“So you say, but can I believe you? You also said, or at least implied, that your magic isn’t especially powerful.”
“It isn’t. I’m strongest here at home, where I practise my devotions and my link to Chaos never fails. Where I’ve laid charms to aid my conjuring and help me escape if the witch hunters ever call for me. Yet even so, when you made up your mind to try, you had no difficulty breaking free of my glamour.”
“Why did you catch me in it in the first place?”
She smiled. “To test you. To see if your abilities were as modest as you claim. Plainly, they’re not, so why did you lie?”
He groped for an acceptable answer and decided something close to the truth might serve. He hoped so, because it was the only thing that came to mind. “I want to learn as much as I can, for its own sake and to bring the Empire down. I do. It’s just that things are happening too fast. After I kissed the icon, my visions were… troubling. I’m still trying to decide what they mean and how to feel about them, and already you want me to immerse myself in dark lore and contend with that as well? I’m not sure I can bear up under the pressure.”
“Don’t be a silly goose. Of course you can. Have faith that the Changer brought you here for a reason.”
“I want to believe—”
“Then do. I understand what you’re going through. Every new convert has misgivings. All your life, everyone has told you Chaos and evil are the same thing. Then, when you first catch a glimpse of it, it is disturbing, because it’s so different and so much bigger than this sickly, drab little world we inhabit.
“But as you persevere in the faith,” she continued, “you’ll come to see how glorious it is. That it’s the only ideal worthy of your adoration. But even if it were otherwise, you’ve already pledged yourself to the god, and he’s accepted your troth. It’s too late for second thoughts.”
“In other words, stop shirking and study the damn papers.”
“‘Shirking’ is too severe a judgement, but yes.”
All right, he thought. If she insisted, she could closet him with the documents for hours on end. That didn’t mean he had to read them. Now that he knew what he was up against, his will was strong enough to resist the temptation.
Wasn’t it?
His forehead gave him a pang, and, in the gloom in the middle of the cellar, something clicked. It was probably a rat’s claw tapping on a hard surface. Surely not a carved stone monstrosity changing position.
* * *
Jarla’s home, if one cared to dignify it with that term, was a single cramped box of a room adjacent to the street and handy to the barracks and the marketplace, a place she could bring men willing to pay extra for privacy. Adolph hesitated before pounding on the door. Because the bitch might be with such a customer even now, and if so, he’d rather not know it, even though he understood her whoring aided the cult.
Even though, in a strange, angry, hurtful sort of way, it sometimes excited him to imagine it.
He rapped on the cheap pine panel. For several heartbeats, no one answered. Then Jarla called, “Yes?”
He scowled. She generally hesitated before answering a knock or doing a good many other things, for that matter. It was one of many annoying habits she had yet to abandon no matter how often he corrected her.
“It’s me,” he said. “Let me in.”
The door was warped, and bent slightly in its frame as she tried to pull it open. After a moment, it jerked loose, and Jarla peered out at him.
She was fully clothed, and, looking over her shoulder, he saw that the room had no other occupants. He wondered what she’d been doing shut away by herself, then noticed the brass pendant she was wearing around her neck. It was a representation of Tzeentch in his draconic guise, but simplified and stylised into an essentially abstract figure. The average person wouldn’t recognise it for what it was.
But many a witch hunter would. Adolph hastily entered the room and shoved the door shut behind him to hide the damning display from public view.
“You’ve been practising your cantrips again,” he said. It was the only reason she’d dare to wear the pendant anywhere but inside Mama’s hidden sanctuary.
“Well, yes,” Jarla said.
“I thought you’d given up on ever mastering them.” It had seemed only sensible that she should. As the coven’s experimentation had revealed, she possessed a spark of mystical ability, but it seemed too feeble to accomplish anything useful.
“I had. But if the Purple Hand are going to try to kill us, I need some way of defending myself.”
It made a certain amount of sense, but he could tell she was keeping something back. “Is that all there is to it?”
She hesitated. “Mama Solveig said that, since Dieter already knows some magic, maybe he’ll discover things in the papers that we’ve missed.”
Adolph sneered. “I doubt it.”
“Maybe, with his help, I really can learn. Maybe he can teach us all.”
He slapped her, and the crack resounded in the enclosed space. Eyes wide, pressing her hand to her cheek, she shrank back against her rumpled bed.
“Do you think,” he demanded, “he can do better than me?”
“No! It’s just… you figured out a lot, but not everything. Mama and the others teased out some of the secrets before you did. So that just shows, a fresh set of eyes could be useful, especially if Dieter already knows things the rest of us don’t.”
Adolph grunted.
In point of fact, he felt torn. He was avid to acquire more learning, more power, and Jarla, for once, was right: Dieter might be the proper guide to lead them all deeper into the mysteries.
Yet it galled him to see a newcomer so favoured and respected. Not long ago, Adolph had been a mere journeyman scribe recording the minutiae of other men’s lives. The Cult of the Red Crown had raised him from insignificance as he’d discovered talents for both sorcery and the crimes that aided Leopold Mann. Mama Solveig might be the high priestess of the coven, but her followers had come to regard him as her unofficial lieutenant and heir apparent. He had no intention of relinquishing that status and the good things that came with it.
Good things that included Jarla. She was just a stupid slut, to be discarded as soon as something better came along, but until then, she belonged to him, and he wouldn’t let anyone steal her.
He decided he needed to walk a middle course. He’d learn whatever Dieter had to teach, but at the same time, defend his position and prerogatives.
He could start by reminding Jarla whose property she was. “Take off your clothes,” he said, “and fetch me the rope.”
Dieter poked the corner of his toast into the round yellow yolk, puncturing it. Mama Solveig had prepared his eggs just the way he liked them.
He took a bite, chewed, the morsel crunching, and closed his eyes in pleasure.
“Is it all right?” the old woman asked.
He swallowed. “Better than all right.” Indeed, the meals Mama Solveig prepared were tastier and more plentiful than any he’d enjoyed since the day Otto Krieger overturned his life, just as her cellar, squalid though it was, was luxurious compared to a doss house or sleeping outdoors. He still felt restless and irritable, still worried about the twinges in his forehead, but for the moment at least, his new living arrangements, together with his liberation from the noxious toil of rat catching, had brightened his mood.
It almost seemed conceivable that he might survive this lunatic errand after all.
“Should I make more?” Mama Solveig asked.
“No, thank you. You already made more than I can finish.”
Her greasy tin plate and utensils in hand, the healer rose from the rickety, ring-scarred table, a cast-off, by the looks of it, from some tavern or other. “Then I’ll start clearing and washing up.”
“Leave that for me.”
“I most certainly will not. It’s women’s work, and besides, I like taking care of people. It’s why I became a healer.”
&nbs
p; And a Chaos worshipper, he wondered, forcing me to wallow in filth and helping mutants waylay innocent travellers? With the thought came a sudden pang of loathing that burst his appreciation of petty comforts and doting care like a soap bubble, and he had to struggle to keep his face from contorting into a scowl.
The mad thing was that he suspected, had he asked out loud how she reconciled her dedication to the healing arts with her service to Chaos, she would have justified it somehow. As he’d observed before, the cultists weren’t crazy, it was subtler than that, but their devotions twisted their thinking.
How long would it be before they twisted his? Or had the process begun already?
He finished his breakfast and washed it down with the last gulp of water from his cup. Then Mama Solveig took up her wicker basket of healing implements and led him back into the hidden sanctuary.
His heart thumped and his meal abruptly weighed like a stone in his stomach as they neared the icon. Mama Solveig patted him on the forearm. “It’s all right, dear. You don’t have to go near it today. It’s too soon, I think. Just stand back and watch.”
Reciting a prayer, she doddered right up to the coiled black sculpture, then opened her basket. She took out a bandage and rubbed it over the image as if to dust and polish it.
Next came a ceramic jar, evidently the repository for some poultice, ointment or medicinal powder. She rubbed her fingertip on the icon, stiffening when a jolt of its power evidently stabbed into the digit, then swished it around inside the container.
She proceeded in the same manner for a while, contaminating a goodly portion of her supplies. Meanwhile, the entire basket was presumably soaking up vileness simply by virtue of its nearness to the statue.
Finally she said, “That should do it, and about time, too. We have a lot of calls to make, and these old legs can’t walk as fast as they used to.” She recited a prayer of thanks as she bobbed her head and backed away.
When they emerged from the cellar, he blinked, and realised it was the first time he’d been outside in the daylight since Jarla had drugged him. The blue sky, breeze and mundane bustle of the streets seemed a bracing relief from dark, enclosed spaces, secrecy, and abominations. But it lasted only until he remembered the Watch, presumably keeping an eye out for a fugitive answering his description, Krieger’s agents, spying to make sure he didn’t run away, and the Purple Hand, quite possibly lurking about awaiting another chance to strike at their rivals. After that, he felt vulnerable and exposed.
Mama Solveig clung to his arm. Proximity to the taint in her dangling basket made his forehead itch. Her neighbours called out greetings as she passed, and she responded as if she were everyone’s doting granny.
At length they reached their first stop, a brick boarding house as smoke-and soot-stained as the one in which she made her home. The old woman looked up the shadowy stairwell and sighed. “This is the part that’s a trial. All the climbing up and down.”
Maybe so, but they tramped all the way to the top floor, and she never called a halt to rest.
She tapped on a door, and a feeble voice called, “Come in.” Mama Solveig led Dieter into a small room stinking of spoiled food and sweat, and crammed with cots and pallets. A young woman with a small, skinny frame and a distended belly lay on her side on one of the straw mattresses. All the other occupants had presumably gone to work.
“This is Dieter, my new helper,” Mama Solveig said. “Dieter, this is Sophie.”
“Hello,” Sophie said in the same thin little voice.
“Help me down,” Mama said, and Dieter steadied her and supported her weight as she lowered herself to her knees. “How are you getting along?” she asked.
“It still hurts,” Sophie said, “and the baby kicks and squirms and makes it worse. Is he supposed to do it all day and all night? I can’t sleep.”
“Poor dear,” Mama said. “I’m sorry you’re having such a hard time.”
Sophie shook her head, spilling a lock of wavy brown hair over her eye. “I can stand the pain if I have to, but I can’t lose this one, too. Is he going to be all right?”
“Let’s see.” The midwife began an examination of sorts, first pressing Sophie’s abdomen at various points. When she pulled up her patient’s skirts, Dieter felt a pang of embarrassment, and wondered if he ought to turn away. But perhaps an assistant healer was expected to observe even the most intimate portions of the process. Sophie must think it appropriate, for she didn’t object. Or maybe she was simply too desperate and exhausted for modesty to matter any longer.
Finally Mama Solveig said, “Well.”
“Tell me,” Sophie pleaded.
“I think both you and the child will be all right.”
Tears welled up in Sophie’s eyes, and she blinked to hold them back. “Thank you!”
“Mind you, you must stay in bed, and you have to keep taking the powder and applying the balm. I brought more of both.” She folded back the lid of the basket and extracted two ceramic jars.
Dieter had understood the point of contaminating the medicines and believed himself ready for this moment. Now he discovered he wasn’t. Sophie seemed little more than a child, and the baby in her womb was more helpless and innocent still. He yearned to grab Mama Solveig and fling her away from her victims.
But he couldn’t. It would wreck his mission, and it was inconceivable that a relentless brute like Krieger would agree that the good so accomplished outweighed the opportunity lost.
“Thank you!” Sophie repeated. “I’ll drink some right now.” Trembling, she pulled the cork from one of the containers.
Mama Solveig smiled up at Dieter. “She has a cup right here beside her bed, and I see a pitcher in the corner.”
He fetched the water. The moment felt both horrific and surreal, not unlike his vision of Chaos. He filled the pewter cup. Sophie took it in her dainty hand, spilled a dash of grey powder into it, mixed the contents with her fingertip, and raised it to her lips. Which, he supposed, made him a poisoner. His guts squirmed as if he’d swallowed a toxin himself.
Sophie, however, smiled. Apparently the medicine had eased her soreness, or calmed the agitated life writhing and thrusting about inside her.
As he and Mama Solveig hiked back down the shadowy, creaking stairs, Dieter struggled to hold his tongue. Even though they appeared to be alone, it wasn’t safe to talk about the cult and its atrocities in public. Besides, he was afraid that if he said anything, the old woman might discern the depth of his disgust and dismay.
Yet he found he couldn’t contain himself Perhaps the constant gnawing restlessness was to blame.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She turned her head to smile at him. “Understand what, dear?”
“If you transform a grown man, and he wants to stay alive afterwards, he may well sneak away and join Leopold Mann. But what’s the point of altering Sophie or her child?”
“I know, Sophie seems like such a delicate little thing, but if she changes, she may be very different. Even if she’s not, the raiders will put her to use in one way or another. As for the infant, it might grow up more quickly than an ordinary child. Some of them do. If not, well, who’s to say Leopold and his band won’t still be fighting a dozen years hence? We hope to have our victory by then, but we can’t be sure. Anyway, altering folk is worthwhile for its own sake. You might even say it’s a sacrament.”
“Even when it results in witch hunters throwing a newborn baby on a pyre?”
“Yes, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You’d be surprised how often it doesn’t. Parents are inclined to love their babies no matter what form they take. If the child shows signs of being different, they’re often in no hurry to call a priest or witch hunter to carry it away and kill it any more than they’d rush to throw away their own lives. Instead, they ask a trusted healer if anything can be done to reverse the change. Sadly, I have to tell them no, but I do know a way for a sport to survive. Then they give the wee one into my keepin
g, or perhaps they even accompany it into the forest. Leopold has a few such folk in his band, mothers and fathers who couldn’t bear to separate from their children.”
“I guess I see. Well, except for one thing: you betrayed the Purple Hand to the authorities for trying to taint the water supply and change people. Basically, the same thing you’re doing yourself.”
“Yes. The Red Crown had to choose the greater good. It’s always worthwhile to spread the blessing of the god, but it’s vital to suppress the Purple Hand before their doomed strategy places all our goals out of reach.” She chuckled. “Or before they manage to suppress us.”
“Right.” He held the door for Mama Solveig, then followed her stooped, hobbling form out into the sunlight.
The parchments usually reposed atop the lectern because the cultists read aloud from them during their rituals and observances. But a worshipper seeking to unravel their mysteries in solitude was welcome to do so sitting down, and so Dieter carried both a candle and a rickety chair into the hidden shrine.
Out in the front of the cellar, Mama Solveig hummed while she crushed dried berries with her mortar and pestle.
Heart thumping, Dieter came close enough to pick up the documents with their smell of old dry paper, then froze, paralysed by a sudden acute perception of the filthy power seething inside them. Touching them now would be like thrusting his hand into a tangle of adders, or thrusting a needle into his own eye.
But he had to do it and do it quickly, before Mama Solveig noticed his reluctance. He made himself take them up, shuddered, and sat down. He tried to steel himself for the next and even more difficult phase of his ordeal.
He now knew it wouldn’t be possible merely to pretend to study the papers while avoiding comprehension altogether. If he didn’t demonstrate at least a minimal understanding, his fellow cultists would realise he’d shirked.
Thus his task was to absorb a certain number of superficialities while evading actual enlightenment. It should be possible, considering that the cultists claimed it was difficult to puzzle out the deeper meaning of the texts even if one studied assiduously.
The Enemy Within Page 8
