, she felt her head bump against the wizard's skin-draped skeleton.