03 - Death's Legacy

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “Kill the witch!” Gerhard bellowed, ducking under Hans’ latest attack, and laying open a wound across the mutant’s belly, which barely slowed him. The daemon howled as rainbow flames engulfed it, and Rudi felt a faint echo of its suffering in the hollow space in the centre of his being, which it had occupied for so long.

  “Don’t you know any other songs?” the third figure asked, a familiar edge of sarcasm dripping from every syllable. Hanna strode unhurriedly into the middle of the melee, a nimbus of raw, red fire rippling into existence in front of her. Rudi stood, dumbfounded, suddenly paralysed by indecision again. “Hello, Rudi.” She smiled warmly at him. “Ready to go?”

  “Go where?” he asked.

  “Wherever you like,” said Hanna. “It’s almost over. As soon as that thing’s dead, you’re free.” The echo of the daemon’s terror quivered inside him, and at last he understood.

  “She’s really killing it, isn’t she? Not just banishing it back to the Realm of Chaos like Markzell’s trying to do.”

  “That’s right.” Hanna flung the fireball she’d conjured into existence at another of the priests, but instead of striking and immolating him, it fizzled and went out. A moue of disappointment crossed the girl’s face for a moment, to be replaced by one of alarm as the cleric responded with a short prayer, and a streak of golden fire shot through the space between them. Hanna cried out as it struck home, scorching through the concealing cloak she wore, and staggered.

  “Hanna!” Concerned for her safety, Rudi took a step forwards, and then hesitated. Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but confusion. Gerhard and Hans were still exchanging blows, neither apparently able to gain the upper hand, and the daemon was still shrieking, engulfed in mystical flames that flickered and danced like Rhya’s Veil, the mysterious polychromatic lights that occasionally appeared in the night time skies of the northlands. Markzell was still groaning, trying to regain his feet, and the other priests, far from running in panic after the gruesome deaths of their comrades, as Rudi had expected, were coming together, a common expression of grim resolution on their faces.

  His decision made, Rudi took Hanna by the arm. Whatever else happened, he had to get her to safety.

  “Rudi!” Gerhard ducked a slash from Hans’ talons, which tore a small hailstorm of multicoloured tiles from the wall. “Don’t let her kill it!” To Rudi’s astonishment there was a clear edge of panic in the witch hunter’s voice, something he’d never expected to hear there. He hesitated again, wondering why the man was suddenly so frightened, and what he should do for the best.

  “Help me, Rudi.” Hanna turned a pale face to his, and staggered against him.

  “What happens if it dies?” Rudi asked, reaching out an arm to support her. The priests were muttering among themselves again, and more bright streaks of light, like miniature comets, were hurtling across the room. Some struck Hans, making him stagger, while the rest expended themselves against a sudden flare of yellow flame that sprang up to surround Greta. Only his proximity to the girl, Rudi assumed, prevented Hanna from being a target as well. “Tell me!”

  “What does it matter?” Hanna asked, leaning in towards him. Once again, Rudi felt the strength of his love for her warring against his rational mind. “When it’s gone, you’re free. We can go wherever you like, make a real life together.”

  “What happens?” Rudi insisted. The backwash of agony from the dying daemon was diminishing, becoming barely perceptible. The point would become moot in a matter of moments anyway. Hanna sighed, and looked up at him, her eyes alight with a disturbing joy that he’d never seen there before.

  “Isn’t it obvious? We’ll have sacrificed a daemon here, in the name of Tzeentch! You can’t imagine the power that will unleash. This place will become his, along with everything it touches!”

  “The Church of Sigmar. The Empire itself.” Rudi staggered back, releasing her, the enormity of the idea almost too huge to grasp. “You’re delivering it all into the hands of Chaos!” Hanna straightened, apparently no longer needing his support to stand.

  “That’s right. So you might as well be on the winning side. After all, you made it possible.” She smiled, with the same expression of disdainful amusement that he remembered so well from Kohlstadt. “It’s not as if there’s anything you can do to stop it.”

  His mind spinning, Rudi glanced around the chapel, hoping to find some form of inspiration. The daemon had stopped howling, and was whimpering, making a sound like thick sludge trickling down a faraway drain. It seemed smaller, diminished, dwindling away even as he watched. Hans was staggering, his armour-like skin pockmarked from the impact of the priests’ miraculous fire, and Gerhard was pressing him hard, his sword a blur of motion in the light from the swinging lamps. Greta remained invulnerable behind her curtain of shimmering yellow flame. It seemed that Hanna was right. There was nothing he could do, and no one he could call upon for help.

  Then his eyes fell on the huge icon of Sigmar, protector of the Empire, and a new sense of resolve flooded through him. Almost as if the idea had come from somewhere outside himself, he suddenly knew what he had to do. Quickly, before his courage failed him, he felt for the last fading vestiges of his connection to the dying daemon.

  “Hurry,” he thought, hoping the link still functioned both ways, and that the crippled abomination was still whole enough to respond, “while there’s still time!”

  Suddenly the thing vanished, disappearing from the mortal world again in a single burst of imploding air. Greta staggered, as if she’d been struck, and the nimbus of flames surrounding her abruptly went out.

  “What happened?” She turned to glare at Rudi, her face a mask of perplexity and horror. “What in the name of all change have you done?”

  “What I had to.” Rudi staggered, reaching out to the altar for support. He could barely believe it himself.

  “In here we swear by Sigmar, witch.” Markzell had regained his feet at last, suffused by an aura of power that made the hairs on the back of Rudi’s neck stir. His voice had become deeper, more resonant, echoing from the apex of the dome. “And his will is absolute!”

  “Hans! Save Hanna!” Greta shouted, and the mutant broke off his battle with the witch hunter at once, sprinting across the violated chapel to scoop up the girl in his inhumanly strong arms.

  “Put me down! Mother!” Hanna began to protest as the mutant turned for the door, evading a final thrust from Gerhard’s blade as he did so. Greta began to turn, clearly intent on following them, and then the world seemed to explode.

  “This desecration is ended!” Markzell bellowed, and the chapel became filled with silver flames, rippling outwards from the lector, and from the altar at which he stood. Hans, a screaming, squirming Hanna still struggling in his arms, barely made it out of the door in time, howling as his heel was caught in the wash of cleansing fire, and was instantly seared to the bone.

  Rudi cringed, anticipating an agonising death, but the flames flickered around him without burning, seeming cool and soothing to the touch. Their radiance filled the chapel, and as they washed over him, he felt a deep sense of calm. Almost without realising it, his eyes were drawn to the titanic figure of Sigmar, who seemed to be gazing back at him with an expression of compassionate reassurance.

  The priests, too, were looking at the icon of their god with awestruck reverence. Gerhard had fallen to his knees, an expression of peace and joy on his face, completely at odds with what Rudi thought he knew of the man’s bleak and unyielding personality. Although he couldn’t be sure, as he strained his eyes to see through the flickering luminescence surrounding him, he thought he could see the figures of the immolated priest and the mutated templar as well, restored to their former selves, standing with their comrades for a moment or two, before vanishing entirely in a soundless burst of light.

  An agonised scream, which seemed to go on forever, wrenched his attention back to his surroundings from the vision of blissful peace he’d been gifted with. Unlike everyone
else in the chapel, Greta wasn’t being protected from the full effect of the affronted god’s wrath. The fire was consuming her, from the inside out, burning cold through her eyes and mouth in streamers of blue-white flame. As Rudi watched, she dwindled, like melting candle wax, hissing and falling to the floor, where, in a handful of seconds, she was consumed utterly, vanishing as if she had never been.

  A moment later the mystical fire began to diminish, and the chapel began to take on its everyday appearance. It was still as magnificent as it had always been, but somehow, Rudi knew, it would always seem pale and tawdry now, to those few who had been here tonight and seen it touched by the hand of Sigmar himself. He could think of no other explanation for what had happened. Markzell took a deep, shaky breath, clearly profoundly moved.

  “What happened?” The templar who Hans had struck down, and who Rudi had assumed to be mortally wounded, was stirring and climbing to his feet, an expression of bewilderment in his eyes. The mosaic behind him was clean and unmarred. As he looked around the chapel, Rudi suddenly realised that all the damage inflicted in the battle had disappeared, along with the bodies of the fallen, leaving not a trace of the momentous events that had transpired here. “I thought I saw…” he shook his head, bemused.

  “You saw a miracle,” Gerhard said, trying hard to regain his usual composure. He looked across at Markzell. “Is it done?”

  “No.” Markzell shook his head. “I never got to complete the separation, let alone the banishment. The daemon just vanished.”

  “Then what happened to it?” Gerhard demanded. Rudi looked at him wearily.

  “It’s back where it started,” he said, trying to ignore the flare of malicious amusement in the old familiar corner of his being where the parasite dwelt. “Inside me.” He met the witch hunter’s uncomprehending stare with blank resignation. “I had to take it back. It was the only way to prevent…” His voice trailed away. The consequences of not having done so would have been unthinkable, and he still didn’t dare to contemplate them. Gerhard nodded soberly.

  “Thank Sigmar you did,” he said.

  “Can we attempt the ritual again?” Markzell asked. Gerhard shook his head, working out the full implications of this final twist of fate in his mind.

  “I don’t think that’s possible,” he replied bleakly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “So the book was a trap,” von Karien said, his voice bleaker than the snowstorm that continued to flurry around their heads as they plodded wearily back to Rudi’s lodgings. Every templar in the complex had turned out to hunt for Hanna and Hans, the moment the alarm had been raised, and von Karien had headed straight for the Sun Chapel to find out for himself exactly what had been going on. Gerhard nodded his head in agreement, coming to the end of a terse summary of the apocalyptic events of barely an hour before.

  “Obviously we were meant to find it, and make use of the ritual it contained. Allowing the daemon to manifest on consecrated ground weakened the aura of sanctity enough for the witch to enter the chapel and invoke the power of her own blasphemous god, even in a place blessed by Sigmar, himself. If we hadn’t prepared the way for her, she would never have been able to cross the threshold.”

  “Then it’s all my fault,” Rudi said, his heart colder than the flensing wind that tugged eagerly at his cloak. “If I hadn’t insisted on reading those papers, none of this would have happened.”

  “It would have been brought to our attention some other way,” von Karien said shortly. “You can be sure of that. If they were willing to sacrifice a dozen of their own people just to make sure the damned book fell into our hands, they wouldn’t have just left it to chance that we’d find what we were looking for in there.”

  “One of the cultists we brought in with it would have been told just enough to point us in the right direction after sufficient persuasion,” said Gerhard. “All you did was bring things to a head a few days earlier than they would have otherwise.”

  “What exactly would have happened if she’d managed to kill the daemon?” Rudi asked, still trying to comprehend the enormity of what Greta had hoped to achieve. Like everyone else in the Empire, he’d heard whispers about the malign influence of Chaos all his life, and his recent first-hand dealings with its agents had opened his eyes to the reality of the threat it represented, but its true magnitude seemed too great for the human mind to grasp. “I know it had something to do with desecrating the chapel, but I don’t see how that would have tainted the whole Empire.” Or perhaps he didn’t want to see it, he told himself bleakly, still clinging to some vestige of hope that Hanna hadn’t fully understood what it was that she’d been helping to bring about.

  “The chapel would have been re-consecrated to her own dark deity,” Gerhard said, “and the taint would have spread from there to the rest of the Church. If she’d succeeded, every prayer to Sigmar in Altdorf and beyond would have been twisted to further the power of Tzeentch. At least for a time, until the True God reclaimed his own.” How long that would have been, Rudi had no idea, and he suspected that Gerhard didn’t either, but even a handful of minutes would have been enough to wreak untold spiritual corruption throughout the Old World.

  “Then we should give thanks that Rudi had the presence of mind to realise what had to be done, and the courage to go through with it.” Von Karien looked at Rudi with a respect he’d never shown before, “Few men would have, I’m sure.”

  “I had a little help from Sigmar,” Rudi said, feeling uncomfortable with the witch hunter’s unaccustomed approval.

  “That’s true enough,” Gerhard said. He looked at Rudi, an expression curiously akin to confusion flickering across his face behind the obscuring curtain of snow. Rudi had clearly been touched by Sigmar, aided directly by the god whose temple he served, which meant that according to everything he believed in, the young man couldn’t be a heretic after all. On the other hand, he continued to harbour a daemon within him, one that would become immensely powerful the moment he died, which meant that he was still a walking embodiment of Chaos.

  Rudi had little sympathy to spare for the witch hunter’s crisis of confidence. He too was being torn apart by conflicting emotions. The magnitude of Hanna’s betrayal was only just beginning to sink in, but that hadn’t diminished the yearning he still felt to be with her. Somehow, that had become mingled with anger and bitterness, so that he was no longer sure where love and loathing blurred into one another. Sometimes he thought that she must still be an innocent dupe of the Dark Powers, just as he had been, and at others that she’d been a party to this monstrous conspiracy from the beginning, even before they’d left Kohlstadt together. He’d probably never know the whole truth, the point at which her Chaotic heritage had finally overwhelmed her, and whether she’d fought against it to the last, or chosen to embrace it willingly in the end.

  “I take it there’s no point in attempting the ritual again?” von Karien asked, narrowing his eyes against the flurrying snow.

  “None at all,” Gerhard said. “Rudi accepted the daemon willingly this time, rather than being an innocent victim. The bond between them is indissoluble.”

  “Perhaps that’s just as well,” Rudi said, trying to put a brave face on the unalterable. “We can’t trust a thing in that damned book. Even if we tried, Sigmar alone knows what else we might be stirring up that we weren’t ready for.”

  Despite all he could do to prevent them, his thoughts kept returning to Hanna. How could he have been so blind? Gerhard had been right, his feelings had betrayed him. Damn it, he’d known her mother was a Chaos cultist when they’d gone off together; how could he have been so stupid as to trust her?

  It was because he loved her. Had loved her, he corrected himself hastily. Now he felt… He didn’t know what he felt. The image of her laughing face floated across his mind, and suddenly all his old feelings were back, as fresh as they had been when he’d first acknowledged them. Then they were swept away by a fierce, passionate anger, and he wanted nothing more t
han to see her burn as she deserved, the treacherous, conniving witch.

  He breathed the freezing air deeply, grateful for the distraction it afforded. Snow still lay thickly around the temple complex, rutted to slush by the passage of innumerable feet along the most frequently used byways, which were now becoming resurfaced with irregularly indented ice as the mess refroze. Rudi and the witch hunters placed their feet carefully, keeping their balance easily with the confidence of experienced fighters.

  Preoccupied with his whirling thoughts, he barely noticed a small group of cloaked and cowled figures approaching them from the direction of the temple. Like everyone else they’d seen that evening they were heavily muffled against the cold, and their gait seemed a little unsteady as they slipped and slithered on the rutted ice.

  As they got closer, Rudi heard them muttering among themselves: just another group of clerics on their way to a service somewhere, murmuring prayers as they went. He relaxed again, only then becoming aware that his hand was groping for the hilt of the sword that no longer hung at his belt, impelled perhaps by the memory of the disguised interlopers who had disrupted the ceremony in the Sun Chapel.

  It was at that point that he became aware of the words the little group was chanting, and without any conscious thought he leapt into the attack.

  “Hail the vessel! Hail the vessel!” The phrase was unmistakable, the very chant that he’d heard from Magnus’ band of cultists in Kohlstadt and Marienburg.

  “Rudi! What in the name of Sigmar—” Gerhard began, but his protest died away, his weapon leaping into his hand. Rudi’s first punch had dislodged the hood of the leading cultist, and the face revealed left his true allegiance in no doubt at all, as its owner reeled back into a pool of flaring torchlight. Thick black blood welled stickily from a nose, mashed back into a visage ravaged by disease, pustules blooming across swollen and febrile cheeks.