CHAPTER TWO

 

 

The knocking, not thunderous but sounding in a succession of rapid, insistent staccato bursts, jarred Adolph Braun from his slumber. It would have been remarkable if it hadn’t. His employer, a master of the Scribe and Bookkeepers’ Society, slept upstairs, but a journeyman had to make do with a pallet in the shop on the ground floor of the house, just a few paces from the front door.

Adolph felt more irritated than alarmed as he threw off his blankets, rose, and groped his way around the writing desks and stools that were all but invisible in the dark. It was true, he led a dangerous double life, but he was cunning about it, and wasn’t worried that retribution had come calling, not at his master’s staid and respectable house. His chief concern was to silence the pounding before it woke the old man, and the old man’s ire.

He fumbled with the bolt and cracked open the door. A flare of lightning illuminated Jarla standing on the other side.

His irritation evoked a tension in his arm and the back of his hand, as if it were urging him to lay it across her face. “Damn you,” he whispered. “You know I can’t entertain a whore here.”

“Please,” she said, her voice as soft as his, “I need you. There was a stranger. He started coming to the tavern, and saying the kind of things we listen for. So I befriended him to see if he was really the sort of man we need.”

He grunted his comprehension. One good thing about her job—about both her jobs—was that they brought her into contact with men who felt inclined to confide in her, and occasionally she found one with the proper mix of boldness and virulent dissatisfaction to join a cabal such as theirs. “Go on.”

“Well, at first I had a good feeling about him, but tonight everything started moving too fast, and he was the one pushing it along. Supposedly, beastmen attacked his village, but all of a sudden, he suggested that perhaps Chaos isn’t as awful as most people think, and then raised the subject of treason and forbidden cults. He even said right out, right there in the taproom, that he wished he could join one. Who would be so reckless?”

“A spy,” Adolph said, feeling sick to his stomach, “trying to draw you out.”

“That’s what I suspected, and once I did, I realised there were other funny things about him. He talked more like a city man, maybe even an educated man, than a peasant from some little hamlet, and if he really was a farmer, his hands should have been callused. They weren’t. They were blistered from—”

“Shut up!” Adolph snarled, and she flinched. “I don’t care about his hands. How much does he know? Where is he now?” A terrible thought struck him. “By all the voices whispering in shadow, if you let him follow you here—”

“I didn’t! I leaned over him and slipped sleeping powder in his ale. Then I told him I’d take him to a cult and led him around back streets and alleys until he passed out.”

Adolph felt some of the tautness go out of his limbs. “I guess, once in a while, you aren’t completely worthless.”

It was kindly meant, and it annoyed him when she flinched again. If she didn’t appreciate it when he tried to be nice, then what was the point?

Not that this was any time to ponder the perversity of women. “What happened next? Did you kill him?”

“No. I didn’t know if I should.”

He sneered. “Meaning, you’re too squeamish.”

“Meaning, I need you to come and help me decide what’s best to do!”

“All right.” Confronted with a crisis, she’d performed better than anyone would have expected. But now she was buckling under the pressure, and it was plainly up to him to bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. “Just let me put on my shoes and get my knife.”

 

Jarla wasn’t especially strong, but she’d managed to drag Dieter behind a section of fence and into someone’s tiny, neglected, weed-infested garden, where passers-by were less likely to notice him.

Despite her newfound suspicions, she found it a relief to find him lying unharmed in the drizzle. He looked like just another of Altdorf’s homeless paupers sleeping outdoors, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t steal his clothes, or hurt him simply for the amusement it afforded, or that the rats wouldn’t decide to nibble his flesh.

Adolph crouched to inspect their prisoner more closely, and it struck her that the two men looked as if they ought to switch roles. With his burly physique and coarse, choleric features, Adolph should have been a drudge, while a man with a thin frame and intelligent face like Dieter’s should spend his days writing documents and adding up sums in a ledger.

Adolph grunted. “Let’s get this done and get away.” He pulled the curved, single-edged knife from the sheath on his belt.

But Jarla hadn’t fetched her lover simply to kill Dieter while he lay insensible and helpless. She could have done that herself, whatever he thought, or at least she hoped she could. “Wait.”

Adolph glowered at her. “Why?”

“What if he isn’t a spy? I could be wrong.”

“True. You generally are. But from what you told me, this seems to be the exception.”

“I don’t want him to die if he doesn’t deserve it.”

“We have to do what we have to do to protect ourselves and serve the Changer,” Adolph said. “It doesn’t matter who deserves what.” He scowled. “Did you spread your legs for him? Did you like it? Is that why you’re baulking all of a sudden?”

His spasm of jealousy evoked the usual mixed emotions in her. On the one hand, he’d known from the day they met what she did to earn her living and serve the god, so what was the sense of getting angry about it? But on the other, when the resentment flared, it showed he really did care about her after all.

“No,” she said. “It’s nothing like that. It’s just… if he’s a spy, who’s he spying for? Who has he talked to, and what did he say? Shouldn’t we find out?”

“Well… maybe.”

“So we need to question him.”

“That would mean waiting for him to wake up, and we’re in danger every moment we linger here. On top of that, suppose we try digging answers out of him, and he lets out a yell?”

“It wouldn’t matter how much noise he made if he was in Mama’s cellar.”

“It’s too far away. How are we supposed to get him there?”

“You’re strong. You could carry him. I’ll help. He’s a drunk friend, and we’re taking him home.”

“No. Too risky.”

Unwilling to surrender but uncertain what to say next, Jarla hesitated, and at that moment, Dieter groaned. Adolph wrenched himself back around and poised his knife against the thin man’s throat.

 

Dieter woke coughing and retching, and the convulsions jammed his neck against something hard and unyielding. After a moment, the object pulled away, affording him the space to twist his head and expel the burning foulness from his throat. Through tears blurred his vision, he saw that he lay on a patch of earth that, despite the weeds overtaking it, still displayed forlorn, fading signs of orderly rows and cultivation. Once, it had been somebody’s garden, bounded and protected by a fence. Light rain pattered on the ground.

Fingers grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head back around. A square face scowled down at him. The hard object pressed against his throat once more, and this time he felt that it was sharp—a blade, which had already nicked him when he coughed. He began to feel the sting of the little cuts, too. He was lucky the spasms hadn’t killed him.

That seemed to be the only bit of good fortune that had come his way. He strained to remember what was happening, but the pounding in his skull, the vile taste in his mouth and the nausea still churning his guts made it difficult.

“I wanted to kill you in your sleep,” said the man with the knife, “but Jarla wanted to question you. You’re awake now, so I guess we can spare a moment to try it her way. But struggle, or raise your voice above a whisper, and that’s the end of you, understand?”

“Yes.” The mention of Jarla’s name helped bring his thoughts into focus. He recalled their final conversation in the tavern, and the circuitous creep through the alleyways that followed. He’d thought he’d fooled her, but now could only assume he’d somehow roused her suspicions, whereupon she’d rendered him helpless with a drug or spell, then run to fetch one of her fellow conspirators.

“Who are you?” asked the man crouching over him.

Dieter was frightened enough to tell him, except that the truth was damning. “I already explained to Jarla who I am. I don’t understand. Is this some kind of test?”

The knife pressed his raw, smarting neck a little harder. “You don’t have time to play games.”

“I’m not.”

“Get over here,” the big man said. “Hurt him. Break his fingers or something.”

“Me?” Jarla asked. When Dieter shifted his eyes, he could see her standing off to the left, hugging herself as if she were cold.

“No, the Grand Theogonist!” her companion snapped. “Of course, you. I can’t do it. I have to hold onto him and be ready to stick the knife in if he struggles or squeals.”

Jarla’s features clenched with a mixture of reluctance and resolve. She trudged forwards, knelt down, and took hold of Dieter’s wrist.

 

As every wizard knew, the energies required to fuel his sorceries fluctuated from place to place and time to time, and that was the problem. The man in the dark hooded cloak needed to act quickly, and it was just his bad luck that his immediate surroundings had little power to offer. The ambient forces wouldn’t support the manifestation he intended.

That left him with a choice. He could go somewhere more accommodating, or he could try to raise the raw energy he needed. As time was of the essence, he’d opted for the latter.

Accordingly, he strode along the twisting little side street seeking a fellow pedestrian. Damn it, people claimed Altdorf never slept, even late at night. So where was everybody?

He rounded a bend and spied a yawning youth emerging from a doorway. Perhaps the boy had apprenticed to a trade that required him to report for work well before dawn.

“You,” the magician said, and the boy turned in his direction. The warlock whispered a word of power and fixed his quarry with his gaze. Fortunately, this particular cantrip required only an iota of mystical force to power it, and the lad froze like a rabbit before a serpent. Only for a heartbeat, but that was all the time the sorcerer required to dash across the intervening distance, whip the dagger out from under his mantle and drive it into the youth’s torso.

Even late at night, on a deserted little street with a paucity of lamps, it was dangerous to commit murder right out in the open, but the warlock had no time to worry about that. He kept on stabbing. The boy grunted every time the blade rammed home, and fumbled at his attacker as if he hoped to shove him away. But he no longer had the strength.

Finally the youth collapsed and lay motionless. Working as quickly as he dared, given that a slip could ruin the magic and imperil him in the process, the sorcerer carved sigils on his victim’s brow and cheeks. Then he dipped his forefinger in blood and daubed additional symbols on a wall.

The act of desecration cracked the barrier between worlds, and power flowed through. The mage could feel it rising like floodwater full of drowned corpses and filth. He shuddered in mingled ecstasy and revulsion.

Since he needed a clear head for the conjuring yet to come, neither emotion was useful. Drawing a deep breath, he did his best to quell them, then declaimed words of power and flourished the gory knife in mystic passes.

The glyphs he’d written sizzled and steamed, eating their way deeper into the boy’s face and even into the brick wall. Faint but ominous sounds, suggestive of a reptilian hissing, whispered from the empty air.

Then, abruptly, the creature appeared, its brightness driving back the dark and making the warlock squint. He watched for any indication that it meant to attack, for such defiance was always a possibility, no matter how able the summoner.

Happily, the entity wasn’t inclined to resist. Rather, writhing this way and that, its body throwing off heat, it simply awaited his commands.

 

Dieter clenched his fist, and Jarla pried at it, trying to get hold of one of his fingers to bend and snap. He had the feeling she was reluctant, and wasn’t yet exerting her full strength. But if he continued to resist, she would. It was only a matter of time.

Curse it all, he was a wizard, in theory, the possessor of extraordinary powers. Surely his magic could extricate him from this nightmare? But how, when the ruffian with the knife would no doubt slash his throat as soon as he tried to recite a spell?

“I told you to hurt him,” the male cultist growled.

“I’m trying,” Jarla replied.

“Idiot! How difficult is it? If you can’t grab a finger, gouge an eye.”

“Please,” Dieter said, “you’re making a mistake. I’m not your enemy. I—” Something luminous and yellow streaked through the darkness above their heads, and he faltered in fear and astonishment.

The long, sinuous creature appeared to be a flying serpent either shrouded in flame or composed of that element entirely. Plainly, it was some minor spirit of Chaos, although Dieter didn’t understand why it had come. Jarla and her fellow cultist hadn’t alluded to summoning it, nor did they need its help to control or kill their captive.

But whatever the reason, its arrival extinguished whatever feeble hope he had left, and he wondered if he should deliberately provoke the man with the knife into cutting his throat. It might well be a less excruciating death than the one the fiery serpent would give him.

Then, however, Jarla somehow sensed the creature wheeling above their heads. Perhaps she caught the all-but-inaudible hiss of its corona of flame. She glanced up, then screamed and lurched off balance.

Her outcry startled the other cultist, and his head snapped around. He looked where she was looking, and then, as the snake turned for another pass—to all appearances, studying the mortals on the ground—his eyes opened wide, and his face turned white. As though steadying himself, he swallowed, sucked in a ragged breath, then jumped to his feet. He apparently didn’t care about immobilising Dieter anymore. He wanted to be ready to dodge, run or fight if the serpent dived at him.

So, obviously, he and Jarla were just as afraid of the entity as Dieter was, even if that didn’t make any sense either. The pair worshipped Chaos, and the unearthly reptile was a manifestation of that universe of blight and madness. Judging from its form, it might even serve their particular deity.

“What does it want?” Jarla whimpered, rising.

“Shut up!” Adolph said. “Don’t talk, don’t move, and maybe it will go away.”

It didn’t. Instead, as lightning danced in the clouds behind it, it opened its jaws and dived at Jarla.

She screamed and threw herself to the side. Fearful that the serpent’s blazing mass was about to slam down on top of him, Dieter rolled.

Fierce heat swept over him and receded just as quickly. He looked up and saw that the snake, after missing its initial strike, had pulled out of its dive and was spiralling skyward once more. Its lack of wings notwithstanding, it flew with an agility no terrestrial creature could match.

The cultists bolted from the forsaken little garden. Proceeding more warily, Dieter rose and peeked out into the alley—

—to see that his erstwhile captors’ flight had accomplished nothing. The serpent could fly faster than they could run and had manoeuvred to cut them off. At the moment, it hovered in the air ahead of them.

Its behaviour suggested it was more interested in Jarla and her ally than in Dieter. Was it possible that if he simply stayed put, it would kill the cultists and go away? It seemed worth a try.

Except, what then? He wouldn’t be any closer to accomplishing his task. Indeed, if he allowed Jarla to perish, he might be forfeiting his only hope of ever succeeding. Whereas if he saved her…

That, of course, was assuming he could. His training had included some battle magic. Afterwards, serving the Empire as a journeyman wizard, he’d even fought in a few skirmishes. But never without a rank of soldiers standing protectively in front of him, and never against a foe like this.

Still, he decided to try. He stepped out into the alley, and, as the serpent whipped itself around and dived at Adolph, raised his hands to the heavens and rattled off an incantation.

Power shivered through him, and despite his desperate circumstances, he thrilled to its exhilarating touch. He thrust out his right arm parallel to the ground, and a dart of blue light streaked from his fingertips.

Down the alleyway, the serpent’s fangs clashed shut in a burst of flame, and Adolph threw himself flat to avoid them. The creature dropped on top of him, and probably didn’t need to do anything more to kill him. If it stayed where it was, and he couldn’t struggle out from underneath the weight of its coils, its mere proximity would roast him alive.

Except that at that moment, Dieter’s luminous missile struck it at the base of its wedge-shaped head. It hissed and turned to glare in his direction.

When he met its gaze, he shuddered, for its blank eyes somehow conveyed infinite malice and the promise of savage retribution. He yearned to run, but quashed the impulse, instead conjuring a second dart. When that one pierced the spirit, it sprang back into the air. Adolph rolled and slapped at himself to extinguish the flames now nibbling at his clothing.

The serpent hurtled straight at Dieter. He rattled off the first words of another spell. Dangerous to work so many in succession, dangerous to cast them so quickly, but, as was always the case of late, he had no choice.

He felt the heat of the onrushing creature’s body. He recited even faster. Disembodied voices howled and gibbered, a warning of botched casting and magic twisting awry.

It didn’t, though. Despite his haste and the fear gnawing at his concentration, he’d evidently got the spell right, or near enough, because a great wind roared, smashed into the serpent and tumbled it backwards. It shrieked, caught itself and, its aura of flame blowing out behind it like a comet’s tail, attempted to struggle forwards once more. So far, though, it wasn’t having any luck.

Dieter pierced it with another glowing dart. On his feet once more, black, charred patches on his clothing but essentially unharmed, Adolph snarled a spell of his own. Dieter couldn’t make out the actual words above the scream of his conjured wind, but they had a vile, rasping quality that made his skin crawl.

Swirls of inky shadow writhed into existence around the serpent’s body. Adolph grinned, then scowled when the black bonds vanished as abruptly as they’d appeared, and without seeming to trouble the spirit in the slightest. It was as if the aura of flame had burned them from existence.

Meanwhile, Jarla threw stones. Unfortunately, unlike arcane attacks, the rocks fell short or flew wild, deflected by the same wind that kept the snake away from Dieter.

Although it wouldn’t hold it back much longer. The creature had started slowly but was steadily gaining ground, and the artificial gale would subside in a few more heartbeats anyway, when the enchantment ran its course. Once again, Dieter struggled against the panicky urge to flee.

He cloaked himself in a bluish shimmer that might, if he was lucky, stop the serpent’s fangs like armour. He then focused his mind and reached high into the sky, where his form of wizardry lived. He needed a storm, and in fact, there was one raging, but unfortunately, well to the north, with only the fringe hanging above the city. But if his skills sufficed, perhaps that would be good enough.

He chanted, and the warp and woof of existence responded to his commands and entreaties. It was like hooking a fish, like seizing clay in one’s grasp and moulding it, somewhat like a hundred mundane actions yet like nothing anyone not a wizard could ever comprehend.

The bellow of the wind started to fade. The serpent lurched closer. Adolph grabbed Jarla by the bodice, spat an incantation into her painted, terrified face, stooped and, to all appearances, tore her shadow loose from her feet. She thrashed, and he set the murky figure standing upright. Portions of its body stretching and contracting as it moved, it charged the creature of Chaos.

But the conjured servitor scarcely bothered the serpent any more than the dark bonds had. A single snap of its blazing jaws destroyed it.

The wind died entirely. The snake shot forwards, and Jarla, apparently at least partially recovered, wailed. Dieter kept chanting as his attacker surged into striking distance.

The shimmering haze he’d conjured to sheathe his limbs kept the serpent’s first bite from penetrating, but it couldn’t block the heat. It was like standing in a furnace, like the air in his lungs and throat had turned to smoke and embers. Somehow he held to the cadence and precise articulation his spell required. The serpent reared to strike again.

Then the world burned white and boomed as lightning, drawn far from its natural course by Dieter’s magic, pierced the creature from above. The serpent vanished instantly. The blast hurled Dieter through the air to slam down on his back.

Gasping, blinking at after images and listening to the ringing in his ears, he knew that by rights, the thunderbolt, striking so close, should have done more than pick him up and fling him. It should have burned or killed him. But he’d had the power under control.

Jarla ran to him and dropped to her knees beside him. “Are you all right?” she cried.

He sat up. “I think so.”

Breathing heavily, looking as if he was starting to feel the sting of his singes and blisters, Adolph approached more warily. “You’re no farmer,” he said. “Those were powerful spells you cast.” Dieter wasn’t sure if the other man’s tone reflected admiration, jealousy, or both.

Nor was he inclined to dwell on the matter. He had something more urgent to figure out: what he needed to say next.

“You’re right,” he said. “Like you, I know some magic, and also like you, I would imagine, I don’t tell people about it until I trust them completely.”

“Right,” said Adolph, “but who are you really?”

“Someone who truly does want to join your cause,” Dieter replied, clambering to his feet. “Can the details wait until we’re away from here? The fight made enough commotion that I doubt it’s safe to linger.”

In addition to which, he could use the extra time to polish his new set of lies and fix the particulars in his memory.

Adolph scowled. “You’re right. We should leave before the witch hunters show up, and we want to go this way.”

They hurried onwards, not quite running, but striding quickly. Dieter struggled not to flag, to deny the weakness and fatigue that inevitably followed so much spell casting. At first Jarla too seemed to strain to keep the pace, as though she was still suffering from Adolph’s mystical violation of her person. Gradually, though, she appeared to rally, and then she gave Dieter a tentative, inquiring sort of smile.

“I’m sorry I drugged you,” she said, “and sorry we tried to hurt you, too.”

It had terrified him at the time, nor, in his secret heart, was he inclined to take his mistreatment lightly even now, but he forced a grin. “You thought I was deceiving you, and on one level, I was, so I have only myself to blame.”

Forgiveness widened and brightened her smile. “Adolph is right. The way you defeated the daemon”—evidently she wasn’t sufficiently well-versed in Dark Magic to distinguish between true daemons and lesser entities like the one they’d just encountered—“was amazing.”

“He and I defeated it together!” Adolph snapped. “Don’t you remember me casting my spells, you stupid whore?”

Jarla flinched.

They walked in silence after that, on towards whatever new dangers awaited. Dieter tried to draw encouragement from the fact that at least his situation was less dire than it had been only minutes before. Or several weeks before, for that matter…